I have now started my Journalism Masters dissertation which is to be a collection of articles revolving around the theme of postmodernism today. I studied Philosophy at university and took a particular interest in postmodernism. Below is the 'editor's letter'/an introduction to the theme and project.
“That film was so postmodern!” my friend found herself laughing at a dinner party the other week. She told me it was one of those awful moments where you find yourself agreeing with someone and yet you have no idea what they are talking about, and you pray that they don’t realise this. Since then, she has been on a mini-quest to find out everything she possibly can about postmodernism so this faux-pas doesn't happen again. I have decided to put together a collection of articles that you will find in the next few months of blog posts, with a postmodern theme running throughout.
So what is postmodernism and why is it important that we understand this phenomenon? So many people throw the word ‘postmodern’ around carelessly, the media and myself included, without seeming to know what it really means. One great way of learning about postmodernism outside of the classroom is to book yourself tickets to Stoppard’s latest production of Arcadia, showing at the Duke of York’s Theatre in West London. In an entertaining yet informed way, this play successfully enacts the differences between modernism and postmodernism beautifully, and is reviewed later in this series of articles.
Postmodernism is a movement that began in the early 1960s. To understand postmodernism though, we must delve further into the past and understand modernism, which started during the nineteenth century and came to an end in the early 1960s.
Postmodernist beliefs began to challenge religious beliefs about God and the Church, and people started to turn to man and not to God. Suddenly man was a thinking being and self who was individual and autonomous, and, as some philosophers have argued, more selfish. Modernism was all about narratives; the narrative of marriage and family as a unit, the narrative of a job for life, the narrative of just one identity, and not many. Postmodernism is the exact antithesis of this.
Postmodernists believe that we now live in a fragmented society where ‘anything goes’. Fragmentation really is the hallmark of postmodernism, and instead of living in a universe, postmodernists believe that we now live in a multi-verse.
In a postmodern society, the past and a tie to your roots are not necessarily that important and don’t automatically form an integral part of who you are – context is severed from the past. One piece in this magazine that describes a way of living that is very much modernist rather than postmodern is the article about a small village in Northern Spain, which has been almost totally undisturbed by postmodernism.
Postmodernism lets the self choose what and who it wants to be, and does not have to take responsibility for their family, country or community. Perhaps for these reasons then, families are now more broken and divided, with divorce steadily increasing throughout the postmodern period, creating more unhappy families in society. How has divorce affected the children of today? This is an important area of concern that will be explored in this issue.
Postmodernism has also meant the birth of today’s fast-moving technological society where people express themselves through an explosion of computerised progressions such as twittering and blogging. Certainly in Iran this last month, many of us only know what has been happening because of the constant twittering that technology is allowing people to do.
The human being is no longer understood as a single entity, and identities are deeply fragmented because of the nature of the postmodern society and its institutions that segment our very being and personality. There is a fundamental lack of single completeness of the self in today’s world. Please see the piece on fractured female identities in today’s society for more about the fragmentation of identities.
Old age and childhood have now become distinct and wrenched away from the rest of human life, perhaps a contributing reason as to why so many children and old people in Britain are unhappy today.
Postmodernism has changed the rules; we no longer have to follow the norms of marriages ‘till death do us part’ or play out conventional heterosexual roles. As a consequence our society is far more open-minded and liberal than it once was, with the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transsexual (LGBT) network now campaigning around England for more and more gay rights.
For these reasons then, an understanding of postmodernism is important as it will help us to recognise why society is the way it is, and have a deeper intuition into the underlying values of today’s world. And the big question is – are we better of as a society with or without postmodernism? That is for you to read on and decide.
“That film was so postmodern!” my friend found herself laughing at a dinner party the other week. She told me it was one of those awful moments where you find yourself agreeing with someone and yet you have no idea what they are talking about, and you pray that they don’t realise this. Since then, she has been on a mini-quest to find out everything she possibly can about postmodernism so this faux-pas doesn't happen again. I have decided to put together a collection of articles that you will find in the next few months of blog posts, with a postmodern theme running throughout.
So what is postmodernism and why is it important that we understand this phenomenon? So many people throw the word ‘postmodern’ around carelessly, the media and myself included, without seeming to know what it really means. One great way of learning about postmodernism outside of the classroom is to book yourself tickets to Stoppard’s latest production of Arcadia, showing at the Duke of York’s Theatre in West London. In an entertaining yet informed way, this play successfully enacts the differences between modernism and postmodernism beautifully, and is reviewed later in this series of articles.
Postmodernism is a movement that began in the early 1960s. To understand postmodernism though, we must delve further into the past and understand modernism, which started during the nineteenth century and came to an end in the early 1960s.
Postmodernist beliefs began to challenge religious beliefs about God and the Church, and people started to turn to man and not to God. Suddenly man was a thinking being and self who was individual and autonomous, and, as some philosophers have argued, more selfish. Modernism was all about narratives; the narrative of marriage and family as a unit, the narrative of a job for life, the narrative of just one identity, and not many. Postmodernism is the exact antithesis of this.
Postmodernists believe that we now live in a fragmented society where ‘anything goes’. Fragmentation really is the hallmark of postmodernism, and instead of living in a universe, postmodernists believe that we now live in a multi-verse.
In a postmodern society, the past and a tie to your roots are not necessarily that important and don’t automatically form an integral part of who you are – context is severed from the past. One piece in this magazine that describes a way of living that is very much modernist rather than postmodern is the article about a small village in Northern Spain, which has been almost totally undisturbed by postmodernism.
Postmodernism lets the self choose what and who it wants to be, and does not have to take responsibility for their family, country or community. Perhaps for these reasons then, families are now more broken and divided, with divorce steadily increasing throughout the postmodern period, creating more unhappy families in society. How has divorce affected the children of today? This is an important area of concern that will be explored in this issue.
Postmodernism has also meant the birth of today’s fast-moving technological society where people express themselves through an explosion of computerised progressions such as twittering and blogging. Certainly in Iran this last month, many of us only know what has been happening because of the constant twittering that technology is allowing people to do.
The human being is no longer understood as a single entity, and identities are deeply fragmented because of the nature of the postmodern society and its institutions that segment our very being and personality. There is a fundamental lack of single completeness of the self in today’s world. Please see the piece on fractured female identities in today’s society for more about the fragmentation of identities.
Old age and childhood have now become distinct and wrenched away from the rest of human life, perhaps a contributing reason as to why so many children and old people in Britain are unhappy today.
Postmodernism has changed the rules; we no longer have to follow the norms of marriages ‘till death do us part’ or play out conventional heterosexual roles. As a consequence our society is far more open-minded and liberal than it once was, with the Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transsexual (LGBT) network now campaigning around England for more and more gay rights.
For these reasons then, an understanding of postmodernism is important as it will help us to recognise why society is the way it is, and have a deeper intuition into the underlying values of today’s world. And the big question is – are we better of as a society with or without postmodernism? That is for you to read on and decide.
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