Postmodern Perspectives
According to this perspective, all existing theories
have been unsuccessful in explaining social life in
modern societies that are characterized by postindustrialization, consumerism and global
communications
Postmodernists oppose grand narratives (ie.
Generalizations developed in academic isolation)
–Instead they emphasize the free-flowing sharing of
ideas and the removal of boundaries between academic
disciplines
Postmodern Perspectives
Post modernists have been criticized for ignoring
many of the central problems of our time
–For example: inequalities based
also inequalities based on global,
oppression
on race, class, gender;
political and economic
Postmodern Perspectives
Response Questions
What characterizes the postmodern society?
According to the postmodernists, what does our
fast-paced, high-tech world force us to do?
According to the postmodern approach, what did
the media’s representation of the Heaven’s Gate
mass suicide reflect?
Postmodern Perspectives
Response Questions
•What characterizes the postmodern
society?
•Postmodern societies emerged after WWII. They are
characterized by an information explosion and an
economy in which large numbers of people either provide
or apply information, or are employed in service jobs (eg.
Fast food server, health care worker).
•They are also characterized by the rise of a consumer
society and the emergence of a global village, in which
people around the world communicate with one another
by electronic technologies such as television, telephone,
fax, email and the Internet.
Postmodern Perspectives
Response Questions
According to the postmodernists, what does our
fast-paced, high-tech world force us to do?
–Our fast-paced, high-tech world forces us to develop our
own coherent narrative order (ie. world view) by which
we understand ourselves and the social events that take
place around us.
Postmodern Perspectives
Response Questions
According to the postmodern approach, what did
the media’s representation of the Heaven’s Gate
mass suicide reflect?
–According to the postmodern approach, the media’s
representation of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide (where
they said that the Internet played an actual role in the
fatal event), reflects a world in which individuals and
the media may establish “fake” realities and pseudoexplanations in the absence of real knowledge about
events or causes.