Marshall McLuhan

in 1964 he coined the phrase 'the medium is the message'
by this he means the way any message is communicated is more important than the message itself.

Roseau's 6 contradictions in postmodernism theory

1. its anti -theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stance.
2. postmodernism stresses the irrational instruments of reason are freely employed to advance to its perspective.
3. the postmodernists prescription to focus on the marginal itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely of the sorts that it attacks.
4. its stresses intertextuality but often treats texts in isolation.
5. By rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, then cannot argue that there is no valid criteria for judgement.
6. they also criticise the inconsistency of modernism but refuse to be held to norms of consistency itself.

Examples of hyperreality

- films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI e.g. the film 300 was filmed entirely in front of a blue screen.

- a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)

- professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of human beings.

- Many fake places around the world, e.g. disney land, Las vegas.

- TV and film in general, especially reality TV, due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds, the current trend is to glamorise the mundane using histrionics.

- A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating a world of endless identical products.

- A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of an unattainable partner.

- A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artefact, by simulating the feeling of age or ageing.

Baudrillard - theorist

 Developed the ideas of McLuhan to the point where it is possible to deny that the message under the medium has any substance at all. Therefore the audience comes to perceive through the media a world that appears real but is not.

In some ways this reflects what Rene Magritte painted in 1928, in his work called the 'treachery of images' (quite clearly a painting of a pipe) the caption of the painting is 'This is not a pipe' (in french), our eyes tell us it is a pipe because we are used to decoding images, colour and perspective, but it is not a pipe as it cannot be smoked.

Baudrillard and simulacra 
- copies of historical events and landmarks
- fantasyland at disneyland - copies various disney films and books e.g peter pan.
- Umberto Eco said that "we enjoy a perfect imitation, we also enjoy the conviction that imitation has reached its peak and afterwards reality will always be inferior to it"

Disneyland and simulacra and simulation
- both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard refer to disneyland as an exemplar of hyperreality. Eco believes that disneyland with its setting such as mainstreet and full sized houses has been made to look "absolutely realistic" "taking visitors imaginations to a fantastic past"

- this false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality, the fake animals like alligators and hippos are all available to people in disneyland for everyone to see. The "fake nature" of disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real life, therefore they seem more admirable and attractive.

- In his work simulacra and simulation, baudrillard argues that the 'imaginary world" of disneyland  magnetises people inside and has been presented as "imaginary" to make people believe that all its surrounding are real. But he believes that the los angeles area is not real, therefore making this hyperreal.

Baudrilard and hypereality
-Hyperreality is an exaggeration of something that existed into something that is so perfect its a fantasy e.g. disneyland.
- he believed that the media reality is the reality today, e.g. we all want an xmas tree, but everyone wants the perfect ones they see on the adverts
- you see photoshopped women in magazines, so that you have a fantasy women that is very far removed from what real women are like.


- in the postmodern world, media texts make visible and challenge ideas of truth and reality removing the illusion that films, music videos, or any media text can ever accurately or neutrally reproduce reality or truth
- there are competing versions of truth and postmodern films explore this.

Jean Francis - Lyotard

He suggests that grand narratives like religion, science, marxism and capitalism no longer have the same importance in our lives, the concept of progress and the arts, technology, medicine, and knowledge would progress to a greater good is now seen to be questionable. 

He rejects what he called 'grand narratives' or universal 'meta narratives', he rejects that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress, he would reject universal 'political solutions' such as communism and capitalism, he also rejects he idea of absolute freedom.

In studying media texts it is also possible to apply this thinking to a rejection of western moralistic narratives of hollywood films where good triumphs over evil, or where violence and exploitation are suppressed for the sake of public decency. 

Lyotard prefers micro narratives that can go in any direction, that reflect diversity, that are unpredictable. 

Jim collins: film as a postmodern medium.

there is a new divide in hollywood today, between the eclectic or 'hybrid' film one hand, smart and knowing and a more traditional kind of film keen to endorse 'authentic' values and a solid, traditional sense of reality, as opposed to a playful sense of representations.

says that different films operate on different levels:

- says that some explore a character adventure

- some make the text very self referential and 'knowing' and in that sense the journey is the texts journey. 

- the texts 'adventure' can mean different signifiers from different genres, disconnected from their typical  narrative structures.

- often there is a 'knowingness' a self consciousness in deploying generic features and on that part of the spectators in interpreting them. 

He says you read a film or tv programmes on 2 levels. 

 1. straight narrative layer 

2. the post modern layer, which is filled with meaning, pastiche, parody, intertextual references, irony, humour, and knowingness. 

TV as a postmodern medium

In its resistance to simplification or generalisation, tv is sometimes seen as one of the clearest embodiments of postmodernism.

Tv provides a constant turnover of images and symbols.

TV is seen as the central to the explosion of consumer culture, unlike modernists art which which was thought to be characterised by 'integrity, authenticity and originality' and therefore stood against capitalism and consumerism, Tv thrives and focuses on these ideologies.

Jim collins said that about TV: "TV is frequently referred to as one of the main kinds postmodern culture"

Features of Postmodernism

Simulacrum

"a copy of a copy"
"no such thing as originality"
"distinction between media and reality has collapsed"

e.g. andre 3000 and mick jagger
venice las vegas // venice italy.
pyramid hotel las vegas // pyramids in egypt.

intertextuality 
one media texts references another.
intertextuality mixes forms, genres, and conventions of media, it dissolves boundaries between high and low art, between the serious and the comical

the simpsons reference a clock work orange
fight club references the ikea catalogue (foreign language version)
the simpsons vs george bush senior.

mixing of genres - shrek, the office, shaun of the dead, django unchained, the lego movie,


Pastiche 
in modernism there is parody, which ridicules by exaggerating the distance of the original text from 'normal' discourse.

In postmodernism there is pastiche, a 'blank' parody; theres no sense of a distance from any norm.

Bricolage 
This is used to the process of adaptation or improvisation where aspects of one style are given a completely different meaning when compared with a stylistic feature of another, e.g. youth subcultures such as punks with their bondage gear and swastikas were eclectic as they converted clothes associated with different class positions / functions and converted them into fashion statements 'empty' of their original meaning. A more recent example is girls wearing summer dresses with doc marten boots.


Confusions over time and space 
Travel across the globe is now swift, inexpensive and available to most people.
most people have a fair knowledge of other cultures due to news / documentaries on TV.
The internet has broken down space and time barriers
24hr cities
Satellite link ups.

An emphasis on style at the expense of content / substance 
the visual and stylistic impact becomes more important than the meaning / message.
Media texts which defy interpretation
Retro / nostalgic
shallow / empty?
e.g. moulan rouge, pulp fiction, donnie darko,

The breakdown of a distinction between high culture (art) and popular culture. 
According to post modernists, high and low culture are of equal worth.
Against the 'elitism' of high modernism
Treating 'low art' or 'popular culture' as if they were high art pieces.

High art - fine art, opera, ballet, classical music, classical literature, art cinema, sculpture.
Popular culture - Advertising, pop music, genre films, television, pulp fiction or trashy novels, porn, music videos.

The decline of the meta - narrative 
A meta = a narrative or story which claims to explain something totally e.g. christianity / marxism.
Because society is so fragmented, we live by individual 'hand picked' beliefs rather than collective ones.
Post modern texts reflect this state of being by being ambiguous in their meaning message, they defy an 'absolute truth'

Postmodernism is said to reflect modern societies feelings of alienation insecurities and uncertainty concerning identity, history, progress and truth, and the break up of those traditions e.g. religion, family, or to a lesser extent class, which helps identify and shape who we are in the world, artists like michael jackson, madonna and david bowie have all created an identity for themselves which makes them postmodern.

Writers on postmodernism such as Lyotard, baudrillard, and jameson argued that recent economic changes produced particularly 'structures of feeling' or 'cultural logic'. Typical assertions include claims that thanks to television and mainly MTV we now live in a 3 minuet culture (length of most peoples attention spans) or that we are part of an over visual society, ' a society of the spectacle'  due to the predominance of the television and the internet.

- this has implications for realist forms of media, since our sense of reality is now said to be completely dominated by popular media images; cultural forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since reality itself is saturated by advertising, television, and video games.
- the capacity of digital marketing makes 'truth claims' or the reliability of images tricky e.g the use of photoshop in magazine and advertising images. advertising no longer tries to seriously convince of the products real quality, but just shows us an ideal fake version of the product.

Postmodernists claim that in a media saturated world where we are constantly immersed in media, on the move, at work, at home, the distinction between reality and the media representation of reality becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us, in other words we no longer have any sense of difference between real things and the images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them, media reality is the new reality.

video games and postmodernism - the sims.

The sims is a sandbox life simulation game, which already highlights postmodernism as you can create new, different versions of yourself, the use of this hyperreal world gives the user the ability to create new people and create new lives for them, out of the real world, however there is a use of intertextuality as the game uses music, television from real life in the game itself. The game has expansion packs which allow the player to interact with celebrity sims giving it more connections to the real world and what the user knows, the game is also self reflective as the sims can look at you at the creator and address you if they have any desperate needs, therefore the players know they are being controlled which is unrealistic, Baudrillard states that things things are 'not a copy of the real, it becomes the truth in its own right', thus highlighting that even though the sims is a simulation game and therefore similar to real life, it is actually very different in its own way, overall this game as postmodern allows the player to have much more freedom than a normal game does.

Telephone - lady gaga

Many artists use postmodern elements in their music videos to help them stand out and create media attention, which in turn is likely to increase sales, an artist who is very good at this is lady gaga. in her video for 'telephone' she refers to many existing big brands and media forms of  which the audience can relate to, this is intertextual referencing as at the start of the video she uses an opening title screen which is imitating something usually associated with films, she has this in the style 'jackie brown' which is a film by quentin tarantino who is a director famous for challenging the forms of convention and experimenting with postmodern methods, sticking with tarantino lady gaga also refers to beyonce in the video as Hunny bee which is the name of one of the characters in his film 'pulp fiction' which is considered a postmodern text, this shows that gaga is playing with the features of postmodernism and creating something new and unique.

Hyperreality is another postmodern feature that is prominent in the telephone music video as lady gaga is creating a hyperreal version of herself in the way that she dresses with a telephone on her head and even her name isn't her real name, so she has created this persona for herself to represent her in the media, but in real life she will not be this flamboyant character in real life. Lady gaga's image often reflects Laura Mulveys theory of 'the male gaze' which is that men see women in the media in a derogatory way, lady gaga applies this concept to her music videos often as do many female artists as it attracts more viewers and more sales, for example in the music video she is seen with just tape wrapped around her while she dances, which reveals a lot to the audience, all of these features are what make lady gaga the artist she is and enables her to create this character that we as an audience perceive her as, it allows her to stand out as an artist and most importantly against modernist music videos.