In the event of an emergency, you would have been notified of what? i don't remember.
Do you?
Some set of instructions would have been given.
These tests used to be regular occurrences on the TV - least ways in North America, accompanied by an irritating (perhaps the point) sin wave tone.
A little googling shows that this system was instigated by Kennedy in 63.
It's an icon of cold war. Another shared cultural marker of a particular time and community. It's been how long? a generation? since the wall fell? young adults in their late 20s, born after the fall of the Berlin Wall, have no direct knowledge of the culture of fear over global nuclear devastation.
What does a film like War Games look like to a post Wall Fall person, where wee border towns like Grand Forks North Dakota are pictured on a direct nuclear flight path for anihilation? For Canadians on the other side of the border, Grand Forks of that time (and slightly more south, Fargo (same as the movie)) were Mall Stops for weekend cross border shopping sprees, where the goal was to hit Target, Kmart and find deals and products only available south of the 49th and CHEAP. Now there's walmart in Canada, so not so much incentive. but that's another story. But there they were. In holiwood and russia: strategically significant malls. The fall out would hit home. We were in the flight path of global nuclear annihilation. This is a test. This is only a test. It's a bonding thing.
What are the icons of cultural communion in the post cold-war error. It took a generation to develop it - the War on Drugs perhaps a pilot test for the globalization of "evil." But now, an icon of globalized engagement, in the era of the internet, is the "war on terror," where there are no walls to fall, where borders are irrelevant, where communication is networked, elusive.
Ideology on fire. Secret. Peer to peer. Distributed. privileged.
is there more to be wrought from the analogy of P2P, globalization and that the cultural divider of our time would be "terror" of the fleeting, unpredictable, rather than the identifiable, vast, specific arsenals and silos of hardware?
Posted by mc at March 1, 2005 02:53 PM