Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND POSTMODERNITY
propaganda. Readers familiar with the writing of Frankfurt School Marxists will
recognise this pessimistic vision, but conservative critics such as T. S. Eliot and
Frank and Queenie Leavis felt much the same about the likely effects of film,
radio and mass-circulation newspapers (Swingewood, 1977).
Against this, Vattimo argues that the proliferation of media has given voice
to diverse groups, regions and nations, so much so that audiences cannot but
encounter many ‘realities’ and ‘perspectives’ on issues and events. Nowadays
‘minorities of every kind take to the microphones’ (Vattimo, [1989] 1992, p. 5)
and thereby they disseminate worldviews which lead to a collapse in notions of
the ‘true’. From this comes freedom because, says Vattimo, the belief in reality
and its associated persuasive force (‘you must do this because it is true’) is lost.
How can you believe that any more when every day media expose you to a
plurality of competing interpretations of events and competing definitions of what
events are worth thinking about?
Differences come to the forefront of everyone’s attention as multiple realities
(sexual, religious, cultural, ethnic, political and aesthetic) get time on the
airwaves. Bombarded by the very diversity of signs, one is left confused and
shaken, with nothing sure any longer. The result, however, is actually liberating
and definitively postmodern, with experience taking on the ‘characteristics of
oscillation, disorientation and play’ (p. 59). Here Vattimo finishes up in pretty
much the same position as Baudrillard. A multiplicity of signs paradoxically
subverts the sign’s capacity to signify, and people are left with spectacle, nonmeaning
and freedom from truth. Reminding oneself that Vattimo wrote this
before the widespread availability of the Internet, and with this the advent of chat
groups, blogs, instant news and solicitations of a spectacular range, surely adds
credence to his propositions.
Mark Poster
Mark Poster (b.1942), an American based at the University of California, Irvine,
is a long-time student and translator of Baudrillard. He forwards the proposition
that the postmodern age is distinguished from previous societies because of
what he designates a ‘mode of information’ (Poster, 1990). This suggestion of
fundamental change emanating from developments in information is especially
interesting both because of its elaboration of themes found in Baudrillard and
because of its emphasis on the novelty of the postmodern era.
Poster’s claim is that the spread of information technologies, and hence of
electronically mediated information, has profound consequences for our way of
life and, indeed, for the ways in which we think about ourselves, because it alters
our ‘network of social relations’ (Poster, 1990, p. 8). Elaborating this principle, he
proposes a model of change based on different types of ‘symbolic exchange’
(p. 6) which has three constituents:
1 The era of oralism when interaction was face to face. Then the way of life was
fixed and unchanging, the self embedded in the group, and signs corresponded
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