ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors consider how media have contributed to and made sense of concepts of the modern and modernity. They explore one of the most widely known but least understood of contemporary theoretical ideas – that of postmodernism and contemporary questions about the truth of the world presented to us by media. ‘Postmodernism’ is a term that is, ironically, as old as modernism itself, but which became established as a prominent idea in academia – and more broadly – in the 1980s. The term and associated ideas quickly escaped to inform media debates and wider public discourse, to the point where it became and is still perhaps a ‘buzzword’. Theoretically, postmodernism has proven prodigious in critiquing the ideas of modernity, and ideas and movements such as Marxism and structuralism. Eagleton argues that theorists of postmodernism have made too great a play on ‘difference’ and the collapse of social movements.
