Monday, June 24, 2002

You and I: Una bloga in maschera For Kierkegaard, what's driving the explosion of mediated speech is fear, and what we apparently are afraid of is ourselves: "What rules the world is...the fear of humanity. Therefore this fear of being an individual and this proneness to hide under one abstraction or another.... Ultimately an abstraction is related to fantasy, and fantasy becomes an enormous power... [T]he human race became afraid of itself, fosters the fantastic, and then trembles before it." Where David Weinberger sees the mediating distance of the Net as effecting a liberation of "fat" speech, Kierkegaard is attuned to the dark side: The technology of mediated communication conspires with fear to spawn a riot of messages between partly concealed individual selves, a masquerade. (AKMA's thinking on identity is relevant here, as are many of TV's posts and those of many others.) Kierkegaard appeals to the rich mode of face-to-face speech as a corrective, but he is equally if not more suspicious of journalistic speech. The whole blogging vs. journalism "debate" would lack friction for the Dane, since both are forms of disguise and delusion. Indeed, the seductive possibilities of anonymous concealment inherent in any mediation are like minor neuroses when compared with the phantasmagoria unleashed through broadcast media: Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction 'the public', consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organisation.... The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people... that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity. ~ Kierkegaard, The Present Age, quoted in Kierkegaard's "Mystery Of Unrighteousness" In The Information Age, via Wood. Nothing is less transparent or dialogic for Kierkegaard than discourse pretending to address or to speak for "the public." Weinberger offers the vision of a more intimate communion, via the Net, liberated from the tiresome vapidity of the public as media-construct. But if Kierkegaard were to charge that such intimacy is still an evasion of the concrete responsibilities of the face-to-face encounter? Discuss? 9:39:34 PM     A May 23, 2002 email I wrote to several friends: My guess is, a wave of revisionism is coming. Let's put it this way. We see now these guys - Levin, Case, Murdock, Sulzberger, Eisner, Lay, Welch - are legends in the minds of their closest 10 million employees, the media, and the stock analysts. We see, clearly, that this is all one grand delusion. It is a matter of months, I'd guess (things are speeding up) before we see the NY Times heralding, from behind the pack, the revisionist notion that these guys were a pack of hubristic, egomaniacal jerks who left their companies just in time (except for Lay) to escape the fallout from their unutterable folly. Right now, however, The Times dares not whisper such a thing. If you wrote a letter to the editor suggesting as much, they wouldn't publish it. A month later: ====== June 24, 2002 The Imperial Chief Executive Is Suddenly in the Cross Hairs By DAVID LEONHARDT tephen M. Case, a hero of the 1990's for having built America Online into a multimedia giant, sat on the stage at his company's annual meeting last month, listening to investors mock him for overseeing multibillion-dollar losses. Jeffrey R. Immelt, following in the footsteps of the lionized John F. Welch Jr. at General Electric, has tried to soothe rebellious shareholders by releasing more information than Mr. Welch ever did, but G.E.'s stock has still fallen more sharply than most others this year. Meanwhile, Charles R. Schwab, hoping to capitalize on Wall Street's new unpopularity, has appeared in a television advertisement proclaiming his brokerage firm "a different kind of company." Across the business landscape, the imperial chief executive, hailed not long ago as the savior of entire companies and the driving force behind the turnaround of the American economy, is suddenly under siege. With two prominent executives being indicted in the last month, accounting problems continuing to emerge and the stock market stuck near its lowest level in three years, executives are facing their most significant challenge in a decade or more. ==== The news may be unpredictable, but never the New York Times.   9:17:07 AM

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