Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Marie-Claude Sicard

Medias as complex systems

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ABSTRACT

Their name says it all: medias stand between the world and us, as almost everything we know and speak of come from them, beginning with political and social issues. How do they work ?

By pretending they are our mirrors - which of course they are not -  thus mechanically creating what Girard calls a ‘copy crisis’ (crise des doubles ) and a collective disorder. This disorder wouldn’t be so dangerous if we kept in mind that :  

¨ Medias are not only information or entertainment companies, each one of them is a brand, and as such, leading a war against each other : n° 5 desiring n°4’s share of market, n° 4 n°3’s and so on, thus imitating each other’s recipe for success. The result : a confusing whirlpool of the ( more or less ) same messages.  

¨ As complex systems, the medias themselves are vulnerable to « initial conditions », with inputs coming from their shareholders, the audience, random events, new technologies and their own sense of identity.  

¨ Without any ‘good’ or ‘bad’ purposes, they also develop « strange attractors » around people, events or ideas, one of them precisely being the’ Identity’ issue.  

¨ By doing so, they unintentionaly put face to face:  

-A popular but weak and false idea of what ‘identity’ means, rooted in an old platonician pattern flourishing on our disastrous postmodern narcissism.

-Strong identities clearly built as such first by brands, ( on which the medias financially rely for their survival ), and by all those who follow the ‘brand building’ model to give them an equally strong and clear identity ( politicians, religious activists and so on).

¨ As a logical consequence,  people (be they individuals or small/large groups) mislead by the medias, see themselves as stuck in an ever-ending crisis, meanwhile some public actors appear stronger and much more clear about who they are and what they want.

¨ Adding to that unbalanced connection the fact that one of the secret of influence lies in the ability to start and maintain a conflict (which cannot come from weak identities), and the result is a complex system (western societies) unable to metabolize or take control over another complex system (the medias).

But it’s not hopeless, if we overcome the old cliché that the medias are the Bad manipulating the Poor and the Helpless: people manipulate the media as well, even if they don’t know (or don’t want to know) it, they are part of, not strangers to, the systems they live in, as was demonstrated by the Palo Alto so called ‘Invisible College’.

So if intellectuals are to be of any help when dealing with social, cultural or religious violence, it’s by  explaining again and again why we’re all trapped in the mimetic circle, all the more as it is now doubled by the medias, which we can no more live withou – the only exit being knowledge, even of what we refuse to face: that we’re throwing stones to ourselves when we put the blame on the medias, for we made them what they are, as well as the societies in which they are now inextricably mingled.