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.’

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

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

Simulacrum

Simulacrum: reality melts together with imagination. 

In other words: a place where we escape to from reality such as cinema or games.

Discussed in Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (1981). He claims that we don't have the sense to make difference between real experiences and simulations of them. Media became the new reality.

If video doesn't load here's the link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz1bMyQkUEQ

Jean Baudrillard's  4 successive historic phases of the image

1. The image is a reflection of basic reality. (e.g.: Realism)
2. The image masks and perverts a basic reality. (e.g.: Surrealism)
3. The image marks the absence of a basic reality. (e.g.: Adverts, Modernist mass production)
4. The postmodern simulacrum. (e.g.: Today?)

Link: http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/baudrillard1.htm

Postmodern

Postmodern: the world we live in.

• The art, which constantly references itself instead of reflecting the real world.
• A place where dreams are real and reality fades into the fog of history.
• A time where our whole existence relies on technology.
• The parody, mockery or refusal of present conditions and establishment.
• Blurring of high and low art. Judging the value of a product or artifact its merely taste. 
• Rejection of general social values.

SlideShare link: http://www.slideshare.net/anniapple/postmodernism-1523222

Link to Medi@chs: http://mediachs.edublogs.org/13-postmodern-media/

Structuralism

Derrida:

Meaning includes identity (what it is) and difference (what it isn't) and is therefore continuously being 'deferred'. Derrida invented a word for this process, combining difference and deferral - différance.

 'THERE'S NEVER ONLY ONE MEANING'

Rejects the dogmatic representation of Reason as timeless and certainty.

Foucault: 

epistemology = the verification theory of knowledge concerned with distinguishing genuine from spurious knowledge.
An episteme dictates what counts as knowledge and truth and what doesn't.

'There is no history but a multiple, overlapping and interactive series of legitimate vs. excluded histories.'

Art: meta-epistemic; it is about the episteme as a whole, an allegory of the deep arrangements that make knowledge possible.

Moral Panics

Link to Media Know All: Mediaknowall: Violence in the Media — Moral Panics

Signs

Semiotics: the study of signs

Signifier: the word or acoustic image

Signified: the concept to which the word refers

Sign: the signifier and the signified together make up the sign

Meaning: product of a system of representation which is itself meaningless

A bit of Grammar

Structuralism: examines the language from a synchronic (existing now) rather than a diachronic (existing and changing over time) point of view.
See: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Swiss professor

Phonemes: sounds or letters (e.g. C)
Monemes: words (eg. Cat)
Discourse: extended speech; the code of language used to express thought.

Language: sign system
'language games' (Wittgenstein): use of language in social practice; the association of sound and what it represents is the outcome of collective learning

Syntagmatic series: (contiguity, combination): the linear relationships between linguistic elements in a sentence (e.g.: subject-object-verb)
Paradigmatic series: (substitution): the relationship between elements within a sentence and other elements which are syntactically interchangeable (e.g.: verb-verb, noun-noun)

Metonymy

Metaphor: descriptions that are not literally true (eg.: 'tower of strength', 'a glaring error')
--> generated by paradigmatic substitution through perception of similarity

Metonymy: naming an attribute or adjunct of the thing instead of the thing itself (eg.: 'crown' for 'royalty', 'turf' for horse-racing, 'deeps' for ocean)

Synecdoche: naming the part for the whole (eg.: 'keels' for ships)
--> both generated by syntagmatic combination through perception of contiguity

Audience Theories

Passive Audiences

Reception Theory

• preferred / target audiences --> see: audience profiles
• opposed audiences (complain --> censor [age, religion, sex, politics etc.])
• negotiated audiences (move opinion)

Uses & Gratifications

• how we use media & the pleasures we get from that use
• company --> media characters become our friends (informal address)
• social needs --> friends associate with the same products (voyeurism)
• relax --> leisure
• structure & order --> reassurance
• PLEASURE --> scopophilia, reinfication GAZING
• Surveillance, spying (CUs) 
• Escapism (reality) - ASPIRATIONS (Baudrillard + Lyotard) 
• HYPERREALITY - simulacrum, -a (obsession)

Active Audiences

Two-step flow

• criticism of Capitalist media (Marx) 
• influential media --> consider DEGREE OF INFLUENCE
• command words --> Moving audiences from A to B (eg.: shopping)
• Influence (Gramsci) 
• Quantity vs. Quality (Althusser) 
• INTERPELLATION

Hypodermic needle (~ magic bullet)

• injecting an idea --> medical analogy : 'addiction'
• brainwashing / propaganda
• visual violence --> violent behaviour (dismissed!!)
• SHOCK --> horror
• see: Orson Welles radio broadcast  1938 (War of the Worlds) --> people believed they were actually being attacked by aliens
• charity ads: try to make us feel guilty (poverty, maltreated animals, illnesses etc.)

Concept of Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Existing concept or a non-real category?

Although postmodernism has been defined and used in very diverse ways, in general it has always have to do something with the new, the fresh, the unconventional. It is contemporary, therefore popular to some extent, shifting towards cultural aspects. It has been influenced by many previous movements from the philosophical achievements of the Enlightenment (Locke, Voltaire, Hume) to the French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut). Being linked to the experience of modernity it attempts to break free from the schemes and cliches of the 20th century.

In our world, where 'everything is a copy of a copy of a copy', there's  neither need nor chance to create anything original, meaning completely from scratch. Chance in terms that everything that we perceive during our lifetime influences our thoughts, our expressions. The need , if we interpret it by Baudillard's view, means that anything we create is most likely to already exist so everything is a copy.

There are so many stories out there that they are almost forced to borrow characters or recycle concepts from each other. In order to avoid boredom they become anti-conventional.

Returning aspects in films:

• Subjectivity
• Blurring of morality
• Hybrid genres
• Self-reflexivity
• Fragmented narrative
• Intertextuality
• Blurring of high and low art
• Hyper-reality
• Mixing of cinematic styles
• Mini-narratives
• Open endings
• Convincing characters, avoiding stereotypes

Defining Postmodernism

From Wikipedia (for those who feel lost hearing this word):

Postmodernism is a general and wide-ranging term which is applied to many disciplines, including literature, art, economics, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. There is no consensus among scholars on the precise definition. In essence, postmodernism is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. Postmodernism is therefore skeptical of explanations that claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, arguing that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain or universal.

Conclusion:
See, it didn't help at all explaining what postmodernism is. (We will shortly call it pomo). Don't worry about that, because in fact - we all know it by heart. That's what surrounds all day everyday: that cynical, skeptical state of mind which tries to doubt or change or fight against the whatever. You will realise how vast this subject is when you learn to appreciate its qualities. 

This blog will mostly talk about films but all comments are welcome. What's the best in pomo?It never stops at one subject, but flows on and changes like the air we breath.