ABSTRACT
In his 2000 work, The Vital Illusion , French theorist Jean Baudrillard claimed, “The linear tension of modernity and progress has been broken, the thread of history has become tangled” (39). Baudrillard spent the majority of his academic career writing about the fractured nature of the human subject, beginning in the 1960s with his Marxist critique of consumer culture through his 1980s work on simulation culture and hyperreality. He died in 2008, having had the opportunity to witness and reflect on decades of rapid technological innovations. These innovations informed his theorizing, and the quote above is merely one sentence from a tradition of theory with which he and many other authors have engaged in the past quarter century: the idea that we are at the beginning of something radically new. Our digital possibilities allow us to rethink nearly every aspect of our daily lived experiences, from the way we learn to the way we shop, pay bills, fall in love, visit the doctor, travel, and even the way we die. In a broader sense, these possibilities also allow us to rethink our positions in the world, and how our actions and reactions are part of the larger fabric of our complex ecological situatedness.
