On European Union's Transition towards Lisbon Treaty

It is difficult to miss the point that the multi-year drama over the approval of the Lisbon treaty by the member-states of the European Union was more about a collision of the badly understood institutional change of the EU and the popular perception of what this involves for each member country in terms of its positioning within the larger structure of relations. Indubitably, the EU gains it its overall influence in internal and external affairs through the very fact of becoming better governed and coordinated that the election of its president and foreign minister only weakly signifies. The effects of the change will be seen only later when the reorganized and still reforming itself EU commences on a track of transformation that has taken a coal and steel agreement as its starting point. It is clear that any offers of state-like symbols for the EU meets with stiff resistance yet. However, the Lisbon treaty by preserving the institutional moorings of the constitutional agrrement proffered earlier on for the approval by the EU's nations still ensures the forward momentum for the further institutionalization of the EU as a single actor capable of concerted course of action, be it internally or externally. Consequently, it should raise the stakes for closer cross-border cooperation within the Union, for the benefits of such coalition building would have immediate impact for accumulation of power within the from now on more effective and influential EU.

A Chatting Age Morphing into a Digital Blogosphere

It's strage that the pressure to be verbal has brought the blogosphere to maturity that challenges the assumptions of the newspaper, television and literature age with blogs, youtubes and e-books that seem to apply the same kind of pressure on the producers of content with the means of distribution and access eclipsing the original structure of relations. Its seems that another revolution is underway - that of the free content sweeping away the assumptions that the paid-for content has made possible for the last two hundred years or so. When newspapers and magazines hardly offer anything more complicated and the next blog post can aspire to be, when a wealth of special publication projects fills ever more niches, when audiences break down to the micro level of individual person, and when big corporations might in the near future offer exit strategies to individual content producers rather than companies, the playing field of the mass media as we know if may be heading for another capitalist shake-up that might leave the English-speaking public sphere at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other language and cultural environments where relative marginality, cultural traditions and institutional set-up will let a new arrangements of media providers and consumers to arise.

Sensibility, Addiction and Digitality: Perspectives on Being Post-Digital

From Negroponte's Being Digital we have moved into a whole different period of being post-digital with predictably short time span that made it possible to declare a new post-periodization to set in. Not honored with a theoretical terminology of its own, digital capitalism grows at a steep pace even in the days of one of the deepest economic crisis of last century and possibly of this, of this is only a beginning of tendencies that take shape. What in the economic world is called a new normal of economic conjuncture appears to have its pendant in the psychological new normal of addictive sensibility, addictive environments and addictive digitality that come into representative shapes in art exhibitions, computer games, amusement parks and historical districts that rest increasingly on digital media, caffeinated drinks and aesthetic sensibility to get their message across our increasingly distractive environments of instant communication, information overload, and nomadic lifestyles. These dimensions become ever more definitive as cities all over the world put ever increasing numbers of coffee shops on the maps of their flagship airports, art districts and upscale downtowns, ever thicker Wi-Fi network coverage and computer infrastructure into their daily operation, ever more money into art projects, museums and events, and ever more effort into fighting addictions to substances engendering dependencies strong and weak.

Runaway and Uncontrollable as a Defining Feature of This Century

The sad and fascinating feature of our times is that an increasing number of things that make up an inseparable part of our everyday lives is out of our control. From Google mail, internet applications, fossil energy, and risk estimations to our own selves. The irony of the situation is that both the trappings of modernity that surround us have come of age somewhere between 19th and 20th century, and therefore are not new or exciting in themselves. To this adds a seemingly subterranean shift in our self-perception, self-representation and self-development that we try but not always succeed to control. Indeed, decades if not centuries of development of social and human sciences do threated to reduce humans to nothing much than bundles of more or less idiosyncratic reactions that invariably follow same probability laws that do large collections of bees, animal herds and plain random samples. Economies of scale march forward, offer us ever cheaper and perfect material world, and put increasing premium on ephemeral and unstable factors. If to change ones sense of self is as easy as taking a medication, downloading a software and receiving a therapy session, then the core of our decision making power also shifts from within the sphere of our life-world into the non-human systems that surround us and that increasingly take lead in how we spend our time, how we perceive ourselves and how our moods are swayed. Cinema as an essentially a scientific and scholarly instrument can be a case in point.

Through the Looking Glass into the Second Life

Had Alice that got enticed to follow the white rabbit in a vest with a pocket clock into the Wonderland come of age in our epoch she not only would make a pretty wizened old lady but also be playing with the Second Life environments to get an after-taste of her long past childhood experiences of exploring a world that strangely resembled a dream. It is not just that I am trying to get at a root of what makes Second Life so attractive and engrossing, as actually any well-made game that is sold by the dozen in the shopping malls side by side with gaming consoles, but also my totally surprised realization that not only game-like environments can have a chance in the adult world but also that even a plain computing set-up can be enough to let one enjoy what the virtual reality has to offer. It gives me a pause not only about the gaming consoles that definitely come close to being micro-supercomputers for home use, since that is the capacity that the sophisticated games demand to run smoothly, but also these possibilities to become involved intensely and intimately in the hybrid environment that consists of stable hardware set-up, powerful internet infrastructure and software layers that make the whole prestidigitatorial trick possible. Daily magic of high technology.