Postmodernism

As an aspect of style - 'postmodernism' refers to several, now familiar, aspects of contemporary media:

 Hybridity - It is said that all distinctions between high culture and popular culture, have gone, or become blurred. Postmodern texts 'raid the image bank' which is so richly available through video and computer technologies, recycle some old movies and shows on television, the Internet etc.

Bricolage - a French word meaning 'jumble') this is used to refer to the process of adaptation or improvisation where aspects of one style are given quite different meanings when compared with stylistic features from another

Bricolage is quite a useful way of looking at certain media forms such as music videos and advertising that increasingly seem to mix together a wide range of different images that do not appear to have any connection, except that they are somehow 'modern'

Simulation - the blurring of real and ‘simulated’, especially in film and reality TV or celebrity magazines. Simulation or hyperreality refers to not only the increasing use of CGI in films like The Lord of the Rings films

intertextuality is now a familiar postmodern flourish across most moving image media and Jameson specifies pastiche and parody as belonging to a similar idea. This self-reflexive awareness of itself as a text is also termed hyperconsciousness.

Disjointed narrative structures - These are said to mimic the uncertainties and relativism of postmodernity in films

The erosion of history - in non-fiction forms such as television news; in the deliberate blurring of time in films such as Cock and Bull Story (2005) or the extravagant play with historical fact in, say, Elizabeth (1998) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) or Pearl Harbor (2001) historical facts and characters are telescoped, merged or discarded entirely.

Blurring of boundaries - It's easy to spot how boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture have been eroded.

A society of spectacle – Postmodern media texts share a delight in surface style and superficiality, a delight in trivial rather than dominant forms from conversations about burgers in Pulp Fiction (1994) to Lindsay Lohan or Victoria Beckham appearing in Ugly Betty (2008) – and an alternative, excited, ironic tone involving scepticism about serious values.

This delight in superficiality is countered by a different postmodern approach that involves an atmosphere of decay and alienation – 'structures of feeling' that find echoes in the music of Radiohead or Aphex Twin , the films Blade Runner and Fight Club, the music videos and advertising of Chris Cunningham.