Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (b.1929) is probably the best-known postmodern commentator
who elaborates principles found in the writing of thinkers such as Roland Barthes
(1915–80) and discusses them expressly in relation to developments in the informational
realm. One can get a better appreciation of the connections between
postmodernism and information by highlighting some of his themes and insights.
It is the view of Baudrillard that contemporary culture is one of signs.
Nowadays just about everything is a matter of signification, something obviously
connected with an explosive growth in media, but related also to changes in the
conduct of everyday life, urbanisation and increased mobility. One has but to
look around to understand the point: everywhere signs and modes of signification
surround us. We wake to radio, watch television and read newspapers, spend
a good part of the day enveloped by music from stereos and cassettes, shave and
style ourselves in symbolic ways, put on clothes that have sign content, decorate
our homes with symbolic artefacts, add perfumes to our bodies to give off (or
prevent) particular signals, travel to work in vehicles which signify (and which
contain within them systems that allow the uninterrupted transmission of signs),
eat meals which are laden with signification (Chinese, Italian, vegetarian, fatty)
and pass by and enter buildings which present signs to the world (banks, shops,
schools).
To be sure, all societies require the use of signs, but no one, I think, will doubt
that nowadays we swim in a much deeper sea of signification than ever before.
While pre-industrial societies had complex status rankings, elaborate religious
ceremonies and gaudy festivals, the rigours of subsistence and the fixity of place
and routine delimited the use of signs. Nowadays we no longer mix with the
same people in the same places in the same way of life. We interact now with
strangers to whom we communicate but parts of ourselves by signs – say, as a
passenger on a bus, or a client in a dentist’s surgery, or as a customer in a bar.
At the same time we receive messages from anywhere and everywhere in our
newspapers, books, radio, MP3 players, mobile phones, television or the Internet.
It is this which is Jean Baudrillard’s starting point: today life is conducted
in a ceaseless circulation of signs about what is happening in the world (signs
about news), about what sort of identity one wishes to project (signs about
self), about one’s standing (signs of status and esteem), about what purposes
buildings serve (architectural signs), about aesthetic preferences (signs on walls,
tables, sideboards) and so on. As John Fiske (1991), a sympathetic commentator
on Baudrillard, observes, that our society is sign-saturated is indicative of
‘a categorical difference . . . between our age and previous ones. In one hour’s
television viewing, one is likely to experience more images than a member of a
non-industrial society would in a lifetime’ (p. 58).
However, the ‘society of the spectacle’ – to borrow Guy Debord’s (1977)
description of features that were prominent well over a generation ago and to
which the French Situationists were alert in the 1960s (Hussey, 2001) – has not,
after all, escaped the attention of other thinkers who would resist the postmodern
label and any suggestion that sign saturation announces a systemic change.
244