Attention: Mediacracy!
Jun. 25th, 2018 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
belmondo3Nowadays, it looks like the times that Eco foresaw have come – the new world war, which has so far been conducted as a chain of seemingly unconnected “local conflicts”, is finally shaping in front of our eyes as an entity developing along some premeditated scenarios, – yet, disturbingly enough, the Carnival is not over. Instead, what we are witnessing can be best described as the carnivalized war spreading all over the globe.
Putin’s Russia is the first country that has deliberately made the carnival a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policies – in fact, of its entire post-Soviet political architecture. The first country to have established, one decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a full-fledged TV-run postmodern dictatorship – a so-called “managed democracy”, a mixture of Lubyanka and Hollywood, or – speaking in more literary terms – of Huxleyan and Orwellian versions of totalitarianism. In such a system the whole of public life, in war or peace, gets turned into a staged reality show which, being imposed, via media, upon the mass audience, leaves it with no room for reflection on what is true, and what is false – the very terms are becoming irrelevant, as it is not the true/false dichotomy that matters, but whether the event in question is engaging or unengaging. Since this type of dictatorship is yet to be properly classified and named by social science, I would allow myself, in the meantime, calling it a mediacracy.
The symbolic international debut of mediacracy (at the time passed unnoticed), as I see it, came on the night in September, 2000 when Larry King was hosting Vladimir Putin on his CNN show – shortly after the horrible catastrophe of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk that had shocked the world (the Russian government proved then either reluctant, or just inept in handling the rescue operation, and all the survivors of the wreckage died on the vessel, with all the major world media following suit and reporting the story in the news: an opening of the century in which a crowd, when seeing an accident, before running to help starts taking pictures). In Larry King’s later words, that was “a great television moment”: when asked by the host, “What happened with the submarine?”, the Russian president replied, with the characteristically all-knowing KGB wry smile, “It sunk” - thus having triumphantly introduced into international politics the stand-up comedy (“troll’s”) style since then practiced by only too many – from Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine to Donald Trump in the US.
Джерело
Ліві ліберали інтуїтивно відчули небезпеку від таких явищ, але для запобігання цьому робили все недолуго на кшталт політкоректної мови і боротьби з мовою ненависті, перетворивши все на маразм.
PS
З'явився іще один термін для цього явища -- психократія
Putin’s Russia is the first country that has deliberately made the carnival a cornerstone of its domestic and foreign policies – in fact, of its entire post-Soviet political architecture. The first country to have established, one decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a full-fledged TV-run postmodern dictatorship – a so-called “managed democracy”, a mixture of Lubyanka and Hollywood, or – speaking in more literary terms – of Huxleyan and Orwellian versions of totalitarianism. In such a system the whole of public life, in war or peace, gets turned into a staged reality show which, being imposed, via media, upon the mass audience, leaves it with no room for reflection on what is true, and what is false – the very terms are becoming irrelevant, as it is not the true/false dichotomy that matters, but whether the event in question is engaging or unengaging. Since this type of dictatorship is yet to be properly classified and named by social science, I would allow myself, in the meantime, calling it a mediacracy.
The symbolic international debut of mediacracy (at the time passed unnoticed), as I see it, came on the night in September, 2000 when Larry King was hosting Vladimir Putin on his CNN show – shortly after the horrible catastrophe of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk that had shocked the world (the Russian government proved then either reluctant, or just inept in handling the rescue operation, and all the survivors of the wreckage died on the vessel, with all the major world media following suit and reporting the story in the news: an opening of the century in which a crowd, when seeing an accident, before running to help starts taking pictures). In Larry King’s later words, that was “a great television moment”: when asked by the host, “What happened with the submarine?”, the Russian president replied, with the characteristically all-knowing KGB wry smile, “It sunk” - thus having triumphantly introduced into international politics the stand-up comedy (“troll’s”) style since then practiced by only too many – from Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine to Donald Trump in the US.
Джерело
Ліві ліберали інтуїтивно відчули небезпеку від таких явищ, але для запобігання цьому робили все недолуго на кшталт політкоректної мови і боротьби з мовою ненависті, перетворивши все на маразм.
PS
З'явився іще один термін для цього явища -- психократія
