The source of modern resentment

(A blog entry that has no relevance at all to pigs, lipstick, hockey moms, bailouts, suspended campaigns, mortgages, Presidential debates, or the Chicago Cubs)

The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagine to be unprecedented: the present’s resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse, without gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendours that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even the shadow or mist or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it’s just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us.

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Fear

(trans. by Margaret Jull Costa)

Media and bodies

The issue of visibility is, as Dave notes, important for thinking about new media in general and especially thinking about it historically. Bloggers have helped make visible certain moments or kinds of information (two prominent examples: Presidential sexual follies; racist remarks made by public figures) that may not have become part of the public discussion in an earlier era. In doing so, they have also made visible the ways in which mainstream media had always decided on what was or was not newsworthy, allowing for a more public critique of news institutions as well as politicians.

At the same time (as Fernando points out) we need to realize that media of any kind both open up and foreclose certain opportunities, encourage certain ways of acting and discourage others, bring some kinds of information to the fore and hide other kinds. One of the things that the Internet hides is the physical specificity of the bodies that use it: their visibility. Sherry Turkle has famously celebrated that aspect of Internet communication. By removing physical presence from an interaction, people were allowed to be whoever they wanted to be. If you a middle-aged male accountant from Wichita, you could pretend to be a surfer, or a biker, or a Buddhist monk, or a woman, or a space alien. No-one would be the wiser: a kind of postmodernist play of identity became a very real possibility. But this feature also meant that it was easy to forget that most of the people using the Internet in the 1990s (the VAST, VAST majority) were white, youngish, middle-class American males (which might help explain why, for example, the dominant political ethos was essentially libertarian). When we look at how the Net was organized, the ways it was used, the kind of discourse that built up around it, we need to keep in mind what sorts of bodies were in charge, and maybe also look at how they used something like a notion of visibility (or related terms like “openness”), to both publicly present themselves and to strategically hide certain elements of their lives.

Response to the Response, Part 1: History and New Media

This entry is going to be the first in a series of responses to Dave’s post of last week, which has got me to thinkin’:

First, about the noted tendency for many media historians to dismiss the importance of the Internet, or of new media generally, as just the same-old, same-old. I agree that this is annoying, and I also admit to doing some of it myself. I want to offer several different but compatible explanations for what I think might be going on here.

Most media historians, like most other academics, are geeky, and also very often insecure in their geekiness. Part of their insecurity comes from the awareness that they are experts in a subject in which almost all other people have very little interest, and regard as more or less useless. Hence, in their continual effort to prove their relevance, and also in order to preen before their fellow academics, obscure references to historical personages or events or technologies will inevitably pop up. “You tell me that the Internet is inherently democratic, and yet, don’t you know what Forysthe P. Wigglesworth III, nineteenth-American abolitionist, adventurer, and inventor of the epilecticoposcope, had to say about the utopian rhetoric surrounding the telegraph?” Followed by a (not terribly germane) quote from Wigglesworth, and a knowing smile.

Then too, the ready dismissal of new media’s significance is a cheap way to claim political sophistication, or a kind of old school radicalism: oh, I am just too, too historically aware to buy into all that hype.

A more justifiable rationale for this sort of argument, at least seven or eight years ago, when propaganda about the Internet was ubiquitous and rarely challenged, was simple weariness about the claims made on its behalf (Darin Barney has a nice quote at the beginning of his book Prometheus Wired from John Perry Barlow, in which Barlow calls digitized information “the most profound technological shift since the capture of fire.”) A reminder about historical perspective often felt apropos. Nowadays there is less need, although some of us (again I would probably include myself here) do tend to slip back into what has become something of a reflex response.

This is offered more in the spirit of explanation than exculpation. The pattern that Dave describes is intellectually lazy and boring, and because of this essentially helps makes the case for those many people who would rather we just forget all about history when talking about modern media technologies.

Message-Force Multipliers and Panic at the Pump

Last Sunday’s New York Times published a massive, well-sourced piece of investigative journalism on news networks’ use of Pentagon-briefed “military analysts” to comment favorably on the war in Iraq. These retired high-ranking officers were called “message force multipliers,” and “surrogates," spinning war news to keep the intervention justified and the outlook positive. Though they looked like neutral experts, some of them also worked for defense industries as lobbyists or consultants, and the broadcasters failed to investigate or disclose a conflict of interest. More damning, the Pentagon apparently used public funds to propagandize the American people, which, believe it or not, is still illegal. Apparently the chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services is requesting an investigation. None of this is much of a surprise. It’s that bad old military-industrial complex, and the “corporate media” is just an industry in league with the folks getting rich selling big guns, exactly what Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.

That said, in his farewell address to the nation, the military-industrial complex was just one of the two threats to American democracy Eisenhower mentioned, and I almost never see reference to the second: the government’s relationship to research:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”

It’s easy to point to the fulfillment of Eisenhower’s forecast of the power of the military- industrial complex, but this second “threat” at first seems harder to nail down (except by those of us who smugly congratulate ourselves for eschewing “administrative” research). It’s hard to grasp how the general public was meant to understand it then, and how we can understand it now. This view of “free ideas” – as opposed to ideas that cost a lot and require validation with a patent or other “deliverable” – seems romantic but obsolete. However, when paired with the American dependence on oil, and the lengths to which we go to “protect our interests” in the Middle East, Eisenhower’s skeptical glance at “the power of money” in allocating research funds makes a lot of sense. The scholars he imagines are “hard” scientists – those who might have figured out some energy alternatives by now, had public money been aggressively allocated to this sort of research instead of war (and internally-targeted psy-ops programs put in place to justify war). As critical media scholars, we have some interest in examining the demise of the notion of “free ideas,” and wondering whether the education industry has long been covered by Eisenhower’s first warning, leaving the second warning elegantly phrased and interesting to read, but ultimately redundant.