Bundling
Mass media bundling (fascis, bundle) is a negative
concept for Vilém Flusser that harbors the
danger of totalitarian or fascist utilization of the
bundling of information. He describes as fascist
a certain form of communication, regardless
of its ideological content. For Flusser, dialogic
network structures represent an alternative
to bundling. Hence he distinguishes between
bundling and networking, between one-channel
media (mass media that follow a bundling circuit
diagram in which broadcasters send bundled
information to powerless recipients) and
two-channel media (circuit diagrams based on
setting up networks).
In his lecture “Telematik: Verbündelung oder
Vernetzung?” [Telematics: Bundling or Networking?],
Flusser applies his dialogic principle
to the emerging information society (“Verbündelung
oder Vernetzung?,” in: Bollmann, Kursbuch
Neue Medien, 1995). His method could be
called an “anthropology of the Internet”: According
to Flusser, people are nodes of relationships
that materialize only in relation to others. In this
type of construction, proximity is not a category
of spatial or temporal distance, but instead a
category of the number and intensity of the relationships
that connect people to others. Media
produce bundles transmitted by broadcasting
centers. Dialogic threads – cables, videos, etc.
– can connect the fascist bundles into networks
(“To Scatter,” in: Into the Universe of Technical
Images, 2011). Achieving that requires overcoming
the present consensus between images and
their bundled transmissions on the one hand,
and the receivers of the images on the other
hand.
Flusser presumes that the consensus between image and human being results from people’s reluctance to assemble as well as the purpose of the images to distract people. In his view this needs to be countered by the consensus of a human visual culture that carries scattering over into a new kind of assembling – and converts bundling into a dialogic network. Flusser’s goal is a utopian (democratic) and telematic information society in which networking penetrates the mass media through and through; in which the networked islands, such as computer terminals or hypertexts, are able to tear apart the bundling. Images, sounds, and information establish interrelationships that result from the growing interlinking of computers and means of telecommunication.
Original article by Angela Lammert in Flusseriana