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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 109

through the blizzards of cultural and social detritus to the promised
land of ‘content’ or of ‘community’ with like-minded others.
Of course, the problems of information overload in the digital
mediascape are only the corollary of an obscure and complex society
that is impossible to grasp in its totality. That is why, to reiterate a
point made in the previous section, a key task for the democratic
imagination is to think through how the expert systems of mediation
on which we depend – even in the context of interactive and dialogic
media – might become more accountable and diverse, and not simply
be transcended. Even something so ostensibly unfettered by corporate
logic as the Indymedia.org network of collaborative, alternative,
grassroots news production provides a good case in point here. This is
precisely the kind of institutional experiment that, on the one hand,
challenges both the ideological frameworks and the methodologies
and organisational structures of the dominant providers (such as CNN
or BBC Online) yet, on the other hand, still demands both internal
and external scrutiny of its editorial and organisational practices, its
codes and conventions, precisely as it acquires the cachet of a major,
alternative institution – a system – to which more and more citizens
look for guidance and insight.
A second keyword for the digital age has been ‘convergence’, a
promissory vision of telecommunications, computing and the cultural
industries merging into a seamless web of information, entertainment
and communication glued together by the universal language of
binary digital code. All sorts of technical and economic obstacles
have kept the dream (and, for some, the nightmare) of seamless
convergence in the realm of ‘vapourware’. Yet we have witnessed
an unprecedented ‘networking’ of the mediascape with the rise of
digital technologies, ranging from the hyperlinked synergies pursued
by the cultural industries to the themed threads of the news sites
and discussion forums: Dan Schiller has effectively shown how the
digital mediascape can be read as the latest achievement of an always
already ‘hyperlinked’ consumer culture that works to nudge citizens
ceaselessly along commodity networks, motivating them with the
knowledge (and inducing the anxiety) that there is always more
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and better to be had. The dystopic take on digital convergence is

that fulfilment of a Baudrillardian nightmare: the proliferation of
fractured but self-sufficient simulacra in which, as consumer–citizens

logged into our bespoke networks, ears plugged with headphones or
glued to the cell phone, eyes trained on ‘me screens’ (whose function

is, precisely, to screen), we find ourselves relieved of the requirement

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