Baudrillard’s theory of postmodernism
A feature of a postmodern media could be something like irony– when the opposite thing happens to what you think should happen in that situation, meaning the very last thing you would expect to happen happens.
Another feature of postmodern is parody or homage– a homage is when a producer or director includes kind of copies from maybe a genre or style or a product that they like but they do it out of respect for that original product . references to things could be seen to be paying homage to previous media products perhaps they are just showing their respects for previous products with similar narratives. Parody are similar in which they still include references to perhaps a style or genre or a specific product however they do it for a comedy value and they exaggerate it they make it silly and funny to entertain the audience.
Another key word that we associate postmodern with is bricolageand this is a little bit like a collage like art taking lots of pictures and putting them all together to create one big new picture. Bricolage is like that but with audio or video products your taking other media products and outing them into your media product to make something new. An example of this is an artist samples a music track from somewhere else and putting it in their media product in creating a new one from it.
Another key element is intertextual references– this is where the producer or director makes either a subtle or very direct reference to another media product.
Another key feature is fragmented narrativeis where that it broken up into chunks and often those chunks have often moved around meaning you might start at the end of the story and then go back to the beginning and then have flashbacks so its very fragmented , chopped up and cut up rearranged.
They also contain self-reflectivityis where the character in the show / music video or film are aware that they are in a media product and they talk to the audience
The most common themes of postmodern media products is the what if a lot of sci-fi nature has these things and considered to be post modern
It is about the difference between reality the truth and the fiction and artificial reality’s Baudrillard thinks that what you used to have in the media and all around us was reality we used to see real people in the media and real locations and real stories and he thinks that we have left that reality behind and we are now in a world of artificial realities . whilst we have our reality Baudrillard thinks that what happens is society starts evolving media products get made and over the last through decades what we’ve gone from is that reality is that we have heightened reality meaning its more intense than the original but inevitably it still links to the real reality , we start moving away from the reality and start taking our media products and adapting them slightly but they’re still links to reality in this media product but then what we come to is our acritical copies and hardly any real link to the original . What we are left with is a simulacra and try’s to copy it . it’s a copy of reality and that its so artificial its not really linked to reality at all and that Baudrillard thinks that we are surrounded by this sort of simulacra of media products artificial copies to the point where the artificial copies are so hard to tell apart from the reality because they are often looked like the same thing . made to look like reality but the audience cant tell the different between this and reality or that they prefer this. Audience often prefer simulacra to real life.
