Beyond, Beneath and Below…..even Between…..

This is a presentation focusing on ‘all may not be what it seems’. It was used in an assembly last year but it is a good reference point for making sure that in this postmodern age, images, messages, ideas and communication may be no more than ‘a shadow on the wall – look for light source itself’.

https://drive.google.com/a/web.grammar.sch.gg/file/d/0B1VRuSZwlx76dDF2WXdhREJ2dWIwekZLMHJaeFRhX2czbEhj/view?usp=sharing

INSTAGRAM

The truth behind instagram. A collection of photographs showing how instagram provides a vehicle for cleverly constructed images that encourage everyone to aspire to a life, other than their own.

http://aplus.com/a/truth-behind-instagram?

And the girl who quit Instagram?

http://www.businessinsider.com/teenage-instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-social-media-2015-11

FAUXTOGRAPHY

This refers to fraudulent photography, where photographs are manipulated through   photoshop or manipulated by other means to change the information they convey.    Fauxtography is often used to manipulated the viewer and promote a particular agenda.

Fauxtography is also occasionally used to refer to low-quality or humorous photographs taken by amateur photographers who have started photography businesses or blogs despite their limited experience and skill. In this sense, fauxtography is an Internet meme.

“Faux” is the French word for “fake.”  Techopedia explains Fauxtography. The term fauxtography may have emerged in 2006 when freelance photographer Adnan Hajj provided an altered photograph of what was described as an Israeli raid in Beirut. Reuters printed the photo, and it quickly spread online. However, the billowing black smoke was later discovered to have been digitally added, along with other elements of the photo. Fauxtography is especially dangerous in photojournalism because audiences trust the news to provide accurate representations of worldwide events. When images are photoshopped or staged, this can drastically change how people feel about the event depicted.

And the latest from infowars – the website that says it exposes conspiracies, is a very sorry and deeply distressing development.  Whilst, its main agenda is to highlight how the grand narratives, absolute truths are to be questioned and that hegemony is alive and kicking and needs to be challenged,  it also causes an enormous amount of misinformation and anxiety. It has been accused of causing so much hurt to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre, saying it was set up by those in favour of harsher gun licensing laws in the USA. One father though is hitting back.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-39194035

I GUESS ALL THAT THIS SAYS ABOUT POSTMODERN MEDIA IS THAT, with the proliferation of digital media, the idea that anyone and many do, feel the right to air their views, become keyboard warriors or citizen journalists, how are we ever going to be able to police what is out there and really KNOW WHAT THE TRUTH IS? Lyotard might argue that it is good that everyone know has the right to question, air their own mini narratives and to question the absolute truths/grand narratives but is it just making life full of false stories, unproven facts and FAKE NEWS.  Postmodern Media is now, more than ever giving over to the POST TRUTH era. With the President of the USA now embroiled in various FAKE NEWS stories, the whole of society needs to be on high alert and always look beyond, beneath, behind and below the headlines.

Hello all! This is Charlie Brooker…he’s Postmodern. Well not really, but he’s got a good line in deconstructing, criticizing, mocking and lampooning the postmodern media landscape we all inhabit.

This is Lyotard, our last theorist (yay).

Lyotard is a theorist who is a bit more positive about Postmodernism. In so far as rebellion, subversiveness and rejection of big ideas can be described as ‘positive’.

Lyotard was sceptical of anyone who layed claim to ‘the truth’. He felt rather than society was better made up of competing views of the world (discourses).

He suggested that postmodernism ‘signaled the end of the grand narrative’.

Charlie Brooker love to challenge a grand narrative. He critiques the way the media presents the world to us and also he critiques our distorted relationship with the media (as described by Baudrillard). He has also written a series of dystopian (near future) sci fi TV programmes called Black Mirror. In these programmes he challenges the big ideas (grand narratives) that are communicated in the media and Lyotard and quite possibly Baudrillard would approve (I think).

Here is Charlie Brooker happliy and brutally deconstructing news reports

Watch these Charlie Brooker critiques on TV. There may be some soundbites you can use in your writing. He has a fantastic turn of phrase and you can quote him too.

This is a really up to date news story on how a recent BBC documentary has been uncovered to have constructed its narrative in a wholly unacceptable fashion to create a narrative that wasn’t exactly true.

Consider the ways in which even the news media can be described as an example of hyper-reality and blurring the boundaries between a media constructed reality and the real life..

Is it possible that we know far more about the media, celebrity news & popular culture than we did about significant events and people in the ‘real’ world.

It is important to consider news values and understand how some important pieces of news are pushed off the news agenda because they don’t fulfill the editorial agenda and so the news we do consume is highly selected. This selection is often about what will make a popular / entertaining story rather than reporting other bigger world events but ones that are more remote, ‘foreign’ and ones for which they don’t have pictures.

Finally, the news is packaged up into easily understandable narratives, indeed news items have narrative structure, ‘characters’ cast into simple types & roles and there is often highly emotive use of language and symbolic imagery in order to represent the events / people in a particular way.

Here is a really funny and insightful video from TV critic Charlie Brooker, who incidentally wrote one of our key texts Black Mirror. Here he is talking about the formulaic structure of a TV news item and how they are neatly packaged up for consumption.

Take a look at the Guernsey Evening Press – hegenomy at work even in a small, backwater like Guernsey.

And finally – this is controversial but it is an episode of Russell Brand’s The Trews where he criticises the ‘propaganda’ surrounding terrorist attacks and how the story that the government delivers, feeds us through the media, has a purpose of keeping us on their side and not encourage us to question our own foreign policy and actions abroad. He is loud and outspoken but many of his The Trews discuss modern media and in particular Fox News who represent the multi-national corporate dominance of the world. You will either love him or hate him but what he says does give food for thought and ideas for discussion.

https://musingsbymaria.wordpress.com/tag/hyperreality/

In case TOWIE turns your stomach….you could choose to talk about MiC instead. Just a posher version of TOWIE – that’s all.

Above is a really good blog post on hypereality and Made in Chelsea.

Made in Chelsea paints a very vivid picture of the rich and elite in London. From an outsider looking in, it suggests to a large extent that all ‘English’ people live this way. I have friends from different countries who have said to me ‘Is that what England is like?’ (referring to the show) …well quite simply no. London is very diverse and has many different cultures, yet Made in Chelsea does not have one ethnic person in the show. Whilst it is true that Chelsea is very elite, not everyone who lives there is white (believe it or not). Yet the programme tells another story.

This show definitely blurs the distinction between fiction and documentary and soap opera. The cast are exposed by producers in a certain way to show them off as distinct characters that the audience can relate to for entertainment purposes. Spencer is shown as the ‘villain’ of the show, Jamie, Proudlock and Francis are shown as the ‘laddish’ bachelors and the girls Lucy, Rosie and Louise etc. are the upper class women, who are obsessed with material possessions and their taste in fashion is nothing less than a six figure digit. The whole aesthetic of the programme is to exude wealth, high society members and their lavish lifestyles, which is somewhat a fantasy for many of the viewers.

Consumer Culture – features all the right brands: Harrods, Dorchester Hotel, Sloane Square etc. The programme is even sponsored by Rimmel – Get the London Look. You too could be this gorgeous!

Hegemony – capitalist, bourgeois, conservative view on life. Work hard and you too could be like this. The fact that most of the characters are wealthy by inheritance and none of them seem to do a day’s work between them is irrelevant. Capitalism pays off and MiC is evidence of this (the fact that it is completely constructed and contrived should not deter you from aspiring to this lifestyle). This is quite a good powerpoint on examples of ‘hegemony’ in action – it is very USA based but you will get the idea of how the messages of what is right, expected and wrong are constantly reinforced from ‘up above’ or ‘elsewhere’ although there are some steps to counteract this mindset, as you will see at the end of the presentation.

Hypereality – the blurring between the real people and their on screen characters is blurred. This is endorsed by them tweeting when it is unclear as to whether they are ‘in character’ or as themselves.  We talk about them as though they are real.

Simulacra – the original becomes irrelevant.  We believe the simulated world. This is how it is. We value the simulated world more than we do the ‘real’ world.

Watch any of the other ‘scripted reality’ TV shows – The Real Housewives series, Geordie Shore, The Only Way is Essex and you will see exactly the same elements that indicate they are part of this type of postmodern phenomena.

The other TV shows – so called ‘reality fly on the wall’ shows – that are less scripted i.e. KUWTK, Dance Moms, Teen Mom are still no less constructed.  See an extract below from an article that outlines how the new series of Teen Mom will now be produced without the 4th wall.

Are you happy this season breaks the fourth wall and shows production?

Maci: I love it. Before, such a huge part of our life was hidden and it was hard to be 100 percent real because we’re pretending we’re not on TV or that we don’t have a million followers on Twitter. Also, there are many situations in the past when we’re filming a scene and we’re aggravated and all of our anger is escalated because there are people in your house, audio, lights, cameras and then you have a kid running around who can’t get up because [production] doesn’t want to mess up the scene, so on top of the aggravation from what’s really going on, you have all this other sh–. It’ll really show how overwhelming being on a TV show is.

This is evidence that the TV show was completely constructed – think about it – the baby is crying but the camera crew is not ready so you can’t pick up the baby to comfort it.  How ‘managed’ ‘unreal’ the footage must have been.

These shows created a ‘preferred reality’ as it has more drama, tension and clashes. When Big Brother started out, they made the fatal mistake of not choosing characters that were interesting enough to sustain an audience. Now, they deliberately choose participants who will create drama and increase viewing figures.

But what is it about our voyeuristic tendencies?  Even in Roman times we loved seeing people fight to the death in the arena, Have we really not come that far from that kind of barbarity? Think of all the ‘pranked’ videos you watch online – enjoying laughing at people’s misfortune.

Perhaps we have not evolved as far as we had hoped in terms of being civilised.  It makes an uncomfortable thought.

I think that the way that football spectatorship has been copied & recopied by a succession of media texts has lead us to a state of hyper-reality. I’ll try to illustrate:

Grass roots / local football (The Real Thing)

The real thing, standing at the touchline watching a football game in real time, with no media to enhance our experience.

Stadium Football (The Real Thing Max)

A spectator watches a football match from a static position in a stadium, often far away from the action, although the size of the occasion adds to the emotional impact of the spectacle. They watch the match in real time, although their spectatorship is enhanced by replays on a large screen. Also there is music and other entertainment to keep people occupied.

Football on TV – A copy of stadium max, maxed

Cutting to MCU to see individual players

Football on TV follows the action as if we were a spectator in the stands, but also cuts between different camera angles, gives us replays, a running commentary with extra information and ‘expert’ opinion gives us insights into the style of play and management decisions. Also creates player/celebrities and heightens drama .

Fifa – A copy of a copy of stadium max

Fifa simulates the football on TV experience, but goes further. The spectator is now the player, from the POV of a fan in the stands. Except now the camera tracks with the player that the audience is on control of. It includes the voice over commentary to simulate the TV watching experience. Players can play any team they like, play the role of the manager and also enter leagues and goals of the month competitions.

Fifa Communities

Here is a community page about Fifa in which players organise Fifa tournaments, chat about Fifa, give each other tips, compare management strategies, compete in leagues with each other and other groups. Baudrillard would say that these people are in a state of Hyper-reality, where they feel involved in football but completely removed from the real thing and that don’t really understand football as it is in real life, only as it exists in the media.

Baudrillard is the next theorist we are going to explore in the unit on Postmodern Media.

He takes Jameson’s ideas about media and starts exploring what impact these will have on the audience. He suggested a number of key ideas:

Consumer Culture: We are living in a world in which we define ourselves through the product we buy and the brands we support. Consumption is not just about need, it’s also about personal identity.

Hegemony: That we are controlled / conditioned by the media, which encourages us to buy into a culturally dominant set of ideas, as Russell Brand said, ‘..to keep us spell bound and stupid, it’s bread and circuses.’

Simulacra: As Jameson says we have lost contact with the original idea (or referent) through the continued recycling of ideas and images. Baudrillard takes this one step further and suggests that we now believe that the copy of the copy of the copy is reality. We are like the prisoners in the Allegory of Plato’s Cave.

Hyper-Reality: By living in a world of recycled images and ideas that have lost the connection to the original idea/image we are the boundaries between reality and media reality are becoming blurred and confused. In other words, we are all residents in the media reality, which are merely shadows on the wall.

Here is a PowerPoint on these ideas and which gives two thought provoking examples:

Chained to the Rythmn, which you have already examined, includes many references both in its comments and the way it is constructed that would fit with Baudrillard’s criticisms of Postmodern Media and Postmodern times. Try and identify where she seems to be referring to Hyper-reality, Consumer Culture, Simulacra & Hegemony.

• Hyper-reality – Theme Parks, Tablet obsession, 3D, Living life through the lens, living in a bubble.
• Consumer Culture – Hamster Wheel, The American Dream,
• Simulacra – Theme parks
• Hegemony – Chained to the rythmn, you think you’re free, zombies, 2.4 Nuclear family.

What other ones are present?