Baudrillard's Theory

What is it?

• The idea that in postmodern culture the boundaries between the 'real' world and the world of the media have collapsed and that it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and simulation.
• The idea that in a postmodern age of simulacra we are immersed in a world of images which no longer refer to anything 'real'.
• The idea that media images have come to seem more 'real' than the reality they supposedly represent (hyper reality).

Definition from exam board

• Baudrillard implies that social theory loses its very object as meanings, classes, and difference implode into a "black hole" of non- differentation. Social theory itself thus loses its object, the social, while radical politics loses its subject and agency.

Applied to News

• Baudrillard's theory applies to newspapers and any cultural product. This particularly applies to news about news, or celebrities who are famous for being famous, where there is no clear sense of a 'real' lying behind the hyperreality. This however, does not explain anything specific to newspapers as it is an extremely high level theory of the postmodern world.
• Only appearances, there is nothing other than just illusions within the media.
• Opponents of postmodernism, means that we still live in the same old, modern society.
• Postmodernisms argue we have entered a new era beyond modernity.

Applied to LFTVD

• The theory may be celebrated in LFTVD's that refuse any simple identification of 'the real' in the fictional world. This does not explain anything specific to LFTVD's as it is an extremely high level theory of the postmodern world.
• Stranger Things can be described as hyperreal. It is a representation that is based on other media representations. The density of intertextuality that underpins Stranger Things results in a representation of small town America in the 1980's that is based on media texts of that era. 
• The representation of the 1980's in Stranger Things depends on signs- costumes, hair styles, props, set design, music, pop culture references- creating a hyperreal version of the 1980's. There is no attempt to represent the lived reality of 1980's America.
• Baudrillard's ideas are a very useful way to analyse how representations are constructed and the way meaning is made in a media text such as Stranger Things due to its extensive use of intertextuality and the predominance of signifiers to represent a historical time period. It does not help to consider LFTVD specifically as a media form, and it does not consider the pleasures of hyperreal media texts for audiences. 
• D83 shows the different realities are just illusions and are only appearances that aren't real.