bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Wednesday, May 28, 2003 ::

Postmodernism is dead
By way of a recent YouthSpecialties newsletter comes this article about postmodernism's demise. This essay contains much food for thought, but the gist of it is:

Postmodernism, then, was about the deconstruction of the dominant institutions of the Modern and the discrediting of the corresponding metanarratives that gave life to a host of real and perceived social injustices. While PoMo certainly nurtured some excesses, there's a good argument to made that it was a necessary phase in Western society's evolution toward stronger and more productive modes of social organization.

So, what's next? The Network Age, according to the author of this essay.

If we think about our lives here in the early moments of the 3rd Millennium, we can probably see any number of ways in which we're part of an emerging networked social order, and the network itself serves as the best metaphor I can think of for where we are and where we're going now that the big deconstruction is behind us. From a technological and social standpoint, few things have exerted as massive an impact on Western culture over the past few years as the Net - the result of spectacular parallel developments in personal computing and electronic communications. In some cases our migration into the network has been conscious and explicit. E-mail, for instance, has provided us with an easy and inexpensive means for staying in touch with friends and family, in many cases including people we had simply lost touch with before e-mail. The Web is now a primary source for news, to say nothing its role in helping foster communities of interest. Whether you're looking for barbecue recipes, researching vacation sites, seeking people who can provide information about a rare condition your child has been diagnosed with, investigating dog breeds, searching for clues about your family's genealogical past, discussing the merits of the new Peter Gabriel CD, or whatever, there has arguably never been a technology more ideally constructed for the exchange of information and ideas than the network.

In other cases, our colonization by the Net has been hidden from our view. The fact is, in most developed areas of the planet, it's nearly impossible not to be shaped by the network unless you have adopted a highly informed and aggressive opt-out strategy (ie, living in a cave). If you have an ATM card, you're a citizen of the largest network in the world. Driver's license? Credit card? Home loan? Student loan? Discount card for your local grocery store? If you have any of these, you're in the network. Give facial recognition technology another five years and you'll be assimilated by simply appearing in public without a mask.

For better or worse, contemporary culture is network culture, and it's important to understand that network culture is by nature distributed culture. Modernism was about centralization, but the Network is decentralized - it is ubiquitous and omnipresent, although no less rigorously structured. Our relationships with institutions were once conducted around the site of the monolith - the bank, the church, the school, the county courthouse, these were all physical places and to transact business with the agency in question, you had to transport yourself to the physical address of the institution. In today's corporate lingo, we might say that these official relationships were "institution-centric." Networked, distributed culture, though, is "citizen-centric" (though we'd do more justice to the actual character of the relationship with the term "customer-centric"). The locus of these organizational interactions depends less on the address of the building where the offices are and more on our IP addresses. The institution is everywhere there's a terminal, a critical distinction in understanding that the Network Age is polylithic in nature. This suggests profound implications for the makeup of organizations, because now you can be an active participant in any number of social activities without having to centralize yourself. A congregation of 1000 people can share a worship service from 1000 separate locations, for example.

:: Andrew 07:35 + ::
...