Hypersocial

Entry for the Posthuman Glossary which maps and explains the contemporary relevance of the notion of the 'hypersocial'. The term was deployed by French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard in the late 1970s to indicate the process whereby the modern notion of the social has come to be displaced by the 'hyperrealization of the social' that is by a new order of simulation characterized by the projection of models onto the real, which abolished the distance between the real and its representation. The term hypersocial is related to contemporary discussions around digital sociality and the use of the social network as a model based in mathematical abstraction of graph theory which both duplicates and shapes the social in new ways, surveying also different kinds of critical evaluation of the relationship between the modern image of the social and the new image producted by means of informational and computational technologies.