Postmodernism

Modern versus Postmodern

Modern education is connected to an era of print technology and literacy based on reading books. As Marshall McLuhan argued in the mid-1960s, in works such as Understanding Media, different societies have various dominant media that provide diverse modes of society, culture, and education. McLuhan distinguishes between premodern oral culture and traditions, modern print culture, and (postmodern) electronic culture. In traditional, premodern societies, education is oral and transmits relatively fixed and changing traditions and a hierarchic, authoritarian social structure.

For McLuhan, the major instrument of modernity was the emergence of print technology that created an entirely new modern culture, and modes of education and subjectivity with print media dominant. Modern culture and education were highly nationalistic, often determined by the state and reproducing national cultures. Modern education tended to be secular, following the enlightenment and predicated on a separation of church and state. Modern education was organized on the factory and industrial system with public and private buildings and grounds, and classes organized around time periods.

In McLuhan's view, new electronic technologies create new modes of culture connected to media like radio, film, television, and now computers, and create new forms of subjectivity that are more sensory, multimodal, fragmented, and decentered. For McLuhan, there is a misfit between the experiences of students in a rationalized, abstract, book culture environment of schooling and the more kaleidoscopic and aestheti-cized media culture in which they are immersed.

[Page 607]Sherry Turkle, in her 1995 book, Life on the Screen, describes the emergence of personal computer technologies and the novel forms of interaction, identities, and experiences that they are producing. She interprets the shift from big mainframe computers to personal computers as symptomatic of a postmodern shift to an innovative type of computer technology and novel forms of subjectivity and culture. For Turkle, big IBM mainframe computers are bound up with centralization, massification, hierarchy, big government, and corporations, and are thus a symbol for modernity itself. Further, modern computers are connected with mechanistic science that is universalist, rationalist (there is one way to do it), and top-down, with a cult of experts and hierarchy; it is also for Turkle rooted in hard masculine science that is logical and abstract.

By contrast, Turkle claims that personal computers are bound up with a postmodern logic and aesthetics. On her account, postmodern computer technologies are “soft” and “feminine” (e.g., more concrete and ductile), subject to tinkering, more graphic and multimedia, and more expressive, merging art and technology. Whereas modern mainframe computers required highly specialized knowledge and were only accessible to a techno-elite, postmodern personal computers are “user-friendly” and lend themselves to experimental activity and promote creative and multifaceted selves. Personal computers thus nourish a postmodern culture of the iconic surface, for while old modern computers required depth-oriented thinking and in-depth technological know-how to get behind the screen, current computers operate on the surface, requiring only that one point and click to navigate cyberspace.

...