All new technologies in our century--film, radio, television, 16mm film,video--have been greeted with equal measures of hope and despair, of optimism and pessimism. The digital simply followed these same 20th century historical patterns of technological innovation and diffusion.
Erik Barnouw (1)

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas were words are inadequate. . . . . Not only personal experiences, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lies, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents.
John Berger (2)

I. INTRODUCTION: AMNESIA AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Currently, much intellectual and political debate over the concepts of the transnational and the national has arisen as the new world media order reshapes the globe (Time Warner/CNN, ABC/Capital Cities, Bertellsman) and as nationalist passions dismember its Others in brutal ways (Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, China, Kosovo, Chiapas).(3) Arjun Appadurai has advanced this deadly relationship between globalization and genocide: "In ethnocidal violence, what is sought is just that somatic stabilization that globalization--in a variety of ways--inherently makes impossible."(4) Zillah Eisenstein puts it even more succinctly. In her book Hatreds, she irrevocable traces how globalization rethreads ethnic violence into a gendered and racialized hatred that is fueled by cannibalizing its others, a fantasmatic construction of otherness.(5)

In economic terms, the transnational era refers to the period of global capitalism where capital knows no home: manufacturing increasingly disperses, labor becomes ever more mobile, amorphous networked communities disavow body-time corporate loyalties, corporations earn more money than 95% of all nations, mergers across industries create convergences that redefine media economics, and information has come to matter more than bodies or things.(6)