Belated Baudrillard Anecdote to Serve as an Obit

Fall 1995 was the first time I ever got to teach in my area of substantive expertise — it was an intro to communication studies course. I’d cleverly begun with McLuhan (yes, I know I know) and the “Medium is the Message” essay. The course ended with Baudrillard’s “Requiem for the Media” which is essentially his reply to McLuhan. I always preferred In the Shadows of the Silent Majorities to Simulations from his middle period. Anyway, I walk into class a minute or two before starting time, and the students are just sitting there, repeating a single phrase from the essay back and forth to one another: “The hyperreal is more real than the real. The real has been abolished.”