I cue you – DFM
In this age of media overproduction, information immunity is a question of life or death. When the defence mechanism fails and the consumer is overwhelmed by strange impressions, doom seems near. To call a halt to crippling indifference, a media diet is prescribed. The pressure exerted on the world citizen to continually adapt his own image of the world and put technological innovations into practice puts him into a permanent state of insecurity. The urge to create disappears, and we are merely able to react to the overwhelming array of choices. Data are then no longer stimuli to interest, but an inimical barrage constituting a physical threat. From exchange to effacement: communication is preying on naked existence. The innocence of the media is no more. A period of stagnation will follow the rampant growth of the ’80s. This is being foreshadowed by the propagation of a mentality of moderation. It is being made clear to us from all sides that we must stop handling information and images carelessly. Henceforth, the media and data traffic, like other sectors of Western society, must submit in their presentation to the diktat of ecology. The environment is more than endangered plants and animals. It is a mentality which, with abstract concepts like ‘conservation’ and ‘recycling’, sees the constructed media sphere as a third or fourth nature. Watchfulness prevails against all possible needless pollution and senseless waste. Aware media users find a ‘natural equilibrium’ between receiving and transmitting information. After the euphoria of getting acquainted with the new technologies, they seek a balance between the immaterial environment, which evokes imaginary worlds, and the biographical one, where their own flesh lives. This balance is considered necessary to protect the pioneers in data land (who are working at the ‘electronic frontier’) from cold turkey. After the ecstasy of the emancipation phase we see a dissatisfaction in technoculture, and it may be seeking a destructive way out. High expectations all too easily end in great disappointment, which inspires hate for the machinery. Deleuze and Guattari would simply call it ‘anti-production’; the sudden disgust that arises in those who have allowed themselves to be swept away in the stream of signs. Could this be the ‘drama of communication’ (freely adapted from Alice Miller), that at the moment we only receive and are sending no signals back? Or vice versa: putting too much data into the world, without getting anything back for it? Among data workers a feeling of emptiness and senselessness is arising, which can only
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