In the shift from modernity to postmodernity, our world image is experiencing a sea change, from one sustained by a narrative-like, cinematic perspective on the entire world to one read-up by search engines, characterized by databases and interfaces. Amid this change, the Japanese otaku lost the grand narrative in the 1970s, learned to fabricate the lost grand narrative in the 1980s (narrative consumption), and in the 1990s, abandoned the necessity for even such fabrication and learned simply to desire the database (database consumption). Roughly speaking, such a trend may be surmised from Ōtsuka’s critical essay and my own observation. Figure 11 shows the difference between narrative consumption and database consumption. Figures 11a and 11b correspond to the aforementioned Figures 3a and 3b, respectively.
(emphasis mine)
Azuma, Hiroki. Japan's Database Animals. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
During the course of the twentieth century, this media had become increasingly a question of the industrial exploitation of the time of consciousness. This was not a matter of some monstrous evolution through which a “schematics” would migrate outside consciousness: consciousness has never been self-consciousness other than in being projected outside itself. But this era of information industries, and especially of the analogic and numeric technologies making it possible, this exteriorized and materialized consciousness became a function of the manipulations of the flux of consciousness and of mass projections such that, purely and simply, the annihilation of self-consciousness through its exteriorization became a possibility for the masses of-consumers of products and industrial lifestyles dedicated to world markets: this gave rise to the possibility of a homogenizing synchronization of consciousnesses through temporal audiovisual objects that quickly overran national and geographic boundaries, since the numerical is not constrained in the same way as radio broadcasting.
The nascent critique of this manipulation synchronizing consciousnesses during the age of audiovisual and temporal objects and mass-audience industries cannot and must not be a mere denunciation of the “de-naturing” of consciousness by cinema, but on the contrary the highlighting of the fact that consciousness functions just like cinema, which has enabled cinema (and television) to take it over. Consequently, the critique of cinema and television as social phenomena that could destroy consciousness itself (this is the claim of “spiritual ecology”) calls for a new and different critique of consciousness, as a re-working of the Kantian project.
The “general equivalent” (i.e., money), as the basic requirement for capital and for a market in which, through the culture industries, the time of consciousness has itself become merchandise, is a condition of the general equivalence of primary-secondary time in its tertiary, manipulable, storable, exchangeable, and thus saleable, spatializations. A great weakness of Marx’s project is that he did not think through this capitalistic question of retentions, especially within the context of an age of numeric culture industries that would become the very sector controlling the industrial future in general-whether it is called the “new economy” or not.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3. Stanford University Press, 2011.