Keywords: post-modern aesthetic concept of media culture
Media culture is the focus of cultural research in recent years. It not only breaks through the category of traditional culture, but also involves many boundaries including literature and art, value system and system construction, and even covers all aspects of life. Moreover, the discourse of media culture has also turned from the public sphere to the private sphere, from the elite to the general public, from social politics and economy to daily life, from the promotion of serious values and moral education to aesthetic experience and even functional pleasure. It can be said that media culture has become an important part of contemporary society. It has shaped the present situation of human existence and changed the living state and cultural form of human beings.
In the face of complicated media culture, there are high-profile admirers, skeptics and critics, but blind pursuit and criticism is not conducive to our correct understanding of media culture. This paper aims to analyze the post-modern characteristics of contemporary media culture and explore the relationship between media culture and the transformation of contemporary aesthetic concepts.
First, understand the media culture.
Pay attention to media culture. It can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in 1930s (the Frankfurt Sch00 1). Many members of this school, such as Benjamin, Theodore W Adorno and Marcuse, have included the dimension of mass media in their criticism of the so-called "cultural industry". Later, Raymond Williams, the pioneer of Birmingham School, further broadened the horizon of mass media research. Stuart Hall, the second director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, wrote a paper "Coding and Decoding", which became a classic of mass media research. Although the above concerns about mass media came into being earlier, as an independent concept, media culture did not appear until recently. In western research circles (mainly English research circles), it was not until the 1990s that monographs on media culture came out continuously, and media culture gradually became a prominent school. In Chinese mainland, before 1990s, the academic circles basically did not use the term media culture. It can be seen that media culture is a new thing for western and China academic circles.
After several years' development, there are numerous research achievements on media culture in academic circles. However, how to understand and define media culture has always been controversial. In Frankfurt School's view, media culture is a repressed ideology, which can not only improve the spiritual realm of the public, but also mislead the public with false freedom and make the public indulge in one-dimensional sensory enjoyment. JohnFiske, on the other hand, tends to understand media culture from the perspective of consumption practice. He believes that media culture is dynamic, and consumers can choose cultural products that suit them at will according to their own preferences, and actively create their own Shaanxi significance and significance. Marshall mcluhan emphasized the shaping power of media on social culture. He believes that it is precisely because of the media that it is possible for human beings to engage in corresponding exchanges and social activities; Different media determine different social and cultural patterns; The media will destroy one culture and introduce another. In jean baudrillard's view, media culture has created a surreal "quasi-imitation" world, which makes all truths lose stability and finally promotes the diversification and discretization of subjects. It exists to fill people's ever-changing and uncertain needs. Obviously, the openness and transcendence of media culture bring difficulties to its theoretical definition, because we can understand media culture from the perspective of ideology and audience consumption; Media culture can be explained from the perspective of political and economic system, and also from the perspective of pure technology. As Cerna, an American scholar, said, media culture is extremely complex, and it still contradicts any comprehensive theoretical generalization, because highly comprehensive theories are often one-sided and will turn a blind eye to some important aspects of media culture.
Among many definitions of media culture, Cerna's understanding and definition of media culture is unique. In the book Media Culture published by 1995, Cerna first affirmed the value and significance of the concept of media culture. He said: "The concept of' media culture' can not only conveniently express the product nature and form of cultural industries (that is, culture), but also show their production and distribution methods (that is, media technology and industries). It avoids ideological terms such as "(popular culture)" and "(popular culture)", and at the same time makes people pay attention to the production, dissemination and acceptance cycle of media culture production, dissemination and consumption. This concept also eliminates the artificial barriers between culture, media, communication and other research fields, and makes people pay attention to the correlation between culture and media in the media culture system, thus breaking the specific boundary between' culture' and' communication'. " "The word' media culture' has another advantage. It shows that our culture is a media culture. The media colonized culture and became the basic tool for distributing and spreading culture. The mass media has replaced the previous book or oral culture model, and we live in a world dominated by the media. " From these expressions, we can easily find that Cerna used the concept of "media culture" to erase the ideological color of terms such as "popular culture" and "popular culture". At the same time, he regarded media culture and all forms of communication as objects worthy of examination and criticism, consciously put media culture into the framework of cultural research, and made clear the basic relationship between media culture and cultural research.
As for the connotation of media culture, Cerna defined it like this:
Media culture is a combination of various systems: from the reproduction of radio and sound (slow-rotating records, tapes, compact discs, radios, tape recorders and other communication equipment) to movies and their broadcasting methods (theater screening, video tape rental, TV broadcasting, etc.). ), print media including newspapers and magazines, and TV at the center of media culture. Media culture is a kind of image culture, which often regulates people's vision and hearing. All kinds of media-radio, movies, television and magazines, newspapers, cartoons and other printed materials-are mainly visual or auditory, or both, which have an impact on all aspects of emotions, emotions and audiences. Media culture is an industrial culture, which is organized according to mass production. At the same time, it should also follow the routine procedures, rules and regulations and make products for the public in different categories. Therefore, it is a commercial culture, and its products are commodities, trying to absorb the private profits of large companies interested in capital accumulation. The goal of media culture is to have a huge audience, so it must respond to contemporary themes and ideas, and has a great sense of the times, providing a variety of portraiture for contemporary social life. However, media culture is also a high-tech culture, which uses the most advanced science and technology.
In other words, in Cerna's view, media culture is a complex cultural system constructed by print media and electronic media. It is also an image culture, a commercial culture and a high-tech culture. The author believes that it is really easier for us to interpret the secrets of media culture from these three levels.
Second, the post-modern characteristics of media culture
According to Cerna, media culture is first of all an image culture, which mainly appeals to people's sensory experience. In contemporary society, electronic media such as computers and television have fundamentally changed the existing cultural forms. This is a real image society, everything-real, invisible, undescribed, unexpressed and so on. -it has been successfully transformed into visible things and established cultural phenomena through electronic media. All kinds of dazzling images will neither discuss external problems like realism nor emphasize the profundity of internal meaning like modernism (such as profoundly exposing alienation and absurdity). People are required to go deep into it and constantly explain and dig. Image rejection does not need any explanation, it is just a flat display, which provides people with a visual image separated from time and space. Image culture does not provide the deep value and ultimate meaning of any modernist classic works, nor does it have the deep meaning hidden behind the language. This sense of flatness without depth is the first and most obvious feature of postmodernism. Moreover, in the era of media culture, elegant culture and vulgar culture, elite culture and popular culture, intellectual culture and non-intellectual culture can all get opportunities to show themselves on the electronic media stage. They can even interact, penetrate and even shift or even transpose through electronic media. The tension between the original opposing cultural forms began to disappear, and its boundaries became more and more blurred. And "the second feature of post-modernism terminology is the disappearance of some main boundaries or boundaries, and the most noteworthy thing is the elimination of the differences between traditional elegant culture and so-called mass or popular culture."
Secondly, media culture is a commercial culture that produces cultural products in batches and procedurally based on mass production. In contemporary society, the logic of commercialization has penetrated into the cultural field in an all-round way, and the purpose of cultural production has turned to making money. Cultural commercialization has become a trend. Cultural commercialization requires cultural production to act according to market rules, cater to the market, guide the market, win the market, and realize the circulation in the public domain through the market. Driven by commercial interests, media culture began to attach importance to image production and emphasize the satisfaction of visual needs, because creativity and meaning cannot become commodities, but images can become commodities. Therefore ... with the emergence of images, media culture absorbs all elegant or vulgar art forms and abandons everything that is outside the commercial culture. A hodgepodge, arbitrarily combined, has become the internal text of media culture. Many media cultural products, such as movies, TV, MTV, etc. , not only widely use patchwork, combination, simulation and other means, but also deeply ridicule the classic works, and push them to the cultural stage after technical processing to show their planarization. In these media cultural products, historical significance, deep value and ideological content have been abandoned. Not only the production process, but also the operation process of media cultural products completely adopts the market-oriented operation mode. The purpose of media culture production is to attract audiences, and its products are commodities. Such a commercial operation mode has seriously dispelled modernist culture. Today, with consumer goods piling up like mountains and hawking one after another, the impulse of modernism to seek value and significance and the efforts to rebuild spiritual home have been hard to find. In the era of media culture, both elite culture and popular culture can only be integrated into the broader cultural field of media culture and become an organic part of it.
Finally, media culture is a high-tech culture produced by advanced science and technology. In terms of composition, media culture is the sum of cultures produced by various media such as radio, television, movies, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. Technically speaking, media culture was originally produced on the basis of the invention of new technologies, so it emphasized the use of the most advanced science and technology, especially modern communication technology, to integrate culture and technology in a new form and structure from the beginning. Contemporary society is a society.