Is Recession Possible in a Networked Global Economy?

In a front-page article in today's New York Times, David Leonhardt notes that, "just as at the start of the summer, economists can't even agree whether the country is in a recession." 

On the face of it this is a stunningly absurd comment.  American industry continues to lay off thousands of employees, fuel costs are way up even as the speculative rise of oil prices has for the moment reversed itself, major financial companies are collapsing or being bought out by the federal government.  And economists can't decide if we're in a recession???   Maybe they can ask John McCain to set up a commission!

But in thinking about the idea of a recession, I wonder if perhaps this model no longer makes sense in a networked global economy fueled by financial theories and practices only made possible by the computations enabled by digital computing.  The metaphors of inflation, recession, and depression are based on an analog model of the economy, of the economy as a physical, even an organic, system.  Do these metaphors make sense for today's economy? 

Perhaps it would make more sense to think about the success or failure of today's economy in different terms, on the basis of models of networked connectivity and robustness.  The collapse of Fannie and Freddie, of Lehman Brothers or AIG--should we think of these as server crashes, as losses of connectivity, of a narrowing of broadbands of commerce and communication?  In a networked digital model, servers can crash and traffic can be re-routed.  One site may be down but other sites might continue to operate.

I'm not an economist--I'm just a media theorist who follows the news and thinks about things. So I am hardly in a position to explain what the implications would be of shifting the metaphors through which economists think about the economy.  But there is one thing I am in a position to say and one thing I want to make clear.  In suggesting that recession might no longer be possible in a networked global economy I do not mean to minimize the damage and pain caused by our current economic crisis.  Rather I mean the reverse.

Whether the economy can best be understood in analog or digital terms, it is clear that server crashes or network disruptions or other economic troubles cause real human pain.  In suggesting that the metaphors of inflation, recession, or growth might no longer be applicable to a networked digital economy I do not mean to minimize the destruction that the current formation of global capitalism has caused to our planet and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, but rather to suggest that by sticking to these outmoded analog metaphors, economists seem more like scholastic arguing about how many angels you can get on the head of a pin than they do like experts or authorities able to help us move forward through what are unarguably the worst economic times this country has seen since the Great Depression.

 

Cell Phone Anointing Miracle

Below is  video of Day 9 of a "Holy Spirit Awakening" that happened in May 2008 at MorningStar Fellowship Church in Fort Mill, SC.  This church is affiliated with Sarah Palin's home church in Wasilla.  But what is of particular interest for media theory is the way in which this spiritual awakening avails itself of premediated cell phone networks to spread the spirit of God and accompanying miracles.  Apparently similar miracles have been reported from people watching the webstream of MorningStar church services.

For more on Sarah Palin's connections to MorningStar and the "Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation" movement, see  this article by Bruce Wilson.

"Kill, Kill, Kill"/ "BYE BYE, BLING": On the Superiority of Print

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer both commented on the cultural significance of the daily or weekly illustrated newspaper, whose juxtapositions of text, photography, and advertisements provided unprecedented insights into the contradictions of modernity.  A single page in today's national edition of the New York Times provides an example of the largely unconscious revelations available in print newspapers, revelations that are not visible, or non-existent, in the online edition of the Times.

Page 11 of the September 14, 2008, National Edition features articles with three headlines containing the word "kill," each of which reports on political violence in a different part of the Middle East.

1. "Palestinian Is Killed In a Clash With Israelis."

2. "Bomb Kills 8 Kurdish Soldiers, Inflaming an Iraqi Regional Dispute."

3. "A Bomb Blast Near Kabul Kills an Afghan Governor and 3 Others."

The first two headlines are at the top of the page; the third is just below the fold.  Above the fold (and thus above the third headline) is the following photograph, which accompanies the third article:

While the juxtaposition of three headlines of political violence in the Middle East with a graphic photograph of the wreckage of a car in which a provincial Afghan governor was killed by a suicide bomber is unsettling enough to encounter over a cup of Sunday morning coffee, the truly disturbing juxtaposition involves the advertisement that anchors the bottom third of the page.

A photograph of a large graduated diamond necklace on the right side of the ad accompanies the following text, in large caps: "BYE BYE BLING, HELLO POSSIBILITIES"  The ad, for a company called CIRCA, is not selling the necklace, but offering to buy it.  The text of the ad, in much smaller print, reads as follows:  "You never imagined letting go of something could be so rewarding.  As the only international jewelry buying house, CIRCA understands.  We give you power to transform yesterday's trinkets into tomorrow's treasures instantly.  Impeccable service and knowledgeable staff; with unprecedented pricing, CIRCA knows Change is Good."

One hardly knows where to begin.  Underneath the photograph of an Afghan man grieving over his dead relative, we read of how rewarding it is to let something go:   BYE BYE BLING, HELLO POSSIBILITIES.  A diamond necklace worth tens of thousands of dollars is characterized as "yesterday's trinket."  It would not be unreasonable to imagine that the circumstances that might put one in position to want to sell such a "trinket" could even be the death of a relative whose "trinket" it was.  "You never imagined letting go of something could be so rewarding."  And then the coup de grace of the final line, which remediates John McCain's remediation of Barack Obama's campaign slogan: "Change is Good."

To think seriously about this newspaper page is to think seriously about the possibility that the United States of America has gone insane.  That such obscene juxtapositions go unnoticed by those responsible for the layout of the Sunday Times, that the American public encounters without noticing such obscene incongruities as a matter of course on an everyday basis, cannot be dismissed as insignificant.  As Benjamin and Kracauer knew, the media formation of the illustrated print newspaper provided what Kracauer in a different context characterized as an ornament of mass culture.  But as print newspapers are increasingly giving way to online versions, we need to ask, in the words of the CIRCA ad, if letting go of print newspapers is indeed so rewarding.

For readers of the New York Times online, these juxtapositions would be invisible.  The three articles on page 11 appear in a list of clickable headlines on the "International" page of the online times.  The photograph of the bombed-out car and the grieving relative is visible only if one clicks on the article about the Afghan bomb blast.  And the CIRCA ad is nowhere to be found.  What are the effects of this difference in the Times reader's experience?   

To read the Times online is to be protected from the shock of these unintended juxtapositions. Maybe this is a good thing.  One doesn't need to be hammered with the juxtaposition of three headlines about killing in the Middle East.  One doesn't have to be assaulted by graphic photographs one doesn't choose to know about.  One doesn't need to be exposed to the hyper-capitalism of newspaper advertising.  As the CIRCA ad insists, maybe letting go of yesterday's media formation of the print newspaper has indeed let us transform the online newspaper into tomorrow's treasure.

Or maybe not.  Maybe something important is lost by the disappearance of these unintended juxtapositions.  Maybe it is important for us to be exposed to images that we might not choose to see, to be kept appraised of advertisements for products or services or points of view we may not be aware of or do not agree with.  While technophiles and marketing gurus have for the past two decades touted the glories of the customized consumer experiences made possible by networked digital media, maybe such customization is responsible for the fragmentation of our politics and society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  

As I have argued elsewhere, in the years following the events of 9/11 print, televisual, and networked media have been increasingly preoccupied with pre-mediating the future so that the American public will not again have to experience the shock of a traumatic surprise like that they faced on September 11, 2001.  The print newspaper is a media formation that predates that shock and that persists beyond it.  Although the print newspaper reading public continues to dwindle in the face of digital newspaper formats, juxtapositions like those on page 11 of the September 14, 2008, Sunday Times provide perhaps the strongest argument why such "trinkets" should not be disposed of so quickly.  

 

Hurricane Ike, Premediation, and Extreme TV

In an earlier post I noted that hurricanes provide exemplary opportunities for premediation by especially televisual news media.  The lengthy period leading up to landfall provides for numerous opportunities to premediate future catastrophic events--evacuation, flooding, wind damage, looting, death, property damage, etc.  In the case of Hurricane Ike, this includes some interesting narratives about the impact on oil prices and potential oil shortages resulting from the disruption of oil refining in the Gulf and in the Gulf Coast states.  In fact CNN reports how cars are lining up at gas stations as far away as South Carolina, not in response to shortages that have already occured but in anticipation of shortages that are being premediated on TV.

CNN's 24/7 coverage of the impending landfall of Hurricane Ike provides another interesting example of the form this premediation takes.  On Friday, September 12, its ongoing coverage is being called "Extreme Weather"--presented as CNN's version of one of the newest televisual genres, "Extreme TV."  Epitomized by recent shows like Ice Road Truckers or The Deadliest Catch, extreme TV will be coming soon to the major networks as well.  What is interesting about CNN's coverage is that it not only remediates the concept of extreme TV, but its reporters on-site can be seen to remediate the formats of these shows as well, providing media coverage of extreme situations that are unavailable to the average viewer.  For example, CNN has set up its operation on-site at a Holiday Inn Express that has been evacuated; the CNN reporter bravely tells viewers that the management turned over the keys to the CNN crew.  Where the public and the property owners have evacuated, CNN presents its extreme weather coverage.  

CNN's "Extreme Weather" is only the latest example of a long line of news events that have been treated as if they were episodes of an ongling television series or mini-series.   As with other such examples, this is but the latest evidence of the ways in which news media continue to shift their focus from reporting on the present or recent past to premediating the future.  Even when they do report on what is happening live, as in the run-up to Hurricane Ike's landfall, they do so within a premediated format, in this case that of extreme TV.  Indeed the arrival of Hurricane season has become almost as regular and predictable as the arrival of football season.  And the premediated formats through which it is presented to the public on the Weather Channel and the various cable news networks have now become nearly as conventionalized and regulated as those that can be found on networks like ESPN and other major sports networks.  

Virtually Sarah Palin

Much energy on behalf of Democratic operatives and liberal bloggers has gone into the effort to discover and make public "the real Sarah Palin."  What this effort has failed to understand is that the real Sarah Palin is virtual: Sarah Palin is the first virtual candidate for the vice-presidency.

The search for the real Sarah Palin has operated on a variety of different fronts, in every case with the aim of making the American public aware of Palin's true positions on domestic, local, national, and international issues.  Networked, print, and televisual media have spent the past two weeks engaged in the enterprise of exposing contradictions and inconsistencies between her past positions and her campaign stump speech.  Scores of investigators have devoted themselves to digging up dirt from her personal life that would challenge the "hockey mom" narrative of a socially conservative mother of five turned governor of the largest state in the nation.  

Unsurprisingly, in light of the media anonymity in which the first-term governor of Alaska has lived and governed,  all of these efforts have born fruit.  The media has presented us with "Troopergate," the ethics probe into Governor Palin's alleged firing of a state employee for failing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, an Alaska state trooper.  We've learned that the repeated assertion in Palin's and John McCain's stump speeches that Palin opposes earmarks, particularly the infamous "bridge to nowhere" is a lie--Palin campaigned in support of the bridge and took the over $200 million of earmark money designated for the bridge and spent it on other Alaska projects.  The media has exposed Palin's questionable decision to claim "per diem" travel money for choosing to live at home rather than in the governor's residence in Juneau.  And we've heard numerous allegations about Palin and her family: that Palin's daughter is the real mother of Trig Palin; that Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner; that Track Palin, her 18-year-old son who has been lionized for his decision to join the military and his deployment to Iraq, is a drug-addicted thug, whose Oxycontin abuse was but one of the reasons his parents pressured him to enlist.  And the list of verified and alleged facts and contradictions goes on.

But all of these efforts to uncover the real Sarah Palin miss the point.  Palin is a virtual candidate, whose role in the campaign is to generate support for and increase the intensity of the McCain campaign by providing a source of potentiality and possibility onto which voters and the media can project their own beliefs and desires.  This virtual candidacy works by intensifying the affect of both McCain and Obama supporters, for whom the reality of Sarah Palin means and feels quite differently, and mobilizes and amplifies different premediated networks of practices, behaviors, and beliefs.  

This virtuality is epitomized in the brilliant way in which the McCain campaign has introduced Sarah Palin to the American media public.  For the first two weeks after the announcement of her selection she has been off-limits to the media, who have been prevented from interviewing her, from trying to determine what she really thinks, what her real capabilities are, how she thinks.  The McCain campaign has made her available through the narrative of the Republican Convention and through her joint campaign appearances with McCain, where she has repeated a series of lines drawn from or based upon her acceptance speech.  Both mainstream and participatory media have had to define her through her mediated traces on print, televisual, and networked media--videos, newspaper and magazine articles, political records, and so forth. A viral email from Ann Kilkenny, an Alaskan neighbor of Palin, epitomizes the way in which the search for the real Sarah Palin has proceeded.

After two weeks, however, Palin has finally been allowed to be interviewed by Charles Gibson, the ABC News anchor.  After the first night of a multi-part interview, the news about the real Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is (the declaration in September 2002 that the US has the right to engage in preemptive warfare) and that she is equivocating about her earlier proclamation that global warming was not the result of human causes. Although in subsequent interviews it is likely that we will learn more about "the real Sarah Palin," the McCain campaign has staged these interviews to allow them to continue to mobilize the virtual Palin.  

Look at the interview structure, which is scheduled to take place over two days at different Alaskan locations.  On the first day Gibson interviewed Palin in two locations, sitting down inside somewhere and walking outdoors near a section of the Alaskan oil pipeline. Why these two different sites?  So that the McCain campaign can benefit from two different manifestations of the virtual Palin to determine how to deploy her in future media events, to allow different elements of their supporters to realize different aspects of Palin's virtuality.  This virtuality, it is important to emphasize has affective and bodily affordances.  How does Palin impact viewers while sitting across from Gibson, with her business skirt lying across her crossed legs above the knees?   What is the effect of her strolling with Gibson, showing him the technologized Alaskan landscape like a landed woman showing off her estate?  And of course, these different settings provide different video formats to be remediated in different media formations--on the campaign website, on TV ads, on networked print, televisual, and networked news. Furthermore, the multi-day format gives the McCain/Palin campaign the chance to recalibrate her message both in terms of its content and in terms of its affective qualities.  The ABC interview should not be understood as the first opportunity for the media to present the public with the real Sarah Palin, but rather the latest opportunity for the premediation of the virtual Sarah Palin.  This interview is less about what Palin has done or said, about what Palin knows, than it is about how Palin will be remediated by the McCain campaign and the media themselves in the less than two month before the 2008 election.

In focusing on what Palin really thinks or knows or believes or has done (on Sunday, CNN will present Joe Biden and Sarah Palin "revealed"), the media will continue to fail to recognize the way in which what she brings to the McCain campaign is her virtuality, not her reality, and that the search for the real Sarah Palin will do little or nothing to reduce the intensity of support that she brings to the Republican ticket.  The same is true of the Obama campaign.  Rather than continue to deploy their considerable resources on uncovering and exposing the real Sarah Palin, the Obama campaign needs to figure out how to reduce or redirect the affective intensity that the virtual Sarah Palin has brought to the presidential race, which can only be done by recognizing that it is precisely this virtuality that has brought Obama himself to the position he is in.  

To spend time responding or reacting to what Palin has said is to misunderstand what she brings to the McCain campaign, is like trying to catch a sunbeam or a soap bubble  The election of 2008, more intensively than any prior presidential election, hinges on the respective campaigns' abilities to premediate their candidates' (and the American people's) potentialities and virtuality rather than to present the most convincing case about the candidates' solutions to the realities of the global geopolitical situation that faces us today.  Or more precisely, the result hinges on convincing the public of the potentiality of the candidates to deal with the realities of the situation in which we find ourselves.  

Obama vs. McCain: Social Networking vs. Reality TV

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate has been described in the media as a "game changer"--a decision that helps to clarify the sharp differences between the two candidates. What hasn't been recognized is the way in which the selection of Sarah Palin has framed the upcoming election as a battle between two different 21st-century media formations--social networking and reality TV.

Common wisdom has it that Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton was due in large part to his campaign's technologically savvy deployment of social networking media to recruit supporters and register voters, raise money, and engage a swarm or "smart mob" of millions of volunteer activists in getting out the message and the primary vote. The build-up to Obama's vice-presidential choice, culminating in the announcement of Joe Biden via text-messaging, epitomized the bottom-up new media technologies that the Obama campaign has used to systematically remediate late 20th-century practices of presidential campaigning.

McCain's campaign, by contrast, has been criticized for failing to employ the internet and other new networked technologies to empower its supporters. As a self-avowed technological illiterate, McCain has failed to capitalize on social networking technologies to expand and mobilize his base. As a 21st-century man, however, McCain is not innocent of new media formations. He is reportedly addicted to his cellphone, to the point that his advisers have, like parents of a misbehaving teenager, had to restrict his usage of this new media technology.

While Obama employs the texting capabilities of cellphones as part of his social networking campaign, McCain uses the cellphone strictly for one-on-one interpersonal communication. The selection of Sarah Palin, however, reveals that it would be a mistake to dismiss McCain as someone who is unable to use new media formations in the service of his campaign. Her surprise selection, which elevated a woman virtually unknown to the US media audience to the overnight media celebrity of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, remediates the structure of reality TV shows that are also significant parts of our contemporary televisual media environment. The intensity of feeling surrounding the selection of Sarah Palin, manifested in the explosion of emotional commentary throughout the blogosphere, is virtually identical to the way in which the virtues and vices of reality TV contestants are debated on the internet by avid fans. Although many of us have been amazed to see how someone who was unknown to the American media public ten days ago can inspire such intense and widespread support (and criticism), this kind of public fan reaction has been premediated for more than a decade by the emergence of reality TV as arguably the dominant genre of serialized television in the first decade of the 21st century.

In some sense, one might want to frame this contest of media formations as a battle between past and present, old and new--a battle that mirrors the contrast between McCain and Obama. But this too would be a mistake. Sarah Palin's youthfulness reminds us that history works unevenly and is not in any strict sense progressive. Broadcast media have not been superseded by networked media--social networking has not eliminated other more top-down forms of collectivity. New technologies do not determine new media or social formations even if they enable new possibilities that could not have been actualized in the same way in other technological regimes.

The outcome of the 2008 presidential election will not determine which of these competing new media formations--social networking or reality TV--prevails in the future. Nor will the outcome be determined by which media formation is more powerful in contemporary American culture. But one thing is certain: the outcome of the 2008 presidential election will be impacted as much by the efficacy of competing media formations as it will by the differences between policy formations and party platforms.

Premediating Gustav, Remediating Katrina

Hurricanes are arguably the epitome of premediated news events. News coverage consists of a week or more of build-up as they are tracked from their emergence as tropical depressions in the Atlantic to their development into tropical storms and then finally their arrival as actual hurricanes headed towards landfall in the Gulf of Mexico or the Eastern seaboard of the US. In the run-up to landfall (or sometimes the turn away to the open seas), global print, televisual, and networked media coverage focuses exclusively on the virtual, premediating possible future paths along with the death, damage, and destruction that might lie ahead. More than any other natural disaster, hurricanes provide ample evidence that news media today are focused as much on the virtuality of the future as they are on the actuality of the present or recent past.

Hurricane Gustav proved particularly susceptible to premediation, both because it appeared headed directly towards New Orleans and because it appeared that its landfall would coincide with the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Not only were news reporters preoccupied with questions about how New Orleans would withstand its second major hurricane in three years and how well the Bush administration would be prepared to deal with this hurricane, but political reporters found themselves addressing the question of how the hurricane headed for the mouth of the Mississippi would impact the Republican convention being held near its source.

This impact, of course, would not be a result of wind or storm surge or rain or tornadoes, but rather of media coverage. How would it look for the Republicans to be celebrating and attacking their Democratic opponents if New Orleans was once again flooded by broken levees and people were seen stranded, or worse dying, in Gustav's wake? Perhaps equally important, how much media coverage would the Republicans receive in the face of another Katrina-like disaster? When the first day of the Republican Convention was dramatically truncated in anticipation of Gustav's landfall on Monday morning, it was a clear example of how premediation of a hurricane could have an impact not unlike a hurricane itself, how the virtual Gustav could have a real impact on thousands of delegates, convention support people, transportation and communication networks, and of course the media themselves.

Gustav was particularly interesting because its premediation inevitably entailed the re-mediation of Katrina. Not only was Gustav's trajectory and intensity compared to Katrina's, but the response of local, state, and federal governments was measured against what had happened three years ago to the week. This remediation took many forms. It was a formal remediation in that the modes of coverage (maps, weather reporters, hurricane graphics, etc.) were similar to those of Katrina or most other hurricanes. It was a remediation as well of the political practices of evacuation and storm preparation that occurred prior to Katrina. But it was also a remediation in the sense that remediation involves the notion that new media forms mark improvements of older media forms, or remedies of past defects. This was most evident in the coverage of the rebuilt and reinforced levees, the new evacuation procedures, the enhanced generators at Tulane's hospital, and the preparations made by FEMA and the federal government.

Finally Gustav offered the Bush administration something of a "do-over," a chance to prove that it had learned the lessons of Katrina, that it had remediated its own approach to natural disasters. It also offered John McCain a chance to remediate his and Bush's response to Katrina by flying to the Gulf Coast with his vice-presidential selection, Sarah Palin, in advance of the hurricane's arrival, to demonstrate that he would be a president who could take charge in situations like this. And in cutting short the convention in advance of Gustav's landfall, he could underscore his claim to be concerned more with the welfare of the nation than with his own political ambitions. McCain himself sought to premediate his own presidential behavior through the remediation of Bush's belated and feeble response to Katrina.

As often happens in the case of premediation and virtuality, the real often emerges in ways quite different from its prior mediations. Gustav struck only a glancing blow. Sarah Palin, rather than demonstrating her heroism in the hurricane ended up disclosing her daughter's pregnancy and hiring an attorney to defend her in ethics charges in her home state. And George W. Bush, in his first statement after Gustav's landfall to the west of New Orleans, emphasized the importance of what we did after the hurricane struck, underscoring the need to make sure that the energy infrastructure of the Gulf oil industries was intact and urging the Congress to enact legislation opening offshore oilfields for immediate drilling. The Bush administration fails once again to remediate itself, preferring, as in the run-up to the Iraq War and the War Against Terror more broadly, the premediation of the future to the remediation of the present or recent past.