Arthur Kroker quote: “In the hypermodern era, identity goes public”

In the hypermodern era, identity goes public

In the modern era, we were specialists, trapped in private identities. In the hypermodern era, identity goes public. It gets netted and webbed and digitally nested. Today, the hyperreal body, the’ hypermedia body, travels in exactly the way that McLuhan predicted: lighter than an astronaut, but at an accelerated speed. The Web is the digital mirror that reflects back to our nomadic bodies its fate as it is externalized in a world of artificial intelligence, recombinant genes, and spliced data streams. As the spectre that haunts the vanishing of mass media, the Web is our privileged window onto the 3d millennium. (Arthur & Marilouse Kroker (Editors), Digital Delirium, New World Perspectives, CultureTexts Series, Montreal, 1997, p. xiv.)