Hyper Reality on Facebook

ABSTRAK on Facebook. Thesis, English Department, Faculty of Letters, State University of Malang. Advisor: Drs. Arif Subiyanto, M.A. Key words: Facebook, hyper reality, status, chat. We are now living in the post modern world, where the development of technology has a big effect to the society and culture. Popular culture is one of the realms that are affected by the rapid growth of technology. The Internet, both as a technological artifact and as a popular image, provides a site for exploring "the world," and the position of such systems of totality in post-modernity. The development of the Internet has enabled us to experience a new life in a new world. It has brought us to a virtual space, the space that has not existed before the invention of the Internet, The Cyberspace. However, nowadays people tend to believe more in what they see in the Internet than what they see in the real world. This is because the media on the Internet such as news website, entertainment, and even social networking website is considered as a representation of the real world. However, the representation of the real does not longer represent the real, in fact, it represents the representation itself, a simulacra. When simulacra precede the real, this is what we called as hyper reality. The artifacts of human culture in cyberspace that produces hyper reality can be seen in the existence of Internet blogs, forums, and the addictive social networking websites. One of the booming social networking sites on the Internet is Facebook. Facebook as one of the Internet features, with its addictive contents and features does affect the real world. The focus of this study is to find out whether Facebook is capable of creating hyper reality, and if it does, how it creates hyper reality through its features. This study uses Facebook status and Facebook Chat as the object of analysis because these two features can initiate interaction among users which eventually create hyper reality. The analysis of this study uses Jean Baudrillard point of view of post-modernity and also Marshal McLuhan’s extension of man. The result of this study found that Facebook is capable of creating hyper reality using its features; Facebook Status and Facebook Chat. Facebook status creates hyper reality through its published status which can create unlimited interpretation of the posters’ identity. The attachment on the Facebook status creates the extension of human identity. Facebook Chat creates hyper real using its text-to-text computer-mediated communication. Using this communication, user can create multiple identities at the same time. And it also extends human existence without necessarily being present