Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 28 No. 1, 2008.
Original scientific paper
Copy-paste Culture. From "Mechanical Bride" to copy-paste theories
Sead Alić
Abstract
The awareness about the reproductiveness of artwork (that Benjamin used to write about) led us from the field of discussion about artwork to the aesthetization of the everyday (including politics), to a society of spectacles, to McDonaldization and the Disneyesque Americanization of the entire world culture.
Multiplication became a seductive repetition, setting up new relations of cultural and other addiction. It seems that in a world of “plurals” there are laws that define today’s man more than philosophy is (usually) prepared to detect. The strength and convincingness of epics is sublimated into little slogans, used to manipulate public opinion and hordes of information consumers shaped by the mass media. Slogans are really probes with which global corporations conquer the structures of opinion and speech. The multiplication of advertising messages, political slogans, warmongering sentences and spectacular meaninglessness – ends up in a copy/paste culture, which is, unaware of mechanisms and technologies, slowly but surely starting to take its place on the store-shelves of global marketers. McLuhan’s work "Mechanical Bride" was the first to seriously consider the meaning that the seemingly common advertising slogans can have for the shaping of a conscious and unconscious position of the consumers. By analyzing his approach in this less known work and comparing it with certain suggestive modern phenomena in the Croatian and world public – we outline a context, which should not be eft out of the sight of the modern philosophic thought.
Keywords
Copy-paste; media; culture; Marshall McLuhan
Hrčak ID:
23142
URI
Publication date:
7.4.2008.
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