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17 Feb 2007 @ 11:10, by John Grieve
Identity is at the heart of the Post-modern reality. Heavy industry and manufacturing are fast becoming marginal to our daily lives, which are taken up with computers, mobile phones, internet, personal trainers, services and interdependencies.
These are certainly commodities but they are different from 19th century Pig Iron, Railways, steamboats and all the paraphernalia of the Industrial Age. Our present society is variously called post modernist, Post Industrial, The Information Age but few seem to have realised its essential nature. All these things mentioned above such as MP3 players, Gamestations etc. are not ends in themselves or even primarily commodities any more, but are really auxillaries to the production , transmission, manipulation and control of identities, which in my view is the central preoccupation of post-modern society.
There is a noticeable movement away from materialism, in its crude and not-so-crude varieties, to a more rarefied, ethereal and even spiritual basis for existence. Even money, a foundation of a materialistic view of the world, is becoming spiritualized, being transformed from gold ingots and coins to binary digits in a computer network and information contained on a bit of plastic/silicon.
The people who are in charge of all this; the media profession, the broadcasters, journalists and other communication experts, are fast becoming the new dominant class, the News Class. Though the notion of class must itself be re-evaluated along with everything inherited from the industrial age.
Their business is not primarily about the production of commodities, money, profits, value but something far more important; the creation, transmission , manipulation and control of identity itself, of identities. Already they have created a dependent class, based on their manipulation of identities, called celebrities, of the A, B, C and D varieties.
The public world is their realm. They are a public profession and everything they do is publicized, in the open, on the record. Public and private worlds are opposite and complementary, sometimes antagonistic. The private world is more relaxed and free than its public counterpart. The public world shares some of the coercive nature of the “re publica”, the public thing, that is the state, which as we all know, is based on force and coercion.
The news class shares with the state, the control of public opinion, which certainly can be experienced as a coercive force. The main use of this power, apart from the usual aims of money and profit, is the creation of identities—the central fact of this age.
And, of course, Identity is not a material thing. It is profoundly connected with our psyches, our personality, our individuality, our sexuality and ultimately our spirituality. To control this signifies far more than selling someone material commodities. You are dealing in Souls.
John Grieve
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Category: Articles
2 comments
17 Feb 2007 @ 18:27 by vaxen : Yes...
False identities engeandered by a false 'legal' system based on usury and fraud just like the international 'bankers' want it.
Divide and conquer. Get them so involved in trivia that they forget about real ''life'' and become pseudo human, clones of what they once were, hell bent on becoming nothing but well oiled drones duped into producing all the trivia their heartless hearts can be told to desire...
Leave it all behind...
Dealing in souls.
17 Feb 2007 @ 22:45 by ming : Identity
But how do you define identity in this context? How we see ourselves, how we present ourselves to others, the image we hold of the world?
I agree, the material stuff is becoming less important. The world is more and more ephemeral and virtual. Which is both good and bad. Big things can change very quickly, because there's isn't as much matter that needs to be moved around. Information is moved much more easily. But when we define ourselves by information, rather than physical circumstances, we both have the potential for more freedom, and at the same time we might be more easily manipulated, simply by presenting us with different information, in a compelling enough way. Which makes media very important of course. But it is also a bit of a crossroads. We're both more influenced by media as ever, and at the same time the media is increasingly in our own hands.
Other entries in Articles
2 Sep 2008 @ 11:30: Sexual Identity is Basic on the Material Plane
31 Aug 2008 @ 09:19: HomoRacism
27 Aug 2008 @ 08:32: Theology of the Other
24 Aug 2008 @ 15:14: Grieve''s Twin Prime Conjecture
12 Aug 2008 @ 09:13: Truth, Denial and Fascism
4 Aug 2008 @ 09:07: Why is Dialectic Important
1 Aug 2008 @ 09:10: Dual Nature as applied to Personality
14 Jul 2008 @ 09:06: My Philosophy in a Nutshell ---- Part 1
3 Jun 2008 @ 09:12: Phi, the Pentagon and Self-Similarity
23 Apr 2008 @ 09:25: Pascal's Triangle, Self-similarity and Phi
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