“Most recently we have the inflection point called “Reality TV,” which for accuracy’s sake should be written properly with a hyphen, Reality-TV, if for no other reason than the fact that this nomenclature signals the historically achieved inseparability of one term from the other. Today, it is possible to discern that media transformations not only affect the organization of perception, production, literary form, affect, subjective interiority, monetization, state power, the built environment (down to the molecular-genetic), and war, but also that, when taken together, this thoroughgoing reorganization of social relations on a planetary scale constitutes nothing less than a world-media system. Among other things, this system signals that we have entered into a period characterized by the full incorporation of the sensual by the economic. This incorporation of the senses along with the dismantling of the word emerges through the visual pathway as new orders of machine-body interface vis-à-vis the image. All evidence points in this direction: that in the twentieth century, capital first posited and now presupposes looking as productive labor, and, more generally, posited attention as productive of value.”
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I rather enjoyed this paragraph of Beller’s piece, as well as the paragraph before, as I think the idea that media has been transformed by the environment and by monetization is more relevant than ever before. We are living in a time when there are more different types of media that exist and will exist soon that we have become so encompassed by what was once such a separate idea is now so deeply intertwined in our reality. Technology companies and media creators alike have both been inspired by the explosion of media and content appreciation in the last decade, and whether or not this has had an impact for the better has still yet to be decided.