Title: Contemporary Media Issues
1Contemporary Media Issues
- Quick review thenBaudrillard, the Simulacrum,
Marshall McLuhan Reality TV
2What is Postmodernism?
- Postmodernism describes the emergence of a
society in which the mass media and popular
culture are the most important and powerful
institutions, and control and shape all other
types of social relationships. - So we live in a postmodern age.
- Popular cultural signs and media images
increasingly dominate our sense of reality, and
the way we define ourselves and the world around
us. - Postmodernism is an attempt to understand this
media-saturated society.
3Transformers Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
Fight Club (1999)
Radiohead
In This World (2002)
The Big Lebowski
Up in the air (2009)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Scream (1996)
MIAs Paper Planes (2007)
Danger Mouse (2005) The Grey Album
Chanelle Hayes (2007)
GTA
Blade Runner (1982)
Marcel Duchamp (1912)
Life on Mars (2006-07)
Andy Warhol (1964)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
Kid British Our House is Dadless (2009)
Atonement (2007)
Aphex Twin
Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love (2009)
Ugly Betty (2008)
Cadburys Gorilla (2008)
The Chanel No. 5 advert (2009)
Kylie Minogue vs New Order - Cant Get Blue
Monday Out Of My Head (2001)
Guinness Horses advert (1999)
Madness Our House (1982)
David after the Dentist (2009)
Rene Magritte (1933)
Jay-Z (2004) The Black Album
Big Brother (2001-10)
Cock and Bull Story (2005)
The Matrix (1999)
Read My Lips - Bush/Blair (2006) by atmo.se
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
4Quotes to use in your exam
hierarchies of taste
culture remixing itself
Bricolage
modernism
Broadband internet
hyperreality
mediation
'fetishised hyperreality
The Long Tail
The Global Village
The active audience
Cultural Studies
New cultural languages
'structures of feeling'
hyperconsciousness
Twitter, YouTube, Blogger
superficiality rather than substance
Fans as social groups
'death of the metanarratives'
Simon Pegg Trekkies
'society of the spectacle
Photoshopping
'hold up the mirror to reality
New social values
'cultural logic'
The world we see is the world of the commodity
The Digital Divide
ecstasy of communication
Changing media world - changing audience habits
Hybridity
Citizen journalism
Web 2.0
pastiche, parody and intertextuality
simulation
5Critics to drop into conversation
Marshall McLuhan
Julian McDougall
Dominic Strinati
Guy Debord
Jean Francois Lyotard
Fredric Jameson
Chris Anderson
Toby Miller
Dick Hebdige
Richard MacManus
John Hartley
Jean Baudrillard
6Review Baudrillards Postmodernism
- So far youve discovered that Baudrillard isnt
really a postmodernist! - His ideas come from a particular French tradition
of anthropology, sociology and philosophy. - Hes particularly interested in the way we
communicate. - And he sees the media as standing in the way of
communication and not adding to it. - He sees the media as sign makers
7Symbolic vs Semiotic Exchange
- symbolic exchange
- Good
- Sacred
- Organic
- Raw
- Primitive
- Collective
- Real
- semiotic exchange
- Bad
- Profane
- Processed
- Produced
- Contemporary
- Individual
- Simulated
8Review
- He calls true communication the sacred a form
of symbolic exchange. - What the media offer us is a semiotic version of
this not real but hyperreal. - That the media actually causes non-communication
. - That Disneyland and personalisation of mobile
phones and HDTV all distance us from reality
from the sacred.
9Symbolic Exchange
- Fight Club (1999) provides one fanciful rejection
of the semiotic Ikea lifestyle and a return to
the symbolic to physical violence and personal
risk in an attempt to recover a lost meaning in
the characters lives.
10Baudrillard and the Simulacrum
- Baudrillards most famous and controversial
concept is that of the simulacrum. - The simulacrum is a term that describes the
transformation of the symbolic into the semiotic
image a journey from reflecting reality, to
masking reality, to having no relation to reality
whatsoever. - The electronic mass media functions by
translating the symbolic into the semiotic
transforming - the lived character of the world into signs, so
we live, sheltered by signs, in the deserts of
the real. - What we call reality is only the simulacrum -
when we watch the news we see only a world
interpreted, designated and rationalized by the
TV screen.
11The Matrix (1999) Welcome to the desert of the
real
12Baudrillard and the Simulacrum
- Repeated reproduction can rob us of the impact of
reality - The Grand Canyon has become a disappointing
reproduction of the photographic original.
Daniel Boorstin (1992) - The simulacrum is marked not by its unreality but
by an excess of reality or hyperreality. - Reality TV, social realist cinema,
fly-on-the-wall documentaries are all good
examples of hyperreality the reason for their
existence (apart from shaping an audience for
advertisers) is to replicate reality to make us
believe that reality can be discovered through
the reproduction of reality in an orgy of
realism that culminates in the devastation of
the real! - Baudrillard calls this hypersimilitude
hypertruth.
13Its a global village. Dont be the idiot.
TV Advert for Mobile Phones
14They say planetary communications abolish
distance. But the impact of catastrophes remains
inversely proportional to distance 5000 dead in
China are not the equivalent of ten western
lives. In this regard, things are even worse than
they once were, since in the past indifference
could be put down to a lack of communication.
With that obstacle removed, we can confirm that,
beneath the formal solidarity, the discrimination
is absolute.
Jean Baudrillard
15Are friends electric?
- Baudrillard has long been associated with an
earlier cultural critic the Canadian academic
Marshall McLuhan. - The revolution, dissemination and proliferation
in the electronic and digital media since his
death in 1980 has led to McLuhan to becoming a
key cultural icon for postmodernism. - His discussion of electronic media (TV radio)
and culture, the global village of instant
access, contact, participation, and empathy - His views on the live collective experience of
global events, and his interest in the
transformation of our society and culture by
electronic media all anticipate key debates in
postmodernism. - McLuhans claim that the medium is the message
reveals how the form of the media were receiving
imposes itself upon all levels of our private and
social lives - It creates a sensory environment as invisible to
us as water is to fish. - The medium changes the way we interact with the
world around us.
16Just as Narcissus became captivated by his own
reflection we are captivated by the medium.
17Huge televised events like the funeral of
President Kennedy or the Queens Coronation or
the funeral of Winston Churchill or the first
live broadcast of the World Cup final
demonstrates the unrivalled power of TV to unify
an entire population in ritual process and
emotion the media allows us to access a version
of Baudrillards symbolic.
18Are friends electric?
- Baudrillard of course disagreed he saw these
events as replacing the lived relations with
semiotic versions we are alienated from reality
by our technological society - for him the medium
was the message because the medium became the
message the message itself was irrelevant. - Hence we consume today a fragmented, filtered
worldindustrially processed by the media into
signs. - Instead of unifying us into a global village
Baudrillard sees us transformed into an
indistinct mass created by the medium without a
voice.
19Are friends electric?
- The media have replaced symbolic exchange with
non-communication where we pass like commuters
avoiding all contact with others through the
distancing power of the media. - So the organic, collective unity that McLuhan saw
in the media is for Baudrillard a synthetic
simulacrum that removes any potential
transformative power. - Traditionally the media was said to hold a mirror
up to reality. - McLuhan saw that the media was influencing
reality. - Baudrillard sees the media as being a replacement
reality.
20Are friends electric? Not on Reality TV
- Think about Reality TV programmes like Big
Brother. - It aimed to offer a snapshot of real life
seeing the real reactions of people under
increasingly artificial conditions in real time -
a kind of social experiment. - Then were presented with celebrities placed
under the same conditions in Im a Celebrity Get
Me out of Here! And Celebrity Big Brother. - These programmes produce a dissolution of TV in
life and a dissolution of life in TV.
21Are friends electric? Not on Reality TV
- How are we to know whats real and what is
happening because of the cameras in such an
artificial reality? - This hyperreality is a semiotic effect. The
potential for symbolic experience offered by the
first series of Big Brother has been slowly
eclipsed by the elevation, excessive realization
and technical perfection of its increasingly
semiotic ancestors. - Faced with this excessive hyperreality we have
nothing left to do but stare fascinated and
dumbfounded at the empty banality of this
reality.
22For Baudrillard the story of Narcissus needs to
be completed he doesnt just fall in love with
his reflection he dies a slow death because of it.
23Reality TV is only a spectacular version of the
transformation of life itself into virtual
reality.
Jean Baudrillard (1997)
24Are friends electric? Not on Reality TV
- Technology is blurring rather than sharpening
our picture of reality - we fill our lives not with experience, but with
the images of experience- the image, more
interesting than its original, becomes the
original - Daniel Boorstin called this hyperreality - more
real than reality - In Ridley Scotts 1984 film Blade Runner the
character Dr Tyrell creates a replicant more
human than human.
25Blade Runner (1984) More human than human
26Hyperidentities?
27The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- There is no event in the media - only its
simulacrum. - There is no shared, organic, collective
experience, only individual viewers, isolated by
their technologically mediated HD experience,
avoiding all contact or exchange. - There is no shared reality, only the consumption
of signs with the individual propelled from the
comfort of the sofa into a succession of
spectacular images. - Television encourages indifference, distance and
apathyit anaesthetises the imagination.
Baudrillard (1991) - The best examples of the non-event are in the
most heavily mediated and important world events. - The 1991 Gulf War.
- Princess Dianas death (1997)
- Queen Mother funeral (2002)
- 9/11
- Asian tsunami (2004)
- Haiti earthquake (2010.)
28The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- Surely though this is counter-intuitive?
- Surely our shared experience of these events did
produce a remarkable empathetic and emotional
response and communal experience akin to a
rediscovery of Durkheims sacred or
Baudrillards symbolic working as a reminder that
we DO live in a global village - all working to
disprove the theory that TV encourages
indifference and apathy. - Baudrillard would answer that because what we are
witnessing is not real it is hyperreal then
the connection of our emotions to this
hyperreality makes it impossible to create a real
symbolic relationship with the victims or
persons involved. - Our emotions - our empathy are a luxury of our
distance from the event and our consumption of
the simulacrum. - The empathy we feel is no different to a soap
opera plotline, romantic comedy, human interest
news story, or celebrity death and all it needs
to create the emotional response is the correct
lighting, editing, soundtrack and romantic or
courageous ending to act as a prompt.
29The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- On Saturday 28 November 1992 Channel 4 broadcast
an exclusive live performance by the biggest
band in the world U2 - It was introduced as the biggest media event
since the Gulf War. - Thousands of dead Iraqis and a rock group from
Dublin carry equal weight inside the
self-regarding balloon of the mass media.
Sweeting (1992) - The war and the concert had become
indistinguishable as media events. - Media events permeate popular, academic and
journalistic discourses the term event is used
to describe organised publicity, official events
produced to be publicly broadcast, and gives
undue prominence to minor news items or popular
cultural phenomenon involving minor celebrities
where the medias presence alone makes it become
more noticeable.
30The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- At no point is Baudrillard saying that these
events never happened the fact that hes
writing about them as non-events mean something
must have happened to draw his attention! - What Baudrillard attempts to do is by describing
these happenings as non-events, to make us
question their validity. - For example the student riots in Paris in May
1968 - This symbolic explosion of student protest was
given a mortal dose of publicity. - Once publicised an event becomes fixed, rooted,
part of an ongoing mediated narrative that moves
towards a regulated conclusion. - The media impose a single pattern of reception on
us processing the raw event into a finished
product prepared for consumption. - As soon as an event becomes news it starts to
die to become a non-event.
31The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- Media reconstructions of historical events have a
similar effect. - Schindlers List is a dramatized simulation that
produces a process of forgetting, of
liquidation, of extermination, the same
annihilation of memories and of history, the same
implosive radiation, same absorption without
echo, same black hole as Auschwitz. - The Holocaust many claim to know after watching
Schindlers List is a hyperrealised version that
has eclipsed the actuality. - The film employed period detail to signify and
hyperrealise History - It used black and white film to simulate the
media of the era - It used a range of cinematic, documentary,
newsreel, photographic and televisual styles to
enhance its realism - All to transport us into a reality that was only
an effective and convincing simulation.
32The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- Baudrillard rejects the argument that these
reconstructions have a moral purpose in
increasing awareness as he holds them responsible
for allowing us to absolve ourselves of dissipate
the true horror providing a tactile thrill and
posthumous emotion. We can only understand
events in their lifetimes any attempt at later
discussion only adds to the simulacra adds to
the uncertainty and paves the way for Holocaust
deniers. - Playing out a war retrospectively, as Americans
have done through numerous Vietnam war films
Apocalypse Now for example has provided America
with a glorious simulacral victory erasing the
historical reality. - There is no longer any time for history itself.
In a sense, it doesnt have the time to take
place. Baudrillard (1997)
33The delirious spectacle of the non-event
- Commemoration is another virus that accelerates
the hold of simulation. - Baudrillard sees commemoration as arming us
against the future with an artificial memory.
Like the character of Rachel in Blade Runner. - History is exterminated by its promotion into the
space of advertising which allows us to let go
of the actual event. - Take the bicentenary of the French Revolution in
1989 this transformed one of the most powerful
historical outbursts into a safe, positive
simulation viewed as a rights of man
liberal-democratic vision rather than the actual
glorious and terror filled original explosion. - The celebration centres not on what took place,
but on what must never be allowed to take place
again. - Much like this years celebrations of the fall of
the Berlin Wall.?
34The Gulf War did not take place
- Baudrillard even challenges the 1991 Operation
Desert Storm as being a non-event. - He offers us three reasons why this war didnt
happen. - There was no declaration of war this was
replaced by a UN mandated right to war since
the war never started it can never have taken
place! - The Western military excluded all contact
annihilating the enemy from a distance if the
armies never meet, how can a war take place?
Apache helicopters using night vision gunning
down blind targets on the ground offers a
suitable metaphor. - The Western militarys overwhelming firepower and
technological advantages precluded the chance of
an Iraqi victory. If only one side had any chance
of ever winning, does this count as a war?
Coalition losses of 240 (many from friendly
fire!) sit uncomfortably alongside estimates of
100,000 Iraqi casualties and recalls the observer
of a futile Polish cavalry sabre charge against
German tanks in the opening days of WW2 Its
beautiful, but its not war. - As an audience we only experienced a virtual war
like an ultra modern process of electrocution
that left the enemy with no chance of reaction.
35Shock and Awe in the Gulf War II Return to
Baghdad?
36The Gulf War did not take place
- We had no McLuhanist global village empathy but a
moral distancing in the thrill of seeing the
Baghdad skyline being bombed and the grainy
video game footage of smart bombs finding their
targets. - For all the real-time broadcasting little was
seen of the conflict or its aftermath. Only a
single Iraqi casualty was seen in Britain when
the Observer published the picture of a charred
face at the windshield of a vehicle. The real
disaster appeared to be ecological we saw more
dead birds than dead bodies. - Geography was telescoped as we saw Cruise
missiles being launched and then switched to
Baghdad to see their detonation.
37Today the description of the Gulf War as a
deadly video game or as a Nintendo war is
widely accepted. This is a screenshot from Gulf
War II Return to Baghdad!
38(No Transcript)
39The Gulf War did not take place
- The media simulation of the experience of war
followed the militarys simulation of a dual
conflict. - So we have a non-war that must have been a
non-victory as well as a non-defeat mediated with
non-information and non-communicated. - The film Three Kings offers us a useful example.
Set after the ceasefire, the film satirizes the
uselessness of the infantryman in a war won by
high-tech weapons. When one soldier actually
shoots an Iraqi he looks down at the dying enemy
and says I didnt think Id see anyone get shot
over here, whilst his comrade compares the scene
to the film Predator. - The film rescues the war film genre by contriving
a postwar, bullion robbing episode that supplies
the heroism lacking in the actual operation. If
the Gulf War did not take place then a Gulf War
film also could not take place.