Captain Outrageous, Post Class for the Casey Report make up

What is postmodernism? The answer is the objective of our semester. We are in it, we are out of it, we are making it, its already made? Looking through the powerpoint ROG put together, we are kind of all over the place when it comes to postmodernism. Its futuristic, its retro, its about speeding up or stopping completely. Its about radicalism, its about being silenced. And it is definitely out of our control if not out of control completely.

I most certainly like the idea that postmodernism started somewhere along the lines of the Columbia protests. People don't know enough about the student protests of the sixties, and I think that putting them in the postmodern category give them a bit more importance. Students, STUDENTS completely shut down the operations of Ivy League schools to make a statement. That's incredible! The Columbia protests shut down the school for a week. There was one at Harvard also where they shut down for 4 days and the accomplishments were incredible: they evicted 8 deans, created a black studies program, and instituted the right of students to vote to elect staff and faculty members. Maybe technology has gotten out of hand, but these student protests show that matters can be taken into our own.

I feel that technology is only overwhelming because we allow it to be. We have allowed technology and its' commodities to become normalized in our society, we rely on them. True we can't really protest computers and the internet, we do kind of need them now, but there are other things that can be taken by storm. What they are I don't know. But I have the feeling that, if enough people shut off their facebooks for a while we could figure it out.

The only thing I can really think to conclude with is a good contrast: we are a society that can create an atomic bomb to kill millions. But we are also a society that can shut down a University and change the lives of thousands. Perhaps this is the enigma of postmodernity: to destroy and to create are interchangeable, but not entirely inseparable. I think the idea of change has been tainted with the idea of something else being destroyed in the process.