ABSTRACT
Jean Baudrillard was arguably the most important and provocative media culture theorist of the 1970s and early 1980s. His studies of simulation, implosion, hyperreality, and the effects of the new communication, information, and media technologies blazed new paths in contemporary social theory and challenged regnant orthodoxies. Baudrillard's claim of a radical break and rupture with modern societies won him acclaim as the prophet of postmodernity in avant-garde theoretical circles throughout the world. Baudrillard proclaimed the disappearance of the subject, political economy, meaning, truth, and the social in contemporary social formations. This process of dramatic change and mutation required entirely new theories and concepts to describe the rapidly evolving social processes and novelties of the present moment.1
