Hi all, I'm Jed and I'm a Meta-modernist. What is Metamodernism? Its basically someone who is up to date on the latest trends in knowledge and thinking. Back in the 50s we were all "modernists" ... we believed in strong cultural stories, that knowledge was a real and tangible thing, that truth could be explained in simple answers. But we don't think that way any more. Then we had "post-modernism" which was basically admitting that all these stories were just giant narratives, that there was no truth, and what we called truth was just basically repeating what privileged people said in the way that they said it. So postmodernism was all about de-construction and tearing things down and being all hipster about knowledge and ideas. It was the time of the 60s and the 80s ... it was upheaval and questions and trends and dear god a mess load of pop art. A lot of people made some good careers out of postmodernism (myself included) but we kept evolving and pushing the envelope. Postmodernism said: nothing it true and all that culture stuff you do is kind of meaningless. Metamodernsim mixes the two, but in a totally new direction. Metamodernism says, "Hey, sure there's a lot of myth and mistruth in all that knowledge stuff but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater." Sure its all cultural myth and grand narratives and advertising and stories, but you know what - those actually did a lot of good and you can't write off all the beauty, wonder, dollar bills, and culture of the past 6,000 years as "worthless". So you can use myth and narrative, appreciate its structure, employ its strategy, and even buy into it a little, but just recognize that even in doing so you're still dealing with myths, stories and narratives. So we can let go of them or we can embrace them even further by understanding better what all those myths are. Because of that we can use them and put them down, remix them, alter them, love them and leave them, and put them in all kinds of different contexts and use them in different ways. Because face it, unless you believe that early Christians wore business suits and argued for gun laws, that's what's happening any way. The Metamodern age will be known for two things: The embrace of change and the mass exploitation of others because of fanaticism. These are two very opposing things and they will dominate the next 40 years or so - they already are. Trust me all, Fox News was just the start. The level of fanaticism that we are going to mainstream is gonna be epic, as is the amount of newness and change we cause. We're all going to learn about how truth isn't one answer for one problem, its all networked. Its basketwork, crisscrossed, crossing, crossway, latticed, meshed, intersectional, woven. And we're going to show that more and more in the things we do. We're gonna take all the structures and strategies that worked for some things and we're going to apply them to EVERYTHING ELSE. And we'll do a lot of sandcastles too -- you know, that crazy word in programming for "spaces where we can code just to code even if it goes nowhere or just makes weird things" because that's what art is ... its a giant sandcastle environment. And really that's what culture is: its a giant Sandcastle environment just to keep experiencing things. Change. That's a big freaking word to us. Other Metamodernists call it "oscillation" but let's not get all big and heady -- we're in the age of change. Its also the The internet puts all that knowledge in front of our face, so we're also in the age of experience. Change and Fanaticism might just be secondary to experience, and experience might just be the word that binds them. I mean, both people those who keep changing, and those who cling to their beliefs ... both of them are doing it for the experience. Because I mean, experience is where its at. That's REAL truth. We've spent the last several thousand years trying to use words to say true things ... but damn dude, those are just words. The word Koala, for instance ... will NEVER BE AN ACTUAL KOALA. Get over it. Words aint it. Its the experience of a Koala that is whats true about it. So its tempting to say that knowledge is unobtainable - like the postmodernists did - but that isn't the case. Its certainly obtainable and describable ... but its just experience. The words we use will always be oscillating/changing but they'll only ever get closer and closer to describing truth. They'll get CLOSE to the truth, but they'll never actually reach it. And once they get REALLY close, they'll change the very thing they describe. So in the face of the internet a lot of people are going to change and remix and create whole new modes of being and just keep oscillating. We're gonna get down with experience. But some of us are gonna buckle down too and all the great conflicts of the next 40 years are going to be about who is controlling experience and how they are framing it.
via Jedediah Walls, Media Psychologist http://ift.tt/1wcccjp