There’s a famous anecdote from Baudrillard that illustrates some of the fundamentals of postmodernism. A pilot returning from the first Iraq war is interviewed by a television reporter and asked how he found the war. “I don’t know; I missed it” is the reply. He didn’t see it on TV, so it didn’t happen for him. The idea is that our current understanding of reality is that concrete experience is impossible and must be refocused by other means such as television reporting.
I am reminded of this by the reports today of the protests around the G20 summit. Bring on the excellent reportage from today’s activities by Steve Lawson. Here’s a segment that really hit my philosophical bones. Skip to around 5.00 minutes to see some police march across the screen for no apparent reason. Lots of shouting. “Police Oppression” someone shouts. “Shame on you” the crowd chants. Yet it’s clear that no-one really knows what’s happening.
And zillions and zillions of people with cameras, cameraphones and videocameras.
There are more reporters and police, by possibly ten times, than there are ‘real’ protestors, it seems from this footage.
What the hell is that? In a very postmodern way, it seems that the reality of the event will be defined by what appears in the media.
Stuff like this:
Great photo but what we don’t see in this picture is the vast army of photographers, paparazzi, bloggers, v-bloggers, and (yes) journalists following this tiny minority around that Steve’s footage shows. The clear joy that a couple of windows have been broken at a branch of RBS in current news report seem to suggest a great deal of disappointment that there wasn’t more to record but ourselves.
Was there a riot in the City today? I will have to wait for the evening news report to find out.
The ‘G20 riot’ is in some ways more like an audition for Big Brother than political protest. I think it will be voted out on Friday.
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They had to hit the world trade centre twice simply to ensure the press had a chance to get some decent footage.
It may be that this time the press are hiring their own vandals to ensure they get some decent footage.
I don’t know why they don’t make a new law that makes it illegal to photograph vandals. The new law against photographing policemen seems to be working great.
Interesting to see that ‘anarchists’ are now being elevated into the pariah echelons to join terrorists, pirates and paedophiles. Whatever happened to pinko commies?
[…] twopointouch put an intriguing blog post on The Post-Modern G20Here’s a quick excerptThere’s a famous anecdote from Baudrillard that illustrates some of the fundamentals of postmodernism. A pilot returning from the first Iraq war is interviewed by a television reporter and asked how he found the war. “I don’t know; I missed it” is the reply. He didn’t see it on TV, so it didn’t happen for him. The idea is that our current understanding of reality is that concrete experience is impossible and must be refocused by other means such as television reporting. I am reminded of this […]