This part of the site will focus on emerging and developing apsects of global culture from the philosophical to the fashionable, drawing on things happening around the world today. But we lead off with five (5) key trends in contemporary culture which are to a large degree shaping significantly where the Western world at least is heading.

1. The global communications revolution is fostering a new global consciousness
   Developments in technology which have appeared since the end of the Second World War are radically altering not only how we communicate but how we see ourselves and each other in the world. The Chinese Democracy movement which was brutally repressed in Tianenmen Square only fifteen years ago was aided and shaped by fax machines: it is no wonder that some governments are very restrictuve about the internet.
   
   The onset of IT technology has allowed us to 'know' each other in entirely new configurations. Geographic boundaries are collapsing everywhere, often in direct correlation to IT access and technology. Technology always changes us. The world may not have become the global village that McLuhan predicted (global villages might be a better way of viewing it) but there is little doubt that we have, through technology of many kinds, been able to transcend obstacles, compress time and space and open up new forms of communicating with one another. The idea of a new 'global consciousness' is taking shape and it is not merely a western phenomenon.
   
   And this new sense of common humanity is not linked to the more homogenous ideas of it which permeated the end of the modern age: this new consciousness is a product of a global mediatized world in which our similarities and particularities live side by side sometimes in peace and often in tension. We will talk more about this as we add stuff to the site and we also invite your comments and contributions.
   
   
2. Humanity is growing in ecological awareness and concern
   There seems to be an renewed activism taking shape around the world. While at this point it may lack the cohesion and focus of similar issues and movements in the 60s and early 70s (mainly because of the postmodern approach to most things, which is largely de-centered and non-heirarchical) it is nonetheless an emerging trend.
   
   The outpouring of rage against the WTO and more particular issues like the the rainforest and anti-logging movements in the Pacific Northwest or Arundhati Roy's campaigns against domestic economic policies in India are indicators of a growing trend. The environment is central to all of this. One could safely argue that the singular issue of ecological awareness is a key dynamic of postmodern consciousness. At the center of this is the power of the internet (see point 1) to inform and gather the concerned and interested.
   
   Naomi Klein's book, No Logo, an exploration of multi-national corporations, branding and consumer-culture issues, is a key read for anyone interested in the formative ideas influencing people in this regard.
   
   
3. There is a decisive shift towards the embrace of postmodern values
   We have lived with postmodernity long enough now to note some change in cultural responses towards it. Postmodernity could once have been easily defined as simple critique of modernity, all about deconstruction, suspicion and critique. It was 'anti' everything: anti-authority, anti-institution etc. etc. But times and perspectives have changed.
   
   I think there are at least five key points along the way as far as I can tell and as these positions have emerged and continue to develop we can see a definite cultural shift towards postmodern values.
   
   
   1. Origins is where it all began - the philosophers wrestling with modernity's waning and challenging its orthodoxies. This translated fairly quickly into the second more populist stage of...
      
      
   2. Deconstruction. You can see this reflected in the world of graphic design. The work of Jamie Reid and his famous Sex Pistols album covers and artwork symbolize this deconstruction phase of postmodernity. But it was not just art - deconstruction was everywhere in the late 70s. Pick a field of interest and go back and you will quickly find a slew of publications or products which point to this 'questioning and breaking the rules' period. But you can't stay angry forever. Sooner or later one has to decide what to stand for as well as what to stand against.
      
      
   3. Appropriation came next. The deconstruction phase gave plenty of room for experimentation and sometimes even excess. Anything and everything was possible, not in the utopian sense of modernity, but in the giddy days of early postmodernity deconstruction left plenty of room for building amongst the ruins, for new configurations. Like the culture which spawned it, the next phase of which emerged in the late 80s and early 90s was marked by an attention to...
      
      
   4. Excess and surface. A scratching of the surface revealed very quickly what was underneath, and usually it wasn't very much. A still dominant issue is the idea that postmoderns know more about what they don't like and want than what they do like or want. Postmodern language has now fully ent andwiches to rock bands has 'postmodern' linked with it somehow to signal relevancy, cool factor etc. But there is not much there, in all honesty. In fact, self-indulgnece and self-interest mark this phase of postmodernity: lots of people talking to themsleves about themselves with not much engagement with those outside the main focus of interest. Writer Michael Bracewell wrote a brilliant book on this period, When Surface was Depth: Death by Cappuccino and Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990s. It sums up the key elements of postmodern culture in that time and the title tells you all you really need to know. Many of his observations about music could be applied to any other field of interest or study.
      
      The final phase, the one that we find ourselves in right now is perhaps quite surprising to some, particualry those for whom the whole postmodern issue is simply all about relativism, pluralism and lack of any particular focus. John Wesley the founder of the Methodists used to urge his leaders to "strive to be a voice and not an echo," this statment sums up for me the most recent arc of the postmodern trajcetory and brings us to the present.
      
      
   5. Authorship is the word I can best use to describe the current phase. What I mean is that, finally, people are starting to map out a postmodern landscape that doesn't merely react with or revisit or renegotiate the past but actually presents a postmodern way of engaging with the world and each other. This is the postmodern version of Wesley's dictum, voices are emerging in all areas charting out the new horizons.
   
   
   Some might question whether there is such a thing as postmodern values. I would argue that there are and that more and more people are embracing them. What are they? Well some are perhaps simple and obvious: tolerance - an acceptance of plurality at every level of the human condition; love as a shaping force and not mere sentiment to name a few. Others are more complex but are related to issues of justice and economics. Again, we will explore these issues in depth as this part of the site takes shape.
   
   I should also say that there are a couple of ways of interpeting my little timeline. One way is chronologically viewing the transitional phases as sequential to each other, but perhaps a more helpful way is to see the five transitions as different points people might find themselves in in light of their own engagement with postmodernity. Postmodernity is a way of looking at the world not simply a chronological event and we could all possibly find oursleves at differing levels of interraction. And I should also say that along with these five developments in postmodernity is a continuing rejection of and resitance to all things postmodern. The rise of a new kind of fundamentalism can be viewed I think in this light, but more about that later!
   
   
4. There is a new kinds of experiential, 'first-hand' spirituality emerging
   I say 'a new kind', singular rather than plural, even though the revelation of this new kind of spirituality may take many different shapes and forms. God is welcome in the postmodern world. In fact, it could be argued that religion, the return of god to the center of th epublic imagination, is a key dynamic and result of postmodernity. However you see it, religion is changing. And it is more than simply a rejection of the word 'religion' in favour of the now trendier and perhaps vaguer 'spirituality.' Even supposedly 'New Age' spiritualities are undergoing seismic shifts as ideas about consciousness and the relation between science and religion are being re-examined.
   
   Technology is also playing a part as new discoveries in technology and science are allowing for greater understanding of the brain and ways we develop etc. The whole question of interreligous dialoue is being revisited as we understand more about each other. Comparative religion from the level ground of postmodernity is a different game than the somewhat older approach of 'let's talk and I'll tell you why my religion is better than yours' tradition of the past.
   
   This is not of course to paint a rosy picture about all of this or even to declare the end of more traditional approaches to faith and belief. But posmtodernity and the emerging global culture are reconfiguring belief at its very core.
   
   
5. There is a shift towards finding more sustainable ways of living
   Along with an emerging global awareness and concern for environmental issus and challenges there is a shift underway related to finding more sustainable ways of living. Again it appears in many different ways: from the embrace of electric and hybrid cars, to the return of 'farmers' markets', to urban city spaces; from new approaches in architecture (see the work of David Adije for instance) and city planning to the return to the country (see the article The Future is Another Country by Francesca Gavin in the June 2004 issue of Dazed and Confused magazine). It is about the development and rise of small businesses in India and Africa and the shift away from the upwardly mobile Martha Stewart Lifestyle and a return to Simple Living in the U.S. It is handmade goods in a bazaar and a move away from pre-packaged supermarket goods and services. And it is concern about drinking water and alternatives to fossil fuels and protecting the environment.