Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is most fascinating and profoundly relevant and crucial to understanding today’s times. Baudrillard argues that we live in a state of simulated reality. In effect, we do not have an access to reality so we have always adopted frameworks to access, approach, understand and make sense of reality.

With the advent of media, the representation of reality has gone to a totally different level. This world, is made comprehensible to us now by the projections on the digital screen and that becomes the reality for us. For example, Renu gets a facebook friend request from this extremely handsome looking boy called Sanjay and they start chatting. They share numbers, messages and their friendship turns into love. Now in reality, Sanjay is a fifty year old bald man with a wife and two kids but Renu is unaware of this reality. For her Sanjay is the 25 year old man in the Facebook profile picture. So what we perceive as reality is largely mediated by a screen and sometimes there is no way to know what is true or otherwise.

Baudrillard talks about the Iraq war and how for most people across the globe, this war was fought on the television. What we had access to was only a certain narrative, a certain version of the events out of the thousands of versions which the war may have. So in fact reality was fragmented and came to us in the form of sound bytes and certain images and shots and a narrative which obviously consolidated a certain point of view. We lived with that reality for years and years.

Simulated reality is all-pervasive and influences us in more ways than we would like to acknowledge or admit or are even conscious of. For example, all the pictures that we post on Facebook or Instagram are a composition of a certain kind. We choose a frame, a background, put on a certain kind of smile, stand in a particular way and then post the picture on social media. In other words, we create a simulation, we construct an image of us which is commensurate with the way we want to be perceived as happy or rich or glamorous or carefree or thoughtful or professional by the people who will be looking at our picture. In other words, we construct ourselves in a certain way or create a construct of us expressly for the gaze. This simulated reality involves a certain staging of the self.

This is largely what Baudrillard sees as the effect of a consumer culture. We are defined by the things we buy. Our desires are created daily by the screen images we are exposed to. For instance, we might look up some clothes on Limeroad or Myntra and decide to buy them because we aspire to be this person who is wearing that particular outfit. Ironically, the person who is wearing the outfit is also a copy of another copy raised to infinity. Thus apparently we are all either aspiring to be or influenced by copies of which there is no original.

We are lured, enticed into buying the things that are screened or that pop up on our smartphone and laptop screens because the underlying implication and narrative insists that I can be that woman or that man in the picture if I own this product. Or I can create a similar atmosphere of gaiety or pleasure or warmth or professionalism if the product is with me. So when I am buying the product it is not with the exclusive intent of consuming the product but a result of having first consumed the idea of a reality that I will be able to construct and experience through the product. The product becomes secondary at times; it is the simulation, the allure of the hypothetical lived reality that is primary.

Thus there is no longer an authentic road to reality or comprehending reality. If I am so smart as to create a simulation of myself then there’s no reason to doubt that celebrities and leaders can’t be as smart if not smarter than I am and create similar simulations and to imagine the degree and extent of these simulations when the stakes are something as serious as a country’s foreign policy or an election campaign or a defence strategy. All kinds of realities can be floated and concocted. We might want to go on the internet for answers but it pretty much tells us the same thing. It will give us tons and tons of data and evidence that will support our worldviews or opinion regardless of what that might be. Most of us do not want to transcend this maze of simulations because it is easier to accept a metonymical mini narrative in the place of a grand narrative which is no longer an unfragmented whole.

Baudrillard gives the example of the movie Matrix which he uses as a metaphor to convey how we can be completely oblivious of the purpose of our existence and it can be any one of the thousands of realities floating out there except that each of them at best is a mere speculation. And that is something we have to reconcile with and make peace with, in a post modern world in the age of post truth.

This comes very close to Foucault’s theory of all reality being discursive. Even the camera which captures shots speaks a certain language and communicates a certain reality which is just one among the countless other ways of communicating the same event corresponding with countless other ways of capturing and recording reality. There is no single absolute truth. There are as many realities and as many stories as there are voices to narrate them.

Baurdrillard further uses the metaphor of the freeway to convey this concept. Just as on the freeway, we are all driving and headed to our respective destinations, we all live our simulated realities based on the trajectory we want our life to take. Just like on the freeway we exist in the same space for some time as we are driving, we might cohabit a common space but we are actually neither connected nor concerned with each other.