By Mark Heisten, Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton
From “post-truth” notions of news, advertising, and public relations to digital avatars replacing human interaction, humans have entered a space that is similar to the physical world but it is not. This book uses the concept of the simulacra, as developed by Plato, Deleuze, and Baudrillard, as an overarching framework to explore how the digital landscape has transformed our understanding of reality.
Despite a twenty-first-century plethora of images and our collective understanding that digital tools may alter the truth, human beings have a strong belief in the truth of the image: “pix or it didn’t happen.” But what does it mean when the image itself is fabricated? Or when AI is used to create audio or visual content that has the appearance of “truth” but is not, in fact, real? In Living in the Simulacra, Mark Heisten, Kathleen Ryan, and David Staton use Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra to conceptualize the contemporary media landscape.
