Industries in a Postmodern World

Postmodern & Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry.

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from ‘Fordist’ mass production (the studio system) to the more ‘flexible’ forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy.

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms.

Postmodern TV 

• is characterised by a high degree of excess,
• fragmentation,
• heterogeneity, 
• hybridization, 
• aestheticization, 
• stylization, 
• intertextuality, 
• recycling,
• bricolage, 
• self-referentiality, 
• parody 
• and pastiche. 

Postmodern programmes are often

• ontologically unstable, 
• playfully foregrounding production contexts and environments, 
• shifting between realistic and fantasy worlds without comment, 
• blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction or past, present and future, 
• and casually using computer graphics and special effects to create, warp or wipe out televisual worlds.

Much more of TV’s past is on television now. There are also endless shows which literally recycle the mediated past (ie. The 100 Greatest Advertisements, I Love the Seventies)

Narratives: Meta & Mini

Metanarrative ="Grand Narrative" = the modernist model of history; a model of history in which deliberate acts of self-assertion progress towards the realisation of distantly idealised goal.
--> e.g.: Marxism : long-term emancipationist goal guaranteed by history itself.

Meta-narrative: universal, absolute or ultimate truths

Rejection of Grand Narrative

Lyotard & Baudrillard simly reject the idea of the 'grand narrative', that there is any 'universal truth' in literature.

Postmodernists argue that narratives become more and more episodic. See for example Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds. Ien Ang considers TV as a main influence in decentralisation and fragmentation. Anne Friedberg counts it amongst the numerous symptoms of the current 'postmodern condition'.


Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film,
the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of
cinema, can reconfigure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new
and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly
expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment
and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here
means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience’


Ien Ang in Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern
World (1996) suggests that ‘Television itself has undergone massive
postmodernization – manifested in a complex range of developments
such as pluralization, diversification, commercialization, commodification,
internationalization, decentralization – throwing established paradigms of how it
operates in culture and society into disarray.’

‘It is easy to produce an identikit postmodern hedonist: the archetypal decentred
subject with a maximum attention span of three minutes. Living in a world
of schizophrenically fragmented instants, he cruises the surfeit of channels
available to him, zapping his remote control and hopping between channels
and programmes unconnected by time, space or genre. He is unconcerned with
narrative, coherence or rational understanding: rather, he constructs a largely
random bricolage out of bits and pieces of television, which he connects with only
in a bored and distracted fashion...'

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how

we watch a film (through video/dvd), and we increasingly watch film in personal

spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, ‘cinema and televison

become readable as symptoms of a “postmodern condition”, but as contributing

causes.’ In other words, we don’t just have films that are about postmodernism

or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern

quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional

understanding of time and space. ‘One can literally rent another space and time

when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR….the VCR allows man to

organize a time which is not his own…a time which is somewhere else – and to

capture it.’

Anne Friedberg: ‘The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent – the home-

video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of

slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to

repeat, replay, and return – is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The

cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes

for what is now…described as the postmodern condition.’

Inception and Christopher Nolan

Title: An Investigation of Postmodernism in Contemporary Film with Special Reference to Inception

Inception (2010)

The concept of a dream within a dream has been on the literary scene for centuries. However, contemporary art and cinema seems to put a big emphasis on the subject. 'The trick is that we want to be fooled.’4 Baudrillard suggests that media has become our new reality, that the real and the mediated world collides into a simulacrum5 through which we perceive life. In Inception, the protagonist Cobb loses the ability to distinguish reality from dreams. In my creative project I have taken this principle and twisted it around slightly. I have also adapted ideas from the 1960 Hungarian novel 'A gólyakalifa' (the stork caliph) by Mihály Babits, which was translated to English under the title of 'The Nightmare'. In this story the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in another life every day. What connects it to Inception is the addictive nature of dreaming: the urging need to be in a comforted situation, even if the price is the complete loss of control over reality. In Inception, many people enter the world of shared dreaming for hours and hours each day, as if there was no chance of living in any other conditions. The scenario is hauntingly reminiscent of that one explained in Gerbner's cultivation theory, but of course, here the role of television is replaced by dreams. The most shocking part of the film is the view that the only way out is suicide. Although the attempt is to avoid any references to religious background, this could be highly unacceptable even for such diverse societies as the American or British. Most religions deeply reject the idea of suicide, however common it might become in present or future days.

Christopher Nolan

The question of auteurism often pops up in connection with the idea of postmodernism. If everything is taken from somebody else, then how can it be original? There is a considerable amount of originality and creativity in putting other people's work in a certain order6. The writer-director Christopher Nolan uses the recurring themes of blurring reality with imagination/ hallucinations and deception and self-deception, which elements combine to create recognisable filmic fingerprint. However, it is hard to consider him creating a brand of movie which is clearly identifiable - as on the case of other filmmakers such as Tim Burton or Quentin Tarantino. Many fans claim that his labyrinthine narratives have made mainstream cinema more popular among fans of the indie. And it is true the other way as well: mass audiences finally have a chance to see more complicated stories and philosophical ideas. Also there are often lonely, troubled protagonists who are unwillingly forced to hide their true identity from the world. The hero often chooses the world of lies, dreams or fantasy instead of the pain to accept reality. His films usually revolve around characters that are afflicted with some kind of psychological disorder (phobia, dual personality, insomnia etc.). E.g. in Inception (2010), Cobb loses the ability to distinguish dreams from reality; in Memento (2000), Leonard has his 'conditioning', a memory problem, in Batman Begins (2005), Bruce Wayne suffers from bat-phobia since his childhood accident7.The villains often reflect the hero's mistakes and humiliate them in public. The antagonists mirror, question the hero. They are really ‘getting under his skin’.8 Christopher Nolan is a Noir fan himself, and he deliberately uses elements from the ‘60s cinematic scene. The most recognisable element is that most of his films are set in an urban area. This also where he borrowed the tensity, countdown nature of storyline from. He admittedly mixes classical genres with however, he regards himself as a ‘very modernist’ filmmaker.9 His endings have a recurring theme of justified dishonest, almost every time with the characters' fate open to interpretation. Typically concludes his films with a character giving a philosophical monologue10. Often ends his films with a jump cut to black and displays the title before the end credits.

Notes:
4:  The Prestige [DVD], 2006, dir. Christopher Nolan
5: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
6: Mel Thompson, Understand Philosophy, 1995
7: Frank Miller, Batman - Year One, graphic novel, 1987
8: The Treatment, host: Elvis Mitchell. Interviews with Christopher Nolan (2010). Available at kcrw.com.
9: The Culture Show. Interview with Christopher Nolan (Aug. 2012)
10: IMDb profile of Christopher Nolan, available at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/

BBC - broadcasting history

Key Dates in British Broadcasting

1922 - British Broadcasting Company. Financed by licence fee.
1926 - British Broadcasting Corporation
WW2 - The dominating image of the BBC during the war (indeed the dominating image of the war in Britain) was one of relentless domesticity.
1939 - BBC would 'tell the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the news was horrid'
'We shall need a lot of entertainment before this business is over' (Ian Hay, 1939)

1944 - introduction of the Third Programme
- Programme A: 'should be of the highest possible cultural level, devoted to artistic endeavour, serious documentary, educational broadcasting, and the deeper investigation of the news, corresponding in outlook to a Times of the air'
1946 - broadcasting resumed

1954 - introduction of commercial television in the UK. The oligopoly of BBC was broken by the new ITV.

Mediation

Dyer

• selection (~mediation) --> exaggerate
• meanings (semiotics)
• types (stereo /counter)
• representative (person who speaks, e.g. in news)

Hall

• reflection (mirror, documentary, French new wave)
• intention (give the audience what they want)
• construction (media texts are non-real, artificial)

Williams

see at Laughey: http://danlaughey.com/media-theory/
• TV as a specific medium. 
• Importance of flow of programmes.

John Ellis

TV - 3 periods of their specific cultural shapes
 1. Scarcity (national channels, BBC vs. ITV)
 2. Availability (multiple channels)
 3. Plenty (interactive media)

Kelly

Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired magazine suggests that:

Digital copies are free

Piracy is inevitable

Media producers should think about other ways to make profit

Copies are worthless

Anything that cannot be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

We need to sell things which cannot be copied.

8 'generatives':

• Immediacy,
• Personalisation,
• Interpretation,
• Authenticity,
• Accessibility,
• Embodiment,
• Patronage,
• Findability

Reading:

• Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) by Raymond Williams
• The Media Students Book, 5th edition (2010) by Gill Branston and Roy Stafford
• Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (2000) by John Ellis

Form & Audience

Title: An Investigation of Postmodernism in Contemporary Film with Special Reference to Inception

Form

Postmodern cinema employs non-linear storytelling techniques, often flipping around the three acts of a movie to tell the story in an interesting fashion or includes a number of flashbacks (e.g.: Inception). Although there are some, who still follow the linear structure and are still considered to be postmodern. In fact, there is no limitation of creativity here: a film can be completely or just partially CGI, the story can be reversed or all mixed up. What still connects these different styles is generally the subject matter. The recurring theme of questioning reality, the subjective nature of the truth, the sarcastic mockery of reality and the self-reflexive construction. The acknowledgement of the deceptive nature of perception often comes up as the main theme. For example, in Inception, the audience is aware that what the protagonist tells us is just one point of view, not the whole truth. In Sucker Punch, it becomes clear that somehow the imaginary world is connected with reality and there really is one winner in the end, the one who escapes and wins the chance for a happy life.

Audience

Postmodernists argue that narratives become more and more episodic. Ien Ang15 considers TV as a main influence in decentralisation and fragmentation.  Anne Friedberg counts it amongst the numerous symptoms of the current 'postmodern condition’.  According to these two theorists, the control we get at home over the cinema, influences our way of living. The ability of stopping, forwarding and reversing DVDs and television results in changing our expectations of what a film or a programme should be. New moving image text very often end up in utter complexity or right the opposite: clean simplicity. Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the ‘hyper-spectator’. ‘Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can re-configure both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience.’ Therefore we assume that cinemagoers will need to be more sophisticated in films and filmmakers need to construct products which the audience (the new professionals so we could say) can appreciate.

However, critical appreciation is not everything a filmmaker can get. There is always some degree of fear for the unknown and new in society16. After the infamous Aurora massacre, Christopher Nolan had been accused of being ‘irresponsible’.17 Viewers claimed that making villains sexually attractive, such as The Joker played by Heath Ledger, influences young consumers to identify with their socially distorted ideas. In the past there were many films facing the same criticisms such as Fight Club, Child’s Play and Clockwork Orange. However, in most people’s view, one bad example doesn’t prove that the whole media is wrong.18

Future

What can we expect in the next few years, perhaps decades? Is postmodernism going to become a historical period, such as shall we say renaissance or modernism? After all, the name itself only comes from our habit of categorizing everything. Is this behaviour of labelling the new and weird going to make these films more acceptable for us? Or perhaps less interesting, because we will know what to expect?

It is for sure, that we can expect new attempts for regulations concerning the content of films because of the increased cinematic violence and of course the negative responses from the audience. In terms of future really anything could happen: we might all become cyborgs, time-travellers, spacemonkeys or who knows... even realize our dreams.

Notes:

15: Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, 1996

16: Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear, 2006

17: Todd McCarthy, The Dangers of Film’s Dark Side. The Hollywood Reporter (Aug. 3. 2012), p. 47

18: P. McClintock, How Going to the Movies Will Change. The Hollywood Reporter, (Aug. 3, 2012), p. 45

Film companies

Consider :

• Vertical integration (eg. Hollywood Studio System), 
• Big Five (Fox, RKO, Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros.)
• Block booking,
• blind buying, 
• marketing,
• Horizontal integration (eg. Disney)
• oligopoly,
• Target audience, 
• genre,
• Technology

BBFC

Key dates:

• 1912 - beginning
• 1917 - aims to ban immoral practices
• 1932 - new advisory certificate introduced (H for horrific) in response to Hollywood horror films.
• 1937 - H certificate became restrictive, admission to adults only. This led to a number of horror comedies which could escape the certificate while exploiting the appeal of the genre.
• 1942 - increased criticism of horror films. Banning of H certificate films.
• 1951 - X certificate replaces H - new appeal of horror, violence and sex.
• 1957 - banning of Night Creatures at scripting stage. Onwards, Hammer Studios worked closely with BBFC in order to make sure their films would be screened.
• 1960-70s - relaxation of censorship rules. Shift in the representation of nudity, abortion, swearing, violence and homosexuality.
• 1984 - Video Recordings Act. Provoked renewed panic of horror through video. 
• 2000 - present: 'providing advice'

Television facts

Key Dates and Facts

1980 Broadcasting Act
1982 - launch of Channel 4 as a publicly owned PSB provider
1990- Broadcasting Act
1993 - Channel 4 becomes a public corporation
2008: HBO had approx. 40 million subscribers which provided over $6 billion profit.

Free digital TV in the UK

BBC:
In 1944 aimed to become 'a Times of the air' providing 'the highest possible cultural level' in documentary, news, art and educational broadcasting.

ITV:
The first commercial television in the UK. In 1954, when the Act introducing commercial television was passed, it meant a threat to BBC and an opportunity advertising agencies, market research organizations and radio/television manufacturers.

Warner Bros.

Studio System 

1903–25: Founding

The corporate name honors the four founding Warner brothers (Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack). The three elder brothers began in the movie theatre business, having acquired movie projector with which they showed films in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Their original name was Wonskolaser (born Hirsch, Aaron, Szmul, and Jacob), whose parents had emigrated to USA from Poland, which was at that time part of the Russian Empire. They opened their first theater, the Cascade, in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1903. In 1904, the Warners founded the Pittsburgh-based Duquesne Amusement & Supply Company, to distribute films. Within a few years this led to the distribution of pictures across a four-state area. In 1912, Harry Warner hired an auditor named Paul Ashley Chase. By the time of WW I they had begun producing films.
-  their first nationally syndicated film was My Four Years in Germany based on a popular book by former American Ambassador James W. Gerard. In 1918 the brothers opened the Warner Bros. Studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.

Gold Diggers (1933)

- Sam and Jack Warner produced the pictures,
- while Harry and Albert Warner and their auditor and now controller Chase handled finance and distribution in New York City. On April 4, 1923, with help from a loan given to Harry Warner by his banker Motley Flint, they formally incorporated as Warner Brothers Pictures, Incorporated. (However, as late as the 1960s, Warner Bros. claimed 1905 as its founding date.) The first important deal for the company was the acquisition of the rights to Avery Hopwood's 1919 Broadway play, The Gold Diggers, from theatrical impresario David Belasco.

Successes:

Rin Tin Tin

Rin Tin Tin, brought from France after World War I by an American soldier, became the top star at the studio. Rin Tin Tin debuted in the feature Where The North Begins. The movie was so successful that Jack Warner agreed to sign the dog to star in more films for $1,000 per week. Jack Warner nicknamed him "The Mortgage Lifter" and the success boosted Darryl F. Zanuck's career. Zanuck eventually became a top producer for the studio and between 1928 and 1933 served as Jack Warner's right-hand man and executive producer, with responsibilities including the day-to-day production of films. More success came after Ernst Lubitsch was hired as head director; Lubitsch's film The Marriage Circle was the studio's most successful film of 1924, and was on The New York Times best list for the year.

Sam and Jack decided to offer Broadway actor John Barrymore the lead role in Beau Brummel  The film was so successful that Harry Warner agreed to sign Barrymore to a generous long-term contract; like The Marriage Circle, Beau Brummel was named one of the ten best films of the year by The New York Times.
By the end of 1924, Warner Bros. was arguably the most successful independent studio in Hollywood, but it still competed with "The Big Three" Studios (First National, Paramount Pictures, and MGM). As a result, Harry Warner – while speaking at a convention of 1,500 independent exhibitors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – was able to convince the filmmakers to spend $500,000 in newspaper advertising, and Harry saw this as an opportunity to finally be able to establish theaters in big cities like New York and Los Angeles.

As the studio prospered, it gained backing from Wall Street, and in 1924 Goldman Sachs arranged a major loan. With this new money, the Warners bought the pioneer Vitagraph Company which had a nation-wide distribution system.
In 1925, Warners also experimented in radio, establishing a successful radio station, KFWB, in Los Angeles.

KFWB Radio Station's Logo

1925–35: Sound, Color, Style

Vitaphone Logo

Warner Bros. was a pioneer of films with synchronized sound (then known as "talking pictures" or "talkies"). In 1925, at the urging of Sam, the Warners agreed to expand their operations by adding this feature to their productions. Harry, however, opposed it,famously wondering, "Who the heck wants to hear actors talk?" By February 1926, the studio suffered a reported net loss of $333,413. After a long period of denying Sam's request for sound, Harry now agreed to accept Sam's demands, as long as the studio's use of synchronized sound was for background music purposes only. The Warners then signed a contract with the sound engineer company Western Electric and established Vitaphone. In 1926, Vitaphone began making films with music and effects tracks, most notably, in the feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore. The film was silent, but it featured a large number of Vitaphone shorts at the beginning. To hype Don Juan's release, Harry Warner also acquired the large Piccadilly Theater in Manhattan, New York and renamed it the Warner Theater.

Intertextuality & Institution

Title: An Investigation of Postmodernism in Contemporary Film with Special Reference to Inception

Intertextuality

The blurring of high and low art is an aspect of postmodernism. However, some theorists, such as Adorno, consider classical sophistication far more important than pop culture. Others, such as Lyotard think that the favouring of one piece of art or the other depends on mere taste. We can also distinguish intelligence from education.
We constantly recycle the mediated past, such as Edith Piaf’s song ‘Je ne regrette rien’ in Inception. These are references to pop culture rather than simply stealing ideas and inevitable in the process of making memorable emotional connections with the audience. The question of originality has interested philosophers for centuries: even Aristotle thought that everything we create already exists. Russell describes in Problems of Philosophy that human creativity highly depends on perception - therefore experience influences us to make new things. We could simply say it like this:
'We all had films which made an impression to us when a were kids. This is a way of passing on to the next generation.' (Pete Docter from Pixar)

Institutions

In today’s highly commercialised world, we can barely find any free space without ads (not even the cinema screen is sacred anymore) or shopping opportunities (e.g.: Amazon is linked to IMDb). In other words, we choose to be part of a consumerist world and accept the idea that it is possible to ‘buy’ happiness12. In films it is very common to include the list of used music in the ending credits, which enables the viewer to look for that song they liked. Of course today it its much easier to find them with websites such as YouTube. The habit of having more windows open at the same time actually affected the thinking of the general public: today's spectator is considered to be more of an associative thinker in comparison to our ancestors. It might be the reason that most filmmakers encourage us to dig into this pile of information online and get the most out of it. Such as in Sucker Punch, where all the songs are remixes of famous pop numbers. For example Sweet Dreams Are Made of These, which has become infamous in Marilyn Manson's version. Or Where Is My Mind, which was originally by The Pixies and became the theme song of the cult film Fight Club.

Notes:

11.

Problems of Philosophy, 1912

12. Pete Docter from Pixar, writer and director of Monsters Inc. (2001)

13. Fight Club [DVD], 1999, dir. David Fincher

14. Sucker Punch, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 2011, Sony Classical

Definition of Postmodernism

The term 'postmodernism' became vaguely used for a number of approaches to philosophy, literature and the arts, which have in common a rejection of an earlier 'modernist' view.1 Postmodernism is encouraged by the developments in technology, and is mostly associated with a post-industrial economy, which is more service-based, financially globalized and its society is typified by the rise of new information technologies. As the above description applies to our present days, it is commonly considered that we live in a postmodern world. However, many filmmakers, such as Quentin Tarantino, refuse to be categorized as ‘pomo’ artists. Some others, such as the Wachowski brothers (Matrix Trilogy) deliberately reference theorists such as Baudrillard. On the other hand, theorists constantly rewrite the list the returning aspects of films2, in which the most common elements are blurring of high and low art, mixing of cinematic styles, fragmented narrative, hyperreality, intertextuality, mini-narratives, subjectivity, self-reflexivity and open endings. As a consequence of the fast development of technology, we spend more and more hours per day looking at screens. Computers enable us to have several windows open simultaneously. According to Ien Ang we are ‘living in a world of schizophrenically fragmented instants’ in a ’bricolage’ of information 3.

Notes

1. Mel Thompson, Understand Philosophy, 1995

2. Edwin Page, Quintessential Tarantino, 2005

3. Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, 1996

4. The Prestige [DVD], 2006, dir. Christopher Nolan

5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

Power

Power cannot only be coercive. It also has to be productive and enabling.

'Power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress.' (Foucault)

Democratic Media (?)

Question 7: 'New and digital media erodes the dividing line between reporters and reported, between active producers and passive audiences: people are enabled to speak for themselves.' (www.indymedia.org.uk)

Have such developments made the media more democratic, with more equal participation by more people?

Bill Gates said in an interview that 'The Web is remaking the world'. BBC's Virtual Revolution explores the impacts of technical achievements on the media. The programme describes new media as a Gutenberg-type or industrial revolution which connotes the rebellious and life-changing nature of digitalization. 

It could be argued that the Internet provides everyone with the tools to make their voices heard. Anyone can be a reporter to some degree. People like spying on other people, that's one of the reasons why the Facebook newsfeed became quickly so popular after its launch in 2004. According to Bill Gates 'The Web should be a collaborative sharing experience.', which mostly is anyway. The culture of sharing shakes conventional beliefs of authorship. So did the Napster change the music industry and piracy influence to change the law. YouTube can make someone a star or ruin a carrier overnight. Today, anyone can post an article to the internet, and a great number of people can have access to it. How much do we pay for actually being seen on the most popular sites is another question.

The number of websites is so enormous that it its impossible for one person to know them all. Between 1995 and 2005 there was over 20 million registered and plenty ever since. Google worked out a fixed bidding system for advertisements where the price depends on the bidding and the quality of the ad. So again the bigger companies have a great advantage in display and advertisement, and the smaller ones are forced to fall out of competition. Some economists think that digitisation is only a reconstructed way to monopole capitalism, which could simply repeat the events of the 20th century. Others think that new media can create a world, which is more suitable for the individuals. 

Recommendation engines can personalise everything for us automatically, which helps personalities to flourish. On the other hand, psychiatrists say, that this wouldn’t make a person more original, just a more ‘demographic type’.
For example, the new Nokia Lumia advert targets ‘individual’ people, described as such stereotypes as ‘the music lover’, the ‘film buff’, the ‘working mum’ etc. The slogan says 'We didn't create a phone for all of us, but one for each of us' As long as people don’t feel forced to buy it, it seems all democratic, however, the effect of interpellation is strongly sensible.

In order explore how much more democratic the media is today than before, first and foremost we have to define what we consider 'democratic'. Democracy guarantees the human rights for everyone, however, it is not to be confused with financial equality. The utopian ideal world, in which everyone is completely equal, most commonly considered as an invention of Marx and Engels, is closer to a communist idea, however, it have never become reality despite several attempts. Let's just consider the examples of the 1789 French and the 1917 Russian revolution. 

History proves the darwinist idea right, that 'humans are social animals', therefore we naturally build a hierarchical society. In case of a temporary anarchy the leader roles would be taken by those who are the most adaptable to the situation. Today the Internet creates a brand new platform and those who cannot cope with the new expectations will lose their power. This theory also suggests, that due to the mass use of internet, power shifts are not only possible but almost inevitable to prevent full chaos.

John Perry Barlow thinks that the Internet is challenge to authority. Governments overwhelmingly prefer secrecy, therefore the Internet, the most evolving information sharing system in the world, is a threat to them. For instance today anyone can add information to Wikileaks, which is the easiest way to reveal corruption or compromise powerful people. The Internet gives power to individuals, but the real strength is in publicity, the mass audience. 

Arianna Huffington said: 'The Web is simply unequal because it mirrors the inequality in reality.' It is possible to assume, that interactivity serves democracy well, in the sense that people can review and comment events instantly, which could eliminate the usefulness of physical newspapers and magazines. So what should be the role of an online journalist? Reflect reality or create a simulacrum, where hyperreality and life are mixed together? There are many people who write or comment on sites such as YouTube concerning films, music and other forms of entertainment, some of them have nothing to do with reality. The Web slowly melts into a poststructuralist pulp where everyone adds to it and you decide what to take away. 

Portable homeland?

A political system, such as democracy, is unique to a country. We define country as a land with people and a government. However, the internet connects the whole world together. Facebook has as many members, as the third largest country in the world. The whole idea of ‘the portable homeland’ reflects a strongly americanised ideology, which makes governments with a different propaganda, such as China, to face some problems. Most countries have already worked out how to censor the internet, while other places, such as those in the third world don't even have enough users who are worth censoring. We must consider, that the Internet is highly a technical achievement, therefore the poorer countries can never compete with the richer. For example South Korea, the world's most wired country, where an average user spends 8 hours a week online, cannot be compared to places such as Uganda, where most people don't even own a computer.
Considering all, new media is still less costly than the old one, such as printing, so in a long term it could become more available for more people than ever before. Digital media could be a route for a new type of education worldwide, provide more jobs in the industry and serve commercial needs.

Related Texts

Title: An Investigation of Postmodernism in Contemporary Film with Special Reference to Inception

Related Texts

Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch (2011) blends action, fantasy and drama. The director-producer is most commonly known for directing 300, and his obsession with stunning visuals. He is also currently working on superhero movie Man of Steel with Christopher Nolan.

It is unclear if Babydoll's hallucinations are due to her medication received in the mental institution, or come from her rejection of reality after the accidental murder of her own sister. However, she shows incredible bravery and selflessness. The distinction between reality and imagination often blurs, but a certain 'colour code' helps the viewers to cope. The real world is quite dark, greyish, while the first layer of dreaming is slightly more colourful but still contains references to reality, and the second layer is just absolute fantasy with monsters, dragons and spectacular fighting scenes.

Darren Arnofsky's Black Swan is about the internal struggles of a young girl against familial and sexual oppression. Arnofsky takes a rather masochistic approach to ballet. The price of stardom is incredibly high: who wins the fight for perfection is a question of life and death.

Picture of the Self

Freud's Classic Trinity of the Psyche:

1. Id
2. Ego
3. Superego

Unconscious = instinctual, unknowable to the subject

Lacan's Theory

'The unconscious is structured as a language.' (Jacques Lacan, 1901-81)

Stages of Psychic Maturation (by Lacan)

• Imaginary
• Symbolic
• Real

--> Unconscious functions by signs, symbols, and in this sense it is 'like' a language.

--> unconscious only comes to exist after language is acquired

 Stage 1 - The Imaginery of the 'Self'

• Mirror Phase =The sense of self arrives externally, from a reflection or from imaginary.
  (--> Between 6 to 18 months, the infant makes its first startling discovery of itself in the mirror as an image which appears total and coherent.)

• Identity comes from mis-recognition, a false persuasion of Self, which remains with us as an ideal ego for the rest of our lives. 

• The mirror supplies the first signified and the infant itself acts as the signifier.
   --> Lacan is saying that we are imprisoned not in reality but in a hall-of-mirrors world of signifiers.

Stage 2 - Symbolic Order

• Symbolic order = refers to the system of pre-existing social structures into which the child is born, such as kinship, rituals, gender roles and indeed language itself.

• Identity assumed at the Imaginary phase is finally constructed by the symbolic order, the realm of the Father who prohibits the mother-child "incest" relationship.
  --> patriarchal order
  --> oedipal murderous conflict
  --> THIS THEORY EXCLUDES WOMEN

The self-reflection

Cooley, 1902 

--> 'looking-glass self' = we see ourselves add if we were reflected in the eyes of other people

Guthrie

The judgements we make about others can come true simply because we have made them. If we decide that someone is unpleasant, we treat them as such and they are almost bound to respond unpleasantly.
-->LOOK AT STEREOTYPES

Jacobson & Rosenthal, 1968

'Self-fulfilling Prophecy'
The self-concept depends on the type of interaction that we have with other people and on the expectations that they have for us.

Existentialism

 Heidegger (1889- 1976)

Being and Time (1927) - concerned with the way in which human beings relate to the world
Experience of Dasein ('concern')

Sartre (1905-80)

Being and Nothingness (1943)
No Exit (1945) --> 'Hell is other people.'

Cultivation Theory

Agenda-Setting Theory

• Walter Lippman, 1922
• 'media plays  an influential part in how issues gain public attention'
• Media --> Forming public opinion

  Cultivation Theory

Link: http://www.ou.edu/deptcomm/dodjcc/groups/02B2/Literature_Review.html

• Bernard Cohen, 1963
• "the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about" 
• public issues are generated by the media

Link: http://www.uky.edu/~drlane/capstone/mass/cultivation.htm

Gebner's Cultivation Theory

Explanation of Theory: 
Gerbner’s cultivation theory says that television has become the main source of storytelling in today's society.  Those who watch four or more hours a day are labeled heavy television viewers and those who view less then four hours per day, according to Gerbner are light viewers.  Heavy viewers are exposed to more violence and therefore are effected by the Mean World Syndrome, an idea that the world is worse then it actually is.  According to Gerbner, the overuse of television is creating a homogeneous and fearful populace. 
Theorists: George Gerbner
Date:1976