Post-digimodernism and the Art of Blogging

There are moments of epiphany or are they lightning strikes on the road to Damascus – my grasp of religious metaphor’s a tad limited. But there are moments when you encounter the incomprehensible and wonder why it’s there:

Well, what about digimodernism, one might ask? This is akin to some of the pairings in Ihab Hassan's famous list of binaries where the qualities of modernism were placed over against the characteristics of postmodernism. If within a thematic there are logically only two possibilities, and modernism is clearly over, and postmodernism clearly followed it, does this mean that the more recent moment will be with us forever, there being no other options?

I would reply that digimodernism does not choose to focus on either time or space in this manner, but that it combines and enmeshes two relatively new definitions of both. "Real time" and "cyberspace" are the twin axes of digimodernism. The digimodern appears at the intersection of the two. It's not so much a matter of choosing one term or the other, but first redefining then superimposing them.

One might ask, might one? About digimodernism? Somehow I think this unlikely but let’s explore a little further clutching our trusty Concise Oxford for the trickier words:

Since its first appearance in the second half of the 1990s under the impetus of new technologies, digimodernism has decisively displaced postmodernism to establish itself as the twenty-first century’s new cultural paradigm. It owes its emergence and pre-eminence to the computerization of text, which yields a new form of textuality characterized in its purest instances by onwardness, haphazardness, evanescence, and anonymous, social and multiple authorship.

So it seems that this ‘digimodernism’ is something to do with the textual analysis of all the crap that we write on the web – a sort of Jacques Derrida meets the blog. That plus the bizarreness of reality TV, mockumentary and the ubiquity of computer gaming. In essence our ‘digimodernist’ already exists except he, she or it remains blissfully unaware that such an exalted status has been thrust upon them!

I wrote a few crown-sourced (well twitter-sourced really) blog posts – the best of which is:

Beards, cats and clever octopusses - thoughts on the World Cup Finals 

This post wasn’t a conscious digimodernist experiment – more of a giggle really. But it approaches this idea of:

In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.

While part of me loves this stuff – especially the arrogance of saying you wish to appeal to the ‘general reader’ and then exclaiming:

These in turn become the hallmarks of a group of texts in new and established modes which also manifest the digimodernist traits of infantilism, earnestness, endlessness and apparent reality.

The rest of me just want to take the piss – but no-one did that better than Paul Jennings!

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Are national newspaper journalists really, really stupid?

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Cigarette may have started M1 blaze

Look it's pretty simple, we get a huge blaze in a scrap yard that closes the M1. And it wasn't caused by someone lobbing a fag end out the window. There is not the slightest - not even a miniscule - chance of this being the case. None. Zilch. Zero.

So why do journalists on national newspapers write this bollocks?

 

 

Social media can't win an election for anyone - get out and knock on doors!

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They’re at it again swallowing the “social media are changing political campaigning” line put out by the blogosphere’s elite. Today Toby Helm in the Observer is peddling this line:

"Election 2010 will show how much the world has changed – and how susceptible election outcomes now are to the unpredictability of events online."

Just let’s be clear, Mr. Helm presents no evidence to support this contention – I’m not a fully fledged psephological anorak but I’m pretty sure there isn’t any evidence of election outcomes being shaped by “events online”. In fact, those last two words are significant and are why Toby Helm and the blogocrats are wrong – events don’t happen on-line, they happen in the real world.

The second reason why Toby Helm and the others frothing out social media cant are wrong, rests with the very selectivity of new media and with the fact that, as I wrote a while back, the electorate are mostly idiots (in the original Greek sense) and I even described them:

"Round here they’re probably in their thirties or forties, employed at a middle management level in business and industry. They worry about how well their kids do at school, they concern themselves with making their family safe, they grumble a bit about paying taxes but have enough cash afterwards for it not to really matter. Such folk are ordinary, hard-working and inherently conservative. But they also see little or no link between the act of voting in a politician from one party or another and the significant things in their lives."

What these folk aren’t doing is reading political blogs, watching Gordon or Dave’s podcasts or YouTube videos or doing anything other than being irritated by politics gatecrashing their gentle Facebook or Twitter entertainment. These people probably won’t be watching the “Great Leaders Debate” – preferring instead whatever else the multitude of channels has dished up for them that day (or maybe a DVD or a computer game). These are good people who understand that life isn’t all about shouty demands for change, who find politicians a little bit sad (if they don’t actively despise them) and really would rather Government bothered more about good services than social engineering.

I like these people but would rather talk with them about football, music, last night's telly, where they’re going on their holidays, the new car…almost any bloody thing but politics. Toby, the next election won’t be won or lost on-line – at best social media will swing a few votes, at worst it will represent a further dumbing down of politics and a greater distance between the politically engaged and the normal man in the street.

Get out and knock on doors!

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