Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that nothing like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. Baudrillard believed that society had become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was becoming meaningless by being infinitely mutable; he called this phenomenon the "precession of simulacra".
Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena:
- Contemporary media including television, film, print, and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images.
"Simulacres et Simulation" Author: Jean Baudrillard