Postmodern Irony: an Artifact of Information Overload?
The third and final gem from the Oregonian’s blog this evening comes in the form of an entry she made about the postmodern condition and postmodern irony. This entry is a response of sorts. To make the maximum amount of sense out of this post, you should probably read hers first so that I don’t sound like I’m pontificating into the wind.
Read it? Cool, let’s get pontifical.
I propose that postmodern irony is a byproduct of increased media saturation and knowledge sharing. For something to be ironic, there has to be juxtaposition with something else — an unlikely combination of similarity and contrast that we interpret as humorous because there’s almost no other way to process it.
I think it’s possible that the dramatic increase in information flow and the democratization of information access over the last few decades has helped create both the postmodern condition and the sub-phenomenon of postmodern irony. Daily we find ourselves awash in information: 500-channel digital cable, broadband internet access, news, sitcoms, radio, e-mail.
The human brain excels at pattern recognition and spotting relationships between disparate things. To our minds, this constant inundation of data creates a kind of cultural house of mirrors in which everything is a reflection of something else. Postmodernism, in other words. It also increases the likelihood of ironic juxtapositions, which may be nothing more than the sensation of the human mind reaching for some new connection in the datascape and finding itself unexpectedly thwarted by a minor detail.
Of course, I could be completely pulling this out of my ass since my reading in this area is fairly minimal. But it feels right, and that’s enough for me. Besides, I believe everything really is related to and reflected in everything else so postmodernity doesn’t bother me that much. And maybe that’s the new paradigm Emma (that’s her name, Emma) mentions in her possibility #1 — the paradigm that will finally move us away from being “post” anything, and into just being.
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