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.