the act of criticism itself would eventually be co-opted by television the parodists would become...

• The act of criticism itself would eventually be co-opted by Television

• The parodists would become celebrities, star in movies and would end up making TV commercials.

Postman’s view on Parody’s Co-optation

Matt Bai (political journalist)• Read “Amusing Ourselves to

Death” while trying to figure out how the press and media became obsessed with superficiality beginning in the ‘80s.

• Claims Postman’s work almost seems too prescient

• Bai observes a lack of broader curiosity about the world in his younger colleagues

• Journalists have to file stories 12 times a day

• They don’t read novels or history

• “Postman is a victim of the world he predicted” (meaning, people aren’t looking at his work even though it may be more relevant than other more well known Communications critics like McLuhan)

• What’s the point of knowing what happened in 1980?

• It’s hard to get a sense of what’s lost until until you know what it is

Other Current Writers who cite Postman as an influence • Astra Taylor, a documentary filmmaker and Occupy activist, turned to his

books while she was plotting out what became “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.”

• Douglas Rushkoff — a media theorist whose book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” is one of the most lucid guides to our bewildering age — is indebted to his work.

• Michael Harris’ recent “The End of Absence”

• Jaron Lanier (“Who Owns the Future?”) who’s simultaneously a critic and tech-world insider, sees Postman as an essential figure whose work becomes more crucial every year.

• Sherry Turkle: MIT professor and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,”

“If you feel like all information is available, you know less and your thinking becomes narrower”

• The tech world is fairly history free, so rarely historical texts come up.

• In Silicon Valley there is only the present and the present’s ideas about the future. Whoever’s alive now knows best

• He argues “It’s easier to get information than ever before, but people are much less informed.

Jaron Lanier

• To repeat—we are not taking about the less respected, and antiquated conventions of melodrama

• Recognition of good and evil and in that the recognition the utopian hope that justice will be done

Melodramatic Conventions and their Effect on Culture

Blockbuster Films

• Pathos of the suffering victim turned righteous action hero is the convention of the contemporary popular melodrama

Melodramatic Imagination

• Conquest of the West • Invasion of other Countries• We imagine ourselves as suffering at the hand of

villainous others • Or more prevalent at the end of the Viet-Nam

era we are forced to see ourselves as the villains • As long as we can portray ourselves as victims

we seem to morally deserve to conquer and invade

•Many times the heroes occupy the position originally occupied by the injurer

(Melodramatic sense of justice)

• The Wire recognizes, but does not always show institutional routes to good

• Enlists a form of realism to generate outrage against realities that could and should (according to its creators) be changed

• is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration.• If I suffer, self-righteousness contends, that

I am good and deserve to triumph • Is melodrama condemned only to repeat

these patterns of personal injury, suffering and vindication?

Ressentiment

• Is melodrama itself the problem as greater portions of the modern imagination have been given over to its influence?

•Matthew Buckley asks whether melodrama’s affective structures and sensational effects have become by now “a normative form of feeling and thought”

• In a variety of contexts it reassures an individual group of its inherent virtue as well as the villainy of those who threaten us

• “left melodrama” melodrama that particularly works in the American context towards social justice

• “War on Terror” American freedom was attached by a villainous other and the response to that attack ironically increased state power.

• Linda Williams asks if there could be a less self righteous melodrama—less dependent on wild swings between pathos and action, less a matter of cycles of victimization and retributive violence

• Can we reach beyond personal good or evil to determinations of better justice?

The Wire• Breaks some—not all—of the pervasive forms of

melodramatic thinking

• The seriality of The Wire and the blurring of the lines between good and evil

• showing multiple sites

• Its central dilemma is that “good” is no-longer self evident in a neo-liberal world

• The drama, the realism, and the tragic situations make us yearn for that “good” or justice without being overly simplistic

• Melodrama is a central form of communication (poetics of modern life—according to Peter Brooks)

• Inextricable from popular media

• It should be part of our modern vocabulary

• We should be able to complain about it when its archaic qualities persist

The Mode of Melodrama still Holds us in its Grip!

• We should also appreciate it when it evolves into something new (As in the case of The Wire)

• It can be a tool with which mass culture makes a case for some kind of justice (not just a way of forming simplistic views of good and evil—sufferer and villain)

• Validates aspirations of a liberal democracy in a neo-liberal era