“Throughout history, conventions and techniques of representation have both given shape to and been shaped by that culture's particular conventions of seeing—a culture’s understanding of how embodied vision works or it’s understanding of how the mind[(s)] pictures the world”--

Struken and Cartwright (2009) 

Thesis: Jean Buadrillard’s ‘hyperreality', as a specific function in American simulacra, is on the verge of a paradigm shift. 

In this website’s content and structure, we try to provide several reasons why the American form of ‘hyperreality’ will fundamentally change in the near future. The structure highlights the breadth of the analysis, taking a two-pronged approach--critically analyzing the theory of hyperreality, while simultaneously providing contingent media analyses. The main content follows this structure and ends with suggestions about how this shift might look. First, we explain why the theoretical relationship of hyperreality, in the context of America, is inherently flawed and adaptable. Then, in the context of the shift of media and new media, we provide various instances in which hyperreality has manifested provides a vehicle for this paradigm shift. Within both, an implicit socio-political-cultural dynamic will be traced as a driving force behind fractures in the traditional theory of 'hyperreality', which is highlighted in the conclusion.

1. Postmodernity and ‘Hyperreality’, Part 1: Theory