COVID-19: an age of fear, simulacra, or reality?

ABSTRACT The present research aims to deconstruct the proclamatory discourses on COVID-19 circulating in the networks of cyberspaces. The study attempts to analyse whether the knowledge produced about the precautionary assumptions such as a lockdown or social distancing are intentionally highlighted through media and other social networks. For this purpose, the research borrows Jean Baudrillard’s concept of Simulacra and Simulation to analyse how the COVID-19 pandemic creates a sensation of unreal fear at the global level. This excessive sensation constructs a culture of exercising power that gradually replaces the real understanding of discrimination between reality and imitation. This projection of sustained discordance aligns with Baudrillard’s basic tenets of media simulation of reality, wherein a simulation process is a fabricated culture constructed by human beings that dominates nature through a reversal of commonsensical understanding about the relationship between nature and the culture that is constructed by man. Hence, whatever knowledge is consumed as a constructed entity remains a copy ad infinitum. The exploration demonstrates the stage of hyper-reality highlighted in the process of simulation and simulacra. The present analysis is interested in perusing the effects of interpenetration between the real/created media knowledge production through Baudrillard’s concept of simulation simulacra.