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Epilogue: “Berliner Fenster”
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
263 For a number of years now, Berlin subway authorities have been successful in distracting passengers from the underground’s absence of distractions. Similar to what can be experienced in urban transport systems in other German cities such as Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, and Fürth, Berlin subway users today will find almost all of the capital’s 1,200 subway cars equipped with several dual television monitors, each mounted under each car’s ceiling and spread out across the wagon in reasonable viewing distance. Linked to a wireless system for digital multimedia broadcasting, these monitors—simply called “Berliner Fenster” (Berlin windows)—primarily display the latest news items as edited by the Berliner Kurier, with the inevitable interruption of commercials and selected event announcements. The presentation of news follows a highly standardized template. Not only does this template break up all the news that’s fit to be displayed into a number of clearly separated groupings such as world events, domestic politics, local issues, the arts, and sports, but it is also designed such that within each of these categories a total of three consecutive items can be presented, whereby bulleted text with alluring headings dominate the left screen and eye-catching images attract the viewer’s attention on the right. Notwithstanding the fact that the system can easily handle the streaming of large amounts of data, so far most of the news has been presented in the form of still images, one screen basically serving as the other screen’s visualized soundtrack, as it were. Commercials and event calendars, on the other hand, freely use moving pictures and animated designs across both screens, yet the Epilogue “Berliner Fenster” Framing Attention 264 intentional absence of sound—chosen not because of technological difficulties but for the sake of passenger comfort—here often produces rather comical side effects and lapses of attention. As theorist of silent film Hugo Münsterberg already knew, whereas we have no problem consuming still images silently, moving images seem to require sound and music to keep spectators alert and prevent their interest from drifting off to something else.1 According to the company that has installed and is marketing “Berliner Fenster,” since the year 2000, the displays have served the purpose of “shortening the passengers’ travel time with the help of a varied program for the capital [ein abwechslungsreiches Hauptstadt-Programm].”2 There is no need to read long statistical surveys in order to realize that this new electronic window indeed captures people’s attention. A brief ride on any of the subway lines will do, as we witness the vast majority of eyes—in an effort to look at anything at all and thus escape what in chapter 4 I characterized as the subway’s melancholic, introverted and fogged-up gaze—trying to capture a glimpse of the current program. Though most cell phones and handheld computers will remain entirely able to receive data transmissions even in the deepest of Berlin’s subway tunnels, it is as if—in our era of compulsive connectivity and instantaneous accessibility—the system’s dual monitors offer an umbilical cord enabling passengers to stay in touch with whatever they consider the world outside.To look at the screen is to prevail over what made the Weimar underground a poetic heterotopia of the first order: a (non)place whose dark windows suspended the ordinary perception of space and time above ground. To follow the news on the dual monitors becomes a way not only of reinserting the authority of sight into the underground but also to incorporate the underground’s unsettling alterity into the circuits of our information age. No matter how dull and mindless the news, what the screens offer are electronic windows that keep us from delving into our own dullness and fatigue. Rather than veer into dysfunctional drift, we attach our eyes to the monitors’ drift in the hopes of staying connected and not stumbling over our own feelings of lack, failure, and disattachment . Wouldn’t it be foolish to resist these windows’ lure? The proliferation of the “Berliner Fenster” during the first years of the twenty-first century has coincided with the ascension of a new word in the German language, namely the term Zeitfenster (time window), approximately equivalent to the English timeframe.3 To speak of a “time window” is to identify a clearcut span of action and possibility. It is to define a distinct frame in which certain events are likely to happen, desired activities are...