The document provides an overview of postmodernism and some key postmodern concepts. It discusses how postmodernism emerged after modernism and rejected notions of universal truths or grand theories. Some key postmodern ideas discussed include the breakdown of distinctions between high and low art, self-referentiality, intertextuality, pastiche, irony, and the blurring of boundaries between reality and simulation in a hyperreal world dominated by media. Jean Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and the simulacrum are summarized, where mediated experiences become more "real" than reality itself.

1. << MEDIA STUDIES >>
Postmodernism & Hyperreality (A2 Only)

2. WHAT IS POST-MODERN?
What do these words mean to you?
POST MODERN

3. WHAT IS POST-MODERN?
• Notoriously hard to define, can mean different things to different
people.
• Consider the words post-modern: What do you think they mean?
• If “Modern” is now, how can we be after it?
• So what is/was modernism?
Write down in one sentence what you think it means.

4. Modernism:
The answer to the whole world and everything?
•Embracing of Major Developments in Technology at the start of
the 1900s. Can you think what they were?
•Rejection of “traditional” values and ideas (e.g. religion) in
favour of science and technology – ‘rationality’
•Photography and Recording = “Crisis of Representation” &
“End of Realism”
•Art Movements considered Modernist include Cubism,
Surrealism, Dada, Expressionist.

5. Cubism
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906): The View contains The Viewer
…painting not Reality but the effect of Perceiving it
•Simplification to geometric Shapes
•Synthesis of space and figure
•Multiple and simultaneous viewpoints
•Interlocking Movements
Rejects notion of a single isolatable event
The Human is non-exceptional to reality
Pablo Picasso’s
“Girl with Mandolin”(1910)

6. Dadaism (1916-24) - anti-art?
•Horrified by atrocities of outbreak of WW1, Dada was a
retaliation to the bourgeois intellectualist elite whose
ideologies were believed to have led to it.
•Marcel Duchamp’s “Ready-mades” sought to breakdown the
rules of art.
•Any non-art object could be displayed as art if disassociated
from its original use context and meaning
•The mass-reproduced object displaced the artistic originality
and sacred uniqueness of the work of art.

7. Dadaism (1916-24) - anti-art?
“If it’s signed and you can’t
piss in it because it’s stuck
on a museum wall-it’s got to
be art-what else?” Marcel
Duchamp
“Fountain” (1917) by R.Mutt
(M.Duchamp)
However it backfired. Instead of being
a challenge to the establishment, they
became admired for their “aesthetic
beauty”.

8. Surrealism
Salvador Dali’s Swans reflecting as Elephants
(1937)and his Paranoiac Critical method
“Dictation of thought in
the absence of all control
exercised by reason,
outside of all aesthetic or
moral preoccupation.”
from Surrealist manifesto

9. Pop Art
Andy Warhol
Campbell’s Soup cans (1962)
Takes Dada’s “Readymades” even further, reproducing
everyday objects as art, sometimes with a hint of parody and
blurring the barriers between “Hi” and “Lo” art.**
Roy Lichtehstein’s
Drowning Girl(1952)

10. Modernism/Post Modernism
Hard to define where one ends and one begins.
Some even argue that Post Modernism and
Modernism are actually both part of the same
thing.
But “Post” usually refers to something after (and
against) some previous movement/idea.

11. Summarising Post Modernism
•Similar to Modernist rejection of tradition and embracement of
Technology
•But rejection of Modernist quest for “Grand Theory of Everything” - no
ONE right answer…
•Used in so many diverse ways, hard to have one meaning. This
ambiguity in itself is in some ways postmodern!
•It sets out to break so many rules it is sometimes described as nihilistic.
•High Art vs Low Art
•Self awareness
•Intertextuality: Parody, Irony, Hybridity,
•“The way new artifacts can be constructed by making references to
existing ones, often relying upon the audiences prior
knowledge/experience”

12. Postmodernism playlist on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUPxDOG-YGRAt7bPL7pk2stK47aNSpE80

13. Definitions of postmodernism
According to Media & Film Studies Handbook (Clark, V. et al.):
Postmodernism is a set of ideas that replaced modernism as a
way of interpreting society and culture. Postmodernism covers a
wide range of philosophical, sociological, psychological and critical
perspectives.
Its key characteristic is disbelief in the idea of objective meaning.
From a postmodern point of view, there is no such thing as ‘truth’,
only individual ways of interpreting the world.

14. Definitions of postmodernism
According to Media & Film Studies Handbook (Clark, V. et al.):
Postmodern narratives tend to be highly self-reflexive and make extensive use of
irony.
Self-reflexive or self-referential texts: texts that deliberately draw attention to their
own fictional nature. Self-reflexivity is a characteristic of postmodernism but also
occurs in other types of text. Some self reflection serves comic purposes, as when the
comedy western Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, USA, 1974) ends with a chase
sequence bursting onto the sets of other films of different genres apparently being
made at the same studio. The screen writer Charlie Kaufman is well known for his
self-referential approach: in his film Adaption (Spike Jonze, USA, 2002) the central
character is a screen writer called Charlie Kaufman.
Irony: any communication whose denotation is markedly different from its
connotation, i.e. it has a double meaning – one on the surface and another apparent
to those in the know. Irony is used in a wide variety of situations, often as a source of
dark or dry humour. In narrative, dramatic irony exists when the audience know more
about a character’s fate than the character does.

15. Intertextuality
The shaping of (Media) texts' meanings
by other texts.
It can refer to an author’s borrowing and
transformation of a prior text or to a
reader’s referencing of one text in reading
another.
This may take the form of parody, critical
commentary or simply as a way to add
meaning through another text’s meanings
or juxtaposing unconnected meanings.
Can you think of any more examples?

16. “OTHER THEORIES ARE ALL RUBBISH!”
According to postmodernists any theory that makes claims about
universal or underlying truths is just missing the point. For them, the
point is that modern culture is so fragmented, so diverse, so full of
differences that no unified theory could possibly explain such a melting
pot.

17. IS IT A POSTMODERN TEXT?
Values: Collapses distinction between Popular Culture and High Culture
Bricolage (“Do It Yourself”)
Recycling: Plundering the historical canon
Intertextuality: cross-media references
Irony, ‘knowingness’: a sly wink to the receiver
Superficiality: It’s all on the surface. No depth or hidden meaning
Abandons consistent narrative
Self-referentiality
Blurs the distinction between image and reality; ‘hyperreality’
Advertorials and infotainment

18. STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
Postmodernism concerns itself primarily with surfaces rather than the
‘hidden depths’ of structuralism or psychoanalytical theory.
Much of contemporary culture communicates this idea of depthlessness,
like a film set that may appear to be three-dimensional but isn’t.
Often, a cultural product can look as if it is heavily weighted down with
meaningful signifiers, but this is an impression given by the form rather than
the content of the artefact.

19. STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
This ‘style over substance’ idea can also be applied to the
postmodern identity.
In this view, a person’s surface appearance (their clothing,
make-up, hairstyle, personal possessions and body
adornments) neither mask or transmit that person’s true
identity because they are the true identity.
Personal identity becomes a matter of surface appearance and
therefore infinitely variable and changeable.

20. SIMULATION
French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard noted that we live in an era of media
saturation in which we are bombarded with information and signs.

21. SIMULATION
For Baudrillard, we live in an era of media saturation in which we are bombarded
with information and signs.
So much of our experience is in the form of media texts rather than first-hand direct
experience that mediated signs become ‘more real than reality itself’.
This is simulation: the part of our lives that is dominated by computer games,
television, social networking on the internet, magazines and all other forms of
media experience.

22. SIMULATION
“The Screenslaver interrupts this program for an important announcement.
Don't bother watching the rest. Elastigirl doesn't save the day; she only postpones her defeat. And
while she postpones her defeat, you eat chips and watch her invert problems that you are too lazy to
deal with.
Superheroes are part of a brainless desire to replace true experience with simulation. You don't talk,
you watch talk shows.
You don't play games, you watch game shows. Travel, relationships, risk; every meaningful
experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain
ever-sheltered, ever-passive, ever-ravenous consumers who can't free themselves to rise from their
couches, break a sweat, never anticipate new life.
You want superheroes to protect you, and make yourselves ever more powerless in the process. Well,
you tell yourselves you're being "looked after". That you're inches from being served and your rights
are being upheld. So that the system can keep stealing from you, smiling at you all the while.
Go ahead, send your supers to stop me. Grab your snacks, watch your screens, and see what
happens. You are no longer in control. I am.”

23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujgwEldk5Jk&vl=en

24. IMPLOSION
For many of us, this is a very big part of our lives; maybe the biggest and most
important.
Consequently, Baudrillard argues, the distinction between reality and simulation
breaks down altogether: we make no distinction between the direct reality that we
experience first hand and the simulated experience offered by media.
This is implosion.

25. HYPERREALITY
Finally, we may get to the stage where the difference between reality and mediated
experience hasn’t just got blurred, the ‘image’ part has got the upper hand; this is
hyperreality.

26. HYPERREALITY & SIMULACRUM
Examples of Hyperreality:
• Disneyworld
• Betty Boop (modelled on singer/actress Helen Kane)
• a sports drink of a flavour that doesn’t exist ("wild ice zest berry")
• a plastic Christmas tree that looks better than a real one ever could
• a magazine photo of a model that has been touched up with a computer
• a well manicured garden (nature as hyperreal)
• pornography ("sexier than sex itself")
• “Reality becomes redundant and we have reached Hyper-reality in which images
breed incestuously with each other without reference to reality or
meaning”(Appiginanesi, p.56)
By Jean Baudrillard

27. HYPERREALITY & SIMULACRUM
• Baudrillard controversially said that the first Gulf war never
happened.
• Consider also the Western world’s representation of disaster: The
death of Millions of starving African’s represented as a charity
rock concert.
Pop music and mass re-production: Sampling and the cover version
http://www.whosampled.com/
What is the original? What is the Reality?
Rihanna’s
S.O.S.

28. POST MODERNISM
JEAN BAUDRILLARD: SUMMARY OF KEY IDEAS
In postmodern culture the boundaries between the ‘real’
world and the world of the media have collapsed and that
it is no longer possible to distinguish between reality and
simulation.
In a postmodern age of simulacra we are immersed in a
world of images which no longer refer to anything ‘real’.
Media images have come to seem more ‘real’ than the
reality they supposedly represent (hyperreality).

29. Put these terms into your glossary of definitions

30. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Wateraid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiy3dkTwPcQ
Beyonce Formation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ
Humans (ad campaign)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_94sQiXlPtE
Zoella
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjTvkTaDrNI

31. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Wateraid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiy3dkTwPcQ
Beyonce Formation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ
Humans (ad campaign)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_94sQiXlPtE
Zoella
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjTvkTaDrNI

32. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS

33. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Wateraid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiy3dkTwPcQ

34. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Beyonce Formation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ

35. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Humans (ad campaign)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_94sQiXlPtE

36. APPLY TO ASY1 SET TEXTS
Zoella
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjTvkTaDrNI