The Society of Spectacle.

If we can understand anything about what Yaron Ezrahi means by "outformatics" in Western society (as presented in his chapter "Science and the political imagination in contemporary democracies"), then it should be the predominance of spectacle as a key orienting political fact. The force of what happened on September 11th, 2001, came not only through the destruction of key Western landmarks in New York, but through the hyper-mediation of the event. The terrorists won not because the U.S. failed in their military response, but because the U.S. broadcast those terrible images over and over and over again. The victory was won over the U.S. by purely symbolic means. The fear and anxiety of future attacks arrested the entire country and halted the economy; the attacks were not on gas lines, power plants or trade routes (but they could have been... right?).

In the transition from wisdom to knowledge to information to outformation the role of political imagination, or, more appropriately, ideology, takes on an increasingly important organizing role in Western liberal democracies according to Ezrahi. He is quick to the note that there is problem a with this in terms of the constraints put upon democratic impulses by a media-saturated, consumer culture. Nonetheless, Ezrahi still champions the decentralized potential supposedly inherent to communications technology and the images they transmit. The reason Ezrahi and others think more optimistically about information and outformation is because these forms are stripped of its "theoretical, formal, logical and mathematical layers and made to fit quick, often "do-it-yourself" tasks and operations" (p.257). The presentation of this knowledge becomes matter-of-fact and tends to be accepted at face value. Wikipedia is a perfect example of an information apparatus that has hugely contested problems with accuracy, but which so many people rely upon because it seems so neutral and democratic (whatever that means). Ezrahi warns about this aspect of information, noting that the normative commitments are largely hidden from immediate view.

Outformation, which might be better framed by a semiotics of media images, is freed from the constraints of language yet still communicates, or better affects us. The examples we are given by Ezrahi are unfortunately entirely ones from mass media. These spectacles are "low-cost realities" that, in Noam Chomsky's words, manufacture our consent to ruling power, particularly in the United States. Foucault calls these "regimes of truth," though Ezrahi is skeptical that Foucault's thesis about contemporary society being completely subject to these regimes (but, as Ezrahi doesn't note, so is Foucault). However, this image-economy drives the quick-fix demands of our media-saturated, middle-classist political era. We should be aware that many are not tech-heads or media-savvy individuals with smart phones and laptops. These are middle-class cultural forms that do not dominate many people's lives either by choice or for reasons of poverty. Nonetheless, Ezrahi is quite right to note the "decline of mass political activism" in the United States. His point omits this qualifying aspect of the statement, but given the movements today in Britain, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, etc. it is hard to believe that mass political activism is in decline. Perhaps people are finally becoming disillusioned with the illusions presented to them by the media, or perhaps they're just using the wisdom gained by their life experience.