The Hyperreal, Postmodern, Financial Simulacrum: How The American Dream led to an Economic Nightmare

 Aaron Tanyhill CMC 200: Researching Media and Culture Professor Gournelos May 6, 13

Literature review

My Literature review is broken up in to Five Sections

Painting the Hyperreal picture

A Brief History of Capitalism

Capitalism Through a Post Modern Lens

Understanding the Economic Crisis of 2007

The American Dream

Big 5

Topic: Hyperreal systems

Focus: The American Dream and The 2007 Financial Crisis

Methods: Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis

Targets of Analysis: The American Capitalist System

Goals: To explore the causes of the economic crisis, using hyperreality as a lens to identify is place in Capitalism and the American Dream

Quotes

Simulation substitutes signs of the real for the real, this creates a reality that is in fact more real than real, a hyperreality (3). Hyperreality is a consistent theme in all realms of life, culture, nature, education, economics etc. Societal substitutions of the real for signs or signals of real does not imply the end of real, it means that signs no longer directly have referents to the original real they refer to

The American dream has separated from its root and has (d) evolved in to the accumulation of material items to satiate one's wants and establish their success.

Capitalism’s system of production has created a network based on credit and other fictitious forms of capital that involve false social value. (Buzgalin and Koglanov.2009.30) This idea of fictitious financial capitals are called assets and it is its isolation from the real sector that caused the Economic Crisis of 2007.

Conclusion

Because the American dream’s success has been redefined as the assets you have acquired through working hard, people began to define their success and themselves as the assets they have acquired. This causes the Americans to fetishize this accumulation of things, the capitalist system is the vehicle used to gain these assets. These greed driven Americans will manipulate this system in order to obtain this success.When many Americans lost these assets they felt they lost their dreams rather than returning to the real, succumbing to their nightmare, many chose to opt out the only way he knew how to, quitting, committing suicide. Kathik Rajaram was the name of the man that lost a fortune due to the crisis. Days after the murder suicide of his family a suicide note was found saying that he decided to commit this atrocity due to financial trouble.