Andrei Codrescu made a few insightful comments about the media in a recent essay. He basically said that study of the psyche and its reception of information could be ignored. We no longer need to think of the unconscious, he said. We are unconscious.
When it comes to the info industry, I think he's right.
Then again, information culture has always been gamed in such a fashion, from embedded reporters in Iraq, to CIA operatives working the top newsrooms. In fact, this was going on ages ago. I saw a presentation yesterday which proved that in the 1930s the Nazis were conducting psychological warfare against England by publishing works by top Irish writers who were critical of colonial policies. These were being published by established presses and magazines in New York and Paris.
From his obit in the London Times:
Baudrillard first attracted worldwide attention in 1991 with his deliberately provocative book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place ... Nothing was as it appeared in the war, he said, claiming that the public's - and even the military's - perception of the conflict came filtered through images from the media. As a result, the conflict was best seen as a simulation -
Nothing was as it appeared in the war, he said, claiming that the public's - and even the military's - perception of the conflict came filtered through images from the media. As a result, the conflict was best seen as a simulation -
From Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In the 1980s, Baudrillard posited an "immanent reversal," a flip-flop or reversed direction of meaning and effects, in which things turn into their opposite. Thus, according to Baudrillard, the society of production was passing over to simulation and seduction; the panoptic and repressive power theorized by Foucault was turning into a cynical and seductive power of the media and information society; the liberation championed in the 1960s had become a form of voluntary servitude; sovereignty had passed from the side of the subject to the object; and revolution and emancipation had turned into their opposites, trapping individuals in an order of simulation and virtuality.
We don't Act, anymore. We consume. We consume the pre-digested baby food that the moguls and their media spoon feed us. That baby food could be that brand new electronic nose hair picker to an iPod to a TARP or to a War. It's all the same because the channel of communication flattens all differences. It's 15 seconds of Babble-Box stuffing and then onto the next 15 seconds, to the next, and the next, and the next, and the next ...
It's "noise" in the strict sense of "unintelligible or dissonant sound carrying no information."
