Hello everyone, you're listening to CMAF 1010. I'm Edward Holmes, and with me is Laura Bennett. Today we're digging into the deep end—the collapse of reality in the digital age. Laura, let’s start with Baudrillard. Hyperreality. Simulacra replacing originals. The copy becomes not just as real, but more convincing than what it’s simulating.Right, and, you know, it’s wild because if you just look at your social feeds, it’s not even a question of what’s real anymore, it’s, well, why does the artificial feel more compelling? Baudrillard’s Disneyland example always gets me—he says it’s a fantasy that actually reveals how the rest of life’s become a kind of theme park, yeah?Absolutely, and then you bring in McLuhan with that—he saw media as these environments that shape us more than the content itself. Today’s internet, it’s almost like a mirror world, self-contained and looping back. What we see online—news, memes, everything—it’s a simulation feeding off itself. Sometimes I think, wait, am I reacting to an event or just the representation of it, you know?That’s the crazy bit, right? I mean, everything gets so polished and optimized that even our outrage is sort of prepackaged for us. And, honestly, when we talk about authenticity—well, that gets complicated fast. You did some work in British newsrooms with deepfakes, didn’t you?I did, yeah. I spent some time trying to teach journalists how to spot deepfakes not just as a technical challenge, but as an editorial dilemma. I always said, "Look, once the copy becomes indistinguishable from the original, it's not just about telling real from fake—it’s about whether audiences trust anything at all." People tune in, see a “too-perfect” politician or event, and wonder, did this actually happen? Or did an algorithm conjure it up for clicks?And it leads to this sort of sense where our experience of reality gets flattened. Like, the duration and depth—the feeling that something lingers—is gone. We’re skimming surfaces, and everything, even our skepticism, feels automated. It’s exhausting!That exhaustion, yeah, it comes from living in a hyperreal world—constantly re-interpreting, never landing. And with that, maybe we should shift gears just a bit and ask: how is the audience actually positioned in all this? Not just as spectators but as data points, right?Definitely. So, Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model—that’s my bread and butter. He says content producers encode messages, and then audiences decode them through their own cultural contexts. But, with algorithms baked into platforms like TikTok or YouTube, that audience role gets totally redefined. We’re not just decoding, we’re being decoded—turned into, you know, datasets.Right. The algorithm becomes the interpreter. I once tried explaining this to undergraduates and, uh, they didn’t find it threatening, they just found it… normal? Like, “Of course the platform decides what trends.” But Hall never anticipated the machine would start doing both encoding and decoding, did he?No, and that’s the twist. It’s like, our memes, our TikTok dances, all that—it becomes this loop of production and consumption, but Leve and Foster say it’s all feeding a circuit, right? Our participation generates raw material for more algorithmic responses—and honestly, it’s free labor. We’re working for the platforms, even when we think we’re just, you know, goofing around.“Audience commodity”—I always find that phrase a bit haunting. When I was researching meme virality for a BBC doc, I realized—half the people contributing to a trend don’t even realize their labor is being commodified. Have you seen that, Laura? People thinking they have agency, but really, they're part of a massive, automated feedback loop?All the time! I did a research project where we traced how a single meme spread. And sure, people remix it, but every share, every comment is just further training data for the algorithm. The “agency” starts to look a lot like routine. It’s participation, yeah, but it’s also, I dunno, like, exploitation hiding in plain sight.Hmm, and the lines blur. Are we expressing ourselves, or just feeding the machine, shaping the mirror world by the very act of looking into it? Which, I’m sure, takes us directly into questions of control and surveillance—how all this raw data gets looped into predictive systems.Absolutely. Here’s where Lyon, Marx, Zuboff, all come in. Surveillance capitalism is what they call it—where our data isn’t just pixels floating around, it’s the new commodity. I mean, you can practically hear Zuboff’s voice: “They don’t just predict your behavior, they shape it.” Algorithms are quietly, almost politely, nudging us. Choices appear, disappear—free will kind of slips out the back door.Yeah, it’s like Lyon calls it: normalization. We don’t have an Orwellian Big Brother, it’s a thousand friendly algorithms managing our attention. Marx’s three circuits—they say data flows almost like money, always circulating, always generating value. It’s not about overt coercion, but the choices we’re given. Participation gets automated, and before you know it, “free” means something else entirely.And then, there’s what Ball, Renzella, and Rozova have started calling the “dead internet” hypothesis. This is the bit that chills me. Bots outnumbering humans online. Content is just a simulation trying to sustain itself. Sometimes, I wonder, who are we talking to online—other people, or the mirror image of what the platform thinks we want?Oh, that’s real. I ran a focus group with students last year, and gave them two news discussion threads, one bot-generated, one real. Almost none could tell the difference without a second look. That’s what gets me—if bots talk to bots, information loops endlessly, and the whole digital space becomes performance, not dialogue. Can we resist it?I’m not sure resistance is simple. But—Carr and McLuhan have a hopeful note: awareness, slowness, intentionality. I ran an ethics workshop recently, made everyone slow down and really, deliberately engage with stories instead of sharing instantly. Some found it awkward, but a few said, “Hey, that actually felt real.” Maybe intention is the last bit of agency we can hold onto.I like that. It’s not about escaping the mirror world or the dead internet—it’s about choosing how we inhabit it. If we go slow, act with intention, maybe we can still make meaning, even in a system designed for automation and spectacle.Well, that’s all the time we have today. We’ve covered hyperreality, participatory data circuits, the dead internet—honestly, it’s a lot to take in. Laura, thanks for helping untangle it all.Always a pleasure, Edward. Can’t wait to dig deeper into these themes next episode, maybe even bring in some listener stories. See you all next time on CMAF 1010.

Episodes

Circuits of Control and the Collapse of Reality