Jean Baudrillard, french media theorist, died yesterday at the age of 77. Many of you may not know who he is but his work has influenced millions, especially in the arena of post-modern media theory and pop-theory entertainment like the Matrix. Next to Jaques Derrida (the father of deconstruction theory) he is arguably one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late 20th Century (also including Chomsky, Foucault, Heidegger, Sartre).

Famous for his theory concerning Simulacra (see his work Simulacra and Simulation) Baudrillard argued that we live in a world in which representation and simulation have come to dominate over what was once thought of as reality, to the extent that our reality now often is our simulation of it. The theory reached public notary when he applied it to the Gulf War announcing that it had never really taken place and what really happened was just a media spectacle (not saying that fighting had not really occurred just that it happened as a media spectacle and not really as a war).

In his essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Jean Baudrillard states that we are in an era of “connections, contact, contiguity, feedback, and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication.”

While he only briefly at times commented on the mobile age, his work has been used a countless number of books and articles written on mobile communications theory (I know I used him in my master degree thesis).

Baudrillard might argue that mobile technology has so penetrated our daily everyday spaces that those spaces do not really exist anymore and only seem to be made real by our mobile devices.

When once asked how he would like to be remembered after he died, Baudrillard commented “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.”

Applying his own theory to his death its safe to say that it never happened, nevertheless he will be missed.

[via ClickNoise]

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