Postmodern Media Culture

Contents: Preface. Introduction: media culture and the postmodern. 1. Theoretical discourses: subjects and objects. 2. The end of history and film narrative. 3. Writing, judgment and cinema. 4. Children\'s media culture as postmodern culture. 5. News media and the postmodern. 6. Articulating media from the global to the local. 7. Computer-based media. Bibliography. Index.

"Postmodern Media Culture analyses the function of media examples in the work of a number of key theorists including Adorno, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Habermas, Jameson, Lyotard and McLuhan and discusses contemporary media production, products and audiences, to test and reorient theoretical models of the postmodern. The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products and popular literature and assesses challenges to conceptions of the postmodern based on gender, race and region.

The book also addresses the confusion of terms in this subject area (such as \'modernity\', \'postmodernity\') and integrates a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary media culture with theories of the postmodern. Topics discussed include mass culture, technologies of media production and consumption, simulation and spectacle, apocalypse and the end of history, the politics of consumption, media aesthetics and politics, heterogeneity and difference, and contemporary culture as a global village or a postmodern condition." (jacket)