Simulating a birthday

Before to dig deep into the reading, let me tell you it was awful to read it in a birthday weekend, but this does not mean I did not enjoy reading it.

Jean Baudrillard writes about simulacra and simulations. While reading the firsts examples about the patients who pretend to be sick and the one who pretends to be sick and develop the symptoms, realized that I did not totally understanding what I was reading, I called my personal doctor, friend and who is also my father, to ask him about this, he gave me the example of Placebos, but I'll explain this later. These firsts examples got me in a lot of trouble with my girlfriend, because I was telling her about the reading and the examples, but all she was telling me was that examples did not make any sense, so I had to come with the same example of the placebo effect.

After this small intro, I have not mention anything about the reading, so here it comes. Primarily is necessary to understand what is a simulation and what is feigning, and once more I'll come to placebo example. If you don't know what this is, here is a link that will explain briefly about it:  PLACEBO ; so what a placebo does is that it simulates the effect of medicine, but it is your own body the one which is taking care of curing itself, that is a simulation. On the other hand a feign needs would be a fake medicine that tries to cure some symptoms, but it wont work because it has no ingredients to do it.

Ok, but if my class is about digital media, what do I have to do with simulations? As I understood, everyday we see images in the Internet, in newspapers, magazines or you have photography or paintings, but these images are not the real images, these images that you see are mere simulations of an original image that the creator of the image had in his/her mind, and tried to record in canvas that may be called paper, notepad or camera.

As the lecture keeps going more examples come to explain simulations, Disney example is quite accurate, but I wont talk about it because I’ve never been there and makes me sad to write about it. 

When the author mentions the simulation of power and government, make me think about ideologies and revolutions, because they are all simulations of a feeling of being more powerful than the other, and for me this is bullshit and useless, but this how the world is been working since society begun.

By the end of the reading I got completely lost, the part in which is mention that we may be living a simulation of another reality made the paper go down, but still, I really like this and hopefully my conclusions about simulations and media is right.

U.C