People want to be selective in their participation. If they feel motivated they will join a demonstration, sign a petition or put on an event to raise money for ‘Children in Need’. However, they will not want to do it every week. Rather they choose to ‘dip in’ to things when they choose. Reality TV becomes the model of engagement, with a low-cost, low-commitment way to participate and play a part in influencing the outcome.
This ‘soft’ expression of commitment is also carried over to issues of social and political concern. There is no doubt that global warming, people trafficking, third world debt and issues of social justice register as high concerns in the public mind. However, the concern diminishes as it impacts personal preference and behaviour. BBC2’s Newsnight explored issues of sustainable lifestyles through its ‘Ethical Man’ feature in 2007–8. One of the sobering observations was the reluctance of members of the public to consider dropping their overseas holiday, even when the impact of the accompanying air flight wiped out all their other attempts to reduce their carbon footprint for the rest of the year.
Virtual relationships
There can be no doubting the fact that recent years have seen an explosion of communications technology and, through the World Wide Web, the growth of social networking. We are more connected now than at any other time in history: Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Second Life, internet gaming, email, texting, the impact of technology in shaping how we communicate together is breathtaking. Yet how far is the quantity of communication representative of a depth of relationship? Is it legitimate to call a social network a community?
If ‘virtual reality’ is a computer-simulated environment that gives the impression of actually being somewhere where we are not, then there are virtual dimensions in our technologically generated communications and networking realities. While we might have a large number of ‘friends’ on Facebook, the capacity of any of us to hold and maintain relationships of substance remains the same as it always did.1 And face-to-face, real-time engagement is a non-negotiable part of that. Likewise, that Stephen Fry has 1.4 million followers on Twitter is merely confirmation of his popularity as a celebrity and his ability to maintain an interesting narrative in 140-character Tweets.
Of course, in so far as time is invested in maintaining our online presence and interaction, this erodes our available time for pursuing real-time relationships in real-time communities. Back in December 2009, the pop songstress Lily Allen spoke about her conversion to becoming a ‘neo-Luddite’.
So I put my BlackBerry, my laptop, my iPod in a box and that’s the end. I won’t use email, I play records on vinyl, I don’t blog. I’ve got more time, more privacy. We’ve ended up in this world of unreal communications and I don’t want that. I want real life back.2
Allen’s observations are not unique and express the sentiments of other commentators like Steve Tuttle of Newsweek and Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times.3
The consequence of the growth of virtual relationships is almost inevitably going to result in social atrophy. Our ability to form and develop substantial friendships and build those friendships into communities will be diminished.
Celebrity
In many ways the growth of celebrity in western cultures is a direct corollary of the rise and rise of entertainment as the basis of contemporary media. While societies have always had heroes, the basis of their acclaim was in their heroic exploits on the battlefield or in some other distinguished service or accomplishment in the wider life of the country. It has only been relatively recently that popular mass celebrity in its present-day form has emerged. First with the music halls and then the movies, sport and the broadcast media celebrity has grown. Fuelling its reach and cultural impact has been the growing amount of available leisure time and disposable income of an ever-increasing proportion of the population to access and consume celebrity.
Thus the culture of celebrity was born and established itself among us. The success of publications like Hello and OK magazines along with the gossip columns and 24-hour TV following their every move is indicative of how deeply embedded this has become within our society. The power of celebrity endorsement is not lost on organizations like the United Nations as they appoint high-profile figures as ‘Goodwill Ambassadors’ to increase publicity and interest in their good causes. The role of Bono and other musicians in the Make Poverty History and Drop the Debt campaigns is further evidence of this phenomenon, as is the Alpha Course’s endorsement by Bear Grylls.
To the identification of individuals as ‘A list’, ‘B list’ or minor celebs, relatively recent developments in Reality TV have brought a further category into play, namely, those who are famous for being famous. Such is the infamy and then tragedy of a character like Jade Goody, one-time anti-hero in the Big Brother house and then transformed by her battle with cancer into a national heroine: Reality TV brings celebrity within reach of ordinary people. The storming success of franchises like Big Brother, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and the rest are testimony of the significance of celebrity in validating reality. For all that most people happily live ordinary lives, the culture of celebrity constantly whispers a different story.
Liquid modernity
We live in changing times and the present looks very different from the past. In trying to understand the reality that confronts us and the future that lies ahead, many have turned to the conversation regarding postmodernism for help. Along the way almost every change and trend in contemporary life has been used as an illustration of the postmodern advance. For some this is a deeply unsettling dialogue as old certainties are swept away: others want to embrace this new context enthusiastically and so to enable the gospel to contextualize itself into the new cultural reality. Scholars like Stanley Grenz have attempted to sum up these influences and demonstrate that the future will be defined by the postmodern impetus to pessimism, holism, communitarianism, relativism, pluralism and subjectivism (1996, pp. 14–15). Other voices hold that the Christian community needs to take seriously the deconstruction of Derrida, Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ and Foucault’s work on the relationship between knowledge and power.
There is no doubt that these are important thinkers who have significantly influenced contemporary ideas. However, Christians often have either been overly fearful or, conversely, have over-interpreted this debate. James K. A. Smith in his Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? looks to exorcize the fear while giving a more accurate account of the ideas of postmodern theorists (Smith, 2006, see also White, 2006). For example, Smith outlines how Lyotard’s ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ addresses a distinctly modern phenomenon where the grand stories were legitimated by an appeal to universal reason. What he had in view were the scientific narratives told by modern rationalism, scientific naturalism and sociobiology insofar as they claimed to be demonstrable by reason alone. By contrast, while the biblical narrative is grand in scope, it does not make an appeal to a supposed universal, scientific reason. Rather, it is a pre-modern matter of proclamation and requires a response of faith. By Lyotard’s definition, it is not a metanarrative (Smith, 2006, pp. 64–5).
While most commentators will make clear that in talking about postmodernism the subject of the conversation is about this time of transition and flux at the end of the modern era, the very term itself can be deceptive. It is often misunderstood as implying that the whole of life is now being lived after the modern era, which is patently not so. In many ways contemporary western society remains thoroughly modern as both our individualism and scientific rationalism clearly demonstrate.
An early writer on the advent of postmodernism, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman began to publish his series of books on liquid modernity in the year 2000, seeking to reframe the conversation. In short,