Publisher's Synopsis
This work examines the relationships between theories of the post-modern and contemporary media institutions products and consumers.;It 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 post-modern. The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products and popular literature, and assesses challenges to conceptions of the post-modern based on gender, race and region.;The book also addresses the confusion of terms in this subject area (such as "modernity", "post-modernity". "post-modernism", the "post-modern") and integrates a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary media culture with theories of the post-modern. 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 post-modern condition.
