The first usage of the term “post-modernism” is attributed to Charles Jencks in 1947. The term was used to describe a new style of architecture that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century.
Eventually the term began to be used to describe the state of contemporary culture with its apparently incongruous and irreverent mix of classicism and popular art forms, the disregard for generic conventions, the intensely self-conscious and self-reflexive mode in films and fiction, the blurring of reality and illusion, and the rise of digital technology, the global communication networks, the proliferation of data and cyber space and its influence on art forms (including cyber texts and cyber art) and the increasingly problematic distinction of private and public space.