Introduction
Almost 150 years ago, a new communications technology appeared in the western part of the United States. Guaranteeing speedy delivery for a price many could afford, this technology transmitted information in a way that quickly redefined long-distance relationships. It brought news, contracts, advertisements, instructions, personal letters, and perhaps even poems from one distant place to another more rapidly and cheaply than ever before, swiftly changing the way people perceived themselves and their positions within larger social and national collectives. This new technology, which created in some senses a kind of information society, was called the Pony Express.
Fast forward: communications technologies are still redefining human relationships, and the complexity of this process has grown exponentially. Rather than exchange information via the Pony Express, we send and receive it instantaneously through email and instant message networks, cellular phones and live webcasts, portable fax machines and three-way telephone calls. Packages sent by mail courier from Oxford, OH may be received in Moscow or Tokyo in less than twenty-four hours, and electronic wire transfers allow billions of dollars to be sent to banks around the globe with just the click of a mouse. Where, in the midst of so much sending and receiving of information--in such an information society--is the individual? How do the ways in which we communicate determine the ways in which we think about each other, both
SINGLY
and as
MEMBERS OF GROUPS MEMBERS OF GROUPS MEMBERS OF GROUPS MEMBERS OF GROUPS?
How does technological change affect a sense of self?
In order to answer these questions, I want to closely examine two broad designations in cultural theory, modernism and postmodernism. Each of these terms represents a loosely constructed school of thought concerning one's relationship to one's self and surroundings, and each has attracted its own coterie of followers in both academic circles and "popular culture." Among cultural theorists, this relationship has become extremely hot property; the stakes involved in identification with one school or the other are quite high. At issue is nothing less than human agency, or "free will"--the degree of truth belonging to the belief that we choose to be the way we are and to do the things we do.
