postmodernity

• Postmodernism is a major intellectual movement that has emerged since the 1970s
• • postmodernists argue that we are now living in a new era of postmodernity.
  • Postmodernity is an unstable, fragmented, media-saturated global village, where image and reality are indistinguishable.
• postmodern theorists

  • lyotard
  • Baudrillard
• lyotard - metanarratives

  • in modern society, meta-narratives claimed a monopoly of truth
  • lyotard argues people have stopped believed the big stories (meta-narratives)
  • e.g decline in religion, distrust of motives of politicians, fake news
  • people look to create their own narratives - technical language games
  • shifts the need from structural solutions to smaller scale solutions
  • e.g in postmodern society, no such thing as one size fits all
• features of postmodernity

  • increased diversity and choice
  • increased hybridity - merging of cultures
  • family diversity
• Postmodernity is an unstable, fragmented, media-saturated global village, where image and reality are indistinguishable.
• Baudrillard - simulacra

  • He argues that society is no longer based on the production of material goods, but rather on buying and selling knowledge in the form of images and signs. 
  • hyperreality - media saturation led to people finding it hard to distinguish between fake and reality
  • simulacra - signs in society that have meanings of their own, illusions of reality, try to imitate real life, not real representations
  • e.g photoshopped magazines, influencers on instagram
• a03 of postmodernity

  • marxists - ignores power and inequality, ruling class control over institutions
  • too deterministic - not all believe what they see in media
  • structures in society still exist - class, gender, ethnicity are still structural issues
• Foucault - discourse is power

  • sees a discourse as a set of ideas that have become established as knowledge or a way of thinking and speaking about the world
  • When we use a discourse, it makes us see things in a particular way, and so it is not only a form of knowledge, but also a form of domination – Foucault describes discourse as power/knowledge.