ABSTRACT
According to Kirby (2009), contemporary modernity, or what he terms ‘digimodernity’, has several important characteristics. For example, it disdains the past, emphasizes the present, and ignores the future. This is evidenced by the viewing of the past as less knowledgeable, the propagandizing of loans for the present, and the marginalizing of savings for the future, respectively. Such focus on living in the present tends neither to learn from experiences of the past nor to think about implications for the future. Besides being engulfed by the present, digimodernist society is also characterized by greater production of autistic traits in the population. On the one hand, the spread of autism is encouraged by the advent of new technologies, especially computers, the Internet, and smartphones, which enable individuals to engage with the virtual world but disable them from socializing in the real world. On the other, it is reinforced by the growing trend towards valorizing acting on personal impulses in the mass media, including broadcast and digital media, without regard to other people or social conventions: ‘[The media] may fetishize an absence of empathy and a solitary, cruel fantasy potency; or they may romanticize a state of helplessly total and self-harming isolation from society’ (Kirby, 2009, p. 230). What is more, digimodernist society is culturally antielitist in the sense that the weight of one’s cultural judgment or evaluation has nothing to do with one’s cultural knowledge or training; hence the flattening of expertise and the cult of amateurism. The rationale behind this phenomenon is that consumerism, as the dominant ideology of cultural critique today, not only levels the interpretive ground by dictating that one person’s money is as good as another’s, but also fosters an infantilized popular culture by privileging the response of the targeted market.
