http://dare.uva.nl/document/171928
Catastrophe is the unexpected interruption that television's realism of temporal continuity cannot assimilate, at least not immediately. Rather than the regulated, modulated punctuality of news flashes and ads for the newest, hottest commodity, catastrophe on television inflicts a traumatic shock resistant to the ideology of liveness, of which the loss of signal is the most disastrous. In the pre-programmed and minutely calculated flow of television, only when the signal is unexpectedly broken, lost, or terminated can it really be immediate, instantaneous, truly 'live' or 'direct'. The condition that guarantees television's referential connection to events is in fact its failure to broadcast at all.
Egypt goes off the digital map as authorities unplug the country entirely from the internet ahead of protests:
ReplyDeletehttp://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/2011128796164380.html