postmodernism revision cards

A general descriptive term, which is usually, taken to mean two things. First, it refers to the emergence of modern societies based around things like industrial production, urban living, science, technology, political democracy, rational planning and the growth of the state. Secondly, modernity is characterised by a particular outlook on the world, which sets itself against tradition, superstition and religious interpretations. It celebrates the power of rational understanding, and science in particular, to understand how the world works. As the video makes clear, sociology is closely tied to modernity. Not only did it begin in the nineteenth century as an attempt to understand these ‘new’ modern societies that were developing in Western Europe, it was itself a product of modernity. That is, the idea of understanding how societies work with a view to improving them is a distinctly modern idea.

The social condition preceding modernity based largely on agricultural production and craft industries, rural life, localised personal authority, religious values and traditional action; that is, things were done in certain ways because that was the way they had always been done.

The development of mechanised technology and large scale productive processes, seen most clearly in the factory system. Industrialisation is a major source of the transformation or pre-modern to modern society. Sociology began as attempt to make sense of industrial society.

Originally this was an idea, held by many classical sociologists like Marx and Comte, that human societies were not just changing but were moving forward in very specific directions towards higher forms. While few sociologists hold that view so clearly today, most still believe in progress in a more limited sense: that is, that sociology can (and should) be used to reveal aspects of social life that can (and should) be changed for the better

This refers to processes and beliefs by which the individual and individual rights become increasingly important. Modernity was associated with increasingly individualism and while, most sociologists generally approved of this development, many were also aware of its dangers. For example, Durkheim attributed the rise in suicide rates of developed societies to increasing individualism. The postmodern condition could be characterised as one of super-individualism, where people become increasingly preoccupied with self and self-fulfilment at the expense of obligations to the institutions of wider society.

The term uncertainty is used in a very specific sense here to refer to processes where people become less certain of who they are or what they should be doing and of the world around them. For some sociologists this arises from the fact that people’s identity is less clearly defined by a sense of belonging to particular institutions or cultures, a process resulting in what Giddens has described as ontological insecurity.

In human societies certain forms of conduct and belief, moral codes or religious practices for example, become reproduced by successive generations as accepted and proper ways of doing things. In sociological terms they become social institutions. Thus family, religion, education and government are examples of social institutions. These are organisations which exist over time. Although the people may change the structure continues to exist

The mass media is defined as large-scale organisations which use one or more technologies (newspapers, television, internet etc) to communicate with large numbers of people.

This really relates to the idea that the world of the media is in some way more real than the reality that it attempts to represent. The distinction between reality and fantasy or reality and fiction has become blurred to such a point that it’s almost no longer meaningful to make a distinction between the two. An example of this is would be the fact that people regularly write to soap opera characters as though they were real people with real lives.

Deconstruction is a process, which involves looking at a text and trying to identify what are the key elements within that text. Postmodernists use the word text in a very broad sense, so the text can be literally a book, or a text can be gender, or it can be ethnicity.

This means literally ‘big ideas’ or ‘big stories’ about how the world works; world religions and science are examples of grand narratives. In social science the term grand narratives (or grand theories) is applied to general theories (or perspectives) about how societies work and change. For postmodernists, the diversity and fragmentation of the contemporary world does not allow such general theorising.