I was reading through an assigned chapter about postmodernism and the world facing college graduates, and this description stuck in my mind:
"We have the feeling we live in a decentered world, a realm of fragmentation and incoherence, without a nucleus or foundation for experience.....Ours is declared an age of image and spectacle, and we are daily bombarded by a variety of sensory assaults--from the shopping center to the TV....We live in an age of "simulacrum," of simulations that take on a life of their own, appearing more "real" than what they represent--even more real than immediate material conditions....For those with the means and the time, life becomes a rich succession of manufactured events, a simulation of the past or future, the end being detachment from the concrete material and social conditions of one's historical moment. One defeats time and space and escapes the depressing features of daily life--the dark side of the new regime--through manufactured public performance."
From "Chapter Three: The Postmodern Predicament" in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures by James Berlin
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Actually that sounds a lot like a lift from Frederic Jameson's The Postmodern Condition which I had to read for my dissertation. I eventually came to the conclusion that everyone can be seperated into being a 'modern' or 'post-modern' person with the latter being more likely the younger you are.
Yeah, looking back at it Jameson is cited within that passage.
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