Mediacology

Occupy the new year (and the spirit of the times)

The Occupy Rose Parade octopus (click here if you can’t see the embed video)

Local news coverage by CBS (click here if you can’t see the video embed)

As a native Angeleno, one of my annual rituals is to watch the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. Though I have never witnessed it in person, I have checked out the scene in Pasadena the night before and know many artisans who design and build floats for the annual parade. This year was no different, with the exception that I wanted to share the nostalgia with my kids. However, now that I’m a bit of an ex-pat, I see things that were part of my past with a slightly defamiliarized perspective.

As the parents of former students have told me, media literacy ruins TV watching for the family. Though I wanted to convey my enthusiasm for the artisanship of Rose Parade floats to my daughter, I couldn’t remove my critical hat. I became highly sensitized to the more troubling aspects of the event’s televised broadcast. Before watching it I was keenly aware that an Occupy group planned to tail the parade with their own anti-corporate message, so I was hoping to see if the network coverage (in this case, NBC) would mention or cover the Occupiers. What transpired should be of little surprise to any seasoned media watcher.

The parade coverage opened with a flyover of a Northrop Grumman’s B-2 stealth bomber, ironically dubbed the Spirit. In a sense, Spirit is an apt name for it represents the “spirit” of a particular mode of thinking (as in zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the age”). At a cost of $1.5 billion each, the B-2 represents the absurdity of our social structure in which our government pays outrageous sums to an elite group of military contractors at the expense of a withering infrastructure. Anthropologists and historians of the future will note how incredibly insane such a social system is. Meanwhile, parade commentators Shaun Robinson and Al Roker fawned over the bomber arguing that for most of the audience it was the main attraction. Such death technology warship should not be surprising given that one of NBC’s primary shareholders is the military contractor General Electric.

The rest of the broadcast represented a seamless integration between the values of the military industrial complex and totalitarian capitalist ideology. The parade’s Grand Marshall, J. R. Martinez, is a bit of a rising media personality whose notoriety comes from his experience of overcoming the psychological damage of getting 40% of his body burned while deployed in Iraq. While I admire his perseverance and resilience, none of the discussion of this man’s tragic circumstances get contextualized by how unnecessary it was in the first place. No doubt, with stealth bombers getting applauded by pop culture punditry and parade organizers, these dirty little details need not be aired publicly. Martinez is a perfect metaphor for the denial of our sick system: get burned and disfigured and then turn it into corporate motivation for how to transcend the adversity of Empire’s reckless global behavior.

Meanwhile, each parade float was a mini-ad for its corporate sponsor. It was obvious that Roker’s canned commentary was essentially ad copy penned by the corporate overlords. Meanwhile, interspersed throughout the coverage was a noticeably higher ratio of advertising that mostly hawked product discounts and financial services for the newly poor. Though subtle (or not if you are media savvy), this was truly a hegemonic spectacle selling the ideology of the 1%. Good thing the Occupiers were there to counterbalance the message. Yet.. if you watched NBC, such a perspective didn’t exist. It was eliminated from the parade’s coverage.

This is a blatant example of how alternatives get excluded by the traditional power structure’s media system. Luckily, we no longer exist in a reality bubble of top-down communications. The complex ecology of our current social media allows for alternative perspectives to be shared horizontally. This is not to say that Occupy Rose Parade was entirely ignored. The LA Times and local news stations mentioned it, and those who were in attendance at the parade certainly had a chance to be exposed for the first time to the Occupy message. Not surprisingly, some critics disparaged the protestors for degrading a family event with politics. But in light of the parade’s default message of corporate and military domination, to not see the entire event as political represents a triumph of ideology.

Let’s hope that those who fail to see the political nature of mainstream media spectacles increasingly become the minority. Transforming and educating for a new perspective means we have lots of work to do. To begin with, its time to occupy the spirit of our age. I keep harping on the Occupy theme, but I believe it represents a concrete alternative to the mode of communication propagated by the hyper-capitalist take-over of the cultural commons.

Occupying Times Square: From 99 theses to 99% thesis

Archived Live Stream of Occupiers holding a General Assembly in Times Square. Link for video embed

On Saturday I was enraptured by Tim Pool‘s USTREAM live cast of Occupy Wall Street’s recent action.* As Occupiers played Red Rover and Frogger with police across Manhattan, all was captured live and uploaded into the planetary Net. Like the live cast of the Occupiers getting kettled and arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge a few months ago, it was a riveting reprieve from the old, predigested form of media we grew up with.

As I watched I couldn’t help but feel that this is a collective, emergent version of Martin Luther’s protest in 1517. Like the 95 theses he posted on the church door that later was reprinted and widely disseminated with the new media technology of that period, likewise we are now seeing an unprecedented diffusion of an alternative paradigm that challenges the power structure. But this time it’s the 99% thesis. Whereas Luther challenged the corrupt authority and abuse of power by the Roman Catholic Church, we are now doing the same against domination and colonization of the planetary commons by corporations.

The fact is, since the 1980s I’ve seen these kinds of actions over and over again, but they never gained traction like they are now. The difference is probably that so many people have been pushed off a cliff that the propaganda system in place can no longer shield people from the truth at hand: that the corporate takeover of the commons can no longer be sustained. We have reached the limit and end of the old system and we are currently in a transition into a liminal state in which all the old thought forms that were codified during the past 500 years are becoming destabilized.

This is made visible in the above clip, which is an archived stream from the Saturday protests. It’s the moment when the protestors, after dodging the NYPD throughout Manhattan, spontaneously organized a General Assembly in Times Square. Using the “people mic,” they “testified” as to why they are part of the Occupation movement, all the while bathed in the surreal glow of corporate propaganda.

Times Square is the quintessential spiritual center of the corporate project. Once the seedy underbelly of New York’s deviant unconsciousness, since Giuliani’s reign as mayor the open space of 42nd St. has been transformed into a kind of dystopic hydra of capitalist enclosure (privatization/fencing off). A mix of surveillance and marketing uber alas, Times Square has become an open air television studio that invites anyone to enter and be mediated by the planetary corporate rulers. This, I would argue, is part of its lure. A hybrid of advertising and reality TV, I know of no other place on Earth where Disneyland, advertising and mass media cohere into a pulsating hum of mediated insanity. Not even Las Vegas can achieve such a distinction. And like moths to a flame, people are attracted by the very thing that could ultimately destroy them. To paraphrase Benjamin, not since the Nazis has our own alienation and self-destruction been made to look so beautiful.**

Yet as police stand by to protect holiday shoppers and business as usual, a handful of Occupiers bear witness to this insanity (thereby labeled by the system as lunatics). Here, as the embodiment of Earth’s spirit, these brave souls momentarily disrupt the pulsating spectacle. Whilst in the past numerous crazies have attempted such sacrilege against this colonizing machine, something has changed.

We are being heard. And it’s resonating.

It’s happening despite the luminous power of Times Square and its tentacled financiers in Wall Street. A people’s mic, which is a spontaneous form of direct democracy and speech, utterly contradicts the communication forms of advertising in which psychologically tested and honed messages are pushed into people’s mindspace. The occupiers wage guerrilla war against that mechanism through the deployment of prefigurative politics that pull people together with a shared senses of responsibility and reciprocity. Their collectivity, community and ritual becomes an alternate form of mediation that deprives the corporate powers of their ability to colonize human energy.

For the moment the system seems invincible, its vast architecture of light and information permeating public space. It can only succeed when no other world can be visualized or imagined beyond it. What you see here is a new kind of collective imagination taking shape. Behold, participate, smile and look around. Raised consciousness is coming to a live stream near you.

* Here is an insightful interview with Tim from Current’s USTREAM channel.

** If you think I’m stretching the analogy too far, I consider the rapid rise of Co2 emissions changing the very chemistry of our atmosphere as a far worse crime against humanity than anything achieved by the worse totalitarians of the 20th century.

Technology / Video — No comments
04
Dec 11

Ericsson’s smiley-faced vision of a totalitarian future?

Ericsson’s “Networked Society ‘On the Brink’” ignores some big questions. Is a life of more data really a better life? I agree that some of the trends the video describes are appealing, but I also fear that this little propaganda film by one of the world’s largest mobile companies is really encouraging people to view themselves as data gadgets rather than as human beings. For example, its vision of education is that we get to watch more lecture videos on the Internet. And healthcare is a matter of quantifying the body’s functions.

What is made to look so forward thinking and innovative strikes me as repackaged technological totalitarianism. While Ericsson promises to be paradigm-shifting, this is still about good old-fashioned consumerism. The tipoff is the dreamy soundtrack, which is always a cue that media companies are inviting us to uncritically enter into their fantasy world. I would be more optimistic if they talked about the possibility of the networked society as a means for dismantling global capitalism and organizing regional occupations.

To be fair, the company does have an assortment of sustainability and social responsibility commitments (check here for their self-assessment). Nonetheless, are these measures compatible with the deep cultural changes necessary to create a sustainable world? I don’t have the answer, but I remain suspicious.

Corporate Media / Magazine / Propaganda — No comments
27
Nov 11

Time Magazine shows that denial ain’t a river in Egypt

Time-Usa-Dec5

Time-European-Dec5

Sometimes the media gods do us a big favor by giving us a clear example of how corporate media is occupied by Wall Street. In this case we are presented with two different covers of the same issue of Time Magazine that ran domestically and abroad. Reading between the lines it shows how scared the media elites are of pushing the idea of revolution at home. And just as the disconnection between the US State Department’s support for the Arab Spring overseas versus the various crackdowns against the Occupy movement throughout the US is not casual, no doubt the editors at Time are nervous about the idea of revolution in Egypt further inspiring the locals. This makes the alternate title, “Why anxiety is good for you,” that much more interesting. Surely their editorial choice reflects a great deal of anxiety.

H/T to CommonDreams.org for the heads-up.

Brain / Ecology / Video — No comments
06
Nov 11

Divided (mind) we fall

Click here if you can’t see the video

In a new RSAnimation, psychiatrist Iain McGilchristc revises the great divided brain debate, something I discuss in my book, Mediacology. To recap, in the ’70s the idea that the left and right brain hemispheres serve different cognitive functions entered into popular culture (represented by books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain). In The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers run with this concept, arguing how different kinds of media favor or bias the cognitive processing of our brains. Reading and writing are distinctly left brained, whereas nonlinear media like TV and music are favored by the right hemisphere.

Leonard Shlain presents his main thesis

Many authors posit that writing has turned us into an overly rational and patriarchal culture. In the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, neurosurgeon Leonard Shlain argues that writing mimics the same mental processes of hunting: the pen replaces the spear.

McGilchrist doesn’t contradict these arguments. Rather he points out that it’s not an either or situation. Sight and sound are processed by both sides of the brain, but what happens is that the left hemisphere handles detailed and focused thinking, whereas the right hemisphere deals with field-like vision or hearing. Consider how we differentiate between seeing and watching, and listening and hearing.

What I find intriguing about the animation (a mix of both right and left brain media), is the possibility that sustainable behavior comes from cultivating right brain thinking. This is what I argued for in my book, but this video does a much better job of articulating how that’s possible. My main point was that traditional media literacy was mainly left-brained, because it focuses on reductionist deconstruction techniques, whereas new media involve right brain skills, and therefor should be incorporated into the concept of media literacy.

He points out that the right brain’s job is to inhibit immediate responses to situations so that we can use our wit and empathy to work out solutions. It also helps map and simplify the world so that we can make better sense of it. Metaphor, implicit meaning, body language, embodied experience, and a disposition for living rather than mechanical reality characterize the right brain approach to the world.

The machine model is self consistent because it made itself so. It’s what he calls the “Berlusconi of the brain” because it controls all the “media”– the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice. The left brain model of the world is like a hall of mirrors, a reality bubble. And this is exactly the kind of problem I see in media theory which rarely challenges the mechanical model of cognition and communication. This is also why I believe media theory has not significantly tackled ecology (not in the “systems” sense, but in the sustainability sense).

Finally, McGilchrist argues knowledge within the left hemisphere is a closed system that demands perfection. By contrast, the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world is an open system.

In the end, it’s not reason versus imagination, he says, but both working together. You can’t have one without the other. The problem with our current world system is that it’s based on a closed, machine-like model of the world built by an unbalanced, and ultimately, insane mind. To restore sanity, we need to re-balance how we perceive the world and ourselves.

Activism — No comments
06
Nov 11

Picture says it all

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Need we say more? Link to related article: An Ethic of the Earth, by The Blue River Quorum

Ecology / Networks — 2 comments
05
Nov 11

Is the Internet killing the planet?

Such is the provocative title of the following info graphic. While I think it provides food for thought, I feel like a stronger argument can be made about the troubling connection between net usage and Co2, in particular as a driver of climate change’s “mindprint” (as an instrument of globalization and consumption). The flipside is that the Internet can undo the greenwashing of media in the same way that Occupy Wall St. has forced a new debate about the economy.

UPDATE: Here’s rundown of current Internet energy usage: Internet Sucks Up 2% of Global Energy, Study Estimates

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Earth Day Infographic

Infographic via: Wordstream

Ecology / Video — No comments
05
Nov 11

Permaculture at #ows

Nice little video about Occupy Wall St.’s green power, compost and gray water systems. Could they be auditioning the new post-oil world?

UPDATE: Apparently I’m not the only writer to have this idea: Is Occupy Wall Street a model for the post-apocalyptic future of cities?

Activism / Copyright-Fair Use / Video — No comments
30
Oct 11

Privatizing the cultural commons

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I love this graphic, which sums up quite visually the intent behind the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The trade agreement, which has been negotiated in secret, represents how corporations are trying to enclosed and privatize the planetary cultural commons. You can read more about it here, or you can watch the video below (if you can’t see it, go here):

Say no to ACTA di QuadratureDuNet

Activism / Self-Referential / Video — No comments
29
Oct 11

Berlusconi’s fiddle

The above clip from Fox News (link) cleverly inserts riot footage from Rome, making an erroneous connection between Occupy Wall St. and the antics of violent protestors in Italy. Such footage is meant to scare viewers and to discredit the thoughtful and nonviolent people who pose a serious threat to the system. As I go on to explain below, violent insurrections like the one on Oct. 15 have essentially sabotaged the occupy movement in Rome (for now).

Saturday Oct. 15 was an internationally coordinated event meant to extend the momentum of Occupy Wall St. In Rome, when we first arrived at the launch point (Piazza della Repubblica), the energy was fantastic. Lots of excitement. People felt energized, but the mood was bit dour as well. The day before Berlusconi had survived another no-confidence vote. The demo was massive–I heard that it was as high as 700,00 people, though that figure seems a bit exaggerated. All I can say is that from where it started it took over three hours for all the people to enter into the march.

After about 45 minutes of moving slowly while serenaded by all kinds of sound systems blasting the protest classics, once we began seeing the hooded black block infiltrate the crowd, we decided it was time to leave. One of them even threatened to punch me when I tried to take their picture.

Trying to leave proved difficult, however. The police had cordoned off the side streets, making it impossible for anyone to exit the march. We ended up having to backpedal upstream to get out of the demonstration. I took that as a very bad sign because it seemed to me that the police were forcing everyone into a pressure point. Sure enough, fifteen minutes after we exited all the burning and smashing started.

Local articles have pieced together a confusing picture. A theory among many is that the massive riot that quickly exploded was a highly coordinated and well-planed urban warfare strategy. Various kinds of projectiles were strategically placed and hidden at different points along the streets. There was a very large group (at least 100) that cut the demonstration in half at the precise point that the front group had arrived at march’s final destination. The police did not do very much at the beginning and let the rioters go about as they wished. Some claim police inaction was out of fear of being libel, as was the case in the aftermath of Genoa (indeed, the hashtag for the militants to coordinate each other was #genoareloaded). The police officially say they held back out of concern for people’s safety. This, I find dubious, since when I tried to leave the police wouldn’t let me. There were also reports of “ultras” (soccer hooligans) entering into the fray (apparently this is par for the course–they are professional rioters, after all).

Many of the black block kids were quite young (minors) and from all over Italy. It was clear that they were well prepared and had tactics. Rumor has it that they were trained in Greece. What their goals were remain a mystery to me, because at the end of the day, the government and police are the victors: an opportunity to initiate a peaceful occupation was sabotaged and now the fascist mayor of Rome is calling for a suspension for all marches during the next month. This means that Fiat auto workers who were planning a big demo are now prohibited. Jasmina Tesanovic asks the right question, a chi giova–who bennefits? My impression is that police and the black block need each other the same way that Christians and Satanists are co-dependentent. They define each other’s actions and reality. I suggest they go have it out in the Colosseum and let the rest of us participate in something productive.

Commentary — No comments
29
Oct 11

Mic check

Dear friends and readers,

Those who have followed this blog over the years have probably noticed a substantial drop in production. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that Facebook and Twitter have channeled some of the creative energy that the blog was used for in the past, such as linking and sharing. For this reason, I hope you will follow my Twitter account as well (@mediacology) or check out the box in the right column with my Twitter updates. I’m not a massive Twitterer, but usually that is where I filter things that I think others would be interested in.

The other reason has to do with my writing time getting eaten up by my current book project. I’m prioritizing my creative flow by channeling it into the book, but occasionally some half-baked thoughts surface and I find that blogging is a good way to process. Fingerscrossed, the manuscript is due in two weeks, so I’ll have a chance to get back into the flow again.

Peace out!

PS I posted the following request elsewhere. If you have any suggestions, please post in the comments section:

We all know intuitively and rationally that the no-longer mainstream media represent the interests of the 1% (re. the occupy wall st. meme). I would like to compile some stats to make this point more clearly. Aside from the most obvious fact of media consolidation, can anyone suggest a way to connect the 1% economy and media with some grounded statistics or facts?

Activism / Video — 3 comments
12
Oct 11

Meme occupation

Video link

I admit that I have been hard on AdBusters. In particularly I have objected to founder Kalle Lassen’s overly mechanistic concept of memes. In his book, Culture Jam, he claimed that media “inject” ideology, a view long discredited by cultural studies. I also find the magazine’s focus on anti-advertising–though a good exercise for learning media literacy skills–a bit ineffectual. Is the solution to compete with marketers by playing their own game? The branding and selling of AdBusters has been equally disturbing.

But I’m happy to admit that some of the AdBusters crew got it right by initiating the Occupy Wall St. meme. It was their initial call to action that brought people down to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. It has now spread across the country to urban areas everywhere, and is also linked with movements around the world. The simple slogan, “we are the 99%,” has far more resonance than Coca-Cola’s “It’s the real thing.”

Though the typical media backlash is evidenced by the usual haters–Fox news featured Ann Coulter who invoked the dreaded specter of beheadings and mob rule from the French Revolution–I’m finding unusually sympathetic coverage coming from unanticipated places, such as AdAge and Forbes.

A meme works when it taps into a zeitgeist. It’s a flame that ignites, but doesn’t necessarily replicate exactly in the same form every time. It’s like an utterance that echoes and reverberates through resonance. It doesn’t exist as a thing but as part of an ongoing conversation. Few need a college degree to apprehend the depth of catastrophe the current economic model has become. By establishing contact zones with the awareness that something needs to be done, these occupations become apertures for an emergent reality that contests the delusional dreamworld propagated by the corporate media.

The handful of corporate media that dominate the telecommunications environment represent the interests of the One-Percenters. The One-Percenter media will have difficulty commodifying the reality that people are experiencing on the ground. After all, how long can you get away with calling the opposition Nazis and remain credible? This was Kracauer‘s insight when he studied why Nazi propaganda ultimately failed: it couldn’t sustain the contradictions of its own messaging (such as the Nazi’s were simultaneously invincible yet vulnerable). How is it possible that we can simultaneously grow and prosper while real economic and ecological systems collapse? Capitalism can no longer sustain itself by externalizing the crisis, because ultimately there is no such thing as externalization in a planetary community. The financiers might think they can survive by boarding some kind superliner arks like we saw in the film 2012, but ultimately food, energy and labor has to come from somewhere.

I think the #occupywallstreet meme works because it is backed by feet on the ground. It’s not just an immaterial commodity whose symbolic value can be drained of meaning by the culture industries. Nike and Levis may try to brand it, but most are savvy enough to see through this kind of cynical manipulation. Part of its resilience comes from the movement’s ability to self mediate. It doesn’t depend on mainstream media (though it appreciates sympathetic coverage) . It has made a lateral move around it, expanding through social networks on the Web and smart phones. Fox will scare the pants off of retired Republicans with its visions of mob rule, but even Fox viewers must be feeling the pinch as their pensions get sucked into the financial black hole.

Like in the Arab Spring, youth have sparked the movement. They are technically connected and media savvy, but their concerns are not theirs alone. Nonetheless, it’s too premature to call this a revolution. Revolutions don’t happen this easily. Just look at Egypt and Libya. Winter is coming, so it remains to be seen if an outdoor occupation can withstand the harsh reality of climate change (then again, the weather is so weird right now that we could have an American Spring in December). What is clear is that the energy is finally shifting. People sense the endgame is upon us and have finally decided to do something. About time.

Commentary — No comments
29
Sep 11

Dousing the KIndle-Fire

Lots of buzz this week about the new Amazon Fire, the Kindle update primed to take a big bite out of Apple (OK, I couldn’t resist such a silly cliche). Upon viewing its first TV ad (posted above) I’m struck by the use of the fire metaphor for describing communications, something I’ve also been doing in response to the meme model of media. The idea of memes is too mechanical for me–it implies that an idea is an object that gets replicated from person to person. I prefer to think of an idea as a kind of flame that inspires or ignites new understandings, but doesn’t just repeat itself. My initial inspiration for this understanding comes from Buddhism which sees thoughts as impermanent.

Amazon borrows the concept from Voltaire, whose pithy little quote makes an excellent argument for how ideas belong to the public sphere and cannot be owned:

“The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”

Unfortunately, as DefectiveByDesign.org points out, Amazon’s digital rights management strategy is more about restriction than sharing. For example, even though you purchase books through its service, you don’t actually own them. You can’t trade, give away or resell them in the same way you can with physical books. By storing your media on its cloud drives, Amazon exerts complete control over your content and can delete books if they choose (it has happened). This also represents more of the creeping privatization of our data. We have to trust Amazon to not abuse their power of surveillance, data tracking and censorship. Remember that they deleted Wikileaks from their servers when it became politically uncomfortable.

While the media will likely focus on the titanic battle between our gods of capitalism– Amazon’s Jeff Bezos versus Apple’s Steve Jobs–our rights under their control freak purview will increasingly diminish. As the African proverb states, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. So be mindful for how these new gadgets get fetishized in the absence of a healthy debate about their impact on the public sphere.

For what it’s worth, I own an iPad and I happen to like it, but I’m also not that impressed. I have been mostly disappointed by how limiting it is in terms of my power to create and do stuff with it. It is certainly a perfected media consumption device that makes reading Twitter and PDFs a great pleasure. But when it comes to making media, even something as basic as a PowerPoint presentation, forget it. Even my favorite presentation tool, Prezi, is rendered useless by the iPad (I can view Prezis with an app, but i can’t edit them because iPads don’t have Flash).

In sum, though I’m a fan of tablets for reading and viewing media, they reinforce old media regimes and increase the monopolization of our mediasphere. It’s probably why big media companies really love them. If we eventually migrate from flexible laptops to restricted tablets, it will probably mean a general regression to the one-to-many media model of old rather than to increased participation that should be the promise of the new. I hope I’m wrong.

Commentary — No comments
15
Sep 11

A friendly review of Mediacology

I just came across a sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book on the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Website (I swear I wasn’t looking for myself on the Web!). This review was far more appreciative than the last one I read in which the author expressed a desire to throw my book in the garbage (I hope that she at least put it in the compost). Reading reviews is incredibly painful, but thankfully the AEJMC reviewer got what I was trying to say while ignoring all the typos!

One thing the reviewer points out is that Mediacology was not an easy read. Agreed! Mediacology was my first book and was done in the midst of heavy readings of McLuhan and the Media Ecology tradition. I was playing with academic jargon, perhaps as an exaggerated response to the boring newspaper journalism I had been doing for so many years before. Every venue demands a different style and over the years I have become schizophrenic from writing in so many different formats: punk fanzines, magazines, newspapers, blogs, academic journals, academic books and popular culture books. I’m hoping that I’m finally hitting a sweet spot between all of these with my current book project. But that remains to be seen. The main thing I realize is that my first book didn’t exactly practice what I preached: though I was calling for participatory educational practice, its language was a bit too inaccessible. Let’s hope I do a better job on the next round.

Ecology / Video — No comments
15
Sep 11

Watching 24 hours of #reality

Reality media just got more real.

Through live streaming and archived video, “24 hours of reality” has launched its attack against the disinformation and muddling tactics of energy companies that’s confusing a serious discussion about climate change policy in the US. First the presentation deconstructs the “deniers” argument and counters energy company claims with science and stats. Then, drawing on the history of how the tobacco industry disrupted and confused health policy in the US, they show how energy companies have followed a parallel path through pushing bogus science and a clever framing strategy. By using the tobacco case study, The Climate Reality Project shows convincingly how these tactics are being used, giving numerous examples of politicians and pundits recycling industry tactics. The presentation points out that energy companies have deliberately framed climate change as a theory instead of fact which allows pundits to argue that human created climate change is contested science. However, with 98% of global scientists arguing that climate change is indeed human created, allowing the deniers an equal platform would be like legitimizing the Flat Earth Society’s argument that the earth is not round.

Given the rather clear evidence of a global ecological crisis, will the US media get “real”?

Commentary / Film / Video — 2 comments
11
Sep 11

A cinematic balm for the 9/11 blues

My Italian friends asked me if I wanted to to do something special for 9/11. I was ashamed to say that the memory conjured something that I didn’t want to re-experience: bloodlust, revenge and war. All I can remember is how the moment of compassion and empathy that the incident called for eroded as fast as war plans were drawn-up to invade Afghanistan. Ten years ago all I could think about was the impending world war that would be launched in the name of 9/11 victims and their families. Indeed, the mainstream media failed to give voice to the peacemakers and antiwar critics who predicated the inevitable folly, crucial voices that I’m afraid have been proven right by the course of history.

But for this post I didn’t want to focus on politics. Rather, I wanted to share with you a clip from a film that I feel is one of the most powerful polemics against political violence I’ve ever seen. It comes from the Italian film Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), directed by Marco Bellocchio (who, BTW, won last night’s lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival). Unfortunately there are no subtitles, so I will have to set it up for you.

The film is about when Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped in 1978 by the Red Brigades, a left-wing terrorist group. The movie depicts the 55 days of his captivity in Rome, focusing on his captors, four young brigadistas, and their relationship with the imprisoned Moro. The story zooms in on the conflicted brigadista, Anna Laura Braghetti, who is increasingly troubled by the fact that the Italian political establishment won’t negotiate a prisoner exchange–the condition for his release–which means that Moro will be sentenced to death by his captors and eventually murdered.

The clip I have posted above involves Braghetti (performed by Maya Sansa) reading Moro’s final letter to his wife. It is then ingeniously overlaid with a letter by a WWII partisan who was sentenced to death by the Nazis. She then has a shattering epiphany (1:50 in the clip) when she realizes that the senseless horror that is about to be inflicted on her captive is no different than the heartless political murders of the past. Bellocchio emphasizes this point by intercutting source footage of prisoner executions from the war. Cut to Pink FLoyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky,” for me it is one of cinema’s most poignant montages, a heartful rebuttal against the cold logic of terrorists and vengeful war machines.

I hope you have the patience to watch the entire clip. Even if you don’t understand the language, it is poetry in motion. Incidentally, it is possible to see a subtitled version of the film. If at all possible, I encourage you to watch it and learn more about this tragic moment in Italian history.

Self-Referential — No comments
11
Sep 11

Calling London’s genius loci

Greening Media Ed on Prezi

A Prezi for my presentation at the Media Education Summit, London 2011

I just returned from my first trip to London where I presented at the Media Education Summit, 2011. It was a slightly disorienting but invigorating experience. The conference itself was a success. I had a chance to network and learn from the various good folks who comprise the The Centre for Excellence in Media Practice.

One of the strangest things I experienced was when I clutched my first handful of British pounds. I had never fondled British money and it felt oddly magical, as if I was handling something from global banking’s radioactive nucleus. I’m sure others have had similar experiences handling their first dollars, but for me seeing the currency’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth–something I’m more familiar with from a Sex Pistols poster–gave me chills. I’m not sure if these were the good kind of chills, but I felt as if I was crossing a threshold into the capitalist core.

For the US, England is the motherland–for better and for worse. As such, I wanted to experience the city’s genius loci–spirit of place. My first effort failed. The hotel was at one of those conference no man’s land that is not unlike the other nonplaces that dot the planet’s web of global business centers. Yes, there were some unique architectural elements that drew upon the former industrial character of the place, but it had an inorganic feeling common to so many current developments. It was most certainly an island unto itself. The hotel, comfortable though that it was, also had the feeling of virtual quality one gets from Ikea: design-wise the elements and details of the hotel room feel fresh and interesting, but highly fragile and toxic. From the future’s perspective, the materials seem flimsy and dated.

I have mixed feelings about how my talk went (you can see the Prezi above). Only five people attended, while next door there were dozens checking out a presentation about incorporating Facebook into educational practice. When it comes to sustainability, it’s hard to compete with Facebook. I also had technical issues. Prezi behaves weirdly on the new MacBook Pro (the navigation menu disappears and you have to use the arrow keys to move around, which is really awkward when giving a talk). Towards the end, the video projector frizzled. This was a huge drag because the most important part was demonstrating how a non-linear approach to media ed can be achieved through a circular design based on a media mandala. Oh well. Maybe Mother Nature was punishing me for trying to bring technology into the process of healing the planet.

Though I was a little dispirited, I also saw it as a growth opportunity. I think one lesson for a talk under any condition is to keep it simple, find a good narrative to tell the story and try to focus on one take-away message that can fit into a sentence. Using a presentation tool like Prezi can encourage all kinds of intellectual mischief. Maybe it’s better to not lean so much on presentation tools so much.

Some of the feedback was interesting and unexpected. One gentleman who teaches production said that he simply had never made the connection between his work and sustainability. This view was confirmed by another attendee. This probably explains why so many people prefer to think about Facebook than greening media practice. I half suspected a low turnout since my current crusade (bad word, I know) to green media education has gotten so few bites. I have never felt so lonely. Either I am totally insane and what I’m talking about is useless, or I’m part of a minority of visionaries that the world hasn’t quite caught up to. I hope it’s the latter. But if I can plant the seed in one person that the connection is important, then I feel like I have helped evolve our species.

London was a little more surreal. I had only two nights and one full day while there, which made exploration limited. The weather was beyond fowl, but at a certain point the wicked winds and pelting rain blew away and I had a window of a few hours to see central London. First things first, I ate a good curry and drank a few pints (had my first hangover in over a year). Then I entered into the famous Underground and sailed into the city’s dreaming mind.

The tube really felt like a tube. Unlike NYC’s subways, it’s intimate and enclosed as I imagine a spaceship would feel. I entered central London through the portal of the Underground’s Leicester Square station. At first this was a little disappointing. I exited into a corridor of brand stores, video screen walls and tourist shops that had a slightly different flavor than Time Square and done on a much smaller scale. London should not try to outdo Americans with this kind of ostentatious display of capitalism. It’s way too tacky in the wrong context. Even Banksy was reduced to t-shirts in tawdry tourist shops

I did my best to get lost. I searched about for the genius loci but a mantra kept running through my mind: corporations destroy the spirit of place. This is, it seems, is their essence. A corporation cannot be successful unless it obliterates a sense of the local. For example, when a Taco Bell replaces a taqueria–as I have witnessed in some communities in New Mexico– this is a sure sign that the natives have been banished. I’m sure this has a little to do with London’s wildcat riots in which the inhabitants of culturally specific neighborhoods asserted their identity, albeit in a way most Londoners felt was unpolite.

I ranged through SoHo and Covent Garden, but could not quite get the gist of the place. I know two hours won’t do the trick, but there are other cities where one immediately gets a much stronger feeling for the local spirit. Most Italian cities, for example, have that affect. I suspect that because they emerged within such specific bioregional limits Italian cities are so particular. Maybe it’s because London peaked during the age of colonialism and grew according to an outward expression of ecological imperialism. It has a bold and fortresslike presence, as if it were a kind of command and control center.

My night closed with a descent back into the tube, where I entered into a sonic bath of Pink Floyd’s “Breath.” A busker at the bottom of the escalator noodled along to a Karaoke version of the track as if he were one of London’s many threshold guardians reminding its visitors that the city’s soul does express itself… through music. Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and Radiohead are just a few of the great artists to emerge from the English dream that has so permeated my lifeworld.

Maybe this was the genius loci I was searching for.

Documentary / Video — No comments
03
Sep 11

Connected: A declaration of interdependence

Connected is a new film by Tiffany Shlain, daughter of the late-great writer Leonard Shlain. I think you will agree that the trailer is a huge tease–this promises to be a fascinating documentary.

In a related project, Shlain is organizing a 3-minute crowd-sourced film, A Declaration of Interdependence. If you want to contribute, follow this link.

You can check out Paul Levinson’s preview of Connected here.

Art / Ecology / Music — No comments
20
Aug 11

Tarantulas, volcanoes and festivals: Primordial reality asserts itself

TaranProject “Tarantella Nova”

In recent days I’ve been floating in the warm Mediterranean waters, contemplating life as I soak in a panorama of Etna blowing off steam and the silhouetted Aeolian volcanos on the sea’s horizon. I’m feeling a bit primordial, a bit lizard-like. So though the wheels are coming of the global financial system, I’m feeling more contemplative about our time together on Earth.

At one point during Lewis Mumford‘s massive polemic against Western civilization and technology he argues that neolithic cultures–the gold standard of ecological cultural harmony–continue to exist, though in tatters. He suggested that anytime a community still practices solstice celebrations–or something like it–it means there is a shred of ancient nature worship still intact. Indeed, this seems to be the case in many Mediterranean communities, and in Latin America as well. The survival strategy of the Roman Empire to adapt and incorporate regional cultural practices (as long as they didn’t challenge their authority) into their system carried through with the Roman Catholic Church. And as Rigoberta Menchú stated in her autobiography, indigenous Guatemalans–to survive by not giving away their secrets– practice syncretism–essentially layering over Christian religious rituals their own system of beliefs. Hence, God is the sun, Mary is Mother Earth and saints represent various nature deities.

Currently I’m spending ferragosto (a summer holiday in Italy–follow the Wikipedia link for its pagan roots) in Calabria, Italy’s impoverished southwestern province. In the town of Palmi, which overlooks the northern tip of Sicily and the Aeolian Islands, there has been an ongoing festival in celebration of San Rocco, the community’s patron saint. As an outsider, these festivities are every bit as pagan as the kind you will find in Latin American towns. Every day there are dancing puppets called giganti (“giants”) that depict an ancient myth about an African Prince, Grifano (Griffin) and a Sicilian Princess, Marta. They prance about from neighborhood to neighborhood accompanied by the continuous drilling of drums and late night fireworks that echo against the mountain like bomb blasts. In the different piazzas throughout the town there are free concerts. With daily processions, the place reverberates with noise, revelry and communal spirit.

All of this is funded by the community. You do not see corporate banners sponsoring this or that event. It has the true spirit of the commons, which belays the planetary trend in which global financiers and their cronies are privatizing and taking over as much of our communal cultural space as possible. Nontheless, this is by no means a utopian environment. The mafia are the counterforce to corporatization.

However, it was during these festivities that I experienced a bit of an epiphany. I saw in action a fully realized manifestation of ecology, culture and community coming together during a musical performance by a group called the TaranProject. Taranta–derived from tarantula–is a kind of regional folk music that makes your body shake and move continuously like a spider. There are examples of it from all over southern Italy. Much of the music is sung in regional dialect and performed with locally made instruments.

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The logo, lyrics, music and spirit of the group celebrates regional identity, social justice for immigrants, advocates for laborers, and sings reverently for the land. As you can see from the logo, its music unifies land and culture. Throughout the concert audience members danced in circles and song along to various folks songs with lineages that go back generations. During the concert there was a real sense of unity and cultural pride that I have rarely experienced.

It occurred to me that this kind of folk music and art is really the true counterforce to all the negativity that we are feeling about the world right now. It is tonic that strengthens the bonds between identity and culture. It is done in the spirit of independence, healing, and respect, values that are counterweights to the atrociously amoral system of economics that is pillaging the Earth and its peoples. It is my firm belief the collectives like the TaranProject are an inspiring answer to the destructive and nihilistic force being unleashed upon Europe, the US and the rest of the world right now.

For me, this is what real ecomedia is about.

Ecology / Education / Video — No comments
08
Aug 11

Pushing “agendas”

It might seem like a waste of brain cells to complain about Fox News. I used to think that even though they were little better than cheese mold, a few million people watching it didn’t mean the end of the world. Yet, as the News of the World scandal has shown, Fox’s parent company, News International, is neither innocuous nor ethical in its broad influence on world politics and debates. It has a disproportionate influence on shaping the symbolic power relations of particular discourses. It’s remarkable, for example, that Obama fired Van Jones based on the lunatic rantings of Glenn Beck. Since when do insane people wield so much influence on reality?

Anyhow, this is certainly masterful propaganda. The pundits argue that schools can’t even teach kids math and reading, why in the hell should they teach about the environment using a ridiculous cartoon like Sponge Bob? (Unless, of course, Mike Huckabee does it.) What do teachers know? Perhaps Fox’s newsreaders could apply a little critical thinking to their own claims. Which science journals are they reading to make their argument? What proponents of anti-climate change scientists are a percentage of the nearly universal scientific consensus supporting the human-caused climate change thesis? Yes, some people claim the Earth is flat, but does that make discussing Earth’s shape controversial? Apparently they fail their own test: anti-science pundits should not complain about the lack of science education in schools.

But, they doth complaineth too much. Education policies like No Child Left Behind have largely produced the ignorance and lack of critical thinking Fox so cherishes. They act like abusive patriarchs, treating teachers like scum of the earth, meanwhile making sure they don’t have the tools to do their job well.

Murdoch has certainly muddied the climate change debate. For example, he made his company “carbon neutral,” seemingly contradicting the anti-climate change rhetoric of his minions. It took me a while to figure out why, until it dawned on me that there was a shrewd strategy afoot. First, is the carbon neutrality claim really verifiable? According to whom? Given the parent corporation’s ethical standards and normal use of doublespeak, I find any claim of verifiability dubious (kind of like S & P giving Goldman Sachs AAA credit rating at the peak of the derivatives bubble). Secondly, how are they defining carbon neutrality? The meaning of the term is not objective. Just because there is a pledge to plant trees doesn’t mean that the real carbon footprint is offset. Moreover, getting electricity from a wind farm does not compensate for the ecological “mindprint” of Fox’s magical thinking. Likely this is actually a model of the kind of climate remediation that will be pushed by Fox (when they have no choice but to actually acknowledge that something has to be done). They will point to themselves and say that we can do it without government regulation. We can make any claim we want and it’s acceptable because we say it is so.

Yeah, just like the claim that they are “fair and balanced.”

You see, these are very tricky people. Shape-shifters, if you will. Pay close attention because they are modeling the reality of fascism that they claim to rail against. In this sense, they offer us an excellent case study for how this works. The trick is to defuse their influence, which is tough. I don’t have all the answers, but maybe the case to revoke their broadcast license based on ethical and legal violations could ultimately do them in. This seems like a vague and distant future, but then again, the swift collapse of News of the World was as sudden as the fall of the Berlin Wall.