Postmodernity is a social and political condition, distinct from modernity, closely related to postmodernism. For social, political, technological, and economic determinists, it is a major cause of the emergence of postmodernism and postmodern culture. For others, it is a mode of society which go hand in hand with postmodernism. Postmodernity may be a reason for some to choose postmodernism as a way of life, epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic position.
Postmodernism is an epistemological, aesthetic, ethical, and/or cultural attitude which is said to be distinctive from that of modern society.
The defining characteristics of postmodernity are not unanimously agreed on. Yet there are some characteristics that are frequently mentioned:
In politics,
- The end of the Cold War, an end of overarching world order.
- Increasingly diverse and complex landscape of various groups religious, ethnic, and others, sometimes sharing a political agenda, other times having conflicts.
- Globalization, or the increasing volume of trade among countries.
- The rise of an information economy, or increaseing importance of information industries, information-related occupations, and informatization of production processes in the economy.
- Increased ties between information industries and competitive advantages of a country or a company.
- The decline of mass production.
- An increased role of branding and other semiological dimensions of goods, as opposed to their pragmatic usefulness.
- An increasing role of information and communications technologies in society.
- The emergence of digital technologies which allow nearly perfect copying of digital information with ease.
- The rise of information networks, especially the Internet.
- Improvements in media technologies in making realistic presentiations of things.
References
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a French philosopher and literary theorist well-known for his embracing of postmodernism after the late 1970s. He published "La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir" (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) (1979)
From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context by Ihab Hassan [1].
