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Some authors, such as Lyotard and Baudrillard, believe that modernity ended in the late 20th century and thus have defined a period subsequent to modernity, namely postmodernity, while others, such as Bauman and Giddens, would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. Others still contend that modernity ended with the Victorian Age in the 1900s.[2] Postmodernity has been said[by whom?] to have gone through two relatively distinct phases, the first beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s and ending with the Cold War (when analog media with limited bandwidth encouraged a few, authoritative media channels) and the second beginning at the end of the Cold War (marked by the spread of cable television and "new media" based on digital means of information dissemination and broadcast). The first phase of postmodernity overlaps the end of modernity and is regarded by many[by whom?] as being part of the modern period (see lumpers/splitters, periodization). Television became the primary news source, manufacturing decreased in importance in the economies of Western Europe and the United States but trade volumes increased within the developed core. In 1967-1969 a crucial cultural explosion took place within the developed world as the baby boom generation, which had grown up with postmodernity as its fundamental experience of society, demanded entrance into the political, cultural and educational power structure. A series of demonstrations and acts of rebellion - ranging from nonviolent and cultural, through violent acts of terrorism - represented the opposition of the young to the policies and perspectives of the previous age. Opposition to the Algerian War and the Vietnam War, to laws allowing or encouraging racial segregation and to laws which overtly discriminated against women and restricted access to divorce, increased use of marijuana and psychedelics, the emergence of pop cultural styles of music and drama, including rock music and the ubiquity of stereo, television and radio helped make these changes visible in the broader cultural context. This period is associated with the work of Marshall McLuhan, a philosopher who focused on the results of living in a media culture and argued that participation in a mass media culture both overshadows actual content disseminated and is liberating because it loosens the authority of local social normative standards. The second phase of postmodernity is defined by "digitality" - the increasing power of personal and digital means of communication including fax machines, modems, cable and high speed internet, which has altered the condition of postmodernity dramatically: digital production of information allows individuals to manipulate virtually every aspect of the media environment. This has brought producers into conflict with consumers over intellectual capital and intellectual property and led to the creation of a new economy whose supporters argue that the dramatic fall in information costs will alter society fundamentally. It began to be argued that digitality or what Esther Dyson referred to as "being digital" had emerged as a separate condition from postmodernity. Those holding this position argued that the ability to manipulate items of popular culture, the World Wide Web, the use of search engines to index knowledge, and telecommunications were producing a "convergence" which would be marked by the rise of "participatory culture" in the words of Henry Jenkins and the use of media appliances, such as Apple's iPod. The simplest, but not necessarily most correct demarcation point of this era is the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberalisation of China in 1991. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History" in 1989 in anticipation of the fall of the Berlin wall. He predicted that the question of political philosophy had been answered, that large scale wars over fundamental values would no longer arise since "all prior contradictions are resolved and all human needs satisfied." This is a kind of 'endism' also taken up Arthur Danto who in 1984 acclaimed that Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes asked the right question of art and hence art had ended. |
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