During the last twenty years, digital technology has begun to touch on almost every aspect of our lives. This book offers a new perspective on digital culture by examining its development, and reveals that, despite appearances, it is neither radically new, nor ultimately technologically driven. | 5. Digital Resistances postmodernism The period between the early ’70s and the late ’80s saw the advent of the much-heralded information society. The inadequacies of Fordist-Keynesian ideas in relation to global competition and financial deregulation necessitated restructuring on the part of capitalism to more responsive, fluid models of organization. This was bound up with concurrent developments in information communications technology, which presented the technical means to realize a new flexible capitalism. At the same time those developments in ICT also led to a new range of commodities based on microelectronics, personal computers, and video games. Thus the vision of a society dominated by information and information technologies propounded by academics such as Daniel Bell or Futurologists such as Alvin Toffler would seem to have been realized. But, unlike Bell’s vision of the move towards such a society as an evolutionary process, its realization was antagonistic and sometimes violent, in with traditional industries and industrial models being either radically overhauled or, effectively, dispensed with, often at great social cost. The ’70s in particular saw industrial antagonism on an unprecedented scale throughout the industrialized world. In the ’80s these antagonisms were ‘resolved’, in some countries at least, by the coming to power of right-wing governments, whose invocations of traditional values masked radical neo-liberal economic agendas. 154 These circumstances produced a number of aesthetic and cultural responses and sites of resistance. These were often bound up with the notion of ending and rupture, as evinced by the use of the prefix ‘post’, as in ‘post-industrialism’. Quite early on in the 1970s commentators were declaring the supersession of modernity by ‘postmodernity’, and by extension, in the arts, the end of modernism and the beginning of ‘postmodernism’. The repudiation of modernism’s aesthetic dominance was proposed by architects Robert .
