Mass-Media Culture

By Jean Baudrillard

History often occurs twice; the first time with real historical import; the second merely as caricatural evocation of the event.

Cultural consumption thus may be defined as the time and place of the caricautral resurrection, the parodic evocation of what already no longer exist- of what is not some much consumed as consummated (completed, past and gone).

What we consume here, historical and structural definition, are signs on the basis of a denial of things and the real.

Mass communications added winds for consumer industry to be further developed.

Cultural recycling

One of characteristics of our society is "update" in knowledge, skills, expertise and so on. This notion is based on the continual advance of knowledge (in the exact sciences, sales techniques, teaching method etc) to which all individuals should normally adapt if they are to remain "up to speed".

It inevitably brings to the cycle of fashion, everyone follows, if not they are not true citizens of the consumer society; though there is no continual progress in these fields: fashion is arbitrary, transient, adds nothing to the intrinsic qualities of individual. It does however, impose thoroughgoing constrains, and the sanction it wields is that of social success or banishment, the same in medical recycling and knowledge recycling, even recycling of nature.

That is to say, our world, are standing in symbolic opposition to culture- but a simulation. The principle of organization governs all mass culture today. What all the acculturated receive is not culture, but cultural recycling.

Consumption of culture is not linked to cultural contents, but an ideal reference, losing its semantic substance.

By the mode of production, culture has become as material goods, can be produced out of the medium itself. Ultimately, there is no longer difference between cultural creativity and ludic/technical play of combination in signs and symbols.