Postmodernism - "Living Tomorrow Today"

Dr Abe V Rotor
"Postmodernism claims that modernity which began with 'the Enlightenment', industrialism, Darwin and Marx, has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly contemporary culture full of contested meanings. The resulting postmodern culture embodies parody, pastiche and cultural cross-over. It is a virtual world of hyperreality containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace and Fukuyama's proclaimed 'end of history'..." - Authors of Introducing Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought. Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism (the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known).

To a layman postmodernism has virtually limitless applications: 

• Living in a home twenty years or so to pay, under various amortization arrangement;
• driving a car likewise acquired through down payment and installment plan;
• selling the potential harvest of a crop like wheat, even before it is the planted, or even if the cropping season has yet to come. (future marketing); 
• melting clocks of Salvador Dali's surrealism; 
• supplying the missing arms of Venus de Milo, and at the end deciding not to. 
• carrying smartphone or tablet all the time, and updating its features with new models; 
• model of [de]FORM[mation] in Picasso's art, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; 
• credit cards, advantage cards, discount cards, VIP cards in a wallet; 
• wearing oversized or undersized RTWs, fashion or for whatever reason; 
• gay is gaining acceptance by society; gay marriages rising, legalized in certain states in the US, some countries in Europe. 

• obesity is a major problem in health, employment, sports, design and engineering, among others. Governments in obese populations are now intervening into the epidemic before it gets out of hand. 
• increasing role of women, even surpassing that of man, in many aspects. Janet Yellen takes the helm of the US Federal Reserve, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Yinluck Shirawartra of Thailand, Dilma Rousseff, first woman elected president of Brazil.
• wearing coat-and-tie, short pants and rubber shoes;
• drive-in funeral parlor (e-libing);
• e-learning, e-library, e-mail, e-commerce;

• Man-induced calamities creating never heard havoc;
• shifting of currency - Latvia will adopt the euro becoming the 18th country to switch to the EU's current currency. Similar moves are being planned by other countries to balance the US dollar currency.
• bitcoin, (PHOTO, above) software currency, a peer-to-peer payment system and digital currency introduced as open source software (cryptocurrency). (photo)
• rise of nones, people who move away from organized religions;
• globalization, homogenization, global village, terms about our "shrinking" world; 

• From Einstein's E=mc2, comes the discovery of now Higg's Boson that gives mass to matter, known as God's Particle; 
• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. PHOTO, right
• Human Genome Map tells a person's genetic makeup - reference for health, job, career, marriage, etc. 
• longevity increasing, more and more centenarians all over the world; 
• music revival of classics and oldies, on the other, avant-garde music on the rise; 

• Unmanned war machines - drones (e-warplanes). Air force stealth drones spend up 24 hours behind enemy lines without being detected. PHOTO
• unmanned testing of NASA's Orion designed to take humanity into deep space.
• private space race (not the Col Way space race) is on: SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, Virgin Galactic, Orbital Sciences Corp., aimed mainly at space tourism.
• emerging cultural center - Riga, Latvia will become the 2014 European Capital of Culture, a shift from traditional Western Europe and other regions.
• world design capital will shift from the West to Cape Town, South Africa.
• odds of a serious strike - Asteroid colliding with Earth - this year are very, very low.
• new cures for old ailments: a valve that can fix your heart, pills that stop Hepatitis C, a vaccine for malaria, a once-a-week medication for diabetes, a better breast-cancer drug.

• Death of the PC (Personal Computer); desktops and laptops are on the decline.We now carry computers in our pockets, palm size or even smaller.
• fossil fuel independent cars: hybrid cars (Prius), battery cars, solar powered cars, hydrogen-powered cars. What's next is car that can also fly and cruise on water.

• One World Trade Center will be completed, 13 years after 9/11, at 1,776 ft (541 m). it is the tallest building in the US. (PHOTO)
• finding other Earth-like planets in the universe that can also support life. There are more than 4,200 potential exoplanets, perhaps billions in an entire galaxy like our Milky Way.
• There will be as many mobile-phone subscriptions in the world as there are people (UN's prediction).
• Facebook now has one billion users 10 years after its launching, and still increasing.
• testing asteroid mining technology in space (Planetary Resources).

• China's e-commerce market becomes the biggest in the world. It will have more online shoppers than there are people in the US. (Forester Research)
• crisis, and emergence, of new leadership, fueled by the new "enlightenment' brought about by social media, mass media and distance or e-learning.
• down fall of dictators (Qaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt); weakening of the dynasty political system. (Kennedy's, Sukarno s, Peron's)
• emerging people-based leadership, grassroots focused, Christ-like, Gandhi-like, Mandela-like, Lincoln-like.

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Scenario of a baby born in 2014
(By Alice Park, Time January 13, 2014)

Evaluate the scenario of 2014 today, after more than 5 years

• If girl, her name is likely to end in - lyn, as in Marilyn, Annalyn, Genelyn. (Likely a girl, a margin chance over a boy)
• 11 billion world's population during her lifetime. She will share the planet with 3 billion more people who haven't been born yet.
• 172 million. That's how many she will be competing with for a job when she will be in her 20s.
• 1 to 2 children. She will have few siblings, since families will remain small.
• 69 years. She will probably live close to seven decades on average.
• technologically dependent generation ever. She is a part of, but more than relying just for communication, she will increasingly use them to learn.
• likely to be among the heaviest children in recorded history - a troubling sign that may actually keep them from outliving their parents.
• by the time she is an adult, she will find herself living in a society with the largest number of elderly ever (about 20% of the population will be over 65 by then, compared to 13.7 today).

Research: Create a similar scenario, say five years - 2025