Hyperreality examples

1.A magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer.

2.Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).


3.A well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).

4.Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).


5.Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of the human beings.

6.Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; and Las Vegas.


7.TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.

8.A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.


9.A life which cannot be (e.g. the perfect facsimile of a celebrity's invented persona).

10.A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of a bodily or psychologically unattainable partner.


11.A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.

12.Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.

13.Weak virtual reality which is greater than any possible simulation of physical reality.

Hyperrreality

Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterize the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.[1]

Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges (who already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal. Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan.

Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation

Think back 9/11 'it was like a Movie', Baudrillard gives this phenomenon a name, Simulacra Simulation. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. He believes we cannot separate the image from the 'reality', when we drink coke we drink more than brown coloured water flavoured with sugar, we drink the marketing and lifestyle associated with it.

This sequence from 'Falling Down' illustrates what happens when you realise the reality isn't the same as the image.

Postmodernism-another definition

"A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable.

In terms of literature and media it is generally considered to be anything which makes little attempt to hide the fact that it is not real, it wants you to know that its been created and it wants you to recognise elements from elsewhere (i.e. that they have 'stolen' ideas from other sources), that there are no new or original ideas and that everything is in someway connected. Importantly it doesn’t want you to view it as being any more or less valid or important than a text which pretends to be real, postmodernists want everything to be equal, they want to remove binary opposites and start again. Students are often criticised for being post modern as they tend to like 'naff' things and think they are cool precisely because they aren't cool (thus removing binary opposites)"

Michael Smith (2009)

Are we living in a Postmodern world?

We frequently hear it said that ‘we are living in a postmodern world.’ Are we? How do we know? And how is postmodernism as a theoretical perspective applicable to Media Studies?

Where do we start? How about some definitions? George Ritzer (1996) suggested that postmodernism usually refers to a cultural movement – postmodernist cultural products such as architecture, art, music, films, TV, adverts etc.

 Ritzer also suggested that postmodern culture is signified by the following:

• The breakdown of the distinction between high culture and mass culture. Think: Black Swan-a film about a prima ballerina laced with a liberal dose of crowd pleasing sex and (psychological) violence.

• The breakdown of barriers between genres and styles. Think: Django Unchained a mixture of spaghetti western, drams, action film, serious comment on slavery.

• Mixing up of time, space and narrative. Think: Inception or The Mighty Boosh.

• Emphasis on style rather than content. Think: Little Mix, One Direction.

• The blurring of the distinction between representation and reality. Think: TOWIE or Celebrity Big Brother.

The French theorist Baudrillard argues that contemporary society increasingly reflects the media; that the surface image becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from the reality. Think about all the times you have heard an actor on a soap-opera say, that when they are out and about, people refer to them by their character’s name. Look at The Sun’s website and search stories on Nicholas Hoult when he was in Skins: he is predominantly written about as though he is ‘Tony’, his character in Skins.

Key terms

Among all the theoretical writing on postmodernism (and you might like to look up George Ritzer, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson and Dominic Strinati), there are a few key terms that you’ll find it useful to know. These terms can form the basis of analysis when looking at a text from a postmodern perspective:

• intertextuality – one media text referring to another

• parody – mocking something in an original way

• pastiche – a stylistic mask, a form of self-conscious imitation

• homage – imitation from a respectful standpoint

• bricolage – mixing up and using different genres and styles

• simulacra – simulations or copies that are replacing ‘real’ artefacts

• hyperreality – a situation where images cease to be rooted in reality

• fragmentation – used frequently to describe most aspects of society, often in relation to identity
 
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 32, April 2010

Modernism

In the field of art the broad movement in Western art, architecture and design which self-consciously rejected the past as a model for the art of the present. Hence the term modernist or modern art. Modernism gathered pace from about 1850. Modernism proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is thus characterised by constant innovation. But modern art has often been driven too by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the Realism of Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as Postmodernism.

Postmodern Adverts

Firstly the advert represents hyperreality because it shows a crisp, as to be what the viewer would perceive as perfectly sized and in theory the idyllic crisp. Although we know this is not possible because of the manufacturing process, the use of hyperreality makes us believe the crisps are in fact perfect and we must have these crisps. Also the use of self reflexivity whereby we are shown filming equipment it breaks the fourth wall and makes us realise that the advert is not real, this is a postmodern effect because it deliberately shows us it is an advert. Finally the advert is postmodern because it is weird and puts crisps and climbing walls together, which before had no link/relation. This advert is postmodern because it pays homage to the film, Untouchables and previously the Odessa Steps, by copying the baby falling down the steps/going down the slope falling to its fate. It also shows irony because in the other instances the baby is the major concern, and so it appears in the advert, until the man saves the cereal primarily- representing irony.