HU520: A Review of Deibert's Chapter 7 & 8

Deibert, Ronald J. (1997). Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia:

Communication in World Order Transformation, New York: Columbia U. P., pp. 177-217.

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Chapter 7--Hypermedia & the Modern to Postmodern World Order Transformation: Changes to Social Epistemology.

What are the Medium's Multiple Messages?

• SE = "web-of-beliefs into which a people are acculturated, and through which they perceive the world around them" (177).
• "changes in the mode of communication do not generate new symbolic forms, social constructs, or cognitive biases de novo, but rather that elements of social epistemology present in society will tend to flourish or wither as a result of a fitness between those elements and the new media environment" (177).
• Postmodernism (PM) = (Jameson, 'the cultural logic of late capitalism')
• "segmentation of different components of the production chain ... to "multiple national locations" (141).
• Individual identities: PM self = an assemblage o its environment, a multiple self; a net work of beliefs, desires, and emotions w/nothing behind it (181). The FIT with the HE includes
  • authorship in an authorless environment: ease of manipulation, modification, erasure => a very intertextual system of information. Who is the author and has added value? Int. Property disrupted (182). Foucault (on authorship) and IP debates quite similar.
  • Private/public split underdetermined with nice example (184).
  • Maluable individual identities online, Gergen's "multiphrenia" (186).
• Spatial Biases
  • PM art and architecture: rejection of realism, representationalism acceptance of pastiche and collage
  • As distributional systems expand . . . the surface depthlessness and pastiche-like characteriscs of hypermedia participation will only intensify" (191).
  • Video gaming!
  • "nothing left against which to measure the accuracy of the simulation" (194) so it is all simulation (Baudrillard).
  • * "hypermedia create a conducive communications environment where such a spatial bias might find a more receptive audience . . . . will seem more 'natural' to the current generation of children acculturated into the irrealsim and world creationism of such escapist fare as video games movies, and advertisements where distinctions between the 'real' and the 'virtual' has not only been blurred, but also promoted . . . (194). See notes on 195: Narrow casting versus broadcasting.
  • Online personal newspapers.
• Global Village or Planetary Villages: important because of way different groups appropriate global image AND in may create "an imagined basis for and emerging planetary polis" (200).
• PM with the fit with HE will deepen and expand over time: demassification of imagined communities; enmeshment of sovereign states in multiple layers of authority

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Chapter 8--Conclusion

• Summaries of chapters from 202-205
• What do these changes portend for the character of political authority
  • "private makers of global public policy" (quoting Timothy Sinclair). States find themselves subject to the structural power of transnational corporate interests => a more complex web of governance structures both 'above' and 'below' the sovereign state.
  • Transnational capital the big winner

How accessible will these governance structures be? invisible and idiosyncratic?

• entire planet has become a focus of constant surveillance: thousands of 'eyes' watching all parts of the planet (208): both _Enemy of the State_ stuff and bio-sphere monitoring.
• Class-based distinctions versus state-based distinctions
• Global capitalists versus and underfunded interest groups (environ., feminists,....)

Now there is a one-sided contest!

• Using Rorty's metaphoric redescriptions or therapeutic redescriptions (214): "a more poetic way, through the creative use of metaphors and analogies that help us se the world around us in a new and interesting light" (214). => neomedievalism as a way of describing the world today to shake us out of our dependence on the 'state-centric' paradigm.
• Lewis Lapham's Harpers article sounds quite interesting: 1994. Umberto Eco's _Travels in Hyper Reality_ .
• "The postmodern recognition of 'difference,' coupled with the move away from Cartesian universalist and totalizing metanarratives, may be just the type of weltenschaung [cultural mindset?] necessary for the multiple and dispersed authorities of an emerging planetary polity" (217).
  

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