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INFOWAR: Re: cultures in contention

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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Simon Biggs of London GB writs:

> Yes, the term as used by Ars seems more about branding, hyping and
> marketing than anything else. As I suggested in an earlier post, the term
> Infowar is highly emotive. Of course artists and thinkers often enjoy
> using emotive elements in their work (it saves a lot of effort) but for
> that to work well it has to be contextualised and deconstructed, otherwise
> it comes across as a cheap trick. Last night the Channel 4 News here in
> the UK ran a long story on some new BSE issue. It was terrible. The
> interviewer/broadcaster was hitting this industry guy with very general
> questions in a very aggressive manner, and the guy was saying "I can
> answer your questions if you let me", and the interviewer said he was not
> interested in his answers but in evidence that everything was as the guy
> said it was (I wondered as to the difference at this point). In the end it
> was clear that the interviewer was scare-mongering, knowing that this
> would generate fear and outrage in the viewers, and thus justify this
> incredible waste of TV time as "news". This might be routine in the
> States, but in the UK we are not so use to this type of self-serving
> broadcasting. 

In my experience, having been interviewed by both UK and US interviewers,
I could not say that one is any more objective than the other. While the
US approach may often be one of fear-mongering, the UK approach, I find,
is often one of humor-mongering.  While the US interviewers are often
aggressive and intense, the UK interviewers are often disengaged or at
least often strain to create the impression of disengagement (or perhaps a
cultivated and contrived creation of an appearance of disinterest, so that
their mates don't view them as "trainspotters"). 

Thus I do not believe that one is any less "scholarly" or "thorough"  than
the other, merely that we are witnessing two different cultures here. I
found that the UK interviewers were as self-serving as the US
interviewers, but just in different ways. One day, while I was away from
my office, I returned to find my voicemailbox full of calls from the UK,
blokes who wanted to interview me (perhaps heard of my WearComp invention
as an assertion of the existential principle of self-determination and
mastery over one's own destiny), and I ignored the calls for the most
part, but then they called back again to interview me over the phone. 
They did not at all seem interested in what I had to say about the
underlying meaning of my work, but only wanted to get a giggle out of
their audience through various references to undergarments. Experiences
like this lead me to believe that the UK culture is no less self-serving
or "full of itself" than the US culture, but just in different ways (e.g.
perhaps using humour as a disguise rather than fear and paranoia). 

In some sense, humour often serves as a disengagement mechanism ---
a means of withdrawal, and a method of ignoring important issues.

Perhaps humour is as much fascism's friend as is fear, scare-mongering,
and paranoia tactics. What better way to keep a nation happily obedient
than training them to giggle at themselves, or each other, whenever
serious matters surface? Bentham's vision of the future could certainly
be amplified by laughter. Perhaps the new motto ought to be "Whenever I
feel like thinking, I giggle until the feeling goes away". Perhaps this
is no less evil than paranoid musings.  Perhaps it is just the same thing,
translated into a different culture. 

> With the title Infowar I feel that Ars is getting very close to doing the
> same type of thing... starting up a debate about something that is largely
> the product of the paranoid musings common amongst Pentagon officials and
> weird fringe groups (are they the same people?). Is this a subject that
> should engage our minds and time? 

Steve
http://wearcam.org
 

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