Why Study the Media? by Silverstone Roger;

Author:Silverstone, Roger;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1024015
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 1999-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

From these arguments Appadurai constructs the outline of an aesthetics of ephemerality. It is, he suggests, the ground base of civilization in its contemporary form, mediating and moderating the effects of a global culture and the consequences of a global economic regime flattered by a presumption of rationality and consistency. ‘Modern consumption seeks to replace the aesthetics of duration with the aesthetics of ephemerality’ (Appadurai, 1996: 85). Well, yes and no.

There is something missing in this powerful mix of wanting, remembering, being and buying. It is a sense of the rhythmic and the cyclical. And it is a sense of time as a structure. To fix on the ephemeral is to buy into the ideology of the mass market and not to see that the ephemeral is itself dependent on the continuities, the predictabilities, the rhythms of the calendar. We only desire and manage the ephemeral because we know it is permanent. We are only happy with the spontaneous and the new because we are confident in the consistencies of the continuous. And in this the media keep us going.

Much has been written about the quality of time in a globalizing and post-modern society. It no longer features as a constraint. It has no limits. It is compressed. The forces of commodification, the demands of capitalism in a world economy that seems to have to go faster in order just to stay still, the particular character of information as a global, weightless, transparent product and resource, have changed time irrevocably. It has been removed from experience, from the metronomic, the regularities of the clock, from the human, from the body, from the seasons. Work now is continuous. Production is too. The digital watch marks time as a continuous process, where time consists of a series of points: eight fifty-four, eight fifty-five, eight fifty-six. It no longer marks time, as the sweeping hands of the analogue watch have done, as a set of relationships and positions: five to nine, a quarter past eight, noon. Time no longer needs to be read.

Commodified time, the time which regulates consumption is, in these arguments therefore, both continuous and ephemeral. The two are crucially interrelated. The media are the instruments to persuade us to increase the level and intensity of our consumption activities. The home-shopping TV channels, the web-sites which offer electronic trading, are no slaves to the timetable or to natural rhythms. They are boundless, eternal. Time is reduced to insignificance, an individual matter. Time, consumption, mediation together become desocialized, dependent on nothing other than the eccentricity of the moment.

This certainly seems to be the trend, at least as it is read from the vantage points of metropolitan cultures. It is not yet, however, the whole story. Everyday life is still, for most of us, a complex of different times and temporal pressures. Marked still by the sequencing of work and leisure, or weekdays and weekends which, despite their erosion, require us to synchronize activities with each other. Marked too by the requirements to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.