All Media, All the Time

In a New York Times article from October 17 by Laura M. Holson ("Now Playing on a Tiny Screen") about cell phone TV shows and other micro-screen media, Eric Young--who directed several one-minute episodes of the cellphone drama "24: Conspiracy"--is quoted as saying that "we are all experimenting to see what works. . . Every new medium finds its own way and rules. It will be true of this one, too."

Young's comments express a theory--an almost McLuhan-esque theory--that would be familiar to academics who teach in the areas of cinema, film, and new media, and to anyone else who has an interest in the broader implications of new media. It also highlights a crisis in higher education when it comes to new media theory: is there any place for "resistance" to the culture industry anymore? Does there even need to be resistance anymore? The discipline of academic film/cinema/new media theory has always had a strong--sometimes dominant--element of cantankerous opposition, whether it be the bitter aphorisms of Horkheimer and Adorno, or the post-1968 marxist energy of those opposed to the bourgeois realism of Andre Bazin, or the feminist and post-feminist manifestos by the likes of Laura Mulvey or Donna Haraway. And yet today, we can't help but read them with a sort of resigned nostalgia not because they were wrong, but because the coming world they described, and feared, has triumphed.

The most influential new media theory today--such as Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media--is really more descriptive than argumentative. Is this because we are so adrift today in the toys and tools of new media (our IPods, our PowerBooks, our DV cameras, our videogames, our RES Magazines, our DVD collections), or is it because there is no longer a need for the poetic resistance of earlier times? Is it no more than nostalgia to reflect upon the good old days of denunciation? Awash in media, drowned in images still and moving, seduced by music, is it any longer possible to look at things harshly and critically?

Is the job of liberal arts-based higher education today to prepare students to resist, or to master the media tools that will enable them to create new media themselves? One dark answer is that it's presumptuous even to assume that students need to be schooled in how to "demystify" media today, because media relentlessly demystifies, deconstructs itself. Indeed, perhaps the very logic of new media is to show "how it's made," to reveal its codes, to confess its secrets, to show us behind-the-scenes, to make stories whose central premise is to make fun of themselves as stories, to make screens so small that the screen calls attention to itself at every moment. Why does a student today need to be told how a movie or a video game  "works its ideology on you" when the movie or game itself can't wait to confess this fact?

All media, all the time. A contagion of screens, in the form of TVs, laptops, portable DVD players, cell phones, IPods...And a crisis for a new media theory discipline that denies that it, too, is complicit in the promotion and spread of ever more effective ways of using the screen. And because universities and colleges today are imagined and governed increasingly as businesses, what place is there for a discipline whose goals are not the "appreciation" or the "mastery of" but rather the "opposition" to the logic of the screen today?

The nature and critical contours of this opposition dare not be articulated, because to articulate it would mean the obsolescence of the discipline itself.

Comments

[Matt]

"Why does a student today need to be told how a movie or a video game 'works its ideology on you' when the movie or game itself can't wait to confess this fact?"

Because I don't know that it does, Nick. Certainly not all the time. A lot of students are extremely media-savvy, yes--most likely a far greater number than at any time in the past. But at the same time, I would argue that people who believe what they're told are doing so with greater and greater conviction; i.e. the extremes are getting further apart, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I think you're wrong about media's confession. I think you're talking about one very specific, more or less postmodern, stream of media; certainly not the media itself. A lot of the time what we're getting is the illusion of demystification, if that makes sense, not actual demystification itself. The vast majority of behind-the-scenes features on DVDs, for example, do not demystify the filmmaking process, but continue to mystify it, to create an illusion--which countless people buy, even if the savvy among us don't at all--of the Hollywood dream machine. Hollywood isn't really a place where "so-and-so brought me the script and I just had to do it and working with what's-his-face was a dream," but that's what a great many DVD featurettes will have you believe. The media (if not all of it) doesn't confess its ideology (or its sins) because it more or less doesn't know how to analyse itself and its forms and therefore doesn't know how or what to confess. Not every image in this brave new world realises that it's an image.

[Joseph]

I don't think it's quite as dire as you make it out to be. You get it right when you describe the new media as "tools"; and to risk banality, tools can be used for a variety of purposes (and to a variety of ends). The media of the past (from writing to radio to television & film) was mastered, adopted and put to critical use by artists and writers. I see no reason why the same can't be done with today's new media. Of course we should recognize our complicity in the culture industry even as we critique it. The difference today is that our (counter) culture isn't as oppositional as it was, say, 30 years ago. The polemics of Adorno, or even Mulvey, make no sense in today's media environment (that's not to say their work is irrelevant or that we can't learn from it). It's a conundrum (have you seen Symbiopsychotaxiplasm:Take One and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2? I thought the latter perfectly illustrated the current political situation. In the original film, from the early 70s, the film crew hijacks the media and takes the film away from the control of the director; in the sequel, filmed recently, the director wants something similar to happen, only the film crew realizes that it would be ridiculous for them to hijack the film simply because they're "supposed" to do it; they have no reason to; they're working with the famous avant-garde filmmaker William Greaves, after all).

[Nick]

Matt,

Many thanks for your comments....but I do think that DVDs demystify the filmmaking process in significant ways. Off the top of my head, I recall Christopher Nolan talking about in detail about the narrative construction--and the writing process--of his films Following and Memento, or pretty much any of the Criterion Collection DVDs which often to into great historical/cultural/technical and very often ideological detail about the feature film, or even blockbuster films like Fellowship of the Ring, which has two DVDs devoted to things like "Digital Grading" "Post Production" and and "Editorial Demonstration" detailing the assembly of a specific scene.

If anything, the process of demystification has become a new commodity. Of course, it always was, as students paid money for classes and books to help them see-through cinema.

Hi Joseph--
I'm going to have to check out Symbiopsychotaxiplasm...sounds crazily good. I think you're right that the polemics of Mulvey and Adorno are of their time, and one of the reasons that film studies/cinema studies risks obsolesensce today is because it has for too long replicated and "applied" the cultural critique model over and over again...

[Chuck]

I *think* the "demystification" you describe in DVD commentaries is a "false demystification," though. It's less about the political aspects of mystification and more about technological, making the technology itself the mystified object (or, more precisely, technologies themselves).

I'd agree that we need new language for talking about how thi smystification operates. The directors of this generation have grown up reading Mulvey, Baudrillard, and Haraway (look at any film by Bigelow or Wachowski here), and while those ideas have been co-opted, mystification is still taking place.

[Nick]

Chuck--

I see what you mean--so many DVD commentaries are about the process of filmmaking itself. It almost becomes a fetish. But I don't think you can separate out politics from technnological matters (and I know this isn't what you are suggesting.) My general skepticism about the need to demystify even the political aspects of film is that it assumes a sort of compliant, passive audience.

For better or for worse, I think audiences today bring an ironic sensibility to much of what they see on the screen. And of course there is the old conundrum about the process of demystification itself: what we generally believe needs to be "demystified" are values, ideas, and assumptions that differ from our own...

[orange.]

"..is there any place for "resistance" to the culture industry anymore? Does there even need to be resistance anymore? The discipline of academic film/cinema/new media theory has always had a strong--sometimes dominant--element of cantankerous opposition, whether it be the bitter aphorisms of Horkheimer and Adorno, or the post-1968 marxist energy.."

The concepts of 'mass', 'individuum', 'culture' and 'Kulturindustrie' (and therefore in consequence the concept of 'art(s)') that are transported by orthodox marxism and the Frankfurt School have been critically revised within the Cultural Studies Approach that is heavily New Left influenced. This means focussing on the Eigensinn of the individuum as well as on selforganizational processes.
'Appropriation' in this context is seen as keymechanism and is a keyfocus also in regards of doing 'Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft'(not sure how to translate properly) in the Cultural Studies Approach. Admittedly this is not 'the' Agents of New Media--more observers and participants partly. What I want to say is: yes, I believe, "resistance" is possible and moreover that it is practised.
Perhaps this is because I do not regard blogs aka vlogs aka New Media as traditional media. They re different means in regards of style and production process and in regards of content.

[Nick]

Orange--

Okay, do you mean that the medium of the blog is not just another way to write about new media, but is a form of new media itself? If so, I absolutely agree, as I see them as new forms that make possible new ways of saying things. For one thing, they unfold in a way that approximates "real time"--the individual entries leave traces of the date of posting, etc. They are epistolary, serial. They unfold over time.

[orange.]

Excuse me tracking back your entry this late, somehow it got off sight.

"Okay, do you mean that the medium of the blog is not just another way to write about new media, but is a form of new media itself?"

Sure.

I might have misunderstood your point on New Media, resistance and Kulturindustrie, as you were talking about film. Replace term 'culture industry' by term 'mainstream media' and focus for example news business, so what I said concerning 'resistance' or 'subversion' or 'personal knowledge publishing' makes more sense.