1. POSTMODERN MEDIA : Postmodern Media (OCR Media
Conference 2009) - Presentation Transcript
Postmodern Media Julian McDougall Focus for students – Definitions of
postmodernism in relation to media products and media • audiences, and which
definition is the one you want to work with. The difference between postmodern
media and traditional media – • what difference does postmodern culture make,
historically? Examples of media products which you think can be, or have been •
defined as postmodern, and the reasons for them being analysed in this way.
Here are some basic postmodern ideas to get us started: Postmodern media rejects
the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All
judgements of value are merely taste. Anything can be art, anything can deserve to
reach an audience, and culture ‘eats itself’ as there is no longer anything new to
produce or distribute. The distinction between media and reality has collapsed,
and we now live in a ‘reality’ defined by images and representations – a state of
simulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other as reality rather
than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the image represents it – this is the state
of hyper-reality. All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses
and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning’ discourse.
The Wire
The Wire has acquired a cult status in the UK despite never being broadcast on a
UK terrestrial channel, which is a great example of how TV is increasingly
watched by a ‘fragmented’ audience – most of the ‘viral marketers’ of this show
(people who love it and ‘sell’ it to their friends) are watching it on ‘catch up’ or
‘on demand’ TV, through the internet (torrent offers a host of streaming options
but these are not legal, be warned) and through the discount DVD box-set option.
This is another TV product which is seemingly intended to be postmodern and
unlike the films of Wong Kar Wai, where the director pays lip service to the idea
but is uncomfortable with the label, this quote from The Wire’s writer, David
Simon, is explicit in its acceptance of postmodernity as a context for the drama:
The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the
Olympian forces. It's the police department, or the drug economy, or the political
structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomics forces that are
throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason. In much of
television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed
as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions
always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the
postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized,
or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. (Hornby, 2007: 1)
So we have a very different example of postmodern media here. This TV show is
not postmodern in style or aesthetics (or at least not explicitly so). But it takes as
its subject matter postmodern society, in which, according to the creator, the
individual human being’s life is increasingly meaningless in relation to the huge
corporations and institutions that dominate the world in the capitalist system. This
takes us back to Baudrillard’s work on the power of the system over the human
and here we can think of The Matrix as a series of films that deal with similar

2. themes but in a less ‘real’ context. The world as represented in The Wire is a
matrix of power-holding institutions immersed in a capitalist system which has its
own force. Here is another explanation from the writer:
Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of
ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day,
despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of
capitalism. Whether you're a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows
his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It's
the triumph of capitalism over human value. (quoted in O’Rourke, 2006: 1) But
what is the story? The Wire has so far been four series long (at the time of
writing) with a fifth planned. Each series has a different theme but in each case the
‘network’ of corruption and exploitation across institutions and organisations to
the extent where this dominates daily life for the everyday human being is
explored. The first series represents a family of drug dealers and the police
officers attempting to bring to justice the organised crime fraternity. The next
series featured the murder of a group of sex workers and, again, the way that these
crimes are ‘sanctioned’ by the corrupt system. Series three took a more political
theme and the most recent series took the viewer into the American school system
to look at the life chances afforded to inner city youth during a political election.
If season five is, as is suggested, about the media, then this will be the best
example yet for your studies of postmodern media. By the time this book is out
you will be able to access this final series.
DJ Shadow – Endtroducing
Released by Mo Wax Records in 1996, DJ Shadow’s first studio album made
history by being the first album to be produced entirely from pre-existing sampled
music. As such it is an essential example for a study of postmodern media. The
title itself mirroring the irony of the word postmodern (which is impossible),
Endtroducing by DJ Shadow is a media text that is almost always referred to as
postmodern in reviews, articles and fan discussions. There are a number of
reasons why it gets this label. Firstly, it includes so many different recognisable
but mixed up styles of music that it is not useful in any way to try to apply genre
to the collection. Secondly, this is one album that many critics have celebrated for
producing ‘art’ out of sampling (we could have a longer debate here about what
counts as art). And then there is the cross-media experimentation of Shadow as a
DJ, film composer, musician so more boundary blurring.
The track Stem / Long Stem is a case study in itself blending classical sounds with
Nirvana to make something new, possibly as close to a ‘textbook’ example of
what is meant by ‘postmodern’ as we are likely to get. His own description of the
album – “a lifetime of vinyl culture” is also helpful as an illustration of the remix
concept. DJ Shadow has made a new musical contribution out of what was already
there. Whether you celebrate this as postmodern art or deride it for lacking
originality is entirely up to you, but it will force you to a ‘judgement call’ on
postmodern media either way.
GTA4

3. Two concepts which help us understand videogames as postmodern are flow and
immersion. The latter, immersion, describes how the gamer invests imagination in
the game and is subsequently absorbed into the gameworld. The first concept,
flow, is described by Csikszentmihayi (1997) as a state whereby an activity
demands incrementally harder, but increasingly pleasurable and achievable
challenges whilst providing regular feedback (a ‘loop’) on degrees of success: It is
easy to recognise the conditions of flow. These include having a clear goal or
problem to solve, ability to discern how well one is doing, struggling forward in
the face of challenges until the creative process begins to hum and one is lost in
the task, and enjoying the activity for its own sake. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997: 113)
Within flow, immersion (a pleasurable loss of reality) becomes difficult and
challenging whilst also feeling creative and pleasurable, so the feeling of being
‘lost’ in the gameworld leads to an enhanced state of ‘happy hyper- reality’. Grand
Theft Auto 4 is probably the most discussed videogame of all time. This is a
media product that made roughly $500 million in its first week, eclipsing even
Hollywood blockbuster releases with that scale of distribution and demand. As the
section on Contemporary Media Regulation explores, this game has polarised the
public – there are not many people who are ‘in between’ the two conflicting
opinions - the game is a masterpiece versus the game should be banned. But what
both sides of the argument do seem to agree on, whether they use the term or not,
is that GTA4 is postmodern – that it immerses the player in a convincing, intricate
and believable world, but that the reality it represents is the stuff of films and
other media. Like Disneyland, The Matrix and The Gulf War, to take on the
character of Nico Bellic and live in Liberty City is a profoundly hyper-real
experience. The emotive debate is about the extent to which intense experiences
of violence, sex, crime and ‘vice’ in the hyper-real situation translate into ‘effects’
in our real society, and of course a postmodern position on this has to be that there
is no discussion to be had, as the separation of the two ‘states’ is meaningless. But
as the postmodern theorists tend to be see contemporary media experience in
terms of play and ‘picking and mixing’ aspects of identity and meaning, the idea
of ‘effects’ are also off-limits.
Much of the discussion of Grand Theft Auto 4 as a media product with the
potential for harmful ‘effects’ focuses on the content, which is undoubtedly
‘seedy’ in many ways but ignores crucial contextual factors, the most important of
which is what we call ‘situated literacy practices’. This means, simply, that we
need to explore how players of the game ‘read’ it and whether playing this game
is very different to reading a book or watching a film. Until we know this, we
won’t be able to make very informed judgements about what is going on in
peoples’ heads when they fight innocent members of the public or visit prostitutes
in Liberty City. So what we are saying here is that it’s not so much a question of
whether the content of Grand Theft Auto is postmodern – as far as the working
definition we are using goes it probably is – but it is rather a matter of whether the
playing experience is postmodern, whether the player / reader of the text / game is
immersed in a set of practices that can’t be understood using the ‘old’ concepts –
representation, narrative, audience. The player in GTA4 has so many options we
can’t list them all here. Not just options within the single player game (which are,
if not infinite then at least countless) but also the chance to play in multiplayer
mode, within which there are several ‘mini-games’ such as ‘Cops and Crooks’,
‘Hangman’s Noose’ and ‘Mafiya Workout’. Equally, when first playing the new

4. product in this long running franchise, many players will be comparing the game
to the previous incarnations. Certainly a great deal of the ‘360 degree’ media
coverage of the 4th game in the series has obsessively made these intertextual
observations. Even if we are thinking of videogames as ‘always already’
postmodern as a media form more broadly, considering the whole GTA series for
a moment, we can identify the experience provided by the product as being ‘more’
postmodern than other games because of the ‘sandbox’ principle and the choices
offered to the player, as this extract from Play magazine’s “Unofficial History’
agrees: It was in the gameplay itself where Grand Theft Auto managed to break
the mould in many ways. Grand Theft Auto contained free-form ‘go anywhere
you please’ gameplay that saw you tied to an over-arching plot that contained
various missions to complete but also left you free to explore the huge world in
your own time, finding hidden packages and Rampage icons, exploring the world
and doing what you wanted. (Play: 2007:9)