Despair & The New “Anti-Media"

So, to end on a mildly dismal and “current” note about the world of blogging, if you’re a reader of Gawker or any of the blogs in the ever-growing Gawker Media stable, or ever briefly entertained the dubious idea of spending your early 20s working for near-minimum wage as a writer/blogger in a misguided post-collegiate haze, then perhaps you’ll find Vanessa Grigoriadis’ recent cautionary tale in New York Magazine, “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass,” of slight interest. If not, the moral of the story is simple: stay far away from blogging, especially in New York, unless, of course, self-destruction is your thing.

Syllabus Revisited

My favorite readings of this quarter have been:
• Mizoeff’s “Teletubbies: Infant Cyborg Desire and the Fear of Global Visual Culture”
• Sterne’s “Sounds Like the Mall of America”
• Anderson’s Imagined Communities
• Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”
• Adorno and Horkeimer’s “The Culture Industry”
• Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”

Mizoeff’s “Teletubies,” essay, by far, takes the prize for the best essay of the syllabus, or, at least, the most fascinating and engaging in its approach, subject matter and tone.

As for my least favorites, I don’t really have any particular articles that I feel so strongly about to label as such. I did feel, however, that the enthnography-focused articles that came primarily towards the end of the quarter could be a little longwinded and tiresome at times. So, I would advocate trimming those from the syllabus, perhaps just one or two essays for each section instead of the standard three.

Interpersonal Insight and Obstructed Vision

Picking up from our discussion in class today of the importance of changing role of visuality in face-to-face or “real” interactions versus online interactions, I wanted to briefly expand upon this in relation to “authenticity” or a vague notion of “purity” in the act of self-representation.

In the Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s “Relationships” article, one of their subject’s lauds chat room interactions for circumventing the automatic, discriminating judgments that hinder or guide face-to-face interactions. With the removal of the conventions of imposed by a person’s immediate physical presence, the subject argues that online modes of communication allows users to bypass appearances and “actually see into people’s minds, their personalities” (196). For him, such interactions allow for a flourishing of authenticity that would normally be obscured a face-to-face interaction. And, he qualifies his assertion by saying that only an idiot could be duped in such an online environment by someone exploiting the anonymity afforded by the medium to nefarious or “inauthentic” ends.

Interestingly, this need not to be seen in order to truthfully reveal—to actually show one’s self to another—occurs in other confessional or reflective scenarios. For example, traditional Freudian psychoanalysis dictates that the physical arrangement of the analytical space should be arranged so that the patient faces away from the analyst, prohibiting direct eye contact from interfering with the act of listening. Additionally, the space of the conventional Catholic confessional is mediated by a screen so neither the priest nor the confessor can clearly see the other while also being arranged so that neither actually face each other. And, of course, these practices aim to elicit from their subjects a glimpse at an authentic self. In both, direct, interpersonal vision is disrupted in the name of an authentic accounting of the self.

Of course, in most contexts, “authenticity” is deemed a dubious notion at best. In relation to anonymity, and specifically visual anonymity, in online interactions, the level of trust found in Miller and Slater’s “Relationships” is incredibly curious. Of course, perhaps they caught their ethnographic subjects in Trinidad during the Internet’s halcyon days in the 1990s, before it succumb to the obligatory rise of cynicism and skepticism that accompanies the aging of any medium and the public’s gradual accustomization to its presence. Either way, the centrality of vision to this tension between genuinely knowing someone and being able to truthfully reveal one’s self and the necessity that the physically present and direct examining gaze be denied by way of the medium is incredibly fascinating and certainly deserves more attention and investigation than I’ve paid to it here.

Defensive mediation: or, a short video from the Mall of America

Yes. This is it.

Notes from an ill-advised yet existentially reaffirming trip to the Mall of America

In the spirit of our typical eighth week malaise, and in the name of my final paper, a friend and I decided to make a feeble gesture towards ethnographic fieldwork and, on a whim, hopped on the Megabus – a friendlier and more Midwestern substitute for the eternally endearing Chinatown bus of our past youth – and traveled to the most appealing of regionally-located attractions: the Mall of America.

In honor of this brave expedition, I’ve compiled a rather fragmentary list culled from our live, on-the-ground reporting:

• This is kind of disappointing.
• But not disappointing enough.
• Critically, that is.
• (We were hoping for a Minnesotan Las Vegas.)
• Anyway, we are still horrified.
• And it still qualifies as an example of the Culture Industry writ large.

Mediated Trajectories: A Brief History of the Flash Mob

In my presentation last week, I made a passing reference to Harper's Magazine editor Bill Wasik's March 2006 article "My Crowd: Or, Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob." Wasik's confession, aside from its wonderfully acerbic tone, serves as a remarkable example of how new ideas or fads spread through and with the help of different media. Wasik's experiment—arrived at when the author was "bored and therefore disposed to acts of social-scientific inquiry"—illustrates how mildly novel ideas can be virally perpetuated in contemporary culture at astoundingly rapid rates. Wasik's article traces how his flash mob pet project moved first through his immediate social network via email, then mushroomed via blogs, the mainstream news media and eventually corporate advertising. It's a cradle to grave account, following his outlandishly cynical experiment from conception to co-option, with appropriate doses of Stanely Milgram and Komar and Melamid thrown in for good measure.

Mondo Cane

Given our recently focus on ethnographic films, I’d like to recommend Mondo Cane, a documentary made in 1962 by Italian filmmakers Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti. The film, credited with creating the “shockumentary” genre, documents various bizarre rituals across the globe and juxtaposes them in a somewhat whimsical narrative fashion. And although the film is composed of sequences that are politically objectionable, overly sensationalist and of questionable authentic ethnographic merit, Mondo Cane's faults highlight the limitations and potential pitfalls ethnographic documentary filmmaking. Despite its flaws, however, it remains fascinating both as a film text and a relic of cinematic history.