Digimodernism

1. Postmodernism's Demise Paves the Way for a New Cultural Logic.

Twenty years later, however, the horizon has changed; the dominant cultural force field and systematic norm is different: what was postmodernist is now digimodernist.

A cultural shift. Postmodernism, once a "breath of fresh air," has become "vaguely old-fashioned," its creative period long past. While its traits linger, often as "common sense," it no longer serves as the dominant cultural logic. This transition is evident in various cultural spheres, signaling a profound change in how we create, consume, and interpret culture.

Signs of exhaustion. The decline of postmodernism is visible in its mainstreaming and subsequent exhaustion. Children's entertainment, like Pixar's Toy Story and DreamWorks' Shrek, initially embraced postmodern hybridity and irony, but later sequels devolved into "postmodernization of the postmodern," becoming tiresome and convoluted. Simultaneously, movements like Dogme 95 in cinema, the New Puritans in literature, and the Stuckists in art explicitly rejected postmodern artifice, cynicism, and depthlessness, yearning for truth, reality, and a return to modernist values, however flawed their execution.

The end of theory. The academic world also grappled with the "death of theory," acknowledging that the "golden age of cultural theory is long past." Thinkers like Terry Eagleton argued for a return to fundamental questions of morality, metaphysics, and truth, rejecting postmodern anti-essentialism and its perceived political impotence. This intellectual reorientation, though often nuanced, underscored a broader cultural weariness with postmodernism's tenets, clearing the intellectual landscape for a successor.

2. Digimodernism Redefines Textuality Through Digital Intervention.

In its pure form the digimodernist text permits the reader or viewer to intervene textually, physically to make text, to add visible content or tangibly shape narrative development.

A new textual paradigm. Digimodernism represents a fundamental rupture in textuality, unlike the superficial evolution seen between modernism and postmodernism. Its core innovation is that the reader or viewer actively participates in creating the text. This isn't metaphorical interpretation; it's a physical act of making visible content or shaping narrative progression, driven by digital technology and the "digits"—fingers and thumbs—that click and key.

Defining characteristics. This new textuality manifests several key traits:

• Onwardness: Texts are perpetually growing and incomplete.
• Haphazardness: Their future development is undecided and can branch in multiple directions.
• Evanescence: They are difficult to capture, archive, and do not endure in a fixed form.
• Fluid-boundedness: Lacking clear physical limits, they can be endless.
• Anonymous, multiple, and social authorship: Creation is plural, scattered across pseudonymous communities, and often hierarchical.

Beyond old terminology. Traditional terms like "author," "reader," "viewer," and "listener" become inadequate, requiring a new "antilexicon." Concepts like "interactivity" capture the back-and-forth exchange but often imply a false equality. "Nonlinearity" is frequently a misnomer for nonchronology; digimodernist texts are often ultralinear or antisequential. Even "publishing" is redefined, becoming democratized but devalued, while "reading" sees a quantitative rise but a qualitative decline, favoring scanning over sustained engagement.

3. Proto-Digimodernism: Historical Seeds of a New Textual Form.

Nevertheless, there are certain traits intrinsic to the digimodernist text that existed already before the arrival of digital technology gave them their distinctive contemporary form.

Anticipating the digital. While digimodernism's fully fledged form is new, its core textual traits have historical precursors, appearing as "proto-digimodernism" in texts lacking digital technology. These earlier examples, often marginalized or considered eccentric, displayed characteristics like user-integrated content, fluid authorship, and ephemeral narratives, hinting at the future digital revolution.

Marginalized forerunners. Examples of this nascent textuality include:

• Industrial Pornography: Insists on "reality" but integrates the male viewer's sexual habits into its content and sequencing, making it intelligible only through the user's projected desires. It's anonymous, engulfing, and often disreputable.
• Ceefax (1970s UK): An electronic newspaper accessed via TV, it offered an evanescent, nonsequential textuality, constantly remade and user-oriented, but not user-generated. Its hypnotic, amnesiac quality anticipated digital information flows.
• Whose Line is It Anyway? (1988-98 TV): This improvised comedy show featured audience members as low-level authors, contributing content and shaping sketches. Its haphazard, unstable textuality blurred traditional creative roles, though often collapsing into comedic miscarriage.

Literary experiments. Even literature explored these boundaries: B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969) presented a novel in a box, allowing the reader to choose the order of its sections, thus physically determining the narrative sequence. Pantomime, with its audience participation, also blurred the lines between performer and spectator, though the audience's role remained minimal and controlled. These diverse examples, from the disreputable to the experimental, demonstrate that the seeds of digimodernist textuality were present long before the digital age.

4. Web 2.0: The Digital Heart of Digimodernist Textuality.

The forms of Web 2.0 are the most globally important cultural development of the twenty-first century so far, and they lie at the heart of digimodernism as we currently know it.

The new cultural engine. Web 2.0, encompassing wikis, blogs, social-networking, and file-sharing, is the epicenter of digimodernism. It moves beyond static, read-only websites to platforms where users actively generate, distribute, and collaborate on content. This dynamic, user-driven textuality is a direct manifestation of digimodernism's core principles, making it the most significant cultural development of our time.

Redefining identity and authorship. Web 2.0 platforms fundamentally alter traditional notions of self and creation:

• Chat Rooms: Offer endless, evanescent communication where identity is suspended, allowing users to become "fictive players" in an invented universe, leading to a loss and infinite expansion of selfhood.
• Message Boards: Quantitatively overwhelm original content with a torrent of anonymous, often vitriolic, posts. They represent a systemic failure of communication, driven by a "petty and frustrated megalomaniac" urge to disagree.
• Blogs: Thrive on "onwardness," requiring constant updates to maintain readership. They blend personal narratives with reader comments, creating a perpetually developing, multi-authored text.

Competence and haphazardness. Wikipedia exemplifies the digimodernist challenge to objective competence, allowing anyone to contribute, often leading to unreliability but also serving as a valuable "pre-encyclopedia." YouTube embodies haphazardness, offering an "infinite gallery" of amateur and professional videos, blurring the lines of expertise. Facebook, by textualizing friendship and making the electronic interface almost invisible, foreshadows a future where human identity is increasingly constituted by digimodernist textuality, blurring the lines between "real" and "textual" lives.

5. Popular Culture Transforms into Children's Entertainment.

To describe a complex development simply, what was once “popular culture” now consists overwhelmingly of a form of children’s entertainment, to the degree that it has become difficult, if not impossible, to make the sort of assumptions regarding its significance that became commonplace in the heyday of Tarantino, Blur, Nirvana, and The Simpsons.

The infantilization of culture. A striking aesthetic shift in digimodernism is the pervasive transformation of popular culture into children's entertainment. This isn't merely "dumbing down" but a fundamental reorientation of content across media. Half of the top-grossing Hollywood films are now children's fictions, characterized by:

• Child-centric experiences and surrogate-parental figures.
• Pre-democratic societal concepts (kings, superheroes).
• Romanticized archaic figures (dinosaurs, pirates).
• Visual, pre-literate storytelling (cartoons, comics).
• Elision of adult themes like sex and work.

Music and TV follow suit. Popular music, once a site of artistic and social rebellion, now defaults to "children's song," exemplified by boy bands and manufactured pop stars from TV talent shows. Television schedules are dominated by children's and "youth" channels, leading to the infantilization of news and drama. Shows like Friends saw characters regress to simplistic caricatures, reflecting a broader societal trend where adult actors portray juvenile behaviors.

Beyond condemnation. While this shift can be seen as a "ruination" of culture, it also represents a troubled gestation of new narrative forms. Authors like J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, through series like Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, have refurbished children's stories with adult themes and scientific justifications, blurring the lines between "children's" and "adult" literature. This redefinition of narrative, often validated by adult science, suggests a seismic attempt to renew fiction by returning to its foundational storytelling modes.

6. The Rise of the "Apparently Real" and the Decline of Irony.

The apparently real is, then, the outcome of a silent negotiation between viewer and screen: we know it’s not totally genuine, but if it utterly seems to be, then we will take it as such.

Beyond postmodern illusion. Digimodernism's "apparently real" stands in stark contrast to postmodernism's sophisticated, ironic "real" (a social construct or fiction). The apparently real is straightforward, devoid of self-consciousness or irony, and impervious to demystification. It's a shallow, trivial reality—the mere absence of obvious lying—where visible seeming is paramount, and the viewer implicitly agrees to accept it as genuine, even with an underlying awareness of its manipulation.

Ubiquitous manifestations. This aesthetic dominates:

• Reality TV and docusoaps: Present "true accounts of everyday experience" with improvised content, captured and molded by production companies. The "reality" is apparent, but its interest derives from this perceived authenticity.
• Web 2.0: Requires a level of sincerity from users; "trolls" who reject this are anathema. Blogs and amateur YouTube clips thrive on this perceived honesty.
• Masterpieces: The Blair Witch Project (1999) used marketing and "found footage" to create a compelling apparent reality. The Office (2001-03) invented the camera as an implicit character, making the viewer a "hologrammatic projected presence." Borat (2006) used a fictitious self in real situations to expose genuine prejudices.

Concomitant traits. The apparently real is often accompanied by:

• Pseudo-scientific discourse: Reality TV adopts laboratory language (dates, times, "experts") to frame human interactions as experiments.
• Engulfment of the self: Digimodernist texts can be "addictive," overpowering the individual's sense of time and reality, leading to a loss of will and a psychological need for textual engagement.
• Immersion in the present: It lacks historical consciousness, assuming contemporary behaviors and attitudes have always existed, reflecting a societal "sacralizing of the present."

This aesthetic also fuels celebrity culture, which strips famous individuals of competence, presenting them as "exactly the same as anyone else, except famous," focusing on their flaws to project the "realities" of the female reader/viewer.

7. The "Endless Narrative" Reshapes Storytelling in the Digital Age.

This suggests that, in this hypothetical argument, endlessness is the fictional form of onwardness.

A new narrative dominant. Digimodernism favors the "endless narrative," a storytelling mode that, while not literally infinite, is characterized by perpetual expansion, reordering, and a lack of definitive closure. This contrasts with the finite, problem-solving narratives of earlier eras and postmodernism's "open" narratives, which focused on interpretive ambiguity rather than material extension.

Forms of endlessness. This mode is prevalent across contemporary culture:

• Franchises: Narratives like Star Wars are ostensibly complete but capable of endless additions, extensions, and reorderings, constantly reshaping the "whole" without ever definitively establishing it.
• Reality TV: Its open and haphazard nature resembles the subjectively endless flux of life, unfolding without a predetermined conclusion.
• Soaps: Designed to go on indefinitely, halted only by external interference rather than intrinsic plot resolution.
• Continuing Drama: Series like Friends or The West Wing blend episodic completeness with character carryover and real-time aging, creating a continuous shape fractured by semi-independent stories.
• Mythopoeic Sagas: Works like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter draw on ancient oral legends, offering immensely long, heroic narratives structured by the regular opening and closing of episodes within a broader, ongoing framework.

Impact on consumption. This shift caters to the "fan-geek" who has the time and inclination to delve into intricate fictional universes. The unprecedented success of series like Harry Potter demonstrates the power of narratological onwardness, generating a global thirst for continuous installments. This reorientation of interest from the overall arc to minute-by-minute detail is also seen in the popularity of Jane Austen, whose generic plots are less important than her intricate, subtle prose.

8. Videogames as the Exemplar of Digimodernist Super-Subjectivity.

The figure of the computer game player, fingers and thumbs frenetically pushing on a keypad so as to shift a persona through a developing, mutating narrative landscape, engaging with a textuality that s/he physically brings—to a degree—into existence, engulfing him or herself in a haphazard, onward fictive universe which exists solely through that immersion—this is to a great extent the figure of digimodernism itself.

The core of digimodernism. Videogames, having reached a new level of textual sophistication and cultural significance around the millennium, serve as the formal exemplar of digimodernism. The player, through physical interaction, actively brings a "haphazard, onward fictive universe" into existence, embodying the new textuality. This engagement is so profound that it often leads to a sense of engulfment, making the player a synecdoche for the digimodernist individual.

Super-subjectivity defined. The rupturing novelty of videogames lies in their grammatical reliance on "super-subjectivity." This means:

• Inflated self: The player's self maps onto game selves that are vastly expanded, enhanced, or immune (e.g., multiple lives, impunity for violence).
• Pathological traits: This can manifest as latent schizophrenia (one-to-many selves) or narcissism (playing as a single, enhanced character).
• Enforced identification: Unlike passive character identification in film or literature, gaming super-subjectivity is grammatically enforced; you must identify to play.

Textual and artistic implications. Super-subjectivity unifies the ludic and narratological aspects of games, establishing them as texts within digimodernism's redefinition of textuality. However, this very feature poses a challenge to their status as "art." Art, often defined by "beauty plus pity," struggles with super-subjectivity's inherent focus on an expanded "I," which can convey ruthlessness and indifference but struggles to express compassion for the human condition, a quality rooted in the universality of loss and mortality.

9. Digital Technology Reshapes Film and Television's Ontology.

The real revolution is ontological. CGI embodies neither the contents of the mind nor of the world, neither idea nor substance.

Cinema's third age. Digital technology has ushered in a "third age of film" (1990-present), fundamentally reshaping its aesthetic and ontological structures. CGI, initially used for monsters and impossible scenarios (Jurassic Park), now creates entire reality-systems, blurring the line between film and video games. This shift has led to the "infantilization" of popular cinema, as CGI-dominated movies often resemble children's magic shows or theme parks.

New narrative typologies. CGI cinema gives rise to distinct narrative forms:

• Apocalypticist movies: Focus on spectacular, impersonal destruction and victimhood (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow), often echoing real-world traumas like 9/11.
• Historical movies: Revitalize vanished places and reenact ancient battles (Gladiator, 300), often presenting an "alpha male" historiography of power and conquest, sometimes inadvertently resembling neo-conservative propaganda.
• Mythic movies: Create self-sustaining reality-systems with legendary, superhuman figures (Star Wars prequels, Lord of the Rings), moving from adventure to complex mythology. Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is hailed as the first fully fledged masterpiece of digimodernist/CGI cinema.

Television's transformation. TV also undergoes a profound redefinition, moving beyond pure spectacle to "second-wave" digimodernist forms. This includes:

• Viewer as agent: Shows like Big Brother allow viewers to dictate narrative direction through voting, making them "part-authors."
• Innovative formats: Ally McBeal used CGI for expressionistic visualization of thoughts, Peep Show used digital cameras for first-person POV, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire? became a psychological quiz involving the audience.
• Self-scheduling: DVD box-sets and online streaming redefine TV programs as "novels," allowing viewers to consume content at their own pace, bypassing traditional advertising models and transforming the viewer into a "channel."

10. Radio's Digital Renaissance and Literature's Lingering Crisis.

Radio, however, is thriving in the digimodernist era.

Radio's resurgence. Digital technology has paradoxically revitalized radio, enhancing listening experiences with crystal clarity, improving access via the Internet and mobile devices, and enabling personalized consumption through podcasting and "listen again" services. This "digital renaissance" has led to an exponential increase in stations and listeners, particularly for speech radio, which embraces digimodernist textuality.

Digimodernist radio forms. Shows like BBC 5 Live's Victoria Derbyshire exemplify this new radio, fostering open, vigorous debate where listeners contribute via calls, texts, and emails. The presenter acts as an ethical manager, overseeing onward, haphazard, and intellectually inconclusive discussions. Other shows like "Drive" leverage "citizen journalism" for real-time news and travel updates, while "6-0-6" offers a consumerist, emotional outlet for sports fans. These forms redefine the roles of "writer" and "listener," creating evanescent texts that are constantly being made and remade.

Literature's delayed impact. In contrast, digimodernist literature is "yet to come," as the high cost of innovation in film and TV has not yet translated to novel and poetry production. The primary impact has been on publishing, with Amazon, print-on-demand, and e-books revolutionizing access and distribution. Reading itself has become more social and commercialized, with book clubs and author tours shaping textual meaning through collective use.

Hypertext's failure. Hypertext, once heralded as the future of literature, has largely failed to gain traction. Its promise of reader-sequenced text now seems functionally old-fashioned compared to Web 2.0's user-generated content. Hypertext fictions often feel joyless and disorienting, lacking the cumulative pleasure or coherent narrative drive needed to engage a broad audience, leaving it a niche academic curiosity rather than a cultural force.

11. The "Invention of Autism" as a Societal Mirror.

It’s not then absurd to hypothesize that we inhabit a society uniquely adapted to the frequent ascription of autism and the identification of autistic traits.

A diagnostic surge. The dramatic 25-fold increase in autism diagnoses since 1978 suggests not just improved clinical recognition, but also a society uniquely predisposed to identifying and producing autistic or pseudoautistic traits. This phenomenon is explored in cultural works like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and films like Blade Runner and Rain Man, which depict worlds or characters exhibiting profound social alienation and lack of empathy.

Technological and cultural drivers. While new technologies like computers, the Internet, and videogames contribute to desocialization, solitude, and diminished empathy—fostering pseudoautistic traits—they alone cannot explain the diagnostic rise. Instead, autism is increasingly understood as the "excluded other" of contemporary society, a counter-model to hegemonic values.

Autism as antithesis. Society's peculiar values define "normalcy" in ways that make autistic traits stand out:

• Overpopulation/Surveillance: Autism's need for solitude clashes with constant social intrusion.
• Economic Flexibility: Its insistence on sameness and repetition resists the demand for constant restructuring and retraining.
• Social Skills Fetishization: Autism's preference for concrete facts over superficial chatter contrasts with the valorization of gregariousness and "social skills."
• "Extreme Male Brain" Theory: The disproportionate diagnosis in males links masculinity to mental impairment, making autism the "sickness of masculinity."
• Anti-Intellectualism: Autism's embrace of exhaustive knowledge, rationality, and rigor stands against a societal denigration of cleverness and non-utilitarian information.

This societal pressure constructs autism as an incapacity to accept the "sub-intellectual barbarism" of the age, making it a profound mirror reflecting contemporary social anxieties and values.

12. Poisonous Grand Narratives and the Death of Competence Define Digimodernity.

Consumerism is megalomaniacal: it wants everything to be run its way.

The return of grand narratives. Despite postmodernism's supposed "incredulity toward metanarratives," digimodernity is dominated by powerful, often poisonous, grand narratives. Religion, in its public face, frequently appears as a force for violence, ignorance, and oppression, exemplified by acts of terrorism, censorship, and the rise of fundamentalism. This "toxic fundamentalism" leverages advanced technology for medieval ends, demonstrating a post-Enlightenment regression.

Consumerism's totalitarian grip. The most pervasive and destructive grand narrative is consumerism, which transcends mere buying to become a totalizing worldview. It reconfigures all aspects of life:

• Freedom as "choice": Happiness as "retail therapy."
• Social fragmentation: Families splinter into isolated consumption units.
• Education's decline: Universities prioritize student whims over knowledge, fearing to "flunk students" and shrink their "customer base."
• Media's role: Newspapers and magazines merge advertising with journalism, and DVDs sell "extras" that are essentially marketing.

The death of competence. This societal shift is intertwined with "the death of competence"—an eclipse of value in public fields (culture, education, politics, journalism) and a decline in personal expectations (hygiene, finance). Education, for instance, prioritizes "sharpening the vessel" over filling it with knowledge, leading to low intellectual self-esteem and alienation. Politically, "morality" often trumps competence, and policy is driven by prejudice rather than evidence. In cultural matters, consumerism dictates that all judgments are equally valid, regardless of knowledge or training, fostering a "cultural anti-elitism" that is, in fact, a "proto-elitism in denial." This pervasive incompetence, often glamorized by digital culture, is a critical challenge for digimodernity.