Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 13
constitute the Qur’an in the mythical Mecca of Silicon Valley. Negroponte’s
visions of the transformation of atoms into digital beings through
the ‘technologies of freedom’ have provided much material to create the
myths of this allegedly unprecedented revolutionary era.
Mosco (2004) argues that the building of the Information Society is
based on a series of myths that provides the narrative necessary for the
implementation of policies, and the acceptance of the organization of the
economy and social relations. Mosco explores these myths to show how,
historically, every new invention was claimed as ‘ahistorical’, that is, the
first and unprecedented expression of technological breakthrough. All of
these ‘ahistorical’ unprecedented moments of technological revolution
were presented as the promise for freedom, peace and wealth. Tracing
such myths throughout the development of telegraph, electricity, telephone,
radio and television, Mosco shows how each innovation has been
accompanied by nested discourses about prosperity and peace embodied
by these new technologies, popularized by ideologies of ‘magic and awe’
and of course of the superiority of Western science and progress. 3 In
the cases of electrification, for example, the ‘light’ brought by electricity
became the metaphor that separated progress from underdevelopment,
the white colonists from their subjects: ‘As the telegraph and electricity
demonstrate, the new world of cyberspace is not the first to be christened
with magical powers to transcend the present and institute a new order’
(Mosco 2004: 125).
For the information society, nowhere more graphically and magically
than in WiReD magazine, has this mythical information society been celebrated
, a publication that Negroponte has helped found. Negroponte,
himself a member of the board of directors of one of the most powerful
telecommunications industries (Motorola), occupies a position at the
nexus of military, regulatory and industrial research and practice. The
wonders of the Information Society, but also the fear – of being left
behind if one does not embrace this new world order; of becoming obsolete;
and even of not being useful anymore in the new economics – are
adequately transmitted to the readers of WiReD. Melanie Stewart Millar
(1998) offered one of the most astute early analyses of the bard of digital
technology. The production of further myths to sustain the myth of a
computer mediated society is part of the magazine’s raison d’être. These
myths, like the myths that came before them, sustain the ‘awe’ of the
new era and the drive to consume, reinforcing gender, class and racial
hierarchies associated with American capitalism. Stewart Millar (1998)
analysed the myths that WiReD developed to produce the ‘hypermacho
man’. They are the myths of a deterministic culture of digital technology
that is both religious and libertarian in its promise. WiReD helped pave