“This is not a pipe,” Magritte warned us, and yet, we keep mistaking the image for the thing itself. In this episode, we trace how screens have turned representation into reality, from Magritte’s illustrated illusions to Baudrillard’s simulacra and McLuhan’s media landscapes. Our phones decide what to show us, our feeds script how we feel, and even irony has become a kind of sincerity. Between memes, mirrors, and digital selves, we ask what happens when the copy outlives the original, and whether anything we see (or say) is still real. Maybe this isn’t a podcast at all, just another echo in a hall of mirrors whispering: Ceci n’est pas un podcast.
In our podcast we refer to a few concepts, here’s some background!
Baudrillard tells us that we no longer copy reality, the model now creates it. The map comes before the territory; images no longer reflect the world, they produce it. In this hyperreal landscape, the difference between truth and imitation dissolves. That’s the terrain we explore in this episode: how the post replaces the experience, the meme replaces meaning, and performance becomes reality. Our screens no longer show us life; they script it, curate it, sell it back to us as “authentic.”
Citations:
Baudrillard, Jean. “‘The Precession of Simulacra.” In Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel, edited by Bran Nicol. Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
Bullingham, Liam, and Ana C Vasconcelos. “‘The Presentation of Self in the Online World’: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities.” Journal of Information Science 39, no. 1 (2013): 101–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051.
Lindgren, Simon, “Digital Society.” In Digital Media and Society. 2017.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Message.” in Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
Striphas, Ted. “Algorithmic Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 18, no. 4–5 (2015): 395–412. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577392.Wells, H. G. “The Brain Organization in World Brain.”The MIT Press (2021). http://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542562.
I started thinking about many recent moments in my own life and realized that a lot of my memories are confirmed through screens rather than stored in the body. It feels as if events that were never recorded are easier to doubt. I see this as a shift in our tolerance for reality. Real life is messy and cannot be paused, yet we are becoming less accustomed to unprocessed experience. We trust versions that can be replayed, edited, and displayed. That is why I found it so compelling that you pulled the podcast itself into the structure. Even criticism of media cannot stand outside media. It can only speak within the same system of mirrors. What a hall of mirrors……