The connection between postmodernism and New Media

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism first identified in architecture is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalization of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry. Not surprisingly, it is seen that the culture and politics produced by a ‘post-industrial' society will be markedly different to that which was dominated by the industrial context of modernism. These cultural changes can partly be understood as the inevitable by-product of a consumer society, where consumption and leisure now determine our experiences rather than work and production. This means that ‘consumer culture' comes to dominate the cultural sphere; that the market determines the texture and experiences of our everyday lives.

In this ‘postmodern' world there is no point of reference beyond the commodity and any sense of technology itself as separate to experience is slowly disappearing. These changes in post-industrial society have clearly influenced the way that critical theory now understands and conceives the role which the media currently plays in society. In particular, there has been a discernible shift away from the cultural pessimism that once defined the modernist approach to the media found in the likes of The Frankfurt School. Perhaps the first signs of such a critical shift can be detected in the work of McLuhan. While McLuhan shared many of the modernist anxieties about the ideological influence of the media on a gullible and powerless audience, his work often betrayed an enthusiasm and excitement for the media that was seldom detected in modernist critical theory. Even his writing style seems steeped in the fragmented messages of the electronic media with famous aphorisms such as ‘the medium is the message' appearing to mimic advertising slogans or sound bites. Indeed, his early use of the term ‘surfing' (to refer to rapid, irregular and multi-directional movement through a body of documents), preceded the World Wide Web and multi-channel television by some 30 years. Much of his work anticipated the power of New Media to enhance an audience's interactivity with electronic information as a whole - transforming us all from ‘voyeurs to participants'. This theoretical shift in the conception of the media and its audience was later carried out by much of the work informed by post-structuralism. While structuralism generally reflected the modernist need to uncover the latent ideological meaning embedded in the media text, post-structuralism tends to take a less deterministic view about the nature of the media as a whole.

Media analysis gradually began to acknowledge that ideology was more complex than first imagined, that media audiences could resist ideological meaning and that texts themselves could be ‘polysemic', that is, consisting of multiple meanings. This inevitably meant that the modernist insistence that a media text could be stripped down to one ideological meaning became increasingly untenable. The indeterminacy of meaning in a text is central to much of poststructuralist theory, changing the very means by which contemporary research not only understands the media but also its receiver or ‘reader'. In particular, the influence of poststructuralist theory on media analysis means that current research has tended to put less emphasis on the way a text is encoded (by its producer) to the ways in which it is decoded. Originally referred to as the ‘Uses and Gratifications' tradition, new methods of media analysis have now produced a wealth of material that endeavours to show how complex the production of meaning between a text and its audience actually is. This is a profound step away from the modernist and structuralist conception of the audience as passive cultural dupes, re-imagining them instead as active participants in the production of meaning. As this suggests, crucial to both the postmodern and poststructuralist view of the world is the notion that meaning itself can never be entirely pinned down.

Building on structuralism's understanding of culture through the structures of linguistics, post-structuralism argues that reality can only really be known through language and discourse. This means that rather than simply and innocently reflecting the real world, language actually constructs our view of ourselves and our notions of ‘the real'. So, rather than looking for a deeper meaning which somehow magically exists beyond language and discourse, post-structuralism tends to analyse the discursive and practical conditions by which ‘truth' is constructed. So while modernism tended to search for meaning and truth among the chaos and fragmentation of the modern world, postmodernism appears to accept that the pursuit for such universal truth is futile. This instability of ‘truth' is linked to the postmodernist claim that by the end of the twentieth century people had gradually become more sceptical about utopian theories such as the Enlightenment and Marxism. Dismissing them as ‘grand narratives', postmodern theorists tended to categorize these totalizing world views as nothing more than linguistic and narrative constructs. Although it may be difficult to conceive of such a theory in a world partly in the grip of religious fundamentalism, the belief in the utopian possibilities of modernism does appear to be contested by what many critics argue is an increasingly cynical Western world.

The connection between postmodernism and New Media

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