The chat room as a voting booth, free and secret: everyone can take on as many identities as he wants. There are hardly any careers which proceed in a straight line. Multiple careers are normal. An optional subject occupies the different, sometimes contrary social positions which society offers as an option in the course of a life. The conditioning of power of which Michel Foucault spoke, the subordination to existing patterns, seems to be in decline. Against the apparent independence of freely selectable identities or non-identities there are new constraints. Globalisation means polarisation. Social, government and regional allegiances make identity appear as an inescapable, in wartime fatal constraint.

Pictures duplicate reality – the normative power of the factual. Television pictures repeated a thousand times merge into loops of destruction. The programmes of the mass media produce symbols of collective perception and identity. Security is to be ensured by electronic surveillance, searches are conducted world-wide. Do the large number of programme particles, voices and pictures presented in the media combine all together to form a stream, a single pattern of collective identity? Does the other, the foreign, that which is perceived in the media as a threat, lead to the old friend/foe pattern of thought, and to the totalisation of a society which defines itself as pluralist and democratic?

Raoul Schrott
lyricist , novelist , author of radio plays , literary translator

Kathrin Röggla
author

SAID
author, President of the German PEN Centre

Peter Weibel
artist, media theoretician, board of ZKM

Christoph Lindenmeyer (BR)
host

BR/ZKM/intermedium 2