Abstract
Cultural products of late-stage capitalism, relentlessly consumed through internet media, are reified (Marx) as pure commodities operating in the culture industry, becoming instruments of ideological oppression and intellectual hegemony, while the masses, dazed and alienated, consume the proceeds unquestioningly, reinforcing the resistance against their own liberation. As Jameson observes, the function of media and products distributed through them have suffered a culturally and politically significant change since the end of the 20th century: aesthetic production is fully integrated into commodity production generally. Not only are products of media relegated to a state of mere ‘content’, but they are in the service of legitimizing clandestine forms of oppression and neutering impulses of dissent and discontentment. The inescapable reach of modern media also intercedes in fabricating for an individual a fictionalized reality or, as Baudrillard calls it, a ‘hyperreality’. Qualitative descriptive data in the form of the visual text comes from broadcast media in shows like Friends and The Big Bang Theory while simultaneously applying autoethnographic research techniques to understand the perception of reality in them. Textual analysis and discourse analysis were conducted on the same descriptive data to further understand the thematic tones prevalent in the text to comprehend the ideological thought furthered by way of the same. This research explores how simulacra of reality that sitcoms reproduce alienate the individual in the classical Marxist sense, from each other and reality itself.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Democratic Disorder: Disinformation, the Media and Crisis in a Time of Change
KEYWORDS
Alienation, Postmodernism, Reality, Oppression, Ideological State Apparatus
