My understanding of Postmodernism.

Postmodernism literally translates as "after the modernist movement". There are some things which postmodernism defines as a term. These are such things as "there is no such thing as high art or pop culture anymore", "in a postmodern state you cannot be unique" and "postmodernism is an ecletic state, drawing from the past and bringing it into the future". This realtes to hebdige's idea that "postmodernism is a scyzophrenic mode of space and time". This concept basically states that time and space have been drawn together through our use of past in present and what will be our use of present in future.

There are other key terms within postmodernism. These tems include the three P's of postmodernism: Parody, Pastiche and Plunder. Parody is when one text "pokes fun" at another". Pastiche is when a text "draws influence from more that one text" and Plunder is when a text "uses one media text and dwells upon it within itself". Postmodernism is a concept that has not only been widely discredited by modernists, but also taken on board by the modern media. Most texts we will see today have examples of posmoderninity within them. Examples of these texts are:


Shaun of the dead (Edgar Wright 2004), the movie which "pokes fun" at zombie films with particular reference to "dawn od the dead" in the title.




The music video "we made you" by Eminem, which makes particular reference to different cultural phenomenon such as; The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Kim Kardashian, the relationship between Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson, the film Rainman, Sarah Palin an american politician, the game guitar hero and many other subjects.


The film The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick 1999) which creates a hyper-reality. The film makers made the film oout to be a documentary rather than a horror film and persuaded many people globally that the story of the blair witch was a true one ond the events seen within the tape were true.

These different examples of postmodernism highlight the effect the theory is having on the media, and the effect this is therefore having on the audience. A confusing term to grab at first but now this term explains so much within the media industry and the way people around the world react to the media before them.