Yet another example of systems-oriented storytelling combining the power of investigative reporting with animation. This comes from the Center of Investigative Reporting, a fantastic cauldron of muckraking. Back in the old days when print was king, I interned there while I was in college. They work hard trying to protect the public interest, so your support is greatly needed.

I’m not going to suggest this is the future of journalism, but this recent “explainer” project, “My Water’s On Fire Tonight,” combines the best of worlds: investigative journalism, oral cultural expression and visual storytelling. It represents a good example of media jujitsu that can simplify complex issues for our intellectually challenged world. Typically well-financed energy companies deploy their black magic media spin and PR to divide and conquer the American public sphere. So while extreme weather rips through the United States, people experience cognitive dissonance as if there is no connection between drought, fire, tornados and crazy temperature fluctuations with our energy consumption. We have to do a better job of “social marketing,” by doing an end-around the normal machinations of thought control. I hope explainers represent the best uses of new media to counter traditional forms of mental inoculation. (Check out the “explainer awards” for more examples.)

Image source

The following are notes from a presentation I recently gave during a panel discussion entitled, “Twittering the Revolution: Causes and Prospects of the North African Upheaval” at John Cabot University. These thoughts are largely sketches to fit into a ten-minute frame.

The problem is that everything I have to say comes from the media: media have become very self-referential and often reports on themselves. The important point is that what I say comes from inside a very complex media ecology that combines twitter, Facebook, blogs, Al Jazeera, hybrid print media, live blogs and email. As an indication, most of what follows came from following various discussions via Twitter.

Competing narratives:

1) Digital Utopians with implicit ethnocentrism that it’s West’s technological tools that enabled revolution and a hint of technological determinism, i.e. Tim Conner (writing in incomplete sentences like ad copy):

“Facebook and Twitter are great apps for inciting a riot to start a revolution. We need the next app. The app that lets the People gather together to quickly establish government of the people, by the people, for the people. The app that prevents extremists from taking advantage of a power vacuum. The app that enables quick restoration of the rule of law. And allows folks to quickly get back to work.”

In response David Smith writes:

“If the digital punters out there are to be believed, it is the power of some corporates in California that is setting the Arab world free. It is the venture capitalists, the CEOs, the boardroom visionaries of Palo Alto that are to be thanked for the groundswell we are seeing in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan. According to the social-media posse, we must bow our heads and give praise to Mr Mark Zuckerberg and Mr Jack Dorsey for sponsoring the Middle-East revolution.

Yup, Twitter and Facebook. They have both been pronounced as the cornerstones that one builds a revolution on. Got a regime you need to overthrow? Hashtag it, bag it, and throw it on the scrapheap, job done.”

Then there’s the tempered but optimistic view:

Jeff Jarvis (author of What Would Google Do?): “Today, it occurs to me that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may be the Gutenberg press of the Middle East, tools like his that enable people to speak, share, and gather. Without those tools, could revolutions occur? Of course, curmudgeons, they could. Without people and their passion, could revolutions occur? Of course not, curmudgeons. But why are these revolutions occurring now? No, curmudgeons, we’ll never be able to answer that question.”

On the other hand, from those who were there:

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, calls it Revolution 2.0 and likens it to Wikipedia where you have no clear structure or leaders and it is done collectively.

2) Digital dystopians and the “debunking cycle” (Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom) who argue a) revolutions happened without Twitter and Facebook, so we can’t attribute social networks as causes (Gladwell: “People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.”); b) clicktivism is false sense of empowerment with weak ties, and is without deep organizing that builds strong ties; c) social networks are also tools of repression that help authorities crackdown and find who the rebells are (as was the case in Iran).

Reinforcing this view:

* Remember how quickly Wikleaks was shut down by corporations on the Internet.

* Facebook deactivated an Egypt group because it used pseudonyms. Gawker’s Adrian Chen argued that Facebook was timid and cowardly by not actively helping Egyptians protestors.

3) The Third Way. This sees the situation as a “media ecology” that has all these elements. Missing is the role of Al Jazeera, which has spurned a pan-Arab neo-nationalism, and its English version which has inspired those in the West to solidarity. You can’t argue “what if” because it is impossible to speculate what would happen without the current media ecology. For example, Jay Rosen’s “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” polemic argues, “factors are not causes.”

I’m interested in the reversal of roles of the traditional media model. For us in Europe and the US, Africa is normally the “periphery” and we depend on our own technicians and experts to report back to us. During these events, we became the periphery. News was “crowd sourced”— Al Jazeera depended upon people on the ground with cell phones and Twitter. Live news blogging, like the Guardian UK mixed its reporting with sources from all over the world. Twitter was an amazing way to track what was happening on the ground. Al Jazeera does not exist in isolation of social media. It is a hybrid.

Israel and the neocons could not control the narrative on the ground. This is the biggest change. 85% of Americans said they sympathized with Egyptian revolution. Now there is increased transparency, and those who did biz with dictators are being discredited. Artists like Boyance, Usher and 50 Cent who performed for the Gaddafi clan were called out and embarrassed by their actions. You can be sure people will think twice about enabling dictators.

There is a far more heightened morality in the global public sphere.

Other thoughts:

* Can you believe this slight against US media from the US State Dept.? This is a pole shift. Sec. State Hillary Clinton: “Like it or hate it, it is really effective. In fact, viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it is real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news that is not providing information to us, let alone foreigners.”

* Did American media fail because of its celebrity/parachute journalism, so we have the spectacle of Anderson Cooper’s attack or the unfortunate assault on Lara Logan?

* Was Wikileaks the catalyst that the started the whole process? Impossible to answer, but it seemed to have had the effect of the Emperor’s New Clothes fable.

Again, there is too much complexity for simple answers. Fear factor broken. The field of action changed.

Will Arabs save Western civilization again? Recall that it was the Islamic universities in Spain that translated the Greeks. Without them our philosophical tradition would be long gone. And now, for the revolution that seems to inspire so many.

First, Google’s Wael Ghonim on “Revolution 2.0,” discovering that you are not alone and the power of thinking together: “the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.” Next, Al Jazeer’s Wadah Khanfar talks about the network’s role in the Arab revolts. Al Jazeera shows loads of integrity difficult to find in US media, shoring up Hillary Clinton’s claim that Al Jazeera is real news.

Incidentally, you might enjoy the comments on the TED page that features this video. One commenter, hamd hamid, had this choice quote:

“They refine the crude oil but not their faith,purify even the blood but not thier intention,transplant hearts and kidneys but not love and health… They have made wine purer than water,have send many things to space but not even a few good deeds to heaven,have lighted the world but darkened thier souls.”

This writer is an Internet Rumi.

Glenn Beck doesn’t deserve more media coverage, but I couldn’t resist. Sorry Glenn, naturally Disney will make a doll honoring Chinese communists. Where would good ol’ American capitalism be without the strong arm of the Red Guard enforcing unfair labor conditions so that we can buy cheap Disney crap at Wal-Mart? Frankly, a single party state with unregulated capitalism is a Tea Party wet dream. Man up Glenn, the Chinese Communist Party has you beat at your own game.

Wooster Collective posted these images from CNN’s ad campaign in Turkey, “Stories with the full background.” Aesthetically this is by far one of my favorite marketing stunts (see my book cover to understand why). The thing is, why don’t they run ads like this in the US? I think the answer is self-evident. The US press is generally chckenshit to be too honest at home, but will present a different face abroad in order to appease the generally oppositional view of the US overseas. This kind of two-faced approach is a disservice to the American public and also points to the ethically crippled state of corporate media.

Girolamo Savonarola: Beck’s Old World counterpart (Image source: Wikicommons)

Without intending to do so, this is my belated response to the 9/11 anniversary. Even though what follows doesn’t address the event explicitly, no doubt it is the background of the current rise in rightwing fanaticism. Anyhow…

Alternet has a great thought piece about the Glenn Beck phenomena. In particular the author does an excellent job of comparing Beck’s popularity with the shenanigans of the film Network‘s Howard Beale (based on Beck’s own claim that his role model is indeed Beale). Granted, I’m far more sympathetic to Beale’s character than I am with Beck. But the parallels between Network‘s uncanny prediction of the future of news (it was made in 1976), in particular its prescient vision of what would become Fox News, makes the comparison necessary and appropriate. It has certainly become on odd time when the fake news is real (Daily Show, Colbert Report) and the real news is fake (Fox and other cable news).

Admittedly, it has been hard for me to grasp how a completely nonsensical character like Beck could come across to his fans as a serious journalist. In a way, he’s a perfect empty signifier for television. He can use the professorial signs of serious research through his deployment of a blackboard and sophisticated-looking diagrams, and he commands all the tricks that TV offers as a medium of emotional engagement. Whereas in the past you’d find such rants in conspiracy laden books, like Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy, or on radio (which remains a popular medium for right wing anger), TV is a “cool” medium (to put it in McLuhan’s terms) that engages more senses and therefor has a far more powerful effect. What Fox is doing is mainstreaming John Birch Society antics for its own cynical business interests, but might find itself in trouble when their clown-lead movement takes over government and starts outlawing the kind of liberal lifestyle enjoyed by the rich New Yorkers who staff and operate conservative corporate media. For a hint of what this kind of world might look like, I suggest reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

All this points to something that I have found troubling. How is it that satirical depictions of corporate lunacy (such as Network) become embraced and co-opted by the right? I first noticed this when the brilliant parody of warmongering wingnuts in Team America was celebrated by so-called patriots. The film’s theme song, “Team America Fuck Yeah,” became a popular anthem for the right. Any sane being who watches this film must know that it is an ugly mirror of all the untruths and idiocy associated with fanatical patriotism. But then the reality sinks in that there is a psychological mechanism that makes it impossible for crazy people to see their craziness. I don’t want to patronize and argue that these people are stupid. But insane? Perhaps. Even rational and well-educated people can get caught-up in a wave or irrationality (such as Germans in the Nazi era) when a kind of groupthink charges the larger social field. Under such conditions, people seem to be enraptured as if under a kind of spell. Indeed, anthropologists have noted that when people participate in group rituals their normal behavior can be altered. Leftists can succumb to the same kind of behavioral modification. I have seen it in action during riots. Not fun.

The Beck scenario highlights a few trends. For one, Beck and his appeal will not go away in the near future (nor will his ilk like Sara Palin (unfortunately not related to Monty Python’s Michael Palin)). As long as it makes money and serves the interests of far right business interests, it will be amplified and well-funded.

Secondly, rational facts will not change this dynamic. We have to consider that we are dealing with people who are medieval in worldview, but have the tools of the Renaissance at their disposal. This is a kind of contradiction that usually does not end well. Consider the cultural wars between the Florentine intellectuals, artists and cosmologists (i.e. the Bohemians of the Old World) and the Vatican. While the Pope and his inner circle was as hedonistic as the neo-Platonists at their employ (Michelangelo wasn’t the only homosexual to rome the halls of the Vatican), the Church’s lower ranking minions were the shock troops to keep the power matrix intact. In particular there was the arch enemy of Florence’s Medaci family, fanatical monk Girolamo Savonarola, whose mad rants and book burnings (“Bonfire of the Vanities”) fired up enough unrest to keep the liberal values of the Renaissance in check (and eventually squashed by the Counter Reformation). Eventually the tables were turned and Savonarola was tortured and burned at the stake. Network‘s Beale ended just as badly when his ratings and public appeal dropped, and was gunned down in a staged assassination by the network bosses. I don’t predict either outcome for Beck or Palin (nor do I wish it upon them), but as a Tai Chi master pointed out, life is a roller coaster: what goes up, goes down. Simple analogy, I know, but it’s good to remember. Even Hitler’s lunacy wasn’t sustainable, but he was around long enough to cause a lot of damage and heartache.

So, then, the $10 million question becomes, What to do about it?

I’m reminded of an anecdote from the oral history of the Mexica concerning the time of Cortez’ colonial conquest of Mexico. As the story goes, Moctezuma sent his priests to confront Cortez and his growing indigenous allies who were sick of Aztec rule and were willing to help rid their oppressors. Moctezuma’s priests tried their usual tricks, including dazzling people in a kind of magic ritual that would scare them into submission. But this time it didn’t work. In the words of Moctezuma’s enemies,

You cannot deceive us; you cannot make fools of us.

You cannot frighten us; you cannot blind our eyes.

You cannot stare us down; we will not look away.

You cannot bewitch our eyes and turn them side.

You cannot dim our eyes or make them swoon.

You cannot fill them with dust or shut them with slime.

(From The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, p. 52)

Why did the priests’ magic fail? Because the context changed. I don’t mean to sympathize with Cortez in this particular story, but only use it to illustrate how the social field can be altered through a kind of dis-illusioning. As Cesar Chavez said,

“Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

Consider the fall of the Soviet Empire and Eastern Europe. It’s not that suddenly everyone became a revolutionary (or reformer as the case may be), but that the control mechanism was altered, enabling people to see new possibilities. Or put differently, suddenly they understood an alternative mode of existence.

What this tells me is that social change comes about not only because of information inputs, but also as a result of changing contexts. No doubt information is helpful, but it will not be useful when a mentality is incapable of utilizing it for its own good. The experience of Orson Well’s War of the Worlds broadcast on Halloween, 1938 makes this point. Recall that Wells, perhaps an early postmodernist who understood mass media as a useful artistic medium, repurposed HG Well’s chilling tale of alien invasion as a radio newscast. Some in the Northeast took the broadcast to be real and panicked. Later sociologists researched to study why people reacted in such a way. What they found was that in general those who believed the hoax tended to be very religious, whereas those who doubted it tended to be educated. In other words, those who weren’t fooled were critical thinkers. They knew how to find a phone and to call their neighbors to see if this event depicted on the radio was actually taking place.

To this end, I believe education is the real antidote to right wing fanaticism. Of course, we then need to consider what kind of education. No doubt, many on the right are products of contemporary American education, which has been thoroughly redesigned by the neoliberals, the very same kinds of people bankrolling the likes of Beck and Palin. As I discuss more thoroughly in my book, Mediacology, No Child Left Behind is a conspiracy to destroy creative and independent thinking in schools. Unfortunately, I think Obama is doing no better, and is furthering the goals of corporate interests who want to shape education so that it churns out technocrats who are good at implementing the worse aspects of the global information society. Unfortunately, I have little faith that my particular solution to the education problem–media literacy–will succeed in the public school environment, because its goals are contrary to the testable rubrics promoted by so-called education reform.

Nonetheless, It is my hope that critical thinking skills taught through media literacy will become more widespread. Indeed, as the good work of media educators and activists has shown, media literacy has become a formidable movement. But it has done so mostly in unofficial settings, such as in after school programs and nonprofit-funded arts programs. This doesn’t bother me so much because working inside much of the school system is a nightmare (I’m not using hyperbole here–I’ve been inside some of the US’ worse schools, and no child should ever be placed in such environments, let alone be tolerated as acceptable by the adults who run them). The question remains how to fund and support these semi-formal networks of alternative education. Certainly the economy and budget cuts aren’t helping the non-profit sector either (again, not to be conspiracy minded, but in A Brief History of Neoliberalism David Harvey reminds us that the financial sector periodically engineers crashes to re-appropriate wealth. He shows how depressions and recessions have historically enabled privatization and transfer of middle class resources to the rich).

I admit that I don’t have the answer for how to help spread media literacy, in particular in the communities where fear is more amplified and “foreign” ideas are rejected. I’m fairly certain that underlying most fear at the moment is a loss of power and control that historically belonged to whites. The world is getting darker (not in the ominous sense), and American power is on the wane. The crazy white people who are grasping and clinging to myths of the past will ironically exacerbate all the trends they rail against, in particular if they insist on military solutions and Christian militancy as their balm of choice. For things to shift into a new dynamic, no doubt the current cultural environment will have to change, and one place to start is to work towards a more democratic and critical media that will not elevate the claims of the insane Qu’ran-burners into national stardom. We need to isolate these orchestrated hysterias within their larger project of fear-mongering by the far right, and to somehow counter it with the power of love and creativity.

CNN’s recent re-branding effort, “Go Beyond Borders,” presents a bit of a conundrum for me. On the one hand this is a brilliant marketing campaign that is also educational and interactive. On the other hand, it really bleeds the line between marketing, history and interpassivity–designing carefully controlled parameters of interactive media that are “free” in aesthetic only.

Here CNN re-brands itself as “borderless,” yet it’s not just any border. It carefully chooses an event whose symbolism as the triumph of capitalism cannot be ignored. At a time when capitalist ideology should be challenged by media, CNN intrenches itself as the premiere network of capitalist dogma, incorporating the various signs and trademarks of the system’s triumphs– the fall of communism, art, marketing and networked technology–to bundle them into their own nifty little neoliberal package.

Is this something to be concerned about? Commercialism has penetrated every aspect of public life. I know I’m old school when I argue for a clear line between the public good and corporate interests, whereas others would say, what’s the big deal? Maybe it shows that corporations are responsive to the public good. Yet, as is the case with BP, it’s one thing to brand yourself and side with a particular outlook, it’s another thing to practice it. Given a choice between CNN and Fox, I would certainly prefer CNN, but I would hardly call the network virtuous. It certainly remains a primary propaganda arm of global capital. This is not a conspiracy, just business. After all, which “side” do you think Time Warner Inc. is on? Wall Street’s or yours?

I suppose the world is more nuanced than my cartoon, punk rock version of it, yet it’s still hard for me stomach this marketing ploy couched as a history lesson.

“Cyclonic perpetual emotion machine…” and other prescient observations about Fox from Jon Stewart. Not surprisingly, Stewart eviscerates his nemesis on ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ But of greater interest is his discussion of TV and radio from a media ecology view (around the 13:00 mark).

This news clip and video of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Ady Gil being struck by Japanese whalers will be of interest to anyone who has read Kevin Michael DeLuca’s Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. In it he reflects on the success of Greenpeace’s anti-whaling image war in the 1970s in which the organization was able to successfully reframe Russian factory ships as agressors against powerless whales. Their guerrilla media played well in the Cold War rhetoric of the time, their images being provocative enough to transcend the dominant discourse of the evening news. DeLuca argues that through such media environmental groups have the ability to raise awareness of issues otherwise ignored by mainstream press. He wrote the book before “viral video” became a mainstream concept.

This clip, which comes from CBS News’ YoutTube channel, was also viewed on the evening news in Italy. I don’t know if it has managed any real TV coverage in the US other than the Web, but the clip is already spreading through the blogosphere.

There are two curious things about this video. First, it is from the perspective of the Japanese whaling ship, so it’s a bit odd that the video is distributed at all–considering the potential liability of the whalers. Either there’s more to the story that the Japanese intend to tell, or there was a covert videographer onboard who uploaded it via satellite. Either scenarios is intriguing.

The other strange twist is something that begs a snarky comment, but I’ll resist. The the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s other vessel that rescued the Ady Gil’s crew is called Bob Barker, the namesake, no less, of the famous game show host who paid for the boat. Goes to show that media do have a peculiar way of circulating reality.