Mentioned this old old essay from 2003 in the theory reading group on Virilio so I thought it would nice to re-air it here.  This essay was actually an interactive multimedia presentation where clicking on hyperlinks in the text affected a TV-screen or something like that.  Unfortunately, this is lost somewhere in digital archives.  Anyway, for anybody interested the text of the project here:

Is terrorism the accident of global mass media?

This project begins with an accident.

Or rather, it begins with the playful idea that, perhaps – just
perhaps – the spectacular violence of terrorism we have seen on our
TV-screens after the events of September 11 could be an accident of
the global mass media. According to French philosopher Paul Virilio,
every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident (1).
For example, while the invention of a technology such as a car allows
us to move quicker through space, it also simultaneously creates the
possibility of the accident: a violent car crash. Virilio claims that,
since Aristotle, the substance of any technology has been
over-emphasized at the expense of its accident; that is to say,
historically, the emphasis on the positive side of technology has
overlooked its negative side-effects (2).

Telecommunication technologies are central to Virilio’s analysis of
technology and speed called dromology. They allow us to move, so to
speak, at the speed of electromagnetic waves – the absolute threshold
of the speed of light. Thus any geographical location can be, in
theory, linked to any other place in the instant here-and-now of the
speed-of-light communications. Virilio thus says: “once broadcast and
distribution points are sufficiently generalized so that ‘coverage’
can assume the mantle of global completeness, and live events
tele-distributed in ‘real time’ across geographically dispersed
audiences occupying their own ‘private’ spaces, the nature of the
social contract becomes subject to new exigencies (3).”

Moreover: unlike “local” accidents caused by old technologies that
still move at relative speeds, the new telecommunications technologies
moving at the absolute speed of light bring about the possibility of
an accident that is no longer tied to geographical space or time. It
can be simultaneous and everywhere. This raises the possibility of an
accident happening in a geographically confined-location that becomes
generalized: a computer virus entering the computer network can spread
anywhere in an instant; panic spreading through the Internet can cause
a stock market crash; a spectacular event of terrorism broadcasted
live on TV can … ?

Virilio says:

Let me put it this way: every time a technology is invented, take
shipping for instance, an accident is invented together with it, in
this case, the shipwreck, which is exactly contemporaneous with the
invention of the ship. The invention of railway meant, perforce, the
invention of a railway disaster. The invention of the aeroplane
brought the air crash and its wake. Now, the three accidents I have
just mentioned are specific localized accidents. The Titanic sank at a
given location. A train de-rails at another location and a plane
crashes, again, somewhere else. Thus what these three accidents have
in common is that they are localized, and this is because they are
about relative velocities, the transport of ships trains and planes.
But the moment the absolute velocity of electromagnetic waves is put
to use, the potential of the accident is no longer local, but general.
It is no longer a particular accident, hence the possibility arises of
a generalized accident (4).

Now, if we take this line of speculation a bit further, could the
characteristics of contemporary global mass media then also bring
about its own accident? And if so, what could the mechanisms be in a
system that seems to feed off spectacular TV-violence transmitted
live, globally, 24-hours a day? Virilio says, echoing many terrorism
analysts: without one, the other would not exist, socially speaking
… the terrorist who knows the time of televised news programmes and
who plans the explosion of his bomb and the murder of innocents so
that they will be aired on the evening news (5).

Indeed, if we look at the two spectacles of terrorist violence that
this project will focus on – September 11 and the Moscow Hostage
Crisis – neither of the cases seem to have little geostrategic purpose
outside the immediate suffering of the victims. Yet, due to the ample
coverage both events attracted, both cases immediately acquired
symbolic meaning through the conduits of global mass media. What is
sthen triking about the recent screen-event-battles of the War on
Terrorism is their symbolic role in the post-September 11 New World
Order. The meaning of terrorism that, at least on the surface,
struggles to achieve local goals – the removal of American troops from
the Holy Places or independence in Chechenya – has gone global. Local
events are given global meaning when otherwise they might have
remained in regional obscurity.

Baudrillard remarked: “the more concentrated a system becomes
globally, ultimately forming one single network, the more it becomes
vulnerable at a single point … here it was eighteen suicide
attackers who, thanks to the absolute weapon of death, enhanced by
technological efficiency, unleashed a global catastrophic process
(6).”

Could this be the accident of global mass media that Virilio warned about?

Admittedly, however, saying that media causes something sounds awfully
familiar to anybody with background in media theory. A similar
argument was made almost a 30 years ago; a theory that has now had a
resurgence alongside the popularization of the Internet, especially
amongst the techno-utopian postmodern cybertheorists and
information-age enthusiasts. Remember Marshall McLuhan – the foregone
icon of the information age? The medium is the message; form
determines content. Understandably, then, making the assertion that
media technology causes something per se risks pushing us on a
slippery slope towards McLuhanian technological determinism; as if the
accident would be some sinister version of the global village; and
suicide bombers the causal effect of people glued to their TV-screens.

This is not the aim.

Rather, the “accident of the mass media” should be seen as a metaphor,
a playful idea, that is used to “tease” out what role (if any) does
the technological determinism argument still play in the decentered
world of today where people use media in radically different ways in
different culture-specific contexts. With this in mind, this project
sets out to assess how the technological determinism argument – in its
modified and refined form as found in the works of Virilio and
Baudrillard – pan out vis a vis two events of recent terrorist
violence: the screen-events of September 11 and the Moscow Hostage
Crisis.

is the medium the message?

To say technology causes something is called technological
determinism. Such a philosophical standpoint can be best summarized by
Marshall McLuhan’s memorable punchline: the medium is the message.

McLuhan said: In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and
dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a
shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the
medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and
social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of
ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our
affairs by each new extension of ourselves, or by new technology (7).

But is the medium the message? That is to say, how much do the
intrinsic characteristics of specific technologies determine the way a
culture and events develops around them? How much does the form of
this essay – done in multimedia rather than in traditional essay
format – influence and affect the content of what is being
communicated? In Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media
(1964) McLuhan embraced the idea that, historically, the form of
media-technology used has determined what kind of culture has
developed around these technology. He outlined a historical
progression of the four stages of communications that have changed the
way culture has unfolded:

1. A PRIMITIVE CULTURE OF ORAL COMMUNICATIONS: The primary means of
communication was face-to-face spoken word. The primary sense was
hearing and there was a balance between the sense of hearing and the
sense of sight – between the aural and the oral (8).

2. CULTURE OF LITERACY BASED ON THE ALPHABET AND THE HANDWRITTEN WORD:
The transformation from the oral culture to a culture of literacy came
along with the advent of writing (and later the clock). Alphabet and
writing acted as an extension of the eye thus allowing man to break
away from the immediacy of the ear. The oral tradition and writing
coexisted: texts were individually produced, words often read aloud to
audiences, writers and readers were hardly separate – allowing the eye
and the ear remained in balance (9).

3.THE GUTENBERG GALAXY: The creation of the printing press created
what McLuhan called the “typographic man.” The mass reproduction of
the written word dominated this rational print culture. While the oral
culture was dominated by hearing, print culture was dominated by the
eye at the expense of the tactile and auditory experience of reality
(10).

4. A CULTURE BASED ON ELECTRONIC MEDIA: A culture based on electronic
media brought culture back to the sensory equilibrium of the oral
culture. A result of the inventions of telegraphy, television and the
computer, the culture of electronic media is characterized by full
aural and oral sensory experience. Electronic communications allows
simultaneity and the world is reduced to a “global village” where
everyone can communicate with everyone, the media connects people
across the world and gives everybody simultaneous access to the same
events (11).

Each technological invention therefore has a determining impact to the
culture around it. Different technologies change the way the human
body relates to and perceives its surrounding environment and this, in
turn, affects the the whole psychic-social complex. No different,
then, the media we use also determine our relationship to the world in
ways that are idiosyncratic to the technology itself. Medium becomes
the message: the form of the media determines content. The real
message behind media technologies is therefore how they change our
social arrangement and relationships, how they mediate our
communication with each other, and how they affect the way we relate
the world through our senses (11).

McLuhan said:

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and
mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding.  During
mechanical ages we had extended out bodies in space. Today after more
than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central
nervous system itseld in a global embrace, abolishing both space and
time as far as our planet is concerned …. As electrically connected,
the globe is no more than a village (12)

McLuhan’s technological determinims thesis – outside his resent
resurgence with the discourse around cyberculture, globalization and
the information age – has not had significant resonance amongst
mainstream media and cultural studies. Some have nonetheless picked up
where he left of. The two thinkers whose theories I will focus on -
Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard – arguably share elements of
McLuhanian technological determinism in their writitings about the
relationship between media technology and culture.

Coincidentally, Ctheory.net – an on-line journal dealing with
technology, media and culture from a critical postmodern perspective -
calls McLuhan, alongside Virilio and Baudrillard, its “patron saints
(13).” Another commentator noted: both Virilio and Baudrillard follow
McLuhan in their own way: the medium is the message. The development
of mass media, tele-technologies, brings about the ecstasy of
communication and the hegemony of the screen, the vision machine (14).
Baudrillard himself has said that “in reality, even if I did not share
the technological optimism of McLuhan, I always recognized and
considered as a gain the true revolution which he brought about in
media analysis (15).”

Yet, standing in stark contrast to what some have called McLuhan’s
“drooling technological optimism (16)” about the kinds of changes
brought about by development of new communications technologies,
Virilio and Baudrillard share a darker, more dystopian vision. Unlike
the McLuhanian global village – a place where the world unites in the
happy embrace of global media – the world they envision is one of
confusion, loss of reality, generalized accidents, simulation and
deterritorialization brought about by the simulation and
ever-increasing speed of modern media technology.

Therefore, in order to analyze what role global mass media plays in
bringing about the spectacle of terrorism, a brief synopsis of the two
theoretical concepts of Virilio and Baudrillard – speed and simulation
- will be provided, which arguably share elements of the technological
determinism thesis and can be used to understand the “accident” of the
global mass media.

virilio, speed and the integral accident

Paul Virilio is first and foremost known as an analyst of the change
and havoc brought about by the speed of new technologies. Similar to
the technological determinism of McLuhan, Virilio also claims that
technologies affect – determine, sine qua non, if we wish – the way we
perceive reality and thus create culture.

While Virilio’s theoretical work initially began analyzing the impact
of speed on cities and architecture, his later work picked up the
effect of the speed of telecommunication technologies on contemporary
culture. He says that since the beginning of the 20th century the
speed and acceleration of new technologies “is mainly about the
increasing speed of information transmission … and the quest for the
attainment of real time…(16)” Similar to McLuhan, Virilio argues
that, because of the speed of the new technologies of communications
our mode of perception and experience is altered. This changes the way
we perceive space and time and thus how we encounter the world and the
technologies of speed thus produce an increasingly fragmented,
discontinuous and transhistorical mode of experience (17). Contrary to
Mcluhan, however – who saw new electronic communications such as the
TV as restoring the unity of perception of the earlier oral culture -
Virilio is pessimistic. Commenting on McLuhan’s technological optimism
in an interview, he said that “television is a media of crisis, which
means that television is a media of accidents. Television can only
destroy. In this respect, and even though he was a friend of mine …
McLuhan was completely wrong (18).”

The reason for this change is the speed inherent the technology
itself. What technologies such as the TV, moving images at the speed
of light, therefore accomplish is they implode space and time
rendering geographical location irrelevant. Virilio says: “with
acceleration, there is no more here and there, only the mental
confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal – a mix
of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication
technologies (20).” Furthermore, new technologies such as satellite
link-ups, real-time live feeds and high-resolution digital video
increase the power of media to dissimulate events by imploding time
and space by the speed of the communication taking place.

From this perspective, then, analyzing the impact of contemporary
media is no longer a question of content or reception but of the
impact speed of information and the implosion of the spatio-temporal
dimension has on the subject (21). According to Virilio, this results
in confusion and a loss of reality: of an real-time image dominating
the thing represented, real time prevailing over real space turning
the concept of reality on its head – to what Virilio has called the
“virtual theatricalization of the world(22).” The observer and the
observed get linked and chained by an encoded language from which
emerges the “ambiguity of interpretation … and the ambiguity that of
the audio-visual media, especially that of live television (23).”

Therefore, Virilio doomsays that the changes happening create the
possibility of an accident caused by global mass media; an accident
where global interconnectedness implodes the firewalls of civil
society, truth becomes relative, and crises can spread beyond the
local to the global (24).

baudrillard and simulation

Another writer who has been linked by many to McLuhan is Jean Baudrillard.

Already in 1967, Baudrillard wrote a review of McLuhan’s Understanding
Media, claiming that that the formula of the medium is the message
was, in fact, the recipe for alienation in a capitalist society (25).
Later in his theoretical career, however, after shedding his earlier
Marxist critique of McLuhanian technological determinism,
Baudrillard’s writings began to give more importance to the radical
changes modern media technology bring about in the contemporary world.
Like Virilio, Baudrillard is resolutely pessimistic about the changes.
He says in the Implosion of the Social and the Media:

the medium is the message signifies not only the end of the message,
but also the end of the medium. There are no longer media in the
literal sense of the term (I am talking above all about the electronic
mass media) – that is to say, a power mediating between one reality
and another, between one state of the real and another – neither in
content nor in form … hence the impossibility of any mediation, of
any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other,
circularity of all media effects … This critical – but original -
situation must be thought through to the very end; it is the only one
we are left with. It is useless to dream of a revolution through
content or through form, since the medium and the real are now in a
single nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable (26).”

For Baudrillard, therefore, what the media technologies bring about is
a situation where reality implodes into a “nebulous state” where the
distinction between reality and its representation becomes blurred
through mass media. We are left in an ominous twilight where the
representations of reality have become more real – or, said more
clearly, there is no more real.  Only simulation and representations
of representations – simulacra, as Baudrillard calls it.

He thus says in Simulacra and Simulations:

In this passage to a space whose curvatures is no longer that of the
real, not of truth, the age of simulation thus begins with the
liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their artificial
resurrection in systems of signs, which are more ductile material than
meaning, in that they lend to all combinatory algebra.  It is no
longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even parody.
It is rather substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that
is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational
double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which
provides all signs of the real and short-circuits all its
viccissitudes … A hyperreal henceworth sheltered from the imaginary,
and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving
only room for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated
generation of difference (27).

Thus while McLuhan ascribes a generally positive outcome to what
contermporary mass media such as the TV determine, for Baudrillard the
function is to “prevent response, to isolate, to privatize
individuals, and to trap them into a universe of simulacra where it is
impossible to distinquish between the spectacle and the real, and
where individuals come to prefer spectacle over reality (28).”

hypothesis # 1

The first hypothesis concerning the deterministic models of global
mass media deals with speed – the speed with which an event gets
transmitted globally via the conduits of global mass media to
geographically distant locations. The perfect testing ground (zero)
for this is September 11. Indeed, if we look at September 11 – the
Mother of All Events as Baudrillard put it – one of the most striking
features was exactly how quickly the news of the event spread
globally, through the Internet, TV-coverage, through personal
phonecalls. Partially due to the non-stop live coverage, partially due
to the abundance of news-organizations and people with video cameras
in New York, people across the world were able to watch the events
live on their TV-screens: the fiery inferno of the Twin Towers, the
crisis and human drama that ensued. So by the time the second plane
had hit the Twin Towers only 17 minutes later, dozens of cameras were
in place to capture the all the action live, turning it into the
biggest spectacle of (non-state) terrorist violence the world had ever
witnessed.

While quantitative evidence has not been produced to map out the speed
by which the news – panic in some places, joy in others – spread, a
few facts and anechotes hopefully illustrate my first hypothesis
concerning technology and culture: the speed of new telecommunications
technologies implode geographical space and time creating a complex
relationship between local involvements and interaction between across
distance. Global real-time coverage give events immediacy and salience
despite geographical location.

First a personal anechdote to illustrate the qualitative nature, the
feelings people has immediately following September 11. Being in
Washington DC during the unfolding of the events, within hours of the
planes hitting the World Trade Center and Pentagon, I received
phonecalls from Finland, France and Costa Rica, all concerned about my
well-being.  The most ironic remark was the discussion in Finnish
local news: people were concerned whether Nokia – the biggest Finnish
corporation – would be the next target of terrorist violence. What
could be done to boost up security?

Indeed, some research has been done that shows 70 percent of the
people in the US learned of the event within 15-30 minutes of the
attacks. Furthermore, in the USA alone, “the Attack on America” drew
79.5 million people glued to the TV-screens, even during working
hours. The TV was the primary source of information because Internet
search engines such as Google jammed and most major newsportals such
as CCN and NBC were overjammed (30). Traffic to CNN grew 680 percent.
In the UK, 15 million people were glued to TV-screens during the
unfolding of the events (31). BT reported a 1000 percent rise in
phonecalls to the US following the events (32).

As, the BBC reporter Stephen Evans, who was present at the scene,
aptly put it: “there were people in London who knew more about what
was going on that I did withing 10 minutes of the first attack.  The
reporters on the ground played a role but, when you’ve got camera
footage like that, things move pretty quickly. It’s a particular kind
of event – a made for TV “thing (33).”

hypothesis # 2

The second hypothesis concerning the global mass media deals with
simulation: a situation (as Baudrillard said it) where it is
impossible to distinquish between the spectacle and reality … where
individuals come to prefer spectacle over ‘reality’ – and where events
staged out for the purpose of creating a spectacle to be broadcasted
through the global media.

The history of terrorism and hostage taking extend much further than
the events in Moscow. One terrorism analyst dates the emergence of
this new kind of transnational terrorism to a plane hijack in 1968 -
coincidentally at the same time McLuhan’s ‘medium is the message’
thesis was being played out in Western Academia.  He said: “a new kind
of terrorism was born: transnational terrorism, whose main purpose is
propaganda. This political terrorism has developed rapidly. It cannot
be understood in isolation from the ideological context that has
helped to produce it and without some appreciation of the development
of communications and the media (33).”

Which brings me to my second hypothesis concerning the technology and
culture: Global mass media give people involved in local struggles the
possibility to stage events that transcend the local , simulations of
an event whose primary purpose is to create a representation of that
event that can be transmitted through global mass media. It becomes
possible – through global telecommunications technology – to
circumvent a local struggle beyond the boundaries of the local by
creating spectacles that get global media coverage. Thus, the coverage
of the events themselves, in fact, becomes more important than the
actual events – a representation of a representation, a simulacra, if
we may.

Even before the Moscow Hostage crisis, Chechenyan rebels have resorted
to high-profile hijackings and hostage situations to gain
international coverage to their cause. The recent Moscow Hostage
Crisis, however, was the most internationally covered of all these due
to the raised awareness against terrorism due to post-September 11 War
on Terrorism. Briefly, in October 2002, a group of about 40 men and
women stormed a theatre in the heart of Moscow during a popular play
and kept more than 700 hostages captive for four days demanding
immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechenya. Finally,
Russian special forces raided the theatre killing all but two hostage
takers and more than 100 hostages by using a sleeping gas in overdose.
As usual, media played a central role. During the crisis, the
hostage-takers were in constant touch with the media: there was a
telephone connection with the BBC bureau of Russia, Russian TV-crews
were one of the few people invited into the theatre and – contrary to
convention – most Russian TV-stations broadcasted news of the crisis
24-hours a day. In an interview, Russian media minister Mikhail Lesin
said:

the terrorists had a worked-through media-plan. They were well
prepared from the point of knowing the Russian media agencies,
journalists and newsmakers. They took advantage of that situation.
They were actually watching live TV broadcasts, a few channels.
Correspondingly, we were facing a difficult task in preventing the
media from being involved in this game … the terrorists’ propaganda
mechanism is operating quite competently and skillfully. There is
great danger in showing pictures of the terrorists, or allowing them
to speak. They are criminals. To enable them to campaign for their
ideas, so that new people might join them and resume the terror, is
flatly wrong. All terrorists demand live broadcasts; this is one of a
terrorist’s goals. Giving them such rights means provoking more
terrorist attacks in the future (34).

The events in Moscow thus seemed to comform to the analysis of one
terrorism analyst:

Terrorism … is the weapon of the weak. The various forms of
propaganda terrorism have largely succeeded in drawing attention to
themselves and the causes they are fighting for, but the only
political success scored over the last fifteen years has been through
the media (36).

Terrorism’s growing impact can be attributed almost exclusively to the
development of the media, and above all, to the televisual image
combined with propaganda-type, often transnational terrorism in which
the participants frequently represent no one but themselves (36).

conclusion

In conclusion, then, what can we infer by looking at these two brief
examples where it seems that the global mass media seemed to play a
significant role in bringing about the “accident” of the global mass
media? How much does the technology of telecommunications, in fact,
determine the way culture unfolds around it?  What can we say about
how this process works in a decentered world where media is used in
culture-specfic contexts?

In fact, it is the counter-arguement to the technological determinism
thesis that is now generally accepted amongst most media and cultural
studies scholars: that is to say, it is human agency and culture, NOT
the technological form of the media that determines how it is used and
what impact it has. The way a specific media technology develops is
ultimately determined by its culture-specific historical context -
including all the power relations and politics that come into play.
The theories of usually Western (French) ivory tower intellectuals
(such as Baudrillard and Virilio) are accused of being ethnocentric in
assuming that the media technologies can determine something
irregardless of cultural difference and that the whole world is
affected by the media in the same way.

Among many criticizing the technological determinism thesis, Raymond
Williams – one of the fouding figures of British cultural studies -
advocated a different approach of how the impact of media and
technology on culture should be understood. According to Williams,
instead of embracing the technological determinism arguement, we
should look at how the social use of a certain technology affects its
development.  The focus should be taken away from the technology
itself and placed on the practice of the use itself.

Some others, such as Sjerneby-Mohammadi and Abu-Lughod have looked
at the cultural specifics of how technologies are used, argueing it is
the economic, cultural and social conditions that shape the use,
impact and developement of media technology used to achieve
culturally-specific ends (35). The medium is not the message: form
does not determine content; but rather – vice versa.

However, as the recent examples of terrorism have hopefully
illlustrated, it might just be too early to throw the baby out with
the bath water. I will therefore conclude that by bringing in a less
deterministic version of the impacts of media technologies on the
perception of space and time, the global and the local, through the
prism of which we can understand the forces at play in bringing about
spectacles of terrorist violence such as September 11 and the Moscow
Hostage Crisis. This will hopefully provide a new way of looking at
the global mass media in a way that takes into account both the
changes (and havoc) brought about by the technologies new
telecommunications media as well as radical differences in their
cultural use.

Three concluding perspectives:

1. What the new telecommunications technologies do is they interpolate
the subject in a way that allows the subject to perceive space and
time, the relationship between the global and the local, differently
from previous technologies.  While this does not argue for
technological determinism, it nonetheless takes into account the
Virilio’s and Baudrillard’s analysis of how the mass media, in fact,
implode space and time and blur the boundary between reality and
representation.

2. Taking into account Foucault’s and Althussers analysis of how the
subject is constructed/interpolated by different cultural forces, the
new telecommunications technologies therefore create a subject for
whom the perception of space and time becomes affected by the way mass
media allows him/her to both access to geographically remote events as
well as – if the need to – create strategies that exploit this
interconnectedness of the world through the mass media. The cases of
September 11 and Moscow Hostage Crisis briefly illustrated how this
process works: the news of September 11 spread rapidly to all parts of
the world because of the technological characteristics of global
telecommunications media; and likewise, the people who staged the
Moscow Hostage Crisis were well-aware of how to utilized the media to
create a spectacle of their action in order to gain global coverage.

3. In a way, then, the subject becomes deterritorialized into an
“information subject” by the changes in the perception of space and
time allowed by new telecommunications technology. Such an information
subject

is no longer located in one point in absolute time/space, enjoying a
physical, fixed vantage point from which to rationally calculate its
options.  Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer
messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and reidentified by TV
ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electrnonic
transmission of symbols.  In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari,
we are changed from “arborial” beings, rootes in time and space, to
“rhizomic” nomads who daily wonder at will across the globe without
necessarily moving our bodies at all (36).

Finally, then, it might be too early to bury McLuhan completely. The
technology of media determines one thing: the interplay between the
global and the local; how people have access to events in different
parts of the world; and finally, how this access can also be used for
political purposes by creating spectacles whose purpose, ultimately,
is to be a representation of itself for the consumption of global mass
media.

Yet, how the subjects use this window to the global is nonetheless
always dependent on historical and cultural context. The task ahead
for new ethnographic research is to find out how exactly the implosion
of space and time brought about by telecommunications technology can
be understood within a wider cultural framework of a specific
location. For what the cases of September 11 and Moscow Hostage Crisis
have shown us, the modern mass media does not always interpolate
subjects towards positive ends. The terrorists (if we wish to call
them that) in both cases – by being aware of the function of the
global mass media – were able to create spectacles that then
successfully spread globally acquiring surplus meaning far beyond the
events themselves. Who knows, then, maybe the “accident” of the global
mass media is exactly this: because of news that feed on global
spectacles, somebody willing to commit an act that would otherwise
remain local might find further justification and motivation for his
action from the assurance that his acts will transcend the local and
become salient to a world tuned into the neverending haze of real-time
news.

What the outcome of this accident, however will ultimately be, it is
too early to determine. What sound does a falling tree make when
nobody is listening remains the paradox that we are left with facing
the future.

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