45 Revolutions Per Minute (media history on heavy rotation)

Armin Medosch — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:43:25 +0000

This text riffs on the theme of revolutions thereby referring less to the political act of one class wrestling power from another one but rather to cycical motions caused by the interplay of industrial, scientific, cultural and political motive forces. This approach challenges the prevailing viewpoint according to which class struggle has been replaced by media technologies as the subject of history in technologically advanced free-market democracies. Instead, it tries to develop a more complex understanding of the forces that shape history by working out the dialectical relationship between technological rationality as a means of power and domination and as a means of human emancipation at the same time.

Preface

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:56:08 +0000

My earliest radio memories go back to my grandmother's living room/kitchen. In this two bed room flat in a social housing estate in Graz in the 1960ies radio was the dominant medium. Every day during lunchtime the whole family would listen to an hour long news programme on Austrian state radio ORF. Austrian politics as well as world affairs broke into the domestic reality of our kitchen through this apparatus: The Cuban crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedy's, the Vietnam war, the war in Palestine, the political awakening of Muhammed Ali and the student's revolt.

The Next Layer - 45RPM

45 Revolutions Per Minute (media history on heavy rotation)

Preface