Re: <nettime> C(APITAL|OMMUN)ISM (i|ha)s (ARRIV|FINISH)ED

[Jonathan Marshall <Jonathan.Marshall@uts.edu.au>]

I'm sorry, but as far as i can understand the argument goes something like this:

New media: is digital, networked, allows many to many, many to one, and one to one 'conversation'. Its portable and distributed. It allows manipulation (to an extent) of images, sound and so on. It is not consumerist.

Apple: makes equipment which is digital, networked, allows many to many, many to one, and one to one 'conversation'. Its portable and distributed. It allows manipulation (to an extent) of images, sound and so on. It is consumerist.

Therefore apple is not new media.....

Still think this argument is assuming a future which is not here yet in order to analyse what is happening now which is fine but the future is divined not observed

I would say the argument actually implies:

1) 'New media' can be consumerist (just its revenues have been constantly overestimated if it does not involve physical objects)
or
2) 'old media' is not dead, and may not die.

If, as mark writes: "Kids waiting in line for a new iPhone -- hoping to become "famous" among their friends or maybe even on the evening news -- are acting out *television*  fantasies".

then 
1) the younger generation are not abandoning 'television fantasies'. I would expect them to abandon such fantasies if old media was dying. Young people, as a whole in the west, tend not to hang around the outmoded. 
Or 
2) Celebrity and fame is perceived as the currency of new media and of getting on in life to an extent that it was not percieved to be under the television regime. This is something which might be implied by the radical increase in interest in celebrity gossip, efforts to get recognised, etc. since the birth of new media.

In either case conspicous consumption is presumably not dead yet. 

Indeed the growing separation of income in the West, and the possible diminishment of the middle class in both volume and importance, suggests that wealth, and what it can bring, is very much in the minds of those who are able to appropriate it and keep it from being shared around.

And we still cannot assume, without evidence that the rising middle classes of Asia will abandon consumerism - even if people in the west are...

jon

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