15/11/2012 16:46 Birchall, Woodbridge & Hall — How to Do Justice to Media Specificity | ctrl-z.net.au Page 1 of 4 http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/articles/birchall-woodbridge-hall-how-to-do-justice-to-media-specificity/ How to Do Justice to Media Specificity —Or, Should This Video Be Left to Speak for Itself? Clare Birchall, Peter Woodbridge & Gary Hall Liquid Theory TV is a series of IPTV programmes produced as part of a collaboration between Clare Birchall, Peter Woodbridge and Gary Hall. IPTV, in its broadest sense, refers to technologies which use computer networks to deliver audio-visual programming. The Post-Secret State: Openness and Transparency in the Era of Gov 2.0 is the third episode in the series. The previous episodes are Liquid Theory TV (Hall, Birchall & Woodbridge, 2009) and Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ (Hall, Birchall & Woodbridge, 2010). A stress on the importance of focusing on the specificity of different technologies has been a crucial feature of many theoretical engagements with new media. In this context few advocates of media specificity can claim to having been as intellectually rigorous over as extended a period of time as Mark Poster. In his latest writing on the specificity of networked computing—an introduction to two recently translated volumes by the relatively unknown media theorist Vilém Flusser—Poster explains that, somewhat surprisingly, most of the major critical thinkers whose work provides a framework for the study of contemporary media (Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, Ernesto Laclau, Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler) have actually paid little serious attention to media culture at all (even if some have engaged with the philosophy of technology). In books such as The Mode of Information (1990), The Second Media Age (1995), What’s the Matter with the Internet? (2001) and Information Please (2006), Poster has gone to great lengths to counter this theoretical shortcoming by showing how different media— print, film, television, the Internet—constitute and organise culture and society in the West differently. Nowhere is this message conveyed more interestingly and with more force, however, than in his essay introducing Flusser’s Does Writing Have a Future? (2011) and Into the Universe of Technical Images (2011). In this relatively short essay Poster is able to demonstrate that, For Flusser, writing as a medium encourages a specific form of temporality. The medium and the character of time are particular. This suggests that each medium might have an associated, special form of temporality. Flusser’s media theory thereby accounts for the specificity of each information technology. His view contrasts sharply with Derrida’s view in the sense the latter understands the temporal logic of writing as paradigmatic for all media – indeed, for all technology. As a result, deconstruction has difficulty distinguishing between media cultures such as between writing cultures and image cultures. Bernard Stiegler finds fault with Derrida on precisely these grounds…. (Poster, 1 2