This week's blog post is in response to both the excerpt Simulacra and Simulations from Jean Baurillard's Selected Writings as well as Antionette Lafarge's piece Winside Out: An Introduction to the Convergence of Computers, Games and Art.
Despite its relative brevity at only five pages (in print anyway) the Baurillard reading was plagued by applying too many examples to its premise. As I was reading this, I felt the author applied roughly a baker's dozen examples to his rather lofty concept.
It seemed that they all attempted to make their own points that were wildly different from each other and that there were so many of them that they ran a serious risk of contradicting one another instead of all tying back to the central theme of the article which in this case was to explain the concept of the "simulacrum". Baurillard's writing should've done a better job of getting in, unpacking its central premise, applying two or three simple and relevant examples to it and getting out.
However, the article does make more sense when read with Lafarges' piece on video games as it is a good companion concept to simulation. Lafarge does a considerably better job with her writing style at first. She starts off great drawing lots of relevant parallels between life, art and games and is slightly better at engaging the reader and keeping focused than Baurillard.
However, Lafarge quickly loses steam at the end because she appears to be explaining modern video game concepts that appear to be common knowledge to the target audience for this article. If she were trying to broaden her audience by including a "glossary" of terms at the end, this would be the wrong way to go about doing that.
Still, going back to Baurillard, his reading is based around a concept that it quite relevant to digital technology in this day and age. I'd like to explore this concept just based on the following quote from Ecclesiastes he opened his article with.
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true."
Applying this statement to the way we interact, online this could mean that no matter how many avatars or alternate identities we hide behind online to try and keep "anonymous", our real selves can never be concealed. Other online participants who we react with will see right through them immediately. While our online activities may be referred to as "simulations", our online identities are not necessarily the "simulacrum." Our real life identities are the "simulacrum" because "the simulacrum is always true".
That's it for this week. I have other homework to finish. Bye.
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