Eco talks about the hyperreality in places such as the Hearst Castle, that combines the actual building pieces of authentic historical castles, reconstructed in a new place with more recent mortar and filler. Or the Museum of the City of New York, that put a piece of history, an "authentic" object from a particular time period, side by side with reproductions of objects from that particular time period, to create a tableau that looks and seems real. He goes to show how the layers of reality and concept of original become even further blurred, for example in the reconstruction of the Flanger home from 1906, in which certain aspects of their "original" home were actually based on or inspired by various examples of historical European architecture.
"Now the real fake, the 1906 home, is maniacally faked in the museum showcase, but in such a way that it is difficult to say which objects were originally part of the room and which are fakes to serve as connective tissue in the room (and even if we knew the difference, that knowledge would change nothing because the reproductions of the reproductions are perfect and only a thief in the pay of an antique dealer would worry about the difficulty of telling them apart)" [1].
We know that it's no longer in it's own historical time period because we're looking at it here right now. But the fact that we also know that some of it came from the original time period and is therefore real (or can be thought of as real), calls into question the whole scene. It is precisely that laying side by side of the authentic and the fake that Eco speaks about that really makes the web an example of hyperreality. And unlike the museums Eco visited, there are not even any placards on the web to help the visitor distinguish an "authentic" homepage from a "faked" home page. The whole realm becomes "Authentic Fake."



[1] Travels in Hyperreality, 10.

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