This is not exactly the most typical media critique in the philologies. Horkheimer and Adorno's chapter on the Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception still seems to be read as the suitable description of our current cultural landscape. The technologies which, in their view, make 'man' possible also make possible the literal end of mankind in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In contrast to the Frankfurt School's pessimistic assessment, one has the technological positivism of media theorist Norbert Bolz's remark: "The face-to-face conversation does not function better than a teleconference. On the contrary, the more technological the communication is, the more progress communication is making."

I don't want to tie myself down with the question, apocalypse now or not. I think Dialectic of Enlightenment is quite clear on that point. Horkheimer and Adorno treat Goebbels' war propaganda and Hollywood propaganda as two facets of the same phenomenon. One is military and the other commercial, but the authors examine them as parallel aspects. That's the appalling thing about the book. But it also makes sense because it establishes a sort of system theory. It would be nonsense to say that the technological media are all fatal and apocalyptic because the apocalyptic dangers which we constantly activate and engage are not only provoked by the media but can also be discovered by them. For instance, no one would know about the hole in the ozone without the media. On the one hand, we're probably the first humans to have torn a hole in the ozone — maybe men in the ice age did too, we don't know — while computers, on the other hand, are the one tool with which we can describe and analyze the ozone layer. Without the computer we wouldn't know what an ozone layer is.

Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the technological media as the tools of Apollonian control, or instrumentalized reason, is decidedly lop-sided: they refuse to acknowledge the Dionysian aspect of the new media as anything other than self-destructive. You know the line from Tommy: "...that deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball." Well, it's still not clear to me what happens, in your version of history as media history, to the old project which relies on the Dionysian 'revolutionary forces' inherent in a medialized body?

I've always liked playing pinball. It's a way of acquiring quicker reflexes. The discovery made by Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond showed that the nerves are the slowest electrical connections on Earth. Some ten meters per second, and no faster, which is why a driver's reaction time, 0.1 seconds, is so slow. And that's perhaps also why you have to train on pinball and other machines, in a technologically advanced society or culture....