Each era has a cultural dominant medium that serves as its symptomatic index.

Evidence

What this account suggests is that however helpful the declaration of the priority of film over literature in jolting us out of print culture and/ or logocentrism, it remained an essentially modernist formulation, locked in a set of cultural values and categories which are in full Postmodernism demonstrably antiquated and “historical.” That film has today become postmodernist, or at least that certain films have, is obvious enough; but so have some forms of literary production. The argument turned, however, on the priority of these forms, that is, their capacity to serve as some supreme and privileged, symptomatic, index of the zeitgeist; to stand, using a more contemporary language, as the cultural dominant of a new social and economic conjuncture; to stand — now finally putting the most philosophically adequate face on the matter — as the richest allegorical and hermeneutic vehicles for some new description of the system itself. Film and literature no longer do that, although I will not belabor the largely circumstantial evidence of the increasing dependency of each on materials, forms, technology, and even thematics borrowed from the other art or medium I have in mind as the most likely candidate for cultural hegemony today. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 206

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what ‘cultural dominant’ means operationally: a medium that stands as supreme privileged index of the zeitgeist.
• QUESTION: If film and literature no longer serve as cultural dominant, how would one falsify the claim that video now does?