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Title: Contemporary Media Issues


1
Contemporary Media Issues
  • Quick review thenBaudrillard, the Simulacrum,
    Marshall McLuhan Reality TV

2
What 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.

3
Transformers 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)
4
Quotes 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
5
Critics 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
6
Review 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

7
Symbolic vs Semiotic Exchange
  • symbolic exchange
  • Good
  • Sacred
  • Organic
  • Raw
  • Primitive
  • Collective
  • Real
  • semiotic exchange
  • Bad
  • Profane
  • Processed
  • Produced
  • Contemporary
  • Individual
  • Simulated

8
Review
  • 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.

9
Symbolic 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.

10
Baudrillard 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.

11
The Matrix (1999) Welcome to the desert of the
real
12
Baudrillard 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.

13
Its a global village. Dont be the idiot.
TV Advert for Mobile Phones
14
They 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
15
Are 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.

16
Just as Narcissus became captivated by his own
reflection we are captivated by the medium.
17
Huge 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.
18
Are 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.

19
Are 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.

20
Are 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.

21
Are 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.

22
For 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.
23
Reality TV is only a spectacular version of the
transformation of life itself into virtual
reality.
Jean Baudrillard (1997)
24
Are 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.

25
Blade Runner (1984) More human than human
26
Hyperidentities?
27
The 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.)

28
The 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.

29
The 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.

30
The 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.

31
The 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.

32
The 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)

33
The 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.?

34
The 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.

35
Shock and Awe in the Gulf War II Return to
Baghdad?
36
The 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.

37
Today 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)
39
The 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.
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