I like this video’s snappy, quick-cut deconstruction of several absurd greenwashing projects. In particular the eco-Barbie is tooooooo much! But is soundbite Web TV in keeping with true eco-communication? Well, there is no rule, of course, so it wouldn’t be fair to banish this kind of media from the realm of evolution. Working in its favor is the open-ended form of Web distribution. Going against it is the flashy-short-attention-span-twittery-ephemerality of it all. I just don’t know how this kind of stuff will stick without serious discussion. There needs to be a way to bring media into the realm of dialogue. This is my current model for organic communication, but I’m open to suggestion and the possibility that I’m wrong.
Deconstruction
23
Nov 09
“Every act is an animal act”
You can thank PT Barnum (quoted in the header) for viral video’s secret formula: videotape some kind of stupid human/animal trick (the more extreme the better) and draw a crowd. Enter Plane Stupid, a group that wants to reduce air travel by using freaky video to draw awareness to its cause. Problem is, the the ad’s logic isn’t logical. While it’s true that our taken for granted use of air travel leaves a tremendous carbon footprint, and the madness of building more airports defies common sense about the global climate crisis, equating a plane ride with a polar bear’s death won’t serve its hyperbolic purpose. It reduces the systemic nature of the problem into a simplistic kind of telemedic death porn.
Who does this kind of tactical media help? In the end, Plane Stupid. They will get lots of hits and new visitors (such as myself), thereby making the video a success for them. But does it facilitate understanding of the problem? Probably not. Though a worthy cause, in balance I’m wondering if the circus-act-as-medium is hurting the message. In the end we are left with Susan Sontag’s lament that we’ll remember the image, but not the circumstances that created it.
20
Sep 09
Untamed Two, unleashed
(watch the videos in order)
Do you want to frak this car?
One of the key themes of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature is the loss of a cultural restraining ethic in our dominant global paradigm, one that limits “progress” and prohibits the over-exploitation of land. Up to the Renaissance it was commonly held in European cultures that it was sinful to plunder Earth. With the scientific and industrial revolutions, that ethic of restraint has become a heresy, in particular if it inhibits capitalism’s primary product, growth. As I write this, though, I see how “growth” is actually a gross misnomer because what “grows” is financialization, and hence disimbedding from the constraints of nature, while simultaneously diminishing the biosphere’s diversity and “budget of flexibility,” to put in Gregory Bateson‘s words, which makes ecosystems so resilient to disturbances. Bateson likened the situation to a tightrope walker’s balance pole getting increasingly smaller. We’re on the verge of whittling ours down to the nubs of our hands.
Given this context, we should be weary of popular buzzwords like “unleash.” From the Enlightenment perspective, unleashing the autonomous self on a global scale is a virtue, but from the view of a constraining ecological ethic, “unleashing” is akin to cutting loose the ego pitbull, which has been designed not to cooperate or participate in the cultural commons, but to terrify neighbors and to destroy a sense of community, best expressed by Margaret Thatcher, who said there is “no such thing as society, only individual men and women.” She added, “Economics are the method, but the object is to change the soul” (P. 23 from David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism (highly recommended!)).
Thus we come to Untamed Two, stand-ins for two new Mini Cooper models (two new *models*, get it?). This is a fairly clear example of the merger between culture and car industries in the current waive of branded entertainment. Gleaning the ad’s imagery and banal disco-pop soundtrack, the images at best a parody of the worst kind of Euro-trash bourgeois aesthetic, “aesthetic” being a kind word given the state of the world.
Part one’s mirror motif is reminiscent of a tale told by Borges. In it he refers to an old Chinese legend about an emperor’s battle against a race of specular beings from the mirror world who had previously lived side-by-side with humans. Upon losing the war with the Yellow Emperor they were banished back to the mirror world, and forced to imitate all our movements. The legend warns that one day the people inside the mirror will return, and we’ll know of their eminent arrival when we hear the clanking of their weapons from behind the mirror. I liken the mirror people to our fractured and shadowed unconsciousness, the disembodied observer self common to people who experience extreme trauma. In our collective Western psyche, with linear perspective and later the Industrial Revolution, we pushed away from our Earthen bodies as we increasingly mass mediated our lives, disembedding ourselves from a grounded and sacred relationship with the Gaia. The mirror world starts to replace the one we evolved in.
McLuhan writes of the Narcissus myth as an allegory for our amputated selves transported into this mirror world. Failing to feel anything in our own bodies, we look to the media to re-stimulate and reawaken our machinated corpses (see Romanyshyn’s Technology as Symptom and Dream for a great discussion of the transformation of our living bodies into corpses, machines, robots and now astronauts). The more we call upon media to awaken us, the more we turn ourselves over to the mediation of our very bodies so as to avoid feeling the pain of the world.
Which brings us to the next two installments of the Mini Cooper ads. In them we see quasi-David Lynch horror edits that jar the nerves, exemplifying how media evolve to make us feel (something), thereby satisfying the viewing public’s increasingly desensitized need for amped-up nerve stimulation, the clawing, animalistic growls an allusion–and nod even–to the repressed animal-being in all of us. Not surprisingly, it’s the “wild” woman–not the rational man who is to buy the car–who invokes in the male gaze a broken mirror of the ancient, “primitive” self. She smashes a pastoral scene with cows, an ironic image given that many believe that it was the domestication of animals and plants that initiated our separation from a holistic connection to the land and each other. So the deeper shadow of our long-lost carnal selves is there, but it’s so twisted and deformed, its benevolent and mutual aid nature has been mutilated beyond recognition.
Unless you pay attention.
9
Mar 09
“Speeding forward, future hopping, always dreaming never stopping…”
In the digital media class I teach we have been talking about the “consumer sublime,” which is the idea that people seek increasingly more stimulating media to “awe” their senses in the same way we once encountered the sublime within nature. The clearest example is comparing the experience of going into the Grand Canyon versus watching an IMAX movie on the canyon’s edge (yes, it’s possible). This pattern goes along with the theory of the “creeping cycle of desensitization” which argues that every time media technique hits a threshold and becomes normalized, new media come along to amp up sexuality, violence, editing, sound and overall sensory experience. For instance, go to the IMAX home page and it instantly promises that you will “hear more, see more.” For another example, compare early James Bond trailers with recent ones, or old Bat Man with the new one.
Why does this matter for the environment? Because in our addiction for speed and thrills, we seek to supplant nature’s innate experience of awe with one generated by a computer; in the process of hyper-stiumulation we actually numb ourselves to the subtle voices of the extended natural world. But there is a fuzzy boundary between technology and nature (ultimately a false dichotomy, anyway), which might explain why naturalist Wade Davis of National Geographic would star in the IMAX film, “Grand Canyon: River at Risk.” On the one hand it seems absurd to watch this film inside a dark theater on the edge of the Grand Canyon when you could simply hike down and have the experience yourself. On the other, not everyone can travel there (the film can be seen in other theaters) and it does create an intimate experience that technology enables (such as telescopes or microscopes enhancing the invisible). This contradiction is similar to that which Walter Benjamin grapples with in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He argues on the one hand art loses its “aura” when reproduced, but on the other, it becomes democratized because it becomes available to everyone (unless, of course, if it’s being mediated by fascist propaganda or corporate media).
Any new medium both enhances and eliminates some sensory experience– no doubt certain aspect of nature become accessible to us through film and TV, while others are inadvertently cut off. BBC’s Planet Earth series, for example, takes us places we can never go, or allows us to see animals we’ll never know intimately. Or Winged Migration can show us birds’ “umwelt” (selfworld) in a way that we may never know (unless we become a shaman, that is). This is an over simplification of a much larger argument, but suffice to say, the natural sublime can be present in some kinds of media.
With that said, I now want to take a closer look at Comcast’s “Dream Big” ad campaign (the first is posted here, to see the others you can click on the YouTube playlist I created with examples). Like the IMAX Website, it promises more and better of everything (the jingle chimes,”Speeding forward, future hopping, always dreaming never stopping…”). The ad presents a veritable Christmas morning of sensory delight in which we can live out our fantasy of perpetual childhood. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with being childish, but as ecopsychologist Paul Shepard points out in Nature and Madness, our culture is traumatized because we are wired for rites of passage involving communication with nature, without which our “ontogenesis”–growth pattern– is corrupted. In other words, because of our increasingly deeper disconnection with the natural world, we never fully grow up and mature the way that our biology intends. Look around, and you will see the disastrous consequences of this kind highly addictive personality disorder. Rather than have a healthy, nurturing relationship with our natural world “parent,” we run around the globe like five-year-olds with M-16s gulping as much oil as possible, even if we choke on it. I use the royal “we” of course. Most of us, I presume, would not choose this mode of life if given a choice or were properly aware of our options. Yet, here we are.
Even more sad is the Prozac calm of the ad talent’s tone. There is nothing arbitrary about this because historically “advanced” capitalist societies have cultivated a certain emotionless gaze. Think Ray-Bans and aviator cool. This began with the “Fordization of the face,” industrialization’s efforts to smooth the temperament and emotion of workers so they wouldn’t rebel against mind-numbing work. The modern equivalent is advertising’s droll voiced 20-something narrator who bemoans the cubicle life, but surrenders to it, nonetheless. The logic is that the System is more successful when few care what its managers design or do with the world, as long as it is entertaining and fun on the weekend. But then again, that might be the very reason why the System is currently falling apart. Confuse, divide, conquer and rule the emotions of people, and they will no longer find any gratification from a system that is supposed to “nurture” them. This creates a perfect opportunity for nature to reassert herself into the center of our attention, because in the end we know deep down inside the Candyland reality of this Comcast ad is only an unfulfilled desire to bond with the Mother. In fact, it’s available to you if you go outside and look. I recently had my own Candyland experience with a patch of grass. In it was a wonderworld of tiny spring flowers, varieties of grass, buzzing bees, succulents galore and mounds of emerald moss. I imagined myself tiny running amok in this little forest and found it wondrous and full of awe.
Finally, I want to remark on the inevitable harvesting of Generation BoingBoing culture. If you have followed BoingBoing over the years (it remains one of my favorite sites), you’ll notice that its writers have become tastemakers, a role I don’t think they sought or care much about unless it has to do with promoting positive net values such as open source and sharing. But aesthetically they have certain obsessions that inevitably become pop culture “cool,” which is evident in the Comcast ad. Comcast is “remediating” (or recycling from other media) a number of BoingBoing motifs. First is the fetishizing of coy, flirty ukulele DIY songstresses recorded on Webcams in bedrooms by young, attractive females. Another is the flattened eboy art style of pixelated cities hybridized with the Sims-like virtual world playground of video games. It’s a consumer cornucopia of vintage vinyl and cassettes, Japanese monsters, 1970s toys, Sesame St. animations, Linux penguins, and so on. True enough, the Comcast world is full of “wonderful things,” which in and of itself is not bad, but put into the context of how the global culture is trending, we may do well to hit the pause button for a minute and wonder where in the hell we are, and assess how we really got here.
Unfortunately, to criticize something like this is to be labeled a “Luddite” against “progress.” But I’m far from it. I don’t bemoan the many great positive changes that are happening as a result of convergence and new media (such as participatory media, collective intelligence, and transmedia storytelling). Nor do I think that Comcast is brainwashing us into a specific reality frame. But what it does do is reinforce dominant cultural themes and mentalities that need to be called out. Failure to do so would mean a failure to intervene and read against the grain of paradigmatic thinking that normally goes unchecked. Frankly, if I wake up some morning in Comcast’s world, I’d say we’re pretty screwed.
13
Nov 08
Disaster media shake out
Preparedness Now, created by the USGS Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, is an interesting piece of environmental media. It tries to convey the catastrophic consequences of a major earthquake while keeping some distance through a youthful graphic style so as to avoid being too visceral, and therefore too scary to deal with. Before watching it I expected Day After Tomorrow-like graphics too real to imagine, but I think if it were done in that style it would make it “too much like a movie,” and actually lesson its impact. As many media theories have noted, we often use media as containers for that which we can not deal with in our bodies– we run fearful scenarios in film as a way to contain them and make them less material. We deposit life’s risk into these external shells. For example, all those earthquake films of the ’70s ended up as good fodder for Mad Magazine parodies and did little else but entertain.
In keeping with Scott McCloud‘s theory of cartooning, the more cartoony you make something, the more you can project yourself into it because the lack of physical detail creates a space for your psyche to enter. The filters used in the video recall those instruction films from grade school that ran through dirty projectors, invoking the necessary innocence of childhood in order to imagine yourself inside the event. In this way, I think this preparedness video is rather brilliant. It really maintains the right balance between threat and personal responsibility. As a kid who grew up in LA, I can appreciate the usefulness of the piece and wish we had something this cool when I was in school.
It would be fair to criticize the video from one perspective, however, which is the manner in which it disassociates humans from nature. In the video’s scenario earthquakes are something that happen to us, and are not described as part of the necessary adjustments that Gaia makes to maintain an equilibrium. In fact, one reading of the video could be the ridiculous point that we built a significant global metropolis in such a dangerous zone. Moreover, the implication is that insurance companies (and hence caitalism) can handle the threat for us. Finally– perhaps this was an unconscious choice of titles– but isn’t “Preparedness Now” a riff on “Apocalypse Now”? Considering that film and mass media are our main reference points for reality, I’m guessing the title is ironically intentional. As such, it might be interesting to loop back and ponder Apocalypse Now! as an allegory for California in the ’70s. Think about it.
27
Jun 08
Aliens in the home world
© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI
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.”
10
Jun 08
Product Placement Planet Pt. 2
Yet another chapter in which a major corporation postitions itself as the savior of culture against the oppressor. As I wrote previously about Snicker and its clever Webisodes that somehow tried to convince kids that Mars Inc. is the savior of hip hop and youth culture, another caffeinated sugar pusher, Mountain Dew, has created this small semi-interactive universe in which Dew is equated with the elixer of freedom.
As high budget cartoon dystopias go, DEWmocracy is the mother of all corporate cannibals, riffing on the Matrix, The Invisibles, 1984, while managing to include a requisite Native American (with a really bad wig) to tell our skateboarding hero that he is “The One.” Hard to believe, but this bad acting trumps Keanu Reeves. Mountain Dew even includes pseudo participation in which user generated designs can become the next Dew label. Yeah for democracy.
The project also has a bunch of mysterious interrogation videos uploaded to YouTube, by one mysterious seedvideos1234, which is an odd bit of art imitating life given the recent scandal of the alleged destruction of CIA torture videos. But you won’t see the viral videos on YouTube associated with the DEWmocracy site, either because it’s just so bad PesisCo is disowning it, or it’s now too old to be bothered with (I have been sitting on this post for six months– sorry to be so out of it).
Just for fun, here’s an anti-Dew piece that attacks Pepsi for hypocritically advocating corporate responsibility while plastering the city with its ad graffiti.
8
Jun 08
Cut and paste your mind
Samsung is trying to get on the iPhone bandwagon with its F480 or “Tocco”(“touch” in Italian). Hey, why not just call it the “Taco”? It’s something you eat with your hands… Anyhow, as I argue in my book, one of the greatest distresses of media users is a lack of a sense of place. Samsung is well aware of this problem, so it offers us this alternate reality presented in its “Drag and Drop World” ad.
As an old zine publisher I often feel a tension between manipulating pixels and actually working with my hands. I prefer scissors and glue, but I’m old school. The use of traditional stop motion animation and collage to create this ad is an excellent example of “media composting,” which is to repurpose/recycle/remediate dead media into new media as a way of enriching and tapping into authenticity. The struggle of all marketing right now is to appear authentic, and of course to grab our “inattention.” Riffing on the successful HP “Personal Again” ad campaign, which has famous creative types changing the world with the wave of the hand, here Samsung shows not only how this is possible, but maybe it leads to too much information, overcrowding, and complexity.
As mentioned elsewhere, these new touch devises are remediating the body– trying to bring it back into the fold. So rather than the mouse or button pad being finger surrogates, we can manipulate the machines more directly. This also may be a step closer to direct manipulation with our minds. But as I have noticed with my infant daughter, she maps space through touch before the mind patterns it for her to design expectations of how reality should present itself. Without touch, there is nothing there.
Unfortunately the ad depicts the aspirations of a wannabe– a young male who desires the luxuries of the old industrial world: space, the mastery of nature, compliant women and material wealth with no one to intrude upon that realm. Notice how the forest scene has a bulldozer clearing forest for the new house and truck. But in typical hypocritical fashion, it’s OK for the individual to do that, but not everyone else! Which is what the ad is showing our young protagonist. He wants the wealth of the world, but only for himself. Dream on, the ad tells us, so instead construct your own virtual world in your isolated electronic reality. Your home is the hybrid world of Samsung electronics and Ikea furniture. Let your browser master the world, while you sit back and enjoy a microwave dinner with your virtual wife.
PS
You can view this user demo of the Samsung F480 on YouTube– note the difference between the speed the ad shows and its actual use, kinda like the difference between a McDonald’s Big Mac ad and the real thing.
This unboxing video demonstrates how the refined hunter gatherer can experience Christmas everyday!
19
May 08
The Hummer spaceship
I’m trying to change my thinking about advertising to become more open to the possibility that there may be something redeeming about marketing. But then I come across another Hummer ad which convinces me that advertising can also be so utterly evil. This is typical of Hummer, and I think a good example of the ideological environment that cars operate in. Hummer (and most car ads for that matter) consistantly portray themselves in relationship to nature. There are two reasons for this. First, because we live in an auto world, cars have become the environment, so it is impossoble for them to offest themselves. Secondly, cars are our spaceships. To paraphrase JG Ballard, humans are the real aliens.
I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape. We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.
3
May 08
Bread and circuits
It’s what we in the education biz call a teachable moment: an explosive artifact of the media world whacks the piñata of media fears and phobia. Enter the $100 million Grand Theft Auto IV.
A recent discussion at BoingBoing about the new Grand Theft Auto reminds us the obvious but often forgotten axiom that communications are messy (just ask your husband/wife/lover/friends/mother/father/daughter/etc.). Scale doesn’t matter. Not surprisingly the thread is an eclectic treatise on how hipster netizens view media ethics. The most interesting tension is between those making a feminist critique of the game’s misogynistic tendencies and those calling the game social satire. I think the truth lies somewhere between, but the discussion does demonstrate that in an age of postirony (irony with a faux critical pose lacking real substance), it’s hard to be critical without coming across as anti-fun. People are ridiculed if they use big words and theoretical tools to back up their ideas (some commentators derided the use of “patriarchy,” but hey, did the problem of patriarchy somehow magically disappear?), which begs the question, when did being educated become so uncool? Granted, academese can be a kind of inarticulation that obscures a lack of creative thinking or good ideas (and frankly quite boring), but we should be able to say things like patriarchy and militarism without seeming stuck-up.
GTA maneuvers social norms because postirony allows us take pleasure in the politically incorrect, permitting us to dismiss without consequences our own moral standards as frivolous relics of the ’60s. I’m for engaging fantasy, but mindfully, so perhaps we’re in need of a kind of post-postirony, which in the laws of logic, makes a kind of double negative, and hence we return full circle to irony as a rhetoric of social critique (i.e. Dada, Situationism, punk). In the mediated realm irony and humor are often the only way corporate media take on serious issues while maintaining some emotional distance. Recall how the court jester is the one person who can criticize the king without getting his or her head chopped off. Now think of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, both cultural phenoms on a network owned by one of the world’s biggest media companies, Viacom, and realize that their silly/serious media deconstructions have a bigger educational impact than Fox News (as a PEW study showed).
Navigating media requires traversing a realm of double binds such as real news being fake, and fake news being real. You can add to the list just about every advertising message which has as its subtext the belief that commodities have utopian properties that will transform our mundane lives into magical realms of possibility. To stay sane we require cognitive dissonance, which means holding contradictory beliefs as true (like buying new designer jeans that look old or freedom equals militarism). Mental tools like “truthiness” help us seek moral clarity in a world that has little, yet we sill suffer greatly when we see acts of cruelty played out in the media, video games being an easy target because we associate them with children. But beware of talk about media victimizing children, because kids often become ciphers for adult anxieties of being hijacked by technology. Most adult media critics claiming to represent children are probably masking their own fear of change.
Is it possible to accept the existence of video games as a kind of phenomena on their own terms? Unlike traditional media video games contain problem solving tools that often require people to work together. Moreover, video games have depth and challenges that encourage transgression. In one anecdote from a friend who teaches digital media, he found a clever kid using his taxi in GTA to run over and kill as many people as possible. His rationale? He was testing the stupidity of the game’s AI.
Can video games be used as tools to discover something important about how our minds operate, and where in the spectrum of moral critique our values come from? I don’t suggest making them into Roarshack tests, although that is what GTA has become for many. Nor I’m I calling for solipsism, because we do need a moral compass and social norms that respect people’s rights and integrity. I do feel in many respects that we are as much defined by community as we are by our own internal thought process. We need to go from the Western idea, “I think, therefore I am,” to a more indigenous concept like, “It all thinks, therefore I am.” As such, there should be a space for us to consider the intelligent aspects of video gaming, albeit with an eye towards critical engagement, and explore the potential holographic concepts contained within them.
(A recent book, Gamer Theory, takes a slightly different POV to argue that life in capitalist reality is in itself a gamespace, and that gaming reflects the ideological structure of our world.)
At one point media effects research changed the question from, What do media do to children?, to, What do children do with media? The latter question assumes a lot more agency on the user’s behalf. Media are not just ideological magic bullets that control our thoughts, but can also be a source of gratification. That in itself is not evil, despite what the religious fanatics want us to believe. Still, the rule of the playground stands: it’s always fun until someone gets hurt. But so far I can only vouch for tennis elbow.
I don’t think games like GTA pose a threat to society, but do enrich the complex and entangled debate concerning media effects. Yes, some people are prone to violence and can be pushed over the edge by certain heightened states of nerve stimulation, but I believe most people have a check against that. Still, we should also be able to criticize the game without being attacked as neo-Vicotrians. Play and fantasy should not be considered a threat to the social structure.
When I go to teach my mass media class at the university, my bus passes the Roman Colosseum, built by Emperor Vespasian in his “bread and circuses” campaign to entertain and feed the masses in order to stave off social unrest. It’s a reminder that in ancient times real people were killed for sport, and that was perfectly normal. Now virtual people are killed for entertainment (admittedly our method of aerial bombardment is a kind of “virtual” killing that is very real for its victims), but wouldn’t you agree that in the Old World when there was no mass media people actually killed more often for stupid reasons like honor and the sex lives of rich land owners? (“All wars are sex wars” — The Invisibles) This is a tough argument to make, because immediately WWI and WWII and Nagasaki come to mind, so in certain respects, war deaths have not decreased, they have just been industrialized. Still, again reflecting on the Colosseum, I have the strange, if not naive sensation, that in general the world is a more moral place to live (albeit less than perfect and full of blood thirsty lunatics supported by institutionalized violent pathology), and that it is in direct relationship to ideas about human rights disseminated and normalized by global media.
Truth is, after reading the Buddha’s sutas from over 2500 hundred years ago, I find that people have not changed much. Back then the mind was just as susceptible to greed, ignorance, delusion and confusion as it is today. The difference now is that the feedback system is far greater and involves more people. Frankly, it’s harder to get way with shit. In terms of cosmic cycles, you could say that we’re in a global phase of high metabolism. We amplify and burn more quickly. Trick is, at what point does the organism/system stabilize? Clearly a society that produces GTA for entertainment is in a highly volatile state. However, there are signs from the great GTA Debate that we are edging towards homeostasis. The fact that we have this instantaneous and massive societal debate is certainly an important indication that rather than being brainwashed, many of us still care deeply about the world… and we use the media to voice our opinions.
After Orson Well’s broadcast of War of the Worlds inadvertently produced a panic (recall that HG Well’s classic was recast as a news report), social scientists went back and surveyed listeners to find out what happened. What emerged from their media effects study is that educated people were the least susceptible to believing the broadcast was of a real invasion. Those with strong religious convictions were the most vulnerable. That caveat should remind us that more often than not it’s not the media itself but our own beliefs and education that produce the outcome, media being an element of a far more complex mental ecology than we would admit. If there is one sure thing to be gleaned from this whole exercise, it’s going to be a lot of free marketing for Rockstar, whose $100 million investment is sure to pale in relation to its profits.
PS Check Buzzfeed for the latest in the blogosphere.
Technorati Tags: Grand Theft Auto IV
29
Apr 08
Media’s environmental “brain print”
Image by Giuseppe Arcimboldo
I just discovered two interesting reports on media and sustainability produced by SustainAbility and WWF-UK, Through the Looking Glass and Good News & Bad. These PDFs are linked on their Media Spotlight page. You have to register to download them (it’s free).
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.
22
Apr 08
Earth Day memo: beware of info graphics
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.
Finally, if you want to keep current on greenwashing, then visit PRWatch for its weekly spin report. Here is their video from the latest on PB.
PS Why is only one day a year dedicated to Earth? Just wondering.
20
Apr 08
Into the reel
The “real” McCandless
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.
Note: I initially wrote this piece for Reality Sandwich, but someone else wrote a really good article and beat my lazy ass to post it. I recommend that you go over and read Andrew William Smith’s article too.
Technorati Tags: Into the Wild, Sean Penn
5
Feb 08
Citizen deconstruction? Not!
OK, so this is really not a spontaneous deconstruction of Super Bowl ads, but really a clever Miller Lite ad made to look like something fo’ real. I spotted the ad technique right away from the gratuitous lingering shots on the Miller Lite logo, and I thought the cuts were a little too fast for an amateur. But, I’m sure it will do its viral trick as it was intended to.
PS Unfortunately this year I cannot do a Super Bowl ad round up because here in Italy it was running far to late for me to watch. I will monitor the net closely, though, for some good montages.
Technorati Tags: Super Bowl
29
Jan 08
All I wanted was a Pepsi: pt. 2
Continuing the thought from my previous post on oppositional defiant disorder, I came across this excellent new series of pharma ad deconstructions from Consumer Reports, AdWatch (What no embed? Come on guys, get on with the Web 2.0! At least put the videos up on YouTube to spread your meme). Just more evidence that drug companies are trying to pathologize our lives.
For fun I’m posting my own re-edit of pharma ads here:
26
Jan 08
Photo War
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I just completed my first Slidecast, which is a combination of a PowerPoint with narrated audio. It’s about eight minutes long dealing with the theme of propaganda, war photos, film and popular culture. I hope you like it. More to come!
12
Jan 08
The flaneur’s coda
Charles Baudelairer‘s character of the flaneur has been celebrated and vastly discussed as the archetype of Modern Media Man: he grazes the sights and sounds of the new urbanity, a casual consumer of the senses. He is somewhat disengaged, his focus meanders and samples. As a “Bourgeois dilettante,” he’s a no where man. While the flaneur has come to symbolize the rise of media in the 19th century, I also see him reasserting himself in today’s ads, mostly in the guise of the 20-something tech economy knowledge worker. Usually he drives a (new) car, letting his electronics extend his senses for him while he consumes the landscape like any other media experience. So rather than a pedestrian wandering the city, the new flaneur is guided by GPS and a smart phone that makes his appointments (he may even have an outsourced personal assistant in India handling ticket reservations and other mundane activities for him). So rather than roam the sensations, his technological devices browse for him.
The Verizon VCast ad featuring Led Zeppelin (screen grab above, link below) brings the flaneur back to the street, but this time he wanders a hybrid reality of magical dimensions. The music is not only a soundtrack but describes every scene change he encounters. Meanwhile Led Zep memorabilia and clues are planted through out his sojourn connecting the physicality with his media space, giving “Physical Graffiti” a literal existence. He no longer meanders the city but a videogame. The outside is in, the inside is out.
I have to admit that this character makes me really mad. He’s young, good looking, self-assured, disengaged, clueless and apparently rich enough to live in Manhattan. He doesn’t really give a crap about Led Zeppelin because if he did he’d be banging his head to John Bonham‘s beats. He’s so self-absosorbed he’s probably thinking about how his $60 American Apparel T-shirt will get him laid. Led Zep belongs to the throngs of insecure, sexually dysfunctional, pimple-faced youth. This is spin the bottle make-out music, not Bourgeois dilettante, phone status, ring-tone accessory bullshit. Sheesh. This cheap commercialization is far too casual for me to bear.
(Article link (you may have to register to view it).
Technorati Tags: Led Zeppelin, puppy, VCast
12
Dec 07
Hunting the cool hunters
So you want to be a media pundit? I’ll confess my dirty little secret: I get a lot of the material for this blog from spying on the cool hunters. There are a variety of lists and Websites out there designed for marketers. These are created by so-called trend spotters, so I rely on them to tell me what is interesting to marketers. Maybe you can call it “unmarketing.” I dunno. Anyhow, I was spurned to give away my trade secret because one of the newsletters I subscribe to, The Cool Hunter, had this graphic demonstrating their campaign to place little marketing stickers on things that are deemed “cool” (click on the above image for more detail). Truth is they are just using this as a gimmick to flatter people in order to drive them to their site (after all, we all want to be cool, don’t we?). The great mystical problem of cool for marketers is that cool cannot be captured in a bottle. They know this, of course, but pretend to feign hipness anyway. But the ultimate law of cool is this: those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know. Try marketing that one, my friends. And save yourself some existential grief: cool is a rat race that you will never win, so give up now before you your soul gets ground up by the newness machine.
Technorati Tags: cool hunting
8
Dec 07
Dying of boredom in the Information Age
“Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?”
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
Funny how clever ads will make us forget about about their insidious messages. Repeating the conventional wisdom that time can be dissected into bits and pieces, and therefor is a thing that can be owned and sold, this ad makes it seem like down time is a droll activity only for losers who wear funny unitards in public. Vodafone would certainly love to carve up your day and bill all those moments that are not already being consumed by work or the Internet. If the Situationists argued that boredom was counterrevolutionary, Vodafone would contend that boredom should be reduced to a billable activity. I can’t wait for the moment when nanoseconds will be carved into subunits of the penny. Not even the blink of an eye should go without its billing cycle. 
8
Feb 10
Super Bowl 2010: Meme police
This year’s slate of Super Bowl ads indicate two trends: 1) a continued lack of imagination among the highest paid “creatives” in the world, and 2) a backlash against environmental activism. These Super Bowl ads were decidedly conservative by recycling standard demographic tropes to shore up the shrinking ego of the persecuted male species. This has been the long-standing approach of torch-bearer Bud Light, which perfected the art of celebrating the isolated, addicted male in defiance of the over-bearing power of women and community. What is new this year is transmuting this “abusive authority” into the guise of ecological consciousness.
Case study number one is the “Green Police” ads by Audio, which couches its anti-PC message in ironic humor, thereby softening the seriousness of its subtext. It confirms the fears that environmental regulation will result in a police state, and turns anyone who cares about the environment into a potential fascist. While we may laugh at such cartoony fears (it’s only a joke, right?), the Rush Limbaugh crowd takes them very seriously.
(It’s not an illegitimate protest. From an eco-justice point of view, the threat of global regulations forced upon local populations is real, but in the latter case the concern is that corporate interests will hijack environmental rhetoric in the service of obliterating local autonomy in the same way that trade liberalization promoted by the WTO has done.)
Here Audi defends the rich white male’s perceived loss of autonomy and his right to be a jerk. My particular peeve against Audi is based on personal experience in Europe where Audi drivers across the board are the most arrogant and dangerous exemplars of the tragedy of commons (for example, watch this ad). On highways one must be in constant alert of Audis rushing at jet fighter speed, lest your leisurely Sunday afternoon drive through the Tuscan countryside ends in a pile of crushed steel, bones and shattered glass.
The paranoia exhibited by Audi plays into the general meme that government regulation of corporate abuses will translate into socialist totalitarianism. Say “Green Police” ten times fast and you may end up with “Greenpeace.”
Call this a backlash shot across the bough of environmental activism. Green consciousness becomes the work of thought police.
You can see more “Green Police” ads and PSAs here.
Case study number two comes from Bud Lite, which (yawn) sticks to its failsafe storyline. In it Bud Lite’s primary target audience (those possessed by an inner 13-year-old “mook“) must retreat to their boys-only (stripper exception clause allowed) playhouse to take cover from moralistic authorities (women) who condemn their innocent behavior. But now the right to secrecy, addiction and misogyny is threatened by ecological activism. In this ad, rather than a house being built of recycled beer cans (which excites a young female foil), its owners have constructed a living refrigerator, without realizing, however, that symbolically it’s also a morgue.
Case Study number three is the Budweiser bridge. The only thing surprising about this ad is how it blatantly demeans humans as mere slaves to their corporate overlord. In this case, people are willing to let the truck (a symbolic container of the Budweiser corporate brand) drive over their backs. So while the previous ads play into people’s fears of losing individual freedom to ethical constraints, here people voluntarily become the servomechanism of corporate power and control. How’s that for ironic Super Bowl humor!
Bonus footage: Go here to see a hilarious Daily Show deconstruction of Super Bowl ads from 2004.