Culture can be understood as arts, everyday practices, or national traits. Postmodernism questions grand narratives, blurs high/low distinctions, and foregrounds images and fragmentation. Foundational thinkers such as Bourdieu and Baudrillard remain relevant as the digital era - with social media, algorithms, and AI-generated images - intensifies visual culture, complicates authenticity, and sustains struggles over cultural capital.
What do we mean by "culture"?
Culture is the network of ideas, practices, and meanings that shape how a society lives and understands itself. Scholars still use the term in at least three overlapping ways. One is "high culture" - the arts and institutions such as opera, galleries, and canonical literature. A second, broader usage treats culture as everything people do and believe: food, rituals, work, and everyday habits. A third is national or ethnic culture (for example, "American culture" or "Francophone culture"). These definitions overlap and change as societies change.
Signs and semiotics
One way to study culture as a changing, interactive process is through semiotics - the study of signs and how they make meaning. Semiology looks at patterns and systems of signification (how images, words, and symbols point to ideas), not only individual messages. That analytical frame helps explain why some images or narratives feel "real" while others feel staged.
Postmodernism: a skeptical posture toward grand stories
Postmodernism, broadly, rejects the idea of a single universal truth or a single dominant narrative. It emphasizes plurality, fragmentation, and the contingency of meanings. Postmodern cultural analysis highlights the breakdown of strict boundaries between "high" and "low" culture, a growing preoccupation with visual media, and skepticism about linear progress and stable identity (Ward, 2003).
Jean Baudrillard argued that contemporary culture is saturated by representations - simulacra - so that our experience of the world is filtered through images and signs (Baudrillard, 1994). Pierre Bourdieu showed how cultural knowledge and tastes function as "cultural capital" that reproduces social advantage (Bourdieu, 1984).
The digital turn: images, algorithms, and markets for attention
Since the turn of the 21st century, visual culture has intensified. Social media, streaming platforms, targeted advertising, and algorithmic feeds concentrate attention on images and short-form content. The commercial "attention economy" prizes the visual and the clickable (Wu, 2016). New phenomena - deepfakes, AI-generated images, and highly produced influencer content - blur the line between representation and reality and raise fresh questions about authenticity and trust.
The 2010s also brought the so-called "post-truth" moment, when emotional and visual appeals sometimes outweighed verifiable facts in public debates (Oxford Languages, 2016). That trend reinforces many postmodern anxieties about how meaning is made and who controls it.
What follows for cultural study?
Postmodernism does not end clear analysis; it redirects it. Studying culture today requires attention to images, platforms, and economic forces, and to how identity can be curated or commodified. Semiotics and cultural theory remain useful tools, alongside media literacy and critical awareness of how algorithms and markets shape what we see.
References cited in text: Bourdieu (1984); Baudrillard (1994); Ward (2003); Wu (2016).