Mark Poster
(This essay appears as Chapter 2 in my book The Second Media Age
(Blackwell 1995)
[EDITED by SNK]
On the eve of the twenty first century there have been two innovative discussions
about the general conditions of life: one concerns a possible
"postmodern" culture and even society; the other concerns broad,
massive changes in communications systems. Postmodern culture is often
presented as an alternative to existing society which is pictured as
structurally limited or fundamentally flawed. New communications systems are
often presented as a hopeful key to a better life and a more equitable society.
The discussion of postmodern culture focuses to a great extent on an emerging
new individual identity or subject position, one that abandons what may in
retrospect be the narrow scope of the modern individual with its claims to
rationality and autonomy. The discourse surrounding the new communications
systems attends more to the imminent technical increase in information exchange
and the ways this advantage will redound to already existing individuals and
already existing institutions. My purpose in this essay is to bring these two
discussions together, to enact a confrontation between them so that the
advantages of each may redound to the other, while the limitations of each may
be revealed and discarded. My contention is that a critical understanding of
the new communications systems requires an evaluation of the type of subject it
encourages, while a viable articulation of postmodernity must include an
elaboration of its relation to new technologies of communication. Finally, I
shall turn to the issue of multiculturalism in relation to the postmodern
subject in the age of the mode of information.
For what is at stake in these technical innovations, I contend, is
not simply an increased "efficiency" of interchange, enabling new
avenues of investment, increased productivity at work and new domains of
leisure and consumption, but a broad and extensive change in the culture, in
the way identities are structured. If I may be allowed a historical
analogy: the technically advanced societies are at a point in their history
similar to that of the emergence of an urban, merchant culture in the midst of
feudal society of the middle ages. At that point, practices of the exchange of
commodities required individuals to act and speak in new ways, ways drastically
different from the aristocratic code of honor with its face-to-face encounters
based on trust for one's word and its hierarchical bonds of interdependency.
Interacting with total strangers sometimes at great distances, the merchants
required written documents guaranteeing spoken promises and an "arms
length distance" attitude even when face‑to‑face with the
other, so as to afford a "space" for calculations of self‑interest.
A new identity was constructed, gradually and in a most circuitous path to be
sure, among the merchants in which a coherent, stable sense of individuality
was grounded in independent, cognitive abilities. In this way, the cultural
basis for the modern world was begun, one that eventually would rely upon print
media to encourage and disseminate these urban forms of identity.
In the twentieth century, electronic media are supporting an equally profound
transformation of cultural identity. Telephone, radio, film, television, the
computer and now their integration as "multimedia" reconfigure words,
sounds and images so as to cultivate new configurations of individuality. If modern
society may be said to foster an individual who is rational, autonomous,
centered, and stable (the "reasonable man" of the law, the educated
citizen of representative democracy, the calculating "economic man"
of capitalism, the grade‑defined student of public education), then perhaps
a postmodern society is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different
from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic communications
technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities. Discussions
of these technologies, as we shall see, tend often to miss precisely this
crucial level of analysis, treating them as enhancements for already formed
individuals to deploy to their advantage or disadvantage.[1]
I. The Communications "Superhighway"
One may regard the media from a purely technical point of view, to the
extent that is possible, evaluating them in relation to their ability to
transmit units of information. The question to ask then is how much information
with how little noise may be transmitted at what speed and over what distance
to how many locations? Until the late 1980s, technical constraints limited the
media's ability in these terms. To transmit a high quality image over existing
(twisted pair copper wire) phone lines took about ten minutes using a 2400 baud
modem or two minutes using a 9600 baud modem. Given these specifications it was
not possible to send "real time" "moving" images over the
phone lines. The great limitation then of the first electronic media age is
that images could only be transmitted from a small number of centers to a large
number of receivers, either by air or by coaxial cable. Until the end of the
1980s an "economic" scarcity existed in the media highways that
encouraged and justified, without much thought or consideration, the capitalist
or nation‑state exploitation of image transmission. Since senders needed
to build their own information roads by broadcasting at a given frequency or by
constructing (coaxial) wire networks, there were necessarily few distributors
of images. The same economies of technology, it might be noted in passing,
applied to processes of information production.
Critical theorists such as Benjamin, Enzensberger and McLuhan envisioned
the democratic potential of the increased communication capacity of radio, film
and television. While there is some truth to their position, the practical
model for a more radical communications potential during the first media age
was rather the telephone. What distinguishes the telephone from the other great
media is its decentralized quality and its universal exchangeability of the
positions of sender and receiver. Anyone can "produce" and send a
message to anyone else in the system and, in the advanced industrial societies,
almost everyone is in the system. These unique qualities were recognized early
on by both defenders and detractors of the telephone.
In the recent past, the only technology that imitates the telephone's
democratic structure is the Internet, the government funded electronic mail, database
and general communication system. Until the 1990s, even this facility had been
largely restricted to government, research and education institutions, some
private industry and individuals who enrolled in private services (Compuserve,
Prodigy) which are connected to it. In the last few years Internet has gained
enormously in popularity and by the mid-1990s boasts thirty million users
around the world. But Internet and its segments use the phone lines, suffering
their inherent technical limitations. Technical innovations in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, however, are making possible the drastic reduction of earlier
constraints. The digital encoding of sound, text and image, the introduction of
fiber optic lines replacing copper wire, the ability to transmit digitally
encoded images and the subsequent ability to compress this information, the
vast expansion of the frequency range for wireless transmission, innovations in
switching technology, and a number of other advances have so enlarged the
quantity and types of information that [is currently] able to be transmitted
that a qualitative change, to allude to Engels' dialectical formula, in the
culture may also be imminent.
Information superhighways are being constructed that will enable a vast
increase in the flow of communications. The telephone and cable companies are
estimating the change to be from a limit of 60 or so one-way video/audio
channels to one of 500 with limited bi-directionality. But this kind of
calculation badly misses the point. The increase in transmission capacity
(both wired and wireless) will be so great that it will be possible to transmit
any type of information (audio, video or text) from any point in the network to
any other point or points, and to do so in "real time," in other words
quickly enough so that the receiver will see or record at least twenty-four
frames of video per second with an accompanying audio frequency range of twenty
to twenty thousand Hertz. The metaphor of the "superhighway" only
attends to the movement of information, leaving out the various kinds of
cyberspace on the Internet, meeting places, work areas, and electronic cafes in
which this vast transmission of images and words becomes places of
communicative relation. The question that needs to be raised is "will this
technological change provide the stimulus for the installation of new media
different enough from what we now have to warrant the periodizing judgment of a
second electronic media age?" If that is the case, how is the change to be
understood?
A discourse on the new communications technology is in process of
formation, one which is largely limited by the vision of modernity. The
importance of the information superhighway is now widely recognized, with
articles appearing in periodicals from the specialized zines (Wired and Mondo
2000) to general journals (Time, Forbes, and The Nation). Essays on the new
technology vary from breathless enthusiasm to wary caution to skepticism.
Writing in Time, Philip Elmer-Dewitt forecasts: "The same switches used to
send a TV show to your home can also be used to send a video from your home to
any other, paving the way for video phones... The same system will allow
anybody with a camcorder to distribute videos to the world..." Key to the
new media system is not only the technical advances mentioned above but also the
merger of existing communication technologies. Elmer-Dewitt continues,
"...the new technology will force the merger of television,
telecommunications, computers, consumer electronics, publishing and information
services into a single interactive information industry." (pp. 52-53)
Other observers emphasize the prospects of wireless technology. Writing in
Forbes, George Gilder predicts the spread of this system: "...the new
minicell replaces a rigid structure of giant analog mainframes with a system of
wireless local area networks....these wide and weak [replacing broadcasting
based on "long and strong"] radios can handle voice, data and even
video at the same time....the system fulfills the promise of the computer
revolution as a spectrum multiplier....[the new system will] banish once and
for all the concept of spectrum scarcity..."[1]
Whether future communications media employ wired, wireless or some combination
of the two, the same picture emerges of profound transformation.
Faced with this gigantic combination of new technology, integration of
older technologies, creation of new industries and expansion of older ones,
commentators have not missed the political implications. In Tikkun, David
Bollier underlines the need for a new set of policies to govern and regulate
the second media age in the public interest. President Bill Clinton and
Vice-President Al Gore have already drawn attention to the problem, stressing
the need for broad access to the super highway, but also indicating their
willingness to make the new developments safe for the profit motive. For them,
the main issue at stake is the strength of the
If Bollier presents a liberal or left-liberal agenda for politics
confronted by the second media age, Mitchell Kapor, former developer of Lotus
1-2-3, offers a more radical interpretation. He understands better than Bollier
that the information superhighway opens qualitatively new political
opportunities because it creates new loci of speech: "...the crucial
political question is `Who controls the switches?' There are two extreme
choices. Users may have indirect or limited control over when, what, why, and
from whom they get information and to whom they send it. That's the broadcast
model today, and it seems to breed consumerism, passivity, crassness, and
mediocrity. Or, users may have decentralized, distributed, direct control over
when, what, why, and with whom they exchange information. That's the Internet
model today, and it seems to breed critical thinking, activism, democracy, and
quality. We have an opportunity to choose now." With Kapor, the
interpretation of the new media returns to the position of Enzensberger:
socialist or radical democratic control of the media results in more freedom,
more enlightenment, more rationality; capitalist or centralist control results
in oppression, passivity, irrationality. Kapor's reading of the information
superhighway remains within the binaries of modernity. No new cultural
formations of the self are imagined or even thought possible. While the
political questions raised by Bollier and Kapor are valid and raise the level
of debate well beyond its current formation, they remain limited to the terms
of discussion that are familiar in the landscape of modernity.
The political implications of the Internet for the fate of the nation
state and the development of a global community also require attention. The
dominant use of English on the Internet suggests the extension of American
power as does the fact that e-mail addresses in the
In some ways the Internet undermines the territoriality of the nation-state:
messages in cyberspace are not easily delimited in Newtonian space, rendering
borders ineffective. In the Teale‑Homolka trial of early 1994, a case of
multiple murders including sexual assault and mutilation, the Canadian
government was unable to enforce an information blackout because of Usenet
postings in the
The effortless reproduction and distribution of information is greeted
by modern economic organizations, the corporation, with the same anxiety that
plagues nation-states. Audio taping was resisted by the moguls of the music
industry; video taping by
II. Reality Problematized
Before turning to the issue of the cultural interpretation of the second
media age, we need to consider a further new technology, that of virtual
reality. The term "virtual" was used in computer jargon to refer to
situations that were near substitutes. For example, virtual memory means the
use of a section of a hard disk to act as something else, in this case, random
access memory. "Virtual reality" is a more dangerous term since it
suggests that reality may be multiple or take many forms. The phrase is close
to that of "real time," which arose in the audio recording field when
splicing, multiple track recording and multiple speed recording made possible
"other times" to that of clock time or phenomenological time. In this
case, the normal or conventional sense of "time" had to be preserved
by the modifier "real." But again the use of the modifier only draws
attention to non-"reality" of clock time, its non‑exclusivity,
its insubstantiality , its lack of foundation. The terms "virtual
reality" and "real time" attest to the force of the second media
age in constituting a simulational culture. The mediation has become so intense
that the things mediated can no longer even pretend to be unaffected. The
culture is increasingly simulational in the sense that the media often change
the things that they treat, transforming the identity of originals and
referentialities. In the second media
age "reality" becomes multiple.
Virtual reality is a computer-generated "place" which is
"viewed" by the participant through "goggles" but which
responds to stimuli from the participant or participants. A participant may
"walk" through a house that is being designed for him or her to get a
feel for it before it is built. Or s/he may "walk" through a
"museum" or "city" whose paintings or streets are
computer-generated but the position of the individual is relative to their
actual movement, not to a predetermined, computer program or "movie."
In addition, more than one individual may experience the same virtual reality
at the same time, with both persons' "movements" affecting the same
"space." What is more, these individuals need not be in the same
physical location but may be communicating information to the computer from
distant points through modems. Further, "movements" in virtual
reality are not quite the same as movements in "old reality": for
example, one can fly or go through walls since the material constraints of
earth need not apply. While still in their infancy, virtual reality programs
attest to the increasing "duplication," if I may use this term, of
reality by technology. But the duplication incurs an alternation: virtual
realities are fanciful imaginings that, in their difference from real reality,
evoke play and discovery, instituting a new level of imagination. Virtual
reality takes the imaginary of the word and the imaginary of the film or video
image one step farther by placing the individual "inside" alternative
worlds. By directly tinkering with
reality, a simulational practice is set in place which alters forever the
conditions under which the identity of the self is formed.
Already, transitional forms of virtual reality are in use on the
Internet. MUDs or Multi User Domains have a devoted following. These are
conferences of sorts in which participants adopt roles in a neo‑medieval
adventure game. Although the game is played textually, that is, moves are typed
as sentences, it is highly "visual" in the sense that complex
locations, characters and objects interact continuously. In a variant of a MUD,
LambdaMOO, a database contains "objects" as "built" by
participants to improve upon the sense of reality. As a result, a quasi-virtual
reality is created by the players. What is more, each player adopts a fictional
role that may be different from their actual gender and indeed this gender may
change in the course of the game, drastically calling into question the gender
system of the dominant culture as a fixed binary. At least during the fictional
game, individuals explore imaginary subject positions while in communication
with others. In LambdaMOO, a series of violent "rapes" by one
character caused a crisis among the participants, one that led to special
conferences devoted to the issue of punishing the offender and thereby better
defining the nature of the community space of the conference. This experience
also cautions against depictions of cyberspace as utopia: the wounds of
modernity are borne with us when we enter this new arena and in some cases are
even exacerbated. Nonetheless, the makings of a new cultural space are also at
work in the MUDs. One participant argues that continuous participation in the
game leads to a sense of involvement that is somewhere between ordinary reality
and fiction. The effect of new media such as the Internet and virtual reality,
then, is to multiply the kinds of "realities" one encounters in
society.
III. The Postmodern Subject
The information superhighway and virtual reality are communications media
that enrich existing forms of consumer culture. But they also depart or may
depart from what we have known as the mass media or the "culture
industry" in a number of crucial ways. I said "may depart"
because neither of these technologies has been fully constituted as cultural
practices; they are emergent communication systems whose features are yet to be
specified with some permanence or finality. One purpose of this essay is to
suggest the importance of some form of political concern about how these
technologies are being actualized. The technical characteristics of the
information superhighway and virtual reality are clear enough to call attention
to their potential for new cultural formations. It is conceivable that the
information superhighway will be restricted in the way the broadcast system is.
In that case, the term "second media age" is unjustified. But the
potential of a decentralized communications system is so great that it
certainly worthy of recognition.
Examples from the history of the installation and dissemination of
communications technologies are instructive. Carolyn Marvin points out that the
telephone was, at the onset, by no means the universal, decentralized network
it became. The phone company was happy to restrict the use of the instrument to
those who registered. It did not understand the social or political importance
of the universality of participation, being interested mainly in income from
services provided. Also the example of Telefon Hirmondó, a telephone system in
In The Mode of Information I
argued that electronic communications
constitute the subject in ways other than that of the major modern institutions.
If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that
elicit identities as autonomous and (instrumentally) rational, postmodernity
or the mode of information indicates communication practices that constitute
subjects as unstable, multiple, and diffuse. The information superhighway
and virtual reality will extend the mode of information to still further
applications, greatly amplifying its diffusion by bringing more practices and
more individuals within its pattern of formation. No doubt many modern
institutions and practices continue to exist and indeed dominate social space.
The mode of information is an emergent phenomenon that affects small but
important aspects of everyday life. It certainly does not blanket the advanced
industrial societies and has even less presence in less developed nations. The
information superhighway and virtual reality may be interpreted through the
poststructuralist lens I have used here in relation to the cultural issue of
subject constitution. If that is done, the question of the mass media is seen
not simply as that of sender/receiver, producer/consumer, ruler/ruled. The
shift to a decentralized network of communications makes senders-receivers,
producers-consumers, rulers-ruled, upsetting the logic of understanding of the
first media age. The step I am suggesting is at least temporarily to abandon
that logic and adopt a poststructuralist cultural analysis of modes of subject
constitution. This does not answer all the questions opened by the second media
age, especially the political ones which at the moment are extremely difficult.
But it permits the recognition of an emergent postmodernity and a tentative
approach to a political analysis of that cultural system; it permits the
beginning of a line of thought that confronts the possibility of a new age,
avoiding the continued, limiting, exclusive repetition of the logics of
modernity.
Subject constitution in the second media age occurs through the
mechanism of interactivity. A technical term referring to two‑way
communications, "interactivity" has become, by dint of the
advertising campaigns of telecommunications corporations, desirable as an end
in itself so that its usage can float and be applied in countless contexts having
little to do with telecommunications. Yet the phenomenon of communicating at a
distance through one's computer, of sending and receiving digitally encoded
messages, of being "interactive" has been the most popular
application of the Internet. Far more than making purchases or obtaining
information electronically, communicating by computer claims the intense
interest of countless thousands.[1] The use of the Internet to
simulate communities far outstrips its function as retail store or reference
work. In the words of Howard Rheingold, an enthusiastic Internet user, "I
can attest that I and thousands of other cybernauts know that what we are
looking for, and finding in some surprising ways, is not just information but
instant access to ongoing relationships with a large number of other
people." Rheingold terms the network of relations that come into existence
on Internet bulletin boards "virtual communities." Places for
"meeting" on the Internet, such as "the Well" frequented by
Rheingold, provide "areas" for "public" messages, which all
subscribers may read, and private "mailbox" services for individual
exchanges.
The understanding of these communications is limited by modern categories of
analysis. For example, many have interpreted the success of "virtual
communities" as an indication that "real" communities are in
decline. Internet provides an alternative, these critics contend, to the real
thing. But the opposition "virtual" and "real" community
contains serious difficulties. In the case of the nation, generally
regarded as the strongest group identification in the modern period and thus
perhaps the most "real" community of this era, the role of the
imaginary has been fundamental. Pre-electronic media like the newspaper were
instrumental in disseminating the sign of the nation and interpellating the
subject in relation to it. In even earlier types of community, such as the village,
kinship and residence were salient factors of determination. But identification
of an individual or family with a specific group was never automatic, natural
or given, always turning, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues on the production of an
"essence" which reduces multiplicity into fixity, obscuring the
political process in which "community" is constructed: "...the
thinking of community as essence ... is in effect the closure of the
political." He rephrases the term community by asking the following
question: "How can we be receptive to the meaning of our multiple,
dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only make sense by
existing in common?" (p. xl) Community for him
then is paradoxically the absence of "community." It is rather the
matrix of fragmented identities, each pointing toward the other, which he
chooses to term "writing."
We may now return to the question of the Internet and its relation to a
"virtual community." To restate the issue: the Internet and virtual
reality open the possibility of new kinds of interactivity such that the idea
of an opposition of real and unreal community is not adequate to specify the
differences between modes of bonding, serving instead to obscure the manner of
the historical construction of forms of community. In particular, this
opposition prevents asking the question of the forms of identity prevalent in
various types of community. The notion of a real community, as
Another aspect to understanding identity in virtual communities is
provided by Stone. Her studies of electronic communication systems suggest that
participants code "virtual" reality through categories of
"normal" reality. They do so by communicating to each other as if
they were in physical common space, as if this space were inhabited by bodies,
were mappable by Cartesian perspective, and by regarding the interactions as
events, as fully significant for the participants' personal histories. While
treatment of new media by categories developed in relation to earlier ones is
hardly new, in this case the overlap serves to draw closer together the two
types of ontological status. Virtual communities derive some of their
verisimilitude from being treated as if they were plain communities, allowing
members to experience communications in cyberspace as if they were embodied
social interactions. Just as virtual communities are understood as having
the attributes of "real" communities, so "real" communities
can be seen to depend on the imaginary: what
makes a community vital to its members is their treatment of the communications
as meaningful and important. Virtual and real communities mirror each other in
chiasmic juxtaposition.
IV. Narratives in Cyberspace
Electronic mail services and bulletin boards are inundated by stories.
Individuals appear to enjoy relating narratives to those they have never met
and probably never will meet. These narratives often seem to emerge directly
from peoples' lives but many no doubt are inventions. The appeal is strong to
tell one's tale to others, to many, many others. One observer suggests the
novelty of the situation: "technology is breaking down the notion of few‑to‑many
communications. Some communicators will always be more powerful than others,
but the big idea behind cyber‑tales is that for the first time the many
are talking to the many. Every day, those who can afford the computer equipment
and the telephone bills can be their own producers, agents, editors and
audiences. Their stories are becoming more and more idiosyncratic, interactive
and individualistic, told in different forums to diverse audiences in different
ways." This explosion of narrativity depends upon a technology that is
unlike print and unlike the electronic media of the first age: it is cheap,
flexible, readily available, quick. It combines the decentralized model of the
telephone and its numerous "producers" of messages with the broadcast
model's advantage of numerous receivers. Audio (Internet Talk Radio) and video
(The World Wide Web using Mosaic) are being added to text, enhancing
considerably the potentials of the new narratives. There is now a "World
Wide Web" which allows the simultaneous transmission of text, images and
sound, providing hypertext links as well. The implications of the Web are
astounding: film clips and voice readings may be included in "texts"
and "authors" may indicate their links as "texts." In
addition, other related technologies produce similar decentralizing effects.
Such phenomena as "desktop broadcasting," widespread citizen
camcorder "reporting," and digital filmmaking are transgressing the
constraints of broadcast oligopolies. [These days, blogging.]
The question of narrative position has been central to the discussion of
postmodernity. Jean-François Lyotard has analyzed the change in narrative
legitimation structures of the premodern, modern and postmodern epochs. Lyotard
defines the postmodern [attitude] as an "incredulity"
toward metanarratives, especially that of progress and its variants deriving
from the Enlightenment. He advocates a turn to the "little story"
which validates difference, extols the "unpresentable" and escapes
the overbearing logic of instrumentality that derives from the metanarrative of
progress. Any effort to relate second media age technologies with the concept
of the postmodern must confront Lyotard's skepticism about technology. For
Lyotard, it must be recalled, technology itself is fully complicit with modern
narrativity. For example, he warns of the dangers of "a generalized
computerization of society" in which the availability of knowledge is
politically dangerous: "The performativity of an utterance...increases
proportionally to the amount of information about its referent one has at one's
disposal. Thus the growth of power, and its self‑legitimation, are now
taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativity of
information." (p. 47) Information technologies are thus complicit with new
tendencies toward totalitarian control, not toward a decentralized, multiple
"little narrativity" of postmodern culture.
The question may be raised, then, of the narrative structure of second
media age communications: does it, or is it likely to, promote
the proliferation of little narratives or does it invigorate a developing
authoritarian technocracy? Lyotard describes the narrative structure of tribal,
premodern society as stories that (1) legitimate institutions, (2) contain many
different forms of language, (3) are transmitted by senders who are part of the
narrative and have heard it before and listeners who are possible senders, (4)
constructs a non‑linear temporality that foreshortens the past and the
present, rendering each repetition of the story strangely concurrent and most
importantly (5) authorizes everyone as a narrator. Modern society, Lyotard
argues, derives its legitimacy from narratives about science. Within science,
language (1) does not legitimate institutions, (2) contains the single language
form of denotation, (3) does not confirm addressee as possible sender, (4)
gains no validity by being reported and (5) constructs "diachronic"
temporality. These contrasting characteristics may serve, as Lyotard wishes, to
indicate the "pragmatics" of language. It would be interesting to
analyze the role of technologies in the premodern and modern cases, and
especially the change, within the modern, from print to broadcast media.
In any case, for Lyotard, the postmodern little narrative refunctions the
premodern language game but only in limited ways. Like the tribal myth, the
little narrative insists on "the heteromorphous nature of language
games" (p. 66); in short, it validates difference. Unlike older
narrative forms, the little narrative emphasizes the role of invention, the
indication of the unknown and the unexpected. Lyotard looks to certain
developments in the natural sciences for his examples of such postmodern
narratives, but we may turn to the Internet and to the developing technology of
virtual reality. As we have seen, the Internet seems to encourage the
proliferation of stories, local narratives without any totalizing gestures and
it places senders and addressees in symmetrical relations. Moreover these
stories and their performance consolidate the "social bond" of the
Internet "community," much like the premodern narrative. But
invention is central to the Internet, especially in MUDs and virtual reality:
the production of the unknown or paralogy, in Lyotard's term, is central to
second media age communications. In particular, the relation of the utterance
to representation is not limited to denotation as in the modern language game
of science, and indeed the technology encourages a lightening of the weight of
the referent. This is an important basis for the instability of identity in
electronic communications, leading to the insertion of the question of the
subject and its construction. In this spirit, Katherine Hayles defines the
"revolutionary potential" of virtual reality as follows: "to
expose the presuppositions underlying the social formations of late capitalism
and to open new fields of play where the dynamics have not yet rigidified and
new kinds of moves are possible."
For the new technologies install the "interface," the face
between the faces; the face that insists that we remember that we have
"faces," that we have sides that are present at the moment of
utterance, that we are not present in any simple or immediate way. The
interface has become critical to the success of the Internet. To attain wide appeal,
the Internet must not simply be efficient, useful, or entertaining: it must
present itself in an agreeable manner. The enormous problem for interface
design is the fear and hostility humans nourish toward machines and toward a
dim recognition of a changing relation toward them, a sharing of space and an
interdependence. The Internet interface must somehow appear
"transparent," that is to say, appear not to be an interface, not to
come between two alien beings and also seem fascinating, announcing its novelty
and encouraging an exploration of the difference of the machinic. The problem
of the Internet then is not simply "technological" but para-machinic:
to construct a boundary between the human and the machinic that draws the human
into the technology, transforming the technology into "used
equipment" and the human into a "cyborg," into one meshing with
machines.
In Wim Wenders’ recent film, "Until the End of the
World," (1991) several characters view their own dreams on videotape,
becoming so absorbed in what they see that they forget to eat and sleep. The
characters sit transfixed before their viewing devices, ignoring everyone
around them, disregarding all relations and affairs. Limited to the microworld
of their own dreams, the characters are lost in a narcissistic stupor. And yet
their total absorption is compelling. Visual representations of the
unconscious--no doubt Wenders has film itself in mind--are irresistible
compared to everyday reality, a kind of hyperreality.
One can imagine that virtual reality devices will become as compelling as
the dream videos in Wenders' film. Virtual reality machines should be able to
allow the participant to enter imagined worlds with convincing verisimilitude,
releasing immense potentials for fantasy, self-discovery and self-construction.
When groups of individuals are able to interact in the same virtual space, the
possibilities are even more difficult to conceive. One hesitates to suggest
that these experiences are commensurate with something that has been termed
community. Yet there is every reason to think that virtual reality technologies
will develop rapidly and will eventually enable participation through the
Internet. Connected to one's home computer, one will experience an audiovisual
"world" generated from a node somewhere in the Internet and this will
include other participants in the same way that today one can communicate with
others on bulletin boards in videotext. If such experiences become commonplace,
just as viewing television is today, then surely reality will have been
multiplied. The continued Western quest for making tools may at that point
retrospectively be reinterpreted in relation to its culmination in virtual
reality. From the club that extends and replaces the arm to virtual reality
in cyberspace, technology has evolved to mime and to multiply, to multiplex and
to improve upon the real.
V. Multiculturalism and the Postmodern Media Age
If the second media age constitutes subjects in a postmodern pattern,
critics have ascribed similarities between the politics of multiculturalism and
the culture of postmodernity. Political positions surrounding issues of
ethnicity and race are various and complex. But commentators have noted a
filiation between Lyotard's critique of pluralism in favor of the differend and the multiculturalists'
parallel attack on liberal pluralism. In this connection, two questions are
paramount: (1) what is the relation of the second media age to ethnicity and
(2) what is the relation between the multiculturalist critique of modernity and
the challenge to it by the second media age.
In many respects, the dissemination of second media age communications
systems is likely to dispense with the question of ethnicity with the same
disregard as has the first media age. In the absence of an effective anti‑racist
political movement, dominant institutions tend to be constructed as if white
were the only race, Anglo-Saxon the only ethnicity and Christianity the only
religion. Participation in the information superhighway and virtual reality
will most likely be accessible to and culturally consonant with wealthy, white
males. In these respects, the media reflect the relations of force that prevail
in the wider community. At another level, one may ask if these media
intrinsically favor one group over another. Is virtual reality, for example,
somehow white or somehow masculine? I believe these questions are important to
raise but that they cannot be answered at present beyond a few brief remarks.
The new technologies, even after two decades of the new social movements, are
likely to have been conceived, designed and produced by white males. In that
respect, they are likely to conform at some level to the cultural peculiarities
of that group. The best example of this may be found in video games. Beyond
this uncomfortably vague statement, one cannot at present say much more. The
technoculture of the second media age largely remains to be constructed.
With respect to the second question--the relation of multiculturalist and
second media age resistances to the modern--there is more to be said.
Multiculturalists claim some affinity with critiques of the modern that depart
from the poststructuralist rejection of the Enlightenment view of the subject.
The rational, autonomous individual who preexists society, as Descartes and
Locke maintained, emerges after the critique by poststructuralists as a Western
cultural figure associated with specific groups and practices, not as the
unquestioned embodiment of some universal. One may argue that such attributes
ought to be desired or realized by everyone. But then that argument is one
among others and has no presumptive claims to priority over any other
figuration of the subject. Multiculturalists also desire to relativize Western
values, to remove the patina of universalism from what is no more than another
ethnocentrism. In such critiques I can see no important difference in the
poststructuralist and multiculturalist positions, both of which can be
coordinated with the type of non‑modernist subjects constituted by the
new media.
Multiculturalists, post-colonialists and subaltern theorists sometimes
further claim certain privileges for the subject position of the
"minority" or "third world person" not simply as that of
the oppressed but as affirming the ethnic characteristics of the group. In
my view, such a cultural politics are not critical of the modernist position
but simply shifts the values or relative worth of two terms in the binary
opposition autonomous rational universal/particularist non-rational other. To
the extent that placing value on ethnicity promotes a recentering of the
subject, supports the foundationalism or essentialism of the group in question,
then the subject position so articulated has little to do with postmodernity or
the second media age. In "The Jewish Question," Marx long ago
effectively analyzed the limitations of such special pleading for an
antiauthoritarian politics. For the chief characteristics of the resistance of
the new media to modernity lie in their complication of subjecthood, their
denaturalizing the process of subject formation, their putting into question
the interiority of the subject and its coherence. I believe these traits of the
postmodern may contribute to a critique of the modern, may help to undermine
the fundamental cultural configuration of modernity, whereas the type of
multiculturalism that celebrates a particular ethnicity does not achieve that
end. These hopeful possibilities are by no means guaranteed by the
dissemination of second media age technologies and the articulation of a
commensurate cultural formation.
Proponents of multiculturalism sometimes claim that poststructural theory
and concepts of postmodern culture systematically limit the understanding of
non-Western ethnicity by configuring it as the Other. While the
"post" theories may be effective in a cultural critique of Western
logocentrism, they argue, such a critique runs aground to the extent that
Western identity is bound up with non-Western identity both at the levels of
imperialist politics and economics as well as in the cultural domain. No doubt
this argument effectively indicates a limitation of poststructuralism, one
which postcolonial discourse may contribute to correcting. Indeed
interpretations of ethnicity often go far in this direction such as Rey Chow's
formulation: "Ethnicity signifies the social experience which is not
completed once and for all but which is constituted by a continual, often
conflictual, working‑out of its grounds." (p. 143) In this case,
multiculturalism is a process of subject constitution not an affirmation of an
essence. As the second media age unfolds and permeates everyday practice, one
political issue will be the construction of new combinations of technology with
multiple genders and ethnicities. These technocultures will hopefully be no
return to an origin, no new foundationalism or essentialism but a coming to
terms with the process of identity constitution and doing so in ways that
struggle against restrictions of systematic inequalities, hierarchies and
asymmetries.
The relation of the second media age to multiculturalism is likely then
to be profoundly ambivalent: to some extent, both contribute to a critique
of modernity and therefore to the dominant forms of oppression; on the other hand,
the new media will no doubt work against the solidification of ethnic identity
and, it would appear to me, that traditionalists in the multiculturalist camp
are unlikely to look with favor on the information superhighway and virtual
reality. As these technologies emerge in social space the great political
question will be what forms of cultural articulation they promote and
discourage. One needs to keep in mind the enormous variability of the
technology rather than assume its determining powers. The example of
contemporary
Notes:
1 See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds
Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American
Thought, 1550‑1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) for
an analysis of the formation of this subject position and its particular
relation to the theater. Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MI T Press, 1989)
offers a "public sphere" of coffee houses, salons and other
agora-like locations, as the arena of the modern subject, while Max Weber in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New
York: Macmillan, 1958) looks to Calvinist religion for the roots of the same
phenomenon.
2 See, for example, the discussion of new "interactive"
technologies in the New York Times on December 19, 1993. In "The Uncertain
Promises of Interactivity," Calvin Sims restricts future innovations to movies
on demand, on‑line information services, interactive shopping,
"participatory programming," video games and conferencing systems for
business. (p. 6F) He omits electronic mail and its possible expansion to sound
and image in networked virtual reality systems.
3 I have not discussed the work of Marshall McLuhan simply for lack of
space and also because it is not as directly related to traditions of critical
social theory as are Benjamin's, Enzensberger's and Baudrillard's. Also of
interest is Friedrich Kittler's "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter,"
October, 41 (1987-88) pp. 101-118 and Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, trans.
Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
4 For an excellent essay on the economics of the Internet and its basic
structural features see Hal Varian, "Economic FAQs About the
Internet," which is available on the Internet at listserver@essential.org
(send message: subscribe tap-info [your name] and in the Fall 1994 issue of
Journal of Economic Perspectives.
5 Kevin Cooke and Dan Lehrer, "The Whole World is Talking," The
Nation (July 12, 1993) p. 61.
6 Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "Take a Trip into the Future on the
Electronic Superhighway," Time (April 12, 1993) p. 52.
7 George Gilder, "Telecosm: the New Rule of Wireless," Forbes
ASAP (March 29, 1993) p. 107.
8 David Bollier, "The Information Superhighway: Roadmap for Renewed
Public Purpose," Tikkun 8:4 (July/August 1993) p. 22. See also the
cautionary tone of Herbert Schiller in "The `
9 Mitchell Kapor, "Where Is the
10 For the implications of the Internet on world affairs see Majid
Tehranian, "World With/Out Wars: Moral Spaces and the Ethics of
Transnational Communication," The Public (
11 For one report see Craig Turner, "Courts Gag Media at Sensational
Canada Trial," Los Angeles Times (May 15, 1994) p. A4.
12 Robert Lee Hotz, "Computer Code's Security Worries Privacy
Watchdogs,"
13 Many writers prefer the term "artificial reality"
precisely because they want to underscore the privilege of real reality.
Needless to say this substitution will not cure the problem.
14 Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," The Village Voice
(December 21, 1993) pp. 36‑42. I am indebted to Rob Kling for making me
aware of this piece.
15 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About
Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford, 1988)
especially pp. 222 ff.
16 For interesting examinations of this practice see Mark Dery, ed.,
"Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture" South Atlantic Quarterly
92:4 (Fall 1993).
17 Howard Rheingold, "A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community,"
p. 61 in Linda Harasim, ed., Global Networks: Computers and International
Communication (Cambridge: M IT Press, 1993).
18 See Rheingold's comments, for example: "...I believe [virtual
communities] are in part a response to the hunger for community that has
followed the disintegration of traditional communities around the world.' (`A
slice of life in my Virtual Community': 62).
19 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
20. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner et
al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)p. xxxviii. See also
the response by Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community, trans.
Pierre Joris (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1988).