How Post Modern City Differs from Modern City - Essay Example

Name Tutor Course Date Introduction Post modernity, sometimes termed as postmodern condition is normally used to illustrate economic and cultural or society’s condition that is believed to prevail after modernity. Several schools of thought believe that modernity lasted until late 20th century. It was later replaced by post modernity. Post modernity can imply an individual response to post modern society. The conditions therefore in a society or city that makes it post modern are usually associated with postmodern society. Post modernity is a situation of being post modern. This implies that a nation or a city that experiences post modernity can be referred as post modern city or nation. A city or nation on the other hand that experiences modernity is referred as modern city. Post modern city can differ from modern city in a number of ways (Delanty, 150). How post modern city differs from modern city Delanty (150) argue that the modernity’s period was discovered on reliable belief in authority and power of reasoning as a major arbiter of fact. Therefore, in modern city, there has been always a single truth. This truth has been grasped, examined and dissected via power of rational mind. Post modern city on the other hand believed in multiple facts. People in modern city discovered their fact conviction through reasoning, experience and participation. For instance, people in post modern city do not simply demand to learn about Gallipoli, they demand to Visit Anzac Cove. In modern city reasoning really matters, but in post modern city reasoning should be clothed in an experience that can be engaged in. people in post modern city do not only want to learn about God, they also want to experience God. People in post modern city are ready to do anything as long as they do not lose connection with life experience. The rise in current years, particularly among 20s and 30s, of renewed spiritual interest, chiefly outside the Christianity mainstream, is a great expression of the need for experiencing spiritual kingdom (Boullata and Hallaq, 210). Post modern city differ from modern city because they are characterized by prevalence of great ideal of autonomous self. Individuals in post modern city are self-determined. They usually operate with a great degree of independence from any tradition or community. Individuals in post modern city matters a lot. They normally choose what they are pleased with. They can select their career, live wherever they like and marry whoever they want with minimum interference from family members. This kind of freedom is not common in modern city. There has been a new search for community in the post modern generations. The most preferred words on web are connected and community. These words have been joined together to form, connexity. Cyber space organizations such as Amazon.com are in connexity business, that is, they make connections and develop community. Post modern city is considered as a new generation.com. The kids in post generation city have been brought up with internet. Unlike modern city, in post modern city the web is more less a source of information than asocial medium. It has therefore been proved that 28% of Australian homes are connected with web and about 51% teenagers utilize chat rooms to communicate with their peers. In post modern city, Internet is a major way of maintaining friendship in their community (Harvey 95). Boullata and Hallaq (210) argue that Modernity is a word based culture. Modernist created a rational, propositional, word aimed at reasoning. Students in modern city are taught how to examine, criticize and to be objective. Secrecy and symbol were banished as being unclear, too illogical and mystical. Only words had power to summarize and display the fact that could serve scholar and scientific quests for humankind. Unlike in modern city, people in post modern city can negotiate their world via the strength of power. The implications of the shift from word to image had vast implications on how church offer worship services that engages younger generations. Unlike modernist, post modernist do not still believes that things are getting better. Things are already better in post modern city. There are no children living in poverty. Scientific progress has resulted into a fairer, safer and healthier society. Poor people in post modern city can benefit from the trickle down impact. Advancement assumes a starting point, a centre from which stuffs develop in a reasonable and sequential manner that is based on scientific method of experimental and observation. Modern science philosophers have currently challenged this understanding. The philosophers argue that theory shifts cannot occur via reasonable modifications created on the past understanding but via a fundamental transformation on the way scientists view the world. Science however, is not just the impartial observation of raw objective data as it is assumed in the modern outlook (Malpas 67). Scientists have introduced their personal belief systems and the views of the world to their duty. The reigning pattern or scientists’ worldview determines what to observe, what to measure and what experiments need to be worked on. Scientists in post modern city usually take the current understanding of reality very serious. The understanding asserts that there is no given worldwide centre from which a person can develop his or her knowledge base. Post modernist asserts that many various worlds prevail as world-creating languages (Malpas, 90). Modernism is a rational and artistic movement that developed in line with, and finally opposing to, entirely developed modernity. Artists and scholars in modern city were shocked by banality and dehumanized life quality in industrial capitalism. They therefore responded to degradation of life quality by withdrawing from reminiscence of pre-capitalist organic social order, by searching refuge in fundamental and at times anti-social individualism. High modernist art always features disintegration and disruption at form’s level, though it normally tries to recover a sense of order and faith in general content’s level or the entire impact. The modernist therefore normally tries to shore up the impressive narratives, the complete facts and values, of western tradition. Though high modernist have experimented with conceptual representation and official disintegration as a means of opposing the degradation of social life within industrial capitalism, post modernist on the other hand has embraced the condition, apparently opposing the impressive narratives and principles for parodies of classics and exalting common or low culture at the cost of traditional high culture. Arts in post modern city are usually characterized by extremely self-conscious applications of strategies such as parody and pastiche to underrate a sense of order, general facts, timeless values and impressive narratives. By doing this, it emphasizes surfaces at the cost of substance and depth. It therefore insists that the look and representation is efficient (Harvey, 200) According to Harvey (200), the social and economic situations of modern city started to appear as early as sixteenth century, with development of global trade, urbanization of peasant Europe’s populations and a stable increase in literacy. The economic and social situations were displayed and to some extent allowed, by super structural occurrences such as protest reformation, with the emphasis on uniqueness, literacy and patriarchal nuclear family and enlightenment, with emphasis on rationality, faith in human development and scientific method enhancement. According to Beilharz, the modernity’s period can be characterized by high rate of centralization of production management, increasingly huge scale industry’s capitalization and high rate of routinization and products and processes standardization(56). Modernity reached its high point of enhancement in industrial practices of Taylorism in which actions of employees were segmented and standardized efficiently, making every employee interchangeable and fordism thus adding to taylorism a systematic effort of managing employees’ off-the-job life. Ford therefore organized communities, media control, housing and adult education. The enlightenment principles of rationality and scientific development were displayed in late 19th and 20th century. It was required to perfect the human race via selective breeding program based on Darwin’s evolution theory. The modernist faith within scientific development was deeply shaken when it was exposed that the ideas can result into serious consequences such as holocaust Beilharz (75). Post modern city on the other hand has been characterized by an apparent general breakdown of production’s situations of modernity, as capitalism finds a way into current phase. For a number of futurists and other social observers, the current information production seems to be more significant than the traditionally material products. Heavy industry appears to be fading in first world it has really been shifted to sites in two-thirds globe. The period of post modernity started in 1945. This date is part of the period when cities were changing from modernity to post modernity. A major feature of modernity in this period was colonialism. Another period in which many cities transformed into post modernity from modernity was 1970s. In this period the Arab embargo on oil destabilized western industrial machine to its foundations. The oil embargo that in someway can be associated with anti-colonial struggles in 1950s and 60s, motivated an international capitalism crisis in which rank and file employees in developed industrial nations have never improved, though the impacts have in some way masked by changes in patterns of labor toward two-income households and enhance in child labor (Beilharz, 170). Conclusion From the discussion, it is quite clear that post modern city is not similar to modern city. Unlike modern city, in post modern city, reasoning should be clothed in an experience that can be engaged in. People in this city are ready to do anything as long as they do not lose connection with life experience. In post modern city, people are always interested to both learn about God and experience God. Another major difference displayed in the discussion is the prevalence of great ideal of autonomous self. People in post modern city are self-determined. Post modern society is characterized by high level of connectivity, mainly through internet. This therefore had made post modern city to be considered as new generation.com. Unlike in modern city, individuals in post modern city normally believe that things are already better as they wanted. Post modern city has been characterized by apparent general breakdown of production’s situations of modernity, as capitalism finds a way into current phase. Works Cited Delanty, Gerard . Modernity and postmodernity: knowledge, power and the Self. SAGE Publications: New York, 2000. Boullata Issa and Hallaq Wael. Tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in Arabic literature: essays in honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata. BRILL: New York, 2000. Malpas, Simon. The postmodern. Routledge: London, 2005. Harvey, David. The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Wiley-Blackwell: New York, 2004. Graham, Beattie. 2006. Modernity to post modernity. Beilharz, Peter. Socialism and modernity. U of Minnesota Press: New York, 2009. Read More