Postmodernism and Popular Culture (233-277)

Interestingly, the quip about postmodern sensibility brought to mind the massive advertising that now dominates large urban areas such as New York. An even more compelling thought that comes to mind is that of Beijing, which I just visited over Spring break, in which streets are lined with massive advertisements ranging from Nike to Adidas to Swatch to any and all brands imaginable in all different sizes. In our society of mass marketing through mass mailing, mass emailing, viral marketing- essentially mass everything, the culture of images immerses us in its flowing wake of changing brand names, flashing pictures, flowing banners, and scrolling messages.

Also, since the advent of technologies such as Tivo and recording abilities on laptops, the idea of a commonly watched and shared television or popular culture at times fails to exist, forcing advertisers to find other ways to advertise, namely through placing products surreptitiously (or so they think) in television shows and movies. One example that comes to mind is Castaway, a movie made several years ago, which basically featured countless images and clips of Fedex-related goods and forms of transportation. Though the average viewer may not think of its overt use and in some cases, overuse, the images nonetheless flash in the viewer’s mind and will tend to form memory connections there. Also, though I cannot remember the show, there was an episode of one particularly popular show whose entire plot revolved around the brand, even going so far as to have a new product like a dress or shirt custom-made for one of the sitcom’s characters. Can anyone say product placement?

Postmodernism proposes the intriguing theory of questioning the idea of one truth, instead saying that there are more than one truths. In a sense, it seems to be a movement that hearkens back to the Enlightenment in terms of its reliance on reason. However, at the same time, it reaches far beyond the Enlightenment’s sole focus on reason, even questioning the foundations of logic during that the time that basic reasoning itself was based on. In doing so, postmodernist theory seems much more applicable to the everyday in terms of its philosophical questioning of, essentially, everything. Postmodernism beckons one to think about what’s good or bad, and why, and then why that, and so on, which seems again to go back to the circular arguments of Socrates.

Individual perception complements the notion of there being many truths. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is truth as well. To one person, for example, Christopher Columbus may have been the first person to journey to the Americas. However, to another person, the Chinese may have been the first. To yet another, the Native Americans or Amerindians may have beaten them both to the chase. This notion of different truths involves the idea of meaning given to different names and different actions as well, also relating to the actions done by specific individuals and how and why any of those things are important enough to be named truth or argued about.

The Mass Media and the Public Sphere

Video Clip: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

This video clip produced by a professor at Kansas State University highlights the coming issues and controversies that may confront us as a result of Web 2.0, possibly sooner than we expect. From what I got, the video clip basically argues that the “machine” is either us, using us, or both. In making this argument, one must acknowledge the creative use of various typing techniques, video editing and recording, and innovative use of texts, windows, and nearly everything related to web-browsing. Well presented, the clip states controversially that as consumers and users of the Internet, we may be consumed by it and possibly controlled. Throughout the clip, it is already scary how quickly images can be made to change. Already from the beginning, the contrast between the written words and the typed words and the speed with which the words are typed as opposed to speed of being written by hand highlights the ever-changing, nearly unpredictably frenetic pace of the change of the Internet and essentially everything on it, including news, blogs, forums, most popular searches, and all information and content available.

In what I felt to be a key part of the video, the part in which the user clicks the screen, opens the code, and modifies it, one begins to understand the magnitude of not only how easy it is to make changes on that level, but how easy it is for anyone to make any sort of changes quickly, easily, and from the looks of it, at their convenience. The pros to this are that participatory culture may become larger and more popular and possibly even replace aspects of traditional culture, including traditional forms of media and communication, such as television, radio, and possibly in the distant future, phones. This new or increasingly popular development has the potential to jumpstart a revolution.

In the last section of the video, words such as privacy, family, and ethics pass by quickly, implying that the meanings and use of these words may change, along with the meaning we have traditionally meant for them to mean. These flashing words only cause questions; for example, what will happen to not only these words, but all words in the future? As words are interconnected and have the potential to change, what will change first, the definition of the word of the actual object or idea the word has come to embody itself? Though these questions may currently seem far-fetched, with the current rapid pace of technological change in invention, the answers to these questions and the issues they relate to may only become even more complex.