Postmodernism - Jean Baudrillard (Textbook Notes)

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  • Post-modernism: Jean Baudrillard (Mark Dixon Textbook)
    • Ten-minute revision
      • The postmodern age is marked by the dominance of advertising as a media form. Advertising has also impacted on other media forms creating hyper-real inertia
      • We now live in the postmodern age which is marked by a massive proliferation in media content and media messages
      • Media proliferation is enabled through the endless copying of pre-existing media. Media forms 'blend' and hybridise during this copying process
      • Baudrillard suggests that media blending has resulted in the construction of fictionalised reality
      • Baudrillard suggests that there have been three distinct cultural phases: pre-modernity, modernity, and postmodernity
      • Media proliferation has resulted in an implosion of meaning through the simultaneous presentation of oppositional truths
      • Media proliferation has resulted in an implosion of meaning through the simultaneous presentation of oppositional truths
    • Definitions
      • Hyper-reality: Baudrillard suggests that we are unable to separate the real world from that which is manufactured by the media. In this sense, we live in a world that is beyond reality or is hyper-real
      • Inertia: the constant stream of media that we are subjected to paralyses us or makes us unable to feel or act in a way that creates deep meaning
      • Meaning implosion: the sheer volume of media and the multiplicity of voices within the contemporary media landscape produces a cocktail of opinion and counter opinion that audiences cannot disentangle
      • Media blending: media forms in the postmodern age blur - the narrative strategies of news, for example, become absorbed into fiction and vice versa
    • Three phases of the simulacra
      • Early modernity: Renaissance to the early Industrial Revolution
        • Limited cultural production
        • Cultural production is dominated by a few authors (the church and the state)
        • The masses are held firmly in their positions by cultural messages
      • Modernity: The Industrial Revolutio to WWII
        • Cultural representations begin to break down - producing multiple versions of reality
        • Cultural production is dominated by the bourgeoisie and legitimises the capitalist system
        • Mass media forms dominate
      • Postmodernity: Post WWII onwards
        • Media produces hyperreality - an explosion of meaning
        • Media makes everyone a consumer - audiences have a limited relationship with authentic meanings
        • Advertising and television ascend as the dominant cultural forces
        • Contemporary digitial technologies accelerate the effects of postmodernity

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