Sunday Morning Musings On Media

Trapped in a cabin along the Gatineau River in Wakefield, Quebec (tough life, it’s heaven here on sunny days), re-reading sections of "Mediated – How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live In It", by Thomas de Zengotita …

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In Full Relax Mode – Viewing Doobie

Bros. Video Through (Closed) Eyelids

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"When I talk about publicly about mediation, I get predictable objections that I can usually satisfy, one by one – when time permits.  After people catch on – when they start to understand that this isn’t so much about media per se, but about being a mediated person, about existing, in the Heideggerian sense, in a world that is made up of a flattering field of represented options – then they usually switch from making objections to saying one of two things:  "Okay, I see what you mean, but isn’t that a good thing?" or "Okay, I see what you mean, but what’s the solution?"

The Justin’s Helmet principle takes care of the first question, but people with the second response are harder to reach.  They speak with a very particular tone of voice, the tone of one who holds a trump – namely, in this case, the settled assumption that a critical analysis that doesn’t provide a solution is a waste of time.

That’s why almost every book of social criticism, every article, even every little op-ed piece, must conclude with some solution, however lame.

Which came first ?  Audience expectations or visionary bogosity?  With cultural forms like this it’s hard to tell.  What is clear is that this genre requirement is a vestige of modernity’s faith in the technological fix – with "technological" meant broadly, to include political and social and even psychological programs and reforms. I say "vestige" because I think a lot of people who consume social criticism and futurist tracts don’t fully believe in these solutions anymore either.  Not all, but a lot.  Like the visionaries, they are trapped in the genre.  I think what’s going on now, especially since 9 / 11, in Bush’s America, is that more and more people are realizing, at a gut level, that we are all in that car fishtailing around on a snowy road, that so far we haven’t gone over the edge – but that doesn’t mean that anybody or anything is in control.  It just means that, so far, we’ve been luck (some of us, anyway).

I think more and more people understand that events are beyond our comprehension, let alone our management capacities.  We can sense the flop sweat behind the stern masks of jut-jawed leadership, especially now that terror by WMD is starting to feel inevitable, just a matter of when, not whether.

Which was totally predictable all along, by the way; it’s one of the few things that you could have known would happen someday.  But the jut-jawed leaders of yore were too busy with whatever immediate crisis they had created back then to bother about the totally obvious long-run consequences of making these lethal technologies in the first place, not to mention pursuing policies bound to get us hated by most of the people on the planet.

Realizing that things have gotten out of hand isn’t just irrational intuition.  The premise upon which modernity’s faith in the fix is based is logically flawed.   "If people cause X, people can cure X" just isn’t true.  A man who jumps off a bridge can’ arrest his descent in mid-air.  At a certain point, if we keep pumping junk into the environment, we will pass a point of no return.  Maybe we already have.

So if my suspicions on this score are justified, why do we keep producing and consuming these lame predictions and solutions ?  Could it just be, as I’m trying to get up the nerve to assert, because it’s a condition of employment and entertainment in this genre ?  Do we conclude with solutions and predictions because that gives us  the closure we need before moving on to the next thing we want to produce or consume? 

An aesthetic conversation, in other words, that panders to a niche of people who identify as engaged and knowledgeable, people hooked on insights into megatrends, people who crave the rush of righteous resolve that comes with knowing what needs to be done on the world historical stage.

After all, even if everyone understands, on some unconscious level, that things are pretty much out of control, who wants to hear that over and over again?  I mean, you get one book, max, out of that insight, and then what? 

Everybody stops pontificating?

Not a chance.

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