Ill-communication

As the social theorist Niklas Luhmann once remarked, “today will be yesterday tomorrow”. Logically irrefutable, this little aphorism also effectively summons up and summarizes those uncanny aspects of postmodern life – “insecure security”, “uncertain certainty” and “unsafe safety” – that beset everyone. Wherever you are, you hear new news every day, of war, terrorism, unemployment, earthquakes and typhoons, murders, more murders, fluctuating exchange- and interest-rates, lowtech genocide, global instability in the economic system, the resilient fragility of the environment, secret state organizations, and the banning of smoking from establishments where food is sold. Decisions concerning the future are made elsewhere, by others, most probably malignant toward, or, at the very least, indifferent to, your continued existence, whose values and knowledges and interests and powers and whatever are absolutely beyond your personal control (and probably beyond theirs as well). It's no wonder that, statistically speaking, you’re more than likely to be depressed, enraged, panicked or fearful. Postmodern life is hard on the psyche.

But it's tempting to overstate the novelty of the present: after all, a sense of impending catastrophe has always been a temptation for human beings. As Robert Burton wrote almost four hundred years ago, positioned on the threshold of modernity, and at the center of a radical media explosion: