Hard reading

Today, I read a pretty difficult essay. Partially it was difficult because the book it’s in uses 8-point type, and no pictures or graphs. My new-media-spoiled brain craves interactivity and visuals. Or maybe I’m just lazy.

The first, McKenzie Wark’s “The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual,” is complicated. It’s about the strange paradoxes in the concept of “Global Media” and “Global Media Events.” Wark uses the events of Sept. 11, 2001 to illustrate most of her points. These events were global media events, and how they’ve played out in the media (and are still playing out). A few of her most interesting points are:

Wark writes “It proves remarkably difficult to think back from one’s experience to the causes of the event itself.” She explains that even in The New Yorker magazine, where some of the “most distinguished writers in town” were charged with recording their experiences produced “banal” results. The writers, including “stars” like Jonathan Franzen and Adam Gopnik provide “richly detailed versions of their whereabouts on the day, connected to nothing but trivial remarks about the more abstract forces at work.”

Is this paradox a product of the technosphere’s influence? We have the capability to be more connected to more people and more information than ever before, yet, when “Global Media Events” happen, we stake a claim on our individuality by writing about where we were and what we were doing when we found out. This makes me think of something Chuck Klosterman wrote. In his book “Killing Yourself to Live,” he writes "When people want to go into detail about what they were doing on 9/11] "You have to listen, because that person is actually trying to show you that they can talk about life without the safety of ironic distance. September 11 is one issue every American can be completely earnest and unguarded about." When I read this for the first time, in 2005, I was thinking about it in context. It’s in a chapter about a Radiohead record, I think. But now I wonder if there’s some technological voodoo at work here. This sort of relates to what I think is Wark’s second interesting point:

Theydom and Wedom. This comes from John Hartley, and Slavoj Zizek and Edward Said. The “they” in Theydom is the other. “They” are not like “us.” Zizek explains that we don’t like “them” because “they” either want “to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment.” But now “Theydom” and “Wedom” has started a war. Isn’t this also opposed to the “Global Village” mindset? If we can contact these people and access information about them from the comfort of our laptop computers, does that make us more or less likely to blow them up? Wark says it like this, “The frightening paradox of September 11 is how this attack on actual human lives in New York and Afghanistan is at the same time merely an attack on abstract signifiers of Wedom and Theydom. This is an interesting, albeit scary, point.

I guess both of these points kind of make an argument for the futility of the “Global Village” nomenclature. Things, at least things like this, haven’t really changed. We aren’t really a village at all.

Tomorrow, hopefully, I’m going to read another hard essay, “Imperceptible Perceptions in Our Technological Modernity” by Arvind Rajagopal.

In other news, over the weekend I watched all three “Back to the Future” movies. In the fictitious 2015, there were fax machines and hoverboards and videophones and flying cars and “Jaws 19,” but there wasn’t an Internet. I don’t know if I would have even noticed that if I hadn’t been working on this course.