On arrival...

Terranova fittingly brings together a lot of key concepts and themes that we have grappled with throughout the semester in order to apply it to the circumstance of the modern moment. Often it seems that one reads media analyses only to realize that it has already become irrelevant but it is not so with this. It's moment is still our and its reading still contains accuracy.

The big questions that come to my mind after reading the book are in terms of goals in practice and the function of media. Her discussion of Baudrillard's description of the masses as a body that in a sense desires this sort of manipulative spin from their media opens the grand question of 'well, what is media good for?' that is besides the manipulation of large groups of people for the benefit of interest groups. In this question, there arises the dialogue between internet and television where television maintains a hierarchy of an information flows whereas the internet does not thanks to its open architecture and so appear at odds with one another. There is also the interesting question of media's role in globalization and the inability to control this such as in the discussion of how media depicting suffering in underdeveloped countries created anger in those countries more than sympathy in overdeveloped countries and the use of media for goals that are anti-western and anti-enlightenment. For example, I find it hard to imagine the sort of global decentralized terrorist infrastructure that exists today and coordinates itself in the shadows to be able to exist without the internet or cell phones or any number of other mediating technologies.

So I suppose these are sort of jumbled thoughts but really, there's a lot to say about this book and how it relates to what the status is on the ground today. We are connected, we mediated, we are played with, we are masses, we function as dynamical systems whether we know it or not, want to or not and so all of this must be taken into consideration in political goals and objectives. As was stated in the book, the ethics of journalism are not as efficacious as those of advertisement that consider the need to clear out a channel, create contact, and reduce noise as much as possible. Our news is never direct experience and comes to us as always already processed simulcra. This camera angle or that one, this is what's given, this is their choice; the television gives us and constructs our gaze just as a book we read tells us our thoughts and so media is redundant in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's descritpion of language.

So we live in a network culture typified by informational dynamics that become through networks such as the internet that are continually expanding and present a problem and a possibility. This is the internet's great interest, its organization in opposition to all the tenets previously valued as necessary for something to function with efficacy. This corresponds to the biological turn in computing of which the internet is born as an organism, a body without organs, where each intensity of its multiplicity is a player in the global network of networks hooking in and out and routing and rerouting as fluid intensity. This is not easy to manage, this is not easy to control thus the need for this new style of internet imperialism that allows for coexistence rather than domination and specificity of the target rather than broadcast.

All of these media really do have a lot of implications for the way we live life that are slowly materializing and becoming manifest and as this continues I wonder how much it is a benefit and how much a detriment. After all, much of technology requires a great expenditure of energy, as diffuse networks problems can spread quickly and have devastating effects while still being difficult to localize, and, as it is practiced today and described by Baudrillard, media is often more of a hindrance than an aid to understanding, and this is all in addition to the problems of global corporate imperialism. But it's been a long day and I have just returned from the vast highway networks of the east coast as a part of the masses of cars still and moving at different intensities. I have been becoming car all day and now I shall become sleep.