Postmodernism
The
Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as "a style and
concept in the arts characterized by a distrust of theories and ideologies and
by the drawing of attention to conventions".
Postmodernists
claim that in a media-saturated world , where we are constantly immersed in
media, 24/7. 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.
Postmodernism is also said to reflect modern society's feelings of alienation,
insecurity and uncertainties concerning identity, history progress and truth,
and the break-up of those tradition like religion, the family or perhaps to a
lesser extent, class, which helped identify and shape who we are and out place
in the world.
Writes on
postmodernism (such as Baudrillard and Jameson) argued that recent economic
changes produced particular 'structures of feeling' or a 'cultural logic'.
Typical assertions include claims that, mostly thanks to television especially
MTV in particular, we now live in a 'tree-minute culture' (the length of most
people's attention spans, it is said) or that we are part of an over-visual society.
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 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.
