Postmodern identity is shaped by constant media channel-switching rather than fixed subjectivity

Evidence

Thus the movement from one generic classification to another is radically discontinuous, like switching channels on a cable television set; and indeed it seems appropriate to characterize the strings of items and the compartments of genres of their typologization as so many “channels” into which the new reality is organized. … “We” thus turn out to be whatever we are in, confront, inhabit, or habitually move through, provided it is understood that under current conditions we are obliged to renegotiate all those spaces or channels back and forth ceaselessly in a single Joycean day. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 796

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘channel switching’ model of postmodern perception and identity — a central concept for explaining the mediated self.
• QUESTION: Interesting to push on whether channel-switching attention is actually new (1960s TV culture?) or simply intensified — relevant to testing periodization claim.
• XREF: Pushes against psychoanalytic multiple-subject-positions models; connects to the reader’s interest in cognitive mapping of position. — connects to: Postmodern ‘waning of affect’ fragments the subject into depthless, spasmodic flux. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 154; Postmodern aesthetic practices respond to an environment of image-and-message saturation — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 230