Hybrid Identities in the Information age: The Glocal in the World of Literature

In his recent book Critique of Information, Scott Lash claims that contemporary times can better be understood as the information age rather than as postmodernism, the risk society, late capitalism, consumer society, etc. “Information society is, first, preferable to postmodernism”, he states, “in that the former says what the society principle is rather than saying merely what it comes after. Second, postmodernism deals largely with disorder, fragmentation, irrationality, whilst the notion of information accounts for both the (new) order and disorder that we experience.” He goes on to delineate the great difference that he sees between narrative and discourse, on the one hand, and information as it is presented by the media on the other. “Unlike, say, narrative or discourse or painting, the information in the papers comes in very short messages. It is compressed. Literally compressed. Narrative as in the novel works from a beginning, middle and end. The subjective intentions of the protagonist are the motor of the plot, the events follow from one an other as causes and effects. Discourse ‐ as in philosophic or social scientific texts ‐ is comprised of conceptual frameworks, of serious speech acts, of propositional logic, of speech acts backed up by legitimating arguments. Information is none of these.”. In fact, Lash suggests that, “the primary qualities of information are flow, disembeddedness, spatial compression, temporal compression, real‐time relations.” He ends his interpretation of our contemporary society with the conclusion that “informational knowledge is increasingly displacing narrative and discursive knowledge”.