Bunker media: stories from the abundant and redundant underground

Greg Elmer and Steven J. Neville, ORCID

a) Department of Professional Communication, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada

b) Communication & Culture Program, York University, Toronto, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2024.2311914

Pages 120-139

Published online 14 March 2024

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Abstract

Media are abundant. So much so that our very identities, past, present and future, are tied – if not defined – by our personal media documents. How then can individuals and communities whose lives have gone unmediated later tell their stories? How can the ‘media scarce’ be heard and recognized? This paper turns to the cold war bunker as a site that arguably universalises the precarity of media scarcity – of being disconnected from our homes, friends, loved ones and indeed our future. Focusing on the Canadian government’s ‘Diefenbunker’, recently renovated into a Cold War museum, the paper argues that the media scarcity of underground bunker life has been kept at bay by the redundancy of bunker media, an installation that communicates the dangers of its own use. The paper concludes with a discussion of the renovated bunker, now an event hall space flush with programmes that bear little resemblance to the dystopic concrete bunker. While returning to a degree of abundance, as was the case in the 1950s, the new bunker museum displaces a redundant state-controlled bunker-media framework and global thermonuclear fallout in favour of participatory forms of play and pleasure replete with zombies, spies, and escape rooms.

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