A general term for the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical problem of the relation between original and copy. Benjamin, Walter, writing about the mass production of cultural commodities in latter part of the nineteenth century, was one of the first to draw attention to its significance. His concept of aura was conceived to articulate his thesis that multiplying the number of copies of a thing tended to degrade the symbolic potency of the original. Several decades later, Eco, Umberto reached basically the same conclusion writing about what he called the hyperreality of contemporary or postmodern life, especially in the US. Mystified by the apparent passion in the US for replicas of European icons such as one sees par excellence in Las Vegas, Eco theorized that simulation is an attempt to produce something more real than the real itself and in that way compensate for its absence or impossibility. For Baudrillard, who is undoubtedly the theorist most well known for his interest in simulation, it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality, or what he also calls a hyperreal. As he explains in Simulacres et simulation (1981), translated as Simulacra and Simulation (1994), in such circumstances the usual order of things is reversed: the copy no longer follows the original, it now precedes it. But more than that, simulation threatens to erode the distinction between real and copy, true and false, imaginary and real, and so on, and that is why postmodernism, which according to Baudrillard is defined by the presence of simulation at every level, is so alarming. His example of this process is the famous cave drawings in the caves at Lascaux. Because they are so old and fragile the caves are sealed off from visitors, apart from a tiny peephole; but so as to satisfy the touristsâ desire to see them at close hand a full-scale replica has been constructed nearby. Thus, Baudrillard says, the duplicate renders the original artificial: it is not the ârealâ that visitors carry away in their memories. It is not difficult to extrapolate from this line of argument that film, TV, and especially the Internet, also perform a similar function, on a much bigger scale.