Interesting times allow me the indulgence to reflect…ideas coming together…why do they need to come together, is there a purpose, an outcome, a greater reason? Yes, ideas coming together can be a good thing, but it is also good to keep some ideas apart. Ideas coming together may not always provide solutions, they may also create problems. Fools shouldn’t have guns, dialogue isn’t an end in itself.
And as I have found out the hard way, there are just some hermeneutics that are in-penetrable and there isn’t anything that you can say or do to change them (like parts of ‘new media’). And the more parochial the discourse, the more likely that it is universalised (“best little town in the World mate”). Paul Keating used to lament talking to Queensland farmers because their politics were hot-wired into their souls and their weren’t going to listen to him. And if they aren’t going to listen to the Prime Minister, then they ain’t going to listen to me on my web log.
And I suppose that parts of ‘New Media’ were interesting for a while. It reinvigorated an entire new political class of activists, mostly from the old Industrial centres of Newcastle, Western Sydney, Brunswick, and Inner-Melbourne. It also gave a hook for the new 1990s Red Brick Universities to ‘Meta-Narrative’ some of their educational-history into the larger Australian educated public sphere (especially with the Globalism, cultural industries, and ‘information society’ rhetoric). And it also provided a platform for visual artists from the Red Bricks to perform on the big stage through the Australia Council etc. Who would have thought that ‘one’ technology and ‘one’ hermeneutic could achieve so much in so little time for a whole new political class?
Some parts of ‘new media’ flourished, whilst others failed. (And ‘new media’ is geographically specific; ie. what Australians call ‘new media’ is very different from how the Americans or Germans, or Nords use the term). In Australia ‘new media’ became a sort of festival, a networking event, a place where people congregate to realign things a little. At worst, it became a Libertarian orgy where a millionaire bio-tech engineer with deadlocks could hang out with a unemployed son of a panel beater from Toowoomba and imagine that the place that they inhabit is based on equity. No Borders huh? It because a place where political cynicism reached such heights that the political process became imagined as nothing more than a dance of images and hollow political sloganeering. It became a place where ‘intelligent people’ became the enemy of the ‘common man’ because the common man could never be an intellectual.
The reason why parts of ‘new media’ *failed* is probably the same reason that a whole bunch of companies *failed* etc. The problem isn’t some external thing to new media, it is internal to new media. It is (parts of) the understanding of new media that it the problem, not the solution.
I think the day that I lost faith in (parts of) ‘new media’ was when I met a Fascist at university (this may not be a *real* person). It sort of sent me into a bit of a crisis because not only did the Fascist not know he was a Fascist, but his peers didn’t know either. They thought Fascism was just a swear word and what the Fascist was saying was ‘empowering’ the other students (for better or worse) so they liked him. The Fascist wasn’t an outward racist, modern Fascists are smarter than this, but he was a right-wing extremist ‘Libertarian’ of the Continental style with an impenetrable deterministic monomania’ hermeneutic. He told them that they were the most biological advanced people on Earth because they used computers, he told them that everyone else needs to be civilised, and that any other way of thinking was an enemy of the ‘common people’. The Fascist was smart and he knew a lot about new media technology which gave him credibility with his peers. After all this was a ‘Red Brick’ (vocational university) and they wanted skills and jobs; Fascism wasn’t part of their ‘real world’, this was ‘theory’ or something from some other ‘snobby’ place where the common people weren’t allowed. The Fascist was a complete armature as he made deference to the ‘common people’ (who were of course ‘stupid’ like him) and to ‘nature’ which means that they had no choice.
The Fascist made me infuriated, one is because his skills made him untouchable in the ‘Red Brick’ and two because no one else was questioning his ideas. Allowing a Fascist to operate unhindered in the ‘new media’ field in a University was a sign of a chasm in the curriculum of a university that didn’t teach the humanities and make its students equally responsible for the pain in the historical maps. After all this was the ‘real world’ and history isn’t part of the real world, only jobs that stoke the (Fascist?) oven.
And the Fascist was a networker and the Fascist had manners and the Fascist tried to destroy me because I was an ‘enemy of the common man’. The Fascist was politically cunning, and the Fascist got money of the Government and the Fascist thrived for a while. But the Fascist inevitable *failed* because his platform failed.
But I hear that ‘he’ is still hiding away in the new media field somewhere pulling down ‘boundaries’, attacking ‘hierarchies’, creating ‘grass root’ ‘communities’, creating ‘discussion networks’ attacking the ‘nation state’, persecuting intellectuals, and creating ‘revolutions’ of ‘common people’ on the way to a place where everyone can participate on ‘non-hierarchical’ terms…as long as you are a Fascist.
Even political ‘white ants’ have a history. Hitler was a ‘white ant’, Hitler loved the ‘common people’, Hitler was a brilliant ‘New Media activist’ and Hitler deferred his actions to nature and ‘young Germans’ adored him. And after the Second World War the occupying forces forced German technical schools to have humanities schools. Why? Because the technical schools (the common people) had been compliant with Nazism. Why? Because the schools were ‘real world’ ,they were being ‘dynamic’ and ‘job ready’ to stoke the ovens.
Not all ‘New Media’ has failed; in fact the opposite is true. It’s now about recognising the usuful components of New Media, about finding more pieces of the societal jigsaw puzzle. New Media (as an academic field) is about a generation behind fields such as Political Science and History, but this is good because there is plenty of scope to get things wrong and fail and learn and move on. In research 9 things wrong out of 10 makes a right and it is the history of the fog that we forget. And new media is all about fog; problem being is that this is where the Fascists hide. Once ‘new media’ learns to deals with the ‘Fascists in the fog’, it will be a powerful, responsible, and significant field and maybe some of this ‘network society’ rhetoric will take on some responisbibility for our shared history because it is always with us.
