Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Suck on This, Planet of Noise!

1993; Griffith University; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1329878x9306900113

0312-9616

McKenzie Wark,

Media Studies and Communication

The Gulf War sparked off a long overdue examination of the impact of the globalisation of media vectors, and not before time, but the war was hardly an unprecedented event of this type. Nor are many of the analyses that have been offered in conventional paradigms entirely convincing. This paper presents a summary of research on weird global media events of this type since 1987. The Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the 'Black Monday' stock market crash are all examples of a new type of singularity in media events. A theory of the kind of media space they operate in and its effects is advanced, building on Paul Virilio's concept of the vector. The concept of 'global village' is refuted, as are some of the entirely pessimistic responses, particularly in the US to the Gulf War. Concepts such as 'third nature' and 'telaesthesia' are further explored in relation to spin-out transactional media events.