Media or Barbarism

There is increasing talk about "media or barbarism." Is this a choice, an 
alternative, a threat, a slogan, a questionnaire, a luxury, an 
advertisement for opinions perhaps? If it's a matter of choice, we must 
examine the pros and cons of each option; we must make an assessment of 
the merits of medial barbarism and the use of media by barbarians - or of 
barbarians by the media - in order to arrive at a sound and balanced 
judgment. Let the experts provide the arguments and analyses, and let a 
public discussion draw the conclusions.

If "media or barbarism" is seen as an alternative, then we see the media 
as the most powerful psychotherapeutic means to cure the last of the 
disconnected barbarians - from the illiterate to the Muslims - as though 
watching "Dallas" and "Twin Peaks" might save them from the dead weight 
of their premedial history and finally include them in the civilization 
of market democracy. The coming of the media is always accompanied by the 
threat of impending armed intervention or humanitarian aid campaigns. 
Increasingly, disaster areas will refuse access to the media in order to 
avoid the catastrophic arrival of international aid organizations. If, on 
the other hand, the battle scenes and environmental calamities do get 
extensive coverage, the information offered attains such a complex scale 
that even the most sympathetic of citizens find it impossible to keep up. 
Media have no civilizing impact on either those in the pictures or the 
viewers. If the barbarians refuse to see media as multipliers of 
complexity, but instead as archives full of evidence, they proceed to 
treat the question of media in their own way - by shooting as many media 
carriers as possible. Every dead journalist is a victory in the media 
war.

The fear underlying the question of media-or-barbarism is that without 
mediation humanity quickly loses control of itself, that it starts acting 
like a beast as soon as it is deprived of images to distract it. On the 
one hand, the media are expected to keep the masses off the street; 
they've a long record as the people's opiate. On the other hand, the 
media are thought to corrupt the people and incite them to violence, 
satanism, ecocide and cultural devastation. Once again, the relationship 
between cause and effect is completely forgotten. The practice of 
relativism has led to a rampant revaluation of values. The middle classes 
come up with the wildest proposals: censorship, freezing government 
subsidies, rescheduling, self-regulation, educational categorization, age 
discrimination, the scrambling and encoding of naked images, the dubbing 
of bold statements, and other methods to conceal harmful data. The moral 
terror of other people's consciences is given free play to frustrate the 
evil schemes of one's fellow humans, from incest, fraud, corruption, 
child pornography, drug abuse, and serial killings to car theft, 
adultery, nationalism, and racist remarks. The media are credited with 
the power of turning people into either barbarians or civilized 
participants. Bad media must be made good, the question being how many 
cubic meters of public information it takes. The point of political 
correctness is not to behave correctly yourself, but to have the others 
corrected. 

As a slogan of the antimedial movement, "media or barbarism" reflects a 
real 1980s attitude: the dream of destroying a communicative global 
empire. Those who demolish teleports and MediaParcs claim that a bit of 
negative energy can only serve to strengthen democracy. Recently, their 
slogan has been taken hostage by the emerging media ecologists and 
transformed into the equation "media = barbarism." All the shit that 
flows through societies we owe to media. A reduced emission of i-smog 
would result in a manifest reduction of multicultural abuse. The route 
followed is from the outside in: Violence and crime are seen as mental 
disorders that are containable through a correct and balanced data diet. 
Information turns people on, and frequent encounters with multimedia have 
a titillating effect that is ultimately released upon the others. The 
only way to prevent this is through the implantation of inner peace. 
Nudist data don't dress themselves up through design, but strive for a 
natural representation within a sheltered environment. Data dietitians 
prefer to be left to their own creations, without the constant 
interruption of someone else's tragedies and monstrosities. 

Our hot and central question gains real stamina once it is seen as a call 
for "decision." But where is this sovereign? Is it the editor-in-chief? 
Is it the tycoons? Should we wait for a world government to decide on the 
urgent matter of whether Russia should be allowed more media, or that we 
arm ourselves pending a second Cold War? The consequences of a massive 
import of media are as unpredictable as those of the interruption of 
media. Every conceivable question of power is up in the air, where it 
remains without consequence. Only on the local level do we still find 
some self-made sovereigns who take pride in the control they have 
acquired over the remote. Only within the self-defined private reality 
are fatal nanodecisons still being made. Within this reserve, decision 
becomes a fashionable gesture, intended to provide oneself with the 
necessary individuality. It is the coming-out of the will to decision; 
not a postponement but a proposed conclusion.

The puking-out of the twentieth century is well under way, though there's 
still plenty to look forward to in this dynamic age of ours. The question 
arises: Will the unbeaten record of '39-'45 be improved upon or not? It 
remains to be seen whether we will achieve the necessary escape velocity 
to leave the twentieth century and continue on our way, or instead end up 
in the eternal return of the same 20th century (or, perhaps, witness the 
crash of spaceship Earth). The marshes having been drained and converted 
into farmlands, the latter are now being reflooded to create neo-swamps. 
According to Hans Peter Duerr, the last barbarian became civilized at 
least twenty thousand years ago. Terror and joy are both products of 
Civilization & Progress, Inc. Nothing could possibly ever enter 
civilization from outside again. The fear and the desire that 
civilization can be corrupted and eroded from within represents a 
cultural high point, presented with massive technological support. The 
ancient Greeks understood tragedy as an exquisite dramatic genre. No 
Dionysus without Apollo, no Sarajevo without Dallas. The crisis is a must 
you can afford to miss. The question is not whether the barbarians are at 
the gates, but what to do with all the technology at hand. Once the 
crisis is taken seriously, you lose track and can only internalize it as 
the next personal experience of the end of ideology, history, 
international aggression, and the subject. Add the twentieth century to 
your media archives, free to flick through it on weekends. Those who 
prolong their artificial existence in personal opinions cater for a lost 
cause which was undesirable to begin with. The world after the media is 
not made up of barbarians; more likely it is full of businessmen. It is 
their stockjobbing that poses the next challenge.
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