In this week's reading response, I would like to respond to Hans Enzensberger's abstractly-titled essay, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media." In particular, I found the fourth, fifth---- sections of his essay to be of interest. In the fourth section - Cultural Archaism in the Left Critique - I was struck by how the societal conceptions of media have changed over time. For example, I was intrigued by the fact that while "[new media is] felt to be an immense threatening power; because for the first time [it] present[s] a basic challenge to bourgeois intelligentsia, the computer was a favorite target for aggression during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley" (264).

In the fifth section - Democratic Manipulation - I intrigued by the second paragraph on page 265 that says "Thus every use of the media presupposes manipulation. ... There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator" (265). First off, I agreed with the initial argument that all forms of media presupposes manipulation, such that the question becomes by whom, not whether, media has been manipulated. I find this to be particularly true in the current mass media market in which politically motivated individuals on both the right and left of the political spectrum have decried various mass media outlets of blatant political bias. Similar to Enzensberger's underlying argument, the important issue is not whether a given media source has been manipulated or politically biased, but whether the manipulation or political bias fundamentally undermines the facts and argument provided by the mass media outlet. For example, I relevant issue is not whether the New York Times is fundamentally to the political left of Fox News, but whether such manipulation or political bias fundamentally undermines the credibility of facts and arguments presented by the news source.

Overall, I was struck by how societal conceptions of media (new and old) have changed over the years. At times, media has been (or perceived to be) an integral part of the bourgeois intellectual fortress, and at other times it has allowed for political mobilization of revolutionary political forces that are at odds with the bourgeois intellectual fortress. Given the ever-changing nature of media, I am intrigued to see how the current new media 2.0 influences older (but still societally relevant forms of media) and changes the nature of the political discourse within the US and the world.