Baudrillard - The Implosion of Meaning In The Media

Baudrillard’s The Implosion of Meaning In Media (1944) proposes three hypotheses as to why meaning is being lost with the increase of information. Either; it is impossible to successfully reinject message and content into information, and meaning is lost quicker than it can be reinjected. Or information operates outside of meaning, according to Shannon’s hypothesis information that is funcitional is purely technical – it does not imply meaning. Or information is detrimental to meaning; it directly destroys meaning and signification. This is the most controversial of the three hypotheses as it opposes all common opinions, due to the fact that currently socialization and development are measured by exposure to the media. Furthermore because this is seen as a positive thing its binary opposite – underexposure to the media – has negative connotations of desocialization. It is believed that information creates communication, but Baudrillard argues that there is a huge loss of meaning, he likens the belief to the commonly accepted myth that material production produces an excess of wealth regardless of its drawbacks/dysfunctions. Our belief that information produces meaning, Baudrillard claims, will be our downfall; as the opposite is the reality – information destroys meaning. He offers two reasons as to why information cannibalises its own content: firstly that it stages meaning, exhausting itself in doing so, it simulates meaning rather than produce it. This information is what Baudrillard terms ‘phantom content’ and is part of a circular process of simulation which results in the hyperreal (more real than real). Secondly he attributes the cannibalisation of content to the staging of communication i.e. the mass media, because information dissolves meaning and the social. The mass media, therefore, produces the “implosion of the social masses” (1997[1981]:81) because they are dissolving the value of the sign. Meaning lies in the relationship between signs (Surprenant In Waugh 2006:206), if the signs themselves are losing value so are the relationships and meanings between them, thus information is dissolving meaning.

Full Text. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/simulacra-and-simulations-viii-the-implosion-of-meaning-in-the-media/