InterCommunication No.12 1995
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Self,Gaze,and Power in the Hypermedia Society
ASADA Akira
OSAWA Masachi
KARATANI Kojin
KUROSAKI Masao
SUMMARY
This talk session included four people from different fields in the liberal arts, Akira Asada (Economics/Social history), Masachi Osawa (Sociology), Kojin Karatani (Literature) and Masao Kurosaki (Philosophy). They offered their perspectives on the theme of electro-media and communication, a theme which "InterCommunication" Magazine has been pursuing.
The meaning of a discussion about electro-media by an economist, literature expert, sociologist and philosopher is that industrial and technological issues have begun to have significant social meaning today, and the development of electronic media has begun to be an essential matter for culture and society.
By putting the "non-materiality of information," at the center, a discussion was held about the cost of information, the correlation between the quantity of information and access, the distance between public and private and the real-time delivery of information. In addition, the connection between these issues and so-called postmodern theories, such as those by Foucault and Derrida were also discussed.
The main topics were "The computer and the super-panopticon," "Hume and Kant," "Ideology in electronic media," "Information Capitalism and copyrights," "Common tacit knowledge and common knowledge," "Networks and co-authoring," "Globalism and localism," "The electronic media and the Eyes of God" and "The thing-in-itself and the frame problem. "The discussion was quite unusual in comparison to conventional discussions about media theories.
In this session, the existence of an electronic network was discussed from a negative perspective, so it is ironic that the discussion premiers on the Internet. It is similar to the situation when Plato rejected letters as "dead words" and then his philosophy went on to control later Western culture with the letter.
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