The distrust towards the revolutionary projects of modernity may help explain postmodernism's more relaxed attitude towards the media as a whole. While the media was generally dismissed by modernism as standardized, formulaic and shallow, postmodernism tends to celebrate popular culture generally for its implicit refusal to look for deep universal truths, tending instead to embrace image, surface and ‘depthlessness'. This may help explain why postmodern aesthetics appear to indulge in increased levels of intertextuality, generic hybridity, self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, recycling and sampling. Such characteristics may be seen as reflecting a world where traditional binary oppositions such as ‘fact' and ‘fiction', the ‘real' and the ‘unreal', the ‘authentic' and the ‘inauthentic' are less clear than they may have once seemed. This is perhaps why Andy Warhol's work is often conceived as intrinsically ‘postmodern'. Warhol's ‘Campbell's soup cans' (1962), for example, confuse and upset the very differences by which we have come to understand ‘art' and the products of ‘mass production'. Indeed, some postmodern critics argue that it is now increasingly impossible to distinguish between the media ‘image' and the ‘real' - each ‘pair has become so deeply intertwined that is difficult to draw the line between the two of them'. In a contemporary society the simulated copy has now even superseded the original object. This phenomenon Baudrillard refers to as the ‘third order of simulacra' which produces a state of ‘hyperreality'.
It is not that simply the line between the media image and the real have become blurred; it is more that the media image and the real are now part of the same entity and are therefore now unable to be separated at all. Some critics have even suggested that the differences between human and machine is now beginning to disappear, tending to eradicate the old ‘human' versus ‘technology' binary opposition upon which so much of the pessimistic theories of modernism were based. Although the idea of the cyborg (a hybrid of machine and organism) may still be in its scientific infancy, feminist critics already use it as a metaphor for the power to deconstruct essentialist notions of gender and identity in a ‘posthuman' world. For some critics, then, such a theoretical framework gives us a new critical arena through which we can start to understand and account for various aspects of New Media. For example, the postructuralist and postmodernist distrust of a stable and fixed notion of the ‘real' tends to reflect the landscape of New Media where such traditional definitions are increasingly becoming problematized by new technologies. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, cyberculture, virtual communities and virtual reality, our sense of what is ‘real' and what is ‘unreal' is clearly undergoing a dramatic transformation. For example, real existing companies now place advertisements in virtual worlds like Second Life, an artificial environment which affects real existing sales.
So how can we separate the ‘real' in this example from the ‘virtual'? What part of this virtual world is ‘real' and what part of it is not? Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but it is an illustration of the wider kinds of technological and cultural change that developments in New Media are currently producing. As this suggests, this problematizing of what we once recognized as ‘real' will inevitably influence the very notion we may have of an ‘authentic self', the conception of identity in a postmodern world becoming increasingly fluid and contestable. In particular, it has been argued that the increased interactivity of New Media generally allows audiences to play around with and make their own composite identities from various and sometimes even contradictory sources. This process is referred to by some as ‘DIY citizenship', the notion that the media now allows us to all create our own complex, diverse and many faceted notions of personal identity. With so many different communities now open to us on the web, we can begin to simply pick and choose which identities we want to adopt and which ones we want to reject, allowing an individual to decide how they define themselves rather than simply having to stick to the narrow and limited number of choices that once defined the past. This is in stark contrast to a world where identity is primarily a matter of heritage. This fluid notion of identity certainly appears to be in direct contrast to the concept of citizenship and identity that was propagated by the underpinnings that informed the roots of modernism, particularly a concept like public service broadcasting. Postmodernist critics might argue that even the notion of ‘broadcasting' itself is a totalizing concept which was never able to successfully reflect the sheer diversity of a nation or its people.
The phrase ‘narrowcasting' - that is used to denote New Media's pronounced interest in addressing and catering for niche audiences - perhaps better encapsulates the role of television and radio in a world of multimedia. As we have seen, the increased interactivity of audiences in a New Media context is also articulated in poststructuralist theory whose tendency is to conceive the audience as active participators in the creation of meaning. Websites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook appear to reflect this recent understanding of ‘participatory culture'; not only creating virtual communities but also allowing audiences to become ‘producers' as well as ‘receivers' of the media. Theories of ‘fandom' are important here with the Internet allowing the fans of different forms of culture to create virtual communities that add to the original understanding and even content of their chosen interests. For example, the rise of ‘slash fiction' allows audiences to actively participate in the production of meaning by creating extratextual material about their favourite television programmes.
Consequently, rather than being seen as essentially commercial and inactive, in a postmodern world consumption itself is now regarded as a positive and participatory act. Indeed, the ‘top-down' cultural ‘uplift' seems particularly redundant in a world where audiences are increasingly determining their own choice of media and what they do with it. The hypertextual ‘cut' and ‘paste' culture of New Media - that seemingly encourages sampling, poaching and remixing - produces not only copyright problems, it also further confuses the very means by which we conceive of the media and its relationship with its audience. Certainly, the idea that a media organization like the BBC could so rigidly dictate public tastes seems almost unimaginable now. We may now require a completely new theory of authorship to help us understand the current relationship between the media and its audience.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Paul B. Livingston at
01192010
1. Satellite TV: Invention Of Modern Convenience
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved.