Week 9 Readings
HODKINSON – Chapter 14: Saturation, Fluidity and Loss of Meaning
STEVENSON – Chapter 5: ‘Baudrillard’s Blizzards’
Is it possible to think reality without recourse to the media?
For some postmodernists,
contemporary societies are so saturated by media that reality and
representation are, essentially, one and the same – that reality
consists of no more or less than a multiplicity of representations.
Everything, from understandings of contemporary events to the
construction of individual identities, is inseparable from media of one
kind or another.
The
centrality of media to our everyday experiences means that their
cumulative impact throughout our lifetimes is overwhelming – they
define and dominate our broader cultural relations, values, experiences
and understandings of the world. Even in those rare moments when we are
not ‘tuned in’, our thoughts and activities are defined in
relation to the myriad previous media experiences through which our
lives are constructed.
Our understanding of public issues such as those concerning politics,
wars, famines or the environment, then, should be regarded as entirely
dependent upon layer upon layer of media representations, whether
through news, documentaries, film, magazines, television series or the
ways these are framed and interpreted via cascading social media
commentary.
The ways we live out our
relationships, family lives, interests, hobbies and everyday behaviour
are developed in relation to past and present media representations of
these aspects of life, not least in the form of novels, soap opera,
films, magazines, news stories, chat shows and advertising, to say
nothing of the ever-expanding range of reality TV programmes.
as well as dominating our
perspectives on the broader world, media are equally integral to our
everyday routines and dominate the values we live by and the ways we
understand our place in the world.
the celebrity industry revolves around media referring to other
media, forming an interchangeable array of empty simulations which
rarely refer to any reality outside themselves.
the sight of such huge
popular grieving in response to the death of someone who for
everyone except their friends and relatives is little more than a
set of media representations, surely would have represented a
near-perfect example of hyperreality.
Are particular media more prominent than others in shaping our sense of reality
We listen to radio as we
get up, view billboards and digital displays around our towns and
cities and engage with a range of content and friends via social
media at various points throughout the day. We then spend our
evenings watching television, playing video games and engaging with
more social and online content. Alternatively, if we go out, we
watch films in the cinema or engage with recorded music, television
and/or the internet in cafes and bars. The increasing capacity of
mobile media is crucial here, enabling many of us to take the
internet, games, music and virtually any other forms of content
everywhere we go. Wherever we are, then, multiple media messages
from different sources are competing for our attention, to the
extent that, according to Sherry Turkle, we now inhabit a world of
simulation where ‘what people mostly want from public space
is to be alone with their personal networks’ (2013: 14). Some
of us even consume media to help us sleep.
television was particularly effective at masking the
absence of reality. Its fast-moving blend of sound sequences and
moving images invite us to experience it as a set of representations
of an external world when, in fact, the world amounts to no more or
less than a plethora of television images.
Media do not reflect or shape society –
they are society. This is Baudrillard’s world of the
hyperreal, in which there is no distinction between truth
and falsehood, only a myriad of mediated stories, discourses,
interactions, ideas and images.
In his first stage – the age of print media –
an informed, critical, rational subject has been moulded by the
contextual depth and individualistic orientation of books and
newspapers, as well as their clear reference to an external world in
relation to which the subject could act. In stage two – the
age of broadcast media – the rational subject is still
addressed and constituted as such by media producers but its ability
to act in relation to an external world begins to be undermined by a
proliferation of depthless television images
internet, the notion of
an observable external world implodes altogether, while the subject
itself becomes fragmented. The internet precipitates a massive
expansion in the range and volume of media content, while its
interactivity diversifies the range of sources for such content. The
division between consumers and producers is blurred and the greater
the proliferation of content, the more self-referential such content
becomes. Consistent with Turkle’s account, distinctions
between reality and representations are undermined online while
depthless images or simulacra are ubiquitous. In other words, on the
internet, everything is an image on a screen referring to another
image on a screen and another and so on. The range of media
simulacra on offer, meanwhile, fragment the collective audience so
important to the broadcast age and prompt the breaking up of the
individual subject, which at this point exists only as a set of
different virtual roles being played out in a range of online spaces. There is no
external ‘real’ world for the subject to observe or
understand, only a limitless virtual world within which it is
subsumed: ‘the self is no longer a subject since it no longer
subtends the world as if from outside but operates within a machine
apparatus as a point on a circuit’
How have recent developments in media aggravated or decelerated the supposed ‘loss of meaning’.
For Nick
Stevenson, the amount of simultaneous information with which we
surround ourselves has reached the point where it ‘exceeds
the interpretive capacity of the subject’ (2002: 162),
leading to a replacement of understanding with a range of
superficial surfaces.
the emphasis is on fast-moving,
ever-changing images which are almost immediately abandoned and
replaced with something different. Rather than developing a complex,
in-depth or coherent understanding of anything in particular, then,
our attention constantly switches between myriad temporarily
engaging images and representations. Context and history become
increasingly unimportant, then, and our responses to the images
placed before us are dominated by emotional reactions, snap
judgements and, ultimately, a thirst for the next bite-sized snippet
of contentx
a constant reformulation and
recirculation of styles and fashions from the past. It isn’t
hard to think of examples of this in the worlds of music and
fashion, from individual items such as flares, tight jeans or
leggings, to broader categories such as rock ‘n’ roll,
glam, goth or new romantic. Crucially, the connection of such styles
with their original contexts and symbolic meanings is argued to
loosen more with each reuse.
the more the ongoing process of
recycling and pastiche continues, the more devoid of fixed or
substantive meanings the newly manufactured hybrids can become.
We
can adopt selected elements of punk style, it is argued, without
attending a punk gig and listen to versions of hip hop with little
knowledge of its origins.
Online freedom
from physical constraints was argued to enable identities to become
particularly malleable and fluid. Not only could the images and text
that represent us on-screen change as often as we like, but we could
also sustain multiple virtual identities at any one moment in time
greater and greater time, energy and emotions are
exhausted on parallel virtual personas, it becomes increasingly
unclear which identity is ‘real’ and which artificial. There may even be
ambiguities as to whether the life of the person sitting at the
screen is any more authentic than the actions and affiliations of
their virtual on-screen personalities. Cyborg identities on the
internet, then, were argued to be blurring the boundary between
human and technology, authentic and artificial, real and
representation.
Second Life. Here, users develop
‘fictional’ characters that explore, work, learn,
play, buy, sell and develop relationships with other characters in
an entire world of virtual spaces and places (Boellstorff 2008;
Geser 2007a, 2007b; Johnson 2010). The question of interest to many
sociologists is that, as they put more time and energy into these
‘virtual’ characters and their
‘fictional’ relationships, at what point, if any, do
the latter become as ‘real’ as their identity off the
screen? In 2008 a British couple – Amy Taylor and David
Pollard – were reported to have got divorced in the
‘real’ world as a result of a virtual
‘affair’ between the husband’s character on
Second Life and the character of another user.
Often devoid of detail and context, the stream of updates
on most users’ news feed is so extensive that each message
can only hope to retain our attention momentarily before being
replaced by a torrent of new ones
Think of examples in relation to arguments about ‘fake news’, fact-checking and post-truth and whether these have impacted on you or your friends and family.
STEVENSON – Chapter 5: ‘Baudrillard’s Blizzards’
Is it possible to think reality without recourse to the media?
The possibilities opened up by the new media technologies hold that culture no longer copies the real but produces it. The real is an effect of television, computer screens, virtual reality and stereo head-sets. The movies we watch on television are now part of an intertextual culture drawing inspiration from other genres of popular music, pulp fiction, classic tele-serials and other film features. These forms obviously do not reflect an already constituted real, but help constitute the shape of much of postmodern culture.
The Princess therefore exists as a simulated media personality where truth and fiction can no longer be teased apart.
We can no longer negotiate a path between truth and fiction, the real and the simulated, and surface and depth. In a world which cancels critical self-constitution, we have little choice other than to play with fragments of postmodern culture.
Baudrillard offers the examples of fans of soap opera who take the performers to be the embodiment of their characters or crime stories that frighten the audience into staying home at night.
Baudrillard it seems can't quite make up his mind whether the real world is becoming like the movies, or whether the movies are becoming more like the real world
It may be, as Baudrillard argues, that language does not reflect the real but actively constitutes it. Still, does this fact mean that cultural forms are unable to open up interpretations of the social world?
Are particular media more prominent than others in shaping our sense of reality?
How have recent developments in media aggravated or decelerated the supposed ‘loss of meaning’.
The pictures that we watch on the television news each evening have taken on an autonomous appearance that seems to bear little connection to everyday living.
The world of sound bites, instantaneous news, fluctuating fashions and three-minute pop videos has eradicated our sense of history. The restless and shifting nature of media discourse can only occupy matters of serious importance for a couple of seconds at a time before moving on. The old bourgeois public sphere based upon print culture and face-to-face interaction has been replaced by an instantaneous one-way discourse that leaves no room for reply.
The endless recycling and mimicking of old styles has become a central feature of corporate music culture.
Think of examples in relation to arguments about ‘fake news’, fact-checking and post-truth and whether these have impacted on you or your friends and family.