network culture chart

Fredric Jameson’s classic description of Postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is now well over twenty years old. Jameson’s analysis is crucial for understanding late twentieth century thinking, but in the intervening years, culture has changed radically. As part of my Networked Publics fellowship at the Annenberg Center for Communication, I am preparing a series of documents about the cultural dominant that succeeds postmodernism. This material was developed over the last four years with new media architecture collaborative AUDC. Instead of a theoretical piece, I’ll open this discussion with a table outlining some empirical observations about this new condition which we can term "Network Culture," or perhaps "Transcontemporaneity."

Fredric Jameson’s classic description of Postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is now well over twenty years old. Jameson’s analysis is crucial for understanding late twentieth century thinking, but in the intervening years, culture has changed radically. As part of my Networked Publics fellowship at the Annenberg Center for Communication, I am preparing a series of documents about the cultural dominant that succeeds postmodernism. This material was developed over the last four years with new media architecture collaborative AUDC. Instead of a theoretical piece, I’ll open this discussion with a table outlining some empirical observations about this new condition which we can term "Network Culture," or perhaps "Transcontemporaneity."

  Modernism Postmodernism Network Culture
Political Economy
economy production service debt
capital monopoly multinational transnational
regime of accumulation Fordism Post-Fordism Empire
forms of consumption scarcity affluence luxury and clustering
enemy revolutionary communism soviet communism islamic terrorism
Culture
settlement suburbia postsuburbia exurbia
space abstract hyperspace network space
subjectivity autonomous schizophrenic/fragemented subsumed into the object
media mass media niche long tail
dominant mode of art rupture critical appropriation smooth aggregates
authorship author discursive field network
narratives Hegelian narratives end of the grand narrative neo-Hegelianism
music records cassette tape, compact disc file sharing or itunes
portable music transistor radio cassette walkman ipod
sci-fi fantasy metropolis star wars the matrix
past reference antiquity 19th c.-1930s modernism 1960s contemporaneity
disease TB AIDS Ebola, Anthrax, Avian Flu
war World War I, II Vietnam 9/11
computing mainframe personal computer ubiquitous computing
screen-based media Television GUI Web 2.0
urban détournement the dérive skateboarding le parkour
Representative Figures
psychology Freud Lacan Zizek
philosophy Sartre/Heidegger/Wittgenstein Derrida Deleuze
architecture Le Corbusier/Mies Venturi/Eisenman Gehry/Koolhaas

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