the empty skyscraper

[ sketches for an architecture of media ]

What do CNN, The New York Rangers, Myspace.com, National Geographic, Quincy Jones, Barnes & Noble, theme parks, Cartoon Network, The Times, Netscape, Star Trek, jazz restaurants, Sky Radio Denmark, the Bible, MTV, FOX News, Bol.com and SEGA games have in common?

It is not the rather silly question, but the obviousness of the answer that should already give us an idea of the omnipresent and diversified space of media power. Of course all of the above corporations, brands, products and institutions are completely or partly owned by a very small group of media conglomerates - among them those illustrious names of Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Viacom and General Electric. As entrepreneurs of media's present and future, they don't merely represent the structure of corporation, but have created their own architecture of conglomeration and convergence.

In the United States the media congloms completely control the media and entertainment industries, and in the rest of the world they are rapidly expanding their grip on things. At the same time the number of conglomerates is declining rapidly. In 1983 it took 50 corporations to control the majority of all US media; today six corporations together own more than 90% of the media industry.[1]

Needless to stress, this could well mean a downward spiral towards increasing monoculture, commercially informed censorship, the commodification of culture at large, and the cultural colonisation of the rest of the non-western world. In short: the notion of media conglomeration and its pervasive, monolithical power over media, democracy and the human race is so well known that it has become a cliché which we'd rather associate with activists than with theory.

However, if we try to draw a map of these merchants of media we get lost very soon in an inextricable maze of interconnectedness, parallels and doubles. Conglomerates seem to be structured by the dynamics of hyperlinking - in fact; hyperlinking is the very principle of their power. The only thing that becomes visible when mapping out media ownership and power are the interconnected lines that point endlessly to each other without any notion of an origin. It's like all those browser windows on your computer screen when you've started clicking away, from which you'll never be able to retrieve the original page, unless you go back to history.

Within this maze the corporate tag has been replaced by the conglomerate one, for media giants are built upon and merged with multiple other corporations, capitalizing themselves as true surplus value. The various conglomerates and their property are so thoroughly entangled with each other that it is impossible to map the exact coordinates of their power. For example most subdivisions are shared ones: Warner Bros. is divided between Time Warner en AT&T, Bol.com is shared between Bertelsmann and Vivendi, which also takes a slice of NBC from General Electric, etc. Fixed notions of power and identity are further distorted by the conglomerate's continuous expansion and constant shifting of shapes, its reciprocal balance of growth and loss, and its interchangeable acts of buying, getting bought and selling. Even the most literal substance of power within the conglomerate, its board of directors, conforms to the rhizomatic structure of hyperpower. All conglomerates share members of their board with a variety of other large corporations, including banks, investment companies, oil companies, health care and pharmaceutical companies and technology companies.[2] These "interlocking directorates" not only disperse and flatten fixed power structures, they also point to the endless multiplication and diversification of media into every domain of our lives.

It has widely been acknowledged that mass media and industrialised information present themselves as constant flow without origin or temporal closure, as experienced every time we push the buttons on the remote control or flip the page of the newspaper. However, media ownership is generally still conceived of as a spatially and temporally fixed dynamic, though it clearly resembles the same mechanism of flow that consequently enables conglomerates to render their own power (i.e. their own existence) difficult to map, impossible to isolate and identify, unrecognisable, unaccountable, hence: invisible.

Paradoxically, corporate invisibility is extremely visible: Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch and the others are the celebrities of corporate power, their names luminously inscribed onto our consciousness. It is precisely within that celebrity cult, through its visibility as corporate powerhouse, that the conglomerate transforms into a sign. Rupert Murdoch - most infamous and most personalised of all conglomerate's celebrities - acts in both media and social discourses alike as a signifying agency, not as a person of flesh and blood that has a presumed unhealthy amount of power. Murdoch cum suis merely represents the power we contribute to them.

As we are immersed by media and entertainment, as all culture is mediated through mass media, as the media itself has collapsed onto itself (hyperreality, the order of simulacra, etc - you know the drill), as media's crisis of authority and the absence of authorship have nullified or deconstructed the very act of signification - all of this resulting in Baudrillard's brilliant tagline "you are the screen and the television is watching you" - any sign outside the realm of media culture holds power as a signifier, even if it signifies hardly anything. Ironically, it seems that only the owners of media can be outside the media space, by virtue of those within media space, that is: us, the media consumers.

The meaning (or message) of media is not to be found in the intention or purpose of a medium, but in the effect it has. All media bring into existence an "environment" - that is, a normalized and seemingly natural way of seeing, and everything that is affected by a medium fits into this environment, from architecture to politics, and from public opinion to our self esteem.

Consider the following example: transportation might be the content of the medium "car", its effect (its meaning) is the accommodation of the physical and mental environment to that car, by means of highways, gas stations, spaces for parking and recreation, the city's architecture of roads, traffic lights and office spaces, but also by means of our understanding of speed, distance and the physical body.[3]

Following and simplifying the example, we are the environment of today's multiplied and diversified, endless flow of media. "The media" (that is: the very notion of "the media") have become a medium in itself, and almost everything else, including ourselves, constitutes its accommodated environment. As a consequence we have internalised the media within the screen of our minds, "obliterating the distinction between public and private, interior and exterior space, both of which are replaced by media space - becoming terminals within media systems, eternally connected to the media networks that are surrounding us."[4]

And what about the owner of the car? Actually it doesn't matter if he drives the car, or if he owns the car at all, since our accommodation of reality into a media space renders him invisible anyway. Perhaps there isn't any owner. The very notion of the car being owned (how could it otherwise move?) creates the act of signification (owning the car), which in turn authorises and demands the notion of a car being owned.

Does implosion still hold power?

[1] Media Reform Information Centre | www.corporations.org/media
[2] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) | www.fair.org/media-woes/interlocking-directorates.html
[3] Arjen Mulder | Over Mediatheorie | V2_/NAi Uitgevers: Rotterdam, 2004
[4] Douglas Kellner | Baudrillard: A New McLuhan? | www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillardanewmcluhan.pdf