Preparing for Postmodernity

Above all Giddens is arguing that the "situational geography" (p.84) of modern social life and modern social selves has been drastically repositioned by the electronic media to the extent that the experience of social life and self is more fluid, uncertain and complicated than in previous epox. In the global market place, we are allowed to choose between a series of decontextualized self identities rather in the manner of the commodified market place generally. Hence, the local and traditional elements of self are less constitutive. This leads to the self as an ongoing reflexive and narrative project for as Giddens writes "at each moment, or at least at regular intervals, the individual is asked to conduct a self interrogation in terms of what is happening". (p. 76)

The self then becomes an ongoing process of self building and self negotiation and in this sense, it is possible to see the self as an ongoing narrative project.

This conceptionization of self building is not unlike the conclusions arrived at by Leinberger and Tucker in their book The New Individualists (1991). Here they are concerned with the offspring cohort from the "organization men" of William White's study in 1950. They argue that the whole epistomogical basis of individual life has shifted because of the economic and social changes of the last decade. This economic and social change plays itself out in what they call a different "self ethic".

As the organization men's offsprings came of age in the sixties and seventies, they were exhorted to find themselves or create themselves. They undertook the task with fervor, as self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-assertion, self-actualization, self-understanding, self-acceptance, and any number of other self compounds found their way into everyday language and life. Eventually, all these experiences solidified into what can only be called the self ethic, which has ruled the lives of the organization offspring as thoroughly as the social ethic ruled the lives of their parents. Many people mistakenly regarded this development as narcissism, egoism, or pure selfishness. But the self ethic, like the social ethic it displaced, was based on a genuine moral imperative—the duty to express the authentic self. (Leinberger and Tucker, pp. 11-12)

Leinberger and Tucker push the argument about self to the point where they argue that the authentic self is being replaced with by an artificial self.

In pursuing the ideal of the authentic self, the offspring produced the most radical version of the American individual in history—totally psychologized and isolated, who has difficulty "communicating" and "making commitments," never mind achieving community. But by clinging to the artist ideal, the organization offspring try to escape the authentic self and simultaneously to maintain it as the ultimate value. It is a delicate balancing act to which many of them have been brought by the search for self-fulfillment, but it is a position that they are finding increasingly hard to maintain.