Strinati's Five Features of a Postmodern Text
1. The breakdown of the distinction between culture and society.
Art once reflected reality. Strinati comments that reality now incorporates art in the form of media
texts. Today we make sense of reality with reference to media texts. For example, there is a tendency in newspapers
to accompany factual articles with film stills. Our society today is also heavily influenced by media,
particularly advertising. Advertising can make or break a company, irrespective of the quality of the product, a
poor product can be successful due to great advertising while an excellent product can fail. Where once the
reality of the product would create its success or failure, now advertising does this job
(hardly real though is it!)
2. An emphasis on style at the expense of substance and content.
Because our reality is becoming more idealised, more media saturated and more consumer
led, postmodern texts have little real substance to refer to. People are strongly influenced by
branding when buying, the label becomes more important than the product and the packaging more important than
the contents, people buy inferior products over superior ones because they like the colour of the packaging, bizarre
but true!
In media texts this can manifest itself in intertextuality, where texts make their meaning
through references to other texts. 'The Simpsons' is a classic example. Inferior media texts can also do this
to try to capture an audience rather than thinking up original ideas of its own.
3. The breakdown of the distinction between high culture (art) and
popular culture.
There once was a time when high art was removed from popular culture. Andy Warhol created multi-coloured prints
of the Mona Lisa, dance music samples classical music once heralded as genius, advertising regularly raids the image
bank to mix old and new.
This mixing is often referred to as bricolage, a French word meaning jumbled. Bricolage refers to the process of
adapting and juxtaposing old and new texts, images, ideas or narratives to produce whole new meanings.
4. Confusions over time and space.
In today's society we have accelerated the speed information can travel over distances. Satellites beam down
television links from other countries in seconds. The internet can send mail to someone on the other side of the world
in hardly any time at all. Strinati believed that;
"because
of the speed and scope of modern mass communications, because of the relative
ease with which people and information can travel, time and space become less stable and
comprehensible, more confused, more incoherent, more disunified."
Where once it would take days to get to the nearest city we now have access to most of the world in just seconds. The
technological age has created a very different time and space reality from the physical reality of travelling to places.
even travel is becoming ever faster and cheaper. It seems the whole world is now accessible to us, and due to the
mass media (television and the internet primarily) we have access to the whole world from the comfort of our homes.
Postmodern society is a society built on instantaneity, everything is here and now, there is
no time to just 'smell the roses'. Maybe, as some critics argue, the speed of our society is
causing all the stress.
5. The decline of meta-narratives.
Meta narratives are those which are read by communities and used to understand reality. They can be religious, ‘The
Bible' or 'The Koran', or they can be political tomes, 'Das Capital'. In the ancient world there were the mythologies that
held people together. These meta-narratives bind communities together and create an authority
to believe in. The strength of these so called meta narratives is waning. In the postmodern society
people are no longer believing there are absolute ways to explain reality.