Jean Baudrillard’s response to the previous selection, Enzensberger’s “Constituents of a Theory of the Media,” is not an elaboration of the idea of simulation (as many of his works are), but a discussion of a different concept that might be called interaction. Baudrillard argues strongly against one position of Enzensberger, and of Marshall McLuhan: that there is an inherent structure to media technologically. Baudrillard argues that media serve a social function—the reduction of all they reproduce to pale models, foreclosing any possibility of genuine reciprocity. It is in this sense that Baudrillard rereads McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message.” Baudrillard’s position is that the situation will not get any better simply by making everyone a producer—a point of view that Enzensberger shares. But Baudrillard goes on to say that even the organized reversible circuits Enzensberger discusses would not be enough. He writes, “Reversibility has nothing to do with reciprocity.” For Baudrillard the problem lies not in who transmits, or how turn-taking is arranged, but in our very underlying model of communication—which is reproduced in the media, in political life, and in economic life. This model, described by Ferdinand de Saussure, is that of “transmitter-messagereceiver.” As Baudrillard points out, in this model there is no place for the ambiguity of true exchange, “This ‘scientific’ construction is rooted in a simulation model of communication. It excludes, from its inception, the reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange.” An alternative to this semio-linguistic conception (in which one is the transmitter and one the receiver, with the message always going from one to another) is that of joint production through genuine interaction. In this, argues Baudrillard, lies the true potential for change—in the refusal to accept a model of producers and consumers, even one in which these positions can be reversed. Which brings us to more concrete questions: How would one taking Baudrillard’s position look upon the examples of media from the Enzensberger introduction (◊18)? How would this position view Enzensberger’s ideas of “Networklike communications models ... a mass newspaper, written and distributed by its readers, a video network of politically active groups” or the uses of media in relation to the protests against the World Trade Organization? Baudrillard’s reaction to Enzensberger’s mass newspaper and video network is not to declare them inappropriate; he treats them somewhat positively. However, he states that their value lies precisely in the fact that they are inconsistent with the rest of Enzensberger’s argument. Baudrillard sees them not as demonstrating the reversibility of producer/consumer, but as transgressing these categories. This might make our other examples “a start” from a Baudrillardian point of view as well. Yet examples of a phenomenon that Baudrillard critiques—the cybernetic absorption of response into meaninglessness via reversible media—are significantly more plentiful. Consider how those who were once solely media consumers, and suddenly are included in production, have served only to cement their irrelevance on reality-based TV, on game shows, and on corporate-run Web message boards. —NWF