The World after the Media "For I am nothing, and I did not know it." - Thomas à Kempis The media are empty objects. Located beyond the three-dimensional, they are the mirror image of God. Just as Meister Eckhart said that loving God means loving no one, so can passion for the media only be a yearning for oblivion. Throughout history, God has always been obliged to watch over the world and to expound on meaning and future. Bombarded with prayers, sacrifices and images, he finally died in an act of empathy with, or revenge upon, a humanity that had never accepted the fact that all he really wanted was to be no one at all. Once God lost interest, Earth took his place as the center of the universe. When it, too, disappeared, the void at the center of the world was filled by humanity as the measure of all things. In the 1960s, after two centuries of enlightenment and industrial production, we were suddenly forced to admit that even humanity had disappeared. At that moment, the media as a whole were called in to bridge the gap and bring the ruins of history into the global picture. Until then, the media had been innocent broadcasters of messages from transmitter to receiver. No matter how subversive or law-abiding their content, the media themselves had never defended a particular position. To rid themselves of the information they were burdened with, they had simply let it flow through. But suddenly they found themselves emancipated as the center of power in an information society advocating a belief in overall communication. Forced to be full-fledged objects, they acquired a moment of their own which would thrust them in the same direction as their predecessors. Media became global and universal. Just as God was spread across continents by missionaries and crusades, and humans were later held responsible for all the abundance and misery in the world, so the media are now omnipresent. Every place is instantaneously represented everywhere via satellite and fiberglass; a global view is the only international perspective that remains. At the same time, every object has the capacity to become a medium. Clothes, crockery, furniture, the city have become the media of a national politico-sexual identity and Zeitgeist. They are the thermometers of mental states. Trees inform us about wind force and environmental pollution. Everything transmits meaning; everything provides us with information about something other than itself. Where before there were objects, now there is information. There exists no other reality except as media. Once centralized, all things tend towards their maximum scope, only to finally disappear altogether. Even the media soon reach their omega point where spirit and matter coincide and a void is created, to be filled up by a new spirit. Whereas God needed two thousand years and humanity two centuries, the media will take two decades at the most to disappear from the stage. This megatrend is not only obvious because of the speed whereby technological systems succeed one another, but also because of the prayer-like speed of light whereby information reproduces itself. The media are already being exhibited in museums. Film, the precursor of electronic media, was only declared the seventh art once the studio system of its industrial manufacture had collapsed. That moment, film disintegrated from an active social factor into the object of cinephilic desire. Cinephilia became the only way to view or appreciate movies. The movie industry responded by becoming mannerist and academic itself. Viewing behavior was reduced from a collective reception to an individual experience. Film, formerly a source of stories the public could easily identify with, became an art product that made you wonder what approach you yourself might have taken. Film was effortlessly absorbed by the museum as the twentieth-century art par excellence. Similar to opera as a nineteenth-century relic, film is subsidized by the public and private sectors, accompanied by the criticism and scandal that render it marketable. Cinema without media is like a fish on dry land. The same kind of conservation effort will befall the media at the beginning of the twenty-first century as the museological art of the fin de siècle. Media cannot breathe unless they are encapsulated by the digital network. Resistance against the media's insidious self-destruction is provided by the videophile caste, who have taken to preserving the media as art in a form of protest against the threat of disappearance. These media workers have a complicated job before them. Their social position has not yet taken on a definite form. In close collaboration with the digital thinkers, they have chosen the educational task of using cable TV, the art gallery, and the museum to familiarize the backward leftist classes (who lag hopelessly behind due to their political past and are still waiting to be initiated into the medial environment) with the unprecendented possibilities of the languages and rituals of our time. On the other hand, they appear to agitate against the masses' carefree contact with the media. But their attempt to alienate or interpret television by making it appear as an object in a given environment opposes nothing, because the TV set, as a wall unit, has always been an outsider. What remains for the audiovisual avant-garde is to conduct absolutely uncommitted fundamental research into the principles of sound and image. The isolation, aestheticization, and acceleration of images resulted in the revolutionary genre of the video clip, which immediately turned into the measure of all images and currently defines the rhythm of both feature films and news bulletins. At best, the tendency to lyophilize (scan-freeze) images and reduce television to narcissistic introspection will create a new poster culture. All the anti-techniques invented by video artists lead to an inevitable acceleration of media self-destruction. The spread of video art will contribute to the devaluation of images. In the near future, and in keeping with cinema, the public's only response to the image will be: How would I myself have produced it? By definition, mediaphilia as a hobby is reserved for a select market segment. Passionate image collectors may be aware of the beauty of their personal preferences, yet to outsiders, their collections are as meaningless as they are impressive. Indifference is the greatest threat to the still omnipresent media. The remote control, combined with the unlimited proliferation of channels, enables one to instantly eliminate uninteresting images, only to find out that none of the available images are worth watching in the first place. All-out switching between channels during commercial breaks would force even the advertisers to withdraw from the media. People will voluntarily go on a media diet out of sheer boredom, and the media addicts will be catered to by self-help groups. Already, there are signs of a movement that, out of pure enthusiasm for an image-free society, will reintroduce socialism as a ban on images to be included in the declaration of universal human rights based on Judeo-Islamic Scripture. Just as the death of God rendered religion a private affair, so the image will become a matter of personal experience which, at best, will organize itself into secret societies of heretical mediatists. The implosion of reality in the media has been adequately recorded and proclaimed. The ban on images will cause a chain reaction: the descent of the media into reality. We will be amazed to find ourselves back in a world full of objects that no longer exude messages. Socialism, unwarranted by historical-materialist laws, will establish itself in the emptiness of the postmedial era. An object-orientated communism will reign in an image-free society. ??