From Print to New Media: the Acceleration, Dissemination and Disintegration of Authority

The general compression of time and space that has accompanied the onset and maturing of techno-scientific modernity has run in tandem with the emergence of the printing press a few centuries ago as well as the recent materialization of the new media. On the surface, this compression allows for an ever-wider reach and an ever-quicker reproduction of information, in turn giving weight to the utopian dream of a fortification of mankind’s technological power under late-capitalism. Using the works of various continental philosophers to shed light on this situation, this article will nonetheless claim that such a rationalist dream relies on the mistaken notion that meaning is inherent in information, and that the dissemination of information as such ensures the spread of meaningful existence. Since meaning and authority only ever emanate in conjunction with the historical loci of their ideologies, this article suggests that our new media era rather sees a general decline or simulation of authority and power. We hence find ourselves in a situation in which a mistaken image of ‘meaning’ is now mechanically reproduced and accelerated, which must lead one to conclude that media content only appears as an allegory of its capitalistic form of globally distributed information. New media, as outflows of techno-capitalism, therefore all-round reproduce themselves as their own justification; all media images exceedingly seem to point towards the media themselves and their capacity for dissemination. The article with illustrate these claims by analysing examples from new media activism, as well as from continental philosophy itself. It concludes that, while technological-rational truth and its capitalist system with which it is currently intimately entwined ever more appear as the final and only authorities, their acceleration by way of the new media just as much renders them exceedingly unstable and illegitimate