Uncertainties

1) No way out?!

All the texts read in this section of the course thus far – and particularly those by Ang and Terranova – seem to take it for granted that participation in the media is a universal experience, virtually positioning the entire humanity inside a media-dominated and media-regulated realm of existence. Terranova, for example, uses such general(izing) notions as “human intelligence” – suggesting that the status of participant in the media is universal when she discusses the relation of "human intelligence" to the media – with the Internet, more specifically – (p.38: “the Internet effectively functions as a channel through which ‘human intelligence’ renews its capacity to produce”). Ang, implying participation in the media as “the way things are”, poses the question of resistance and its correlation to power – power as connected to the media –, looking at multiplicity of meanings and at diversity as possibly consistent with the logic of power as well as generated by it (multiplicity and diversity are “in the script”). Situated within the “capitalist postmodernity as a chaotic system” (Ang, p.163) and thus within the media, the human subject is – so these theorists appear to suggest – incapable of resistance, since resistance itself is created/inscribed by/in the “logic” of the media. But couldn’t non-participation in the media be a valid and perhaps most effective mode of resistance? Is non-participation – or, at least, reduced participation – in the media (for example, refusal to watch TV, to use the Internet,…) still an option? Even though I am aware that what phase of media–dominance the contemporary world has reached and whether the line beyond which there can be no return to the un-media-tized has yet been crossed cannot be assessed, I would argue that non-participation in the media is the only true form of resistance available in the contemporary world and still possible at the level of the individual (and perhaps even of the community). However, I am not certain about what the consequences of this deliberate non-participation might be for the individuals – or collectivities - who take this option…

2) A question of importance

In his “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’”, Jenkins states: “In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms” (p.3). There are two aspects that I find particularly disturbing in this assertion. Firstly, what are the criteria for assigning/determining (the) importance to/of the “stories” – and to/of everything, in fact – in a “convergence culture” in which the arbitrary, the “unpredictable” (p.2) appears to be the sole ‘reliable’ criterion? What does it mean to be “important” in the culture of convergence? Secondly, I am intrigued by the repetition of the term “every” in this formulation, which apparently calls attention to an interest in the individual, in the particular. Isn’t this rather implausible focus on “every” thing essentially the ideology of the “convergence culture” – the “story” it tells in order to camouflage the very erasure of individual value/ the value of the particular?

3) "Down to Earth"

Could the present-day economic crisis be the correlate of the essentially un-productive (on the material level) digital economy functioning on "immaterial labor" (p.41, Lazzarato cited in Terranova) that Terranova refers to in her essay?

These are some of my uncertainties in a world that seems to operate on the principle of uncertainty at all its levels (are we to blame Heisenberg for being the first to formulate it scientifically?). Intrigued and de-stabilized as I am by them, nevertheless, I still have (at least) one certainty left as a point of reference in my positioning towards the contemporary political, social, and cultural contexts: however freeing and promising an ‘organizing’ principle it might be, uncertainty is a limitation. Postulating uncertainty as a mode of existence (as “the way things are”) – as Ang seems to do in her essay – appears to me, in light of this, to be a mode of not actually addressing the matters at stake as well as a potentially self-refuting thesis (if everything – including meaning – obeys the principle of uncertainty, then the theory claiming uncertainty as a universal principle is itself uncertain). Which is not to say that uncertainty should not be taken seriously: a world whose very existence is defined by uncertainty might just as well be a world that has reached its limits. I am uncertain if there is/can be anything beyond these limits.