Re: <nettime> Post-digital

["d.garcia" <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Felix Wrote

> Where the terms makes no sense, in my view (and also in Florian's),
> is sociologically. The most powerful forces that transform globalized
> societies, are all dependent on, and amplified by, digital
> technologies. If anything, we are in the middle of the historical
> run of this development rather than at the end. The idea that the
> digital is just one dimension of society and that we can abandon it,
> is ludicrous.

Along with Sociology might it also be a worth including "psychology"
in the mix. Particularly in those spaces where digital management
tools such as gantt charts and other popular workflow apps along with
their digital jargon have shaped influential forms of pop psychology,
such as the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) (whose very name is
self incriminating) In turn these 'instruments' insinuate themselves
in to the working day of most organisations becoming the default argot
of neo-manegerial audit culture with its positivistic lexicon of
'solutions' .

This landscape is described in rich and entertaining detail in Evil
Media by Mathew Fuller and Andrew Jofey who have done us a great
service of mapping and describing this domain of what they have dubbed
'grey media'. A range of connections linking computing, and digital
management and business applications with NLP type psychology and
management self help books. Collectively this digitally inspired
constellation has metastasised into a weirdly seductive language
(seductive because it suggests the possibility of controling our
events) that is all the more powerful BECAUSE it is unspectacular. As
the term 'grey media' suggests it fades into background becoming the
social and psychological infrastructure of the grey media age.

In a weird inversion of the Debord, Grey Media deploys digital culture
to bring us the 'society of the unspectacular'

David 
------------------------


d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk






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