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A Small Net in a Big World
Or: The Importance of Being Media
By Geert Lovink
Do you think of the Internet as a gnostic conspiracy against the
rotting, material world we all would like to leave behind? Well, to
be honest, I don't. Seen from an anti-capitalist, activist and
autonomous/anarcho point of view, media are first of all pragmatic
tools, not metaphysical entities. The 'Ideology of New Media' comes
second and should not uphold any of our activities. Media Theory,
Net Criticism, Computer Archaeology, Cultural Studies, Digital Art
Critique etc. give us an understanding of the 'Laws of Media', but
they should not become a goal in itself, despite all of our (my)
passions for these heroic-marginal, supra-intellectual enterprises.
For me, it is too easy to make the fancy and at the same time
fairly realistic statement, that we should disappear from the realm
of the virtual and return to 'social action'. This legitimate call,
to leave the highly overestimated 'Infosphere' for what it is
(namely over-hyped empty 'fashion') and appear again on the level of
'the street', is making a false distinction between real and
virtual policies. Social movements have always had a wide variety
of media-related activities. Each 'action' (even the most 'direct')
has a high level of 'informatimn', addressing different groups and
targets. Media, in this respect, express social relations in a very
strong way. But what media can't do is to regroup and organise
social movements. If isolation and despair are widespread, and
disorganisation rules, this is not because of the computer, nor can
digital equipment help us out of daily misery. It is too easy to
blame the machines as the cause of the current 'real existing
vagueness'. It's up to us to bring people together and start some
new initiative, the machine won't do that for us.
So, should we just go back to a seventies-like, instrumental use of
media (as megaphones for the true counter-propaganda)? No way. It is
not any longer our first task to 'have the people's voices heard',
the so- called 'voices of the oppressed'. This model still leaves
the old top- down media-hierarchy intact. We should try to stop
speaking for other people. Nowadays, we can make a step further.
With the spread of camcorders, tape recorders, photo cameras, Xerox
copy machines and... computers, ordinary people now have the
possibility to produce 'content' themselves. It is no longer our
duty, in the West, to produce their media-items in a
pseudo-journalistic manner, but to spread the knowledge of how to
use and maintain the hard- and software and build up a common
(global?) distribution system.
In order to do this we have to get a grip on these powerful tools,
understand their inner logic, their seductive side and destructive
side effects, in order to use them in an effective way. And we
should not keep this knowledge for ourselves. In Amsterdam, in the
early eighties, there was the slogan: "Let a thousand antennas
blossom," which meant, at the time, that we should have as many
pirate radio transmitters on the roofs of the squatted buildings as
possible. Do not share your broadcasting time with other
personalities and groups... but empower groups with their own
equipment, thereby destroying, step by step, the 'myth of media'
altogether. Finally, after some wild years of radio piracy we ended
up with three independent ("consciously illegal") stations and some
individuals in the legal, official radio. Having so many different
frequencies and voices has secured our existence over the last ten
years. The same counts for local cable-casting groups and lately,
also for the Internet, having a big variety of our own access and
content facilities (like xs4all, digital city, desk.nl) and actions
(hacking the Van Traa report, the Scientology-case, etc., see:
Eveline's story in nettime).
It seems important not to fight over an artificially created
scarcity. The freedom of expression and media will only be
fulfilled once the capability to broadcast has been fully
incorporated in the daily life 'of the billions'. In my view, each
fight for liberation can easily contribute to the destruction of
the media monopolies by putting out some messages themselves
(graffiti, pamphlets, zines, paintings, songs, imagery).
Complaining about the multinational media giants is not enough (a
critique of 'Wired' can only be a start...). The final goal could
be the 'democratisation of the media' and eventually the 'abolition
of media'. This goes further than to merely participate in other
people's forums or plain 'public access'. It means an overall
dispersion of equipment and knowledge into society. A funny
side-effect of this is that media will become less and less
important. At this moment, we have the tendency to project a lot of
the actual power into this rising 'symbolic realm'. True Marxists,
of course, will point us at the much more powerful realm of the
virtual capital. Or at the real, hard work that is being done,
producing material goods, that is becoming more and more invisible
for us, Westerners, because it is done somewhere, in Asia, Eastern
Europe or Latin-America. Or even at the dominance of the tourism
industry over the relatively small media business. This is all
true. But our 'false consciousness' is as true as the other people
personal realities. The 'hegemony of the media realm', I would say,
seems to be our reality. And we, a relatively small group of media
activists, have the (limited) possibility, in this historical
configuration, to fight 'media power' as such.
At the moment, the Internet is not going into this direction. Funny
enough, the 'user friendly interfaces' are keeping people away from
using the Net in an effective way. Networks turned into 'services'
and users became consumers. Subsequently, we have seen no
substantial rise in 'virtual communities' or independent servers.
We therefore have to fight from now on all neo-liberal ideologies
and supposedly 'anarcho' slogans about individuals and their
so-called power on the Net. This might be true for a few
youngsters, making their way into the ruling 'virtual class'. But
this is not how computer networks come into being, start to grow
and, perhaps, one day, become a threat to the establishment. We do
not have to fear, in the first place, state intervention or even
censorship. CompuServe has the right to filter out any kind of
message they do not like, that's not censorship but a corporate
policy of a large content provider. For me, the danger comes from
within, from the inner logic of the Internet and how it is being
perceived. Way too many clever individuals are just subscribing to
commercial services like CompuServe or AOL, instead of looking for
independent, less/non- commercial providers or starting their own
server. They are thereby failing to set up their own, autonomous
communication structure (and not to forget: money-economy!).
Most of the political activists are still isolated and lack an
offensive policy in crucial areas like access and content. For
example, both APC ('Third World') and Soros (Eastern Europe) are
mainly concentrating on connecting the slow and official
NGO-bureaucracies, leaving the rest of the population to 'the
market' and its high prices. Of course, this is their own business.
What we should do, is to show that it is possible to establish a
BBS, e-mail server, web server, real audio, pirate radio, whatever.
In order to achieve this we have to share experiences and technical
knowledge (UNIX/linux, routers, even html), collect and
redistribute old computers and software, share knowledge about
sponsors, funds and ways to set up our own economy. Only later, can
we speak about content-related matters, like cultural biases and
'European Ideologies', the dangers of neo-Darwinism concepts, the
growing necessity to set up 'translation offices' in the Net, in
order to overcome the monopoly of the English language and other
Subcult issues like the 'abolition of the Net'.
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