Adilkno: The Media Archive

Media or Barbarism

Virilio Calling

In the modern era media and its presence is more and more surrounding, monitoring and influencing us. According to Hans Peter Duerr the last barbarian became civilized somewhere twenty thousand years ago.

In the chapter ‘Media or Barbarism’ its argued that without media humans lose control over themselves and start acting like the animals we maybe used to be in the early stages of mankind. It also keeps people of the streets. Contrary, media corrupts people and lures people into misbehaviour like violence. Media is seen as a tool to cure barbarians and to embrace them into the civilized world. Now, I’m not sure how to define barbarians in the context of this text, but if you mean that there are still people out there disconnected to the outside ‘modern’ world, yes they exist. For example recently a remote Indian tribe in the Brazilian rainforest seek for help because their territory was endangered due to illegal logging.

The media, it’s argued, have the power to turn people into either barbarians or civilized participants. To read this in a chapter with the title ‘Media or Barbarism’ sounds strange to me cause it looks like media is not an opposite to barbarism, but stands above it. And by embracing media you become civilized and by not embracing it you become a barbarian. But what is the outcome of media on the development of the individual? It is said in the article that the consequences of a massive import of media are unpredictable. Besides Media is said not to be neutral. And because of that there is a great influence of the media on the society how to perceive certain occasions. A recent example is the conflict in Ukraine. Western media portrait the conflict in a different way than the Russian media does. Because of that people with only access to one of these media can’t make a neutral judgement themselves or their opinion is influenced into a certain way. A final comment is made in the chapter saying that we don’t have to be afraid of the barbarians but more how to use all the current media technologies. And this is exactly where Virilio enters.

Paul Virilio is critical towards technologies. He compares the development of technology and information with the development of war. In the past speed was the essence of war, which leads to success. Today speed equals war. It’s not anymore about conquering the enemy but about the existence of the earth. In this he sees an analogy with the development of information. Where information in the past travelled slow, now everything is around in split seconds. This means that there is less control and less time to verify certain streams of information when it both reaches the journalists and the public. What is true and what is false? What is real and what is unreal? The news as information that reaches us can always be disinformation. The viewer no longer knows what right or wrong and because of this the world will disappear.

Another thing Virilio is pointing out is the degree of control over the external world. This is connected to the acceleration and refinement of observational techniques and their logistics. The media, viewed as a global network produced by observational machinery, is a treath to humanity and the world.