Virtuality and différance in the age of the hyperreal

What is it about?

Abstract Jean Baudrillard sees in today’s simulation the model ‘of a real but without origin or reality: a hyperreal’. With the hyperreal, the individual is unable to distinguish what is real and what is not. In this article, I argue how the pervasiveness of media, in the form of mobile phones, tablets with their applications and social networking sites, singularly or in unison create and sustain the existence of the hyperreal. They succeed at once through an imagined call for urgency and an implosion of meaning that cannot be contained. This type of media is a priori a form of simulation, and has not only erased the boundaries that exit between the real and the unreal but has also developed as a site accountable for continual deference of the being-in-the-world, forcing on the latter a perpetual existence in the hyperreal.

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