Juni Remember the cartoon-race between the tortoise and the hare? Remember who provoked the race, who was so confident of winning, who took his adversary for granted and in derision and whose only capital was -true!
Remember who won?! Remember how? Again: remember how the tortoise won? Now what if we could detect this same strategy with the old and the new media? What if we could spot many lookalike 'old media' along the way to the future, that is! But enough of rhetorical questions. My point is, that there is a difference between fast and too fast and that maybe a slowdown isn't so bad after all. And since we are here to discuss science, knowledge and culture, I will start with Hannah Arendt's opinion about it all.
She says that "in a conflict between the individual and society, the last man to stay in a mass society seems to be the artist" 1 -- precisely the one who has created the originals copied by mass society. In she already saw it coming, the sale of values Ausverkauf der Werte. Postmodernism cultivated a quite unique approach to art, and the chief method seems to have been the one of recycling, of turning towards past creations and reproducing them in a frenzy of parody and pastiche.
And all this without the feeling that there is a strong, real and concrete reference point with regard to which we can consider past creations: time is dissolved in a dominant intertextuality, art becomes substance of art.
All this leads to the very much talked about issue of the relationship between reality and art, between original and copy, between object and imitation. Highly interesting from this point of view, beyond the strictly literary and artistic analysis, is an examination of the contemporary phenomenon of the mass media, seen as the realm where the boundary between reality and fiction tends to become fluid.
