No doubt, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi wasn’t the final word on cinematography’s powerful capacity to depict the environmental consequences of our modern world. With Manufactured Landscapes comes Jennifer Baichwal’s depiction of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s stunning images of industry in China. If it’s true that what is not mediated doesn’t exist, we can say now that at least one frightening slice of the world, albeit a pretty massive slice, is here for us to behold. Blink at your own risk.
As a cultural meme, photos of the so-called “lost” tribe of the Amazon circulated more rapidly in the mediasphere than electrons buzzing through duel processors. But now that the images have been revealed to be a “hoax,” we should kick back in our collective armchairs and probe what happened. To be clear, the pictures weren’t a hoax per say, because the people depicted in them are real and do live off our grid, but the implication that they were unkown or off civilization’s radar was false. Survival International, one of the organizations who published the photos, said:
This is a classic example of journalists getting the wrong end of the stick. The only people who ever claimed that the Indians photographed were ‘lost’ or ‘undiscovered’ were…. the press, despite the fact that Survival has been campaigning for the protection of the many isolated Indian tribes on the Peru-Brazil border for more than twenty years…. Indeed, you might have thought that the fact that the Indians are living in a government reserve set aside for isolated Indian groups would tend to indicate that they weren’t exactly ‘unknown’.
I found the images intriguing as a media phenomena. With our point of view coming from the surveilling eye of extraterrestrial flight, I can’t help but feel like these are stills from a Star Trek scouting mission in which we– the humanoid aliens– are observing a distant world uncontaminated by our civilization. For many viewers, I’m guessing the reverse reaction was true: that the indigenous people covered in body paint and pointing bow and arrow at our high tech aircraft are the strange, exotic creatures of a “lost” world. But as a reflection of our own zeitgeist, the intrigue of a potentially “lost” tribe says a lot more about “us” (the scientifically “advanced” world) than “them” (the forgotten, primitive ur-past of yore). In our effort to name and identify the event at a distance– i.e. to “other” the Others– the media buzz surrounding these photos is yet another indication that we have become aliens in our home world.
The images struck a chord because of the nature of media (interesting pun), which survives by cannibalizing novelty. Any photo that presents “newness” metabolizes into information and will froth to the head of the noosphere only to be gobbled and digested rapidly like a yeasty beer. In particular, what drives media’s center of gravity is the striving for authenticity in order to fertilize its newness reproduction cycle. This is not without some irony. Upon looking up “authentic” in Merriam-Webster, I found several curious and contradictory definitions. One is “made or done the same way as an original,” and the other is “not false or imitation.” A photo can embody both senses of the word, because on the one hand it is an imitation of something– reality–, and the other hand, it is a reality unto itself. The tricky thing about photos is that we assume that they are facts, yet what we do with them, how we choose what we see and the impact of the photo is far from the reality it purports to represent. Add to that digital manipulation, context and framing– i.e. the “naming” of the image–, and you have one big fat dose of truthiness.
This is the subtext of the image controversy, because there is an underlying distrust of media and civilization itself as ultimately inauthentic. Most of us feel like the characters in The Matrix. The only way that machines can keep us interested is to offer us scraps of reality through these kinds of controversial images so that we can verify the existence of truth and the so-called real. Nonetheless, I happen to not believe in the simulacra argument, because most of our lives are actually not electronically mediated, though we assume that they are. The distrust of simulation is older than modern technology and particular to the European mindset, going back to Plato. He was the one who said the bed was a mere imitation of a more perfect bed made by God. His is not a bed made by machines, but by human hands with tools. The interesting thing is that human language actually evolved from our hands and the use of tools, not the other way around: technology is human communication.
Plato’s fear and distrust of appearances has repeated itself incessantly as a tulpa trapped inside a hall of mirrors that is now modern media. Advertising simultaneously assures us of the world’s stability while the news makes us fearful of its structural integrity. Despite this tension, the capitalist system of commodities and consumption has become nature, our habitat. It is so normal that anything that can differentiate itself from the ambient background of consumerism and the techno-fetishistic mind will become novel.
Nonetheless, in this semiotic war for attention, capitalism still struggles mightily to be relevant and real. The underlying argument of typical advertising pitches is that their product is “the real thing” (to paraphrase one of the more memorable slogans of the century). Marketers use every magician’s trick to offer us some kind of allusion to authenticity, be it the bodily sensations of fear, hunger, humor and sexuality, or to wink at us by acknowledging that we all know this is a con game. It’s a treadmill that marketers fear to jump off of.
Which brings us back to the photos. Like passengers in a spaceship Hummer driven by the corporate dream world, many of us have become accustomed to feeling like aliens on our own planet. I consider this kind of “alienation” the true source of our pill-popping, “social anxiety disorder” ways. I quibble with some postmodernists who contend we are too alienated to be alienated, arguing that alienation requires a sense of self, believing that when we are decentered simulations of our own beings, there is nothing to bounce off of. I disagree. I believe we yearn for nature and connection because they are tangible and exist no matter how minute the splinter in our minds and souls. Without this longing, advertising could never proceed because it traffics in the language of loss.
These images demonstrate, however, that the prevailing “lost” trope in the media zeitgeist is reversing: in our grasping for the real, more than ever we feel the urge to really be “lost”: off the radar, away from the cell phone, pager and Internet like Into the Wild’s Chris McCandless or the actor reciting Jack Kerouac in a recent BMW ad. In our post-National Geographic world where all has been disovered, cataloged, photographed and integrated into the electronic sphere of our realm, there is little left for us to remember or know about how we used to be. But like the X File’s Agent Mulder, we feel the truth is out there, hovering outside us like pixel dust blowing in the cosmic winds.
Contact with “authentic” humans in the natural world gives us hope and wonder, yet the very act of taking the photos violates that innocence. Some even argue that trolling the forests for “authentically lost” humans violates their right to be uncontacted. Consider Star Trek’s Prime Directive:
“No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.” (Quoted from Wikipedia)
Because these photos indeed touched upon the “lost” meme, they also drew awareness to Survival International and to the plight of indigenous people in the Amazonian preserve (an interesting word in itself) and elsewhere. The fact that ultimately we are talking about the fate of real people with integrity and just as much of a right to exist on their own terms as we do, makes the this whole discussion more urgent. The civilization end game is upon us, and our budget of cultural diversity is dwindling rapidly, suffering the same fate as the biological diversity that supports us.
So, while acknowledging that organizations like Survival International do necessary and important work, they also depend on the media to educated the public about their mission and projects. Like many NGOs, Survival International’s site has plenty of sensationalistic images and videos, which begs the question of whether or not other people’s suffering can be contained and communicated effectively through images. Is this unethical? Not necessarily, as long as we are clear about the game we are playing and the nature of how it works. But it certainly remains ironic that it’s through media that we have to communicate civilization’s inauthenticity via the language of propaganda and exploitation.
Bonus footage: the following is a short documentary produced by Survival International,”Uncontacted Tribes.”
It’s a short paragraph at the top of the page. It’s surrounded by white space. It’s in small type.
To really get your attention, I should write like this:
* Bulleted list
* Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
* Short sentence fragments
* Explanatory subheads
* No puns
* Did I mention lists?
What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I’ve been away from the computer screen. Now I’m back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?
A while back a very friendly journalist contacted me about an article he was working on about advertising. We did a little interview and the results are in. I’m always surprised by what comes out of my mouth, but I’m glad it’s at least intelligible. Thanks to Sergio Burns for writing a nice article
“Ads seek to bypass the rational mind through the use of symbols that generate quick emotional reactions,” Antonio told me. “They appeal entirely to the irrational. I like to think of advertising as corporations dreaming your mind.”
Later, as I sat in the cafe Florentin in St Giles Street checking my notes, I was struck by how awesome the image produced by Antonio’s line ‘Corporations dreaming your mind’ was. This also resonated with what Dr Solomon had said about coporations not building share of the market but that their ’strategic goal…is to build share of mind’.
“Ads are there to build mindshare,” Antonio continued. “They usually have nothing to do with the product, but rather the corporate brand and its logo. This is to boost the value of the brand’s stock value. The ad tries to wink and flatter the consumer by pretending to identify with his or her needs.”
This clip is from the Candian documentary, The World According to Monsanto. Since most people in the US will likely not see this, I recommend sharing and passing along the links. This is one of the scariest companies in the world and people need to know what is happening, in particular regarding genetically engineered foods. Incidentally, if you want to read a great book that deals with GMOs and why they are so dangerous to the web of life, I highly recommend Fritjaf Capra’s Hidden Connections.
Cellphones microwaving brain cells like popcorn? Not quite. This video and many imitators are making the rounds quite rapidly, playing on fears (dully warranted I might add) of phones frying our brains. I did a scan of YouTube to check out the phenomenon and it appears to be a fake, albeit a pretty darn good one. This ranks as an A class viral video project.
Old media always goes to war with the new. So the following news is hardly surprising. Too bad for AP. They have no idea what they will be missing, which is a ringside seat to the next media revolution.
But lets look a little deeper here, because this isn’t a case of one small media company taking on blogs, this is nearly the entire print media, and for good measure television and radio as well. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which is the vast majority of all mainstream media outlets. Through AP the mainstream media has declared war on blogging, and established law isn’t going to stop them trying to milk every last cent they can from bloggers who may not know any better, and like the music and movie industry before them, they will attempt to pick off blogs one by one with legal threats. Internecine warfare perhaps?
Could it also be the last throws of an empire of news exclusivity that stands on the precipice of defeat? Perhaps not into oblivion in a Battle of the Bulge, but more along the lines of the The Second Battle of the Somme? I don’t subscribe to the mainstream media will die meme that is often a popular call in some blogging circles, but there’s little doubt, proven by evidence that the mainstream media has entered a period of contraction in the English speaking world, a contraction of which at the moment knows no end.
Despite increasingly complex digital-media offerings and hundreds of channels, we see the diversity of media ownership shrinking, along with the diversity of voices that are broadcast. People are fighting back, organizing, creating alternatives and holding the corporate media giants accountable. The corporations are pushing back. With life and death, war and peace, at stake, hinging on an informed and engaged populace, the stakes have never been higher, the media never more important.
So begins Amy Goodman’s recent editorial and wrap-up of the National Conference for Media Reform. I was initially hooked by the article’s title, “This Way to Better Media,” but found the story rather disappointing. Let me qualify my critique by stating that media reform is necessary and I applaud the work of both Goodman and Freepress who hosted the conference. My letdown was with a lack of stated principles that would lead to better media. To be specific, media reformers allow their argument to be framed by corporate media– they are a response, an opposition, an offset to mass media’s foreground. I was hoping to read about some kind of paradigm shift that was behind the bourgeoning movement, but I’m at a loss for seeing what that might be.
More newspapers? Though I appreciate the necessity of investigative reporting that newspapers occasionally invest in, I find most newspapers an incredibly boring waste of paper that are instruments of propaganda. It takes me about five minutes to read a typical paper, including the highly vaunted New York Times. To be fair, I’m a right-brainer, so I’m more attracted to the graphics and headlines, but really there is rarely much to read any more, and the Times in particular seems to be covering more and more other media. They have become class A media navel gazers.
More TV news? See above.
More radio? Ditto.
“Better media” is not a utopia. It is here. We are doing it, you are reading and clicking through it right now. The one threat to this revolution is net neutrality, and on that one issue alone the media reform movement has salvaged its legacy. And thank god they/we are fighting for it tooth and nail. But as long as we keep thinking in terms of the industrial media model by focusing our energy on reforming a centralized kind of media, we’ll remain trapped within a reality tunnel that doesn’t offer a fundamental paradigm shift that comes through practice and open networks that model the kind of sustainable social change that we really need. Such a shift would not be to revert to more traditional media, but to promote a kind of ethics that restructure our global outlook. For a way to a better media, these are some qualities to consider:
Community-produced media (”glocalized” media)/citizen journalism
Open source media
Hackable media
Open networks
Authentic and credible sources
Flexibility
Right Livelihood
Reciprocity
In practice, both Democracy Now! and Freepress are examples of these principles in action, yet notice that much of what they say is just a negative reaction (such as the video above). For an example of something a little more proactive, check out Global Voices.
You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around. This, of course, cues the laugh track. Yet a survey from an organization called Children Now found that two-thirds of kid respondents described men on TV as angry, while respondents from another group’s survey said men were portrayed as corrupt on TV by a 17 to 1 margin. Clearly, this is no laughing matter.
Feminists have lots to complain about when it comes to ads. No doubt, some of the rankest gender identity construction can be found in beer ads. But how many think about the impact of advertising on males as well? In my media literacy workshops I find myself particularly saddened by the repeated trope that men are stupidly driven by biology– contrary to some of the classical stereotypes that men are the intellectual masters of the universe. Obviously, both images are wrong. Marc Voyer (quoted above) does a nice job of surveying a number of the worse offenders, although I’m surprised that his list doesn’t contain any alcohol ads, though I suppose that would be too obvious. I have been recently re-reading Susan Sontag, and one comment really stuck out. Violence, she says, turns a person into a thing. It made me wonder, is turning a thing into a person also a kind of violence?
Parents, politicians, religious leaders have gone after virtually every art form associated with youth culture – comic books, rock music, and now, video games. And with comic books, these efforts eventually had a chilling effect (on the industry). How is it that current “objectionable” entertainment products avoided that same fate?
The question is, why did comic books lose that battle? The main reason that comic books lost is that their advocates didn’t have much voice. The advocates were kids and no one was listening. Nobody cared what they thought.
Another reason is simply economic. The big corporations weren’t publishing comics.
You write that the comic book industry was comprised of outsiders: ethnic minorities, women, people who were disadvantaged financially and perhaps couldn’t gain entry to prestigious schools or professions. How important was that diversity to the success of the medium?
It was immeasurably important because comics of all kinds — even superhero comics — were explicit, overt, opulent in their portrayal of the pride of (their) outsider status. Superman was the ultimate immigrant. He was an immigrant from another planet.
It’s essential. I think it’s the main thing that comics were here to say, was that outsiders of every sort were not lesser for their outsider status. That had, in one way or another, something over the orthodoxy.
Well, leave it to Taco Bell to cannibalize flash mobs, but there you have it. The voracious appetite of marketing gobbles up another activist tactic. Why am I not shocked?
To promote Taco Bell’s Fruitista Freeze, Philadelphia’s LevLane hired actors costumed in iced-over beachwear with their skin tinted blue who would freeze in position for hours while a support team outside Citizens Bank Park last week during an MLB Phillies home game handed out coupons for the frozen tropical beverage. Also, a flash mob in street clothes would do the same for a few minutes.
Because the stunt was, apparently, so successful and because, it seems, LevLane is so nice, the next day they did another stunt for free. Last Thursday during lunch, all agency employees wore orange t-shirts and walked to Philadelphia’s City Hall. On cue, the majority froze in place while a few others handed out more Frutista Freeze coupons. Ten minutes later the mob thawed, walked to nearby Love Park and refroze.
The Pirate’s Dilemma is slightly maddening. The intention is valid: to steer people towards thinking about piracy in a new light. The “pirate’s dilemma” is whether to persecute and shut down piracy, or to recognize it as a kind of creative competition. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. The thrust of Mason’s argument can be summarized by the two models of music industry approaches to P2P file sharing: either go the route of Apple and create a cheap, viable option for consumers, or the RIAA route and sue its customers.
As a former DJ, Mason cuts and pastes his way through the book with anecdotes. At first I found the approach a little obnoxious– a kind of overly cheerful airline-style of magazine writing. As a former punk, I found the whole chapter on punk capitalism a little superficial, and lacking a discussion of a really important DIY capitalist operation, Dischord Records. The section “Tao of Pirates” was also missing an important discussion of historical pirate culture, i.e. the black beard types that are so debated so interestingly in Wilson’s Pirate Utopias. I think the word pirate is used too generally. Basically, anyone under 50 is a pirate these days, and I don’t thing that’s true. Finally, the remix section failed to credit Dada.
But as I read on, I warmed up to the book and found the discussion of guerrilla marketing and hip hop pretty good. There was some history and anecdotes that I wasn’t aware of, so I was pleasantly surprised here and there. Still, if you want a more in-depth analysis of the economic situation of open source, read Benkler’s Wealth of Networks.
Ultimately I think Mason’s intentions are good. I’m not sure celebrating the cooptation of underground culture by capitalism is something that is to be happy about, but I suppose as the pirates become more mainstream, maybe our society will be better for it, and that to me, is the ultimate Pirate’s Dilemma.
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.
