We have never needed that deconstru

We have never needed that deconstructive project more than now. We live in an intensely connected global mediaspace where media’s capacity to saturate everyday life is greater than ever. Elements of decentralisation – the decentring of some transnational media flows, the intensified competition faced by national media sources – only make media spectacle a more important resource for all media actors, both political and non-political. Add in a conflict-ridden global politics and we can expect the resources of mediated ritualisation to be continually drawn upon by political, corporate and other actors, producing dangerous exclusions within the sphere of visibility (Butler 2004). There is something political at stake in achieving a theoretical grasp of how large-scale media forms work and aspire to the status of naturalised social forms.

The Retort Collective (2005) argue that political power is inseparable from media (symbolic) power in a world of spectacle far more dangerous than Guy Debord ever envisaged (see also Giroux 2006). If so, it follows that any challenge to political power must involve contesting media power: that is (following both ANT and ritualisation theory), questioning not just media’s institutional power but our whole way of organising life and thought around and through media. (Here online resources will surely be crucial longer-term, whatever the dangers of believing the myths that currently circulate about the internet.)

The Retort Collective, from outside media research – they are sociologists, geographers, historians – set two very different challenges for media research. First, alongside paying attention to the major media spectacles of our time, we must analyse also the countless practices of ‘mediation’ that fall outside media’s dominant flows and rhetorics, which silently challenge them by heading in a different direction and on a different scale: hence the importance of the expanding research into alternative media.

Rejecting totalities means analysing new and different particularities and in sites beyond, or obscured by, the scope of those rhetorics. A different challenge, implicit in the first, is to maintain, in the face of media’s universalising ‘panoramas’, a deconstructive intent and a continual suspicion. It is of course tempting to argue – witness Simon Cottle’s (2006) attempt to save media rituals from what he calls ‘neo-Marxian’ political critique – that, even if media events or rituals are social constructions, they are none the worse for that: what society can live without myths? Surely we should bracket out our usual questions (What type of myths? Whose myths? Myths constructed on what terms?), because, in the end, we have no choice but to accept media’s role in focusing our world’s mythical production? The ‘end of history’, perhaps, for critical media research? There is a pragmatic weight to such arguments, yet it is vital to resist such temptation. For it invites us, adapting Søren Kierkegaard, to make the one error that, as media researchers, we had a chance of avoiding.

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Kita tidak pernah diperlukan bahwa proyek deconstructive lebih dari sekarang. Kita hidup di mediaspace global intens terhubung yang mana kapasitas jenuh kehidupan sehari-hari lebih besar daripada pernah. Unsur-unsur desentralisasi-decentring beberapa transnasional media arus, meningkatnya persaingan yang dihadapi oleh sumber-sumber media nasional – hanya membuat media tontonan sumber yang lebih penting untuk semua media aktor, politik dan non-politik. Tambahkan sarat dengan konflik politik global dan kita dapat mengharapkan sumber daya ditengahi ritualisation dapat terus diambil berdasarkan oleh aktor politik, perusahaan dan lainnya, memproduksi berbahaya pengecualian dalam lingkup visibilitas (Butler 2004). Ada sesuatu yang dipertaruhkan dalam mencapai pemahaman teoritis bagaimana skala besar media bentuk bekerja dan bercita-cita untuk status dinaturalisasikan bentuk-bentuk sosial politik.Retort kolektif (2005) berpendapat bahwa kekuasaan politik tidak terlepas dari media (simbol) kekuasaan di dunia tontonan jauh lebih berbahaya daripada Guy Debord pernah membayangkan (Lihat juga Giroux 2006). Jika demikian, dikatakan bahwa setiap tantangan ke kekuasaan politik harus melibatkan bertarung kekuatan media: itulah (mengikuti teori ANT dan ritualisation), mempertanyakan bukan hanya media kelembagaan kekuatan tetapi seluruh cara mengatur hidup kita dan berpikir di sekitar dan melalui media. (Di sini sumber daya online pasti akan penting jangka panjang, apa pun bahaya percaya mitos yang saat ini beredar tentang internet.)The Retort Collective, from outside media research – they are sociologists, geographers, historians – set two very different challenges for media research. First, alongside paying attention to the major media spectacles of our time, we must analyse also the countless practices of ‘mediation’ that fall outside media’s dominant flows and rhetorics, which silently challenge them by heading in a different direction and on a different scale: hence the importance of the expanding research into alternative media.Rejecting totalities means analysing new and different particularities and in sites beyond, or obscured by, the scope of those rhetorics. A different challenge, implicit in the first, is to maintain, in the face of media’s universalising ‘panoramas’, a deconstructive intent and a continual suspicion. It is of course tempting to argue – witness Simon Cottle’s (2006) attempt to save media rituals from what he calls ‘neo-Marxian’ political critique – that, even if media events or rituals are social constructions, they are none the worse for that: what society can live without myths? Surely we should bracket out our usual questions (What type of myths? Whose myths? Myths constructed on what terms?), because, in the end, we have no choice but to accept media’s role in focusing our world’s mythical production? The ‘end of history’, perhaps, for critical media research? There is a pragmatic weight to such arguments, yet it is vital to resist such temptation. For it invites us, adapting Søren Kierkegaard, to make the one error that, as media researchers, we had a chance of avoiding.