Frank Apunkt Schneider will give a talk at SIGINT 2010: “The Medium is the Messiah. On the implicit ideology of media activism”
In the media age nearly all forms of political interventionism show
an inevitable tendency to become media activism. This is to say that the
activists’ focus has shifted from what could be considered “the
problem” to the acquirement and the (adequate) use of media. Hence the
medium seems to have fully become the message of all those shiny happy
media activists out there.Most of them seem to believe that media is something capable of
redeeming us all from capitalist doom. Thus they are awaiting each new
media as the saviour that was promised to arrive some day. Remember the
Web 2.0 hype, that thing about grassrooting the web through new forms of
participation and free information…? Now you got the idea. You always
look stupid when the new media hype has been turned in. Yet, if we look
at the history of bourgeois society nothing of it seems to be new. Since
the invention of the principle of publicity we have always been offered
media as a placebo for political change. In this lecture we are going
to find out what is just bourgeois ideology about the media hype to
distinguish from it what the real potential of the media could be on an
interventionist agenda. And we are going to learn how to look slightly
less silly when the next media hype will be over.
May 24, 2010, 3 PM. KOMED, Mediapark Köln, as part of SIGINT conference.