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Lewis Lapham: Machine-Made News
The reduction of individual human expression to a “primitive, retrograde activity” accounts for the product currently being sold under the labels of “election” and “democracy.” The candidates stand and serve as farm equipment meant to cultivate an opinion poll, their value measured by the cost of their manufacture; the news media’s expensive collection of talking heads bundles the derivatives into the commodity of market share. The steadily higher cost of floating the fiction of democracy -- the sale of political television advertising up from nearly $200 million in the presidential election of 1996 to $2 billion in the election of 2008 -- reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact.
Like the music in elevators, the machine-made news comes and goes on a reassuringly familiar loop, the same footage, the same spokespeople, the same commentaries, what was said last week certain to be said this week, next week, and then again six weeks from now, the sequence returning as surely as the sun, demanding little else from the would-be citizen except devout observance. French Novelist Albert Camus in the 1950s already had remanded the predicament to an aphorism: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”
Ritual becomes the form of applied knowledge that both McLuhan and Lanier define as pattern recognition -- Nike is a sneaker or a cap, Miller beer is wet, Paris Hilton is not a golf ball. The making of countless connections in the course of a morning’s googling, an afternoon’s shopping, an evening’s tweeting constitutes the guarantee of being in the know. Among people who worship the objects of their own invention -- money, cloud computing, the Super Bowl -- the technology can be understood, in Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s phrase, as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Better to consume it, best of all to buy it, and to the degree that information can be commodified (as corporate logo, designer dress, politician custom-fitted to a super PAC) the amassment of wealth and the acquisition of power follows from the labeling of things rather than from the making of them.
Full essay: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175532/tomgram%3A_lewis_lapham%2C_machine-made_news
Like the music in elevators, the machine-made news comes and goes on a reassuringly familiar loop, the same footage, the same spokespeople, the same commentaries, what was said last week certain to be said this week, next week, and then again six weeks from now, the sequence returning as surely as the sun, demanding little else from the would-be citizen except devout observance. French Novelist Albert Camus in the 1950s already had remanded the predicament to an aphorism: “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”
Ritual becomes the form of applied knowledge that both McLuhan and Lanier define as pattern recognition -- Nike is a sneaker or a cap, Miller beer is wet, Paris Hilton is not a golf ball. The making of countless connections in the course of a morning’s googling, an afternoon’s shopping, an evening’s tweeting constitutes the guarantee of being in the know. Among people who worship the objects of their own invention -- money, cloud computing, the Super Bowl -- the technology can be understood, in Swiss playwright Max Frisch’s phrase, as “the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Better to consume it, best of all to buy it, and to the degree that information can be commodified (as corporate logo, designer dress, politician custom-fitted to a super PAC) the amassment of wealth and the acquisition of power follows from the labeling of things rather than from the making of them.
Full essay: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175532/tomgram%3A_lewis_lapham%2C_machine-made_news
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