<nettime> Tim Druckrey / Short Circuits

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Short Circuits

Timothy Druckrey   12.01.2000 

The proposed merger between AOL and Time Warner represents what must 
be seen as one giant leap back into the twentieth century. 
 
 
"The project of modernity had essentially been one of arms and media 
technology... all the better that it was shrouded in a petty 
phraseology of democracy and the communication of consensus." (F. 
Kittler) 
In his 1983 assessment The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian anticipated 
the events of the past years and wrote, in the first chapter of his 
book, "Fortunately, no single corporation controls all the mass 
media in the United States. But something is happening that points 
in that direction. If mergers and acquisitions by large corporations 
continue at the present rate, one massive firm will be in virtual 
control of all major media by the 1990s." Indeed, the critical media 
analysis from the 60s through the 80s focused on the converging, 
some might say collapsing, ownership of mainstream media by 
multi-national conglomerates (and included the work of Herbert 
Schiller, Han Magnus Enzensberger, Armand Mattelart, and many 
others). This critique saw the links between corporate marketing and 
media mastery as central to grasping the subordination of a 
broadcast industry (assumed to be a public trust) to provide less 
and less information and more and more entertainment. This complex 
history is the prelude to the kind of overwhelming mergers of the 
past days, months, and years in the telecommunication, media and 
internet technologies. 
Steve Case and Richard Parsons, Ted Turner, et al., (from AOL and 
Time Warner) spoke in the grandest of terms. "A defining event," "a 
pivotal moment," "an historic moment," "This merger will launch the 
next Internet revolution.'' "It's not about technology, it's about 
making this a mass medium and part of the everyday habits of 
ordinary consumers," "We don't want AOL to be a place people go 
through to get someplace else Š We want to be able to created an 
integrated consumer. That's why, ultimately, the ownership of media 
brands will be important." 
An amazing scenario, predicted by Bagdikian, and one that, conjoined 
with AOL's numerous strategic partnerships (Bertelsmann, Public 
Broadcasting Service -PBS, and others), and appetites, represents a 
watershed moment in which the relationship managed and open source 
media are situated as the crucial issues for the future of 
communication. Yet the proposed merger also represents what must be 
seen as one giant leap back into the twentieth century. Steve Case 
might see the company as standing at the portal of what he called 
"this internet century," but instead AOL will trudge into the future 
burdened with a bloated archive of old media and grounded in hopes 
for terrestrial fiber optic cable whose market is marginal, complex, 
expensive, and largely limited to urban markets. This while the 
trajectory of so much of the delivery system is aimed at wireless 
and hand-held technologies. How these two systems will emerge from 
this proposal suggests a great deal about the international stakes 
for a notion of dominance caught between real and possible markets. 
Thus the highly cash profitable Time Warner empire can be 
assimilated by the potential profitability of AOL, a trend so 
exuberantly (to evoke Greenspan's diagnosis) rewarding virtualized 
economic promises grounded in indeterminacy. 
Of course "integrated consumers" are the essential issue, and the 
benefits Case outlined for users were, in this order, 
"entertainment," "shopping," and "communication." In the 
"integrated" environment of such a potentially closed system, the 
extensive metaphor of "endless possibilities" is more a foreclosure, 
one that discourages "someplace else," and that could easily aim at 
the destruction of open access to "brands," no less information, 
outside the "ownership" of AOL/Time Warner's control (which will 
extend from dialup access to the CNN version of world news). 
Afterall, AOL is already a closed system filtering and managing 
information and cannot be understood as championing the web as a 
"mass medium," but as a service providing a thematized internet 
environment , much like Time Warner's reductively thematized 
approach to news in the severely limited recent versions of Time 
Magazine or the astonishingly reduced coverage of international news 
on CNN. Nevertheless, "integrated consumers" will no doubt provide 
the audience for the kind of short-circuited cul-de-sac of an all 
purpose mass medium promoting a worn content base leftover from the 
20th century. Of course the preposterous idea that one can merely 
buy a pertinent content base is hardly much more than a reactionary 
idea couched in rhetorical excess. To speak of another in a long 
series of media mega-mergers as "revolutionary" is either haplessly 
ignorant or arrogantly pompous, despite the financial spectacle of 
the transaction! 
More disconcerting than the obvious issues raised by the linking of 
content and portals, is the more portentous centralization of 
network information services that run parallel to the nascent open 
source movement. With obviously powerful influence over the access 
technologies (cable), interface technologies (Netscape, Instant 
Messenger), and powerful leverage over content (news, financial 
information, music, book publishing), the opportunities for an open 
network are clearly limited by such enormous consolidations. It is 
abundantly clear from the Microsoft antitrust case that such 
leveraging undermines effective innovation. But the stakes in the 
proposed AOL/Time Warner merger are not about operating systems and 
browsers, but about how content resources will find their way into 
the public sphere. The danger, as even Bagdikian concluded in 1983 
is that "irresponsibly excessive profits will continue to weaken the 
vitality of a crucial institution," and that "glib financial 
manipulators will repeat more pious speeches even as their media 
treat the public mind with contempt."      
 
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Verlag Heinz Heise, Hannover
last modified: 12.01.2000 

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