Post modern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely taste.
Characterised by the self-concious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media.
The mixing and sampling of different kinds and levels - of hip hop music, of material in television advertisements, films).
Experimental Cannon: genre attempts to establish trends
Post Modern: Looks at other trends and attempts to add something new
Cannon Stage: work within those trends
The following are three types of intertextuality:
Homage - Imitations is the highest form of flattery. A reference within a creative piece of work which is initially aimed at someone who has influenced an artist. Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal is a homage of the Band Wagon - Homage.
Pastiche - Using the imagery of one text to make a comment
Parody - A parody is a concept which mimics the conventions and style of another piece of work in a absurd or ridiculous form. (Youtuber: Tobuscus - parody videos of films, etc)
Hybrid forms are said to level hierarchies of taste. It is said that all distinctions between high culture and popular culture, have gone, or become blurred. Post modern texts 'raid the image blank' which is so richly available through video and computer technologies, recycle some old movies and shows on television, the internet. Music, film and TV provide excellent examples of processes.
Post modernism 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 our place in the world. Artists like Madonna, post modernism in the ways in which they have created or re-created different identities for themselves.
This has associations for realist forms of media, the sense of reality is said to be dominated by popular media images; cultural forms can no longer 'hold up the mirror to reality', since reality is saturated by advertising, films, video games, television images and other forms of media.
The capacity of digital imaging makes the reliability of images difficult - The use of Photoshop in magazines and advertising images. Advertising no longer tries to convince the audience/consumer of it's products realistic quality but shows the viewers fake concepts about the product (ideologies which are shown in a advertisement and cannot be done in reality).
Bricolage:
This is used to refer to the process of adaptation or improvisation where aspects of one style are given quite different meanings when compared with stylistic features from another. Youth subcultural groups; punks, with their bondage gear/outfits and use of swastikas were electric as they took the idea of clothes associated with different class positions or work functions and converted them into fashion staements 'empty' of their original meanings.
Simulation:
The blurring of real and 'simulated', especially in film and reality TV or celebrity magazines. Simulation or hyper reality refers to not only the increasing use of CGI in films like The Lord of the Rings films and Avatar, but in the use of documentary style in fiction in the narrative enigmas of science fiction such as, The Matrix or Blade Runner. It suggests if it's human or artificial.
Disjointed Narrative Structure:
This idea is said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism of postmodernity in films like Pulp Fiction as contemporary narratives often won't guarantee identifications with characters, or the 'happy ending' or meta narratives. They often manage to play with multiple, or heavily ironic 'unfinished' or pardoic endings.
De-modification:
A commodity invariably is always contingent for the status and value. In relation to the distribution and introduction, when it becomes inadequate, it becomes effectively free. The status and value of the commodity becomes lost.
- Decomodification is the strength of social entitlements and artists
- Can be the process of viewing utilities as an entitlement
