"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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the internet, agora, Obama
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November 17, 2008
Geordie Williamson in his All Together Now in the Weekend Australian Review argues that the use of the internet in the US presidential campaign has reinvigorated the ethos of the town square. He says:
Never before has a technology proved itself capable of replacing the town halls and city squares that, since the early democratic experiments in the Greek city states of antiquity, have provided the civic space where information is transmitted and ideas are debated, from politics to economics, science to philosophy, by flesh and blood individuals. Developments such as these have inspired pundits from Bill Gates to Wired's founder Louis Rossetto to hail the rise of a digital agora (the ancient Greek term for a place of civic congregation) and to prophesy its revolutionary implications for politics and pretty much everything else.
However, he says that what he saw where crowds of real people, gathered together in often very large numbers, despite delays and physical inconvenience:
to hear a man speak using rhetorical models outlined by Aristotle 24 centuries ago.During the past months, and at no time more than on election night, these crowds have assembled in stubborn resistance to the phenomenon that, we are told, has relegated real-world political rallies to window-dressing for the network news....., the city-sized crowds he [Obama] has attracted, are also a mass indication that the internet, far from supplanting the old-fashioned public realm, has reinvigorated it.
He adds that throughout Australia and across the world, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, public lectures and debates, symposiums and supper-clubs, readings and festivals have exploded in popularity and vigour. They represent an unscripted, unplugged antidote to the theatre that passes for political and cultural discourse in the televisual and online universe.
Let's grant this. What is its significance? To answer, Williamson turns to Seigel's Against the Machine where he argues that the internet produces loneliness which has become a defining condition of our recent history. Williamson turns to Mark Poster's Information Please, where it is argued that the internet radically destabilises identity, is a "a poor substitute for face-to-face contact", and is a space where rational argument rarely prevails and achieving consensus is widely seen as impossible. Williamson then asks:
Could it be that one of the Obama campaign's achievements has actually lain in realising the internet's limitations before the rest of us? That, while the campaign has harnessed those aspects of the technology that would aid it -- fundraising and logistics, say -- Obama has really been running against the loneliness it engenders, the angry echo chambers it endlessly replicates, the human communities that it collapses and degrades?
Williamson argues in the affirmative as the real action is in the world. So on election day he closed his laptopand headed to a public place to stand amongfriends and like-minded others.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:15 PM | Permalink |
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