Narrative for the Naive

I could respond to Dean's article with one sentence: The government will do what ever it wants, regardless of the means we use to try to communicate with it. However, this blog post has to be approximately 700 words, not one sentence.

I had a lot of issue with the article. Dean mentioned that "The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite - the post-political formation of communicative capitalism" (53). Years and years ago in a psychology class, my teacher showed us a graph. On one side of the graph was the amount of ice cream eaten. The other side represented the number of murders. The graph showed a positive correlation. The more ice cream we eat, the more murders are committed. The point of the exercise is to show us that just because two phenomena were demonstrated together didn't mean that they had any direct relation to each other. That's what this whole article felt like to me. Just because two items are represented together doesn't mean they should be. In the above quote, Dean places two items next to each other - "communicative access and opportunity" and "communicative capitalism" - and declares one the result of the other. While the two ideas coexist rather well, it feels a little off to me. Just because they have a positive correlation, does it really mean they are related?

Now, I'm going to pick apart his thesis: "First, I take up the fantasy of abundance and discuss the ways this fantasy results in a shift in the basic unity of communication from the message to the contribution" (54). The government does what it wants to do. In government offices, there are researchers. One of the jobs of these researchers is to look at the contribution to messages that are put out by the public. So, while the government might choose to do whatever they want based on their "superior intelligence" and better access to secret information, the size of certain messages put out by the public don't just become another bit of white noise. From what I can tell, Dean targets electronic forms of communication as being unable and the cause of the problem. However, earlier in the article Dean tells about a demonstration of 250,000 people OUTSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE against the Iraq war. How is the government supposed to pretend to not know about that, even if it didn't make it into mainstream news? They knew that people weren't in support of the war, not just the people in cyberspace. They did what they thought was best regardless.

Surprisingly, I do actually agree with Dean on the second part of her thesis: "Second, I address the fantasy of activity or participation. I argue that this fantasy is materialized through technology fetishism" (54), but only to a certain degree. I do believe that there are people who see the internet as a way to be heard. It's very easy for them to get their voices out there. However, it is only the naive who cling to that hope for very long. Because of all the white noise on the internet, it's very hard to become a recognized voice. I, as an unrecognized voice, know this fact. I've been blogging for years, mostly story stuff, and have had very few people jump on the Melanie bandwagon. Those who did outside of friends and family probably fell off a few years ago. Despite the work and ranting I put into this post, probably less than 10 people will ever read it.

The final part of Dean's thesis states: "Finally, I consider the fantasy of wholeness that relies on and produces a global both imaginary and Real. I argue that this fantasy prevents the emergence of a clear division between friend and enemy, resulting instead in the more dangerous and profound figuring of the other as a threat to be destroyed. My goal in providing this account of communicative capitalism is to explain why in an age celebrated for its communications there is no response" (54). I'm going to examine the first part of this closing argument. It goes back to what I was saying in the previous paragraph about naivety. There is a reason there is such a distrust of politics these days growing in the US (and across the globe?). We've recognized what Dean declares when she says "In the United States today...there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and official politics" (53). We don't believe anymore that the "voice of the people" is being accepted by official politics no matter how much we rant online.