the map is not the territory
There is a story by Jorge Louis Borges about the cartographers of an Empire, who constructed a map which was so large and so detailed that it covered the entire territory, corresponding with it exactly. The citizens of the Empire were proud of the feat of the construction of the map and they gradually came to identify the grandeur of the Empire more with the map than with the territory itself. Over time, as the map became tattered and worn, the citizens felt a deep sense of nostalgia for its loss. But they also felt a sense of alienation because the territory that was revealed to them underneath seemed unfamiliar.
Borges' allegory is about representation or simulation. It is intended to illustrate that tendency to supplant appearance with reality, to privilege the representation over that which it represents.
Jean Baudrillard took the story a step further. He imagined that it was the territory which slowly wears away beneath the map so that all that remains of the Empire is a desert of the real and the map as a simulacrum of what reality used to be. He argued that our post-modern culture is now so dominated by representations that it has become the images which carry the significance for us. When the original is lost, the copy becomes the original.
It is in the nature of modern media and consumer culture to conspire to blur the line between things and the images that represent them. When you watch the television or read a newspaper, when you buy something, when you socialise, when you express an opinion or cast a vote, you are constantly and subconsciously being influenced and steered by a battery of signs that are disconnected from and drained of any real meaning. We simulate the real through constructs that become progressively divorced from reality. Whether it be in religion or media or politics or art, meaning collapses towards the dominant ideology and the social sphere implodes leaving only cynicism and apathy. The modern world is primarily a simulation and the map is the reality that we have created.