| appendix:
some thoughts on the "post-media era".
::: if one took a seat in the time machine, travelling
either forwards or backwards, one could observe, how media take/took over
each "post-" step by step, integrating it into another "pre-"version to
maintain the promises and illusions of a media-eschatology by the means
of the spectacle. of course, going back into real time then, there would
be no doubt that we live in a pre-media era. from now on, if the technological,
economical, military and cultural developments and determinisms will continue
in the same way, the occident will face a pre-media era eternally. that's
the plain truth, as "in a world that really has been turned on its head,
truth is a moment of falsehood" (g.debord). so, every post-media symptom
would mean the end of the media system as an absolute state. since the
media dissolve each symptom of media-revolution into bits of information
on the one hand, handsome entertainment on the other, there is no fear
for the media to be deleted from the planet. preceding the post-media era
there would have been a revolution within and by the means of media. that,
of course, in never going to happen, since it happens every day.
::: as time machines are a fantasy of the pre-wwII-industrial
era, we must assume now that the time machines of the present are the media
itself. that makes the observation of the above a bit easier. but it also
helps to lose the blind spots of the system.
::: it's likely to be one of the signifiers of
this millennium to end, that the prefix "post-" is being (or has been)
used to such an exploding extent. hopefully in one year we will use "pre-"
more often to fix the problem and finally understand media...
::: bruce sterling's dead media list is an example
of how to witness the only seemingly existence of a post-media society.
the list, as every living archive, is steadily growing. so, the list is
not the dumb-your-trash syndrome of a media era long gone, but it's the
database of a media era to emerge. that of course, is the same as with
the use and history of history as a science. you can be sure: as long as
there is a media history, there is an interest in media to "be".
::: it seems that it's more likely to call the
present system a "paste-media era". as it can be felt from your fingertips
to your feet on the dancefloor, from your unpersonal webdesgin to your
personal style of dressing up, from web tv to amazon.com: copying old media
into new and vice versa, be it with our without synergetic effects, is
the way how media work on you and how you work on the media. in the act
of cutting, copying - or pasting, there is both, repetition and difference.
either of them will care for the furture. speed only depends on where you
put the cursor for cutting. so if you cut "post", copy it and "paste"
it to a different location, you will get a true sense of mediated time.
::: maybe pasting is the smallest time machine
we can think of so far. maybe it's the only one exisiting. maybe you already
use it at this special moment. but that, of course, is the rule of getting
copied...
convex tv.
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