Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PKop | Hacker News Reader

>Twitter Is Not Real Life

Maybe this depends on if real life is defined by quantity or quality.

Quoting comment section of that article:

"This article proves Twitter is real life. The main people that use it are the politicians, journalists, academics and educated people. To me that fits the 80/20 rule. That's the 20 percent of the population that influences and controls this world."

Is TV real life? Are movies? How about online news sites, are those real life? Especially back when a few monopolies and 3 or 4 channels dominated the discourse, this one-way flow composed of even fewer voices still greatly influenced "real life".

Reminds me of "hyper-reality" defined by Baudrillard. Most people's references points for understanding significant portions of their world-view come from constructed realities of media, not first hand experience anyways. So impassioned debate from extremely-online minority may actually impact the real world in various ways. I know different political issues that only seemed to exist on Twitter 10 years ago made their way into most other nooks and crannies of the real world a few years later.

Wrt baudrillard. It always strikes me how well the modern condition was understood by the 70s. It's equally baffling how little has changed. Perhaps more specifically, the internet is not nearly as much of a transformational technology than say the industrial processes that enabled commoditization or the telecommunication and image reproduction technologies that enabled instant broadcasting.

During the Bush era, my debate coach in HS made the interesting point that neocon conservatives were more 'post-modern' (a tortured term 20 years later) relative to old-school 'truth-seeking', anti-imperialist Leftists like Chomsky

> a tortured term 20 years later

To me, it has helped to see postmodernism more as a literary term, rather than an epoch.

Postmodernists looked at the modernist hellscape and understood it completely: its mechanisms, its origins, its technology, its social dimensions. Then, rather than to draw the correct lessons, they threw up their hands in defeat and capitulated.

In the 2020s, we are still in the same modernist dystopia from the 70s, the wagon kept rolling down the exact same mountain as it has since then.

I think so too. It’s become a term which means so many different things to so many different people, I don’t know how much value there is in calling someone a “postmodernist” from a political standpoint these days.

Vonnegut, Pynchon, Wallace etc. are what one should think about when they’re discussing postmodernism. People relating it back to gender or race theory is kinda silly IMO.

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