Postmodernism is a kind of philosophy way of life and a way of seeing the world
- Pastiche – is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
- Parody – a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
- Bricolage – a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition
- Intertextuality – it suggests signs only have meaning in reference to other signs and that the meaning is therefore complex
- Metanarrative – how the media stories over a period of time shape and change the public opinion of the artist, or their star image.
- Hyperreality – where everything seems more real than it is, existence of reality which isn’t reality
- Simulacrum – not just a representation of the real, but the real itself
- Consumerist Society – A consumerist society is one in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”. The general view of life in a consumerist society is consumption is good, and more consumption is even better.
- Fragmentary Identities – is characterized and linked to an increase of consumption and the proliferation of new forms of digital technologies.
- Implosion – meaning is being lost with the increase of information
- cultural appropriation – is when someone takes or uses elements of a culture to which they do not belong and does so without the permission or consent of those who do belong to the culture.
- Reflexivity – describes the process by which a film or television programme draws attention to itself, reminding the spectator of its textuality and status as a media construct
New expressions of identity and being are actually new iterations of previous expressions of popular culture
Shuker says “their preoccupation with visual style, and associated with this, their status as key exemplars of ‘postmodern’ texts” (2001:167)
the fragmentary, decentred nature of music videos that break up traditional understandings of time and space so that audiences are ‘no longer able to distinguish ‘fiction’ from ‘reality’
STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE (Put another way, are we more interested in the surface or the ‘inner meaning?’
Richard Hoggart (Uses of Literacy) noted the shift in modern societies particularly the impact on our ‘neighborhood lives’, which was ‘an extremely local life, in which everything is remarkably near‘ (1959:46)
With a displacement of both consumption and production that has radically altered the nature of societies and individuals living in them.
Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities.
In effect, another key characteristic of postmodernism is the development of fragmented, alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
Jean Baudrillard would describe as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms simulacra
A ‘process leading to the collapse of boundaries between the real and simulation’