Contemporary Media Issues

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Contemporary Media Issues

• Quick review thenBaudrillard, the Simulacrum,
  Marshall McLuhan Reality TV

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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.

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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)
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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
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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
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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

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Symbolic vs Semiotic Exchange

• symbolic exchange
• Good
• Sacred
• Organic
• Raw
• Primitive
• Collective
• Real

• semiotic exchange
• Bad
• Profane
• Processed
• Produced
• Contemporary
• Individual
• Simulated

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Its a global village. Dont be the idiot.
TV Advert for Mobile Phones
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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
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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.

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Just as Narcissus became captivated by his own
reflection we are captivated by the medium.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Blade Runner (1984) More human than human
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Hyperidentities?
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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.?

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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.

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

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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!
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(No Transcript)
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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.