17: Simulation and Social Media

A film still from “The Matrix”, 1999

Over the course of the last month, a theoretical door opened in my mind while reading Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, initially published in French in 1981. Imagine this new door in my brain painted as part of an artificial blue sky gingerly peppered with agreeable clouds, like in the 1998 film The Truman Show. This short series of blog posts are going to be an embodiment of the feeling Truman has as he discovers the farce of his world, a “true man” found to be all but false, dehumanized, simulated. R.E.M’s song “The Great Beyond” plays, and a vision of that mythical door fades, “I’m pushing an elephant up the stairs…”, fades into a vision of Sisyphus and his rock. They say there is no greater meaning in life than what we give it, and it seems Baudrillard argued that modern electronic media saturated meaning to the point of meaninglessness.

In short, as explained in its description, “Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacrum--the copy without an original--and simulation, crucial to an understanding of the postmodern, to address the concept of mass reproduction and reproducibility that characterizes our electronic media culture.”

The concept of the computer was invented in 1822, the first physical versions were built in the 1940s, personal computers in the 1970s, the internet in the late 1980s, and then ever more exponentially-common household computers reigned. More portable, practical versions led us to the modern day paradigm of cell phones: the world at our fingertips. Baudrillard wrote his theoretical ideas on the postmodern world in 1981, well after television was universal, and just at the juncture of revolutionizing modern computers as we now know them. With this in mind, we can more accurately imagine the level of mass media he elaborates on and compare it to what he had yet to experience or anticipate at our present day 2024. 

In this first blog post that’s likely to be one of three, we’ll focus on the “inflation of information and the deflation of meaning”(Baudrillard 79). In the chapter titled “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media”, he elaborates on how “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”(79). And here we are, forty years later, inescapably navigating a comical amount of noise, nonsense, and excess in constant circulation at our fingertips. With the risk of being painfully obvious, I am referring to our cell phones, particularly our social media apps (Instagram, TikTok, X, etc.). 

We have entered a time period in which people begin a statement that’s supposed to be factual--that’s supposed to be real--with a phrase like, “I saw on TikTok”, or “I read in a post”, or “I saw a video where” or “I learned on Instagram that”, and assume that their point will be received at near face value, unchallenged, as truth. Maybe some giant world discovery, life hack, social movement, or new dietary recommendation of dire consequence has been revealed to them through the crystal ball of a social media algorithm, and because it was revealed in tandem with anyone else in their connections who dedicated viewing time to said idea, it has nearly solidified into their mind as fact. Because someone else they trust saw it, because there is a virtual room full of people receiving the same exact information, regardless of its accuracy, its intention, its producer. It creates a false consensus. Oftentimes when this happens, my knee-jerk reaction is, “did you check if it was true? Let me google it.” Even THAT isn’t a fool-proof way of navigating truth, and even THAT reaction is uncommon. Whenever I hear one of those fateful phrases, I ponder how there must’ve been a time when people almost exclusively opened factual statements with, “I read in a book that”, “I read in an article about”, “I saw in a paper that”, and it was actually believable. Because the majority of trusted publications were regulated, fact-checked, edited, and vetted as dependable. People once had faith in their media, before there was so much of it, before it got away from us. Of course this is not to say that all media was taken at face value or never questioned or received with a critical eye or ear, it’s just to say that the level and magnitude of unreality has never been so common as it is now. 

What I’m getting at here is that Baudrillard was already dissecting the oversaturation of media pervading Western culture in 1981 due to television and radio, which were still fairly regulated systems of information, and arguing that too much information was creating entropy. “Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social”(80). Think implosion, an ouroboros, a hissing snake taunting and beckoning you to tread on me, eat me, take a picture and post about it. Pics or it didn’t happen.

“Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite, of the implosion of the social in the masses.[...]This implosion should be analyzed according to McLuhan’s formula, the medium is the message, the consequences of which have yet to be exhausted”(Baudrillard 81). The idea of “everything everywhere all at once” (which was well embodied in the 2022 film with the same title), also gets at the core of the information age and oversaturation. A human being tuning into a little box--TV, computer, or cell phone--is immediately removed from a state of presence and placed comfortably within a set of social blinders that can isolate them emotionally, intellectually, and even physically. They stare blankly into our now all-too-familiar black mirror… are you still watching?

Marshall McLuhan

To bring this idea to its uncharted physiological level, in Max Fisher’s book, “The Chaos Machine” (2022), he dissects the psychological ramifications of social media in particular, explaining how its invention was likely the first time in human history we challenged the theoretical “Dunbar limit”. The Dunbar limit is the notion that there’s a cognitive limit on human groups of about 150 individuals. This is because to maintain group cohesion, individuals must be able to meet their own requirements as well as coordinate their behavior with other individuals in the group. Since the neocortex plays a crucial role in social relationships, its size should set an upper limit on the number of stable social relationships that primate brains can keep track of and maintain. Facebook and social media platforms challenged this “limit”. We are no longer only exposed to those in our immediate physical vicinity and a select few featured in television and movies, we are now exposed to EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME. How could this not create dysfunction in social systems that never evolved to accommodate so much information? So much identity? So many ideas? So much immediacy? Of course we are overwhelmed. Of course we feel disconnected. 

In McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”(1964), which Baudrillard references on this topic, he quotes Sarnoff as saying, “‘The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.’”(3). McLuhan denounces the idea that the medium doesn’t matter, arguing that it’s a cop-out, “that is the voice of the current somnambulism”(3). It is the viewer's unawareness of the content of the medium that does, in fact, determine whether the medium is harmful or not. McLuhan uses the example of the medium of a movie and how its content may be another medium like a novel, with the novel’s medium being written text, with the text's medium being speech, the true original source of the content. The idea here is to demonstrate that the medium matters, that it is like a giant experimental game of telephone for someone to watch a 7 second video on TikTok about a movie about a book about an oral story and somehow try to grasp a semblance of the original content to any real level without it getting lost. It is the getting lost that Baudrillard points to as the problem. 

“If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is--and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit--there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined”(Baudrillard 82). The inflation of information and the deflation of meaning. 

In Baudrillard’s chapter, “The Precession of Simulacra”, I couldn’t help but think of the common idea and advocation of “conscious consumption” via social media--algorithmically supercharged to retain our attention on a psychological level--and how it is nullified because “the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished”(29). Baudrillard follows that when “the distinction between these two poles can no longer be maintained, one enters into simulation, and thus into absolute manipulation--not into passivity, but into the indifferentiation of the active and the passive”(31). Social media is simulated sociality. Simulation is substituting the signs of the real for the real, threatening the difference between “true” and “false”. And so we arrive at the deflation of meaning.

In the next blog post of this series, we’ll dive into how social media and it’s freaky cousin Artificial Intelligence(AI) fit into Baudrillard’s ideas of postmodern electronic media, simulacra, and simulation. 

Thank you for reading, it means a lot to me that I can share ideas I care about in a way that feels more well-rounded than a small character-limited post on a short form social platform. 

Thank you!

Gabby