NSFW: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying. A little before 9pm on Wednesday night and I’m standing on the ‘VIP’ balcony of San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom, holding a can of something called ‘MySpace Buzz’ and waiting for Weezer to take to the stage. It’s a weird scene, all told, and not just because I thought Weezer was dead.
The bulk of the weirdness stems from the make-up of the crowd: a dozen feet below me in the main auditorium there are maybe a couple of thousand writhing teenagers – Weezer fans to a (wo)man, cheering and shouting and jumping and sweating and doing all the things I remember doing a little over a decade ago. These are the invited fans; those lucky enough to have been chosen to attend this ‘secret show’, organised by MySpace. You know, for kids. Every so often one of the stage lights picks out a tiny puff of smoke in the crowd. Ah, you crazy kids and your pot: I feel like I’ve been transported back in time. By contrast, there are no kids up on the VIP balcony. Worse still, we’re told that this is the future. Social Media's Top 10 Dirty Little Secrets.
Philosophy Now. Articles Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces. I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, and if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the module is in any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year.
Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. What’s Post Postmodernism? Let me explain. SAI.