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The Interrelation between Broadcast and Network Communication 93
that bunkering in is about something really simple: being sick of others and
trying to shelter the beleaguered self in a techno-bubble. (75)

According to the Krokers, such an electronic self becomes incapable of
negotiating a pre-virtual public world and becomes politically tuned out
and socially awkward:

Suffering electronic amnesia on the public and its multiple viewpoints,
going private means that the electronic self will not be in a position to max-
imize its interests by struggling in an increasingly competitive economic
field. (74)

Denied a political conduit, the electronic self is reactive only – often sway-
ing between fear and anger:

Frightened by the accelerating speed of technological change, distressed by
the loss of disposable income, worried about a future without jobs, and
angry at the government, the electronic self oscillates between fear and
rage. Rather than objectify its anger in a critical analysis of the public situ-
ation, diagnosing, for example, the deep relationship between the rise of
the technological class and the loss of jobs, the electronic self is taught by
the media elite to turn the ‘self’ into a form of self-contempt. (76)

Bunkering in, which becomes a kind of survival strategy, tends to narrow
the electronic self’s world of control to ‘whining about the petty inconve-
niences’ rather than broad scales of social and political issues. ‘Bunkering
in knows no ethics other than immediate self-gratification’ because its
outerworldly contact has been de-realized. This disengagement created by
the architecture of the processed digital world makes it ‘hip to be dumb,
and smart to be turned off and tuned out’ (76).

The psychological war zone of bunkering in and dumbing down is the actual
cultural context out of which emerges technological euphoria. Digital reality
is perfect. It provides the bunker self with immediate, universal access to
a global community without people: electronic communication without
social contact, being digital without being human, going on-line without leav-
ing the safety of the electronic bunker. The bunker self takes to the Internet
like a pixel to a screen because the information superhighway is the biggest
theme park in the world: more than 170 countries. And it’s perfect too for
dumbing down. Privileging information while exterminating meaning, surfing
without engagement, digital reality provides a new virtual playing-field for
tuning out and turning off. (77)

In the Krokers’ depiction, those features that are attributed to the TV age –
cocooning, the bunker ego, the passive couch potato, etc. – find them-
selves multiplied in the context of the greater array of electronic bunkers
which provide a new platform of engagement/disengagement in social
life.