Take your time reading this book. Read it with a search engine open on your phone. Look up words and phrases with which you're not familiar. This is written at a collegiate level, and it is definitely worth understanding. The dangerous culture of social media will make sense, and it will make you fear what's happening to those who are glued to their phones. You may even realize that movies like Strange Days and The Matrix are disturbingly prescient.

I will admit it took me a few weeks to gather my thoughts on this book, particularly because I couldn't understand if it's 4 or 5 stars for me (which is quite meaningless anyways, so let's move on). I think the purpose of theory and philosophy is to come up with ways of looking at life, that make the most sense, or that make life more "understandable". Beaudrillard does exactly that in Simulacra and Simulation, and the relevance of this book to our current timeline could not be understated in a thousand years. I will not lie - this book is hard to grasp. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either a genius or a liar. Some of the articles in this are very coherent and clear, and some are very abstract and confusing. On numerous occasions I found myself treating certain pages as just plain text because I could not understand what the hell is going on. The good news is that I don't think it requires any particular background, except for maybe a very basic grasp of semiology/semiotics. But for the vast majority of the book, there is a point, a very strong point, and as much as I didn't understand some of it (particularly the latter half), I still managed to extract very valuable insights, practically every 2 pages. This is one of the book's greatest strengths - Beaudrillard manages to keep it fresh by approaching the same concept from different angles and there really is beef around the bone - I often found myself thinking about the book while not reading it, which to me is the greatest evidence that a book is truly interesting to me, on some level. Beaudrillard's extremely cynical and pessimistic view is all encompassing - to the point where it seems he fails to see the world in way different than that of the prism of simulacrum and simulation. As much as these raw ratings really don't mean much, I decided to eventually give a 5-star rating simply because of how profoundly profound some of the insights were and how mind-numbingly relevant this book is to world we live in. Beaudrillard wrote this in the 80's - he looked into the future and saw nothing but a grim world deprived of any true meaning. When I say this book is best read critically I mean that you don't have to agree with every single sentence and every single point he makes, to still be able to appreciate the theoretical structure he leans on, and how he meticulous dissects everything in the modern life and exposes the mold and that hides itself from plain sight.

It sounds like an obscure topic of no interest to anyone but a specialist but that could not be further from the truth. This guy, twenty years before smartphones, sorted out exactly how badly people's minds, especially young people's, can be damaged by electronic instantaneous InterNet grid communications. Gift this book to someone along with Pete Townshend's album from 1994 "Psychoderelict."

Quora.com has on file for your review scads of opinions and critiques of this and other work by this author as the book may seem so dense and compacted in meaning that you need a tutor to walk you through it. .

My son enjoys reading at papel than digital format

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher, a contributor to post-structuralism, along with the better-known Jacques Derrida. This bores anyone not deep into philosophy, so why dig into it? Because Simulacra and Simulation is mentioned in the movie, The Matrix, which is becoming a classic among people questioning all authenticity in an on-line world, and this book partly inspired it. The plot of The Matrix hinges on people being unaware that they are interacting with an alien, faux world, not reality, somewhat like Orwell’s 1984 earlier.

So if Simulacra and Simulation inspired The Matrix, what did the horse’s mouth say? Practically nothing; that’s the point. Baudrillard posited that we create meaning only by symbols referencing other symbols in a pattern that makes sense to us. None of it may represent reality, if there is such a thing. Consequently he is an expert turning logic in loops, citing referential contradictions, and doubling logic back on itself.

Simulacra and Simulation is an eye glazer. Its opening attributes to Ecclesiastes the observation that, “the simulacrum (a representation) never hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.” (I could not find this in Ecclesiastes, but suspect that Baudrillard refers to its refrain that of much study there is no end; all is vanity.)

Baudrillard harps on “hyperreality,” symbolism as in videos, whereby images seem more real than whatever they represent. It’s like seeing a video of a resort only to find that the real resort, if such really exists, is much less elegant than the video. He claims that hyperreality is the medium by which humans communicate, so it’s not new, but with modern media, we swim in an ocean of hyperreal nothingness.

Incidentally, Baudrillard did not mention The Matrix, but cited the 1996 British-Canadian movie, Crash, as one that approached seeing reality through the superficiality. The plot hinges on people being sexually aroused by fatal car crashes, either as victims or as witnesses. For Baudrillard, coupling sex and death in one emotional smash up invokes the full circle of life – but this combination didn’t particularly grip me.

I could not follow many of Baudrillard reversals of logic. The impression left, and perhaps the one he intended, is that post-modern, post-structuralism humans live mostly in our own simulations, subject to chaotic flips in meaning as discordant images flash by. You can see this in pop up ads and promos, all trying to out-gimmick the others. Is this a race to symbolic nowhere, an inane mashup of personal and corporate brands, never escaping Solomon’s conclusion in Ecclesiastes, that all is vanity?

Anticipating relief from this depressing thought, I started Baudrillard’s chapter on animals – nature – something other than Mobius strip loops of symbolic logic in media. Immediately, he dived into the mental health of animals in industrial feeding enclosures. “Democratic” access to food, so all animals will grow, screws up animal instinct for a pecking order. Confinement to tight spaces raises anxiety. Birds go nuts. So do other confined animals, whether farmed or merely observed, as in a zoo. Veterinarians have come to realize that animals in a non-natural environment are mentally distressed. They also get cancer, ulcers, and myocardial infarctions. Research vets think that turning them back into the wild once in a while might preserve their mental and physical health.

Baudrillard opines that everything that has happened to us is now replicated in confined animals. Ne notes that the ancients who sacrificed animals to gods must have valued them more than moderns. Sacrificing an objectified critter does not seem emotional enough to appease a god. Baudrillard suggests that sacrifice is at least a meaningful loss. Now we have relegated animals to detached roles of being food or pets or objects of experimentation and casual curiosity. How would humans in such roles react?

This suggests a line of study that has been emerging since Baudrillard’s death in 2007, increased depression in American youth. Some blame cell phones and social media, but the trend began long before those arrived according to an old study led by Jean Twenge. The figure from it below plots data over a 70-year span.

Speculation about this phenomenon keeps increasing. Youth are more self-centered, anti-social, anxious, and sad. And the phenomenon may not be confined to youth. So what is happening to us? What about the march toward a mobile, connected, and for some, affluent society might be a cause?

Maybe in all Baudrillard’s logical looping, he had a point. If we’re not living close to how nature designed us, we can become distressed. Many urban planners have sensed this ever since the 19th century, insisting that in their rush to riches, cities leave plenty of space for nature. These might do nature a little good, and us a great deal of good.

I would highly suggest we should encourage our children to read this book. Specially now days , the world will be better. The best way to unplug from this

good

This book is not an easy read but that is because it needs an open mind, a lot of time to contemplate and outside knowledge of related subjects.

Love challenging myself with this book and hoping to understand it better the next time I read it again.

very good..

Very difficult to understand unless you have sone background in related topic.

This is essential reading for anyone interested in postmodern philosophy. Discussion of his proposal that our world has lost all referentials, and predominantly exists in the form of simulacra, or copies without a true original. Examples from Apocalypse Now, Crash, Disneyland, a French modern arm museum, the Holocaust, and the idea of nuclear deterrence, all in the service of the idea that the world has become...well, the Cracker Barrel, hyperreal versions of signs that have lost meaning. I'm sure I have butchered some terms here, which leads me to...

...the text alternates between the poetic and the utterly incomprehensible, in which there were pages where I won't even pretend to understand what Baudrillard was on about. But it sure seems important.

Some favourite quotations:

"It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operating double." (p.2)

(on god) "This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, who millennial quarrel is still with us today . This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from conscience of man , and the destructive annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, that only simulacrum ever existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to destroy the images." (p.4)

"We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never know the word of Christ. Thus at the beginning of colonization , there was a moment of stupor and bewilderment before the very possibility of escaping the universal law of the Gospel. There were two possible responses: either admit that this Law was not universal, or exterminate the Indians to efface the evidence. In general, one contented oneself with converting them , or even simply discovering them, which would suffice to slowly exterminate them." (p.10)

"Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based," (p.21)

"History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth," (p.43)

"Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal." (p.45)

"Today, it is the real that has become the alibi of the model, in a world controlled by the principle of simulation. And paradoxically, it is the real that has become our true utopia - but a utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible, that can only be dreampt of as one would dream of a lost object." (p.123)

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