So, what have I done so far?
I read Hand. He writes mainly about the political aspects of digital culture – decentralisation, pushing governance to the masses, encouraging participation. Something I particularly liked was his highlighting a qute from Alberto Melucci:
Knowledge is… less a knowledge of contents and increasingly an ability to codify and to decode messages (199: 416-7)
Having seen the Bendito film I wonder if that’s what’s really going on? In this short film it’s not clear if the messages are being decoded – in one scene the people are worshipping a screen showing them images of war. To me this suggests they are not decoding the messages. The images on the screen are somehow not seen as powerful – the screen itself has the power, as illustrated at the end when someone comes along with another machine and shoots the first one. At this point the film makes obvious the link between the message and the agency behind it – control the screen, control the people. Feed your ideologies through a popular medium to achieve the most effective way of having them accepted. It’s like Hand’s observation (drawing on Castells), when he discusses networks, about some people being able to “choose between multi-directional circuits of communication, and those who will be provided only pre-specified packages.” His idea of the ‘interacting’ and the ‘interacted’ sums this up – the locus of power, and who has power over you, comes with the indivdual choice of read only or read/write. Is the world in it’s digital form something that you allow to be done to you, or are you going to choose the channels you tune in to?