Postmodern Media essay question and structure

Discuss why some people are not convinced by the idea of postmodern media.

As you will notice as we move through the course, the questions focus on what postmodernism is and how you apply ideas about it to examples, but also to why there is an argument about the term itself.

Below are the bullet points in the Specification, which define what should be studied, you should be able to relate them to the question:

• What are the different versions of post-modernism (historical period, style, theoretical approach)?

• What are the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as post-modern?

• How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation?

• In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include:

How post-modern media relate to genre and narrative
computer / video games, virtual worlds, augmented reality and and new forms of representation,
post-modern cinema,
interactive media,
social media and social networking,
reality TV,
music video,
advertising,
post-modern audience theories,
aspects of globalisation,
parody and pastiche in media texts or a range of other applications of post-modern media theory.

This part of the exam asks you to do three more specific things, whatever topic you answer on:
1. You MUST refer to at least TWO different media
2. You MUST refer to past, present and future (with the emphasis on the present- contemporary examples from the past five years)
3. refer to critical/theoretical positions

What the examiner says
The main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. There were a number of answers last year which were dominated by older examples, so beware of this if you are writing about games or the web, you can be pretty up to date, but the same is true of examples from TV, music video or cinema. This is not to stop you referring to historical examples, just encouraging an emphasis on recent ones. For the point about the future, you could say something about how as we all live more of our lives online, more and more texts take on elements of postmodernism