VIDEOBRIDGE INTERNATIONAL

A reference from the World Wide Web
PROGRAMME NOTE: VideoBridge International is a commercial web site, located in Cambridge, MA. It maintains a dedicated video link with Moscow. Through this link, it offers to users of all kinds--educational as well as commercial--a (self-proclaimed) reliable communication link with Russia. This commercial venture in America illustrates how far the world has gone in less than a decade after the end of the Cold War, facilitated by the information revolution. It is a small but graphic example of the movement from a closed power system to an open, global system. As such it shows us the conditions of late capitalism. We find an unhierarchical, rhizomatic arrangement unrestricted by statist boundaries and local cultures.

The VideoBridge International also raises an interesting theoretical dilemma. A dominant note in postmodern discussion shows us the particular, the local, the textured immediate, as opposed to the general, the universal, the global totality. The pressure of electronic globalization, exemplified here, seems to represent a contradiction of that dominant note. We reconcile the seeming contradiction, perhaps, by acknowledging that the processes of immanence, as we see them explicated in Deleuze and Guattari, are not simple. Flow and counterflow may be simultaneous; and there is no teleological pattern or outcome to be sought.

VideoBridge International, as an international phenomenon, sheds light on postmodern praxis as manifested in the business and corporate sphere. It is also an illustration of the effects of applied science and technology on the development of international capitalism.


VideoBridge International.


20 March 1997
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