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It has been said that the two main features of cultural postmodernism consist of the transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents (Frederic Jameson). Referring to a post 1968 text or phenomena, disc
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The term ‘modern’ originated from the Latin word modo, which translates as ‘just now’. Our society has been modern for a long time now. It began in the 1890’s and 1900’s, the era of the industrial revolution and large technological advances in society. Postmodernism has recently become an increasingly fashionable subject of debate. The term was first used in architecture to describe the action against the post war concrete tower blocks. It began to be used in areas such as arts and culture and has even become influential recently in areas such as politics, economics and sociology. Nowadays, the idea of postmodernism is that our sense of reality is being largely dominated by media images and popular cultural signs. They appear to define our sense of reality as well as the way that we define ourselves and the world around us. Postmodernism basically tries to come to terms with and understand a media saturated society. In a postmodernist world, styles and surfaces must become more important and evoke in their turn a kind of ‘designer ideology’. A designer for magazines such as “the face”, Neville Brody, has said that when people go shopping in supermarkets they are interested, if not more interested, in buying the packaging and design of the goods on sale as the goods themselves. Therefore, we increasingly consume images and signs for their own sake. Jean Baudrillard does not explicitly discuss the concept of postmodernism in his most influential book ‘simulations’. Nevertheless he is widely seen as a postmodern theorist. He does argue that signs in human culture have passed through four mains stages. In the first stage, he believes that signs are a “reflection of a basic reality”. The next stage, the sign “masks and perverts some basic reality”. Baudrillard believes that images become a distortion of the truth but they have not lost all connection with things that really exist.
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