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
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.
