journeyman:
your position works well if you presuppose that at some point people imagined "objectivity" was possible.
which of course it is not.
at best, "objectivity" is a kind of neutral rhetorical style that functions to mask the political character of the arguments being advanced.

you note the increased visibility of editorial content in "journalism"

if you accept the above statements, it would follow that this increased visibility would probably be better for the public than a situation in which the illusion of objectivity obtained. in such a situation, viewers/readers would invest some faith in the distinction editorial/journalism and so would be more inclined to not note the convergence (identity?) of the two.

as for trying to enforce a standard of "objectivity" rooted in an ideological illusion...i dont see how it would be possible at any level.

Of course you're correct, roachboy.

But I do like the spirit of Journeyman's proposal.
I like it a lot. Why? Because it unflinchingly challenges one of the shibboleths that contribute to our somnolence. The fiction of a "free press" needs to be exploded. We are in a predicament deeper than our old cherished principles will be able to help us out of. And I appreciate such brave attempts to challenge the status quo as regards some of the very things that were created to free us and which now serve only to enslave us. If we are willing to send proposals such as this one up the flagpole, if even for a windswept moment, we will be sure to make some progress toward refashioning our existential situation.

Look, if you are really interested, you'll look at how that question is answered in the FAQ, but for some reason, I don't think you are...

You're completely correct: I'm not. It's not like it matters since y'all will never take power any more than the current "Libertarian Party" will.

i was thinking about the drift of this thread for a while this morning, and it prompted me to track down something from a book by mark crispin miller, "boxed in"--it comes from an essay called "how tv covers war" and seems germaine.
a quote first, short (i hope) explanation after:

the quote:

because the tv image is intrinsically restrained, then, it is not the newsman's purpose to take the edge off an unbearable confrontation. his illusory control performs a different function, necessitated not by the nastiness of actual events, but by tv itself. what upsets us most about these images of aftermath is not so much their painfulness as their apparent randomness; we suddenly arrive upon the unexpected scene and ask ourselves: 'why this?' watching the news, we come to feel, not only that the world is blowing up, but that it does so for no reason, that its ongoing history is nothing but a series of eruptions, each without cause or context. the news creates this impression of mere anarchy through its erasure of the past, and through its simultaneous tendency to atomize the present into so many unrelated happenings, each recounted through a sequence of dramatic, unintelligible pictures (p. 158)

======
question: do you think miller's characterization of tv news, particularly with reference to war (conflict more generally) is accurate? (i understand that it really should be a question posed after reading the whole of the essay, but one of the main arguments in it emerges quite clearly in the above, so...)

if you find that it is, then a couple of consequences follow:
what tv atomizes is the reality that it purports to depict.
miller argues throughout his book that the problem created by this rest on the fact (assertion?) that people confuse image with depiction of "the real" and do not see image as such.

in the case of conflict, miller claims that tv images strip away any explanation for conflict--which would mean that the perfect term for tv to traffic in is "terrorism" precisely because it is, in its nondefinition, most symmetrical with the nature violence.conflict as framed through tv as medium.

now if tv is a primary information source for many (a horrifying thought, but there we are), and if the suburban situation can be taken as a guiding image for thinking about how that information source is integrated into everyday life---the glowing furniture eye in the center of a living room---then it would seem to follow that the effect of the endless presentation of randomized violence would tend to reinforce a desire for a more authoritarian type of state, even if only at the level of psychological compensation---the authoritarian state system would not in itself be fully thought out, but would be figured as a kind of wish for a spectral father-type who would staunch the flow of arbitrary violence-- a flow of arbitrary violence that substitutes for a conception of the "world around me" or "the world in general"--no that's not right--that articulates, that gives particular content to an abstraction named "the world around me"

so i guess the conclusion from this part i would draw is rather the opposite of art's: that tv is fully complicit in creating a climate within which authoritarian solutions to imagary problems seems plausible (by imaginary i am not saying made up--rather problems the nature and meanings of which are constructed entirely by assembling tv images as sources...or by connecting tv images with other medium-specific types of information in a situation where the images function as the ground for thinking)

if miller is correct, it would follow that this effect can occur without any requirement of an agency being imputed to "the media" as such--rather, for him it follows from the nature of tv image assembly-communication itself (in the book he goes to considerable lengths to talk about the implications of this kind of cut-up pseudo-view of the world in a context of advertising streams as well)

it would also follow that the anarchy that would be produced would operate at the level of collective conceptions of the world, but would not function with anything like a causal connection to the social/political atomization of the audience--which would be much more a function of spatial/cultural choices particular to america (the suburban model as example)...the sense of chaos-in-the-world would inflect particular aspects of the experience of this spatial model (it might make you feel more isolated, more helpless, but this sense would neither cause nor explain the isolation produced by the american built environment)

i'll stop here--i suspect this has already gone on too long, but to pose an alternative viewpoint sometimes you have to chatter a while.

Atomized in the private sphere, sure, but certainly not in public. Authoritarian regimes, since the adoption of the nation-state, have always functioned as an artificial unifying device for public interaction.

I suppose ARTele's NEW Authority might seek to "atomize" the public while still maintaining control through a different means, other than a singular "ein volk" philosophy. Don't ask me what that other means would be--media, distraction, drugs???

roachboy, yes, except it's just not TV that functions this way. It is all mediated reality. This begins with our inability to distinguish between our representations of experience and the words we use to describe them.

Subsequently all further conceptual and material reifications of the real, such as works of art, photography, film, TV, etc. function in exactly the same way. Millers ideas aren't new. Susan Sontag's "On Photography" accomplished a similar analysis of photographic imagery and drew similar conclusions. Marshall McLuhan's work engages many of these issues as well.

I've concluded that this inability to distinguish between the real and the representational is rooted in framing conventions, which are after, all based on the mehod in which the human being focuses on discrete objects/events within an overall field. The reduction toward absurdity seems built in to our perceptual/conceptual apparatus.

That said, all verbalization, reification, and all media are control mechanisms. This relates directly to the basic points raised in this thread.

Again, the issue is not whether hierarchy/authority/control paradigms rule lives and societies but what kind and what methods are optimal.

Locobot, yep that's the question posed here.

I'm convinced that as we move forward in time as a species, we will construct more and more complete control paradigms to rule our lives. They will be as invisible as the tools of media will allow - I see total invisibility just around the corner. Perhaps we are there now - and our discussions are just the bubbles of goldfish in a tiny bowl somewhere. It seems clear to me that our destiny is cybernetic. We will be binary code sooner or later operating under the direct command of a master control program.

Miller's theory sounds quite a bit like the reasons people give for not ever watching the news. I think roachboy is correct that this random violence induced disconnect increases the desire for authority. So the answer for ARTelandia then would be more media that was more purile and less connected to reality? You'd really have to have a person-in-a-box type scenario though for there to be an absolute disconnect. Otherwise events would be too easily connected to significant frames of reference for the desired disconnect to occur.

I'm reminded of "explosion" dvds for sale in Asia that are simply clip collections from various movie action sequences also mixed with 9/11 footage for sheer spectacle. I wonder if people figure all the footage is fake or that it's all real.

art--am in between things so only have time to write something quick....

i know that miller did not draw out of the air his position, that it relies on folk like sontag and barthes...but what i was interested in the specific analysis he develops of tv as form--which taken together is one of the better i have encountered.

i was also interested in his position because i think it poses problems for some of the central distinctions you introduced earlier---the anarchic element you attributed to "the media" as formation, that is in itself, would, following the argument above, would be understandable as a formal effects/formal effects (in this case of the medium tv)---these effects might give the impression of being more than that as a function of the genre of images you refer to (that is why i went to an article about coverage of war, not something else...)

i do not see how you can move from a list of these formal effects to a justification for imputing political agency the "the media". nor do i see how you can oppose "the media" to the state, if the latter in some sense relies on the effects generated by the former to legitimate a right drift.

what i wrote was directed at a specific conversation---i am a bit confused about things moving to such a general level in response to it, but tant pis, let's see how the pieces fall here.

if the question really is about the problematic division between ways in which the world is staged conceptually as over against some notion of "the real" then we are either in a kantian or nietzschean space.
either way, it does not work to simply assert the linkage between representation *as such* and either the need for social or political hierarchies (the obvious objection would be how would you know if you own situation is conditioned by the same problems you point out...in which case we bend back round to the arguments you posted above again)...or any particular kind of hierarchy.

instead, i would argue that representation/concept/words are a baseline condition for being-human--this is not to say that this baseline condition is not problematic, and we could talk abotu that if you like--but i think questions about desirable social order are open and the arguments for or against a particular conception are political--and the political is a particular semantic region.

[[note: i edited this post heavily about an hour after i put it up...]]

what a whopper, art. nice one. can't even begin to address everything that's here, hope i can contribute some though.

accepting that hierarchical systems of control are the only social option is like saying math stops at addition and subtraction. hierarchical organizational structures certainly have their place, but human interaction embraces much more complicated and much more flexible paradigms. example: current thinking in business management theory will tell you tall top-down organizational ladders are less agile and respond slower to change and are subsequently less competitive than businesses that employ matrix management structures.

in sociological and anthropological terms, we can extend the mathematical analogy: social interactions are rarely straight lines or polar geometry... even when only two people are involved. they aren't even coordinate geometry in tidy quadrants. art's own descriptions of the optimal range harken calculus, and i argue that real social structures push past set theory and are multi dimensional, organic and fractal. the rigid lines we draw of the hirearchy are the real illusion - we use it to simplify, classify, explain why 2+2=4, but in reality, it doesn't add up.

the media thing: enough self loathing. accept that you are what you complain about. civilization is enabled by complex communication. it wasn't our opposeable thumbs, or binocular vision, or nice posture that got us this way. we learned to talk, worked together to solve problems, and then learned to pass it on by writing the solutions down, and it just kept getting faster from there. communication is media and civilization is communication. withc awareness comes the capacity to change.

knowledge is power, and knowledgable indviduals are empowered and self-aware. they question authority. the more we communicate on a granular level, the power of mass communication is diluted. the more knowledge we seek individually, the less susceptible we are to spoon-fed informaiton, propaganda, marketing manipulation, etc.

i don't really get the whole " what means of control will be the most beneficial to society" bent here, i think it's pretty much elitist crap. no matter what language you put around it, an authoritarian system compromises free will and sets a ruling few over an ignorant, placated, or apathetic mass. of course beneficial is a subjective term, so maybe it depends on which group you're in to judge how beneficial that society is.

gibingus, thanks for the contrib to this thread.
I figure it's sufficiently thought provoking to justify itself. That is a separate and more significant issue than my own musings on the various subjects within its boundaries.

My sense of new management theory, which I've had some experience with, is that it is a fascinating illusory shell superimposed on hierarchical systems to give the impression that they are somehow not hierarchical. In some way it demonstrates the trend we've discussed here (at least roachboy and I have discussed it at some length) regarding the near invisibility of certain control systems and the increasing tendency toward fictitious "freedom" as an additional control layer.

Self-awareness is not self loathing. I know what I loathe about the various disciplines I'm involved in - not much really. My rhetoric tends toward the dramatic, as I'm aware. I've decided it would be less interesting if that were not the case. But that's just an opinion based on some observation.

Certain kinds of knowledge are powerful, that's true. The knowledge of the principles of programming human perception is the one I've pursued through academia and through practice. That's why I focus on media. The relationship between media and politics is a natural extension of my interest in the results of programming human perception.

Having some concern regarding the nature and place of quality in all this seems reasonable to me - this in response to your final paragraph.

interesting thoughts... although you kind of dismiss the biz theory, i rather like the idea of managers as facilitators of talent rather than controllers of human resources. but that's just me.

organized religion fits the bill as an authoritarian means of control in which the participants are voluntary. you mention fear as a control device, art, but they thow guilt into the mix with great effect. i tend to think most religious systems use a blend of guilt and fear couched in a promise of something ever after to get their followers to do the "right thing." accumulation of knowledge and increasingly sophisticated systems of communication offer more choices than mystical answers, and we've all heard that science as religion line as much as we've heard the religion is a drug line.

but somewhere, some knowledge has to tell us what the right thing to do is. a judgement has to be made somewhere as to what direction society is going to put the effort for the greatest good.

the libertarian viewpoint of doing the right thing out of personal responsibility is based upon self reliance and self awareness. the authoritarian view posits you will do the right thing because the authorities know best.

my turn to pose a question: which is better, a widely educated populace or a highly educated few? and in consideration of this question, is knowledge a commodity or a currency and is the middle class the key to the market?

But the power relationship is still the same, facilitators or controllers are still above, in a hierarchical pattern, the employees. A facilitator of talent will still fire your ass for skipping work or showing up drunk etc.

Still answering on behalf of ARTelandia the authoritarian paradise (a wonderful oxymoron), a less-educated populace would be desirable. Ideally education would be only available to the select few leaders or one leader. Education is a commodity, one that must be denied to the population of an authoritarian regime.

I prefer to answer for myself. I don't know who "ARTelandia" is. I never proposed an "authoritarian paradise". It may be a wonderful oxymoron but it's not an invention of mine.

ARTelandia is the Land of ARTelevision's Vision, I think. Sort of like Petoria, or Joehio.

Anyway, to say that an authoritarian nation would require an uneducated populace in order to attain a population that conforms to societal needs is to ignore the potential that the population may find undeniable truth in their own government, and thus accept it's authority. This would lend it more legitimacy than a bunch of drones with a select few at the top who know what's going on. The hard part would be attaining an authoritarian government that educated citizens would accept and approve of, which is a gigantically enormous task with a nation 3,000 miles across and approaching 300,000,000 inhabitants. To get that many people to conform, you may very well have to keep the bulk of them uneducated.

Somewhere back in this thread, we discussed the fact that the most excellent authority cultivates the illusion of freedom throughout its domain. I believe that is the direction of "enlightened" governments in the present day.

There have been many significant issues raised in this thread. I'm hoping we can narrow things down to options for future possibilities. The types of government and media control that we experience today open up a seemingly bifurcated path, IMO. We explored that back in this thread, as well, and I see it as the most illuminating aspect of all this to further examine - whether you see it as bifurcated or not. The examination of how government control compares and contrasts with media control is essential, I think.

i dont see why you woudl need to assume that the population that might go along with a more explicitly authoritarian form of govt would have to be stupid or uneducated--it woudl seem to me that a slide into a more authoritarian political ideology would be easy to accomplish if you introduced it across television, did ot gradually, and were internally consistent--for example. everything would be determined by the event(s) you used as a pretext/occaison and the signifiers you mobilized in reaction to that pretext.

that said, it shoudl be obvious that i would see tv (for one) as a fundamental element in installing such a regime and maintaining its "legitimacy"--such as it would be. if that is the case, then it also follows that i still do not see the division state/media that underpins much of the above.

Sorry for using your name without your consent ARTele. I didn't mean it as a slight. I thought the purpose of this thread was to suggest new Authoritarian paradigms and I was using ARTelandia as a theoretical example for convenience.

Locobot, new authoritarian paradigms, yes. But I haven't proposed a utopian state. Fact is, I pretty much stated I have no idea what the direction of what I see as the inevitable increasingly authoritarian states we're heading toward will take. I figure it will have aspects of the control paradigms of both types I see operating today: government and free-press/media. As to what admixture of both, that's up for discussion. Thanks for your contribs. I know this is a bit of a conundrum of a thread...

roachboy, how would you re-frame the discussion to include the distinctions I've made as regards governmental and 4th-Estate-type control paradigms? If you could suggest an overview of the re-framed discussion to at least include those, I'd be interested in where you'd go with it, in general.

so - beyond all the verbal flowers - it's just a question of what are the most effective means of mass manipulation between/among governments and/or media for what ever the 'greater good' happens to be? and you want that discussion to be pragmatic instead of ideological.

check me if i'm wrong on that. if i'm summing you up right, i think you may have some fatal flaws in your premise.

1. the mediascape is too vast and variated to fit anything resembling an authoritarian complex. just in the fourth estate there is programmed content, newshole, advertising, non-revenue-producing greyspace, advertorial, paid play, commentary, feedback, ombudsmen, sports, data, weather, stats... it is a cacophony. there is entertainment and art and everything in between. and then there is public relations and marketing and campaigning. beyond the messages, there are the mediums. the very nature of media defies definition because it is constantly redefining itself in its clamor to capture and retain attention. it is insanely competitive, and it certainly defies control.

2. just like a business servicing its clients, the government needs channels of distribution for its product - laws, rules, propaganda, but in essence, just information. government needs media to function. it owns its own channels, but just like any business, it also uses secondary and tertiary distribution chains to expand market reach. totalitarian paradigms seek to crush competiting media to complete their message monopoly, but underground press always exists and art again defies authority.

free expression and free will are not illusions, art. they are the entropic state of human social existence, and the power of entropy can not be denied. it is the fundamental law of all existence.

Very well, stated, gibingus. I'll wait to see how others respond and then I definitely will respond to these points. Thanks.

first foray...i think gingibus gives an interesting place to try to jump out from...since even olympic high jumpers get three tries to clear any given bar, i'll assume the game works that way here.

in general, i would think that an authoritarian form would rely on cultural domination---a hegemony shift--a shift in either the set of signifiers or logic for framing/rules of combination across which people would organize their sense of the world around them. it would seem to me that television would be the primary--but not exclusive--mechanism for providing elements of the shift and putting it in motion.

entropy is simply a feature that affects any process that unfolds in time. domination unfolds in time, and i see it as something that (in the present context) would come about partially as a function of state actions, but in the main as a function of people knitting themselves into a framework of consent using material that would be provided and reinforced by the elements of their interactions with the dominant media--those elements that shape their sense of being-in-the-world, being-in-community, being-in-a-polity.

i would think that this mode of transmission for the mental apparatus of domination would be necessary were such a regime to put itself in place in the states----this as a function of the main socio-geographic models that shape this place (e.g. the suburban model, the particular american mode of urbanization...) in my more paranoid moments, i think that the geography is about the abolition of the public in any traditional/capitalist sense, and its transfer to a kind of flickering virtual community---tv functions as a large-scale framing device and a complex set of cultural reference points and mediate experiences of collective involvement (both as such and by providing fodder for interpersonal activities within them)...

to reall think about how this might work requires (well, for me anyway) that you address the general problem of how you would refigure your conception of the world to accomidate the basic fact that any such conception unfolds in time--to actually do it would require an overthrowing of the conventional modes of staging the world, which still sit on observing subject--resolved/stable object--intentional relation models. when historians address questions of time, the do it by staying well within this world-as-picture framework, and add time as a dimension by attaching lists of particular frame-shifts that account for continuities/posit discontinuities....it would require that historians break with a commonsense mode of staging being-in-the-world---which would run directly against the vocational imperative to provide a nice yarn for readers...but i digress.

preliminary point: i think that when art and, in a related way, gingibus stage their understandings of the mediascape, they focus on elements of fragmentation--in the mass media thread, you, art, focus considerable attention on advertising, while in the above post, gingibus focusses on entropic features--i wonder if this explains the split that i am uncomfortable with here on its own--what i would propose is not a simple inversion (exclusive focus on medium as such as a way of unifying what would otherwise appear dispersed) but on questions of whether there exist hierarchies within this seeming field of scatter--and whether these hierarchies remain implicit during "normal" periods but snap into play during period of real or perceived crisis.

i am thinking about the development of the massive group-hate that was the "hostage crisis" in 1979 or so, and again of the months following 911---in both cases, you had news programming operating as a kind of reference-point that posed a question of injury to "the nation", framed the interpretation of that injury (tipping it in the direction of an injury done to this abstraction called nation and away from any alternative analytic possibility that might have called american actions into question)--in both cases, news programming operated as a kind of generator, the effects of which ramified across other genres of programming--comedians late night and otherwise, in their efforts to be topic, function as transmission belts---references turn up in very distant areas of infotainment thereafter---the most obvious to me was the superbowl that followed 911, in whcih the networks tried to turn the event into an enormous, tasteless telvised nuremberg rally, preceding the game with a potted videohistory video of the Nation that posited military values as central to it, a National Destiny, unity---the entire history of the states culminating in the military, who were in turn watching tv in tents in afghanistan....the same material became cental reference-points for other areas of experience as well--in classrooms, in churches, in conversations more generally---the ability of this (informal) system to generate high levels of consent no matter how goofy the narrative being consented to might be (bushwar, for example) is to me telling on this matter.

stopping for the moment, backing up to the start of the run area, waiting for the bar to be reset, thinking about jumping again at some point.

gibingus,

Your summation of my arguments is not weighted the way I weight the arguments. To restate and to include some reconsiderations after having experienced this thread so far, I'd say I posit that there is no option to authoritarianism in the postmodern age. (I've said this repeatedly in several different ways). Given that situation, we already live in the most advanced authoritarian systems ever devised by man. In the US, we inhabit a situation described well by roachboy. I agree with his sense of the framing of experience by media/television.

As for your assertion that media is too complex and varied to function as an effective control mechanism, I would posit the opposite. Its complexity and seeming variety, in terms of content and methods of delivery, are simply different tentacles of the octopus whose grip on us is - and will continue to be - absolute.

As for your second point, I have a long history and solid credentials as an "underground artist" (I’ll share those with you in a PM if you are interested). As you haven't buttressed your conviction that underground art, etc. is as you say, I think my own experience is worth referring to as a base for my opinion. My own personal conclusion regarding the effectiveness of this aspect of media is that its ultimate effect is to provide the necessary illusion of "free expression" in the midst of absolute control that I have referred to elsewhere here.

roachboy,
The only thing I'd amend at this time in your analysis is that I have not focused on advertising here. You may be referring to the "Mass Media Mind Control" thread in GD. I accept "media" as broadly defined by gibingus as a good overall description of the mediascape. I don't have a problem with your focusing on television as the main framing device today. I agree that it conditions our experience of all media to an extent that your premise has significant validity.

This post doesn't necessarily further the discussion. It's just intended as a clarification of my positions as we move things forward.

Thanks for the continuing effort. I do think we're getting somewhere - ableit slowly.

art, thanks for the reweighting... you know, the journalist in me makes me want to spin you around in the paraphrasing to incite controversy and keep the dials from turning. ;)

and with the perfect segue way to roachboy in tv land...

do the dials even turn anymore? back when tense ted koppel was telling us all about "tonight's crisis" when we really should have been watching karnak, there were only three and half channels in most markets, four if you were lucky. (side note, what did the eye have in that slot, was it the late movie that wasn't really a movie but old episodes of 5-0 or something? anyway... back to our regularly scheduled program...)

television is currently in a major metamorphasis. it's still the king idiot box and mind numbing i.v. drip of info-narcotic, but today there are literally hundreds of choices of dumb and dumber. just like how oil painting went through a major change when technology put pigment in a tube and the impressionists took the show on the road to counter the rise of the camera, television now has to respond to another type of screen... and this one has a keyboard attached to it.

once you're online, you're not even playing with the nets or category channels, you have counter culturists (who may or may not resemble arttelevision) who are giving up every flavor of niche possible. you also have communities (which may or may not resemble the tfp) where people band together and they - gasp - talk back. they flock to sites where they can put their own opinions in, because people want to be heard. why else do all those kids who can't carry a tune in a bag try out for american idol? it's the attention.

this is where major (news)media are really failing themselves and also the government. they have held the microphone, and the camera, and the typesetter for so long, they fear what the public has to say. they have filtered their feedback into one liners at the end of the show like a dinner mint to cover up the bad taste of andy rooney; they reserve the right to edit letters to the editor; they script reality to make it more entertaining and ingest twice as many creepycrawlys.

it is amazing that we live in an age where information - the raw data, the straight dope, the actual documents - have never been easier to get, but audiences trust pundits to explain it all to them in a giant warped game of regurgatative telephone without ever going to the source. worse yet, they don't seek objective information, they seek only opinions that validate their own. the almighty 'polls' that tell us and our leaders what we are really thinking are absolutely whacked... the sampling is more skewed than the SATs. how else do white christians keep their iron grip on public opinion when they are a shrinking segment of the national populace? really, most journalists shouldn't be using statistics without a license. but it gives scientists and market researchers something to laugh about.

meanwhile, ebay spawned a billion dollar revolution by simply creating a space where people could come and do their thing. amazon whomps the brick-and-mortars' sites not because it is more convenient, but you can get the straight dope on the goods you're purchasing from people just like you (check their ratings first). people love to talk. to anyone who will listen. even if they aren't really listening. and now that i can see how many people are viewing these threads, they aren't listening, they're just looking at our tits.

cue segue way back to underground art...

maybe the illusion of freedom is actually the disillusionment of the artist never really knowing or trusting the impact of the art they create. you can make the statement with your art, but you can never know if anyone will really get the statement, identify with it, or even appreciate it. will it ever really change the world, and will it do it in the way you intend when you put brush to canvas, note to song, word to verse?

hard to say, really. when it makes me shudder and i'm about to lose hope, i think of mr. rogers. now before you tell me that finger painting isn't art... that is one guy who i can say without a doubt left this world a better place for his having been in it. he tought us by example to be nice, put on your playclothes, clean up your toys, and make believe. people tried to mock him, but by doing so just showed themselves to be petty and insecure. he may not have reached everyone, but in mr. rogers neighborhood people -big and small - did the right thing.

but hey, it was on pbs. never would have made it on the nets, even against snyder. this is gibingus reporting for wtfp. art, roach, loco... back to you in the studio.

very short version of what i think might be a longer response when i am less pixellated brain-wise: if tv is in the process ofrendering itself so utterly trivial, how do you explain its role in generating support for the farce that is the war in iraq? what i was saying is that i suspect folk have hierarchies (implicit perhaps) that they use in sorting through the sea of niche-marketed crap that is tv, and news--particularly news during moments of crisis--seems to be quite important as a source of infotainment relative to which other sources are weighed.
i am not so optimistic about interactivity, nor about the web, in freeing folk from the miasma of american tv infotainment--patterns of presenting information have not yet developed that make the web into an autonomous info source--it looks and read for the most part like cheap imitation of text with added problems brought about by the relative immobility of most computers (in relation to newspapers or books) which tends to push toward types of reading practices that make webinformation more ephemeral than printed.
obviously, there are dispositional and educational strata in the good ole us of a and not everyone uses these sources in the same way, but nonetheless....

back to pixel=land for now.

I just stumbled upon this thread while searching for something else... This was a very good thread.

Upon re-reading it in its entirety I have a question for ART...

What would happen in a situation where the Autoritarian side (Governement) of the equation begins to exert a subtle but clear influence on the Anarchic side (Media)? Where those who are involved in the Media begin to "tow the party line".

In my mind, and as I've stated above, the key is in the balance of these two elements. If one or the other becomes to strong or too influencial it is bad for everyone.

Taken to an extreme you have the classic example of Stalinist Russia and its media (best represented by Pravda). I am not suggesting this. Rather, I am suggesting a much more up to date situation where the combination of media regulation by the government and the willing participation in supporting that government or autoritatian system tips the balance in favour or the authoritarian side of the scale.

Art: Would you suggest this is a positive thing?

Another question occurs to me... Would we be, hypothetically speaking, better without *any* media? Your thread suggests it is a disruptive force, but is that neccessarilly a bad thing?

I'm not in favor of either of those two options - however, if I had to choose, I would choose this mediarchy. It seems this concept of mediarchy has been presented in a bad light by defining it as some sort of anti-socialization, with the converse, authoritarianism, being the supposed glue which saves "us" from undesirable chaos.

But I'm not buying it.

The mediarchy, if we are to agree that it is some form of powerful control, is vastly different than the authoritarianism inherent to control via the threat of violence exhibited by all forms of government. The mediarchy does not imprison an individual for failing to turn on the television, buy the newspaper or surf the web. The mediarchy contains choice - you have the choice to partake in any aspect of it. Authoritarianism eliminates choice - you cannot control your own fate.

Art, you have suggested or stated that authoritarianism is of benefit to society, perhaps even the underlying mechanism that allows society to exist. I don't believe you. Authoritarianism is the underlying mechanism to anti-change, the desire to maintain. I can see how this maintenance of existing society could be perceived as origin of society, or at the least, some form of fundamental requirement for the continued existence of society. This perception presumes that society, as we know it, is both better off unchangeable and presently beneficial. I have yet to see anything in this thread that validates those presumptions.

What's so good about society as we know it, anyway?

Interesting points ART; you sound like you would enjoy reading Hobbes' Leviathan, as it discusses several similar issues about humanity and a chaotic state of nature.

However, I do disagree with your notions, because of the tendency of humanity to abuse authoritarian forms of governance, and the desire to control. All of these things inevitably lead to a corrupt government. Have you read Orwell's 1984? That work alone is quite a convincing argument against authoritarianism.

ART: Here's a book I think you would enjoy. Freedom is often times painful, and when communitites collapse, the worst feeling in human existence (being all alone) can become so great that people will submerge their uniqueness and individuality into an authoritarian whole in order to seek comfort.

But I imagine (based on your comments elsewhere) that you think these are comparable in their power to control people. I am having trouble getting into this discussion in a meaningful way because I think it ignores a very basic truth (truth to me, of course): that complex order can (and most often does) come from very simple rules.

I would agree with your assertions a lot more if I gave credit for the complexity of the current situation (society as we know it) to the people who created the simple rules that led to it. I'm almost positive that they would not deserve that credit. As I see it, this discussion is about changing the simple rules and watching what complex things happen as a result.

Nobody is capable of deliberately creating the kind of authoritarianism that exists and so I say that it hardly exists at all. The tools in charge just happened to pick the right rules to play with as deliberately as they chose to become part of the human species, which has so far been evolutionarily stable. It's the other side of the same coin, I think, Art. I don't think we have personal freedom... but I don't think other people are even capable of having made it that way. It's built into our nature as a society.

If I have managed to misread (or miss reading) something you have said that addresses this point, you have my apologies in advance.

i confess i haven't read this whole thread... so this is written in response to original post only.

i think when you speak about social operation being the holy grail for a societal system... you subtly steer the topic on a specific course where not all the premises are agreed upon (or even brought to the table).

what is the goal of civilization? when you make social order the primary key, it is easy to forget that social justice is by some (myself included) preferred over order.

it appears the discussion has been framed by "how much control produces the best social operation?" while i would begin it with "how much control is just?". the two are not necessarily identical.