The Media and the Message: A Q&A with author and media theorist Barry Vacker

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The Media and the Message: A Q&A with author and media theorist Barry Vacker

POSTED: Thursday, July 2, 2009, 6:00 PM

Filed Under: Arts | Interview Books

Digital media has so proliferated within our daily lives that it's become easy ' whilst skimming news headlines online and indulging in Twitter updates ' to underestimate the role of the changing media landscape in the grand scheme.

barryvacker.net

Then there are people like Barry Vacker. A media theorist, author, filmmaker and professor at Temple University, Vacker dissects how media has influenced our perception of the entire universe, and how it can lead us into a better future, in his Theory Zero book series, available at A House of Our Own, Wooden Shoe Books and GERM. Zero Conditions explores the recurring theme of the number zero in post-millennial society. Crashing Into the Vanishing Points examines the effect of technological innovation with projecting and predicting the future. His most recent book in the series, Starry Skies Moving Away, merges cyberspace with inner and outer space, and draws upon the similarities between the chips in a computer grid network to the with the number of stars in a galaxy and the connections of neurons in the human brain.

City Paper spoke with Vacker on Battlestar Galactica, recurring zeroes and the real center of the universe (hint: It's not us).

City Paper: Why do you think traditional print media like newspapers are dying out?

Barry Vacker: [Marshall] McLuhan was correct when he said: "The medium is the message." He meant that the form of media technology has a greater impact on society than the messages carried. Society adapts to the patterns affected by the new technologies, precisely because they represent new and more powerful forms of perception.
For example, the printing press ushered in the modern industrial world,'creating'the first mass media and the first forms of mass'production. Society reorganized along new lines, for better and sometimes for'worse. Literacy become the expected norm, an issue that educators grapple with today.
Computers'and the Internet will exceed the impact of the'printing'press, precisely because the Internet unites the printing press, television, movies and all electronic media. We are only at the beginning'of the restructuring'of society and its institutions. By this, I am'not'referring to presidents using Web sites and Twitter.'That is mostly superficial, especially if the policies indicate little'insights into the potential of the internet beyond propaganda, fundraising and social control.
The death of many traditional newspapers'is just'one'effect of'television and the Internet, one'of many to come. It is no coincidence'and that modern'newspapers rose in concert with the nation-state.'Is the nation-state in danger? As illustrated by the Internet and'the global'financial networks, electronic media'make borders obsolete.'Yet,'around the world, nations are defending borders ever more fiercely.

CP: What's with the obsession with the theme of zeroes?
BV: Obsession or observations? The zero theme emerged when'I kept seeing "zero" appear in popular culture before and after the millennium. There were the many millennium clocks'counting down'to all zeros, toward the dreaded double zero of'Y2K and'the triple zero of'2000. The hyper-literal reader might say the recurring zeros mean'nothing. And they are right. Zero does mean nothing, and, in meaning nothing, it means much more.
We also have hit ground zero in our ability to reproduce the world as a copy, a clone. This is illustrated by Coke Zero, the soft drink simulacrum, and Las'Vegas, the city as simulacrum. Strangely, the hotel New York-New York anticipated September 11 when it was built in 1997, for the Twin Towers were never included in the massive themed hotel. This is a case of the map anticipating the territory.

CP: What is the correlation between starry skies and space, as you write in your most recent book Starry Skies Moving Away?
BV: With the rise of the modern metropolis, the starry skies have been replaced by electric lights, neon signs, TVs and computers, LED screens, and so on. Most humans are utterly disconnected from the cosmos, as their "cosmos" is almost entirely their city and anything glowing on the screens of the media. The only stars they care about are movie stars and celebrity figures.
Starry Skies Moving Away leads readers out of the fantasy that humans are at the center of the universe ' and the fantasy that some cosmic master is looking out for us in our infantile visions of premodern utopias, gardens of eden, and so on.
We need new utopian models that embrace these kinds of scientific ideas and are secular and eco-technological, not religious or authoritarian, which are quickly combining to be the American model of "the future." America is fast becoming an authoritarian socialist theocracy, where everyone is supposed to be content to have their lives ordered by two gods ' church and state.

CP: How would you define a vanishing point in media theory?
BV: Hollywood repeatedly shows us,'we can envision'the'end of the'world, but not the end'of God or ghosts or wars. Every'summer,'filmgoers flock to see the end of the world in apocalyptic films.'Humanity could vanish at any moment,'but not superstitions'or war. TV is much the same. This strange situation was perfectly'expressed in'the hit show Battlestar Gallactica. Humanity may die out, but not human ignorance, as if the two are not related.
A vanishing point is a creative way to visualize the trajectory of modernity. The vanishing point signifies three existential ideas:'the end of'the'world, the edge of the world, the rest of the'world, all contained'in'a single point at the horizon. The trajectory of modernity was always toward the vanishing points, to create a new world, to remake the world in all directions. From the city centers, the mechanized metropolis extended in all directions, toward the vanishing points. Skyscrapers pointed toward the vanishing points in the skies, while highways and trains extended into the vanishing points. Jets and rockets disappeared into vanishing points in the skies or beyond horizons.

CP: Why is it important to consider the philosophical implications'of media technology?
BV: Let me answer that question by referring to the Amazon Kindle. Is the Kindle merely a cool way to access books? Perhaps true at one level. My books are in Kindle.
But, at a deeper level, the Kindle suggests the full merger of books and computers, print with electronic, real space with cyberspace.'Then we must ask if books and computers are merely neutral vessels carrying the far more important stuff: the content and messages. Or is the book itself more important? Did the book, mass-produced by the printing press, help bring about the modern industrial world and the very ideas of free speech and free press?
And, what are the computer and Internet if not the complete merger of the printing press with all previous electronic media in a vast global network? Will this not change the organization of the world as we know it? The book and printing press did. Why should the Internet be different, when it is far more powerful than the printing press? Computers and the Internet have transformed global finance, but do not tell that to our policy makers, who seem to think we are living in 1930s industrial America.
So, most of our culture is dominated by superficial understandings of the effects of media technology, which lead to naive theories of social change and misguided political policies. We substitute technological proficiency for philosophical understanding.

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