Postmodern Media or Postmodernism?

The title of the unit is Postmodern Media - not Postmodernism.

This is quite an important distinction to make as they are not the same thing. It's also great for us because postmodernism is hard to define, so much so that there isn't really a single definition that is widely agreed. Postmodernism means different things in different contexts. We'll do some work on agreeing a useful definition of postmodernism for our purposes later on in the unit.

Postmodern Media is easier to define. A literal definition would be methods of communication (i.e. media) that are postmodern. Or, texts (films, tv programmes, adverts etc.) that use postmodern features. Once we understand what are the postmodern features (or techniques) that are used things get much easier.

So, we are going to mostly study postmodern cinema and postmodern television but with some postmodern video gaming and some postmodern advertising to back things up. We'll look at some examples from other mediums too, like music videos.

How exciting!