Television, screens in general (and many other contemporary forms of mediation) create the illusion of immediacy—an appearance of unmediated contact with the real—while in fact they displace, replace, and ultimately dissolve the very category of the real. They do not merely hide mediation; they perform immediacy so convincingly that mediation itself disappears from consciousness.

1. Baudrillard is not saying “screens hide the real.” He’s saying they produce a world that feels more real than the real.

This is the heart of Simulacra and Simulation:

• Representation (symbol → real thing) is replaced by

• Simulation (model → no underlying real)

Screens are emblematic because:

• they deliver presence without distance,

• effect without cause,

• visibility without world.

This yields hyperreality: the production of an “as if direct” world in which the appearance of immediacy exceeds any reality it supposedly refers to.

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2. The world increasingly shares this structure: it presents itself as unmediated, but the very presentation is manufactured.

Baudrillard’s argument generalizes well beyond screens:

• The supermarket aisle gives the illusion of direct access to “choice,” while the system produces the field of choices.

• Political discourse presents itself as spontaneous public will, while it is engineered by media-logical feedback systems.

• Social norms appear natural, obvious, and “just how things are,” but are manufactured through institutional, symbolic, and economic machinery.

He calls this the “precession of simulacra”: the model precedes the world, giving the illusion of its naturalness.

So yes: what seems like direct access to reality is actually the result of an immense infrastructure of mediation that has been erased from perception.

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3. This is deeper than “illusion”: it’s a structural displacement of mediation

Baudrillard’s claim is not:

We are tricked by screens.

His claim is:

Modernity has erased the felt presence of mediation, and that erasure is itself a regime of control, a way the world becomes contrived while convincing us it is uncontrived.

The trick isn’t deception; the trick is transparency.

The world says:

“You are seeing the real directly.”

And this erasure of mediation is precisely what makes us unable to detect how the world is engineered.

The world becomes most manipulable at the exact moment it seems most immediate.

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4. For Baudrillard, the system doesn’t hide reality—it replaces the distinction between real and unreal.

Thus, we aren’t alienated from reality; instead reality is absorbed into simulation:

• Wars become televised “clean wars.”

• Democracy becomes polling and spectacle.

• Bodies become monitored surfaces.

• Nature becomes a themed environment.

In this regime, mediation is no longer an interface—it is the condition of the world—but it is experienced as zero-distance directness. This is why he calls it the ecstasy of communication.

• Baudrillard’s core thesis:

Violence begins when mediation becomes invisible and immediacy becomes the ideology of the world.

In short

Yes—Baudrillard absolutely thinks the world gives us the impression of direct, unmediated access to reality. But more precisely:

• This impression is itself manufactured.

• Mediation is structured to appear as immediacy.

• The hyperreal replaces the real, not by hiding it but by producing a more compelling double.

• Modern power operates not through opacity but through transparent invisibility.