Wikipedia is the most postmodern invention of them all!

Postmodern theorists Jean-Francois Lyotard and Frederic Jameson think a lot about how we are today. Postmodern life is a web of truth and fiction, and we rarely know when we are getting one or the other. Both Lyotard and Jameson claim that a free flow of knowledge, shaped for a consumerist culture, is constant in a postmodern society, but contains few truths. In other words, today’s society is packaging content at an alarming rate, but, although it's packaged as “information,” people in postmodern society know less than ever before. 

Lyotard, a college professor and thinker, wrote in French, but many of his writings, like Toward the Postmodern and Postmodern Fables, have been translated into English.  Lyotard died in 1998 of leukemia. Lyotard says a free flow of information has become commonplace in this technological, postmodern age, but its consumer-based shaping creates few conclusions. In other words, Lyotard says that as society moves into faster and more diverse modes of spreading information—or the move from the telegraph to the cell phone, Blackberry, and internet—it has and will revolutionize the way society thinks and processes information. He cautions, however, that this information is often molded to be more palatable and understandable to an expected audience, rather than to offer any sort of truth. The knowledge is packaged for specific consumers, but this package may not offer anything substantive for anyone. 

Jameson, an American writer who is sill living, echoes Lyotard, saying that as technology has made consumption and distribution faster, it has also been shaped more and more to be palatable to the consumer. Moving from the market economy, to the monopoly to the multi-national capitalism, economics, and in turn cultural products, have become more about marketing rather than producing in response to consumer need. In addition, he says that knowledge and culture, produced and distributed at an increasingly fast rate, is packaged to be consumed, not to give any real information or to provide answers to questions posed by the consumers.

Alternately, many novelists have criticized Lyotard and Jameson in terms of applying theory to real, physical art work. Popular American author, Tim O’Brien says that a free flow of information is impossible in actual artistic practice. A novel can’t have a free flow of information, or it would have no form. In addition, a free flow of information never happens because information is classified, or people don’t have the tools to decipher it. The reader is in even a worse condition—not only can he draw no conclusion from what the narrator tells him, but also he is subjugated to what the narrator--or whoever creates what he is reading-- tells him is true.

In our modern day, consumer-based information culture, it is that much harder to determine not only what is worthwhile information, but also becoming impossible to determine its source.  With authorless encyclopedias—who really writes Wikipedia?—to faceless blogs—you don’t know anything about most of the people who write your daily news—American information consumers are increasingly becoming exactly what Lyotard and Jameson predicted—more interested in faith than fact.