This document provides an overview of key concepts related to postmodern media, including theorists like Baudrillard and Jameson. It discusses how postmodern media rejects notions of artistic value and blurs distinctions between media and reality. Key terms covered include simulacra, hyperreality, bricolage, intertextuality, and pastiche. Postmodern media is characterized by styles like hybridity and self-reflexivity, as well as disjointed narratives that mirror postmodern uncertainties. Reality is saturated by media images, blurring boundaries between historical periods and genres.

1. Post Modernism in Media
BAUDRILLARD
JAMESON
LYOTARD

2. OBJECTIVES
• To introduce aspects of postmodern
style/aesthetic
• To introduce aspects of postmodern form
(narrative, genre)

3. KEY TERMS
SIMULACRA,
PARODY & PASTICHE,
HYPERREALITY,
BRICOLAGE,
INTERTEXTUALITY,
HYBRIDITY,
DISLOCATION FROM TIME & SPACE

4. What is Post Modern Media?
•
Postmodern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of
any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely taste.
•
Anything can be art, anything can deserve to reach an audience, and
culture ‘eats itself’as there is no longer anything new to produce or
distribute.
•
The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now
live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of
simulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other as
reality rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the image
represents it – this is the state of hyper-reality.
•
All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses and
what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’
discourse.

5. Postmodern Media as an STYLE
aesthetic
• Hybridity - (the mixing and sampling of different kinds and
levels - of hip hop music, of material in television ads, films,
etc.) Postmodern texts 'raid the image bank' of popular
culture which is so richly available through video and
computer technologies, recyclesome old movies and shows
on television, the Internet etc. Music, film and TV provide
excellent examples of these processes.

6. Bricolage
• This is used to refer to the process of adaptation
or improvisation where aspects of one style are
given quite different meanings when compared
and collidewith stylistic features from another or
a combination of multiple. Look at the inside of
the recent Doctor's Tardis for examples of
Brocolage – the old typewriter with the modern
viewer etc.

7. Self Reflexivity
Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed
simulation or reproduction. In using
intertextual references and creating hyperreality does it play with the idea of this by
making reference to itself as a simulation of
reality?

8. Self Reflexivity
Is the text aware that it is itself a constructed
simulation or reproduction. In using
intertextual references and creating hyperreality does it play with the idea of this by
making reference to itself as a simulation of
reality?

9. Parody & Pastiche
Post Modern texts use Intertextuality to
reference existing texts, sometimes as an
HOMAGE – paying tribute to its influence and
sometimes as PARODY & PASTICHE invites the
postmodern audience to make sense and
meaning of the reference by its understanding
and experience of consuming a bank of
previous media, often for the purpose of
comedy & humour.

10. HYPERREALITY
• Reality is no longer pure or truth – our culture is saturated by
media simulations of reality that we can no longer seperate
them. The blurring of real and ‘simulated’, especially in film
and reality TV or celebrity magazines, Simulation or
hyperreality can refer to not only the increasing use of CGI in
films like Avatar, but also the narrative enigmas of The Matrix,
Blade Runner or Inception.
'Is it human or artificial’?

11. SIMULACRA
• This has implications for realist forms of media, since our sense of reality
is now said to be utterly dominated by popular media images; cultural
forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since
reality itself is saturated by advertising, film, video games, and television
images.
• Moreover the capacity of digital imaging makes 'truth claims' or the
reliability of images tricky – think about the use of Photoshop in magazine
and advertising images. Advertising no longer tries seriously to convince
us of its products' real quality but, just shows us a fake about the product.

12. The Erosion of History
In a society where a constant flow of images via mass media and mass communication becomes
part of everyday life, we are treated to an endless barrage of signs which we accept, not as
being real, but, as Baudrillard would argue, as supplanting the real. The real loses its meaning,
and what we believe and deal with are simulacra. Baudrillard would, as Jameson did, relate
this idea to history. Without any grounding in the real, and having no way to prove the real,
our knowledge of the past is confined to whatever symbols we associate with it when we
attempt to portray it. For example, "The 80's," as an historical entity, is not anything real, but
merely the amalgamation of the symbols that we have accumulated for it, whether they be
images of stonewashed designer jeans, new wave pop, breakdancing, Ronald Reagan, Just Say
No, glasnost, greed, or the Challenger. There is no history, only a distorted nostalgia, distorted
because it relies only on the symbols, icons, and indexes that we have access to at any given
moment.

13. Blurring of boundaries
• The boundaries between form and structure of settings
in time and periods in history have been blurred so
that they are set in a dislocated narrative space –
no time and no place. Films such as Inglorious Basterds
demonstrate the 'erosion of history'. In addition to this
the boundaries of genre have been blurred to produce
Hybridity.

14. Disjointed Narrative Structures
• These are said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism of
postmodernity in films like Pulp Fiction as contemporary
narratives often won’t guarantee identifications with
characters, or the 'happy ending' or meta narratives which
have traditionally been achieved at the end of films. They
often manage only a play with multiple, or heavily ironic,
perhaps 'unfinished' or even parodic endings, Similar to
Memento and Fight Club . Narratives can also be disjointed in
time and space – see modern / retro films like Blade Runner

15. Peer Micro Teach
10 mins to recap 5 terms with
definition/examples
Become familiar with the terms – find your
opposite
Rotate stations
Examples & Definition
Make connection to the other areas
5 mins all rotate

16. Put it all together
Connect them, what are the relationships
between the terms

17. Summary
• We usually think of the media as being 'in between' us
and reality, hence the word 'media' and the idea of
'mediation'
• 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 it becomes
blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In other words,
we no longer have any sense of the difference
between real things and images of them, or real
experiences and simulations of them.
Media reality is the new reality.

18. Jamesons Nostalgia & Cultural
Recycling
Using Intertextuality, Parody and Pastiche
Create a new idea for a nostalgia-based media
text for your generation that recycles
previous media texts either a Parody (Cheeky)
or Pastiche (Homage)
How easy is this to do?
Why – who is the post-modern generation that
Nostalgia works on?

19. You have 0 friends
This becomes more complex but accessible when we
consider the building of virtual worlds in games for
example Liberty City in GTA, but also online our
identity and relationships through memes & the
projection of our selves into avatars, facebook, and
Second Life

20. WHY IS THIS POSTMODERN?
Chicken Fight

21. FIGHT CLUB
NEXT MONDAY
Fight workshop
Design a sequence that demonstrates some or
more of the postmodern stylistic approaches
we have discussed here
Consider particularly how we planning this relies
on us make sense of fighting as 'simulacra' &
'hyperreality'

22. Some starting points
Family Guy chicken fight
Kill Bill
Rocky
Matrix
StreetFighter2
Tekken
Mortal Kombat