<nettime> Re: <nlc> It's the Environment . . . Stupid!

[purple <purple@tellurian.com>]

Again, Mark, I'm going to provide a little more precision here. Your
bounding lines are too unwieldy.

Analog television (back and white, or color) stopped being constitutive
by the Seventies, subsumed by the subsequent computer, satellite,
instant replay, and digital (constitutive) environments. I called this
post-TV convergence "mixed-corporate media" in the Eighties. I like
Kroker's phrase "screenal economy" for that Eighties' phase. This is why
the old TV flipped and became "hot" at that time.

As for the machinations of the "1984" gang around the Macy Conferences,
I see them as maintaining social goals from the radio era (1934). They
held up what became a meme but it was far from constitutive from the
Sixties on, especially when the screenal economy/body was subsumed by
the chip economy (Kroker's "data body").

It would be more useful to spell out how the "social psychology" S&M
discipline was forced to change its colors through these various phases.
For example, why it became the Human Potential Movement in the Sixties
and then cults in the Seventies, only to be completely obsolesced by
pharmacology in the Eighties. And these mandatory effects were just
targeting and programming what I call the "chemical body"  (Kroker's
"surplus flesh", constituted in the later nineteenth century). This
"1984" gang had no say over the unforeseen benefits of the TV
(hyper-expressive "pop culture") and Chip bodies that circumvented their
(Mead-Bateson & Co.) forlorn agenda (which was limited to mere iconic
control). Their last gasp was the retrieval of the "Authoritarian
Personality" in the Eighties via the neo-conservative icons of the
Reagan-Thatcher mold. The Nineties (the Android Meme) replayed the
mocking hyper-expressive phase ("the nineties is the sixties upside
down") which was simultaneously (or tetradically) cancelled out and
counterbalanced by neo-con ecstasy via abuse of the Clinton/Gore icon.

So, the categories "television", the "Internet", "social psychology",
etc., do not meet the standards of what this list claims to be modeling.
I'm not saying we always have to meet those aesthetics but they do have
to be stated now and then. And that's my role as owner of this realm.

As for today, the "old AP" (mainly the chemical body/Middle East oil
concerns) is just one panicked meme among many in our ecstatic
quadrophrenia, while the Mystery Body (the "new AP" - anticipated
effects of cold fusion technology, the Evergreens, MIHR) slips into
our intuition through Peter's back door.

OK, enough for now. Resume whittling if this post doesn't stop the roar.

Bob Dobbs

On 11/7/04 3:29 PM, "Newmedia@aol.com" <Newmedia@aol.com> wrote:

> Folks:
> In response to numerous questions that I've received about "The
> Internet WON the Election!", let me see if I can add a little historical
> perspective regarding recent developments in our collective global
> media "environment."
 <...>


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