Steve, newspapers and the media 1

steve de vos

 

Steve bought some newspapers and other paper media en-route for the underground station pushing them into my bag. Intending to read them on the train whilst travelling into work but once he’d sat on the bouncing and swaying train for a few minutes and was distracted by the music playing on his portable CD player and as happens more often than he cares to think about dosed off. He woke again when the train stopped undulating from side to side around Dollis Hill or maybe West Hampstead. Some half a dozen stations or so later he alighted from the train at the Angel and instead of walking directly too work went into the local Café Rouge and ordered a fruit beer, a cappuccino and an almond  croissant. It was just after 9 in the morning.

After a couple of beers he relaxed and beginning to feel more human, began reading some of the press he had bought en-route for the station. The two local papers were both as fat as almanacs, whilst the broadsheets were slim, pure and written in the terse jargon filled prose beloved of technologists, managers and businessmen. Steve put the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal aside for later and began to skim through the others.

In Belgium some eighteen year old Muslim girl had severely embarrassed the state over its inability to take the issue of her sisters’ paedophilic murder seriously.  Evidently her five year old sister had been kidnapped, abused and starved to death whilst the police had decided to accuse her father of sending his daughter back to Morocco for an arranged marriage. In Hendon trainee police constables were getting terribly confused by the use of black actors who were pretending to be traffic wardens. Post Coitial Amnesia had been afflicting New Yorkers , after sex people were more and more frequently forgetting things held in their short term memory, the most frequent instance being the forgetting of the persons name they had just had sex with. Evangelical Christians had been brainwashing children in Uganda to such an extent that they were now rampaging through the north of the country killing any non-Christians who were not living in accordance with the ten commandments. Right wing political extremists in Italy had again used grenades against various regional government offices. The winner of the Perot prize for computing science was a Dr Paul Taylor of Columbia University (New York), he'd been awarded the prize for his work in standardising protocols for direct human computer interfacing. Steve ignored all those sections of the papers dealing with the sex lives, jealousies and other eternal phantasies about the rich. He also didn't bother to look at those pages that were dedicated to how many kilos had been pressed by whom, how fast humans were currently running over specified distances, nor about how many round balls had been kicked between white painted sticks. He also, on principle ignored the stories about young girls who had been turned into outboard motors and dancing fish by caring parents. The local press suffered from the usual total lack of content, being full of banal pictures and advertisements. He wondered, in the process looking extremely vague, why so many people wanted to work in the media given what was actually produced rather than what they pretended to desire. The waiter, who had seen Steve in the bar quite often wandered over and said ‘hello’ they chatted idly for a few minutes before he had to go off and serve a few tourists. Steve returned to reading page 12 which had a column on the work of that ‘outstanding  proponent of the latest philosophy - Doctor Gardner’. The treatise was entitled ‘World without stress’. Gardner was arguing that things were inevitably getting better and that the new media were the superb instruments of this change. In the evening thirty nine million people who were living in arranged marriages were reaffirming their vows in the in front of a far eastern religious potentate, evidently he was close to death and this was a second generation reaffirmation of family values, presumably so that he could feel that his existence had not been in vain.

He wondered how or when the representations in the media had become mere simulations, how and when had they transformed from the representations of the real into representations of unreal simulated events.

 

Steve de Vos - London  03/16/98