Blurred.

Last week’s discussion about ‘blurring’ made me think about my report on Cyberpunk and Postmodernity when I took up Science Fiction last 2005. The concept of ‘blurring’ is, I believe, brought about by the Internet – a world entirely on its own, decentralized, without physical boundaries, where basic reality becomes a contrived reality. In my understanding, ‘blurring’ is Postmodernity exemplified.

Here are some interesting points about Postmodernity taken from an Internet journal (I’m sorry I forgot the URL L ) that I’d like to share.

- As with the birth of the modern, the birth of the postmodern represents a time in which an old social order is passing away and a new one emerging. This change is revolutionizing every aspect of social life from technology to the arts, economics, political theories, human perception, ways we relate to one another as well as the individual, family and community.

- The computer seems to annihilate time. Information is available in an instant, a nanosecond. There seems to be today, much more than in the past, a sense of the immediate. Studies show that young people who spend a lot of time with video games do not develop a sense of the past and the future as those in the past did. The individual as suggested earlier is being seen not as an integrated self which has been created by his past experiences but as the result of what ever experience is available at the moment. There is the loss of center or logocentrism as it was known in Classical civilization. Terry Eagleton describes the postmodern self as: ...a dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical inferiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, social relationship, trend or fashion. (Eagleton,p.71)

- If during the industrial revolution there is inequality between the ‘haves’ and ‘have- nots’, this post-industrial society has seen growth in global and national inequality between those who are information rich and those who are information poor (digital literacy divide). This information based economy results in the globalization of the economy and global economic interdependence. This in turn results in changes in the shape of the urban zone where the concentric zone sites of the industrial age are decaying to the decentralized multi-nuclei city of today. An employee may work whenever and wherever so long as he has a computer and an Internet connection. “Distance learning” or “virtual university” making it’s appearance on the educational scene. [In some of my subjects, we post blog entries (like this one J) instead of submitting ‘papers’].

- [Now for the disturbing truth] The phenomenon of decentralization has some interesting implications for the self or ego-centrality, also a product of modernity. The postmodern individual is seen as being seen no longer as an integrated whole ego, but more in terms of a multiplicity with no essential being.

Conceptions are changing. How one perceives time, space, and his relations with other is slowly becoming ‘blurred’.