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Popular Culture Review
ungovernable. The viewer at home can be forgiven for feeling helpless to act
and unmotivated to organize. That is, in a seemingly well-meaning effort by the
major studios to inform the voting populace, the television news of the seventies
and eighties actually advocated—unintentionally—for civic passivity and
resignation.14 The pernicious effect of this shift to primarily visual information
media on American civic culture through the latter quarter of the twentieth
century has been well documented.15 The question for our purposes is what
effect the new media has had or will have. We will need to come back to the
question of what unintended message is transmitted by the particular
logic/drama of ephemera.
There have always been technological developments—the flint tool, the
bridge, the television—and they have always mediated our social interactions
and our comportment to the world according to the particular defining
characteristics of each. The flint spearhead allowed hunters to bring down larger
game but required larger hunting parties to do so. The television, at least before
cable, served social cohesion by presenting an entertainment experience that was
broadly shared, and which could therefore be a point of connection, because it
was a one-way medium with a fairly limited number of options for the viewers.
What is definitive of the ephemera we are discussing here is, on the one hand, its
multiplicity—every user is generating individualized content—and, on the other
hand, the sheer mechanical achievement, the speed of transmission and the
perfection of the transcription. We could not have the one without the other—
speed and accuracy make possible the sheer volume of user-generated content.
The Beep-Beeps
There is something intrinsic to being hyper-connected, to having easy
access to content, and, indeed, to having so much content, that logically results
in ephemera. Perhaps we should begin, then, by considering the technological
shift that makes possible the ephemerality of so much that used to be solid, that
used to be property. It is hard to remember now that only a few decades ago we
needed to organize our lives around a TV schedule that presented news only
once a night, and for only half an hour; or that we needed to be home because
someone might call us long distance; or that we might have to listen through
several songs that we do not like before the radio “disk jockey”—we still
anachronistically call them “DJs”—finally played one that we do like. The
revolution in access, and the consequent ascendancy of ephemera, is largely a
product of a digital revolution, a revolution in information and its storage and
transmission.
We think we know what information is, and we believe that a lot of it is
available on the web. We have a sense that there has always been information,
and that it is countable, because it is a thing—a set of facts, perhaps, and we feel
confident that we know what facts are. James Gleick credits Bell Labs engineer
Claude Shannon with coining the term “information,” but Shannon was thinking
about it quite differently: information is what is unexpected.16 For Shannon, an