To the extent that our view of the world is shaped by the media, such a belief is, of course, an effect of the expanded virtual environment manufactured by media industries. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a simulation (in the sense in which Jean Baudrillard argued that “the Gulf War did not take place”), must we not also assume that the conversion and interchangeability of all images of war, projected onto “Sarajevo” or anywhere else, now constitute the very conditions of our technologized commodity culture, in which distinctions between sign and referent, nature and culture, human and machine, truth and falsehood, real and representation appear to be collapsing? Must we abandon our claims to know or experience existence and consciousness of life in the same manner in which we cannot presume that there is a “real world” that somehow precedes or exists outside of representation?

– Johannes H. Birringer, Media and Performance: Along the Border (pp. 4)