Welcome On The Internet, Present!
Up till now news organisations articulated actual concerns of the public, but more and more people raise their voice directly on the Internet. So say hello! to the first archive of the present.
by Mercedes Bunz
When the civil protest in Teheran in the summer of 2009 happened, we were witnessing an interesting moment: For the first time there was an archive of the present. Tons of pictures, films and messages floated the internet.
Up till a short while ago the knowledge about the present was limited to one’s personal context combined with a handy summary of the world affairs in the evening news or morning papers. We never knew much about the actual moment, while we could find detailed knowledge about WW II. in every library: How the automobile industry was doing back then; what an important role football played already for the identity of a nation; there is detailed knowledge upon the nutrition of poor children or who was an important player in the development of communication technology, which diseases haunted Europe or what the political situation in Africa was and so on. Complex data could be requested for the past, but not for the present – except you were the American president and had a swarm of experts, consultants and think tanks buzzing around you. That changed. Slowly and more or less unnoticed, the internet transformed into an archive of the present.
Slowly indeed. If you didn’t know exactly where to look for, it took at least weeks back then to find actual information on the internet. Remember, we joked about the WWW that its abbreviation stands for world wide waiting – and that included search engines. At that time the importance of your webpage was identified via links to your page, so it took weeks for a new page to crawl up to the first search result page, because at that time you actually couldn’t ping Google and say: Hello, here I am. So it wasn’t till blogs, picture and video platforms like flickr or youtube were invented, when the present got a hold of the internet. And now that these services are interconnected with facebook or twitter via the new smart mobile phones, they even create their own broadcast platform. The internet arrived in the present, which it brings to you live and direct.
Therefore the present, the attendance of an event at a certain time and a certain location, is not what it used to be: Immediacy is not any more the most intense form of perception. Today you might know more about an event, when you are actually not there, which is something we experience already, when we attend a football game: The atmosphere might be amazing, but you easily miss an important occurrence, because you simply don’t know where to look. So: Being on site doesn’t mean you are there.
Here is another example: Whoever consulted flickr, youtube, twitter, facebook and relevant blogs during the civil protests of the Iran election 2009 had a more detailed knowledge about what was going on the central streets of Teheran than any car mechanic, who lived in the outskirts.
Even though it is certain, that you can judge much better about a situation in a foreign country, if you have lived there and got to know in what special way humans, houses and social graces are organized. But since nowadays the present is accompanied by a thick layer of information you can get a hold of a lot of details. Details of people who are actually: there. Even if they have to hide and can’t reveal their identity because of political reasons, they can raise their voices in modern media to produce something one can call “a statistical truth”. A statistical truth, that can’t be denied. So being visible in modern media is sometimes more public than being out there on the streets (and sometimes not less dangerous). And raising your voice in the new public can actually be significant for all of us.
It doesn’t matter if it is about governmental decisions or the politics of certain companies: Since we live with the archive of the present everybody can search, it is very efficient to make your concerns public. Modern media, of course, do not guarantee that you win your fight, but a medial awareness of an issue produces a certain pressure, which might help your cause. So therefore it’s time to turn the old slogan upside down: Think locally, act globally. By the way, a strategy we all know from the art world. Since the local art crowd was too small to be relevant in terms of money as well as in terms of opinions, artists always produced for an international market. And this trick is now relevant for all of us.
There is a new archive of the present out there, which provides us, the public, with a more direct voice, and this archive of the present is a very powerful thing. Therefore it leaves us, of course, with new problems and questions: What can be found? What is hidden? What is deleted in that archive? Who controls the archive of the present? What are the governmental regulations and how do they affect us? Which economical investments are done and for what reasons? Which technological decisions push it in a certain direction? Or in short: What kind of archive do they produce for us, what would be the alternative we really would have wanted? Before we had to be aware, what can be heard. Now we have to be aware of what may be present.
