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.

Looking and Looking Elsewhere in Chechnya

Today’s discussion of the televisual portray and construction of a Chechen national identity through the coverage and non-coverage of the Chechen Wars by various international and national news outlets reminded me of slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s book, "A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya." Politkovskaya’s expansive, on-the-ground reporting in Chechnya starkly portrays the unimaginable horrors of the wars and their human toll. Her chilling accounts offer glimpses into the suffering experienced by all sides in the multi-faceted conflict—accounts especially unique in the tightly Kremlin-controlled Russian news media environment. In the context of our conversation, the most striking facet of Politkovskaya’s reporting in the book is her description of how these distant wars are continually mis-portrayed and manipulated in the Russian news cycle and how such constructed, selective and government-approved accounts shape the general Russia public’s understanding of the conflict and, more broadly, the national psyche, especially in their disjointed application as images and concepts onto the lived experiences of civilians and combatants directly involved in the wars.

So, if you’re in need of a depressing read, I highly recommend it. Also, if you'd like more information on her life and work, a good, but rather morbid, place to start is her Economist obituary.

The Cannibalistic Gaze of the Camera

In the documentary Cannibal Tours, photography and the act of photographing operate as the key illustrative displays of economic imbalance and the skewed social politics of “primitive” tourism. The camera and its associated operations and social actions are the primary loci of misunderstanding between such a bizarre and haphazard meeting of Western tourists and the indigenous village residents along the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea.

Like their missionary and colonial predecessors, the Western tourists primarily come and take from the locals without engaging in any beneficial reciprocal acts. Where the colonialists pillaged sacred sites and imposed new cultural and social structures of control, their descendents now come to gawk and take photographs. The incessant shutterbugs featured in the documentary roam the villages in a manner more reminiscent of a trip to the natural history museum, or, rather, some natural history based theme park than a remote village in a far off land. They behave in a manner that perfectly visualizes Susan Sontag’s declaration in On Photography that travel, in the age on the camera, becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.“ The village residents are treated as if they are on display, as if they are mere props in some fantastical play. As they are photographed, and, in turn, catalogued and collected by the gaze of the tourist, a casual violence is perpetrated against the reluctant indigenous subject.

Tellingly, if ironically, it is the gaze of the documentarian’s camera that attempts to problematize the disturbing relationship between the Western tourists and the people of the Sepik River. In a documentary devoid of aural narration, the camera of the documentary crew points, rather cruelly, at the Western subjects that share in its visual tradition. Through its investigative gaze and narrative construction it seeks to illustrate the cultural disparities that exist and are exacerbated by such sociocultural exchanges. Yet while attempting to gesture at some notion of photographic veracity and objectivity, the documentary ultimately only points at and reinforces the medium’s inherent tendency and affinity for identity construction by way of the limitations of the picture’s frame.

This Misanthropic American Life

In our brief class discussion of the This American Life segment “If By Chance We Meet Again” many students expressed concerns, specifically, over the portrayal of the story’s primary subjects and, more generally, the ethics of representation within a framework many assume to be “objective”. While the effects the imposition of the show’s overly cultivated sense of whimsy and air of playful condescension on its subjects may be less than flattering in most cases, I think it would be more helpful to look at how the framework of the show and the conventions of its chosen medium construct identities and narratives both for the subjects and the spectators. After all, the narrative conventions of This American Life are eagerly broadcast by its host, Ira Glass, in the opening of every show: “Each week on our show we choose some theme and bring you a variety of different stories on that theme.” In that simple statement, Glass acknowledges the medium’s frame and the representational practices of his program. These quirky stories about people and their lived or imagined experiences are retellings and reconstructions articulated to fit an imposed narrative mold.

An investigation of how such narratives and their associated images are shaped by the format of their creation and broadcast and how, in turn, they influence and effect the realms of individual and cultural identities, rather than an investigation that focuses primarily on the potentially problematic ethics of such representations, I believe, would be the most fruitful avenue to explore in an anthropological inquiry of media.