THE YES MEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE INFORMATION ... - Index of

economics, or the constant barrage of “new!, exciting!, better!” proliferates the fragmentation of
our consumer society’s already shortened attention span, what David Antin refers to as living in
“television time,” the condition of a fragmented attention span brought on by consumer
culture. 125 Though Antin’s theory is almost thirty years old, the fragmentation of attention spans
in the United States and worldwide remains a problem. Today, instead of “television time,” we
have what might be called “net time.” A scenario built out of the Internet and instant information
era, net time refers to that condition of “allatonceness” described by McLuhan in The Medium is
the Massage. 126 “‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village. . .a
simultaneous happening.” 127 The consumer is not so much a participant in his daily affairs as he
is a receptacle of constant, instant, one-way information flow, on the Internet, the radio, even
billboards on the Interstate as well as on television. The idealistic notion of television as a
utopian instrument of two-way information flow has been pondered by Marshall McLuhan. In
1989, McLuhan opined that “In the one-way distributive mode, television – if it remains in the
125 Simon Penny, “Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace,”in Critical Issues
in Electronic Media, ed. by Simon Penny (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 47-74. Penny
defines “consumer commodity economics.”; David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,”in
Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. by John G. Hanhardt (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press,
distributed by Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Layton, Utah, 1986), 147-166. Antin defines “Television time:” Television
programs are built up from 30-second intervals, so that during the course of a half-an-hour program, the viewer is
bombarded by several non-related presentations.
126 Nettime, located on the web at http://www.nettime.org, was founded in 1995 and is not just a mailing list, but
“an effort to formulate an international, networked discourse that neither promotes a dominant euphoria (to sell
products) nor continues the cynical pessimism, spread by journalists and intellectuals in the ‘old’ media who
generalize about ‘new’ media with no clear understanding of their communication aspects.” Nettime is available in
seven languages.
127 McLuhan and Fiore, 63.
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