Chapter 8 Synopsis: Postmodernism, Indie Media, and Popular Culture

Chapter 8: Postmodernism, Indie Media, and Popular Culture

This chapter discusses postmodernism, indie media, and popular culture. It explains what each concept means and how it can be related to the world around us. It is said that postmodernism was developed around 1968. One definition of postmodernism emphasizes the formative role of economic and political conditions, including post war globalization, the emergence of new information technologies, new flexible forms of production, and the breakdown of the traditional nation-state, in the emergence of postmodern modes of cultural production (311). Another definition of postmodernism is a set of styles which create a creative explosion of style and surface image in reaction to the rigid attention to form and underlying structure in modernism. This definition has been criticized because it is argued that the definition implies that postmodernism is only a style that an artist or producer can choose to embrace or reject rather than a cultural trend that is integral to changes in culture, the economy, and politics (311). Postmodernism is a response to conditions implied by late modernity. This is also linked to the later stages of capitalism. Postmodern and modern are hard to tell when they start and end. It has been said that postmodernism intersects the period of late modernism. This period of intersection is known as the Enlightenment period. During this time, liberalism, modernization, and progress continued to improve on many developments of the poorer and less developed nations through science and technological advances. There is however a way to distinguish between post-modernity and modernity. Modern is described as the knowledge of forward looking and positive belief that one could know what was objectively true and real by discerning the structural relations that underpin social formations and natural phenomena (312). Postmodern, on the other hand, is defined as the questioning of the supposed universality of structural knowledge, as well as skepticism about the modern belief in the universality of progress. The questions asked are “Do we really know that progress is always a good thing? Can we really know the human subject? How can any experience be pure or unmediated? How do we know what truth is?” (313). Postmodern is a style. It can be used to describe fashions and politicians who define themselves and generate their identities through media images and text.
An example of the postmodern media would be the point at which animated studios changed the appearance of many cartoons. Snow White and Sesame Street are perfect examples to show this change in animation. Also, Astro Boy, The Transformers, and Mobile Suit Gundam all show examples of this new style of production. Each of these shows showed robotic characters with superhuman powers. Children who used to associate themselves with the old style of cartoon began to associate themselves with these non-human cartoons. These characters were “artificial computerized life” (317). In the 1990s, Pixar began to release movies that were only CGI “computer graphics imagery” (320). These movies included Toy Story, Shrek, and A Bugs Life.
“The world of images today consists of a huge variety of remakes, copies, parodies, replicas, reproductions, and remixes” (328). Pastiche describes the culture and how everything is an imitation, remake, or parody. Pastiche can also fall into the category of parody. Right now, many forms of media are considered to be in the category of genre parodies. The Simpsons for example uses parodies to play off the codes of film and cultural history.
Critiques say that postmodernism ignored history. Hutcheon says that postmodernism “suggests no search for transcendent, timeless meaning but rather a re-evaluation of, and a dialogue with the past in light of the present” (332). Photographs play a key part in this. A photograph symbolizes memory and history. The ideas of photos show that “the past remains within the present” (333).
Postmodernism is not only from changes in the popular culture and the art world. Postmodern culture is also created through the changes that take place in production, dissemination, and marketing of media forms (334). The internet and indie films play a huge part in postmodernism. Modernity changes concepts of space and time because of the rise of urbanization and communication technologies that create a separation of time and space and a distinction between space and plane. Postmodernism space creates a new kind of experience. Programs that include simulations dominate the themes of postmodernism. SecondLife is an example of this. In this program there is a virtual world of people and identities, virtual societies, economies, cities, building, and legal systems (337). This is a replication of the real world.
The world as we know it does not live in a time of postmodernism but there is many tensions because of modernity and post-modernity. These two ideas are both active and present in our time.