One of my favorite books is The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again). This might sound unbelievable, but I actually think Warhol was an enlightened master who simply spoke in the language of his time: mass media. What makes his contribution so important is that he went against the grain of a 2000 year legacy that distrusts images. While it is necessary to be skeptical of visual illusions as a kind of perceptive magic, at the same time the reaction to it can be just as bad. The striving for some unattainable Utopia also causes incredible suffering. Is it possible to interact with media in a way that is both skeptical but also incorporates a willingness to take responsibility for our own happiness here and now instead of blaming society?
The solution may be to mindfully engage the illusion, and I think that is what Warhol was cryptically alluding to.
Some of the best quotes from his book are:
“The camera turns [people] on and off.” (p. 80)
“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there. I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television— you don’t feel anything.” (p.91)
“At the end of my time, when I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers. And I don’t want to be a leftover. I was watching TV this week and I saw a lady go into a ray machine and disappear. That was wonderful, because matter is energy and she just disappeared. That could be a really American invention, the best American Invention— to be able to disappear. I mean, that way they couldn’t say you died, they couldn’t say you were murdered, they couldn’t say you committed suicide over somebody.” (P.113)
“Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thought into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think of about one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don’t. Usually I think about my condominium.” (p.143)
“Before media there used to be a physical limit of how much space one person could take up by themselves. People, I think, are the only things that know how to take up more space than the space they’re actually in, because with media you can sit back and still let yourself fill up space on records, in the movies, most exclusively on the telephone and the least exclusively on television.” (p.146)
“You should have contact with your closest friends through the most intimate of and exclusive of all media— the telephone.” (p.147)
“I always bring everything back to chemicals, because I really think everything starts and finishes with chemicals.” (p.?)
PS Another fave is POPism: The Warhol Sixties. It’s a great chronicle of life and experimentation at the cusp of the social revolution.
Film, music, news, documentaries, soaps all have an enormous impact on modern society – what we read, hear, watch, believe and feel, some talke in terms of the media’s ‘brainprint’. Media and Entertainment companies powerfully influence how people and politicians relate to corporate responsibility and sustainable development. How could they be accountable for this profound impact on society?
Through the Looking Glass, produced in partnership with WWF-UK, takes a look at how a select group of M&E companies measure up in their efforts to be accountable for their influence on society.
Good News & Bad takes a look at the role of media in building the corporate responsibility agenda for business as well as how corporate responsibility, climate change, ozone depletion, endocrine disrupters, GM foods and socially responsible investment are perceived, prioritised and covered by the media.
Amnesty International is running a campaign to make sure the Internet is not a tool for censorship and control. You can read some background here, and take action here. Please do.
Yochai Benkler is one of my favorite thinkers writing about the network economy. He argues that new networks are reversing the centralized control of industrial media. His book, The Wealth of Networks, is required reading. If you don’t have time to read it, try watching this video.
As a media lit guy I think the one thing I can contribute to Earth Day is a warning that as companies “go green,” to be watchful of the kinds of images they use to hide or mask other activities. In particular an ad from a newspaper Website by Areva (a French nuclear power company) caught my attention. I clicked through and was intrigued by its fun hybrid of video game animation, info graphics and funky music. Immediately I thought of one of my favorite music videos by the band Royksopp (which I also posted above). Turns out they are done by the same animators, H5. Frankly it makes me nervous when nuclear power companies market their products as pop culture.
When you click around Areva’s Website, one things stands out: rather than forgrounding the product (nuclear power), instead they call themselves a clean energy company. This lines are their mission statement:
Innovate to contribute to CO2-free power generation and electricity transport that are cleaner, safer and more economic.
Sounds great. But is the above graphic, which shows the company’s energy distribution cycle, really the new paradigm that will change our lives? It still comes across as a centralized energy network with the consumer as the end user. I believe anti-television crusader Jerry Mander is correct when we assess the true implications of choosing nuclear power. It means a devil’s pact with a highly centralized, bureaucratized, military-industrial-complex. A renewable energy system is decentralized and is not dependent on a massive security apparatus or infrastructure delivery system predicated on scarcity. Areva uses graphics that put renewable energy on an equal footing with nuclear power, but do the size of graphic representations mean the same as actual input into the system?
As an alternative visual representation, consider the following graphic (click to make it bigger):
This is a systems representation from Permatopia derived from the concept of permaculture, which depicts a more interdependent relationship with all the factors of life.
When looking at the green claims of energy companies, you may want to consider the “Six Sins of Greenwashing“:
* Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off: e.g. “Energy-efficient” electronics that contain hazardous materials. 998 products and 57% of all environmental claims committed this Sin.
* Sin of No Proof: e.g. Shampoos claiming to be “certified organic,” but with no verifiable certification. 454 products and 26% of environmental claims committed this Sin.
* Sin of Vagueness: e.g. Products claiming to be 100% natural when many naturally-occurring substances are hazardous, like arsenic and formaldehyde (see appeal to nature). Seen in 196 products or 11% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Irrelevance: e.g. Products claiming to be CFC-free, even though CFCs were banned 20 years ago. This Sin was seen in 78 products and 4% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Fibbing: e.g. Products falsely claiming to be certified by an internationally recognized environmental standard like EcoLogo, Energy Star or Green Seal. Found in 10 products or less than 1% of environmental claims.
* Sin of Lesser of Two Evils: e.g. Organic cigarettes or “environmentally friendly” pesticides. This occurred in 17 products or 1% of environmental claims.
BTW, I have free media literacy materials that you can use to deconstruct industry messages. They are available here.
It’s rare that a work of art—of any kind—lingers with me the way Sean Penn’s screen version of Into the Wild has. And I want to know why. The basis of my query is decidedly nonliterary. I’ll admit that I’m fairly non-literate, not in the writing sense, but the reading sense. I am not steeped in the great traditions that Into the Wild is build upon– not the story itself– but of the vast literary history of writers abandoning the society to probe deeper truths out there, literary pilgrims, so-to-speak. From Walden Pond to On the Road, Americans have probed the wild and the road. Krakaur’s book, Into the Wild, most likely speaks to that impulse. Trouble is, I haven’t read the book, so all I have to offer is how the film itself impressed me, not in dialog with Alex Supertramp’s story (or the book about it), but how as a cinematic experience it connects with ours.
It’s curious that the bus that served as his grave has become a modern pilgrimage site. Alaskans don’t get it, because to many of them Chris was a fool for doing what he did: venturing into the bush ill-prepared with few provisions and a kind of middle class arrogance that all will be fine. Indeed, as the case of his demise has been extrapolated and explored, one gets the sense that he may have had an unconscious death wish. He must have known on some deep level that what he was doing would end badly. No doubt, when he did decide to return to civilization and found the summer runoff too difficult to ford, it doesn’t take much to try other routes. And had he walked a few more miles, his escape would have been complete. Did he accidentally poison himself? We’ll never know. All we can be sure of is that he rejected the dominant values of civilization, and in that courage I think we find the core gestalt of his appeal.
There is an inner Jack London in all of us that simply would like to burn the cash and credit cards, ditch the car in the arroyo and walk off into the sunset. In some ways it’s very American. McCanldles’ deathbed epiphany that joy only has meaning when it’s shared was perhaps the supreme lesson of his life, for we cannot say he was truly free. He was running from something and was so determined to make a statement to his father, his ultimate outcome is not much different than a son’s suicide as revenge.
The film is a hyperreal fantasy of nature. The real location was moved for better views of the mountains to satisfy the requirements of cinema. A love story here, and some exaggerated scenery there, glosses over the more mundane aspects of a boy’s journey into America’s interior. In fact, as I have pondered the film, I was wondering why something so innocuou–a person traveling, running from his famil–could resonoate so deeply with the culture and myself. At the end of the film when we see a picture of the actual Chris (not the actor), it becomes painfully clear that this was a real life. And at that moment I wept like I’ve never wept at the end of a movie. How could I love this anonymous character so much? Is it the power of cinema, or connection with a sense of loss and abandonment that is so often at the core of our daily neurosis?
To some he comes across as a Jesus-like character, to others, just a middle class American fool lost in his own convictions like America in Iraq. With Penn at the helm, we could say this is the anti-parable of the war. If you are going to lose yourself, do it for moral reasons, for god sakes, like connecting with the Great Whatever and the “wild” that alludes us high-tech capitalistas.
The wild is a construct of the literary culture: it was devised by the Greeks to be the first big cultural Other to permeate the psychosis of Modern Man. Now we want to reclaim it, but it means death. And how fearful were we as we watched the film thinking, I could never do that, but I wish I could. We are so deeply ashamed of our domestication and trapped by our worldliness that we hunger for that taste of authenticity Chris/Alex sought and tasted. You see it in his dying smile, one of the eerie media artifacts he left with his undeveloped roll of film.
Which begs the question, was he not a bit self-conscious that his experiment would impact the culture, and he would not survive to see it? What was the purpose of the journal and camera if he was so free of our civilized trappings? Photos embalm, as philosophers have noted, and these artifacts he left us contain the self-reflective traces of a Western man, a narcissus who only vouches for existence in the mirror of media. This is not a criticism, just a reflection of the zeitgeist. Chris was both and instrument and mechanic of the culture. He knew what he was doing, his determination and focus the clues that his legacy would impact the world.
As part of Penguin’s We Tell Stories series, this update of Dickens’ Hard Times is a pretty cool little tour of our current state of the stats by Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma. The above is from the page, “Ideas are traveling faster.” Admittedly I find the graphics a little hard to follow. Maybe I’m too old. Anyhow, take it a tour, it’s worth the trip.
Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex — an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. Mapping out what should more properly be called the Military - Industrial - Technological - Entertainment - Scientific - Media - Intelligence - Corporate Complex, historian Nick Turse demonstrates just how extensively the Pentagon, through its little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with America’s major corporations, has taken hold of the nation.
Of all the nefarious propaganda strategies, the one that irks me the most is the use and abuse of war veterans to justify war. I’m not just talking about the “support our troops” hammer used to pound peace activists, but the parade of retired generals and so-called experts who come on television to legitimate violence. An explosive article NY Times article demonstrates how these “experts” are not random observers, but many have financial ties to war contractors and benefit financially from the slaughter. Does anyone in the news business have integrity any more?
Ironically, the more the Pentagon PR apparatus uses deception to mask reality, the worse it gets for them because they have no check against delusional policies. As the report demonstrates, rather than acknowledge the flawed war strategy (or that it was wrong to begin wth), Rumsfeld– the grand wizard of self-deception– and his aids believed it was the media’s misrepresentation of the situation, and not what was happening on the ground, that was causing the dissent. We could say that media management has become an institutionalized form of denial that would make coke addicts blush. Sneaking and hiding is funny when it’s depicted in a Bid Lite commercial, but when it involves life, death and ultimately a threat to the foundation of democracy, then some kind of community intervention is surely require. Trouble is, how do we get these guys into a reality detox center?
Don’t forget these are the same policy makers who brought us Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Try to remember that historically people who use torture do so because they have no other way to change reality. Think back to the heretics who said the world was round, or that the Earth orbited the sun. Rather than concede to the simple evidence of nature’s laws, it’s more convenient to simply torture, imprison or murder those who refute you. That, or give them company stock from your friendly, local military contractor. Regardless, the Pentagon and its pliant media could surely benefit from this geography lesson: Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.
I find it strange but not surprising that peace activists who generally predicted the outcome of the war accurately (that occupying Iraq would be difficult and bloody, the invasion would certainly lead to civil war among the divergent populations leading to a wider war in the Middle East as refugees flee the fighting, and, finally, Iraq would be a magnet for extremists wanting to take the fight directly to the US) are generally absent from the debate about war. The fear of being unpatriotic has made news so cowardly that most often what you get is a plug-and-play propaganda device that the Pentagon can play like a “Mighty Wurlitzer” (CIA jargon for psychological operations). It feels too obvious to call this situation pathetic and sad, but unfortunately the net result is more senseless death and unchecked psychosis.
Thankfully, the NY Times is finally doing its job as the “fourth estate” by presenting a detailed report on how these shenanigans are perpetrated. The multimedia presentation that accompanies the article demonstrates how hybrid newspaper reporting that combines words, video and images can create a very powerful communications tool to counter the kinds of Spic and Span lies that TV news so readily dispenses with. In an ideal world, counter arguments would make their way into larger media discourse, but alas I think larger corporate media are generally immune to arguments that are outside the self-generating reality loop of power. Unless you are having the three martini lunch in downtown DC with the same group of generals, media professionals and contractors, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. I appluad the NYTime for doing this coragous reporting, but also wonder, what took you so long? What will it take to get a bug into the institutional sheets of the broadcast networks to get them to go beyond Fox-inspired gossip journalism as was recently demonstrated by the ABC Pennsylvania debate debacle?
Ultimately, there is no propaganda on Earth that can cover up a war gone badly. Propaganda works best during the build-up of war, and when war is executed successfully in a climate of fear and paranoia. Would the U.S. public have the same critical attitude about the war in Iraq if American soldier were not killed on a daily basis or if the military could control the situation on the ground? Consider the legacy of Granada and Panama. Who among the general populace opposes those actions?
When Siegried Kracauer was commissioned in 1945 by the U.S. government to survey Nazi newsreels he concluded that one characteristic that separated fascist and democratic propaganda was a complete disregard for truth. Democracies, he argued, have to tell a “good story” and “refer to the truth even if they defy it.” In Germany, on the other hand, “where all powers are actually monopolized by the Nazi rulers and their allies in the sphere of great business, truth has lost any authority of its own; for the sole concern is to maintain and extend their monopoly through appropriate propaganda that unhesitatingly confuses truth and untruth to these ends. Thus truth is put in the same position as untruth: it becomes a pure means, it is no longer recognized as truth.” Something to consider, especially in an era when fake news is real, and real news is fake.
Anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson argued that deceptions behind the negotiating of the Treaty of Versailles set in motion World War II. His point is that communications are cybernetic: they exist in a feedback system, and lying always comes back to haunt the liar. There is no running from hypocrisy. After 9-11 the U.S. government had an opportunity to tell a good story, but instead used fear to justify a war with dubious intentions. Over time propaganda cannot hide murder, torture, or illegality, especially when a global society is increasingly transparent. After all, who could have anticipated that one could view Al Jazeera at a falafel stand in Brooklyn? Or that a vibrant blogosphere is increasingly becoming non-Westernized? These are just a few examples shattering hierarchal notions of the flow of communications and ideas.
Another thing we often forget when discussing propaganda is that it is not simply a situation of the producer inserting information into the minds of innocent subjects. Not only do the receivers of information have agency and an ability to contextualize and form their own opinions, but propaganda makers are also susceptible to their own deceptions. Kracauer’s analysis should serve as a cautionary tale that spin for power’s sake has a self-destructive logic: nice (or scary) metaphors are no substitute for competence or morality. You can’t tell a good story if it’s based on fallacy and fantasy. That should only happen in Hollywood. And when it comes to war, no special effects can solve political or social conflict. It requires human intelligence, negotiation, and a commitment to peace. A social structure predicated on war generates perpetual war. It is poisonous.
We as a culture should realize that in a global feedback system that inserting more violence and death into the circuit of civilization is ultimately nihilistic. I have a sense that this is not the definitive path of humanity, and that in the end we’ll reject once and for all the deceptions and lies that have driven us towards the brink of oblivion. It remains my belief that education based on the principle of self-empowerment, sustainability and nonviolence is a critical anecdote to the situation that confronts us at this historical juncture. Contrary to the Neocon axiom that Empire defines reality, I believe wholeheartedly that it is everyday humans that shape the world, and in the great drama of known history, they have always rejected empires and petty tyrants regardless of the technology and communications systems they deploy.
The good news is that young people are watching less TV. I hope new media completely compost and destroy the “news.” Otherwise there will be little else to stop the grand denial, self-deception machine that it has become.
Here’s a chilling excerpt from the article (you may need to register to view it)…
In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.
The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
SBJ: Have social medias taken over the political debate and activism or do real life debates and organisation still serve a purpose–and if so which?
GL: Taken over? No, there isn’t any statistical evidence for that. Television, assisted by newspapers and radio, are still dominating the political agenda. The Web is playing a strange, new role in all this. For many, Internet is the perfect place to hang out and escape the boring, pre-programmed world of the ‘old media’. Simultaneously, society is moving into the Internet at the same time, just think of the re-invention of advertisement out there. What we see happening is not an easy convergence of media. Real and virtual mix but in unexpected manners. That’s the fun of it. However, the current crises are not properly addressed either in cyberspace. It’s really questionable to think that the paperless Internet is contributing in a positive way to the global warning and environmental pollution that we have in China as the place of production and Africa as the waste basket. But I remain positive. Remember that all these hyped-up self-important dotcom people in the late nineties had no idea about their own upcoming crash, let alone about the social aspects of Web 2.0. This makes me optimistic about Web 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Why won’t some Afro-Brazilian consortium draw up the principles for the Internet architecture in 20 years time?
Dan Havel and Dean Ruck called this tunnel “Inversion” and saw it as a celebration of the old space that had once housed art classes. Just before these houses were demolished to clear the site for a coffee house, they peeled off the exterior wood and recycled it into this awesome art installation. Locals knew the buildings and the classes they’d housed, but suddenly the sight drew in more attention. Kids and adults climbed in from off the streets to get lost in the stunning vortex of wood scraps.
This is the first time this episode of South Park hit my radar. Gawker resurrects it in time for us to ponder some of the latest hysteria concerning net addiction. Thing is, the Internet is the least of our problems, really. Shopped for food or been to the gas pump lately?
When I say the medium is the message, I’m saying that the motor car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the factories, and the oil companies. That is the medium. In other words, the medium of the car is the effects of the car. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as an engineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The car is a FIGURE in a GROUND of services. It’s when you change the GROUND that you change the car. The car does not operate as the medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the medium. So ‘the medium is the message’ is not a simple remark, and I’ve always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation, and the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology.
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, written by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. Occasionally he shoots from the lip, bloviates, misspells and can be tangential.
