A succinct and concise title is the (or at least a) key to a good paper, right? I cut "A Brief Exploration of Intermediated Experience, Smartphones, and How the Nature of Relationships Is Changing" out of the title and replaced it with "Part One" in an attempt to not overdo it by throwing too many things in here all at once. Looks like I'm off to a rip-roaring start. "Part One," explained simply, seeks to put postmodernity into the context needed for this exploration. I'll explain the importance of paradigm shifts and what they mean in terms of the progression of culture and the resulting "symptoms" of postmodernity that arose and consequently set the stage for the "interpersonal relations" part that will be explored next. Funny that in my friendly little introductory paragraph, I explained things "simply" by using a 40-something word sentence where I throw around terms that really need to be carefully handled in order to convey what I want in the way that I want. I guess that's part of the freedom that comes along with having no intended audience and no set parameters.
Before I begin, though, a clarifying note is needed, as it usually is. Many thoughts and fields of meaning come to mind when the word "postmodern" is mentioned. I do not claim to be well versed in all of them; on the contrary, I find it important to clarify that for the purposes of this essay, I am referring to the specific interpretation that was taught to me last year during a very important and formative course I took. When I expand this essay into a larger theoretical paper, I would like to explore postmodernity in general in a more thorough manner. For now, the brief descriptions and mentions I give will suffice. It's difficult for me to write without citing specific references, as I feel that any theorizing or even relevant commentary should be concretely grounded. This essay is somewhat of a venture on my part that seeks to just explore thought and leave the formal citations for later. An exercise, if you will.
One of the most important concepts to acknowledge when considering the passage of modern to postmodern is the idea that we have lost the sense that our world is completely knowable. In the past, when different paradigms prevailed, the opposite was true. With religion as the prevailing paradigm, the world was explained in clear and knowable terms that, while often oppressive and confining, provided a sense of comfort. As religion was slowly replaced with scientific thought and classical physics took over, though some of this was lost, things were described in concrete terms and were explainable. Of course, that paradigm would go on to be replaced again, and as it did, the Western worldview began its all-important shift from knowable to unknowable. As we shifted away from classical physics and onto Einstein's theories, the universe retained a sort of fundamental uncertainty about it that has proven to have a profound effect on our culture.
Leading up to this shift, it was thought that we would eventually know everything and be able to solve all of our problems. It seemed as though we were progressing towards something, approaching a point at which everything would be uncovered and known and understood. Technology was bathed in an almost exclusively positive and hopeful light, but as it expanded and permeated popular culture more and more, a large amount of anxiety was generated from more sinister uses of technology: the atomic bomb, for instance, or the Nazis' use of technology for less than ethical purposes. It was during this era that technology became a major source of anxiety for us, expressed in countless ways through the pop culture of the time (I could write an entire separate paper outlining these things... and probably will).
As the shift occurred, some major "symptoms" of the postmodern era began to emerge. The purposes of this essay only call for most of them to be briefly expounded upon or skimmed, though they are each worth exploring thoroughly in their own right elsewhere (add this to the ever-growing list of things I'll write about eventually). Lacanian psychoanalysis (particularly the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary), for instance, is exceedingly important in understanding the shift, but cannot be done justice within the confines of an essay that aims to explore another area. The same applies to patriarchy, the commercialization of desire, the escalation of commercialization in general, the dominance of late capitalism, the rise of the virtual, and the extreme penetration of media. They are all shining examples of symptoms of the postmodern, things that subverted the old paradigm and brought about the next one, and things that arose as a result of the shift itself.
The important thing to gleam from all of this, though, is the enduring idea that as time progressed throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the idea that we can know everything was eroded more and more. Psychoanalysis planted the idea in the mind of the public that people cannot be taken at face value, that more lies beneath the surface than we are able to know by outward appearance. Indeed, it posited, you cannot even really know yourself! Within you lies an unconscious with its own motives and memories and worries and fears and desires. Similarly, nature was challenged and manipulated in powerful ways that altered our very concept of what nature itself is. What were once fundamental pillars of our worldview fell apart as nature became manufactured and the preexisting notions of understanding human behavior were shattered. The same rang true in many other fields-- again, the bottom line was that what was once knowable and apparent was increasingly no longer so.
What's interesting about all of this, and what I'm getting at with describing this, is the idea that we live in the "Information Age." As the world becomes more photographed, more videotaped, more measured, more recorded in a thousand different ways, a sense of irony begins to set in. The more information we accumulate, the less certainty we have! In the postmodern era, there developed a sense that information is manufactured in order to create a reality. This, above all else, is what I want to emphasize as we prepare to continue on in this analysis. We have exponentially more and more information being thrown at us from exponentially more and more sources, and this seems, paradoxically, to serve only to make things less and less certain. Rather than clearing things up and bringing them back to the knowable, comforting reality of the past, we begin to lose the very nature of reality as a fundamental concept! Take something like the September 11th attacks: countless records of what happened, thousands of videos and recorded phone calls and first person accounts, yet there remains a large black question mark over what really happened that day. New sources appear in many cases to only raise more questions and uncertainty. Conspiracy theories, conflicting accounts, news media with specifically targeted agendas, and perhaps even the sheer volume of information itself all rise up and collaborate to leave much more doubt than would have been there if we had been presented with less information. We are left, in the midst of this Information Age, less certain about things than we have ever been. At the same time, we are being constantly bombarded with overwhelming amounts of information and the stated notion that we now have more knowledge available to us than ever before.
To be continued with Part Two, which will focus on Intermediated Experiences and Part Three, which will tie all of this together with the specific example of Smartphones. Part Four will get to the nucleus of this particular subject, examining how relationships and socialization have concretely changed (and are still actively changing, perhaps more so than ever) as a result of all of these components.
