Bernhard Poerksen - The unleashed scandal: the end of control in the digital age

Title page

The Unleashed Scandal

The End of Control in the Digital Age

Bernhard Poerksen and Hanne Detel

Translated by

Alison Rosemary Koeck and Wolfram Karl Koeck

imprint-academic.com

Publisher information

Copyright Bernhard Poerksen and Hanne Detel, 2014

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

2014 digital version by Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Originally published in the UK by

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

Originally distributed in the USA by

Ingram Book Company,

One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086, USA

The German original was first published under the title Der entfesselte Skandal. Das Ende der Kontrolle im digitalen Zeitalter , Herbert von Halem Verlag, Kln, 2012.

English translation by

Alison Rosemary Koeck and Wolfram Karl Koeck.

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International - Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG Wort and the Brsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Cover illustration: Claudia Ott/ Grafischer Entwurf, Dsseldorf.

I. The Unleashed Scandal: An Introduction

The omnipresence of media

It is a moment of innocence and play. The story unfolds in Corfu in front of a restaurant and a holiday centre. Three boys tear across the road together with a small Greek stray dog. Two of the boys know each other from Berlin. They have come with their mothers. The youngest boy is from another city, he is seven years old. He is with his parents. The boys have all just met. One of the boys - twelve years of age - has a mobile phone. This will remain unknown until later in the evening. The three boys and the dog eventually disappear between the houses. Really nice and funny somehow the two new boys were, the youngest boy will tell his parents later that evening. They shot a little film - of him and the dog and their games. The dog had jumped up on him, had clasped his leg with his front paws and had rubbed itself against him repeatedly. Then he wanted to know what shagging meant. For they had used this very title for the film: Dog shags boy. What did it all mean? And when leaving one of the boys had called to him that he would publish it all on the Internet. Would it function as simply as all that and what did it mean?

This is a good question but difficult to answer. What would have happened if the boy had not said anything and the video of the two chance acquaintances had indeed landed on the World Wide Web? Perhaps nothing at all. Which is, by the way, most likely. The clip might simply have been swallowed up like millions of snippets of reality before and after on all the different platforms and would simply have faded away. But possibly not. And in the extreme case the seven-year-old, like many before him, might have achieved Net-fame against his will . Gary Brolsma celebrated such a success in 2004 with a 97-second clip, which he had created just for fun and for the entertainment of his friends. In it he grimaces and gesticulates to the sounds of a Romanian pop song and sings: Miya-hee, miya-hoo, miya-ho, miya-haha. Today everyone in the world knows him as the Numa Numa-Guy who is trying hard to cash in on his accidentally gained celebrity status. By November 2006, his video, according to the estimate of the British marketing firm The Viral Factory , had been accessed 700 million times.

The pudgy Canadian boy who acquired dubious fame as Star Wars Kid deserves to be mentioned here, too. In November 2002 he shot a short video, in which he imitated the swinging of the lightsabers in Star Wars with a golf ball retriever - again one of those absent-minded moments in a clumsy, inept game, which haunts him to the present day. He had accidentally left the video at his school where it was discovered by four of his classmates. In 2003, they began to distribute the clip through file sharing networks on the Internet thus making him into a first-rate Internet celebrity. Around one thousand million requests of the many video-versions circulating on the Net have allegedly been registered - with disastrous consequences for the ad-hoc imitator and his desire for privacy. He had to leave his school because he could no longer bear the constant teasing, was given private tuition, underwent psychiatric treatment, and finally, with the help of his parents, started legal proceedings against the pupils who had kick-started everything and had thus subjected him to such excessive attention. There was always someone who shouted Star Wars Kid, Star Wars Kid. It was simply unbearable, totally, he explains in an interview, still overcome with consternation. Even today only a few mouse clicks are needed to stumble on the diverse videos, hundreds of articles, and a Wikipedia entry on this hard-hit youngster.

In contrast, Matt Harding, the dancing globetrotter with his feel-good videos, met with a happier fate. He quit his job as a designer of computer games one day and went on a tour of the world. Somebody somewhere must have given him the idea to dance in front of the various sights and in the most unlikely situations (in the corridors of a Russian train, on the peak of Kilimanjaro, on a road in India) - filming everything at the same time. The resulting film that was just meant to entertain his friends and relatives, his collage of clips showing him at diverse places on earth, have by now become a sort of livelihood for him and turned his funky chicken dance for a world audience into a sort of business. Today Harding travels the world, sponsored by a bubble gum firm, supported by his girlfriend, and performs his own strange, funny, and somehow even touching dances, encouraging others to join in. He gives numerous interviews, appears at the conferences of the Bohemian digital community, has published a book in 2009 with the title Where the Hell is Matt? Dancing badly around the world - and quite obviously enjoys the good sides of a weird and completely unplanned kind of celebrity. Everything started with the publication of his video on his website and the adding of a link by a distant acquaintance of his and a few bloggers. Matt Harding: Much to my surprise, they loved it. The bad dancing seemed to disarm the most jaded of viewers and the stream of far-off locales stirred in them a sense of possibility. The overriding sentiment from the forum of commenters was a sudden desire to stop letting life pass them by. People were actually inspired.

Considering these cases, and taking into account the strange and scarcely estimable butterfly effects governing the attention economy of the Internet, the question arises what the consequences might have been for the seven-year-old boy whom his friends on Corfu instigated to play with the dog in front of their mobile phones camera. The answer can only be: there is no way of knowing. The omnipresence of digital media has created a kind of media ubiquity that nobody can escape, a novel kind of universe of visibility in which individuals are losing control of their self-constructs and their public images. Big Brother , the television show, has thus become the guiding metaphor of the media culture of our age - an expression of the fact that everybody may be observed everywhere and at all times and that it has become practically impossible to disappear from the monitors under the given medial conditions. The modern self is squatting in a container everywhere, as it were, and permanently exposed to the watchful eyes of other people. Nobody can be sure nowadays not to be seen, Markus Brauck, Isabell Hlsen, and Martin U. Mller describe the state of mind of this container-self . They may be observed drunk at the Oktoberfest and snapped by a camera phone, caught picking their noses on an underground train by bloggers, or run into the lenses of professional reality-TV: sheer presence has become the universal standard.