The Postmodern Truth
Pastor Min preached by ‘The Doctrine of Being Real’. This post slightly references one minor point he made.
I was thinking about truth. The different ‘ages’ are marked by different technologies or advancements that influenced knowledge. The modern era was influenced by science and the printing press. Key ‘themes’ of the modern era are logic and reasoning. The post modern era is influenced by the Internet. Key ‘themes’ of the post modern era are community, acceptance/tolerance, and experience. Truth is relative; it is primarily based on experience.
I started thinking of how do we determine what is true? I began thinking of sources of information. Where do you look to to learn something? I remember in my house, when I had to do a research paper before the age of the internet, there’s a volume of 24 or so encyclopedias. If you wanted to look something up you would use an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica determined truth; they were the authoritative definition. If I wanted to know about a movie – you would ask Siskel and Ebert. And maybe to a lesser extent, if you wanted to know about good food, you would turn to Zagat.
These days, where do you find movie ratings? You no longer ask Ebert but you check out Rotten Tomatoes. Want to know about a restaurant, you would check out Yelp (at least in SF or other big cities). The definitive mark of post-modern information, if you want to know something, you look it up where? Wikipedia.
This all makes sense with the post-modern era of thinking. All these sites aggregate information from the community. RT and Yelp give their information based on people’s experience. These highly utilized sources of information capture and implement the post-modern era of thinking. There is no longer one definitive source; information is based on a consensus from various sources. They share and present people’s experience because this is what we define as truth, the post-modern truth.