Short Circuits
The proposed merger between AOL and Time Warner represents what must be seen as one giant leap back into the twentieth century.
"The project of modernity had essentially been one of arms and media technology... all the better that it was shrouded in a petty phraseology of democracy and the communication of consensus." (F. Kittler)
In his 1983 assessment The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian anticipated the events of the past years and wrote, in the first chapter of his book, "Fortunately, no single corporation controls all the mass media in the United States. But something is happening that points in that direction. If mergers and acquisitions by large corporations continue at the present rate, one massive firm will be in virtual control of all major media by the 1990s." Indeed, the critical media analysis from the 60s through the 80s focused on the converging, some might say collapsing, ownership of mainstream media by multi-national conglomerates (and included the work of Herbert Schiller, Han Magnus Enzensberger, Armand Mattelart, and many others). This critique saw the links between corporate marketing and media mastery as central to grasping the subordination of a broadcast industry (assumed to be a public trust) to provide less and less information and more and more entertainment. This complex history is the prelude to the kind of overwhelming mergers of the past days, months, and years in the telecommunication, media and internet technologies.
Steve Case and Richard Parsons, Ted Turner, et al., (from AOL and Time Warner) spoke in the grandest of terms. "A defining event," "a pivotal moment," "an historic moment," "This merger will launch the next Internet revolution.'' "It's not about technology, it's about making this a mass medium and part of the everyday habits of ordinary consumers," "We don't want AOL to be a place people go through to get someplace else We want to be able to created an integrated consumer. That's why, ultimately, the ownership of media brands will be important."
An amazing scenario, predicted by Bagdikian, and one that, conjoined with AOL's numerous strategic partnerships (Bertelsmann, Public Broadcasting Service -PBS, and others), and appetites, represents a watershed moment in which the relationship managed and open source media are situated as the crucial issues for the future of communication. Yet the proposed merger also represents what must be seen as one giant leap back into the twentieth century. Steve Case might see the company as standing at the portal of what he called "this internet century," but instead AOL will trudge into the future burdened with a bloated archive of old media and grounded in hopes for terrestrial fiber optic cable whose market is marginal, complex, expensive, and largely limited to urban markets. This while the trajectory of so much of the delivery system is aimed at wireless and hand-held technologies. How these two systems will emerge from this proposal suggests a great deal about the international stakes for a notion of dominance caught between real and possible markets. Thus the highly cash profitable Time Warner empire can be assimilated by the potential profitability of AOL, a trend so exuberantly (to evoke Greenspan's diagnosis) rewarding virtualized economic promises grounded in indeterminacy.
Of course "integrated consumers" are the essential issue, and the benefits Case outlined for users were, in this order, "entertainment," "shopping," and "communication." In the "integrated" environment of such a potentially closed system, the extensive metaphor of "endless possibilities" is more a foreclosure, one that discourages "someplace else," and that could easily aim at the destruction of open access to "brands," no less information, outside the "ownership" of AOL/Time Warner's control (which will extend from dialup access to the CNN version of world news). Afterall, AOL is already a closed system filtering and managing information and cannot be understood as championing the web as a "mass medium," but as a service providing a thematized internet environment , much like Time Warner's reductively thematized approach to news in the severely limited recent versions of Time Magazine or the astonishingly reduced coverage of international news on CNN. Nevertheless, "integrated consumers" will no doubt provide the audience for the kind of short-circuited cul-de-sac of an all purpose mass medium promoting a worn content base leftover from the 20th century. Of course the preposterous idea that one can merely buy a pertinent content base is hardly much more than a reactionary idea couched in rhetorical excess. To speak of another in a long series of media mega-mergers as "revolutionary" is either haplessly ignorant or arrogantly pompous, despite the financial spectacle of the transaction!
More disconcerting than the obvious issues raised by the linking of content and portals, is the more portentous centralization of network information services that run parallel to the nascent open source movement. With obviously powerful influence over the access technologies (cable), interface technologies (Netscape, Instant Messenger), and powerful leverage over content (news, financial information, music, book publishing), the opportunities for an open network are clearly limited by such enormous consolidations. It is abundantly clear from the Microsoft antitrust case that such leveraging undermines effective innovation. But the stakes in the proposed AOL/Time Warner merger are not about operating systems and browsers, but about how content resources will find their way into the public sphere. The danger, as even Bagdikian concluded in 1983 is that "irresponsibly excessive profits will continue to weaken the vitality of a crucial institution," and that "glib financial manipulators will repeat more pious speeches even as their media treat the public mind with contempt."