Description: A paradigm shift has taken place in cultural studies in the wake of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such concepts as 'truth' or 'reality' are frequently expressed in quotation marks, since experience of 'the real' is now mediated through an 'empire of signs', as Roland Barthes put it, especially by the popular media. After a predominantly optimistic evaluation of the media in the 1960s (Marshall McLuhan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger), a growing awareness of the total manipulation of society by mass-media imagery has emerged, and the very concept of 'representation' has become problematic, witness the influential essay 'The Precession of Simulacra' (1981) by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, in which he defines simulation as 'the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal' -- the current boom in 'reality TV' immediately comes to mind. During the last seventeen years, since the publication of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, ever more sophisticated information technologies based on the computer as the simulacrum machine par excellence have offered us powerful new means of manipulating data -- and consequently, means of manipulating, editing, and inventing 'reality'. It is the aim of this study to unmask false 'representations', such as the 'constructedness' of history and of personal and cultural identity (especially gender and racial identities), the simulacrum of speed, and American 'reality' itself.

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