Postmodern social theory is a field of diverse and at times contradictory ideas that try to describe the relations of individuals to society after World War II and the rise of the communications and information age. Postmodern theory is largely concerned with the ways our perceptions and reality are constructed.
Social Constructs
A social construct is an object that exists by virtue of its social function. A good example of this is money, which has no intrinsic value but has social value because everybody agrees it does. This concept can be stretched to include such things as gender roles and identities. Language can also be considered a social construct, in that it has no existence without human interaction.
Social Reality
Social reality is distinct from objective reality and individual subjective reality because it refers to the socially constructed nature of most of our shared institutions, beliefs and values. Social reality can be thought of as the sum of the social constructs in a society, or as the result of the social interactions between individuals within a society.
Hyper-reality
Hyper-reality is a concept popularized by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Hyper-reality refers to the relationship between consciousnesses' experience of reality in a world that is permeated by media and images. It says there a state where reality and the fantasies created by media become so interpenetrated that consciousness can no longer differentiate between the two, and reality disappears behind the phantasmal hyper-reality that replaces it. Reality is replaced within consciousness by a copy of itself, and reality in a sense ceases to exist for individuals living within hyper-reality.
Post-Industrial Society
Post-industrial society is the economic phase where a society changes from an economy based on manufacturing to one based on services, where capital is no longer created by production of goods but through financial markets and professional services. This economic movement is usually accompanied by changes in the social structure, such as a shift in skills from manual know-theoretical knowledge, and the growth and reliance upon communications and information technologies.
Meta-narratives
Meta-narratives, also known as master narratives, are the large historical schemes and stories that bind societies together. They sanction certain kinds of knowledge above others, and give people a sense of national and collective identity. Jean-Francois Lyotard has defined the postmodern social condition as a incredulity toward meta-narratives, when the grand stories that we once told ourselves to justify our social structures, such as the progress of enlightenment or the coming of the communist revolution, are met with disbelief, thus creating fractures in the social order.
