Lately I’ve been wondering if we are still in a Post-Modern state, or have the prevailing winds of culture changed directions? This of course is a tricky question, given how slippery the definition of Post Modernism and Modernism are. I’m inclined to think that something has changed, but dose it require a complete rethinking, or just a minor retooling, I’m not quite sure. We’ll probably be in some mutation of Modernism, until the Helvetica font is no longer used in everything. Perhaps that answers part of my question. The following thoughts might not be completely true in the scientific sense, but they might be true enough for a blog, by which I mean they hit on something that feels truthy that can describe something happening in the cultural sphere, so take it as you will, but before I go any further, a quick Wikipedia dump to summarize

“Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. The basic features of what we now call postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today would agree that postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s. Since then, postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture and philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a “grand narrative” of Western culture, a preference for the virtual at the expense of the real, and a “waning of affect” on the part of the subject, who is caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.”

When I read the words “grand narrative”, “nihilism”, “virtual” and “endlessly reproducible signs” I think of the subtitle to Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X. In bold, ragged font the book declares that it tells “Tales of an Accelerated Culture.” Coupland penned these words less than twenty years ago, but that was before the Internet went mainstream, before Netscape defined the web browser, before things could “go viral.” If that was accelerated then today is something else entirely. When looking at the speed that information of all kinds travels today, I’m inclined to call our current state a sort of Hyper-modernism. Digital connectivity has created a space where cultural products (politics, ideas,fashion,film,television,news,writing) have space to fail an infinite amount of times in moment, letting cultural mutation happen at an astonishing rate(weather this is progress of transformation I cannot tell). Culture now moves us like the Hyper-drive on the Millennium Falcon. When the switch is flipped, The stars stop being small white dots, but continuums for light that streak past us. In a similar manner, a Document/image/tune is no longer a single entity, but a continuum of edits. It can be read at any moment in it’s history or seen as whole, much like a wikipedia page.

We are still connected to Post-Modern ideas in the same way that we are still connected to the ideas of modernism. The Wiki-dump’s description “caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.” seems like an appropriate description of today and for twenty years ago, but it lacks the structured side to the chaos. It doesn’t take into account the digital backbone that that has since been layed over top of humanity. When a layer of meta-data is put on top of a Post-Modern culture that rejects Meta narratives, how long can one stay in a state of schizophrenia, before it is computed away. It is conceivable that if one can test ideas against the world’s knowledge that you could go through the kind of idea shifts that distinguish the Post-Modern from the Modern on a daily basis.

On a surface level we can see the change by looking at the self-referential nature that characterized Post-Modernism. The references still exist but they happen in a much smaller time frame. The original expression has so little time between its existence and the parody (or criticism) that it’s hard to distinguish between one and the other. Or even notice that it has been referenced.

In the forward to Travels in Hyper Reality, Umberto Eco talks about the difference between writing for newspaper and writing academic books. He calls himself an insecure person, who doesn’t always like waiting for the review of an academic book to trickle in. In the Hyper-modern state of the Internet, Eco could get his response instantly, from all parts of the globe, from all walks of life. His ideas can be tested 1000 times an hour, and emerge as something new, remixed, and with a pop soundtrack minutes after he clicked “Post.”

This is by no means a complete look at what is different between then and now, but it’s a start.

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