Becoming an Interstitial Node

Last week we had a lecture about modernism v post-modernism and what it means to be an interstitial node. Firstly an interstitial node is a point i.e me, a person connected to various other points i.e the rest of the multimedia community. The idea behind this is that by being connected for example via social networking (blogs,facebook,myspace,forums etc.) on the internet creative thinkers can easily share thoughts feelings and ideas and learn from one another.

This is where modernism and post modernism comes into the lecture. Traditionally the concept of modernism centers about the author, the creative individual who will create, invent. This individual will take the credit for the discovery and hopefully it will benefit mankind. Post Modernism however celebrates the death of the author and is about how a society of creative thinkers can feed off others ideas and findings, combine or rework them to create something new. Manuell Castells a post modernist sociologist speaks of the hyper text, a way of linking relevent text in an encyclopedic knowledge (much like wikipedia), he says the hyper text is a vehicle of communication, a provider of shared cultural codes. This means we can gather information from various standpoints and cultural backgrounds and from this we can establish our own beliefs and then share these with others.

Simon Perkins claims that Modernism is much like an old quarry, most of the precious resources have now been extracted and it is now very difficult to think of any new inventions, as if we have reached our original creative pinnacle. Rather than extracted new materials from this metaphorical quarry we can combine our existing resources to create something new and exciting.

I do not feel this is totally true as no idea is truly original, all things are inspired by something right back to nature, post modernism is another perspective. This is pretty much what post modernists believe except working in a collaborative society rather than a individual or a team. Regardless I think post modernism has relevence now more than ever considering the recent leaps and bounds made in social networking thanks to the internet.