Posted by Avida dollars on September 21, 1999 at 09:22:41 AM EDT:
Q. And much of the new communication freedom seems to have unleashed an
unseemly crowd of miseducated gossips. Guy Debord was rather pessimistic on
this point, as opposed to McLuhan's glad prophecies of a global village. Debord
wrote that "The Sage of Toronto . . . spent several decades marveling at the
numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly
accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by
conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious
gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the
global spectacle's present vulgarity." One wonders what Debord would say
about most newsgroups!
R.B. McLuhan's concept of the "global village" can seem very
apt in the present stage of the Net because it still only has an elite
group of users. The social controls of a village are possible because
everyone knows everyone else. Ironically, the Canadian guru was
reexporting the Jeffersonian dream of technological pastoralism
back to the Americans! In contrast with this fantasy about
farmers, Debord dreams instead of the digital city -- workers
united through horizontal communications within an electronic
agora. The question therefore has to be posed about whether it is
possible to have mass democracy without representation in both
politics and the media?
On se demande où Richard Barbrook a pu savoir que:" le rêve de Debord,
contrairement à McLuhan et son village global,est une ville numérique-
dans laquelle les ouvriers unis communiquent horizontalement dans une agora
électronique.Par ailleurs , la question se pose de savoir s'il est possible
d'avoir une démocratie de masse sans représentation politique et médiatique"