The Sacred in Pop-culture -The Protest of the Secularization of the “Z” Generation

Abstract

Post-modern society is in an ongoing process of globalization and digitalization. Human culture knows no geo-political boundaries and is becoming globalized in its turn, enabling us to already speak of a culture of a global community (society), that is deeply infused with beliefs, precepts, signs, symbols, meanings and significance, which would have earlier been defining for a particular society / particular culture (identifiable in a precise space of the oikouménē-i), but which is now popularizing, globalizing and, to a large extent, transcending real space - through digitalization - to a new ontological space: that of the virtual. In this context, we are witnessing a dissolution of the old socio-cultural paradigms, a trans-cultural and trans-generational mélange.

The present paper seeks to bring to light the issue of the loss of the element of sacredness, once ubiquitous in the mundane, proper to postmodern culture as an inherent consequence of the hyper-technologicalization of the world and traditional secularization. Furthermore, the paper is intended as an analysis of the process of recharging the lost sacred symbol (of sacredness) of the virtual world, and not only, under the paradigm of universal pop culture. In order to account for what is proposed for argumentation, we will focus our argumentation on the way in which "Generation Z" breaks with the secularized tradition (unadapted to the post-modern era), revises its cultural foundations, and proposes (volens-nolens) a new form of resacralization of the extended ontological mundane (incorporating the virtual), as a generalized protest against traditional secularization. This form of the sacred preserves unaltered the continuous search for the sacred in the profane, as a constitutive element of human nature, but it lends it an increased adaptability to the conjunctures of post-modern society. The meta-sacredness, proposed even by Generation Z, is intended to be a substitute for the already secularized and rigid sacredness, offering an incorporation of the transcultural magic-mystical element, in a "popular" form (characteristic to pop culture) – full of signs, pre-existing symbols, meanings and significance, however, in a reinterpreted fashion, modified and purified of the localization element, in a process of acceptance of glocalization.