The Notion of Postmodernism as Applied to the Understanding of Reality Television
Communication process occur everyday at every given point in time. From our homes up to our workplaces, people engaged with this inescapable process. Effective communication is a necessity in the workplace. Researchers and practitioners have long recognized communication skills are serious to job performance, career advancement, and organizational success (Runoff, 1989; Eckert and Allen, 1986; Harper, 1987). People speak through face-to-face conversations, telephone, mail, and other vehicles of communication. Though, communication is not always verbally done, communication is also present through signs, gestures, body movements, facial expressions, and codes.
Communication may be defined as the transmission of meaning and information from one person to another (Donatella and Davis, 1998). Effective communication must always be practiced as it is significant to individual health as well as for the creation of positive relationships. Specifically, the ability to communicate directly affects an individual’s stress levels, self-esteem and relationship quality (Donatella and Davis, 1998; Fetor, 1992). While the transmission itself may appear to be a simple task, the interpretation of the message being relayed through communication poses a challenge, particularly on the establishment of human relations. In general, communication becomes effective when both parties involved are honest and open to share information and have the ability to decipher the meaning of their messages.
But the technological advancements that the modern society is characterized at present makes the people living today to experience and two things in the most efficient and effective way. The world has changed since the introduction of the computer technology and other communication innovations that time and space barriers have long been overcome in the need for individuals to get connected. In regard to discourse about new technologies, we need to consider what claims are credible, what evidence is accurate, and which spokespersons are truly acting in the public interest. We also should recognize explicitly how advocates and writers use narratives, myths, forms of language, and visual images to tell their stories. Through critical examination of these features, we can begin to see what ideologies are at work and whose interests are being served by the discourse.
All these issues are interconnected with the claims and arguments of postmodernism and its implications to the communication media and the very consumers of communicated information, that is, the masses. This is an important step to a thorough understanding of the issues at stake in the formation of technology policy and of how decisions on these issues may affect us and our lives. Alehouse (1972) and Butler (1997) recognize the effect of the assumptions held by authors regarding the ‘passive’ position of their readers on the content of the messages that could either contribute to or detract from the credibility of the source. Similar to the claims of rhetorical criticism, critical literacy “complements media literacy in particular as it offers a way to examine how media messages are designed for certain groups, why some media texts might be more effective than others, what issues are raised by media coverage, and whose interests are served by media content’ (Warnock, 2002).
Hence, the shared values and lifestyle dictated by the way of presenting particular ideologies to the society could either be beneficial or harmful to the way the general public will decide the fate of their communities especially in the democratic social structure and policy governance. According to Smart (1992) contemporary channels of communication are problematic when it comes to exchange of information as evident in the fabricated non-communication factors that are present in the public’s utilization of the current media in which response can only be determined in the transmission-reception process. As argued, response from the audiences is only limited in the simulation process of the information interchange and dynamics highlighting the characteristics of the medium being used to channel communication messages.
As Baudrillard (1983) claimed, the attempts to democratize the content as well as, to some extent, the control of the communication process in the public sphere through available media channels has little or no effect at all since the channel highly influence how the messages are delivered and how they will be interpreted by the audiences. In effect, despite the concern and means to provide unprecedented types of information for the public as demonstrated in the current communicated messages available, the interplay of power in the form of stakeholders, interest groups, and gatekeepers who can either directly or indirectly dictate the approach of message delivery cease such democratic access to information. Moreover, the very media channels that the general public uses today are utilized as means not just to connect to the masses but to likewise assert control over them particularly on matters that are politically motivated (Smart, 1992).
According to Baudrillard (1983) ‘the medium and the real are now in a single nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable’ (p. 103). Furthermore, it is television that that most accurately delivers such political use of media channels in the era of postmodern communication cradled by the current social, political and economic environment. Television, as the most popular and ever reliable media channel to directly connect and influence the behavior of the audience has the ability to merge its characteristics to the messages or information being provided for public consumption. This has something to do with the television’s appeal to the almost all basic human senses which the audiences use when turning it on (visual and audio) (Baudrillard, 1983).
At present, the modern media “produce and circulate meaning in the society” (Jensen, 2002) within the context of nationality and cultural heritage, religion, regional identities, societal classes, ethnic and minority rituals, family values and self-actualization. Such reality brings about endless debate of what is right or wrong, just or unfair, even real or unreal. McQueen (1995) notes that the audience seeks the media either for surveillance (to find out what’s going on around us), personal identity (reaffirming who we are and how we appear to others), personal relationships (judging ourselves by the way others live), or diversion (generally what we term as entertainment). Having wide variety of meanings in the society is a fact that maintains these debates, but to include the modernization of media simply aggravates the inherent confusion.
In which case it is up to the media to have available the things which its audience might need, lest the audience walks away unfulfilled. Take for example instrumental and ritualistic reality TV watching; the former is when the audience uses the TV purposely to look for something they need, and the latter is when they seek to be fulfilled either by being humored or roused to some other such emotion. This highlights Baudrillard observation of ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV’ in which the media in general regulate the ‘mutation of the real into the hyper real’ (1983a, p. 55) and the simultaneous decline of the social and the political analysis of the entirety of the communication discourse. Hence, it is no longer reliable to view reality in its representations since they exist in different levels of consciousness as dictated by the contemporary power struggle and interplay in the practical applications of the mass media discipline.
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