Brave New Media
Alongside Orwell's dark vision in 1984, there was another. It was slightly older, slightly less well-known, but equally as chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to popular belief, they did not prophesize the same thing. Orwell warned that we would be overcome by an externally imposed oppression, but as Huxley saw it, people would come to love their oppression and to adore the technologies that undid their capacities to think. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Karl Marx once observed, 'the ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.' However, because of the twenty-first century powershift of the means of production in relation to new media and communications, mass global audiences have greater opportunities than at any other time in history to produce ideas to challenge normative assumptions and expectations. With new media connectivity, the world's citizens are now transcending the passivity of watching television and being fed the political line of corporations and governments. Global audiences are actively exchanging information between themselves at light speed, commenting upon and even rewriting the way that events are reported and distributed. We are all authors and producers now.
The new media, in terms of the opportunities afforded by the internet as a means of transmission, has the chance to produce output which is truly autonomous and free of dominant economic ideology. Social commentators can post, largely without fear of censorship, across the globe in real time. Walter Benjamin described the democratization of photography as revolutionary. That new and instantaneous media can highlight oppressive regimes bears out this definition.
Futurist, Alvin Toffler, once said that knowledge is unlike land or machines which can be used by only one person or firm at a time; it can be applied by many different users at the same time. It is inherently inexhaustible and non-exclusive. New media offer opportunities for freedom of expression like never before. The upside of an information age is that knowledge is the one resource that can be increased by sharing it. Power and influence will pass to those who possess this 'social' resource. People who have access to information tend not to be easily manipulated and the ability to communicate issues globally will help to focus public and professional opinion about the plight of groups previously exploited simply because they were isolated.
For all its promise, the danger is that this brave new media will either be constrained in some way by those who would wish to maintain their hegemonic position or that we will become distracted and 'the truth' will be drowned in a Huxleyan sea of irrelevance so that social action will dissolve in an endless flicker of images. How we are obliged to conduct human conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.
Karl Marx once observed, 'the ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.' However, because of the twenty-first century powershift of the means of production in relation to new media and communications, mass global audiences have greater opportunities than at any other time in history to produce ideas to challenge normative assumptions and expectations. With new media connectivity, the world's citizens are now transcending the passivity of watching television and being fed the political line of corporations and governments. Global audiences are actively exchanging information between themselves at light speed, commenting upon and even rewriting the way that events are reported and distributed. We are all authors and producers now.
The new media, in terms of the opportunities afforded by the internet as a means of transmission, has the chance to produce output which is truly autonomous and free of dominant economic ideology. Social commentators can post, largely without fear of censorship, across the globe in real time. Walter Benjamin described the democratization of photography as revolutionary. That new and instantaneous media can highlight oppressive regimes bears out this definition.
Futurist, Alvin Toffler, once said that knowledge is unlike land or machines which can be used by only one person or firm at a time; it can be applied by many different users at the same time. It is inherently inexhaustible and non-exclusive. New media offer opportunities for freedom of expression like never before. The upside of an information age is that knowledge is the one resource that can be increased by sharing it. Power and influence will pass to those who possess this 'social' resource. People who have access to information tend not to be easily manipulated and the ability to communicate issues globally will help to focus public and professional opinion about the plight of groups previously exploited simply because they were isolated.
For all its promise, the danger is that this brave new media will either be constrained in some way by those who would wish to maintain their hegemonic position or that we will become distracted and 'the truth' will be drowned in a Huxleyan sea of irrelevance so that social action will dissolve in an endless flicker of images. How we are obliged to conduct human conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.
No comments have been added yet.
