R4: Postmodernism

Postmodernism, as far as I can understand, was a reaction to the many works of modernism that tried to set a set of rules that would end up guiding society as far as art and culture. By reaction, I mean that it pretty much went almost completely against it. In some ways, Postmodernism was just being new and different for different’s sake. Whether this seems like a good idea or a bad idea is almost entirely in the eyes of the beholder.

Postmodernism, according to most, seemed to come into play during the 1970s. However, with the help of social media today, the art and culture we know as postmodernism has been allowed to expand to so many more people on the Internet. As Turkle pointed out in the reading, “The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for social experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodernism.” (Turkle 180) This is his way of saying because of the Internet, we are not able to expose more people to  Postmodernism but we are also able to develop new kinds of Postmodernism art and culture.

Social media in some ways is almost completely engrained with Postmodernism traits. Social networks such as Twitter and Instagram had challenged our ways of traditionally thinking how we would communicate on the Internet. Twitter introduced a character limit of only 140 characters and Instagram wanted to have us upload photos that instead of looking as high quality as possible we would instead downgrade the quality to that of an instant camera.

Postmodernism isn’t just changing how we see art in our world but it is changing the very core fundamentals of society through social networking. 

Turkle, Sherry, “Aspects of the Self” Chapter 7. Life on the Screen, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1997. (PDF)