CRDM 701
Week 6 - Nick
"A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened." (Sontag, p.?)
Interesting. This thought really seems to coincide with the mystical aura conferred upon many technologies througout the ages. Something is always incontrovertible. Originally, it was eyewitnesses, then it was writing (how could you prove the guy reading the writing wrong if you didn't even know how to read, let alone have any experience with what he was talking about?), and print certainly had that aura of truth about it until people wised up to 'yellow journalism'. Photography moved back towards the eyewitness style, for as Sontag pointed out, you can't argue with the picture! You (or the camera) was there, you saw it happen, and this is a slice of that recorded for all time. Pictures have been used to redeem and damn people. Pictures are also ownership of small snippets of space and time that will never happen again.
Benjamen seems to agree, even though speaking of art in general: "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authority." (p.220)
Yet later Benjamen goes on to say that film and photography liberated art from ritual, and through their ability to be destroyed the importance of the authenticity. Yet! An original photogaph may have once again achieved some semblance of importance, as digital copies can be altered so easily. Proving that a photograph is unaltered becomes vitally important in restoring authenticity and the appearance of truth.
We have discussed the truth value of the most recent major technology, the internet, in class. On the surface, I am tempted to say that we have finally broken from the technology-truth paradigm, as the internet isn't so trustworthy at all, and yet as many of you have pointed out in class our students turn to it first as the pimary authority on information. Is this due to the trust of print or the trust of new technology? Hmm.
To conclude this blog, which has primarily focused on the two articles that interested me the most, I would like to toss up a series of questions that Carey posed. These seem particularly relevant to our projects, and I just wish to make sure they come up here in case they do not in Thursday's discussion:
"...how do changes in forms of communications technology affect the constructions placed on experience? How does such technology change the forms of community in which experience is apprehended and expressed? What, under the force of history, technology, and society, is thought
about, thought with, and to whom is it expressed?"(p.64)
These questions are some that I may be struggling with as I seek to frame my study on internet search engines and place them within an overall cultural context. Perhaps they will even direct my study enough that I can firm up my paper ideas. We shall certainly see!
Posted at 01:11AM Sep 26, 2007 by nmtemple in Week 6 | Comments[0]
Week 6 - Christin
?I reject your reality and substitute my own!?
Those of you who watch Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel might recognize that quote from one of the show?s main personalities, Adam Savage. I couldn?t help but think of it with regards to one of the themes from this week?s readings that caught my attention ? the way in which we construct reality and how this construction somehow is connected to power.
What interested me was specifically this idea that an individual can interact with multiple realities and that those realities are created. Carey states that when creating reality, ?what persons create is not merely one reality but multiple realities.? (63) In light of the discussion Carey also brings up about truth, I can?t help but connect the two. If truth is forms reality (scientists seek truth and thereby create reality), then does that mean that truth is created and changed by an individuals? perception and approach to the world?
Sontag talks about how photographs are ??miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.? (4) They can fade over time, be grouped together to form another reality, or torn, burned or otherwise destroyed. It?s interesting to me how both truth and reality can parallel the different states of the photograph. We believe a certain reality because we see it in pictures; we believe a certain reality because we believe in certain truths.
The Leiss, Kline, and Jhally article discusses how advertising creates a reality and attempts to convince consumers that their reality is the one they should seek. They attempt, in a sense, to give consumers a truth to base their reality on ? pictures convey truth, so if that woman is shown getting so excited over Herbal Essences shampoo in an image, it must be a truth that this particular shampoo makes individuals that excited. Consumers can then alter and form a new reality for themselves based upon these new truths they ?learn.?
Interestingly, there?s much debate over whether virtual reality is really a reality ? in light of the readings this week I would argue it very much is. What does everyone else think?
Posted at 10:43PM Sep 25, 2007 by caphelps in Week 6 | Comments[0]
Week 6 - Jon
The Sontag and Benjamin articles helped me to think about Google Earth (GE) for what it is -- a collection of photographs. In this blog, I would like to apply some of their ideas about photography to my research project.
In the GE interface, a patchwork of satellite images is applied to a globular shape. The idea of a three-dimensional globe being presented as a photo gallery provides an interesting spin on Sontag's discussion of scale: "Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out" (4). Yes, photographs can be resized and edited, but what of scale when the photographs themselves represent "the scale of the world"? In the context of GE, it seems that scale is more a function of the collection of images as a whole than it is each individual image. For example, from the GE interface I can zoom out until the Earth is about the size of a quarter, or, at the same time, I can flip the simulation on its head to reveal a whole new scale: the universe (through Google Sky). So, instead of each photograph "fiddling with the scale of the world," they each are part of a cohesive, manipulatable whole that itself is an examination of the global scale.
I am also hoping to bridge the simulated world of Google Earth with that of reality. Sontag makes clear that images can function in this way: "Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation" (10). Therefore, despite an individual's absence from the physical content of an image, him / her can still feel a sense of presence. The obstacles preventing GE from encouraging participation seem great; specifically, the abstractions at work seem greater than that of an individual photograph. First, for example, an individual views GE through a computer screen, which presents compilations of images that are abstractions of the content they represent. Moreover, the GE globe itself is an abstraction of the Earth proper, and the digital globe is covered with photographs that are an abstracted patchwork. Thus, there are at least three levels of abstractions at play, yet GE still manages to maintain a sense of place and reality.
Amidst all of these abstractions, how does GE serve as a humanitarian tool? Sontag indicates that "a photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude" (17). The Crisis in Darfur project is comprised primarily of images that fall absolutely within what most would consider a "zone of misery." While viewing the project, users of GE will find burning villages, crowded medical clinics, and starving villagers. The images are powerful, and the context in which they appear, the digital globe, is highly successful, as it allows users to spin the globe at will. In this fashion, the situation in Darfur can be juxtaposed with skyscrapers in New York City, the Eiffel Tower, or even "home." Thus, the context is global and local -- virtual and real.
The context of each powerful image is joined by what Sontag terms "familiarity": "The quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the degree of their familiarity with these images" (19). On the surface, the novelty of the Darfur images lies in the fact that, until recently, the situation was largely sidestepped by major news and broadcasting outlets within the US (perhaps due to a focus on the War in Iraq). However, a second level of novelty surrounding the photographs is the environment in which they appear, the digital globe, a completely different interface from the photograph album or magazine spread. Fortunately, the function of the photographs and their context makes the "How can I help?" link hard to resist.
Finally, Benjamin discusses the replacement of cult value with the exhibition. Eugene Atget's images of deserted streets, photographed in a way that Benjamin describes as a "crime scene," is comparable to GE: "With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance . They demand a specific kind of approach. . .They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way" (226). Amidst the many wonders of the world viewable in GE, the Darfur Project represents one such "crime scene" that certainly challenges audiences. Therefore, the Darfur project is successful because it is indeed a "stirring" exhibition on a global scale.
Posted at 10:16PM Sep 25, 2007 by jtburr in Week 6 | Comments[0]
Week 6 - Kathy
If mechanical reproduction made the photograph possible, and
the photograph turned the natural world into an object, advertising made a
business out of selling these images and controlling our view of the world.
Benjamin (1936) acknowledges a major shift in art in saying that "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility" (p. 224). This seems to tie directly to Sontag's (1977) discussion on photography, noting a change in human perception where people began to see photos as ways to collect pieces of the world and to think photographically. This way of framing the world could also serve interests of "institutions of control, notably the family and the police, as symbolic objects and as pieces of information" (Sontag, 1977, p. 21).
In their discussion about the Neoliberal position on advertising, Leiss, Kline, Jhally (1988) explain Galbraith's "revised sequence" (as opposed to the ?accepted sequence? of consumer sovereignty), in which producers control demand. In this view, "wants are created by producers through advertising" (p. 20), and, I would add, strategic information delivery. This got me to thinking about broadband providers, who seem to want to control the demand for information by controlling access to information. Internet users should look toward a tiered Internet system with a critical eye, being aware that a "revised sequence" will affect demand for information.
In the area of technological manipulation, Packard attempted to show that "consumers were becoming creatures of conditioned reflex rather than rational thought" through the use of devious advertising taking place at a subconscious level (Leiss, Kline, Jhally, 1988, p.22). Could tiered internet work on this unconscious level? Preferring some information over others, particularly when users are unaware, could have serious implications - think about political elections for instance - that could be devious indeed. Would Key's concept of "subliminal stimuli" (p.23) be manifest in deliberately longer or shorter loading times for websites?
Leiss, Kline and Jhally (1988) note that as advertising became lucrative for the press, "the audiences themselves become the 'products' generated by the media industry" (p.102). I feel that we need to question, in an age where so much of our media and information consumption (and our purchasing, too) can be tracked, analyzed and suggested, that we need to ask what kind of consumers various industries are fashioning us to be. They also discuss the relationship between advertising and programming, which is a discussion which clearly needs to be had when thinking about tiered Internet, or letting the bringers of the Internet into our lives also influence the speed, accessibility, availability, and therefore the importance of information in our lives. How might this enhance the capacity to commodify users?
An (almost) Complete Aside/Intermission: The discussion on false needs, pseudo ideals, and reification in Leiss, Kline and Jhally had me thinking about the Matrix - more specifically, how the machines control the humans in the Matrix through an image-rich world that tapped both real and artificial human desires to truly incorporate them into the productive system. The concept of reification enters when I thought about the character Cipher, who decides to ?re-enter? the Matrix after he realizes his desire to be with Trinity is not going to be satisfied. Clearly, the machines running the construct of the Matrix wanted Cipher to see a return to the Matrix as a better choice of reality, and in exchange for that better realty, he sold out (and attempted to kill) his former crew. Back to the main point?
Also relating to the commodification of the audience/users, Carey discusses reality as a scarce resource to be "struggled over, allocated to various purposes and projects, endowed with given meanings and potentials, spent and conserved, rationalized and distributed" and argues that "the fundamental form of power is the power to define, allocate, and display this resource" (p.87). Following this, I would argue that with tiered Internet (and in the Matrix), those who create and maintain the way in which we see the world have that power to define, to construct audiences as products, and commodify the human experience.
Carey's (1989) arguments about approaches to studying mass media are somewhat confusing to me, I will have to admit. He argues in Ch. 3, Reconceiving "Mass" and "Media", that "questions of political power and institutional change are inescapable and usually render hopelessly ineffective the standard cookbook recipes retailed by the graduate schools" (p. 69). He offers his approach in Ch. 8 (on the telegraph, which we read last week) as an example of a way to "elucidate a theoretical structure" that supports and gives generality to "detailed historical-empirical investigation" (p. 70). He argues that a critical theory of communication must "affirm what is before our eyes and transcend it by imagining, at the very least, a world more desirable" (p.88).
In Mass Communication and Cultural Studies, Carey discusses Geertz's progress toward a "workable concept of culture" which creates a way to understand specific cultures by "elaborating a theory of symbols and symbolic processes in their relation to social order" (p. 40). Cultural studies "does not seek to explain human behavior in terms of laws that govern it or to dissolve it into the structures that underlie it; rather, it seeks to understand it" (p.56). As I am still trying to figure out the best approach for my research this semester, I spent a lot of time trying to understand the cultural studies approach, and am looking forward to more clarification. I want to know what specific advantages there might be to looking at tiered Internet in the "cultural studies" way rather than by "dissolving the structures that underlie" a two tiered system.
See you Thursday!
Posted at 07:17PM Sep 23, 2007 by kfoswald in Week 6 | Comments[0]