Introduction
Since
its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the
[drive] of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced
postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new
cultural [landscape].
It
owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the
computerization of text,
which
yields a new form of textuality characterized by onwardness
[exploration], haphazardness [randomness], evanescence
[disappearance], and anonymous, social and multiple authorship
[production/creation].
These in turn become the [defining characteristics] of a group of
texts in new and established modes which also [demonstrate] the
digimodernist
traits of infantilism [childishness], earnestness [seriousness],
endlessness
[free of boundaries] and apparent reality.
Digimodernist
texts are found across contemporary culture, ranging from “reality
TV” to Hollywood fantasy blockbusters, from Web 2.0 platforms to
the most sophisticated videogames.
In
its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to
intervene
textually, to physically make the
text, to
add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.
Hence
“digimodernism”, properly understood as a contraction of “digital
modernism”, is a pun:
it’s where digital technology meets textuality and text is
(re)formulated by the fingers
and thumbs (the digits) clicking and
keying and pressing in the positive act of
partial or
obscurely-collective
textual elaboration.
Of
all the definitions of postmodernism, the form of digimodernism
recalls the one given by Fredric Jameson. It too is “a dominant
cultural norm”; not a blanket description of all contemporary
cultural production but “the force field in which very different
kinds of cultural...production… must make their way”.
Twenty
years later, however, the horizon has changed; the dominant
cultural force field and systematic norm is different: what was
postmodernist is now
digimodernist.
The
relationships between digimodernism and postmodernism are various.
First,
digimodernism is the successor to postmodernism: emerging in the
mid-late 1990s, it gradually eclipsed it as the dominant
cultural, technological, social and political expression of our
times.
Second,
in its early years a burgeoning digimodernism co-existed with a
weakened, retreating postmodernism;
it’s the era of the hybrid or borderline text (The Blair Witch
Project, The Office, the Harry Potter novels).
Third.
Digimodernism is a reaction against postmodernism: certain of its
traits (earnestness, the apparently real) resemble a
[rejection] of typical postmodern characteristics. [like
postmodernism did with modernism? Rich]
Fourth,
historically side by side and expressed in part through the same
cultural forms (CGI films, games, reality tv), digimodernism appears
socially and politically as the logical effect of postmodernism,
suggesting a [development on from] more than a [break]. These
versions of the relationship between the two are not incompatible
but reflect their highly complex, multiple identities.
[fluid/complication of identities? Rich]
[Is}
there is such a thing as “digimodernity”? Have entered into a
totally new phase of history?
Postmodernism
insisted on locating an absolute break in all human experience
between the disappeared past [Dislocated Narratives in time &
place] and the stranded present [no future, where do we go?] but has
this lost all plausibility. Modernity continued throughout this
period as an “unfinished project”.
Although
the imponderable evils of the 1930s and 40s [WW2, Atomic Bomb] could
only trigger a breakdown of faith in inherited cultural and
historical world-views, the nature and scale of this reaction were
overstated by some writers [French dead ones...]
In
so far as it exists, “digimodernity” is, then, another stage
within modernity, a shift from one phase of its history into
another.
Digimodernism,
as well as a break in textuality, brings a new textual form, content
and value, new kinds of cultural meaning, structure and use, and they
will be the object of this book.
In
[Death of Postmodernism] I called what I now label digimodernism
“pseudo-modernism”...The notion of pseudo-modernity is one aspect
of digimodernism. The article was written largely in the spirit of
intellectual
provocation;
uploaded to the Web, it drew a response which eventually persuaded me
the subject deserved more detailed and scrupulous attention.
I
begin by assessing the case for the decline and fall since the
mid-late 1990s of postmodernism, in part as a way of outlining the
context within which its successor appeared.
WHAT
CAUSED IT?_
WHAT ARE
ITS TRAITS?_
WHAT
EXAMPLES?_
RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN AUDIENCE & TEXT?_
WHEN IS
IT, POST-POSTMODERNISM?_
HOW ARE
ITS TRAITS DIFFERENT TO POSTMODERNISM?_
WHAT
SIMILARITIES DOES IT SHARE WITH POSTMODERNISM?_
WHEN DID
POSTMODERNISM DECLINE/FALL?_
WRITE
A 1 SENTENCE SUMMARY DEFINITION: WHAT IS POST-POSTMODERNISM?_
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