“To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence.” (Baudrillard 3)
As western society increasingly appropriates the virtual world our experience of reality is brought into dialectic. In our current digital epoch the developed world must be well aware of the changes brought about by these digital technologies as our very concept of existence is put through simulation.
Our global economy now revolves around the manipulation of data rather than the production and consumption of physical goods. Digital society is permeated with networks of information and we rely on digital technologies to the extent that the majority of western lifestyles would perish without them. We have entered the third order of simulacra, the era of simulation.
In his seminal book Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard introduces the idea of hyperreality. Throughout history reality has been objectified and reproduced via the visual arts; primarily painting and later with photography and film. In doing so these mediums of expression put reality through the precession of simulacra culminating in our contemporary phase of simulation, but never before have these signs of reality been so closely grafted to the physical world.
We are increasingly living our lives through our computer screens, the explosion of web 2.0 and user-generated content has pandered perfectly to our narcissistic natures. We obsessively upload our personal photographs onto Facebook and MySpace, or narrate our lives on the blogosphere and upload diary style video footage onto YouTube. We are continually documenting and displaying our lives over the internet becoming ever more ephemeral 'webrities'. We egotistically record and broadcast ourselves in a desperate attempt to signify our existence and to feign the feeling of actually being alive.
“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory...” (Baudrillard 1)
In the last decade this fetishization of Me Media has come about due to the era of Simulation. Our second lives are taking precedence over our real world existences as we spend more and more time online, communicating, shopping and consuming infotainment. In the era of Simulation we are seeing the transcendence of the sign of reality over reality itself. And so we further recede into hyper‐reality because it allows us to continually remind ourselves that we are infact, alive.
In 2007 we witnessed the explosion of Facebook. In March 2008, Jemima Kiss writes for the Guardian, "Facebook saw by far the biggest year‐on‐year growth, of 712% since January 2007." (Kiss) And in March 2009 the BBC reported that "Twitter grew by 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009." These social networks are particularly successful because they provide easily navigable platforms for millions of people to globally communicate, network and exhibit themselves. The more popular they become the more reason there is for the public to use them and so they have vitalized themselves into our everyday lifestyle and ingrained into our western culture.
Our postmodern perversion of reality has culminated on the internet with the meta-verse Second Life. In this complete virtual environment that exploits the ideals of user generated to content to its fullest, residents are not only invited to play and communicate but also to take a part in the further creation of the digital world itself. And so we invest even more of our valuable time, money and effort into social‐networks and multi‐user domains. With home PC's becoming more powerful and the wide dissemination of highspeed broadband the sophisticated graphics of online realities are exponentially enticing. But what are the consequences of investing such vast amounts of time into the virtual world that is essentially just a series of 0s and 1s representing reality?
"Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by the code.” (Baudrillard 83)
When binary code is used to produce a virtual reality our idea of existence within it is reduced to a series of 0s and 1s, something and nothing. Two polar opposites making a whole reflecting the very mitosis of our existence between the real and virtual world. So in the era of simulation our perception of reality is subconsciously doubled, by the development of the virtual world spliced from the real world, and so our lives have become a dichotomy involving both. As 0 and 1 induces a hyper‐reality through simulation the internet appropriates itself as a viable media‐scape suitable for long term existence. The contours of life are becoming pixelated as we create an ever more defined cyber-space online.
In a few generations time our great grand children will see very little difference between existing in the virtual world, and existing in tangible reality. This is not to say that they won't 'know' or be able to define the intrinsic differences between the two states of being but the way in which they distinguish the idea of living in one and the other and the social relationships between both will be of such an advanced understanding that their discernment of either will amalgamate so that they are inevitably linked and naturally considered synonymously.
Does this mitosis enrich our existence or filter it?
