Postmodern Media Culture

Postmodern Media Culture examines the relationships between theories of the postmodern and contemporary media institutions, products and consumers. It analyses the function of media examples in the work of a number of key theorists including Adorno, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Habermas, Jameson, Lyotard, and McLuhan, and discusses contemporary media production, products and audiences, to test and reorient theoretical models of the postmodern. The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products and popular literature, and assesses challenges to conceptions of the postmodern based on gender, race and region.The book also addresses the confusion of terms in this subject area (such as ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘postmodernism’, the ‘postmodern’) and integrates a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary media culture with theories of the postmodern. Topics discussed include mass culture, technologies of media production and consumption, simulation and spectacle, apocalypse and the end of history, the politics of consumption, media aesthetics and politics, heterogeneity and difference, and contemporary culture as a global village or a postmodern condition.Features* Offers astute analysis of the main theories of the postmodern* Provides critical studies of postmodern media culture* Discusses the relationships between theories and the examples used to back them up* Examines familiar media examples alongside new research findings.

Jonathan Bignell is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of Media Semiotics: An Introduction (1997) and the editor of Writing and Cinema (1999)