Postmodern Media – The Big Ideas

As we did for the Media Regulation unit we thought we’d spell out the BIG IDEAS!

Remember that the marking has changed from previous years and whereas once the mark for examples was worth 2/5 of the total mark, now they are only worth 1/5.

This means there is a greater expectation that you can describe the big ideas and explore the consequences of those for audiences, representations and media language.

The Big Ideas for Postmodern Media

  1. There are no new ideas. All art (and media) is simply a copy of a copy of a copy….
  2. The lines between reality and media reality have become blurred and confused.
  3. The postmodern world has lost faith with the big ideas which used to bind our society together.

We will tackle these one at a time and try to weave in the theories which you are expected to use in this essay and also explain how these big ideas can be used to answer the possible essay questions which have and will pop up in your assessments. These are:

  1. Representation &/or Reality
  2. Audience & text relationship
  3. Definition(s) of Postmodern media
  4. Using Postmodern ideas to study texts

The Big Idea Explained:

There are no new ideas. All art (and media) is simply a copy of a copy of a copy….

Jameson describes this in his work ‘Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. In that book he asserts that all art is either a pastiche or parody of previous art. That it uses self reflexivity to draw attention its own constructed nature. He was scathing in his assertion that this lead to a new kind of depthlessness & superficiality.

He also suggest that culture is now a sort of collective games of Chinese Whispers and that in the constant recycling of old ideas into new forms we have lost our collective understanding of historical reality.

Using this to address the questions in the assessment:

This means that all representations are built on the back of an older text, that no new ideas are being developed or explored. That audiences need a cultural competence of the older texts in order to understand the depth of the allusion and comment it's trying to make, if they don't and believe the copy to be the original idea and may miss intertextual references. A bleak assessment of culture where nothing new will ever be made again!
The lines between reality and media reality have become blurred and confused.

Baudrillard picks up where Jameson leaves off and goes further. He wrote a famous book, ‘Simulation and Simulacra’. In this he suggests that the audience have become so drenched within a media saturated culture that we no longer recognise where reality ends and media representations start! We take our cues for what it means to be ‘normal‘ in relationship, careers and lifestyles… from the media we consume this leads to a us living in a simulation of reality.

Furthermore,  corporate media has one primary function and that is to promote a dominant consumerist ideology.  We (the audience) have become defined by the things we buy and success is defined in simplistic materialistic terms!

We are prisoners in Plato’s cave and believe the shadows on the wall are reality.

Using this to address the questions in the assessment:

The representation is not the reality. The map is not the territory. Audiences take to be 'normal' the experience of the media and so shape their personal identity & social interactions in line with what is represented on screen. Happiness and contentment are only accessible through material consumption. We live in a simulation of reality whereby those who control and can pay for the message to be spread widely get to shape the narrative to suit their agenda.
The postmodern world has lost faith with the big ideas which used to bind our society together.

‘Well it’s my opinion and that’s all that matters,’ is an argument made by many people!

That is an entirely Postmodern position to adopt, where truth is relative and personal experience has primacy.

We live in a pluralist (link to regulation) society, where our personal feeling, ‘lived experience’ and world view are held sacred. This is the consequence of Postmodernism according to Lyotard in his book ‘The Postmodern Condition’. In that report on knowledge he asserts that society (audiences) don’t collectively believe in anything! We all have our own ‘truth’, because Postmodernism has challenged and held up to ridicule all the Grand Narratives that enabled us to have a shared set of cultural and social ideas we all agree on.

Using this to address the questions in the assessment:

The representations in Postmodern Media, in which the grand narratives are held up to ridicule and mockery, some argue, have caused great damage to the fabric of society. Alongside the  democratization of the media we have also been given our own platforms and construct our social groups around the media we consume. This has led to a more divided society in which we are in thrall to consumerist ideals through advertising.

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