Hello Post-Modernism, My Old Friend

It's odd to be discussing Post-Modernism again; just seeing the word again made me flash back 20 years or so when you read it all over the place and at the same time made me realize how long it's been since I've seen it. Somewhere in the 90s Post-Modernism sort of dissipated into the general ooze; it became one of those words like "Pop Art" or "Rap Music" that referred to something very important and specific at one time and then became obsolete as the thing it described became so ubiquitous that it wasn't even worth commenting on anymore. Post-Modernism, at least from where I sat, was the subversion of meaning, the notion that symbols, and by extension, ideologies, really could mean anything you wanted them to, or nothing at all--in other words, punk rock. Ideology,of course, was the root and branch of Modernism, the whole idea of Progress. We've lost that now, and we may be better for it, given the damage ideologies did to the world when people took them seriously, but in any case, they're gone. In their place we have the whole cultural notion of "irony"(really sarcasm), the replacement of consensual reality with the ones you make yourself, sampling, Asian-Fusion, New Urbanism, and of course, the Internet. The Internet didn't make Post-Modernism, but the world Post-Modernism created was the perfect soil for it to grow. Now we're so used to appropriating meanings for our own devices that it's hard to remember, or if you can't remember, understand, that there was a time when if you wore a leather jacket and had tattoos, you could only be a biker and if you wore a trucker hat, it meant you drove a truck.

As for old Marshall McLuhan...I never was sure I quite understood that whole "medium is the message" business(something, by the way, that people used to get EXTREMELY EXCITED about). I always took it to be a prediction that content wouldn't matter in the future so much as the way it's presented. I'm not sure that ever happened, exactly--people still value messages for what they actually say. But it certainly is easier than ever to get distracted.