“Simulacra and Simulation” breaks the sign-order into 4 stages (Wiki): Baudrillard called this phenomenon the “precession of simulacra”– expressed in four stages.”
Baudrillard claims that our current society has “replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality.” Furthermore, these simulacra are not “merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives.” The simulacra that Baudrillard refer to are thus the significations of how the symbolism of culture and media constructs perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible “…Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Simulacra and Simulation furthermore converses how symbols and signs relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). …The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.
“ Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. In Baudrillard’s Simulcra and Simulations from 1981, he interrogates the relationships among reality, symbols, and society.