MDST*1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Princess Fiona, Roland Barthes, Scream 4
Week 8: Advertising, Consumer Culture and Desire, Postmodernism, Pastiche, Parody and the
Remake
Selling social awareness
-The marketing of social awareness involves the creation of signs that equate social awareness
with coolness and the attachment of social ideals to particular products.
-Use of the words Green, Natural, Organic, 0 trans-fat, sweatshop-free have become buzzwords
that allow the consumer to buy into an identity, and to associate their consumption with the
coolness of being socially aware (cultural capital).
-ie. the word Natural
Anti-ads and Culture Jamming
-Messages from all around us telling is to sleep, procreate, consume, but not to question.
Culture jamming reveals—through satire— that the ‘naturalized’ concepts that seems most
‘natural’ to us, are false.
-Culture jamming, a tactic used by many consumer social movements, is a mechanism in which
an activist attempts to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions or corporate
advertising. Culture jamming is often seen as a form of subvertising.
-Baudrillard calls our postmodern existence “hyperreality.” Real experiences and things have
been replaced with simulacra - copies without an original.
-Due to the power of mass media advertising, our relationship to the signifier has changed. Now
it conceals the inability to deliver real satisfaction by cleverly simulating it. Part of our hyperreal
lives is the fact that our simulations are more real than real. Given a better imitation, people
choose it over the real thing; hence Disney’s Matterhorn enjoys more visitors than the real one
in Switzerland.
-More insidiously, through various obfuscations, people come to think the simulacrum is the real
thing, and forget about the historical and physical reality it represents.
Postmodernism’s central goal is to put all assumptions
under scrutiny in order to reveal the values that underly all
systems of thought and thus to question ideologies within
them that seem natural. Authenticity is always in question.
-Part of our hyperreal lives is the fact that our
simulations are more real than real. Given a better
imitation, people choose it over the real thing;
Beijing world park.
-More insidiously, through various obfuscations,
people come to think the simulacrum is the real
thing, and forget about the historical and physical reality it represents.
Postmodernism
-can be seen as a rejection of the modern.
-Questioning of boundaries between high/low art/ and the classical/modern—Skepticism in the
universality of progress/ science.
-Notions of truth are culturally and historically relative constructions
-Questioning of narratives (frameworks that explain society ie. Religion, Science, Marxism)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Week 8: advertising, consumer culture and desire, postmodernism, pastiche, parody and the. The marketing of social awareness involves the creation of signs that equate social awareness with coolness and the attachment of social ideals to particular products. Messages from all around us telling is to sleep, procreate, consume, but not to question. Culture jamming reveals through satire that the naturalized" concepts that seems most. Culture jamming, a tactic used by many consumer social movements, is a mechanism in which an activist attempts to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions or corporate advertising. Culture jamming is often seen as a form of subvertising. Baudrillard calls our postmodern existence hyperreality. real experiences and things have been replaced with simulacra - copies without an original. Due to the power of mass media advertising, our relationship to the signifier has changed. Now it conceals the inability to deliver real satisfaction by cleverly simulating it.
