Reflection: Your Own Simulations

Prompts to consider

• Think about your own self-presentation on social media, or in professional contexts, or in social groups where you perform a particular version of yourself. How much of that presented self is a representation of something real (there is an original you that the presentation attempts to capture) and how much has taken on a life of its own, become a simulacrum that you now partly live up to rather than live from? When did the performance last surprise the performer? And does Baudrillard's language of the simulacrum capture anything real about this experience, or does it overdramatize something perfectly ordinary?
• Think about a major political or social issue you care about and follow in the news. How much of what you know about it comes from direct engagement with the issue itself, and how much comes from media representations of it? Can you identify specific ways in which the media representation has shaped not just your information but your emotional responses, your sense of urgency, your picture of who the relevant parties are? Is there a version of the issue that exists independently of its media representation that you could access if you tried?
• Baudrillard says that the people most confident they have seen through the simulation are often most thoroughly captured by one. Think about a time when you were very confident you had the real story, behind the official narrative, about some political or social event. How did you come to have that confidence? What was your evidence? And is it possible that the counter-narrative you believed was itself a simulacrum, a more satisfying and coherent construction than the messy reality, producing the pleasure of insider knowledge rather than genuine understanding?