<nettime> Re: Wolfgang Schirmacher: Cloning Humans With Media

[Simon Bayly <sibayly@freeuk.com>]

In response to the Schirmacher piece, Steven Meinking wrote:

> I do watch many of these
> commercials, but do not directly participate in their daily consumerism.  I
> bring this case up because the cloning you describe in your lecture sounds
> almost entirely passive.  What about the case of the individual who actively
> does not participate in one or more of the channels that stream with the
> process of media cloning?  If individuals pick and choose among these media
> variances, to what extent are they really cloned?  To what extent are they
> the same?
>

French philosopher-cum-sociologist Michel de Certeau and his bunch addressed
precisely these issues in work that had its written form as The Practice of
Everyday Life Vols 1 and 2 during the 1980s.

The main thesis of this work is that the actual practices of consumption
within a late capitalist system are made up of diverse tactics, ruses,
tricks, street knowledges, tacit agreements, etc with which consumers
redeploy or deform the system that superfically appears to completely
circumscribe and limit their possiblities. i.e. out of a set of supposedly
clearly delimited "non-choices", they carve out another ethical lifeworld
that usually remains invisible to conventional inquiry. 

Vol 2 consists ot two detailed "case studies": one explores the habitation
of domestic and public space in a specific urban French neighbourhood, the
other deals with cooking. 

Now whereas we can still imagine there is still "room to manoevure" for
this type of consumer in the use and colonization of private and public
architecture and local economies of food accqusition and preparation, the
exponential expansion of the info/mediascape since de Certeau did the bulk
of his work, begs a lot of questions. 

The "early" desktop era of computing, when a single individual with enough
money, knowhow and time could do many things "in-house" that were
previously out of reach has given way to a much more centralized,
networked, transnational system of marketering and information
dissemination (c.f. the list of most visited websites recently posted to
nettime).  As horizon of the 'net pushes ever wider, the good 'ole days of
BBS, Gopher servers and DIY hacktivism disappear over the edge and it
becomes harder to see how the average consumer in the mediascape operates
the ruses and tactics to reappropriate it. Not everyone can be an RTMark.
The somewhat illusory and diversionary notion of choice (I can order my
DVD or banana around the corner or from 5000 miles away) is not what de
Certeau, et al. were referring to, I think. 

But perhaps we (fully signed up members of the mediascape) overestimate its
strategic significance in the realm of the everyday. As Wolfgang S. says, the
way humans do things hasn't changed that much. "Old" ways are not replaced by
the new:


> Concealed
> from our consciousness, humans live ethically, a good life behind our backs.
> Only in feelings, in fascination, satisfaction, joy,  but also in mourning
> do we get a hint of ethical worlds never present, never absent.
>

This is a little vague, but I get the drift: for all the cyber-prophecy,
many of us (urban dwellers at least) still live in couples and families
(nuclear or not), go to the local shops (even chainstores have people in
them), meet friends face-to-face, frequent public bars and cafes,
participate (even passively) in some kind of street life (meeting the
glance of a familar face we have never actually spoken to, feeling the
possiblity of a relation with random strangers, shop assistants, waiters,
etc).  We reflect sincerely on our life situations with intimate others,
gossip, bitch, argue, talk amusing rubbish. We deal with and talk about
nature (its so hot/cold/wet/snowy/windy) because it still deeply affects
us and the functioning of our shared public infrastructure (at least in
chaotic London anyway). We both seek the pleasures of the elements and
suffer them as well. Equipment breakdowns, accidents, malfunctions, red
tape, bureaucracy, bad days, bad moods, depression and melancholia,
illness, disease, death and mourning still shape our everyday. And perhaps
more profoundly than the mediascape, I feel. Maybe this is what is good
(ethically speaking) about the modern, contradictory city: whether we wish
it or not, it exposes us to these things, to these layers, to these others
with a particular intensity. 

I actually went to Princess Di's funeral, since it took place 10 minutes
from my home. I hadn't given her a moments real thought until that day. On
the day after her death, I arrived from a media-less two week holiday in
France, driving straight from Lyons to London in a day. Thought the
headlines in the London newstands were a wierd joke of some kind.  People
stood aghast in disbelief:  "Don't you know? Where the hell have you
been?". Anyway, we got "ringside"  standing room outside Horseguards
without even trying. It was very ordinary.  People standing on milkcrates,
just watching.  No mass hysteria, just the clicking of a million camera
shutters in a peculiar silence. The coffin went past. We all went home -
or shopping. Rather like my grandmother's funeral, just on a grand scale.
She got cremated and all the relatives who never speak went to play
snooker in the local club. 

Still, the role of the mediascape in the everyday needs to be teased out,
and along different lines than that of Lyotard-style analysis of the
simulacrum. The knowledge industries and academia need first of all to do
this simply for their own good, rather than for the good of those who
inhabit the everyday. Statistics like number of computers connected to the
net, number of website hits, etc. tell us virtually nothing about life
lived in and with the mediascape, just as knowing the number of hours the
TV is on in the average house says very little about how it is actually
used, where it "sits" in the everyday life of a place or space and the
people in it. 

Simon Bayly
London


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