The Second Media Age E-Book

Mark Poster

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 355

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This book examines the implications of new communication technologies in the light of the most recent work in social and cultural theory and argues that new developments in electronic media, such as the Internet and Virtual Reality, justify the designation of a "second media age".

Leseprobe

The Second Media Age

Mark Poster

Polity Press

Copyright © Mark Poster 1995

The right of Mark Poster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1996

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ISBN 978-0-7456-1395-6 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-7456-1396-3

ISBN 978-0-7456-6822-2 (Single-user ebook)

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Contents

Acknowledgements

PART I     THEORETICAL RECONSIDERATIONS

1    Social Theory and the New Media

2    Postmodern Virtualities

3    Postmodernity and the Politics of Multiculturalism

4    The Mode of Information and Postmodernity

5    Databases as Discourse, or Electronic Interpellations

6    Critical Theory and TechnoCulture: Habermas and Baudrillard

PART II     MEDIAS

7    Politics in the Mode of Information: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

8    RoboBody

9    What Does Wotan Want? Ambivalent Feminism in Wagner’s Ring

10  War in the Mode of Information

Notes

Index

For Carol

Acknowledgements

Many people deserve my thanks for comments and suggestions with this book. Members of the Critical Theory Institute continue to serve me as a unique academic environment in which critique is forthright but constructive. Over the years relations of trust have grown there which nurture intellectual development and discussion. My friend and colleague Jon Wiener gave me excellent advice on several of the chapters. Rob Kling read several chapters, offering valuable suggestions, and made me aware of many new works on topics I treat. Versions of the chapters were presented at many campuses and conventions at which I received much valuable criticism which I accepted as gracefully as I was able and for which I am very grateful. Ideas for this volume were also formed in my classes. Graduate students in History and in UC Irvine’s Emphasis in Critical Theory were often more helpful than they can know in assisting me to clarify issues, discover new texts and revise old assumptions. Carol Starcevic provided assiduous, helpful readings of many chapters.

Earlier versions of certain chapters appeared first as follows: chapters 1 and 2 in Arena journal (September 1994); chapter 3 in David Crowley and David Mitchell, eds, Communication Theory Today (New York: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 173–92; chapter 4 in Wolfgang Natter, ed., Contemporary Democratic Theory and Democracy (New York: Guilford, forthcoming, 1995); chapter 5 in Modern Fiction Studies 38: 3 (1992), pp. 567–80; chapter 6 in Douglas Kellner, ed., Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (New York: Blackwell, 1994); chapter 7 in Paradigm; chapter 8 in Zone: Incorporations 6 (Spring 1992), pp. 436–40; chapter 9 in New German Critique 53 (Spring-Summer 1991), pp. 131–48; chapter 10 in Cultural Critique 19 (Fall 1991), pp. 217–22.

PART I

THEORETICALRECONSIDERATIONS

1

Social Theory and the New Media

The twentieth century has witnessed the introduction of communications systems that allow a wide distribution of messages from one point to another, conquering space and time first through electrification of analogue information, then through digitalization. Among critical social theorists there has been a debate over the political effects of these technologies, with one side (Benjamin, Enzensberger, McLuhan) arguing for potential democratization and the other side (Adorno, Habermas, Jameson) seeing the dangers to liberty as predominant.1 This debate occurred at a time when the broadcast model of communications prevailed. In film, radio and television, a small number of producers sent information to a large number of consumers. With the incipient introduction of the information “superhighway” and the integration of satellite technology with television, computers and telephone, an alternative to the broadcast model, with its severe technical constraints, will very likely enable a system of multiple producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms collapse. A second age of mass media is on the horizon. At this critical junction, I shall review the debate over the relation between technology, culture and politics of the first media age, gauging the extent of the value of those positions for an analysis of an emerging new technocultural arrangement. Although one portion of this discussion, the Adorno–Benjamin debate on mass culture, has been analyzed many times, I shall focus on the issue of communications technology, a topic which has been largely overlooked. I shall concentrate my attention on the problem of the construction of the subject in relation to these technologies, the issue of the body and the question of postmodernity. Throughout the chapter my chief concern shall be the development of a critical social theory that accounts for the impending massive cultural reorganizations of the second media age. My motivation is neither to celebrate nor to condemn these prospects but to indicate their importance for cultural change.

The general political question that haunts the discussion of the media for critical social theory is the stalled dialectic. The parties to the debate acknowledge the absence of an oppositional political force that might challenge the status quo. For some the working class, in whom much hope was placed by Marxist theory, has been politically nullified to no small extent by the media but in the widest sense was assimilated into modern society as part of a baleful mass. For others modern society achieved an integration of the working class largely without overt political repression, through the operations of what Antonio Gramsci termed “hegemony.”2 While these positions have a great deal in common, their difference lies in how the popular groups are regarded: in the former the working class has become an inert mass, manipulated by the media and popular culture generally. For the latter the dominant forces have been able to establish a statis but resistance continues at the micro-level of everyday life. The first position is characteristic of most members of the Frankfurt School; the latter is typical of the cultural studies group and of Michel de Certeau in France. Feminists and postcolonial theorists align themselves on either side of the issue. The question I wish to raise is to what extent does the debate hinge on a certain understanding of technology, one characteristic of the broadcast phase of its development which is in the process of being supplanted by a much different configuration?