Postmodernism is superficial

The nature of postmodernism: that there is no truth, only competing stories is now so familiar that it has become cliché.

The postmodern world is a political world, a conversational world, a decidedly European world where reality is resolved through the interplay of perspectives.

So what is Twitter? Twitter is proof that the postmodern world exists at the edge of  plane – that it is the end of an era but not the end of history – the most you can accomplish in two dimensions. Twitter is proof of a third dimension – a demonstration of the superficiality of postmodernism. Twitter comes from underneath – like Jaws. To the postmodern complexities of global media organisations it was invisible – inconceivable even - emerging destructively from another dimension. Its very destructiveness evidencing a reality beyond the story (here I am distinguishing the chatter on Twitter from Twitter itself).

And so a kind of paranoia spreads along this postmodern skin: what will it be next? AirBnB, Bitcoin? How can the third dimension be reduced to the second? It can't. Notice how even Facebook trembles; will 2015 be Snapchat’s year? Will Facebook be the next Yahoo? Facebook is merely disruption projected onto the plane of commercial activity.

It would be easy to think that this is simply a story about disruptive technologies, i.e. to tell a familiar two-dimensional story which misses the significance entirely.

The significance is this: that postmodernism forgets that we do not tell the stories – we are the story being told. The story that is being told will always be experienced as coming from without, as ‘sent’. As disruptive. It tells us that the future is not all about conversations, as some of us may have thought, but rather about expressing technology (even to the point of destruction).

And so it is not that technology spoils the charm of our postmodern world, it is rather that technology is the form that voice currently takes. A voice which reminds us that we are the story, not the storyteller.