Are Games Post-Modern?

Foucault: Fluid Identities - Not Fixed

We often talk about people as if they have particular attributes as 'things' inside themselves -- they have an identity, for example, and we believe that at the heart of a person there is a fixed and true identity or character (even if we're not sure that we know quite what that is, for a particular person). We assume that people have an inner essence -- qualities beneath the surface which determine who that person really 'is'. We also say that some people have (different levels of) power which means that they are more (or less) able to achieve what they want in their relationships with others, and society as a whole.


Foucault rejected this view. For Foucault, people do not have a 'real' identity within themselves; that's just a way of talking about the self -- adiscourse. An 'identity' is communicated to others in your interactions with them, but this is not a fixed thing within a person. It is a shifting, temporary construction.


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Homework due Thursday 12th May

1. Read The Article on Post-Modern Audiences

2. Pitch me your idea for a TV show in 2020 (predictions of where you think Pomo Media is headed - this must be in your exam answer) - these will be filmed as a proper pitch in front of green screen.

Its 2022. Write a 50 word treatment for a new TV show format that shows your opinion of where Post-Modern TV will go based on what we have studied. 

(Think of  the development of Interactivity, Web 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking, The Active Audience & Prosumers, Youtube, how the changes in the Music Industry you studied last year could affect the TV Industry?)

3. A 5 paragraph response to the essay question: "To what extent do Post-Modernism challenge form and conventions of traditional media", use the H/W Articles to help you

i) Write 1 paragraph with your answer - Do they/Don't they & in what different ways? (Gorillaz and Reality TV (XFactor/TOWIE) 

ii) 1 paragraph explain how Gorillaz are Post-Modern (challenging what Modernist forms/style?) with Theory

iii) 1 paragraph explain how TOWIE & Xfactor are Post-Modern (challenging what Modernist forms/style?) with Theory

iv) 1 paragraph explain how each text does not challenge traditional forms & style

v) A prediction of where Post-modern music or TV is headed, how will it develop from this?

Resources:

Post-Modern style & forms:

Past Questions

What is meant by ‘postmodern media’?

Why are some media products described as ‘postmodern’?
 

Explain how certain kinds of media can be defined as postmodern.
 

Explain why the idea of ‘postmodern media’ might be considered controversial
 

“Postmodern media blur the boundary between reality and representation.” Discuss this idea with reference to media texts that you have studied.
 

Discuss why some people are not convinced by the idea of postmodern media.

To what extent does a Postmodern text of your choice challenge existing forms and conventions of traditional media?

All require:

1. A comparison of 2 x Contemporary PoMo Media (Style vs themes/forms)
2. 1 Historical reference (Earlier post-modern text - how it has developed eg Fight Club/Matrix/Music Video)
3. A Future prediction (all films CGI like Scott Pilgrim, will there be a rejection of PoMo? All shows vacuous & empty fake TOWIE, all show audience involved like Xfactor, DIGI-MODERNISM)
4. Arguments for and against how they are/aren't post-modern
5. Examples

PoMo Blurs Binary opposites: Real/Unreal, Audience/Text, Fixed Identity/Fluid Identity, Man/Machine?

Link

The distrust towards the revolutionary projects of modernity may help explain postmodernism's more relaxed attitude towards the media as a whole. While the media was generally dismissed by modernism as standardized, formulaic and shallow, postmodernism tends to celebrate popular culture generally for its implicit refusal to look for deep universal truths, tending instead to embrace image, surface and ‘depthlessness'.

 This may help explain why postmodern aesthetics appear to indulge in increased levels of intertextuality, generic hybridity, self-reflexivity, pastiche, parody, recycling and sampling. Such characteristics may be seen as reflecting a world where traditional binary oppositions such as ‘fact' and ‘fiction', the ‘real' and the ‘unreal', the ‘authentic' and the ‘inauthentic' are less clear than they may have once seemed.

Indeed, some postmodern critics argue that it is now increasingly impossible to distinguish between the media ‘image' and the ‘real' - each ‘pair has become so deeply intertwined that is difficult to draw the line between the two of them'. In a contemporary society the simulated copy has now even superseded the original object. This phenomenon Baudrillard refers to as the ‘third order of simulacra' which produces a state of ‘hyperreality'.

It is not that simply the line between the media image and the real have become blurred; it is more that the media image and the real are now part of the same entity and are therefore now unable to be separated at all. Some critics have even suggested that the differences between human and machine is now beginning to disappear, tending to eradicate the old ‘human' versus ‘technology' binary opposition upon which so much of the pessimistic theories of modernism were based.

Although the idea of the cyborg (a hybrid of machine and organism) may still be in its scientific infancy, feminist critics already use it as a metaphor for the power to deconstruct essentialist notions of gender and identity in a ‘posthuman' world. For some critics, then, such a theoretical framework gives us a new critical arena through which we can start to understand and account for various aspects of New Media. For example, the postructuralist and postmodernist distrust of a stable and fixed notion of the ‘real' tends to reflect the landscape of New Media where such traditional definitions are increasingly becoming problematized by new technologies.

With the arrival of artificial intelligence, cyberculture, virtual communities and virtual reality, our sense of what is ‘real' and what is ‘unreal' is clearly undergoing a dramatic transformation. 
[Facebook 'friends' - Rich]

For example, real existing companies now place advertisements in virtual worlds like Second Life, an artificial environment which affects real existing sales.

So how can we separate the ‘real' in this example from the ‘virtual'? What part of this virtual world is ‘real' and what part of it is not? Admittedly, this is an extreme example, but it is an illustration of the wider kinds of technological and cultural change that developments in New Media are currently producing. As this suggests, this problematizing of what we once recognized as ‘real' will inevitably influence the very notion we may have of an ‘authentic self', the conception of identity in a postmodern world becoming increasingly fluid and contestable. In particular, it has been argued that the increased interactivity of New Media generally allows audiences to play around with and make their own composite identities from various and sometimes even contradictory sources. This process is referred to by some as ‘DIY citizenship', the notion that the media now allows us to all create our own complex, diverse and many faceted notions of personal identity.

With so many different communities now open to us on the web, we can begin to simply pick and choose which identities we want to adopt and which ones we want to reject, allowing an individual to decide how they define themselves rather than simply having to stick to the narrow and limited number of choices that once defined the past. This is in stark contrast to a world where identity is primarily a matter of heritage.

This fluid notion of identity certainly appears to be in direct contrast to the concept of citizenship and identity that was propagated by the underpinnings that informed the roots of modernism, particularly a concept like public service broadcasting. Postmodernist critics might argue that even the notion of ‘broadcasting' itself is a totalizing concept which was never able to successfully reflect the sheer diversity of a nation or its people.

The phrase ‘narrowcasting' - that is used to denote New Media's pronounced interest in addressing and catering for niche audiences - perhaps better encapsulates the role of television and radio in a world of multimedia. As we have seen, the increased interactivity of audiences in a New Media context is also articulated in poststructuralist theory whose tendency is to conceive the audience as active participators in the creation of meaning.

Websites like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook appear to reflect this recent understanding of ‘participatory culture'; not only creating virtual communities but also allowing audiences to become ‘producers' as well as ‘receivers' of the media. Theories of ‘fandom' are important here with the Internet allowing the fans of different forms of culture to create virtual communities that add to the original understanding and even content of their chosen interests. For example, the rise of ‘slash fiction' allows audiences to actively participate in the production of meaning by creating extratextual material about their favourite television programmes.

Consequently, rather than being seen as essentially commercial and inactive, in a postmodern world consumption itself is now regarded as a positive and participatory act. Indeed, the ‘top-down' cultural ‘uplift' seems particularly redundant in a world where audiences are increasingly determining their own choice of media and what they do with it. The hypertextual ‘cut' and ‘paste' culture of New Media - that seemingly encourages sampling, poaching and remixing - produces not only copyright problems, it also further confuses the very means by which we conceive of the media and its relationship with its audience. [Remember last year Music Industry?] 

Certainly, the idea that a media organization like the BBC could so rigidly dictate public tastes seems almost unimaginable now. We may now require a completely new theory of authorship to help us understand the current relationship between the media and its audience.

Post-Modern Audience Theories - Read & Exemplify

Postmodern Audiences

The impact of postmodern media on audiences and the ways in which we think about texts.


How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?


• have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?

• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?

• in terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. Think here about a film like Scott Pilgrim where the plot is in some sense irrelevant to the overall impact of the film.

• has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts

• in its ‘waning of affect’, has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond ‘properly’ to suffering and joy.

• has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to

 a ‘postmodern’ blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms - Participatory Media: With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.

X-Factor, Music & Post-Modern TV (PoMo Audience)

 As voted by the Audience: Only Way Is Essex Wins BAFTA

 Foucault & The Panopticon

Discuss: Charlie Brooker/Jade Goody

 Example: Charlie Brooker Aspirational TV




Blurring boundaries between traditional forms of Media