Conclusion

In this book, I have concerned myself largely with the intensification of premediation after 9/11, as a response to and defense against the media shock that followed the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center both in the United States and in the globalized mediasphere. Premediation, I have argued, pre-existed the events of 9/11, but intensified in response to those events, both in relation to the Bush doctrine of pre-emption and in relation to the concomitant shift in print, televisual, and networked news media from a focus on the immediacy of the present and recent past to a focus on the pre-mediacy of the future, the liveness of futurity. In this conclusion I want briefly to consider the functioning of premediation beyond 9/11, the ways in which premediation has continued, and will continue, to function in areas not directly related to 9/11 and the pre-emptive War against Terror. Over the past couple of years, heading into and moving beyond the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first US president of color, I have been tracking the workings of premediation in print, televisual, and networked news media. I want to conclude the book with three examples of premediation in US media beyond 9/11: Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, both of which made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico in September 2008; the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009; and the so-called “Twitter revolution” in Iran.