Postmodern Media: Key Conventions

Hyperreality
Images refer to each other and represent each other as reality rather than
some pure reality that exists before the image represents it. Hyperreal
texts deliberately break the rules of realism to explore the nature of their
own status as constructed texts they are intertextual and self-referential.
They seek not to represent reality but to represent media reality.

Baudrillard claims that Disneyland is the best example for understanding

hyperreality. Disneyland is a place which is a real physical space but is also
a fictional representational world. He thinks that we inhabit a society made
up wholly of simulacra simulations of reality that replace any pure
reality. Pure reality is replaced by the hyperreal where any boundary
between the real and the imaginary is eroded. Baudrillard wants to
expose the open secret that this is how we live and make sense of the
world in postmodern times.

Umberto Eco believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street
and full sized houses has been created to look "absolutely realistic," taking
visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past. This false reality creates an
illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality.
Disneyland works in a system that enables visitors to feel that technology
and the created atmosphere "can give us more reality than nature can.
The fake animals such as alligators and hippopotamus are all available to
people in Disneyland and for everyone to see. The "fake nature" of
Disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real life.
Therefore, they seem more admirable and attractive.

Interacting in a hyperreal place like a casino gives the subject the

impression that one is walking through a fantasy world where everyone is
playing along. The decor isn't authentic, everything is a copy, and the
whole thing feels like a dream. What isn't a dream, of course, is that the
casino takes your money. Although you may intellectually understand what
happens at a casino, your consciousness thinks that gambling money in
the casino is part of the "not real" world. It is in the interest of the
decorators to emphasize that everything is fake, to make the entire
experience seem fake. The casino succeeds in turning money itself into an
object with no inherent value or inherent reality.