says Frieze: http://frieze.com/issue/article/postmodern-postmortem/
"I recently gave a lecture to a group of young artists: 20-somethings, living in Berlin, born elsewhere. Among the languages I could identify, I heard French, Portuguese and Swedish. Despite the linguistic diversity, my lecture went smoothly – until I made a joke about Postmodernism. No one laughed because no one knew what Postmodernism was." Result. ;-) "[...] These artists didn’t need a culture – let alone a neologism – to bring them together. Their Postmodernism is Facebook: not a catch-all phrase but a catch-everyone technology. The common comes automatically; the culture can always change. In light of social networks, the ubiquity of Postmodernism appears as its most revolutionary trait. The term likely disappeared so quickly because its force was not its multifaceted meaning but rather its capacity to link once-disparate cultural phenomena and once-distant people. Postmodernism may be the first word to become obsolete because it was replaced, not by another word like globalization, but by a technology that did the same job more effectively." I think the idea that a technology can supersede an ideology is ideologically very much of its time. I do wonder if Facebook and Postmodernism are really at the same "conceptual level" or whether this comparison conceals something more interesting. It may still be productive to ask what Postmodernism's enabling technology was and what Facebookism's ideology is. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
