If one is unfamiliar with the cultural significance or poetry of Ezra Pound, for example, instant enlightenment is a mere hyperlink or Wikipedia article away. By contrast, those who are not plugged into cyberspace have been rendered culturally illiterate. My eighty-something aunts are as cut off from the emerging digi-pomo culture as someone without a TV would have been from the pop culture phenom of the past century - not to mention their now limited access to the burgeoning online marketplace, in a culture where virtually every product has an accompanying website.
Likewise, a Luddite professor, doctor, lawyer, or real estate broker will be hobbled professionally as long as they continue to cling to their outmoded, albeit “modern,” ways of doing business. With the help of the internet, a student may in some senses surpass his or her teacher; a doctor may know less about a new medication or medical development than his patient/health care “consumer;” and a layman may discover more about legal specialties or the state of the housing market than his or her own attorney or broker.
But once this tool for mass literacy is mutually adopted, the potential for meaningful, informed debate, collaboration, cooperation, and conversation is instantly brought into play. The age of elitism, non-disclosure, and professional “mystery” in letters, medicine, and most other professions is coming to a close. There are no sacred cows in politics, business, or the arts anymore—at least in the pre-pomo sense.
Everyone can be a “critic,” an instant “expert,” or a forewarned, forearmed consumer. Of course, it does not follow that sufficient talent, temperament, and training, both formal and informal, are not still necessary in order to truly master any professional or artistic field of endeavor, but the prior chasms between generations, professions, classes, races, and nationalities have been duly narrowed thanks to this wondrous new tool.
Triumph and Tragedy in Cyberspace
In short, the true defining mark of pomo — the great technology of our era, our version of the steam engine and the light bulb and the television set — is the internet. Cultural democracy has come to its most logical, or even illogical, conclusion as I write this. Whereas modernism sometimes blurred the line between art and everyday life, artwork and artifact, high and low culture, and even artist and non-artist, now every cultural consumer can become an instant “artist” as well.
Anyone with a computer and the proper software can be a published author, a homespun “record producer,” or a citizen journalist or filmmaker. Via the internet, we can share the same means of production as the most gifted artist does. Many erstwhile “professions” have thus been rendered endangered, or even obsolete—from the printing press to the movie or recording studio to the publishing house. Our fin de siecle, pomo-drenched era represents the greatest example to date of a true cultural democracy, for better and worse.
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