Deconstructing the Digital

Our current uses of information technology and our commerce with images do not always depend on digitization. They often pre-date it, or in any event require a wider context in which digitization is merely one factor, however crucial. The ‘convergence’ argument around the digital media as the ‘motor’ gives a false impression of inevitability and with it a sense of disempowerment that overlooks a number of salient forces also shaping the current situation. For instance:

• * it underestimates the impact of economic concentration on a global scale, which started before the digital revolution and involves major innovations in technologies as different as jet propulsion and satellite technology, containerization, fiber optics, and the transistor.

• * it ignores the geo-political realignments of the recent decades since the oil crises and the collapse of communism, with the move from ideologically opposed power blocs to neo-liberal, capitalist trading blocs, leading to the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America, decenterizing Europe and reorienting the United States towards the Pacific Rim.

• * it does not take into account deregulation (i.e. legal and institutional changes) and its effects on national television industries and statecontrolled or corporate telecommunication monopolies in the developed countries.

When we use the computer to generate letters of the alphabet, few of us seem particularly vexed. When we listen to digital music and sound, again, there is a large degree of acceptance; it is only when digitization generates images that something akin to a cultural crisis appears to occur, with exaggerated claims being made by some, and acute anxieties being voiced by others. This is all the more surprising given that the majority of cinematic digital techniques are modelled on tricking the eye with special effects, something that has been practised since Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang's DIE NIBELUNGEN, Walt Disney, and KING KONG. Are we simply witnessing a new round in the bout between the advocates of ‘realism’ and the perfectors of ‘illusionism’? Or is something more at stake, something to do with a major change in cultural metaphor away from ‘representation’ to ‘simultaneity’, ‘telepresence’, ‘interactivity’, and ‘tele-action’? Media gurus even speak about ‘preparing mankind to accept its own obsolescence’, as homo sapiens hands the planet over to artificial intelligence organisms, at which point the computer and digitization start lending support to wild evolutionary speculations but also to a skewed history of the media.