Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard may be one of the most difficult reads I have ever encountered. His writing is nearly unintelligible to a point of being cryptic. It took many times reading through the article to understand what he was trying to say. I am still not certain of his exact meaning of the paper. The article also did not have much context to accompany the excerpt, which contributed to its difficulty. With that said, here is what I believe he was trying to say.
Baudrillard is making an argument that mankind has always had a fascination with ‘spectacle’, and our personal selves have often provided this ‘spectacle’. We were once obsessed with mirrors, and the idea of examining ourselves. Now in modern days, that mirror has become the screen. We are now obsessed with any technological object that includes a screen, such as televisions, computers, and cell phones. We want to watch ourselves. He also brings up, in his example of the Polaroid camera, that humanity is more interested in the representation of ourselves via some magical medium than our selves in actuality.
What Baudrillard claims is that these representations through the use of screens are images of ourselves as human beings. We are the images that we see in the screen. Baudrillard’s entire paper debates the same question Rene Magritte states in his famous painting, The Treachery of Images, a portrait of a smoking pipe. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” or, “This is not a pipe” is scrolled on the bottom of painting, pointing out that the painting is not a pipe, but a painting of a pipe. It is a representation of the real item, just as a Polaroid photo of an object is a representation of that object itself.
Maybe what Baudrillard is trying to say is not necessarily that we are the representations of ourselves, but that the representations are influencing who we are. We are bombarded with representations of objects, people, and places everyday through many different media. New screens and representations are being developed faster than ever. With humanity’s easy access to computers and television, mankind is over-saturated with the amount of images we see everyday, to a point that we are now completely desensitized. The fact that we are so desensitized means that what is now unconsciously influencing us is what we see in these representations. Do we really see the world around us? Or is it all digitally re-mastered?
I personally do not believe that we as people are the representations of ourselves. Representations are simply images. They are not what they represent. In today’s world, I believe that we are our physical selves. But images are powerful things and we can be influenced by what we see in the ever-growing digital realm. For instance, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the Columbine High School shooters) were influenced by the violent video games they played. They internalized what they saw. We are capable of internalizing the images that we are exposed to, but I think that most of the population has the social filter to differentiate images from reality.