Sociology of Media (3) Mediation Formats

1. Sociology of Media (3) Mediation Formats Digital Reproduction (05.12.2007)

2. Outline • The logic of Digital Communication • The Mass Rally • Baudrillard on Electronic-Digital Hyper-Visualization • Branding • Popular Valorization • Telematics and the Postmodern • The Simulacrum • Entropy and Autopoiesis • Conclusion of Block 3

3. Early French cultural theorists • Jacques Ellul • Alexandre Kojeve • George Bataille • Michel Foucault

4. The Logic of Digital Communication Media • Transforming the relationship between space and time: instantaneity and simultaneity. • Convergence of different media forms, in particular numbers and alphabet, telematics: data-processing + telecommunication. • New modalities of association (‘keeping in touch’) ‘networked sociality’ (Wittel). • The re-emergence of ‘the virtual’

5. The Mass Rally • Euphoria versus pessimism about possibilities of digital reproduction • Limitless freedom and mobility • Excessive isolation and alienation • Mass mediation as non-communication (Baudrillard) • The problem of ‘the mass’ (crowd versus ‘audience’)

6. Baudrillard on Electronic-Digital Hyper-Visualization • Everything has become a signifier • Simulation versus symbolic exchange • The loss of Hau (the sacred nature of the Gift)

7. Branding • Consumption is the appropriation of a signifier: the idea and meaning of the object or message… For Baudrillard the sign is born when this relationship [between human beings in a ‘directly experienced situation’] is broken, a process of the transformation of all relations and meaning into signs to be combined, appropriated and consumed that has become, he says ‘a defining mode of our civilization’ (Merrin, 2005: 16-7).

8. Brand • Means nothing in itself, not tangible • Functions as ‘signal’ (index) • Take on the appearance of ‘myth’

9. Popular Valorization • The dominance of ‘simulation’ (the semiotic) is also an economic shift (the rise of consumerism). • Key role played by (electronic) visual media. • A radical change in the nature of ‘the popular’ (e.g. Warhol ‘pop-art’) • Emblematic illustration: ‘America’

10. Telematics and the Postmodern • Universal arbitrariness of all signs • Illusion of immediacy (e.g. of full presence) • From use value to exchange value to sign value • Data processing and ‘acting at a distance’ • The rise (and fall) of ‘postmodern culture’ • hyperreality

11. The simulacrum • A copy of which no original exists • No longer a distinction between manipulating texts (symbolic) and images (iconic) • Digital media provides their own indexicality • The simulacrum ‘transcends’ (albeit in a simulated transgression) both the world of the counterfeit and use value and the world of production and exchange value. • The simulacrum discloses, in the void of the lost original, the futility of all authenticity

12. Entropy and Self-Referential Mediation (Autopoiesis) • “All cultures strive towards ever increasing entropy” • The mobilization of indifference • [t]hrough the reproduction from one medium into another the real becomes volatile, it becomes the allegory of death, but it also draws strength from its own destruction, becoming the real for its own sake, a fetishism for the lost object which is no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denegation and its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal (1993: 71-2). • Autopoiesis: all systems tend to attain self-replication by means of self-referential closure (Luhmann)

13. Debord: the Society of the Spectacle • Spectacularization is the principle mode of production of contemporary sociality; it renders everything visible: referent becomes index, index becomes icon, icon becomes symbol, symbol becomes sign, sign becomes signifier, signifier becomes referent.

14. Conclusion • Instead of moving towards self-transparency, the society of the human sciences and generalized communi­cation has moved towards what could, in general, be called the ‘fabling of the world’. The images of the world we receive from the media and the human sciences, albeit on different levels, are not simply different interpretations of a 'reality' that is 'given' regardless, but rather constitute the very objectivity of the world. • (Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 1992: 24-25)