Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [64]
Go to a live theater and within a few seconds of the curtain rising you will know exactly which region, which city, which culture you are in. Watch television for days at a time and you still may not have a clue as to what planet you are on—unless it is Planet Reebok. There are stylistic differences between McDonald’s in Moscow, in Budapest, in Paris, and in London by which they can be distinguished from the original McDonald’s franchise opened by Ray Kroc in Des Plaines, Illinois, back in 1955. But squint a little and all the small differences vanish and the Golden Arch is all that remains, a virtual ghost haunting our retinas even on the Champs Élysées in Paris, where its actual display is no longer permitted. Director Alain Corneau’s prophetic “world in which there is only one image” has come to pass.
Of course inside a fast-food establishment or even a movie theater, cyberspace is a metaphor. But when it comes to television, cyberspace is virtually the reality—that is to say, is virtual reality.
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Television and MTV: McWorld’s Noisy Soul
FILMS ARE MCWORLD’S preferred software, but television rather than the cinema is its preferred medium; for with television, McWorld goes one on one, the solitary individual and cyberspace confronting one another in exquisite immediacy—with the screen as the perfect nonmediated (im-mediate) medium.1 Where cinema is limited in time and place, television is a permanent ticket to ceaseless film watching anytime, anywhere. It is a private window on McWorld—providing personal access via computers, satellites, cable, and phone lines to information sources, data collections, shopping centers, banking facilities, and the now almost notorious Internet—that welter of interlinked computers and interactive bulletin boards and video games and information banks and video-marketers and ordinary users that will one day (we are told) replace more or less every other kind of interaction in our lives. We think of the information highway as a way to get from one place to another. But the industry aims at displacing the rigidity of electronic trains with the versatility of cars. Bell Atlantic President Ray Smith thus told reporters at the news conference announcing his failed takeover of T.C.I., America’s largest cable operator, “We are providing the flexibility of the automobile. You will be able to go anywhere you want when you want.”2 But like vagrants and adventurers and robbers of old, many of us may not know exactly where we want to go and may end up living on the road, content to ride the highway like solitary bikers once rode Route I, crisscrossing America to nowhere in particular. Or, to take an adjacent metaphor, a movie screen is to a computer monitor hooked up to the electronic highway as an airplane is to a bird. The airplane does one thing well: it flies from point A to point B and you have to know exactly where and when you want to go. The bird does that too but it can also build a nest, sit on eggs, search for food and feed its young, alight on any surface anywhere, soar, dive, chirp, peck, and scratch. And it doesn’t have to have a particular destination. Movie screens show films, period. Television is a portal on the information superhighway and in its own peculiarly electronic manner it soars, dives, chirps, pecks, and scratches.
Projected onto a movie-house big screen, films reach only a small percentage of the world’s population for specified and quite limited periods of time. The new interactive systems will permit users to dial up films—entertainment and informational,