One of the main arguments for postmodernism comes from the philosopher
Lyotard who states that postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives”,
we can analyse the reliability of this quote by applying it to media texts that
could be defined as being postmodern. For example, Zeitgeist is clearly a
postmodern text; it clearly contains elements of intertextuality, bricolage,
flattening of effect, simulacra, and hyper reality. In particular within zeitgeist
there is a scene where clips of Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani, and George Bush’s
speeches are strung together where they are talking about terrorism to show how
this threat is being forced upon us, a comical soundtrack is played over the
top of this bricolage of speeches which almost exaggerates the idea that this
is all a joke, this directly applies to what Lyotard states about postmodernism
and it is clear that this primary feature is present within this text.
Baudrillard states that “We live in a world where there is more and more information
and less and less meaning.” this supports Lyotard’s statement, particularly
when applied to Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a bricolage of news clips, images, and quotes,
it is clear that within a media saturated world it is difficult to find a
(true) meaning behind what we see within the media, zeitgeist expresses the
idea that terrorism has been “hypnotically repeated” to the public to generate
an automatic idea of fear whenever someone is to repeat the word terrorism,
this shows that we are having information almost thrown at us, yet we have no
meaning or understanding of our own to gain any meaning to the information we receive,
we just simply believe what we are told as a hyper reality is generated for us
by the media. Chomsky believes that postmodernism is too vague, he poses the
rhetorical question “what do they explain that wasn’t already obvious?” this
could be applied to Zeitgeist, implying that Peter Joseph had no intention of
creating a postmodern text, instead he just had the intention of constructing a
text compiled of information and ‘facts’ to present to an audience making this
text an agitprop which is a postmodern idea, this means that Zeitgeist can be
applied to a variety of different postmodern ideas and theories implying that
it could have always had the intention to be a postmodern text. It is clear
that Peter Joseph has made Zeitgeist as a means to spread this propaganda
meaning that this text is an agitprop, something that can be a defining feature
of a postmodern text.
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
Wednesday, 12 March 2014
Describe how your developing understanding of digital technology impacted on your creativity.
A key piece of software I was required to use throughout my media course was Photoshop. Within my first year I was required to make an authentic music magazine using Photoshop, I had very little knowledge of how to use this software at the beginning of the year and began my production using the shape and text tool to create a basic template for my magazine as these were the only tools I understood how to use, this limited my creativity greatly as it made for a very uninteresting magazine to look at. I decided to use YouTube to watch tutorials to gain a greater understanding of how to use Photoshop and this then had a huge impact upon my creativity within making my product as I was able to add drop shadows to shapes to generate a 3D effect within my work, I also learnt how to adjust brightness/contrast, and alter colours and apply filters to imagery, this was particularly noticeable on the primary image for my contents page where I adjusted the contrast to create intense white patches across the image and then applied a light brown filter. Another key feature of Photoshop I found useful was the clone stamp tool, this enabled me to airbrush and adjust images to make them cleaner, this can be seen within the image used on the front cover where I needed to remove a display board from the wall behind the band that I had photographed, using the clone stamp tool enabled me to copy segments of the wall to cover this up. In my second year I felt my creativity was limited within Photoshop as by this point I had a much greater understanding of theories such as Uses and Gratifications, and Reception theory, because of this I found I was trying to comply with these theories to ensure my media products generated the preferred reading I was trying to create for my audience. For example within the review page I created I followed many of the conventions I had seen within other film magazines, meaning the page I had created looked like a generic review page, this was however positive as this ensured the preferred reading was established to its audience, however this limited my creativity as I was trying to conform to these conventions.
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