 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Go on holiday. What's important to you? What's your priority? Relaxation. Ready to relax? Relax and see. And see the sights. If money or time were no object to you, what would a dream vacation be? What's just what we're doing? You're in Victoria, huh? Yeah, this is my dream. Just being able to come here and seeing this part of the world. When you go on a holiday, what's important to you? Weather. Whether you like to go some place warm or some place cool? Some place warm and nice weather, like how? So get away from snow and ice and all that. Rain, hero from rain. What about things like time with family? Are you trying to get away from family or be close to family while you're on vacation? Stay close to family. So you go together as a family? How about things like seeing new sights? Stuff like that. You like going to new places? You like going to the same place every year that's sort of comfortable? I like to go new places. See new sights? Yeah. If money were no object, what would your dream vacation be? No money. It doesn't matter about money. It doesn't matter about time. You've got all the time in the world and all the money to do what you want. What would you do? I want to go on a cruise. On a big ship? Yeah. Tell me a little bit more. What's cool about a cruise? I can get nice sun anytime, like on the sea. Weather. I like the sea. So I can see a nice view. The point would be to be someplace nice and sunny and out on the ocean. Close with my family or friends on the ship. It's not important for me, like Casino and stuff. Okay. What about you guys? Where would you? I would stay in Luxoria's hotel. Room service? Yeah. Yeah. Are we talking spa here with the masseuse coming by every day? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Casino or so. You look like a casino. Yeah. Money is no object. Yeah. How about you? I don't know. Yeah. It's a good idea to go to the hotel and then just relax and yeah. So just taking easy having other people pay up for you. Okay. Are you from Victoria? No, I'm from Switzerland. When you go on holiday, what's important to you? Yeah, important for me is to see new things, new people, to meet new people. Maybe to learn the language, like now. English holiday is also good for rest and take time to think about. If money or time were no object, what would be your dream vacation? Maybe to go to Alaska to look all the nice nature. And get to see some animals there, like moose and whales and something. And then to travel around. Okay, well, thanks a lot. When you go on holiday, what's important to you? Getting away, getting to a new place, getting some rest, spending time with your family, anything like that? Something new, something fun, something new, relaxing, exciting. If money and time were immaterial, what would be your dream vacation? I'd probably go to Jamaica. Jamaica? I don't know, I don't really make friends, I don't. Just figure out what you've got there? Yeah, what I want. Okay, when you go on holiday, what's important to you? Oh, definitely rest is going to a new place. If money and time were immaterial, what would be your dream vacation? I'd love to take a Mediterranean cruise. I'll stop in Egypt to see the Giza, the Temple of Carnac, that sort of thing. I love Egypt. Have you been there before? No, no, but I'm a big study of Egyptology. Okay, so that makes sense. Tourism Victoria is a not-for-profit industry association responsible for the development and promotion of tourism in Greater Victoria. It is funded operationally by over 900 business members, five area municipalities, and Tourism British Columbia. Tourism Victoria is responsible for destination advertising, market research, increasing leisure travel and meeting and incentive travel for the Greater Victoria destination. It is responsible for servicing visitor inquiries, including providing information, making accommodation bookings, selling activity tickets, and fulfilling mail and email requests. Tourism Victoria maintains two offices in Victoria. One is the nation's busiest visitor info center at 812 Worf Street. The other is the administration office at 31 Bastion Square. I spoke with Melissa McLean, director of operations and communications for Tourism Victoria at her Bastion Square office. How dependent is Victoria on tourism? Victoria economy is, I think, very dependent on tourism. We are many things as a community. Certainly we're a government town, a university college town, a military town, but tourism is the number one primary industry. And the distinction there is that it's bringing new money into the economy to circulate through that economy. So we have an annual tourism revenues here of just over a billion dollars. But when you think of the true value of tourism, as it starts to multiply when the person enters and gets their paycheck and then starts to spend it in a community, when the hotel pays their suppliers, the industry is really worth about 1.7 billion dollars to the Victoria economy. How do you go about promoting Victoria outside of Victoria? Well, you know, it's an interesting question. When you promote a beautiful city, a lot of people think you don't need to. They think that it's sort of like field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. And it's really not the case. People are bombarded with marketing messages, including about where they ought to travel, as well as how they ought to spend their disposable income period. So not only do we compete against other destinations in the world, we compete against, well, this year, buy an SUV instead of going on a vacation. So for us, it's very much building upon the success that we've had over the years with tourism having been intertwined in the economy here from the arrival of the first European settlers. And the first marketing message was certainly around a little bit of Old England. There's a certain market that likes that message. And so we still have an element of that messaging in our marketing. For example, American visitors really like it. It helps them see Canada as more foreign than a lot of Americans tend to see as typically a place. And our Japanese visitors quite like it. But beyond that, the growth for us has been, very much, has been in promoting the natural beauty of Victoria and doing that through having people see this area as the launching pad for spectacular adventure vacations that range from soft to hard adventure. I think that people often had a perception previously around adventure as being something very high risk where you've got to be repelling off a mountain or a hell of a gene for it to qualify as adventure. And in fact, Tourism BC's slogan for the past 20-plus years has been supernatural British Columbia. And you see in the advertising people roaring through rapids and repelling down mountains and so forth. There's been a real evolution of what is adventure travel thanks to the Baby Boomer. And it all ties in, I think, very much to the Baby Boomer's desire to find a fountain of youth, to extend life as long as possible, to be active even in their holiday pursuits. And so there's a whole continuum from soft meaning low risk adventure activities like low impact hiking, bird watching, which actually ranks as the number one leisure activity today's Baby Boomer. Are they actually like buying the binoculars and going out with a little guide books and looking for rare birds, or is it just hiking? Well, there's all levels of bird watchers, but it's absolutely buying the binoculars and hiding out in the marshlands and forest. There's everything from the gulf and the freshwater fishing, and you start to ramp it up in level of risk until you find yourself at that hard end of the adventure equation. And that has been really spectacular for us as marketers because people get the combined benefit of this being a city, albeit the most un-city-like city a lot of people have ever been to, where you can have the comfort of the wonderful luxurious hotels and all of the restaurants and attractions and so forth. And you can spend your day out at Galantahod Range Provincial Parks hiking and bird watching and enjoying, and then come back to an amazing West Coast dining experience and, you know, cuddle up underneath the plush duvet comforter. You kind of have a taste of everything then. Do you use a lot of your own original market researcher? Is a lot of what you know about the market come from centralized sources in tourism where you read other studies that kind of give you general information and then you see where Victoria can tap into that? Well, being on an island is a bit of a blessing in that folks have got to hit a certain point of departure off of the island, where typically there is, we hope, a short waiting time to depart. And what we've done is, in conjunction with the University of Victoria from the late 1980s onwards, conducted exit surveys, where as folks are at the various outbound transportation terminals, we have surveys asking them in fair detail what they did on their trip. So it's not speculative, it's not, what do you think you'll do while you're here? It's okay, you just finished your vacation experience. Tell us everything. And we've gathered over 10, 12 years some amazing primary data about people. And of course, we augment that with the research that's out there from Tours and British Columbia and the Canadian Tourism Commission and then private sources. There's mountains and mountains of it. And a lot of it is around what causes groups of people to decide to move in a certain direction. Right now we've got staff on a 16-day road trip through Washington, Oregon, Northern California promoting Victoria as a family destination for the summer. And the focus is more activity oriented around commercial attractions you can visit, parks the kids can play in, things the whole family can do together. The key market that we seem to attract is the couple referred to in our industry as the empty nester where quite often both husband and wife are still working, the kids have flown the nest, the house mortgages paid down, the car mortgages hopefully gone. These are folks who don't necessarily have a lot of time but they've got disposable income and they need to get off the urban rat race. And so for them we're pitching luxury, sanctuary, but still activity. Seniors are very interesting because they used to be very straightforward. They sat on a bus and went on a bus tour like a 21-day tour of the Rockies. And that was very easy for us as Tours and marketers to see and understand how to deal with. Well, seniors are so much more active now that we're seeing huge shifts in the bus tour market, declines to be quite honest, and we're seeing seniors heading out on their own. We're seeing them in elder hostel programs where these are not low-level workshops they're attending. They're with marine biologists from the University of Victoria studying tide pools, then spending the next day with an archaeologist at the Royal BC Museum. I mean, these folks are digging in. And so the whole growth around learning vacations, it spans many age groups, but in particular the seniors have just a massive appetite for this type of vacation. There are a lot of vacation destinations nowadays that kind of offer a fantasy. They really aren't life experiences in the sense of, you know, like getting out of the wild here or on the island or something like that. You go to a park, it's very contained. You're inside a fenced area and experiences are provided for you. Being authentic is really important because we believe that people want to come to a community and to varying degrees experience life as the locals do. And I admit that is to varying degrees. Some folks are here to rent a cabin, read a book, look at the ocean, and never even talk to a soul. And then there's someone on the other side of the spectrum that wants to, you know, become a local. So for us, we really present Victoria very much as it is. Although certainly there are those who criticize us who say, well, if you're presenting Victoria as it is, then why are social issues of concern to you? Why do you rile against panhandling and so forth? Are you trying to create some sort of a magic kingdom for visitors so they don't see the real Victoria? And we say, well, no, we think that social issues are a community issue and we think that we need to address issues like homelessness for the people who are homeless, for the community overall, and the visitors are almost incidental to that. And so sometimes we're misperceived as attempting to create, in a way, a fantasy, maybe not a Disneyland, but this perfect paradise. And it's kind of an inaccurate perception of what we're trying to do. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You're welcome. On CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. We're going to talk a little bit about our vacation. Well, it wasn't really a vacation, it was sort of a move, but we treated it as a vacation in September of 2000. It was kind of a combination vacation and move. And we took our time. We left North Carolina and drove all the way out to Victoria. It was an interesting route because we started out by leaving our family in North Carolina and the first couple of stops along the trip were visiting friends and family. Now, once we got past Minneapolis, or got to Minneapolis, we didn't have any friends or family. So we started doing the hotel, Lash, what do you call those things? Attractions along the highway route. Points of interest. Ah, yes, points of interest. I think is your tour book is important. I had a little bit of everything. I mean, the first part of the trip was visiting family and then the next part of the trip was visiting friends in big cities to do and we were out in the middle of the prairie kind of doing the American tourist thing and then we were doing the sightseeing as we drive by thing. It was a vacation. It was many vacations in one. It was a multiple vacation. It was a simulated vacation. Ah, yes, the Mall of America is an easy target and it was the first sort of kitsch stop on the way. It was a four-story mall, I think the largest in the world. No, West Edmonton is the largest in the world. I've been there over that all the time. Yeah, so right away the notion of objectivity is out the window because apparently it's something that can be claimed. Self-identification suffices to establish. It can be measured in several different ways, too. Number of visitors, number of square footage, number of stores. Proximity to the Vikings training camp. Or to the... What's the name of the stadium that the twins and the Vikings play in? The Metro Dome. Is that right? I think it's the Hubert Dome, isn't it? Hubert Humphrey. Hubert Humphrey, that's it. There's another H in there. It's Hubert to ratio Humphrey, wouldn't it? I don't know. It's middle name began with an H, but I don't recall what it was. No, it's all run by eight. Jesse the governing body of Ventura. Yeah, Ventura. So actually the whole Minneapolis-Saint-Paul area has become something of a simulation. There's a lack of authenticity to it. When your governor used to be a wrestler, one of the rest of wrestling is fake, is that it's no more fake than the rest of everything else into our real life. And what frightens me is that they may be right. Like Badger Yar's comment about Disneyland that the real sham surrounding Disneyland was not that they put together the sort of fantasy world for you. It was that once you went out of the exit back into the real world, that it was, in fact, the real world and not just as simulated in just the same way that Disneyland was, I think that was a bit pessimistic, that you didn't really use any way. Oh yeah, and then there's Lake Wobegon, which is a simulated hometown. I never even thought about that. But they were in the mall, man. There was a Lake Wobegon store, which was one of the coolest stores in the mall. Yeah, I bought a t-shirt there that said so many books a little time. The president supposedly went two minutes out of public radio. And a lot of people don't know that the Prairie Home companion in Lake Wobegon was a figment of the socialist, and we saw the... Well, first we saw Southwest Minnesota. And at the ghost town, and you knew it was a ghost town because it had its own sign that said ghost town. Oh yeah, somebody put up, the last guy to leave put up the sign before he left. It was the only thing they could figure out. But it was complete with wind and tumbleweed, and there was nobody there. That was nice of that with the tumbleweed. That added real verisimilitude. The cat sort of became a kite from the wind as we were taking her out in the leaves. So we went to the Missouri River. They were planting additional grass there to simulate Prairie because the real grass had been killed by everybody tramping all over it. Well, the simulated TP, remember that? Yeah, the simulated TP. It was a sculpture of a TP. And then it got really kitschy because we went to Mitchell, South Dakota. Oh, that was before. Mitchell is east of the Missouri River. Yeah. We saw Mitchell before we saw the Missouri River. And we saw the corn palace, the building in Mitchell, South Dakota that they redecorate with fresh corn every year in entertaining shifts. It's not fresh corn. It's dried out corn. I don't mean fresh in the literal sense. It's the leftover corn. Yes, as opposed to the old corn that they dispose of. They use corn removal techniques and then put the fresh corn in appealing patterns to create some representational, some otherwise to create a colorful corn mosaic effect. Which they redesign every year. I think they went back to the 19th century. We saw photographs of the corn palace. From 1898 or 1893, I'm not sure which. One year, I believe, 1913, they had a swastika on the front. This was while it was still, well, before it had acquired its current signified, as it were. And the proprietors of the corn palace had put up a sign saying, essentially, this thing, it doesn't mean Nazism. It's a good symbol to pop stuff in certain cultures. And I noted from my own reading that Kipling had used it in a couple of his books. He'd appropriated it from the Indians. We lived there. There was like a hundred other names, but it just looked like a swastika. Yeah, it's a pretty common symbol. And there was a woman looking at one of the photographs, this photograph in particular, of the swastika bearing corn palace. And I began giving her a short history of the swastika and told her, since when I told you, she said, I know quite a lot about the work here. And I decided to have some fun with her. I said, well, until two weeks ago, and they fired me, so I just come here and do this for free now. And I think she believed me until Patty left to save her from herself. She was believing you so badly. I was like, oh, no, we can't let this poor woman leave here. I freaked out. I must have had the air of credibility. Anyway, after Mitchell, after Missouri River, we did the bad lands, I think, was the next stop. And that was quite beautiful, but there still was simulated stuff there, the simulated herds. They had simulated herds of antelope. The antelope were not simulated, but the herds were. In the sense that they weren't naturally occurring anymore. They had been restocked. And then we didn't see, and we saw the antelope, but we didn't see the 500 head of buffalo that we're supposed to be running around in there somewhere. The Badlands was kind of a turning point for me on that trip. I mean, we had sort of done the kitschy stuff and it was kind of fun, you know, and we didn't take the route that takes you by the big ball of string, but I thought about that. It was that kind of a trip up until then. But I had read earlier in the summer Burrowing My Heart at Wounded Knee. And I had read about this area, the Badlands is in, because that book is about the history in the mid-1800s of the Oglala. When the Oglala had resisted the white coming into the area. And the Badlands is adjacent to the Black Hills and the Black Hills are a very sacred land to the Sioux. Wounded Knee was probably about 50 miles south of where we were. We didn't go all the way down to Wounded Knee. I actually don't know where Wounded Knee is. I think it's still in South Dakota, and it is in the Black Hills. When I got there and when I realized that what I was looking at, the land that I was looking at was what I had read about earlier in the summer. My feelings about the place began to change. And it was kind of interesting because the kitchiness continued. I mean, we went to Rushmore and there was all this kind of official line, if you will, official story of what Rushmore was all about. And there were like all these little trinkets that you could buy. And we had lunch at the cafeteria at Rushmore and they have the All-American meal that served to you by a foreign exchange student. All the wait staff there were from other countries. They had the countries displayed on their name plates just so that you knew that. And the All-American meal consisted of a hamburger, fries, what else was it? It was hot dog. Hot dog, that's right. And apple pie. We took a photograph just for the second documentation. We wanted to be believed on this one. And it was sort of like the simulated melting pot in the cafeteria. It was kind of weird. It was sort of like we were being treated to a fake unity. Yeah, I don't want to quite say fake because that sort of implies something that I'm not sure it's true, but it was a forced one. It was a forced unity. I mean, I think the exchange students were genuinely trying to help. And I think that they were genuinely happy to be in the park. And I think that the motivation of the park in having all the flags and having all of the exchange students there and everything was probably a good motive. I don't think it was like retelling where they were really trying to present something that wasn't real. But it still didn't ring true. It had a stuck together feel about it. A simulated feel about it. Then knowing what the history is of Rushmore and knowing that that was a way of stamping on fakery ground, the white imprint. I mean, it just has an imperialistic background to it. And of course, nothing in the park went after that. Nothing in the park said, oh, by the way, this is a monument to imperialism. But in a lot of ways it really was. I mean, it was really saying, haha, we won. We beat the native. And this proves it because we etched the faces of our leaders into your sticker ground. So I felt very odd there. It had a real kind of very feeling to it in a lot of ways. And a shameful feeling. It was not a part of history that I was very proud of. On the same day that we went to Rushmore, we went to the memorial for Crazy Horse. And it was an interesting contrast because Rushmore was built. Do you remember how quickly? I think it did it all in one day. No. I actually don't know. I think it was like 13 or 14 years though. I don't think it was a long, long time. Crazy Horse, on the other hand, was begun in the 1930s. There was actually a native man who was still alive in the 1930s who remembered Crazy Horse from when he was a kid. He was very elderly, what, about 70, 75? And he hired a sculptor who sculpted what is going to be the memorial by him describing his memories of Crazy Horse. And then the sculptor drew and said, you know, and did kind of like the police catch thing where this is how you remembered it and so forth. There's no actual picture of Crazy Horse anywhere. So this is from that chief's memory. And it's a beautiful picture with Crazy Horse on his horse pointing towards the horizon and they've been working on it. They've been blasting on it for nearly 70 years now and all that's been blasted out of the mountain is about the head and part of the arms. None of the horse's head or any of the other part of his body has been blasted out. And I think the difference there is as simple as funding. The Mount Rushmore project was funded publicly and Crazy Horse has been funded privately and the private funding just hasn't been there for the water project. It's not especially mysterious on that level. They have done some nice things there. They've put together a wonderful museum and it has a lot of great information about this too about the history of the place about natives history since then. It's a culture center. They have powwows there, that kind of thing. It's a place where the natives were living in the areas on the reservations there have as a center for their culture and I believe that some of the funding that comes into the place has actually helped the tribes in the area. One of the reasons why it's been slow going is that when money is given to the memorial it's not all spent on just blasting the mountain. It's spent on improving the lives of the people there. Now the rest of the trip wasn't quite as a study in contrast as that little area in South Dakota was and it's a trip that I remember very fondly in spite of the fact that there was it wasn't exactly an escape. It ended up being sort of an enriching experience but not what I would call an escape from reality experience if there is such a thing as reality. Now I'd say that somebody had contextualized the West quite inescapably. I wouldn't call it an escape at all. I'd call it a verification that escape is not really a possibility that you can't go home. So we are about to embark on an experimental style of book review. A kind of dueling book review in which we place two books in comparison to each other in order to understand a topic more thoroughly. I will be discussing George Ritzer's enchanting and disenchanted world revolutionizing the means of consumption. Along with his book The McDonaldization of Society Ritzer's project is to look at the ways in which consumption economics are changing social relationships. I really like his work. His writing is accessible especially for a postmodern approach and yet he doesn't dumb his stuff down. He challenges capitalism where it lives at the end of the 20th century. My book will be Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. Simulations consist of two essays by Baudrillard. The first of which is entitled The Procession of Simulacra and the second of which is entitled The Orders of Simulacra. The essays are an attack on metaphysics both deconstructing the notion of a pre-existing real. The notion Baudrillard calls the reality principle and rhetorically reversing the privileged status of any pre-existing real over its simulations assigning privilege instead to the simulations Baudrillard calls hyper-real. I would like to discuss Ritzer's text and Baudrillard's text in light of vacations as a mobile society Canadians hold their quote holidays close quote as sacred. It is a time when people go somewhere. Ritzer would suggest that that somewhere is changing as North Americans become more consumption driven. A great deal of the consumption done on holidays has always centered around food a place to stay for many years. The latter has been kitschy for a while especially with the advent of plastics in the 1920s and 30s. But Ritzer asserts that the fakeness has spread to the food and the places to stay as well as the little plastic trinkets marking the trips. Amusement parks have outgrown the ferris wheels and roller coasters of the 1950s and 60s to become full scale shopping meccas where people eat, sleep, shop and get thrills. Ritzer writes quote for one thing malls have become tourist destinations malls have everything they have an amusement park they have a roller coaster this combination is spectacular and a powerful lure to the traveler. In Canada the largest tourist attraction is not Niagara Falls but rather the Edmonton Mall close quote Baudrillard implies inevitability of the simulacrum he attributes to it a presence that trumps that of the objectively existing not merely mocking the validity of the original but superseding it it begs the question of what is real and does so in a way that exposes the term as untenable he sets up a hierarchy of simulation four levels which he calls orders. one is that which attempts to emulate an original the second order is that which misrepresents an original the third order attempts to create the impression of an original where not exists the fourth order is that which bears no relation to anything that could be called an original he delights in exposing the self-consciously artificial among his examples are the tessidae tribe being returned to its quote natural habitat close quote and quote maintained there close quote scientists close quote who had discovered them also cited of the caves of Lascaux which subsequent to their discovery were barred to the public inspection beyond glances through a small plate of clear plastic but his discoverers constructed a replica nearby for the purposes of public inspection our travels have produced a similar experience we traveled through the badlands of South Dakota in the summer of 2000 and were surprised to encounter among other things a number of antelope at play in the region as in the song home on the range I had been under the impression that they had been largely driven off or killed outright by Caucasian settlers in the 19th century my confusion was ended by a sign by the road informing passers by that the area had been restart with the creatures reintroduced to the area for reasons upon which I dare not speculate Ritzer points out that malls are full of simulations as well not only the obvious amusement park simulations that take traditionally outdoor products and place them in the confines of monstrously large buildings but also simulated quote natural close quote experiences such as rainforest as in the rainforest cafe he also talks about quote authentic simulations close quote such replicas of historical places such as the colonial village in Williamsburg Virginia or a visit to the Windsor castle in England while the site of the vacation is quote real close quote in some sense the experiences are manufactured and are offered as a spectacle I guess Baudrillard would call these first order simulations though I doubt that the rain tree cafe is trying to accurately emulate a rainforest still they had real parrots as I recall Baudrillard has a section in his book devoted to Disneyland he calls it a third order simulation not because it is a deliberately infantile quasi-culture but because its latent function is to deter visitors from the realization that the world outside Disneyland meaning the rest of California the rest of the United States and the remaining area of the globe is just as simulated as Disneyland when one leaves Disneyland one is not going back to the quote real world close quote the opposition is that Disneyland was made manifest to combat the notion that there was a border defining and closing as imperatives that's interesting in light of Ritzer's theory regarding why these simulations exist Ritzer uses Max Weber's understanding of institutional rationality to contrast how these consumption mechas actually function and how they feel to the consumer on the one hand such places as Disneyland or Mall of Americas our controlled environment complete with surveillance, guards gates, fences, etc they are also places of businesses and are discussed in boardrooms and portfolios in terms of growth rates and returns on investments these symbols express a rational view of such places measuring calculating and controlling these institutions with precision and predictability in this discourse such places are both enchanted and rational on the other hand these places are meant to be sources of escape from the rationalized world people who deal in highly rationalized spaces pick vacation spots as quote getaways close quote Disney is supposed to be a place far removed from bottom line thinking a place where troubles are forgotten and fantasies come to life Ritzer writes quote the cathedrals of consumption are described as being highly rationalized rationalization leads to disenchantment rational means of consumption can themselves have enchanting qualities inherent in their rationalized natures in spite of the latter the central problems confronting the cathedrals of consumption remain rationalization and the disenchantment engendered by it close quote however Baudrillard regards the historical simulation as running counter to the conceptual underpinnings of capitalism and of communism for that matter he typifies the industrial revolution as being informed by certain ideas of a teleological nature regarding materialism production and universalism the revolution like all other revolutions needed an ideology and it had one but the onset of simulation disinformed the precepts of the industrial ideology making them obsolete from the day that reproducibility became the criterion for what would be produced Baudrillard cites Marshall McLuhan's work and notes its similarity to his own Ritzer doesn't believe that this tension between rationality and simulation works out as intended disney only thinks it's in control malls only think they are controlling the experiences it is a story told about a spectacle he uses Baudrillard's concept of quote implosion close quote to help understand how all these things are making previously well-defined boundaries fade into what he calls quote de-differentiation a growing inability to differentiate among things and among places close quote these spectacles are undermining the very rationality upon which they were built like a perfectly charged demolition the structures collapsing on itself this implosion has implications for society and human relations many of which are negative I think Baudrillard isn't that concerned with what his orders of simulation mean for society in general and consumption in particular he doesn't seem to be regarding the control and stability issues you have raised I note that he is unimpressed by the hierarchical like the agnostic who would know if given that God is all powerful whether he can make a rock too heavy for him to lift Baudrillard notes a sub-automality of presence in any original not create a duplicate of itself he spends much of the second half of the book advancing the duopoly as a more stable form than the monopoly and the symbolic exchanges between the two poles of a duopoly is becoming more defining than any residual grounding your system might have in the routinely substantive Ritzers cathedrals of consumption must fail according to Baudrillard's paradigm unless they resign themselves to forming a totality with the customers explain what he means by totality does he mean that they must seek control customers or does he mean that the cathedrals must adapt to the customers as readily as they expect their customers to adapt to them I use the word totality just now to invoke a yin yang relationship it implies a lack of primacy and resistance to the imposition of models featuring linear causality if my understanding of the text is adequate the supersession of production by reproduction necessitates our modeling the situation as analogous to universal gravity the mall of America pulls on the consumer but the consumer pulls on the mall of America as well then Ritzer and Baudrillard are on the same page Ritzer writes quote this analysis was put in the context of the overall shift from production to consumption however one of the things that this work indicates is that it is increasingly difficult to sustain a clear distinction between production and consumption especially in the context analyzed in the new world of consumption especially as it is increasingly dominated by entertainment it will make less sense to distinguish between production and consumption close quote I think this is where I start to differ with Ritzer an important point he never quite makes in the book is that much of the so-called production done by consumers really is replications of consumptions instead of making music they reproduce music through their CDR's and DVD's and MP3's instead of creating a cultural alternative most people simply repeat what they hear and see on television in the movies and in magazines it is true that distinct categories of quote producer close quote and quote consumer close quote are difficult to differentiate due to the ways in which any spectacles are simulated through several orders by the participation of those who are paying for the experience but in the end their stuff gets replicated over and over again in a mindless fashion Ritzer doesn't really address consumer as mindless sheep in a direct manner Papa comes important to the producer of the culture is that you buy the medium not the message it is essential that you buy CDs and cassettes what is a peripheral concern is the content that is carried by these media this fits Bodliar well although technically the essential point is that you must pay the producer for the material aspect and the content which is certainly symbolic in the conventional sense I would point out that a reversal of form holds here the audio content is the original which must be protected from replication via intellectual property laws and so forth and the items that are priced because they can be replicated because they can be standardized are the CD's and cassettes which must be playable on CD players there is an italicized passage in the book where Bodliar writes quote the true ultimatum was in reproduction itself close quote this is where he considers the most distinct break from capitalist and Marxist ideology to occur he states explicitly that the global process of capital is founded in what Marx called quote the non-essential sectors of capital close quote and by the way those are Bodliar's words not Marx's he believes that technique dominates value both by the utility theory of value and by the labor theory of value reproduction is not contingent on its products for its justification it can stand on its own conceptually Ritzer writes quote another self-destructive aspect of the cathedrals of consumption is the ever escalating need for spectacle no matter how astonishing consumers grow accustomed to extravaganza in order to attract their attention let alone their business the next spectacle must be even more spectacular than the last also contributing to this escalation is the competition among the cathedrals of consumption each trying to put on an extravaganza that is more astonishing than that of its competitors close quote this means we are going further and further into orders of simulation because what we construct as quote real close quote I think though Ritzer only implies this that this further alienates us from the other and from our own desires we no longer know what we really want or what is fun we only know what we think will be fun though I think movie makers are beginning to catch on to the fact that it becomes so surreal to us at some point that it is better to do less not more at times witness George Lucas' approach to the star wars episode 2 very little hype on this movie compared to a Jurassic park or even his own episode 1 instead he goes around to openings and small venues and gives the proceeds to charities he constructs a new kind of campaign that is gentler and seems more honest and yet it too is a simulation of a simpler time and not the simpler time itself just so the existence of spectacle to use Ritzer's word makes it irrelevant to both Ritzer and Baudrillard whether an original can be located I think that Ritzer is afraid that one has lost something vital at this point but that Baudrillard is unconcerned with a question or regards it as meaningless I wasn't aware that Lucas was doing what you say he was with the new Star Wars movie it's typical of a movie mogul to believe or rather to act as if he believed that so far from one's not being able to go home again if one simulates having gone home again one has ah Hollywood now there might be some who would argue that the movies are exactly how we ended up in hyper reality I thought it was rather poignant that people on television news programs which is a first order simulation at best were discussing how watching the towers collapse on September 11th felt like quote watching a disaster film close quote which would be a third order simulation in that disaster movies are not claiming to be reality but they are claiming to seem like reality quote unbelievable close quote was the word I most frequently heard it was unbelievable because we are so used to simulations to being able to say to ourselves when things are uncomfortable this is not real of course since September 11th we have managed to experience a number of fourth order simulations including a recent fundraiser where George Bush gave pictures of himself on Air Force One at the command post after the attacks to anyone who donated $150 to the Republican party I heard about this fiasco on John Stewart's The Daily Show which is not really the news but a simulation of the news meant to poke fun at the news and yet I bet I get more of my news information by watching him than from any other source and now my brain hurts the key point about the comparisons of the events of September 11th to motion pictures is that their surreality was used to demonstrate their reality it was because the footage bore a closer resemblance to a Hollywood action film than to the mundane world that one was to conclude how really real, how uber real the world trade center attacks were the simulation had become, in practice the standard by which reality was to be gauged with an ontological hierarchy granting primacy to that which resembled the simulation above that which did not I think that the reaction to the attacks afterwards have served to further blur the lines between phenomena and representation between what we think is real and what we think is simulation that's why I bring up John Stuart the truth is that I get as much of not more information about the world from his show as I do from CNN and I am entertained in the process in some ways it is like the simulation of the news is so self aware that it is a simulation that it becomes more believable CNN is a simulation as well but it pretends not to be and that leaves me feeling cheated I remember immediately after we visited the Badlands and saw the simulated herds of antelope meaning not that the antelope were simulated but that the herds were and wouldn't that make an amusing case study in the rudiments of organizational studies that we went to Waldrog and Wald South Dakota which is in the westernmost part of the state Waldrog had started as a simple pharmacy in the 1930s and had gained international fame by advertising free ice water to visitors the idea began quote logically close quote as the owners had noted that motorists arriving in the town of wall in summer after traversing South Dakota in the days before air conditioners were installed in cars tended to be thirsty so they put up signs throughout South Dakota offering free ice water to visitors the whole thing turned into a game the signs started popping up throughout the United States and then internationally I have seen a photograph of one in Kenya with two Kenyans standing nearby gone from being solely a drugstore to being a block long tourist attraction with souvenirs and other thematic efforts it isn't quite a third order simulation because a third order simulation would purport to be about something when in truth there is nothing behind it but it's close it started with a seed consisting only of free ice water and the owners let you know via the tone of it all that they're in on the joke that it's an attraction stemming from next to nothing so I'd call it a simulated third order simulation ah yes kitsch souvenirs and kitschy buildings the interesting thing in our experience was that we had just been in the badlands and even with the simulated herds it was more real and grounded we had visited the corn palace the day before the badlands and reveled in the kitchen but by the time we got to wall I was tired of it it was boring I'll save my feelings about Rushmore as a simulation for another discussion but Carl I wonder what kind of a simulation are we engaged in here and right now we are conversing on the radio but is this a real conversation according to Baudrillard if I've understood him the simulated is the real and it is real because it can be simulated more real at least than what cannot be simulated realist of all is a simulacrum that can reproduce itself and the distinction between the original a word I've used here only for pedagogical purposes and the simulacrum is no distinction at all so I don't know how to answer your question well let's see a first order simulation would be an attempt to sound like a conversation which we've had to do up to this point however now I am deconstructing our conversation we might be entering a second order simulation do we dare admit to what has actually been happening are we engaged in yet a greater order simulation than it seems I'm afraid we are this entire quote conversation close quote is really a transcript of an internet chat session we've spent several hours cumulatively using a popular chat utility a program allowing real time text messaging using TCP IP protocol we decided it would be a clever way to generate a script as it indicates who has said what throughout and a style similar to that used in stage plays and yes yes yes radio dramas so instead of quote talking close quote we have been typing several hours over today to produce by the time the radio audience hears it we will have edited and recorded the original text then digitize the recording and prepared it to air from the computer to the radio waves now we leave you to wonder if we are real or simply computer generated simulation Carl Wilkerson and whether the form of possibility can have the rigorous grounding it would need in order to be valued internally consistent feasible or anything like that objective global oh well you get the idea happy Thomas my name is actually Mary and I am a computer generated voice made by text aloud mp3 with me is Peter also a computer generated voice Bob drillard says that it does not matter whether we are real or not so now that we have admitted to being computer generated Peter are you having fun ritzer says that all this consumption is expanding because it is fun I think it is fun to produce radio as well how about you Peter Carl Wilkerson are you talking to me I am not trying to evoke Robert De Niro by asking you I am pointing out that I am not sure that I am Peter my voice is Peter's but Carl Wilkerson is writing my lines if it helps I have no idea whether I have infeld or at least Carl Wilkerson has no idea if I have infeld more over what is a voice without anything to say can it be said to have presence perhaps Carl Wilkerson is part of me in the specific case how am I supposed to know this is radio I am just the voice talent and even that observation is not mine happy Thomas now my brain really hurts who knew that first person plural would mean that we each would have a plurality happy Thomas is writing my lines yacht who is recording the written text Mary is speaking the lines cool out he is recording them but happy is editing them and Carl is controlling how they get on the airwaves but CFUV is actually broadcasting them where is reality does it end with happy's typing or with the listener listening and now I believe this has all become too deep for me the problem with all this is that if we think about it too much it just keeps getting more complex I think I'll suspend my disbelief and just be happy to be on the radio pretending that the illusion is real yacht who messenger Carl Wilkerson has left the conference yacht who messenger happy Thomas has left the conference yacht who messenger Carl Wilkerson has locked out june 8th to 11 o 3 am yacht who messenger happy Thomas has locked out june 8th to 11 o 4 am brother you have been listening to First Person Plural You have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters. First Person Plural is a show created for community radio by Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural is performed, composed and produced by Carl Wilkerson, except where noted. For more information about First Person Plural, Dr. Patty Thomas or Carl Wilkerson, visit our website, www.culturalconstructioncompany.com, or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com.