roachboy

this is a complicated question, the relation of the net to politics---i think it is still being worked out, in general, and that the questions you raise, art, are mostly a function of the newness of the medium:

there is an enormous amount of information on the net but few if any ways of sorting/classifying it--that this would pose a problem is itself quite interesting, because it points (in a negative way) to the degree to which choices about information (like any other commodity) in the older print/television/radio contexts have been mediated by filtering institutions, which function (quite apart from the politics that are embedded within any such mediation) to sift, to rank to order and thereby tp make meaningful various sources by establishing relations/hierarchies within and between them.

one function of these mediating institutions (an example would be the critical apparatus, analogous to art forum or the music press) is to align information and ideological frameworks for processing information. it seems to take quite a bit of intellectual work to function smoothly in a context that moves in and out, or cuts across, these frameworks.

so one of the advantages of the net as information medium is that you can cross outside the local, nationalist boundaries particular to american politics by simply reading from the international press. one disadvantage of doing this--which is more social/tactical than political--is that systematic indulgence in this moves you outside simple conversation with folk who have not, for whatever reason, affected such a shift.

i think what shapes how people process net information is the informal hierarchies they work out for themselves amongst informations media in general. it might be less disruptive for conservatives, for example, to interact with net information because the hierarchy that shapes their positions in general privileges other media, with other ways of ordering/privileging information.

my suspicion--and this is only a suspcion--is that conservatives rely heavily on tv and local radio as sorting and framing devices.

so i do not think that the problems raised by the multiplication of information sources engendered by the net in its present form is a direct function of the nature of politics. i think it more connected to the social status of the medium.

it is an indirect function of relations to politics, however: the evacuation of meaingful debate and its replacement with opinion management is a real problem, even for american pseudo-democracy, in that it is not in least about informed debate--which is unnecessary in a context where people exercize no meaningful power.

that people would come to function in complex spaces by relying almost exclusively on mediating institutions to pre-chew information commodities is a clear index of how, at the cultural level, hegemony works in the states.

and that people would find themselves bewildered at the multiplication of unfiltered information sources is an index of the extent to which the existing cultural order functions to systematically disable even the possibility of meaningful debate--which is a fine fine way of making sure that no matter how bankrupt the existing order might become, people would still prefer it, not for any reason particular to the order itself, but rather because it spares them the work of having to think for themselves.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite