Constituents of a theory of the media - Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

                                                                       Image: Raffaele Minichiello. Source: BBC.

Begun by listing, and it is an exhaustive list, the developments in tech such as: colour television, cable relay television, cassettes, videotapes, etc traces both the velocity and volume of progress of change, the result of the monopoly-capitalist endeavour which has "develop(ed) the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production." 

Media has become - due to the user-focussed interactive nature of these products - a mass participatory platform and as Enzensberger describes; a"socialised productive process'.

This has been in a diametric shift from a medium as distributive - the communique, diktat - to be disseminated to citizens to a more communicative centring. This has caused an unease amongst those that see an intrinsic link between a possession and therefore maintenance of power versus those that have been given an ability to produce their own audio or visual material, to establish a voice and a thus, a position.

Similar modes of comparison are acutely made by Lefèbvre when he adopts the model of the citizen walking the street and enjoying a street theatre, itself a symbology of the conflation of social distinction and order, a taxonomy of people moving within shared and transient spaces:

 

"All kinds of people mingle and get mixed up together in the street. Once, when class differences were less clear-cut than in our day, when there were 'estates' and 'castes' rather than classes, these differences were conspicuously expressed. The street was expressive. Today, these conspicuous differences have disappeared; they would make the crowds walking along the Champs Elysees or the boulevards intolerably colourful. But these social differences continue to be visible; they express meaning, through many signs and indicators scarcely visible to the casual observer. That is to say that the spectacle of the street encompasses multiple semiologies."

Similarly, Canadian Techno-Prophet Marshall McLuhan preached the gospel of a return to a tribalism, something of a prehistoric unitary tribal experience. McLuhan proposes a closer adherence to an oral-aural tradition, focussing on Ethnographer Carothers' discovery of 'free ideation' within non-literate communities. Reference is made to the "decentralist, oral organization of society that preceded print and nationalism."

"But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous field in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of the "global village". We live in a single constrictive space resonant with tribal drums."

Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction presents an 'unhinging' of the  'fundamental categories and destroying its 'standard's'. The reproduced work - whether art, photograph, film or piece of music - is instead reproduced and then disseminated in a way that meets the consumer/viewer within in their own unique situation and context. This posed a radical shift in the relations between subject and object; the "object is removed from the domain of tradition". The social significance of this, much like Lefèbvre's sidewalk and McLuhan's machinations of a tribal culture, is a "liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage."

"To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction."

Other curious examples given of the anthem-filling pop star; a combination of authoritarian rule, the intersection of fan worship and the emancipatory zeal of their music and lyrics. These same rockstar histrionics can be found in the story of Raffaele Minichiello, an Italo-American and flight TWA85 or a the BBC called it 'The world's longest and spectacular hijacking'. The reason for the hijacking being that Minichiello wanted to fly home to Rome from his adopted Californian base. The most prosaic of reasons for such a radical and deliberate act of showmanship. Andy Warhol's revamped interpretation of a centuries old court painting tradition was injected with 20th century technology; a sort or artist-for-hire inside his Midtown Manhattan 'Factory' developing silk screen printing techniques from polaroid images of celebrities, hangers-on, pill-pushers and debutantes alike.