To be honest, I thought this would be the easiest of the questions. Identifying my first encounter with postmodernity should be as simple as matching up something in my life with the concepts Webber describes - ideas such as the lack of a single unifying factor in the universe, the interrelationship of all things and the increasing tendency to communicate visually and symbolically.
The problem is, with each encounter that came to mind, I could think of something earlier until I came to this conclusion: Sesame Street and Schoolhouse Rock. It sounds funny and maybe a bit absurd, I realize, but, then again, my thought processes are often a bit absurd so let me explain.
When I was just six months old, Sesame Street debuted on public television introducing to the nation a whole new way to teach children. In a show brought to us by the letter A and the number 3, we learned how to count, to say the alphabet and understand concepts like "near" and "far" through a combination of visual images and little songs that our parents must have found to be utterly annoying. Thanks to the technology of the Internet and the fun that is YouTube, here's one example that sticks in my mind to this very day:
As if the Sesame Street phenomenon weren't enough, Saturday morning cartoons were peppered with these little mini-cartoons, known collectively as Schoolhouse Rock, that again used visual images and songs to teach everything from grammar to math to science to civics. I have yet to meet someone my age who doesn't remember at least a little bit of one of these cartoons.
Certainly, I didn't have a clue what postmodernism was when I was a toddler singing, "conjunction, junction, what's your function?" In retrospect, though, we can see that this was a new means of teaching basic educational concepts to children through a medium that had only in the past decade or so become a staple in nearly every household. It relied on visual cues, a fast pace and stories to convey the meaning behind such varying concepts as the parts of speech and how a bill makes its way through Congress.
If, however, you want me to point out an event that I knew at the moment I was watching changed my view of the world, I would have to point to November 4, 1979. On that Sunday afternoon, I watched the special reports as Iranian students led blindfolded members of our embassy staff in Tehran through surging crowds. Before that time, it was inconceivable to me that anyone would want to do Americans harm - much less American who were also diplomats, who, I thought, were universally considered off-limits to such tactics in the world community.
In thinking about postmodernity, I agree with Dr. J.'s statement in the original post that World War I began the awakening and that was reflected first in the arts, as many cultural changes are. With successive catastrophes, such as the Great Depression, World War II, the uncertainty of the Cold War and more, the walls of modernity continued to break down to the point that I believe that if I were to describe postmodernity and then ask the students in my youth group to describe their first encounter with it, they would give me the most quizzical look you could imagine and say, "What do you mean first encounter? It's always been that way ..."
