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• on February 15, 2010 Permalink

  Making television news 

  Lion attacks, vintage car crashes, celebrity kissing, talking ants, personality disorders, and a cheetah that runs really fast. These are some stories from a week of TV news.

  I am trying to make the news. As a ’struggling artist’, the potential national audience of millions should be able to boost my exhibition sales. The concept is not new. I am no avant-garde. Damien Hirst has featured prominently in the British press with his sliced up cows, shark tanks and diamond skull. Hirst has mastered his media.

  

  Damien Hirst’s diamond skull ‘For the love of God’

  The diamond skull made the front page of every London newspaper after it sold for £50 million to a mysterious consortium. It was the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. Hirst himself was rumoured to be member of the mysterious consortium. He bought his own artwork. I don’t have the cash to take on his record, but I do have the time to spend a week watching television news to see what sort of stories make the cut.

  The easiest route to make the ABC news at seven o’clock is to be elected to Federal Parliament.  Three out of the five lead stories that ran during the work week starting September 7 were focused on the Government. McGurk and a school bus crash were the other two.  I suspect getting into politics could take some work, although this hasn’t stopped Berlin artist Philipp Ruch from moving in on the scene, he established the Centre for Political Beauty and staged some press conferences outside the Reichstag that made headlines. That is another key to making the ABC news. Press conferences. A podium is essential. Press conferences also need showbags. There is not much zing in a lonely little press conference that doesn’t come with some sort of report.At the ABC you would be hard stuck to find a news bulletin that didn’t feature the phrase ‘a new report’.

  

  Bernard Salt presenting his new report to the ABC

  The ABC featured a story on ‘a new report’ released by the oft-quoted KPMG Partner, columnist for the Australian and best selling author Bernard Salt. Although for news brevity he is a demographer. The ‘new report’ that the ABC featured from Mr Salt revealed that new technologies allow people to work from home. The research by Mr Salt was reduced to a couple of vox pops that included ‘you can check your Blackberry after dinner’, although the ABC has made it clear that Mr Salt did undertake research. He was shown near a podium and in front of a screen that had graphs on it. Mr Salt is available for further speaking engagements and booking enquiries can made on his website which  describes him as ‘one of Australia’s best communicators’.

  It was wise that the ABC featured ‘one of Australia’s best communicators’ to translate these difficult concepts. It is no easy feat to distill new research from a new report into a sixty second news story. A new report is usually more than a couple of pages. Otherwise it is a press release. The ABC perseveres though, using microscopes and lab rats to illustrate the new research being undertaken by Australian scientists.

  

  The essential white lab coat of a science story on the ABC

  The commercial networks also use animals to illustrate and report breakthroughs. Channel Nine revealed that a Cheetah named Sarah from Cincinnati zoo is faster than Usain Bolt. The groundbreaking story was sparked by a press release from the zoo, and thanks to the vision the zoo supplied, the story made the news. Channel Ten stepped it up with the big cats and included a lion attack. A British reporter said ‘it was worth it’ after being mauled by a lion in its cage. Channel Seven kept it cute, but a little creepy, with a Melbourne dog breeder who sleeps with the ashes of a past show dog winner. SBS was fur-free and instead featured a ‘new report’ released from the public relations department of Turin University that revealed that ants may be able to talk to each other with their own ant language.

  

  Sarah the Cheetah and her TV grin

  The stations don’t limit their interest stories to the animal kingdom, they do try to broadcast stories with a distinctively human interest. Love and lust being the most covered. The ABC revealed that a record number of Australians tied the knot on the lucky day 09/09/09, while Nine featured George Clooney rejecting the passionate proposal of a kiss from a man in his boxer shorts. Machines that go boom, or crash, are also a favourite. SBS did a story on the world’s biggest weapons fair that showed a  ‘James Bond style’ speed boat. The SBS report used the same words to describe the boat that were originally published in the press release by the manufacturer XSMG World. Channel Nine also showed some magnificent slow motion crash test footage provided by  the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an ‘independent, nonprofit, scientific, and educational organization’ funded by US car insurers. The footage showed a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air smashing into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. The footage came with a ‘new report’ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety which revealed that modern cars are safer than vintage cars.

  

  The ‘dramatic test’ that reveals ‘the evolution of car safety’ on Nine

  If I am to make the evening news, I need to put together an art show that features a variety of news worthy elements, the most important being a new report. The new report will need to be accompanied by colourful vision which should include zoo animals. These zoo animals need to be fast, faster than a Chevrolet, and they need to be monitored by people in lab coats. The people in lab coats should stand near a power point presentation with a graph on it. It would be beneficial if the people in lab coats were introduced by a celebrity, but if that is difficult to find, a politician will do. The politician should then be kissed by a fan. The fan could be a robot, or at least be using some sort of advanced technology such as a Blackberry. The new report should reveal something that everyone expected was true, is in fact, true. If I can’t convince the television networks to attend the show’s opening and press conference, I should video it myself, on a mobile phone, and then supply the shaky footage directly to the networks accompanied by the report, and a press release, but the press release should actually be called a ‘research snapshot’ because I am sure journalists don’t just pump out press release for news. They pump out ‘new research.’

  *The week of evening news started on the 7th September, 2009

   

   

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• on May 27, 2009 Permalink

  Google has no right to read the news 

  Robert Thomson, editor of the Wall Street Journal, recently described companies that aggregate mainstream media content without paying a fee as the “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.”  Thomson was referring primarily to Google News, the largest aggregator of mainstream news content. Alexander Macgillivray, senior product and intellectual property counsel at Google, responded that Google only shows “snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act.”  These snippets are generally the headline followed by the lead, the first sentence of the story.

  Ask any journalist what the most important section of text in a news story is and they will tell you it is ‘the lead’. Following the inverted pyramid style of news writing, the lead signposts almost all the information that will follow and allows the old-school reader to quickly scan the newspaper and decide whether to continue reading any particular article. As the old-school reader scans the newspaper, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes hover past advertisements, and the advertised products can successfully catch the attention of this old-school reader and consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays the newspaper and the newspaper pays the journalist.This is why news has financial value.

  As the new-school reader scans Google News, jumping between various headlines and leads, his eyes could also hover past advertisements and these products can successfully attract the attention of the new-school consumer. The consumer then pays for a product, the product pays Google and somebody else can somehow pay the journalist. This is in a nutshell why newspapers are going broke despite more people reading the news than ever before. Newspapers no longer control the distribution of news content, Google does. Google might not advertise on Google News yet, and Google insists it isn’t violating any copyright, but the company seems to overlook the innate purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to provide a financial incentive for the creation of original content. Google News uses original news content created by journalists but does not provide any financial incentive for its creation. Google News generates an incredible income from that all-important lead the journalist composed, just as the newspapers of yesteryear did, but Google doesn’t pay anyone for it.

  Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, recently spoke to a United States Senate hearing that was investigating ways the government could aid the failing newspaper industry. Mayer explained how Google News acted as a sort of conduit that channeled web traffic to the newspaper sites:

  Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that web traffic to increase their traffic and generate additional revenue.

  Google functions similarly to newspapers in that it channels information to end-users. The information that Google channels are the links or ‘directions’ to the entire content.  Mayer describes how Google News uses the headline and lead to direct the reader to the newspaper’s website:

  We show people just enough information to invite them to read more – the headline, a line or two of text, and a link to the news publisher’s website.

  Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the School of Journalism at Columbia University, says that may be true, “but many web readers are entirely satisfied with just a headline and summary.”  It is the very nature of news. Report the basic facts. That is all most readers want from the news. The problem is, who is going to pay the journalists to go out and report and record these headlines if Google doesn’t?

  Google claims that the content they use, the leads copied verbatim from the original content creators, are fair use under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act . The Copyright Act sets out four factors for courts to consider whether something is covered under fair use, these include whether the copyrighted work is factual in nature or fiction, whether the purpose of the copied work is transformative rather than merely copying, the amount and substantiality of the work that is copied and the effect the copying will have on the market or potential market. All of these factors are relatively difficult to judge in regards to the copying of news story leads for the purpose of aggregation, but news publishers are beginning to believe a judgment must be made soon in order for the industry to move forward.

  With recent slides in profit for most news publishers, and in particular News Corp, who posted a 47 percent drop in operating profit on May 6, publishers are beginning to decry that online aggregation is having a dangerously adverse effect on the market. In April, Rupert Murdoch said that Google was stealing the news:

  The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright… People reading the news for free on the web, that’s got to change.

  The Associate Press, who currently has a licensing agreement with Google that is due to expire this year, has also lashed out at online aggregation, with AP chairman, Dean Singleton, saying:

  We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are as mad as hell, and we are not going to take it anymore.

  The primary issue is what constitutes fair use. Does the use of the headline and lead of news story, what most journalists would consider the heart of the story, amount to an insubstantial part?

  In Australia, the recent ruling of the IceTV v Nine Network case provides guidelines of how copyright law might apply to the aggregation and linking of news stories.

  IceTV produces electronic television program guides that paying users subscribe to.  The Nine Network produces a Weekly Schedule of programs to be broadcast on their free-to-air television stations and supplies the schedules to various third parties known as “Aggregators” who in turn collate this information with schedules provided by other networks to produce the “Aggregated Guides” which form the basis of most TV guides published across different media. IceTV was not one of these third parties.

  The Nine Network accused IceTV of stealing their original “literary work” by taking part of the time and title from the Aggregated Guides. According to the Nine Network, the Ice Guide published by IceTV infringed copyright by reproducing a “substantial part” of the Weekly Schedule produced by the Nine Network. IceTV accepted that the Weekly Schedule produced by the Nine Network was an original literary work and that copyright subsisted in it but they denied that they reproduced a substantial part.

  It is interesting to note that the only thing IceTV was reproducing were facts. IceTV were copying the name of a program, such as A Current Affair, and the time it was scheduled to appear.   Facts are generally considered to be outside of copyright but Sect 42 of the Copyright Act regards only the fair use of copyrighted works if it is for the purpose of reporting the news. If the Sydney Morning Herald were to publish an article about a controversial program that was scheduled to air, and detailed the time it was to air, it would be covered under “fair dealing for the purpose of the news.”  But IceTV isn’t a news publisher and this consideration of fair dealing is murky for the production of guides and aggregators.

  These facts weren’t necessarily facts, as the TV programs hadn’t been broadcast yet. It could be the equivalent of reproducing some modern day Nostradamus’ predictions that in 2011 Eddie McGuire will grow a beard and the world will end. It might actually happen, it could be a potential fact, but reproducing the original literary work would be an infringement of copyright. That modern Nostradamus put a lot of time and effort into producing that literary work, just as the Nine Network put a lot of time and money into producing their Weekly Schedule. The Nine Network’s argument, however, was an extraordinarily dangerous argument and could have lead to all sorts of seemingly innocent information being considered off-limits due to copyright infringement. Sporting schedules, flight schedules, train timetables and university semester dates would all be protected under copyright if the Nine Network’s case had been successful. But IceTV didn’t argue that they were reporting facts, they argued that what they reproduced was an insubstantial amount of Nine’s literary work.

  IceTV reproduced only the title and the time of the program. IceTV did not reproduce the synopses of the television programs but wrote their own. The information they did reproduce were in essence links. The title of the program indicated what the program was and the time indicated when it could be seen. These would function the same way in Google News as the headline of a news story and the accompanying URL that directs the reader to the original content. The lead that is reproduced however summarises the news story and could infringe copyright, it would be the equivalent of IceTV reproducing the synopses from the Aggregated Guides.

  In the primary judgment of the IceTV case the judge ruled that that the “lengthy preparatory work involved [in the Weekly Schedule] was directed to the conduct of the business of Nine in broadcasting programmes that would attract viewers” . The judgment emphasized that the appropriation of skill and labour does not necessarily constitute infringement. In the final judgment the judge stated it was not helpful to refer to the University of London Press Ltd v University Tutorial Press Ltd case and “the rough practical test that what is worth copying is prima facie worth protecting.” Similarly the judgment stated that it was unhelpful to refer to “commercial value of the information because that directs attention to the information itself rather than to the particular form of expression”  and it is the particular form of expression that is significant.

  The judgment ruled against the Nine Network stating that the information reproduced by IceTV was insubstantial because the “slivers of information” and their particular form of expression were not particularly original. The judgment referenced the Ladbroke case that showed that the reproduction of an unoriginal part of an original whole would not be an infringement:

  The reproduction of a part, which by itself has no originality, will not normally be a substantial part of the copyright and will therefore not be protected.

  The headlines and leads that are produced in the news however are original parts of an original whole despite the fact that they are through the reporting of the news hopefully relaying plain facts. In essence if news publishers were to pursue Google for copyright infringement regarding the republishing of their headlines and leads they would have a case. This was demonstrated in 2006 when it was ruled by a Belgian court that Google violated the law by publishing copyrighted content on Google News from Copiepresse, a group of 18 French and German language publications. Google argued that the reproduction of original content was to the benefit of the news publishers:

  We believe that Google News is entirely legal. We only ever show the headlines and a few snippets of text and small thumbnail images. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website. Search tools such as Google Web Search and Google News are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites and connect them to a wider global audience.

  Google was initially threatened with a €1 million fine per day of infringement but the fine was dropped to €25,000 a day. Google stated that any news publisher can request Google to remove its content whenever they like or could through the design of their news website prevent Google from having access to it. Copiepresse argued that it was not their responsibility to prevent Google from infringing on their copyright and that Google should request to use their content rather than the onus being on the publisher to request Google not to use their content. Subsequently after the judgment in the Belgian court Google removed the Copiepresse content from both Google News and Google search. Copiepresse felt that the removal of their content from Google search was quite extreme. Margaret Boribon, Secretary General of Copiepresse, said:

  They have done it to punish us. They have a bad attitude.

  This is probably what prevents most news publishers from pursuing Google for copyright infringement; they do not to be removed from Google Search because disappearing from Google means disappearing from the web. Google has over a 75 percent share of the search engine market. It monopolises the internet. News publishers still want to be a part of Google, they just want Google to pay licensing fees for using their material As Boribon said:

  Yes we have a problem with Google, but we don’t want to want to be out of Google. We want Google to respect the rules. If Google wanted to index us they need to ask.

  Google refuses to pay licensing fees to most publishers. In reverse the Nine Network refused to license their material to IceTV preventing IceTV from having any access to their material. It is an interesting contrast of the power of monopolies with one of the few encourage forms of monopoly, that of copyright. Boribon hoped that the success of the Copiepresse case would encourage other news publishers to follow suit.

  What I’m achieving now is getting information to my European colleagues so we will have other publishers taking part in the court case. Then maybe Google will change its mind. If they see this is not a Belgian case but a concern for all publishers all over the world, they will have to review their business model.

  Boribon is hoping that if enough news publishers withdraw their content Google will be forced to negotiate. Yet if all the publishers were to form some sort of cartel and remove their content from Google they would be breaking most countries anti-competition laws. A few major publishers need to lead the way and from the murmurs currently coming from News Corp and Associated Press this could be happening in the near future.

  But it isn’t simply a case of new media versus old media. There was a recent uproar among independent bloggers about the aggregation of their material. The bloggers were concerned not only with the copyright infringement but the infringement of their moral rights. It occurred when bloggers Matt Haughty and Joshua Schachter complained about the reproduction of their content on the Wall Street Journal’s subsidiary site All Things Digital. Matt Haughey wrote on his blog:

  This is weird, apparently the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D does a reblogging thing. I sure wish they asked me first though. That’s a hell of a lot of ads on my ‘excerpt’. If they’re just trying to drive traffic to articles, why have comments on excerpts? That makes no sense to me.

  Blogger Danny Sullivan, from SearchEngineLand.com, justified the aggregation saying “that is a compliment, allthingsd liked your article enough to feature you on their homepage.”  This is similar to Google’s argument that the aggregation of their material is a benefit to the news publishers because it directs traffic to the publisher’s site. Web veteran and independent blogger Merlin Mann disagreed that this was fair compensation:

  In the case here, for Matt and Josh, that compensation was “a link” and — what? — I guess the opportunity to pretend that you write for a giant-for-profit corporation. And because, as the story goes, every blogger writes primarily (or even exclusively) in order to generate page views that bolster his site’s advertising revenue, they/we/I should all be grateful for the largesse of our True Fourth Estate. Even if a giant for-profit corporation’s re-use of that work actually undermines the real motivations, it would be uncivil, ungrateful, and untoward for us to not thank them for helping us out with our little projects. Right?

  All Things Digital published a substantial excerpt of the original blog post in a format indistinguishable from their own original content, including bylines and author photos, making it appear that the content was written for All Things Digital. Bloggers felt this compromised their independence by implying they are associated with All Things Digital. Daring Fireball blogger, John Gruber, who is often featured on All Things Digital was uneasy about the association:

  I don’t like it. The look and feel of the Voices pages suggests that I’m somehow affiliated with AllThingsD, but I am not. I obviously don’t have any problem with AllThingsD, or anyone else, linking to and quoting portions from my articles at Daring Fireball, but the presentation on their Voices pages seems to imply something else.

  These are bloggers that are no strangers to aggregation, and most reached success through aggregators such as Digg or Reddit, but these sites are purely aggregators, like Google News, and not publishers. All Things Digital’s aggregation of their material blurred the distinction between publishing their material and simply linking to their material. As Merlin Mann noted:

  Republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called ‘feed scraping.’ At AllThingsD, it’s called ‘a compliment.

  Most independent bloggers license their material under the Creative Commons, generally with the permission to share and remix the content under the conditions that the work is attributed fairly and used for non-commercial purposes. The primary problems that the bloggers had with All Things Digital’s aggregation of their content was that it didn’t comply with those two conditions. Under the Attribution condition the republisher must “attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).”  As demonstrated, the style of the All Things Digital’s attribution gave the impression that the blogger endorsed the website so it did not comply with this condition. The Noncommercial condition stated that the republisher “may not use this work for commercial purposes.”  All Things Digital also failed to comply with this condition by wrapping each post in ads.

  The primary concern for the bloggers, however, was that it violated their moral rights and compromised their independence. As Merlin Mann succinctly put it:

  Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And — if and when I choose to give away the things that I make — nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

  The independence of these blogs is vital to their success, the bloggers are respected for their individual opinions and analysis and they make their living generally through speaking engagements and. If their independence is threatened, their income is threatened. These blogs may be thriving on the web and the bloggers may be critical of the “giant-for-profit corporations” and “the True Fourth Estate.” They may believe that the failure of newspapers to survive the Internet is simply due to old media “not getting it” but blogging is not reporting the news.

  Bloggers may provide opinions and analysis but most bloggers don’t have the resources to investigate and break stories on an hourly basis. Bloggers and Google who have the web at their fingertips might believe that the news is simply out there, only one click away. Bloggers might believe that the headlines that keep filling up Google News and are the source for most of their stories are like a never ending well. But the well might dry up. Sometimes all we need is a headline and a lead, and if Google News doesn’t value this original content, doesn’t pay for it, then the news will stop coming. This is why we have copyright. It isn’t to hinder the dissemination of knowledge, as the open source community might have you believe, it is to ensure that people are encouraged to continue to create. Google has no right to read the news and not pay for it.

  
  Tags: aggregation, blogging (3), copyright, creative commons, google, icetv, nine network, value (2)   

   

• on May 25, 2009 Permalink

  How postmodernism lost its cool 

  Postmodernism is so yesterday.

  That was the response I received on Twitter from ApostrophePong when I tweeted  about writing something on the representation of postmodernism in the media. I quickly typed up a reply insisting that I knew that postmodernism was ’so yesterday’ and that was exactly what I was going to write about. I didn’t want to sound out of touch.

  I didn’t know why it was so yesterday. I wasn’t too sure when today had begun and I wasn’t completely confident that I even knew what postmodernism was. I didn’t mention this of course. That would have been uncool. But how had postmodernism lost its cool?

  I thought I would start on the autopsy table analysing the corpse. Postmodernism, when you cut it apart, literally means ‘after the modernist movement,’ while modernism itself was originally used to refer to things ‘of the present’. In that sense, postmodernism should mean ‘after the present’. Postmodernism should mean tomorrow. Not yesterday. This meaning must be a bit muddled. We didn’t start traveling through time.

  In an effort to cement some kind of definition of postmodernism I scrounged around some postmodern texts about postmodernism that were written by postmodernists. Hal Foster wrote of a postmodernism that ’seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and poltical affiliations’ . Margaret Iversen wrote of a postmodernism borne of a postructuralism that is defined by its ‘resistance to meaning’ . My efforts revealed that the ghost of postmodernism past was having a great big belly laugh at my attempts to corner it into some sort of definition. I was only cornering it so I could discover how it died, but I soon discovered that the weapon I was wielding as I poked and prodded it into its corner, was in fact the weapon that had slayed it. A definition was used to murder postmodernism.

  The failure of all the student authors to appreciate the significance of the distinction between language and the use of language (and the determinism that is produced) was also closely bound up with their conception of the meaning of words. Nearly always these students treated abstract nouns as if they were the names of curious sorts of hollow objects. And ‘doing theory’ therefore consists of looking at ’society’ (another object) from somewhere imaginatively outside ‘it’, and seeing how the people who, as it were, have to live inside these hollow spaces are constrained in their thoughts and actions as a result.

  According to Gavin Kitching, the students at the School of Politics at the University of New South Wales have been allowing their Honours essays to be corrupted by postmodernism. The students were treating abstract nouns as ‘hollow objects’ devoid of meaning. By treating these words as such, the students had created a society of people living in hollow spaces where their thoughts and actions were constrained as a result. Generally I myself do not find hollow spaces too constrictive. If I were to enter an empty hollow room I could imagine many things I could do in that room. If I were, however, to enter a room with dictionaries stacked to the ceiling and covering every inch of the floor, I might find myself mildly constrained.

  Kitching’s theory  that there is a distinction between language and the use of language contradicts what Heidegger considers makes something some thing. Heidegger, in his essay The Thing , considered that the way some thing is used defines it as some thing. He continues to write that the void, or ‘hollowness’, that creates space for this use, is in fact what the thing is. He demonstrates this concept through the use of a jug:

  When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel. … But if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void. … The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

  Abstract nouns, such as postmodernism, are just such jugs. They are hollow empty objects. The question is, though, what is the water that fills the jug? The water is the liquid meaning that flows in and out of these words, piped into our culture via the media. As Raymond Williams writes, our society (another abstract noun) is made by the finding of common meaning that is written into the land.

  Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind.

  The idea of liquid meaning flowing through the media draws parallels to Myra MacDonald’s Foucaldian reading of a media that operates discursively. But instead of the media manifesting versions of reality that can be accessed through ‘the constructivist prism of discourse’  I would consider that the versions are in reality.

  MacDonald writes that the media frames perceptions of reality, a reality that exists, but remains ‘profoundly unknowable’. She writes that by considering how these perceptions are constructed through the analysis of discourse we can still attempt to understand this reality as ‘refusing any attempt… because it is philosophically impossible to set an absolute criterion of truthfulness is… too rigid and extreme a position.’  She differentiates this kind of ‘unknowable truth’ from the ‘postmodern thinking’ of Baudrillard and his simulacrum because postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality,’

  I would disagree with MacDonald’s fundamental concept of reality that causes her to consider that Baudrilards ‘postmodern thinking’ that stresses the self referentiality of signs systems cannot be utilised in uncovering how the media forms ‘frames of understanding we construct in our head about the material world’ . The error in her concept of reality is in her emphasis of the material world. We live in a society and a world that is primarily constructed of abstracts. That is the reality. Media theorist, Vilém Flusser, writes that all forms of communication are constructed systems of signs . There is nothing natural about the words “I love you”. Marshall McLuhan writes that the content of the written word is speech, and that the content of speech is consciousness. We need to consider how the media shapes this reality of language, of abstracts. We do not need to consider how the media shapes the reality of chairs and trees or other objects of the material world. MacDonald is correct in considering that postmodern thinking ‘denies the point of positing any link whatsoever between media or cultural texts and reality’ , because postmodern thinking does not consider the two mutually exclusive.

  MacDonald writes that ‘words and images, by defining and labeling phenomena, frame the terms in which we think about these,’ but they do not frame the way we think about things, they frame how we think. By changing the way we think, they change our reality. The media does not perpetuate versions of reality, it perpetuates versions in reality. And why did postmodernism lose its cool? How did this reality change? How did it lose its worth in regards to Bordiu’s concept of social capital? It occurred because the hollow empty object was overfilled with meaning by the media.

  According to Sarah Thornton, one of the key criteria’s of ‘cool’ is authenticity. Dominic Strinati argues that authenticity is formed by a particular set of cultural tastes and values and not from any historical truth. I would argue that authenticity is formed through a half empty jug, through ambiguity. By being able to project meaning onto an ambiguous object an individual feels an object is authentic because it adheres to their own individual meaning. Once news media begins to fill the jug up with meaning through referring to the object frequently in stories the jug begins to be filled with outsiders manifestations of meaning. The object loses its authenticity for an individual and in turn loses its cool. But all this would be nought but theory if there wasn’t any empirical data, because with data comes ‘truth’ .

  

  Inspired by this graph depicting the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and ‘other stupid academic fads’ I decided to make my own graph with my own data. I scanned the archives of both JSTOR, the academic journal database, and the Sydney Morning Herald between 1987 and 2002 for articles that mention ‘postmodern’ or ‘postmodernity’. Postmodernism’s crisis of cool it seemed occurred in 1997 when the academic journals began to mention Postmodernism a little less, while the Sydney Morning Herald began to mention Postmodernism a significant amount more. The newspaper continued to increase its coverage of postmodernism annually while the journals coverage continued to decrease. The academic trendsetters started to retreat, they had kept postmodernism as cool as possible for as long as possible by embedding the word with ambiguity. Most of the articles couldn’t settle on a definitive definition, and every subsequent article argued against that earlier unsettled definition. The newspaper however, which avoids ambiguity because it compromises appearances of truth’, settled on a definition on January 7, 1997. The very date when postmodernism started being uncool. The ambiguity of postmodernism was keeping it from the honest unacademic folk:

  For the past decade or so, the dinner party circuit has been divided into three distinct groups: those who know about postmodernism, those who don’t know about postmodernism and those who pretend to know about postmodernism in a thinly veiled attempt to gain sexual favours from one or more of their dining companions. Clearly this situation is unacceptable. If you are one of these impressionable types who feel amorously inclined towards those  who confuse you, how are you to pick the real PoMo pundits from the pretenders?

  The article was titled simply Postmodernism. Written by Emma Tom. Its purpose was to define postmodernism and it enlisted an expert source, a professor of art from a sandstone university:

  Postmodernists reacted to styles of thought that were predominant in the ’60s, such as Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis and an approach to anthropology called structuralism. All these were known as master narratives: huge, elaborate stories that were supposed to explain absolutely everything. Other examples of master narratives include Christianity, capitalism and the idea of human progress. The postmodernists decided that these big stories were no longer appropriate, that it was not possible for there to ever be one story that explained everything. Explaining that nothing could explain everything was to take a great deal of explaining.

  The article filled the jug with meaning. Postmodernism was no longer incomprehensible, people could no longer imagine their own meanings of postmodernism. Their meaning was murdered. It had been usurped by the news media’s objective truth. It lost its ambiguity. It lost its authenticity. It lost its cool.

  
  Tags: baudrillard, cool, gavin kitching (2), heidegger (5), language (3), mainstream media, marshall mcluhan, media discourse, myra macdonals, postmodernism (2), sydney morning herald, twitter, vessels (2), vilem flusser   

   

• on October 20, 2008 Permalink

  Creating connections 

  At the Hotel Waterloo in Wellington my grandmother hurries to room 507 to write a letter to her husband.  From her window she can see the port where he is preparing to board a ship bound for Egypt.

  As I am unable to see you to give you one more last goodbye hug I have rushed back here to write you my goodbyes.
  Dearest remember always no matter where you are and in what circumstances I am with you – closer than breathing – spirit with your spirit. I am so at one with you.

  She is separated from him. Himeros: she desires his embrace. Yet she cannot. Instead she writes to him: Pothos. He is absent and she shapes the space between them with language. In this space she connects to her beloved. Only here in the mediated or virtual realm, created through language, can she be closer than breathing.

  Villem Flusser writes that communication is an artificial construct. The words “I love you” that as a sixteen year old I first whispered into a girl’s ear are no more natural than the electric images glowing from a box in a lounge room.  Communication and the various systems of language constructed by man exist for the purpose of rendering the abstract tangible.  Allowing the unknown to exist in our daily discourses. Language can, through abstraction, create space for the imagining of meaning.

  John Hanhardt writes that Gary Hill’s work is ironic in that it concerns itself with the threat of the erasure of language by the very technologies he uses in his art.  There is however no chasm between language and communication technologies such as video. Language is not limited to the written or spoken word. Language is by definition a system of communication and the written and spoken word is so often supplanted with the term “language” because it is a system that can be easily measured.

  The English alphabet has a set of 26 symbols and these symbols are combined and collected into compilations called dictionaries that list how the symbols should be defined.  The written and spoken word therefore is very typical of a system if a system were to be defined as set of principles and guidelines similar to the rules of a game. If we were however to define a system as a set of things that are interconnected together into a network then new communication technologies such as the internet or television, which are focused primarily on creating connections, are as valid, if not more valid, than the written and spoken word as language. This definition of a system as an interconnecting network is more suitable as it is the very nature of communication to create connections.

  As a media artist I create connections, or rather I mediate. I present a medium, be it a video, a sound or a website, be it hot or cool, it is a medium, and this is what differentiates the media artist from the traditional concept of an artist. The medium shapes a void where connections can take place. A media artist presents a medium, not an object. The difference is of intention and not necessarily technology. A media artist presents a work with the intention to communicate rather than create.  The naïve boundaries drawn up by technologies are neglect to consider why particular tools have been adopted by media artists. Media artists predominantly utilise technologies that have been developed for communication purposes, technologies such as video were developed to aid transmission for broadcast television. The use of these technologies are primarily motivated by a desire to create a connection.

  In this regard a media artist is not dissimilar to a lover writing a letter to their beloved. Both the media artist and the lover utilise language, an interconnecting system, to present a medium that shapes the imaginary void where we can be closer than breathing.

  
  Tags: artist, communication, love letters (2), media art, medium, technology