Baudrillard – Hyper Reality ‘a condition in which "reality" has been replaced by simulacra’ When a sign loses its relation to reality, it then begins to simulate a simulation
Stimulation: The process in which a representation of something comes to replace the thing which is actually being represented. The representation then becomes more important than ‘the real thing’
Hyper reality: Division between "real" and simulation has collapsed, therefore an illusion of an object is no longer possible because the real object is no longer there.
Understanding Hyperreality –
Celebrity culture: Celebrities who reach a point at which every aspect of their lives is taken care of by someone else are said to live in a hyperreal world.
They lose the ability to interact with people on a normal level and are cocooned in Hyper reality. Normal people often try to copy this, for example one man who is obsessed with Britney Spears and every aspect of his life relates to her, he genuinely believes that he lives in the same world as her.
This is a common case in which someone has become more engaged in the hyperreal world than the actual real world.
Carol Clover - The Final Girl Theory In films, women are often portrayed as weak and timid characters, a damsel in distress who is always in need of saving. They are stereotyped as sex symbols, attracting the men’s gaze for cinema showings and rarely make it to the end of a film without the help of a man. On the other hand, some women are seen as strong and smart, posing the characteristics of a masculine hero, such as Ellen Ripley in ‘Alien’ and Sarah Connor in ‘Terminator.’ These types of characters are found mostly in horror films, which are the smartest and bravest to be able to survive the whole film, while all the other characters, including the men, have died. This is known as the “final girl”
The concept of the “final girl” was created by Carol Clover. These final girls usually have the same characteristics in any horror film. The women are usually sexually unavailable, and sometimes have a unisex name such as Billie or Georgie. Sometimes the final girl is even related to the killer. This was true in Halloween 2, where Michael Myers is revealed to be the brother of Laurie Strode.
David Gauntlett David Gauntlett is a British sociologist and media theorist. He specializes in studying contemporary media audiences, the every making and sharing of digital media, and the role of such media in self-identity and self-expression.
Gauntlett (2002) : Media messages are diverse, diffuse and contradictory. Rather than being zapped straight into people's brains, ideas about lifestyle and identity that appear in the media are resources which individuals use to think through their sense of self and modes of expression
Because 'inherited recipes for living and role stereotypes fail to function', we have to make our own new patterns of being, and it seems clear that the media plays an important role here (David Gauntlett, 2002).
Media products provide numerous kinds of 'guidance' - not necessarily in the obvious form of advice-giving, but in the myriad suggestions of ways of living which they imply. We lap up this material because the social construction of identity today is the knowing social construction of identity. Your life is your project. The media provides some of the tools which can be used in this work. Like many toolkits, however, it contains some good utensils and some useless ones; some that might give beauty to the project, and some that might spoil it. (People find different uses for different materials, too, so one person's 'bad' tool might be a gift to another.) (Gauntlett, 2002)
I don't believe that 'experts' can have the final word about representations, since representations are only meaningful when processed in the minds of individual audience members. – David Gauntlett (2008)