Postmodernity facts for kids

Postmodernity is a way to describe society and culture that came after a time called modernity. Some people think modernity ended in the late 1900s (around the 1980s or early 1990s). They believe postmodernity took its place. Others think modernity is still going on, just changing.

Postmodernity can mean how a person feels about a postmodern society. It can also mean the conditions in a society that make it postmodern. It's also a historical time period. It's important to know that postmodernity is different from postmodernism. Postmodernism is about ideas and styles in art, culture, and thinking. Think of them as two big ideas that are connected and keep changing our world today.

Some people don't agree that modernity ended. They see the time after World War II as a continuation of modernity, which they call late modernity.

What Postmodernity Means

Postmodernity describes a state or condition that comes after, or reacts to, what is "modern." For example, postmodern art is art that came after modern art.

Modernity is a period often linked to the Industrial Revolution or the Age of Enlightenment. In philosophy and critical theory, postmodernity means the state of society that exists after modernity. Philosophers like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard use this idea.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas said that a main goal of modernity was to make progress. This was done by using rationality (thinking logically) and hierarchy (levels of power) in public life and art. Lyotard saw modernity as a time of constant change, always trying to make progress. Postmodernity, for him, is when constant change becomes normal. The idea of "progress" itself might not seem as important anymore.

Other thinkers like Fredric Jameson (a literary critic) and David Harvey (a geographer) connect postmodernity to "late capitalism." This is a stage of capitalism where workers and money can move around very easily. Harvey called this "time and space compression." They think this period started when the Bretton Woods system (a global economic agreement after WWII) broke down.

Some people see modernity as a failure, leading to terrible events like Auschwitz and Hiroshima. They view postmodernity as a positive step forward. However, other philosophers, who still believe in the "modern project," see postmodernity as a negative result of postmodern ideas. For example, Jürgen Habermas argues that postmodernity brings back old ideas that go against the Enlightenment. He believes the modern project is not finished. In this view, postmodernity is often seen as a negative term.

Postmodernism: Ideas and Art

Postmodernity is a condition or a state of being. It's linked to changes in how things are made and how society works. These changes have happened globally, especially in Western countries, since the 1950s.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, is a way of thinking. It's a philosophy about art, literature, politics, and society. It includes new movements in the arts that started around the 1920s.

Both terms are used by thinkers to describe parts of today's culture, economy, and society. These are results of life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This includes things like authority becoming less centralized and knowledge becoming something that can be bought and sold.

The connection between postmodernity and ideas like critical theory or sociology is much debated. The terms "postmodernity" and "postmodernism" are often hard to tell apart. Postmodernity is often seen as a result of postmodernism.

This period has had many political effects. Its "anti-ideological ideas" seem to be linked to movements for women's rights, racial equality, and gay rights. They also connect to some forms of anarchism and the peace movement. Even the current anti-globalization movement shows some of these ideas. While these groups don't fully adopt all postmodern ideas, they reflect or use some of its main points.

A Look at History

Some writers, like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, believe that modernity ended in the late 1900s. They say a new period, postmodernity, followed it. Others, like Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, think modernity simply continued and changed. Still others argue that modernity ended with the Victorian Age in the 1950s.

Postmodernity has had two main phases:

• The first phase started in the late 1940s and 1950s. It ended with the Cold War. During this time, media like TV had limited channels. This meant only a few powerful media sources existed. Television became the main source of news. Manufacturing became less important in Western economies, but trade grew.
• A big cultural change happened in 1967–1969. The baby boom generation, who grew up with postmodernity, wanted more power in politics, culture, and education. They held protests and acts of rebellion. These actions showed young people's opposition to the old ways. This period is linked to Marshall McLuhan. He was a philosopher who studied how living in a media culture affected people. He said that being part of mass media was freeing because it loosened the power of local social rules.

The second phase of postmodernity is called "digitality." This means the growing power of personal and digital ways to communicate. This includes fax machines, modems, cable TV, and high-speed internet. Digital tools let people change almost any part of the media. This has caused disagreements between those who create content and those who use it, especially over intellectual property. It also led to a "new economy" where information costs are very low.

Digitality, or "being digital," became a separate condition from postmodernity. The ability to change popular culture items, the World Wide Web, using search engines to find knowledge, and telecommunications led to a "convergence." This created a "participatory culture," as Henry Jenkins described it.

A key moment for this era was the fall of the Soviet Union and China opening up in 1991. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" in 1989. He thought that big wars over basic values would stop because all problems would be solved. This idea of an "end" was also shared by Arthur Danto. In 1984, he said that Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes asked the right questions about art, meaning art had reached its end.

How Society Changed

Fredric Jameson points out several things that make postmodernity different from modernity:

• "New kind of superficiality": He means that old ways of understanding things (like having an "inside" and an "outside") are no longer used.
• Rejection of "Utopian gesture": Modern art tried to make misery beautiful. Postmodern art, however, sees the world as a set of copies or "simulacra" (things that look real but aren't). Modern art tried to give meaning to the world, but postmodern art sees this as pointless.
• "Waning of affect": This means a decrease in a certain kind of strong emotion. Not all emotion is gone, but a specific type is less common. Jameson notes that "pastiche" (copying styles without humor) becomes more common than "parody" (copying with humor). This is because personal styles are harder to find.
• Distance is "abolished": He argues that in postmodernity, we are so surrounded by everything that we lose our sense of place. This "new global space" is a key part of postmodernity.
• Culture's role changes: In the modern age, culture was somewhat separate from everyday life. In the postmodern age, culture has grown to cover everything. Everything becomes "cultural." The idea that culture can be separate from the world of money and power is outdated.

Postmodern Society in Social Studies

Postmodern sociology looks at how life changed in the late 20th century in industrialized countries. This includes the widespread use of mass media and mass production. It also includes the rise of a global economy and a shift from making goods to providing services. Jameson and Harvey described it as consumerism. This is where making and distributing things became very cheap, but social connections became rarer.

Other thinkers say postmodernity is a natural reaction to mass broadcasting in a society used to mass production and mass politics. Sociologists believe postmodernity came from faster transportation and wider communication. It also came from the ability to stop making everything the same. This led to a system that values more types of wealth than before.

Things that show postmodernity include:

• The importance of television and popular culture.
• Easy access to information and mass communication.
• More resistance to making sacrifices for progress, seen in environmentalism and the anti-war movement.
• In developed countries, a growing focus on civil rights and equal opportunity. This includes movements like feminism and multiculturalism.

The postmodern political world has many different ways for people to be citizens and take political action. These involve fighting against unfairness or feeling left out, often in groups based on gender or ethnicity. The modern political world was more focused on class struggles.

Some theorists, like Michel Maffesoli, think postmodernity might lead to less individualism. They believe it could create a new "neo-Tribal" era, where people form smaller, close-knit groups.

According to postmodernity theories, today's economic and technological conditions have created a society that is decentralized and dominated by media. In this society, ideas are often just "simulacra"—copies of copies, without a true, original source of meaning. Globalization, caused by new ways of communicating, making things, and traveling, has led to this decentralized life. It creates a global society with many cultures, without one main center of power or ideas. The postmodern view is that shared understanding, not objective truth, will be the main way people communicate. The widespread sharing of information changes how readers and what they read interact, and how consumers and producers relate.

Postmodernity as a Change in How We Know Things

Another way to think about postmodernity is as a big shift in how people understand and justify knowledge. This idea suggests that how we communicate and prove what we know changes along with other societal changes. The cultural and technological changes of the 1960s and 1970s included such a shift. This shift is what is called the move from modernity to postmodernity.

Criticisms

People criticize postmodernity in several ways:

• Some reject both modernism and postmodernity.
• Some support modernism and believe postmodernity is missing important parts of the modern project.
• Some are within postmodernity but want to change or improve it.
• Others believe postmodernity is just a passing phase, not a lasting way society is organized.

Quotes

• "We could say that every age has its own postmodern... I believe that every age reaches moments of crisis... The sense that the past is restricting, smothering, blackmailing us." — Umberto Eco

See also

In Spanish: Posmodernidad para niños

Images for kids

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  A robot representing the future.

Sources

• Anderson, Perry (1998). The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso.
• Deely, John (2001). Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Self Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Zygmunt Bauman (2000). Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Ulrich Beck (1986). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
• Seyla Benhabib (1995). "Feminism and Postmodernism" in (ed. Nicholson) Feminism Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge.
• Judith Butler (1995). "Contingent Foundations" in (ed. Nicholson) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge.
• Manuel Castells (1996). The Network Society.
• Guénon, René (1927). The Crisis of the Modern World. Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis.
• Guénon, René (1945). The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times. Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis.
• Harvey, David (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Ihab Hassan (2000), From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context, text online.
• 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)
• Charles Arthur Willard. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. (1996).