The Metanarrative Paradigm
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The Metanarrative Paradigm Adrian M. Nissen, B.A. (hons.) This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Murdoch University, 2016. i Copyright notice I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary education institution. .................................... Adrian M. Nissen ii Abstract The original contribution of this thesis is an examination of how the concept of metanarrative can be used to illuminate shifts in popular thought in the Information Age. There is disagreement over what Information Age paradigms signify, and whether a metanarrative can exist. The postmodern dismissal of metanarrative requires re-examination in the face of understandings that have accompanied contemporary technological advancements. Information technology will be used in this study to explain the movement in globalised culture towards metanarrative understandings as technology is the most broadly visible indicator of human advancement. Branching out from a core literature of media and cultural theorists and internet researchers, I also employ analogous understandings of such a phenomenon from tangential theory including philosophy, psychology and natural science. Observations have been made of a pattern of increased self-referral over recent decades occurring in various disciplines, indicating shifts in the contextualisation of understandings. Our paradigms are becoming more self- conscious as narratives. As humankind’s ideas and capacity to harness understandings of the world continue to develop, we are increasingly engaging with further levels of self-awareness that provide us with the perspective needed for epistemological shifts. This thesis explores the way in which our advancement brings us closer to a meta-textual awareness. I will argue that this constitutes a shift in our perception towards an initial oneness of cultural narratives. An examination of convergence paradigms in the iii Information Age can be demonstrated to speak of an underlying metanarrative that fundamentally shapes our constructed narratives. The institutions constructed by our conscious theorisations are becoming seen as conceits, as the Information Age is illustrating for the public that our notions of discrete concepts are constructed from narratives. The dream world offered by the virtual is ingraining us with the idea of a potential for any narrative to emerge and shape the collective consciousness. I conclude from this investigation that we increasingly have a self-awareness of the narratives we inhabit as constructions, creating a popular conceptualisation of everyday interactions as narratives being acted out. iv Table of contents Copyright notice ............................................................................................... i Abstract ........................................................................................................... ii Table of contents ........................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ......................................................................................... v Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Reality digitised ........................................................................... 51 Chapter 3: Dreams and levels of consciousness .......................................... 85 Chapter 4: The microcosm .......................................................................... 122 Chapter 5: Ideas as figurative organisms .................................................... 157 Chapter 6: A world of graphics .................................................................... 186 Chapter 7: Narrative as a technology .......................................................... 213 Chapter 8: Conclusion ................................................................................ 242 Bibliography ................................................................................................ 254 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors David Moody and Ian Cook for their guidance and discernment. I would also like to thank my family for their general support. And of course I would like to thank Isioma for her love and patience. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Our narratives before our eyes Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realise something was actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on. The 2010 film Inception is a cultural site that serves as an illustration of current perceptions of the tenuousness of a tangibly solid reality. The above excerpt is a manifestation of an emerging notion in popular thought that the world is constructed from ideas that lie beneath what is immediately visible. As in a dream, when we are in the midst of a framework of thinking, we do not realise it because the illusion is hidden. We are realising now, however, that shifts in thought make us cognisant of the notion of an unconstructed world from which any narrative of reality can manifest. Popular works such as Inception and the 2011 film Source Code ponder on the properties of a world that is created and perceived simultaneously, as if what we see is being constantly rewritten. Productions such as these reveal the emerging public awareness of how much we bring to the world in perceiving it. Accordingly, there is arising in the global consciousness an increasingly prevalent awareness of the generative and dynamic power of paradigms, in that our changing ways of seeing the world are becoming more tangible and apparent 2 to us. In the Information Age, the movements of information are explicit. This is developing through constant and profound technological advancements. Since the widespread proliferation of mobile telephones early in the decade of the 2000s, for example, it has become common to hear it remarked that text messaging is having a deteriorating effect on the use of correct spelling and punctuation, such as in the Time magazine article “Is Texting Killing the English Language?” (McWhorter 2013). Today, such observations are becoming platitudinous due to the constant documentation of and commentary on social trends in the Information Age. There is also emerging a new, deeper understanding that such societal impacts of technology are occurring not only on an immediately visible level, but also in a less tangible manner that reflects the intrinsic properties of the technology we are beginning to use. An example that today is met with little dispute is distinctions between notions of “professional” and “amateur” becoming undermined by the user-generated environment of “Web 2.0” (Keen 2007, 5), which I will illustrate as being intrinsically associated with a forced convergence of these concepts in culture. These examples are all aspects of a global trend in which narratives of binary opposition between concepts are being undermined by principles of unity implied through emerging technology, namely, transcendence, continuity, and potential. The unravelling of conceptual discreteness is leading to a new conception of paradigms as combined on a unifying substrate, an overarching history of consciousness or “story about stories” that in this thesis I will call the metanarrative. This notion's captivation of the global consciousness can be seen to be, as in the nature of paradigms, spreading through the ubiquity of technological 3 developments. The nature of our advancements is creating an awareness that narratives of reality and reality itself are connected at an intimate and fundamental level. As seen in the blurring of the boundaries between professional and amateur, this awareness is creating a paradigm portraying a unification that transcends narratives of discreteness. I will illustrate this through ways in which other social institutions, including concepts of geographic space, social hierarchies and individuality are being affected by the constructed nature of narratives being brought to the forefront of consciousness by the digital revolution. Literature review Scope of terminology In this section I will examine the particular ways in which terminology will be employed in this thesis. I will focus on the effects of contemporary and emergent technology, and as such will tend to predominantly favour analyses of cultures in developed regions, i.e. those infused with the conveniences of information technology. Globalisation has been recognised as an implicitly technological process: "there is an interacting process in which economic globalisation is facilitated by technological globalisation but also enhances it" (Fotopoulos 2001). I will accordingly use the premise that the tendency of forms of technology to expand in their geographical presence points to the relevance of their associated thought frameworks eventually extending globally. 4 Regardless, in the scope of this research, the specific regions referred to are largely incidental to the capacity of technology to shape society. In temporal terms, I will use the Information Age as a site for this study. In defining the Information Age we must explicate what is fundamental to it, and should therefore identify a central catalyst. While Castells defined it as beginning in the late 1970s as the