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Session 8: Borders, Consent and
Schizophrenia
Chair: Ki-Sung Kwak
The Blurry Borders between Digital and Analog
Media, Live Action and Animation in Spielberg’s Minority Report
Ozge Samanci
No abstract is presently available
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Double Me, Schizophrenic Thinking Becoming a Condition
of Survival
Ursula Drees
Plusinsight, Berlin, Germany
The possibility of escaping from reality
with the help of virtual identities is already an attractive way of
signing off from a given area of life - at least for a matter of hours.
Or will aimlessness itself become a new value? Will the human individual
in cyberspace scatter his microscopically fragmented interests on all
sides, will he experience everything simultaneously and define and
configure himself simultaneously as often as he wants to, will he no
longer recognise his own identities?
Will the capacity for schizophrenic
thinking become a condition of survival in the confusion of the society
of unlimited options? Imagine being able to partake of anything,
to be anywhere, backed up by a computer network, which enhances the
nervous system through the addition of multiple sensors and sub-systems
and externalised cerebral regions... Is the cyber-human then just a
processing node in the world-spanning mega-intellect?
Is human culture
developing into something like the superconsciousness of a new organism,
one that we can no longer register at all on the basis of information-carrying
neurons? Reversibility and the possibility of saving data increase
the half-life of information. Will we some day have so much information
available for new combinations that everything has been set down that
is describable? Will this enable us to travel into our own self-generated
time? And will we find ourselves then only requoting ourselves, while
the mega-organism we have generated is producing realisations on that
basis that lie far beyond our intellectual grasp?
A future time may
come when artificial intelligence becomes a kind of over-powerful dynamic,
one that will master humanity to such an extent in scientific and technological
terms that we will be directed, formed and mastered by it.
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Manufacturing Consent? New Media and the Propaganda
Model
Joanne Boucher
University
of Winnipeg, Canada
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s propaganda
model of the media which was first systematically presented in their
book Manufacturing Consent in 1988 has been the subject of surprisingly
scant academic analysis and scrutiny. The lack of extensive commentary
on their media model is curious precisely because it is a popular and
well-regarded theory especially among political activists. Its central
proposition is that the mass media, despite its apparent freedom and
vibrancy in liberal democracies such as the United States, is a vehicle
in the service of government and corporate elites which instills political
ignorance and quiescence on the part of the general population.
This paper
will attempt to go some way to redress the neglect of systematic analysis
of the propaganda model. The approach will be to pursue two inter-related
lines of enquiry.
First, we will examine some of the basic premises
of the propaganda model. We will address issues such as internal theoretical
coherence, the persuasiveness of the “five filters,” the
approach to audience receptivity, the use of case studies, alternative
means to test the theory as well as the validity of the empirical claims
of this media model.
Second, we will assess the propaganda model in
light of the revolution in communications technologies. In particular,
we will ask whether or not the emergence of technologies such as the
Internet which gives the general public immediate and direct access to
vast stores of information presents a serious challenge to Chomsky and
Herman’s account
of corporate control of the media. Do these technologies break the
hold that government and large corporations have over the information
available to citizens; do they allow the general public to gather and
interpret information free from the gaze of public powers? In short,
do they render the propaganda model redundant or are there dynamics
which ensure that the media does not escape corporate and state control?