Modernism 2.0 - A new weightless nowhere of silent autism

This is a response to Fred Wilson's post referring to this article in Philosophy Now about what comes post Post-Modernism. In essence the argument is that the Digital Generation is a step change from what came before - Post Modernists differed from Modernists in the books they wrote and read and the theories they concocted, but the essential metastructures were the same, whereas today:

There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

And the result of this is, is that today's model is as much about the interaction as about the original content:

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in.

And the medium of this pseudo-modernism is in itself temporary, and lacks solidity - i.e. it has no persistence, as us netgeeks would say:

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete.

And irony is no longer the acceptable stance of the Internet Philosopher - dumb-ass certainty is the way to go (I can think of a few blogs in that mould....)

The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity....

....Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety

And thus we return to the infantile playing with shiny new toys:

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism

A new weightless nowhere of silent autism - or Flow, as some are wont to call it

So that's Modernism 2.0 - disposable culture, quality is defined by its audience, here today / gone tomorrow, content with zero useful thought but lots of strident opinion, often merely an attempt to flog consumer stuff, and driving an obsessive need to become ambient with the new new toys.

Yep, sounds about right to me..... a truly unbearable lightness of being

By the way, I got to the above paper from an exchange on Twitter last night, which at least shows that Twitter is going up in content value. From what you had for lunch to whether lunch exists or not in one short year. Maybe there is a bit of weight emerging in the nowhere after all, the force of gravitas operating on the mass market?

And as for silent autism...silent is one word I wouldn't use for the Modernist 2.0 lot......

Update - quite a pithy definition by Ian Betteridge on his blog Technovia of what this means in practice:

....the current vogue for opinion over argument is the triumph of the post-modern approach which claims that all opinions are equally valid. If opinion is as good as argument, then why bother with all that hard work of building a case, presenting facts, and so on