Media Virus

Informationen zum Autor Douglas Rushkoff is a widely known media critic and documentarian. He has written ten books! and his documentaries include Frontline 's award-winning The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. He teaches media studies at the New School! hosts The Media Squat on radio station WFMU! and serves on the board of directors of the Media Ecology Association! the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics! and the National Association for Media Literacy Education. He has won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology and was the first winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. INTRODUCTION THE NATURE OF INFECTION The average American home has more media-gathering technology than a state-of-the-art newsroom did ten years ago. Satellite dishes spot the plains of Nebraska, personal computers equipped with modems are standard equipment in a teenager's bedroom, cable boxes linking families to seventy or more choices of programming are a suburban necessity, and camcorders, Xerox machines, and faxes have become as accessible and easy to operate as public pay phones. Household television-top interactive multimedia centers are already available, promising easy access to the coming data superhighway. Like it or not, we have become an information-based society. We live in an age when the value of data, images, and ideologies has surpassed that of material acquisitions and physical territory. Gone are the days when a person's social stature could be measured by the distance he had to walk to see smoke from his neighbor's campfire. We've finally reached the limits of our continental landmasses; we've viewed the earth from space over national broadcast television. The illusion of boundless territorial frontiers has been destroyed forever. There's simply no more room, nothing left to colonize. While this may keep real-estate prices high, it also demands that real growthand the associated accumulation of wealth and poweroccur on some other level. The only place left for our civilization to expandour only real frontieris the ether itself: the media. As a result, power today has little to do with how much property a person owns or commands; it is instead determined by how many minutes of prime-time television or pages of newsmedia attention she can access or occupy. The ever-expanding media has become a true regiona place as real and seemingly open as the globe was five hundred years ago. This new space is called the datasphere. The datasphere, or mediaspace, is the new territory for human interaction, economic expansion, and especially social and political machination. It has become our electronic social hall: Issues that were formerly reserved for hushed conversations on walks home from church choir practice are now debated openly on afternoon talk shows, in front of live audiences composed of people just like us. Good old-fashioned local gossip has been replaced by nationwide coverage of particularly resonant sex scandals. The mediaspace has also developed into our electronic town meeting (to use Ross Perot's expression). Traditional political debate and decisions have been absorbed by the ever-expanding forums of call-in radio and late-night variety shows. Today's most media-savvy politicians announce their candidacies on Larry King and explain their positions on Rush Limbaugh or, better yet, prime-time infomercials. It has become fashionable to bemoan the fact that Saturday Night Live's Dana Carvey's latest impersonation of a political celebrity means as much to the American voter as the candidate's official platform or that kids today can get passionate about the styles and attitudes depicted in the latest MTV video but may never have watched an evening news broadcast. We worry that our media industry has developed a generation of couch potatoe...

Autorentext
Douglas Rushkoff is a widely known media critic and documentarian. He has written ten books, and his documentaries include Frontline’s award-winning “The Merchants of Cool” and “The Persuaders.” He teaches media studies at the New School, hosts The Media Squat on radio station WFMU, and serves on the board of directors of the Media Ecology Association, the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education. He has won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology and was the first winner of the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Zusammenfassung
The most virulent viruses today are composed of information. In this information-driven age, the easiest way to manipulate the culture is through the media. A hip and caustically humorous McLuhan for the '90s, culture watcher Douglas Rushkoff now offers a fascinating expose of media manipulation in today's age of instant information.

Leseprobe
INTRODUCTION
THE NATURE OF INFECTION
 
The average American home has more media-gathering technology than a state-of-the-art newsroom did ten years ago. Satellite dishes spot the plains of Nebraska, personal computers equipped with modems are standard equipment in a teenager’s bedroom, cable boxes linking families to seventy or more choices of programming are a suburban necessity, and camcorders, Xerox machines, and faxes have become as accessible and easy to operate as public pay phones. Household television-top interactive multimedia centers are already available, promising easy access to the coming “data superhighway.” Like it or not, we have become an information-based society.
 
We live in an age when the value of data, images, and ideologies has surpassed that of material acquisitions and physical territory. Gone are the days when a person’s social stature could be measured by the distance he had to walk to see smoke from his neighbor’s campfire. We’ve finally reached the limits of our continental landmasses; we’ve viewed the earth from space over national broadcast television. The illusion of boundless territorial frontiers has been destroyed forever. There’s simply no more room, nothing left to colonize. While this may keep real-estate prices high, it also demands that real growth—and the associated accumulation of wealth and power—occur on some other level.
 
The only place left for our civilization to expand—our only real frontier—is the ether itself: the media. As a result, power today has little to do with how much property a person owns or commands; it is instead determined by how many minutes of prime-time television or pages of newsmedia attention she can access or occupy. The ever-expanding media has become a true region—a place as real and seemingly open as the globe was five hundred years ago. This new space is called the datasphere.
 
The datasphere, or “mediaspace,” is the new territory for human interaction, economic expansion, and especially social and political machination. It has become our electronic social hall: Issues that were formerly reserved for hushed conversations on walks home from church choir practice are now debated openly on afternoon talk shows, in front of live audiences composed of people “just like us.” Good old-fashioned local gossip has been replaced by nationwide coverage of particularly resonant sex scandals. The mediaspace has also developed into our electronic town meeting (to use Ross Perot’s expression). Traditional political debate and decisions have been absorbed by the ever-expanding forums of call-in radio and late-night variety shows. Today’s most media-savvy politicians announce their candidacies on Larry King and explain their positions on Rush Limbaugh or, better yet, prime-time “infome…

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