Exploring the Postmodern Television - Research Paper Example

Exploring the Postmodern Postmodernism and television are linked in three ways: (a) the commodification of culture, (b) Aesthetic and textual features of television programmes and, (c) Patterns of spectatorship and consumption Postmodernism is a term that became famous in the mid 1980s and is used to describe the era beyond modernity. Television is possibly the “most ubiquitous of modern media technologies: available and used extensively in nearly all households in Britain, it broadcasts to a potentially massive population of viewers” (Lury 2001:12). The television industry in Britain is an established structure, which has created a situation in which several production personnel commission, develop, and broadcast their programmes from rather small number of locations. They transmit their messages to diverse audiences who mainly watch at home. It is worth noting that television is a form of media that endeavours to be inclusive. The compromises entailed in such attempts are often guided by the appeal to the least common denominator as it tries to create a culture that can be accessed by all people. Television addresses nobody and in the end, it hopes to appeal to everybody as noted by Lury (2001:12). The Commodification of Culture The term postmodernist or postmodern is utilized in relation to the television. However, it has a number of related meanings. Two component words make up the term postmodern and they are post and modern; “post” means after and |”modern” means contemporary. Thus, postmodern or postmodernist indicates newness. This newness may be regarded positively (that is, postmodern television might be exciting, innovative or experimental) or negatively (that is, postmodern television might be trivial, mindless or shallow). The discussion of television in association with postmodernism is a means through which an analysis is made on how television and culture have changed (Bignell 2004:162). Commodification entails both the production and consumption sides. In relation to the consumption side, commodification comes from the consumer’s concern and emphasis is on the price the product will get from the market (that is, the exchange value of the product and its abstract and general quality) rather than the actual and specific use value of the product. Commodification also implies that the consumer is fit to consume a particular product because of his or her capability to pay (Lash 1990:48). It is important to note that toward the end of the 19th century, commodification and popular culture penetrated the world to a great extent (Lash 1990:50). Popular culture began when commodification penetrated the mass culture (that is, in Vaudeville, popular spectator sports, in the music halls, in the England’s fish and chip shops and other places) in the late 19th century. Commodification of the mass culture is a three simultaneous occurring process and it entails; the development of a specific working class culture (a culture that is distinct from the peasant or the artisan culture), the change from folk culture to popular culture, and the commodification of culture in the non-elite groups. The place of television in the commodification of culture is important (Lash 1990:51). Purchasing a TV set is entering into commodity exchange but the effect of televisions is another matter. In other words, there are several commodities that cost less and from which the users can get much use. Television is used as a medium in which commodified consumption occurs. What people watch in the television can be either commodified or not. Nearly all the TV shows are commodified; this is because they are mass distributed. “Surely to watch Bergman’s Seventh Seal on TV, or a nature show, or a documentary on women in Algeria is not the commodified consumption that is the viewing of Miami Vice or Dallas, or a succession of MTV pop videos” (Lash 1990:51). Thus, it can be argued that what is exposed on television is increasingly commodified (Lash 1990:51). One may ask if the consumption of images on MTV and on Miami Vice is the consumption of commodities. In other words, the question seeks to ask if de-differentiation of postmodernist is similar to the process of exhaustive commodification of culture in the modern or contemporary society. The immediate answer that can be given to this question is a no. One may still ask if the commodification of culture at a particular point creates mass culture of the spectacle, image that can be described as postmodern. Largely, postmodernization represents the success of commodification both in the mass culture and in the auratic and potentially crucial culture of elites. It is important to note that this position acknowledges postmodernization in the context of commodification. However, there are provisions that (a) the postmodern culture of spectacle and image must be seen as continuation and a different order of commodification, (b) commodification is one of the few processes of postmodern culture de-differentiation, and (c) there are reactionary and progressive versions of postmodernism (Lash 1990:52). Aesthetic and Textual Features of Television Programmes Postmodern television entails the enjoyment and celebration of the mixing up of principles of the source texts. Some theorists have attacked postmodernism due to lack of critical edge. The richness of meaning that stems from this postmodern parody for the viewer can be highly pleasurable. However, it has little to provide in terms of ideological reviews of television principles and forms which underlie the television studies’ tradition of seeking politically critical and committed progressive programmes. For instance, Umberto Eco argues that some of these programmes in postmodern television are designed to celebrate television-ness of something (Bignell 2004:162). Eco defines the celebrity chat shows or the televised awards ceremonies as neo-TV. Such programmes represent celebrities or superstars whose personas have been designed on the television, for the television, and the programmes seem to be a vehicle for expanding the artificial existence of these celebrities who appear to be in existent within the television universe. Postmodern texts can be summarily featured by formal openness which is a strategic refusal to shut down the meaning (Bignell 2004:163). Intertextuality is important to televisions. Advertisements and programmes are placed within schedules and they address the audience through the establishment of similarities and differences from other advertisements and programmes, and from other types of media texts (Bignell 2004:164). Television is associated with liveness and the provision of information such as news to its audience and thus it is usually related to the present. This indicates that television is postmodern in that it disregards history and the past is preoccupied with what is different and new. On the other hand, the past still exists in television because past programmes are usually repeated and “contemporary programmes communicate about their genre and how they should be watched by referring to programmes which viewers already know” (Bignell 2004:164). Among the notable characteristics of television, which indicate postmodernism, include irony, formats and structures, imitation or pastiche of familiar conventions, and self-consciousness. For instance, the pastiche of The Simpsons film and television conventions or the pastiche of The Daily Today and Brass Eye news conventions. Thus, the term postmodern can be utilized in the description of narrative and textual features of programmes (Bignell 2004:104). Advertisements and television programmes offer positions through which sense and pleasure require the acceptance of the positions given by the text. On the other hand, contemporary spectators are increasingly capable of recognizing, sidestepping, and rejecting these positions. Being part of the audience is rather a conscious choice than what some of the television narrative and text might admit. Specifically, psychoanalytic models of the unconscious positioning need to be enhanced with conferred relationships with the television and the study of the audience’s conscious. Performance is what the audience sees on the television, and becoming an audience is a performed role with which the viewers adopt partly consciously and partly unconsciously (Bignell 2004:105). As stated before, television is perhaps a crucial postmodern medium. Television offers distinctions between the high and popular cultures and it also represents the actual world through continuous flow of images, which are banal and depthless. Since television is a postmodern medium, the individual programmes in the television may show stylistic features that can be identified as postmodern. The Avengers is one of the programmes in which postmodernist eclecticism is a defined design selection. There are stylistic features that identify The Avengers as a postmodern text. The Avengers is usually a pastiche because it imitates other cultural practices and forms. In this context, it is important to differentiate pastiche and parody. Parody has a hidden motive whereas in pastiche there is involvement of mimicry and imitation thus becoming an empty or a blank parody of the original (Aldgate 2000:59). The Avengers mimics other cultural forms and practices for the purposes of an in-joke. Majority of the episodes in The Avengers borrow and refer from a wide range of other cultural practices and forms. This method of quotation and citation (usually referred to as troping) is another feature of postmodernism. Most of the episode titles in The Avengers are copied from other television films and series. For instance, ‘The Winged Avenger’ is derived from the television and comic book series of the Batman, and ‘Wish You Were Here’ is derived from a cult television series The Prisoner. The Avenger also borrows from a variety of literary sources that encompass both the pulp fiction and canonical literature. For instance, ‘Too Many Christmas Trees’ is derived from the Charles Dickens’s novel Silent Dust, ‘Legacy of Death’ is derived from the film The Maltese Falcon, and ‘Mandrake’ is copied from the biography of a pathologist named Sidney Smith (Aldgate 2000:60). Despite the fact that The Avengers derives its reference from various sources, this does not make it a postmodern text. The postmodern in The Avengers is the manner in which it is deliberate and so knowing in its utilization of pastiche and troping of the other texts. The references and the in-jokes are for the audience who acknowledge them and thus, are associated in the joke. The intertextuality of The Avengers goes beyond the borrowing from other sources (Aldgate 2000:61). The textual characteristics recognized as postmodern are all found in the The Avengers series especially in the fifth and sixth seasons. The Avengers displays all the characteristics or features of a postmodern text, that is, “pastiche, iron, the foregrounding of style over narrative and the very knowing and deliberate playing with generic conventions. In this respect The Avengers was ahead of its time, a proto-postmodern series which anticipated the direction taken by American television some two decades later” (Aldgate 2000:64). Thus, it can be legitimately claimed that The Avengers is the first postmodern television series. Other than The Avenger, The X-Files is a television series capable of utilizing television aesthetics and conventional story lines in novel and unusual ways. Unlike the conventional or the traditional television series that depend on the artistically and ideologically conservative aesthetics, The X-Files undermines, subverts, and questions conventional television codes, giving its own sets of aesthetic pleasures. It is important to note that as the television technology became sophisticated and more avenues emerged, television aesthetics also changed (Telotte 2008:236). Patterns of Spectatorship and Consumption Advertisements and programmes cannot fail to offer reinforcement and expression of the dominating and dominant ideologies of the consumer society. They are a form f delivery system for the commodity life. Thus, it is very evident how the forms of television, its schedules structure, its pattern of media calendar and in its choice of channels offer a route into the consumer culture. It offers itself as an item of choice to the more or less passive/active spectator. It can be argued that television as a technology is expressed in the contemporary culture (the culture of consumption and the domestic culture). This is achieved through the production and reproduction of the relationship between the object and consumer that define the whole system. Individuals consume television and they consume through television (Silverstone 1994:108). Consumption is an effective transforming activity and it operates as a form of cultural machine, which constantly offers a variety of identical representations and symbols. It is recycled, refined and mass produced from the obsolescent and discarded products of the earlier time. Central to this phenomenon is the television. Television is both a promoter and an object of consumption; as a promoter it offers the currency in which, it defines the possibilities and limits of the consumption behaviour from which the consumer cannot escape (Silverstone 1994:114). It is a common debate that women and men both take pleasure in watching sports on television; however, their preferences differ. Studies indicate that men and boys show greater interests in baseball, basketball, football, soccer, and ice hockey. These forms of sports are usually characterized by stiff competition and aggression. On the other hand, women and girls prefer sports such as figure skating, skiing, gymnastics, and diving; these are examples of gendered consumption patterns. These patterns can be displayed by the NBC’s attempts to position the Olympics with soap operas like storylines (Chun, McGinnis and McQuillan 2003:4). The Northern Exposure is an example of a television series that displays the patterns of spectatorship and consumption. The Northern Exposure disguises its connection to the feminine melodrama through the inclusion of components that strongly attract to the masculine tastes. Exposure’s setting is on the rugged frontier of Alaska and it focuses on the traditional men’s men like Holling and Maurice, and it has assisted in making the program the most famous series among the male baby boomers in the first two seasons. CBS included more commercials that were geared towards men it its third season. Lynne Joyrich has noted a “hypermasculine quality in many otherwise melodramatic programs, which “attempt to evade TV’s ‘unmanly’ connotations” and create “spectator distance by ... obsessively re-marking the masculinity of their thematic”” (Davis 2007:116). Some of the themes in the Northern Exposure are marked by masculinity and the program alternates between the intense connection and the spectator distance; the program appears to have enough masculine qualities to keep the male audience tuned in. Northern Exposure provides an emotional viewing experience that is unthreatening to men; however, the program is still popular with women. The program became more popular towards the middle of the third season; it attracted an average of twenty three million audiences. Of the 23 million total viewers, 8 million were women and 6.1 million were men (both men and women were of the 18-49 years age group) (Davis 2007:116). In most of the television programming, the soundtrack of the televised event is usually addressed simultaneously to the distracted fan and the attentive spectator. In television sports, the commentator mediates between the distractions of the viewing situation and the sports’ programming flow. The commentators’ direct address is core to the sports narrative discursive organization and the positioning of the spectators in regard to the sports metatext. Just like soaps, television sports programming must regularly offer background information or data so that the spectator is able to make sense of the action and take part in the process of speculation and interpretation, which features television sports spectatorship (Baker and Boyd 1997:5). References Aldgate, Anthony (2000) Windows on the sixties: Exploring key texts of media and culture, New York: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Baker, Aaron & Boyd, Todd (1997) Out of bounds: Sports, media, and the politics of identity, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bignell, Jonathan (2004) An introduction to television studies, London: Routledge. Chun, S., McGinnis, L. & McQuillan, J. (2003) ‘A review of gendered consumption in sport and leisure’ Bureau of Sociological Research 5, pp.1-24. Davis, Kimberly. C. (2007) Postmodern texts and emotional audiences, New York: Purdue University Press. Lash, Scott (1990) Sociology of postmodernism, London: Routledge. Lury, Karen (2001) British youth television: Cynicism and enchantment, Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. Silverstone, Roger (1994) Television and everyday life, London: Routledge. Telotte, J. P. (2008) The essential science fiction television reader, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Read More