“Post-modernism: the Arabs in a video snapshot”
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 24, 2008
“Post-modernism: the Arabs in a video snapshot” by Mai Ghoussoub (March 4, 2007)
I am reading the Arabic booklet entitled “Postmodernism: the Arabs in a video snapshot” by Mai Ghoussoub.
I think that I will have hard time untangling that concept. I guess that postmodernism is related to people’s behavior in the megalopolis where minorities, the variations in ethnicity and cultural differences need to be managed within a mentality and set of laws that prevent daily contacts to degenerate in negative confrontations.
The globalization and the spreading of information might be relegating the forerunners and cultural elite to the background, leaving the professionals to run the show with wider democratization to the consumerism tastes of like or dislike of shows, programs or consumer products.
One of the postmodernism mottoes is: “We need no prophets anymore; we are enlightened enough, we have the information that we need to seek and are professionals enough to have to follow gurus or those of the modernist critics for arts and cultures.”
The discrimination between what is real and what is a picture of the real or a simulation of reality is blurred. There are many techniques to manipulate facts. And facts are tempered with so that it is difficult to sort out what is true and what is false or tricked.
The power of a clip for a song is that it offers vaster perspectives to the lyrics in a way the kids retain the video and what it is conveying of allegories.
The modern wars are typical examples where those who ordered and planned a war are following the war through CNN as most of the viewers do
Thousands dies in the war and 10 times more will die in the post war period, but what millions of viewers retain of the war are the pictures exhibited on CNN or Al-Jazeera; it is like a one-month of fighting can be reduced to 5 minutes of condensed video pictures if we chose to.
In the Arab World what is new and what is creative still mean the same thing, until the consideration of the individual becomes a confirmed given.
Adonis Diaries 
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