Some thoughts on The Postmodern Condition

Postmodernism was the bogeyman of the late ‘90s and early 2000s among evangelicals and other conservatives. In much the same way that one’s response to Critical Race Theory (which has some connections with postmodernity) serves as a shibboleth for acceptability in trendy circles, postmodernism functioned as a way to be part of the cool kids (on either side).

There are now those that think that postmodernism is really just another form of modernity (perhaps further advanced along its trajectory), and thus never really existed as a distinct movement, but there was something that adherents and opponents felt was different from the general stream of modernity, which still deserves some attention. With that in mind, I picked up, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, to try to get a better understanding from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

Lyotard offers a definition in his introduction: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

In other words, Lyotard was arguing that modernity attempted to impose homogeneity on the world through metanarratives—high level explanations that were an attempt to make sense of everything. Postmodernity claims to recognize metanarratives as impositions from authorities that likely have little claim to correspondence to the truth.

At its best, postmodernity shakes the claims of modernistic empiricism, which leads to the apparent supremacy of “Science.” Postmodernity did not succeed in uprooting the religion of Scientism, as evidenced by the year of shaming that we “follow the Science” or “believe in the Science” or “listen to the Science.” In general, when someone puts a definite article in front of “Science” they are no longer talking about actual science, but about how they intend to try to browbeat you into doing what they want to. We are still very much living in an era where people believe that “Science” has or can produce a unified theory of everything. This despite Thomas Kuhn’s work in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which shows a truer picture of the way the scientific community develops metanarratives that evolve over time.

By Lyotard offers some helpful analysis beyond his definition of postmodernism. Though The Postmodern Condition was written in 1979, he predicted the information age with a surprising degree of prescience.

For example, he wrote,

“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”

There are obvious connections to information warfare, the psyops that are ongoing with bots on social media, election interference, etc. The fact that there are operatives from other nations whose primary goal is to stir up dissent and doubt among citizens of the United States is an illustration of Lyotard’s prediction.

Also, significantly for the concept of education and the role of the state, Lyotard anticipated the shifting role of the state with regard to education:

“The mercantilization of knowledge is bound to affect the privilege the nation-states have enjoyed, and still enjoy, with respect to the production and distribution of learning. The notion that learning falls within the purview of the State, as the brain or mind of society, will become more and more outdated with the increasing strength of the opposing principle, according to which society exists and progresses only if the messages circulating within it are rich and easy to decode. The ideology of communicational “transparence,” which goes hand in hand with the commercialization of knowledge, will begin to perceive the State as a factor of opacity and “noise.” It is from this point of view that the problem of the relationship between economic and State powers threatens to arise with a new urgency.”

It isn’t entirely a bad thing when the State is no longer perceived as “the brain or mind of society,” since the State has been significantly wrong about a number of life changing issues in the not-so-distant past. However, within Lyotard’s prediction is the anticipation of QAnon and similar conspiracy theories, which see a “Deep State” that is controlling the narrative. This has effectively made Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other outlets the de facto gatekeepers of truth, as congressional hearings and obnoxious overlays on social media posts frequently remind us.

It is interesting to read The Postmodern Condition at this point, to see how many of Lyotard’s anticipated realities have come true. As a description of reality, he is on the right track. He does little to help find a way to navigate through toward some better condition, but there is some value in the diagnosis.

Technopoly - A Review

Neil Postman’s most well known book is Amusing Ourselves to Death. There is good reason for that, since he both explains the media ecology of the early ‘80’s, including the election of a movie star presidents, and predicts where culture will head. His predictions have proved to be largely true, which is a stunning feat. He provides no timeline for what he anticipates, but he looks at the trajectory of culture and describes where it is headed—for us, where it has headed—in the decades to come.

His book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, is less well-known, but in many ways more powerful and prescient. Published in 1992, Postman was standing at the beginning of the internet age, when personal computers were beginning to be more widely available.

The book is not about some dystopian future where Artificial Intelligence has taken over and time traveling robots have been sent back to wipe out the people that started it all. But it is a book that helps explain what technology is, why understanding that definition is important, and what it is doing to society.

From the very beginning, Postman makes it clear that technology is all around us in ways that we no longer detect. Technology fundamentally changes the way society works and how our brains function. (This is part of Jacob Shatzer’s argument in his recent book, Transhumanism and the Image of God, which is also worth your while.) He begins with one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus, which contains a story of Thamus who resists the use of written languages, especially books, because it will change the way people receive information and allow readers to gain info apart from the oral tradition. To modern readers, so many centuries beyond that technological revolution, and also well beyond the revolution enabled by moveable type on printing presses, it may seem incredible to consider what life would be like without written communication. And yet, that was a technology that has fundamentally changed society in a way that we can no longer fully comprehend because it is so ubiquitous.

The central message of Technopoly is simple, but it is important: Every new technology that gets widely adopted changes society. It would, therefore, important that we ask whether those changes are good or not and what we are giving up by adopting new technologies.

According to Postman,

“Technology is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things––but quite the opposite––seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering believes are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down.”

Postman further notes, only a couple of pages later, that social institutions are supposed to function as control mechanisms to help people discern which information is important and which is noise. As he notes,

“Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.”

In this information age, even the best of our institutions cannot function fast enough to accomplish this task. And, based on the violation of trust that many institutions have engaged in or been accused of, people tend not to trust some of the institutions that might possibly be able to do a fair job at keeping up with information.

Technopoly helps explain the dis-ease of contemporary culture because we are being perpetually swamped by information and it is difficult to discern what is true. We have few reliable handlers of information that we can count on to present the information in a reasonably unbiased way. Some of the gate keepers of information, including members of the media, abuse their institutional role as information handlers to intentionally mislead through shifting perceptions.

Technopoly predicted our present state and our ongoing trajectory. Postman’s book highlights the epistemic and social nightmare we live in: there is too much information and we don’t know who to trust. Postman has few suggestions for a solution (indeed, he pokes fun at himself in the last chapter for that fact), but simply having the problem exposed is helpful.

Personally, I think that part of the solution needs to be a renewal of the Christian Mind, which I have written about previously and will discuss further in this context in a future post.

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

By Neil Postman

Buy on Amazon

Becoming a Smarter Digital Citizen

Technology is amazing. In my life, I’ve seen the advancement of personal communications at a pace and to a degree that I would never have guessed was possible within my own life. I scoffed at the people who told me when I was a teen that television would be replaced by videos streamed on the computer. That was incomprehensible to me, since the internet was so limited as a resource then. I still remember having someone from the city (Buffalo) come out to do a demonstration of the internet at my rural school. They showed us ERIC and we were supposed to be amazed. Given that I was young, I didn’t recognize the potential of a database that would index academic articles, and the platform was extremely limited in comparison to contemporary tools.

Fast forward a few decades and now we are surrounded by a sea of digital influences. I read most of my news online and the news that I do read often depends on the people I follow on social media. I too rarely actually go to the landing page of any website, including those sites whose content I regularly consume.

However, since I get the majority of my content through social media, that makes me vulnerable to manipulations in the algorithms. This is because, in order to keep us addicted to their content, social media platforms distort the way information is displayed on their pages. There are complex calculations running in the background to ensure that you see your cousin’s pregnancy announcement when it pops up, but only get one link to that article that everyone is reading. Also, if they think you will be offended by that popular article, they might just not show it to you.

There is no question that the social media platforms are manipulating the content that gets displayed. That, at some level, might be considered tolerable (since they own the platform) and some might believe it is relatively benign (I do not). But there is a deeper problem: the manipulation of algorithms by people that want to do us harm.

In a multipart series, Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day has researched the manipulation of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube by bots and bad guys. I’m linking here to the series, with a brief synopsis of each video, because I believe that this is content worth sharing and considering as we learn how to live within our present digital culture.

The Art of Digital War

Because of his former day job, which involved working alongside the military on weapons systems, Sandlin was afforded a unique opportunity to engage some experts on the future of war and how cyber warfare will play into the way that wars will be fought or avoided in the coming decades. This video is a key part of understanding why the manipulation of social media feeds is worth the money and time invested in it.

Manipulating the Big Three Platforms

Some of these videos are a little long, but I found them very engaging. What is most helpful is that Sandlin was given access to experts from YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook who are trying to combat the rise of bots and overtly hostile actions. I have my own concerns about how our digital overlords are using their self-granted, self-regulated powers, but it is worth seeing how the algorithms are being manipulated to better understand the world in which we live.

Twitter

YouTube

Facebook

The Problem with Your Newsfeed

Although this video was released before the three-part series on the manipulation of particular platforms, but it provides a very helpful guide to being a better digital citizen. Sandlin talks to someone who works through a process of validating information before sharing it, and tries to teach us to do the same. If we all followed this sort of process, instead of simply sharing something that made us feel the right way, then false information would not be disseminated so regularly.

Sandlin also recaps why carefully parsing any links that you might share is so vitally important, because so much of the contemporary divisiveness and viral disruption of communities depends on false, or at least biased, information getting out into the main stream very quickly.

Conclusion

I’m writing on a website that has no paper counterpart, so obviously I’m not ready to step out of the digital world. A lot of the views for this website come through social media sharing and from search engines, so it isn’t in my interests to jump ship just yet.

However, we really do need to think about how the new information economy is shaping how we learn, see, and understand the world around us. We need to recognize that even more than the biased, but more benign forms of censorship and self-promotion inherent in commercial media, the rise of the portability of digital tools makes it easy for a relatively small, hostile actor to significantly influence the course of societal debate.

Being a good citizen in a digital world is part of being a good neighbor. Part of being a good neighbor is learning how the bad guys work (and the not-so-bad guys that are just as manipulative) so that we can resist unhelpful misinformation and reinterpretation in a rapidly changing environment.