ABSTRACT
The influence of media representations on interpretations of reality is proposed as an irresistible process of the postmodern world (Featherstone 1991). Baudrillard (1983) goes so far as to propose that we now live in ‘hyperreality’ where the real and the simulated become confused so that images are indistinguishable from reality, and in fact become ‘more real than the real’. The individual in postmodernity is depicted as a powerless victim of an ‘hallucination of reality’. The postmodern condition, then, is one in which the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has led to symbolic overload as the individual is bombarded with ‘floating signifiers’ and is unable to resist the hegemonic power of the mass media.
