aro0823, 2-22

We are all guilty of it. Someone whips out a digital camera and immediately we paste the fakest of smiles on our faces, simulating enjoyment and pleasure. A fake smile has seemingly replaced a real smile as a signifier of happiness. As Dr. Rog said in class, images strip away or create a sense of real that may or may not be there. That being said, any given college student’s Facebook album is chalk full of Bauldrillard’s concept of simulacra; it is chalk full of simulation. In reality, I do not have this smile on my face. However, to keep up appearances, I will feign enjoyment of the present situation, thus further perpetuating the cycle of fake smiles and pretend fun.
To speak specifically about Baudrillard’s relation to Facebook photo albums, I will theorize about something that has made me stop and think numerous times. I often find myself asking if a certain event was actually fun, or has looking back at the photos of people smiling made me think it was fun? Reality has become so convoluted that we feel the need to record every second of it just to assure ourselves it happened. Culture is undoubtedly deluding, thus leading to the confusion of reality with staged presence. We have managed to convince ourselves—by way of the intertextuality apparent in modern society-- that the fictional things we see on a daily basis that claim to be ‘real’ are in fact reality.
The rapid spread of repeated images has contributed to this unfortunate phenomenon. It is beyond simplistic to take a video on your phone and upload it to the internet, where it may very well become ‘viral’ and be watched by millions around the world. Regardless if the event was staged or the footage was doctored, people seldom stop to think if the image they are seeing is real if it makes the claim to be. The problem is further compounded by the lack of solutions to our societal delusion. The real and the pretend real have become so interconnected that it is a near impossibility to go back to the simple world of absolutes that occurred before this postmodernist mess of a place we live in today.