- Jean Baudrillard, "Hypermarket and Hypercommodity." Simulacra and Simulation, 1981.
Astonishing to think that McLuhan presaged this thinker by almost 20 years. It is interesting to generalize the phenomenon - that of, to again quote Baudrillard, "substituting the signs of the real for the real."
It was well understood that mere simulacra (in the original, pre-Baudrillard sense of the term - a representation of a person) were not to be conflated for the person they referred to themselves; the fidelity and character of classical, pre-digital media were sufficiently distinct from "real world" perceptual cues to make this clear.
Humanity was, in some way, ineffable; one could only point to it through books and brush strokes, or otherwise witness it and come to one's own judgments of another's character in person. However, in the present day, when every minutiae of every day being can be captured in 4K, paused, rewound, and replayed, we now find ourselves content to mistake that assemblage of pixels on a screen for an actual person, despite McLuhan boldly proclaiming in 1977 that "on the air, we do not have any physical body." [0]
Let us return to McLuhan now, into "a world where the [profile] will become a substitute for the [person] and all the satisfactions will be derived informationally from the [profile] and the [person] will be merely a number in some file somewhere."
Substitutions my own. Stark. In Baudrillard's words, indeed referencing McLuhan:
> The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message is the first great formula of this new era.
- Baudrillard, "The End of the Panopticon." Simulacra and Simulation, 1981.
What makes this especially pernicious is how the mere presence of the new digital and social media are fundamentally intertwined with reality, in the same way an observer becomes a part of their own experiment by virtue of the act of observation itself perturbing the system: "It becomes more complicated because this family fell apart during the filming: a crisis erupted, the Louds separated, etc. Whence that insoluble controversy: was TV itself responsible? What would have happened if TV hadn't been there?" (Baudrillard)
What becomes of the self under constant surveillance and observation? Is it the same self, or one conditioned by the media, and those who operate it? Consider that humanity has been under this condition for over at least a decade now, in which people are content with having many (all?) aspects of their lives documented for the world to see, whereas privacy and pseudonymity used to be the norm until the Facebook era.