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interesting...
i kinda agree with powerclown.
i am not sure that the net empowers or disempowers individuals, of whether individuals, left to themselves, working on their own, really can have power.
i am not wholly sure i understand the sense in which the fact of having access to a range of information sources constitutes power in any political sense--"personal power" in the sense that any consumer has the power to buy skippy or jiff, scott or charmin, sure: but i do not see any relationship between the "power"--or capacity to make purchases--of a consumer and political power. but this gets into an ideological question--concerning the conservative assumption that political and consumer "power" are linked--which may run off the edge of the thread.
for example: diversifying the range of toilet paper options does not necessarily engender any real upset in larger patterns of toilet paper purchase or usage.
on the other hand: there is something interesting and potentially important about being able to cross out of the national boundaries that are assumed to be impermeable by the various elements of the american system of ideological production.
i found myself in paris for the first gulf war--i arrived the day before the shooting starting---i remember that french television created a broadcast stream for cnn, which was up by the end of the second day--and being able to flip into and out of the american graphics and war music--in and out of the range of acceptable debate within the united states as enframed by cnn wwas very interesting--kind of a jolt no less, an accidental demonstration of the extent to which american television "news" outlets (in particular) consistently shape informational streams and the range of acceptable opinion about those streams--this is one of their more insidiuos ideological functions. opinion management, working on the assumption that the audience is locked into a specific media shell, is influenced in some way by american flag graphics and bigwarmusic and very furrowed anchorbrows, and can be pushed via these devices into a more or less uncritical support for whatever military adventure is on at the moment. that situation--the streaming of cnn alongside french television, which was not at all operating in the same way as cnn (at the most basic level, tv does not have the same social status in france as it does in the states--and i think the importance of television and information and communitysource in the states is a HUGE political problem)---was effectively one in which it was hard NOT to develop a critique of how the american press sells the political policies of the administration in power regardless of what administration it is, regardless of what policy it is. but it did not lead you to any particular alternative position. it just made you aware of the extent to which american information is presented in tightly packaged, highly political ways.
i dont think the net provides this kind of experience: perhaps because the dominant medium is print, which is abstract and silent, where war marketing is noisy and full of twitching movement framed with american flag graphics of varying cheese levels. perhaps it is a function of the reversal of information source priorities in the states, where it sometimes appears that print follows television, is shaped by television, both in terms of information presentation (short, snappy, stupid) and ownership--so that (against all reason) print is ancillary to television. all these illusions of objectivity that follow from video footage as over against the distance that writing imposes on events described by its nature: maybe people feel closer to "reality" because they watch footage (highly edited, tightly framed, but no matter---loookit that shit blow up...yee hah) if that is true, then what powerclown argues above would follow: people in the states are not forming their political dispositions mediated by print--they form them around television and to a lesser extent radio--and if that is true, the illusion of immediacy crossed with the no-effort consumption required to take television at all seriously as a nyews source would be of a piece with the rigidty of dispositions....
gotta go.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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