Analysis One: Managing the Message

With the ubiquity of technological innovation and reformation, modern media are far from simple. Even the most straightforward medium contains in its form layers of remediations of other (older or newer) media.  This same straightforward medium also contains layers of cultural, historical, and political mediations in its content, purpose, and effect.  Because media can appear unadulterated, direct, and immediate despite their complex relationship to other media, and because they can be packed so densely with complex messages and employ myriad rhetorical strategies, they make excellent conduits for political, social, and cultural messages.  Indeed, this oft-veiled complexity has resulted in a plethora of public relations professionals, ‘spin doctors,’ and ‘media consultants’ (Webster 190).  Although the availability of “new” and advanced media has intensified this tendency, it is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon.  Effective spin doctors existed even in seventeenth century New England, particularly during the Salem Witch Trials of the late 1690s.  Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World is an “account” of these trials, and in its title page alone, its form, content, and purpose have both overt and covert political and social implications. 

Although its explicit purpose is to educate an already-knowledgeable Puritan public, this piece of information functions on another level as a multi-layered rhetorical appeal to a particular type of public for a very particular effect.  Mather deems it an “Account;” refers to “Observations upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of the Devils;” suggests the need for a course of action, and concludes by introducing “a brief Discourse” (Mather Title page).  This language presupposes an audience receptive to forthright information rather than sensationalism, a public interested in facts.  As members of a public sphere, the audience appears to fit with Jurgen Habermas’ ideal.  He explains that, with the development of a capitalist, bourgeois class, the public sphere became and should be “a sphere of private people come together as a public” to address their common interests through “the public use of their reason” (Habermas 27).  Habermas sees enlightened society as contingent upon a knowledgeable public participating in rational discourse, and this type of public cannot exist without sufficient information.  Mather aims to remedy a dearth of information by using a traditional medium (a plain, un-illustrated cover page comprised of a title, an outline of the information, and publication information), and this will ostensibly facilitate rational discourse. 

In addition to the medium’s appearance, Mather relies heavily on linguistic strategies, employing what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin define as “remediation.”  They explain that “The goal of remediation is to refashion or rehabilitate other media” (56), and in his effort to appear as though he is working with a rational public capable of rational discourse, Mather relies on rational language.  Specifically, he remediates scientific language, incorporating it into a non-scientific public document, to lend credibility to his assertions.  He would have no need to do this if his audience was not assumed to be information-savvy.  The Puritan public was indeed literate; they had access to certain types of information so they could knowledgeably practice spiritual self-assessment, a bulwark of their faith.  However, Mather does not intend merely to inform the public and instigate discourse; rather, he intends quite the opposite.  By incorporating one medium into another, Mather’s remediation of language “can be understood as a process of reforming reality as well” (Bolter and Grusin 56).  He elevates his non-secular opinion by conveying it through a “factual” medium, shaping rather than stimulating public discourse, which in turn, shapes social reality.

If the discourses of the public sphere can be shaped by remediation, then it follows that rational public discourse can be obstructed at the expense of Habermas’ ideal, enlightened public.  Habermas addresses this, calling it “Manufactured Publicity” (211).  Specifically, he explains that “the ‘opinion leader(s) in public affairs’ are usually wealthier, better educated, and have a better social position than the groups influenced by them” (213), and therefore, the former are more able to shape public opinion according to their political agendas.  Webster refers to this as “information management” or “the spread of the means, and of the consciousness of purpose, of persuading people” (190).  He cites Howard Tumber’s analysis that this use of “‘information has become paramount for governments in their attempts to manipulate public opinion and maintain social control’” (qtd. in Webster 190). 

Looking at the social and political context of Mather’s book, as situated in late-seventeenth century New England, information management is just as pervasive as it would come to be centuries later.  After the final execution in 1692, the Puritan public began to doubt the validity of their government’s actions.  Mather was requisitioned by the governing body to explain the situation to the public in order to smooth over the burgeoning dissent (Hovey and Jackson 509). The implications of Mather’s strategic use of language can be characterized by what Habermas refers to as a shift from public opinion to mass opinion.  He defines public opinion as a heteroglossia and free exchange of rational ideas, as opposed to mass opinion, which entails “far fewer people express(ing) opinions than receiving them” (Habermas 249).   In effect, it is “a shift … towards an acceptance of the massage and manipulation of public opinion by the technicians of public relations” (Webster 191).   The disingenuousness of the political maneuvering we see today which creates an information-saturated but knowledge-poor society is painfully evidenced by this single, “simple” medium.  With a history like this, it is no surprise public discourse has consistently, and in some ways progressively, fallen short of Habermas’ ideal.

Works Cited

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.

Habermas, Jurgen.  Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society.  1962.  Trans. Thomas Burger.  Cambridge: MIT, 1989.  Print.

Hovey, Kenneth A. and Gregory S. Jackson. Introduction.  “Cotton Mather 1663-1728.”  Heath

Anthology of American Literature. 5^th ed.  Vol. A. Gen. ed. Paul Lauter.  Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2006.  507-9.  Print.

Mather, Cotton.  Title page.  The Wonders of the Invisible World.  New England, 1693. Google

Images.  Web.  25 September 2012

Webster, Frank.  Theories of the Information Society.  3^rd Ed. Routledge: London, 2006.  Print.

Becoming a Global Citizen

            I often read the Los Angeles Times as a respite from homework during meals at home.  I do so mostly for its entertainment value, and as a writer, to reflect on the rhetorical strategies employed in its often-editorialized coverage.  A couple of things came to mind this morning as I read Benjamin Barber’s Op-Ed piece, “Think Globally, America.” First, I realized I would have skipped this piece entirely had I not just spent the early morning reading about globalization in Frank Webster’s Theories of the Information Society.  I generally skip over the “world news” section because of its seeming irrelevance to my life and the reality that “we” already have enough problems here in the United States as it is.  Webster’s discussion of globalization primed me to have a more open mind, so I didn’t skip Barber’s piece just because of its title. 

Barber sums up his position:

Political conventions won't take up global issues until politicians are willing to do so; politicians won't think or talk like cosmopolitans until citizens applaud them for global realism; and citizens won't be ready to cross the traditional national frontiers that have defined their parochialism until an information-grounded media help them grasp the meaning of interdependence, which is about bridges not walls, cooperation not frontiers, commonality not exceptionalism. [1]

In pointing out the deficiencies at each level of political activity, he offers a means to remedy them, a means which starts with individual Americans having access to globally-relevant information.  Specifically, this is a call to American media sources, our primary information-providers, to alter the breadth and depth of their coverage to create a more world-savvy public, a public which knows its fate is inextricably linked with the fates of those beyond our immediate borders. 

An hour earlier, Webster had already introduced me to this connectedness: that globalization “signals the growing interdependence and interpenetration of human relations alongside the increasing integration of the world’s socio-economic life” (69).  Although Webster does not propose a plan of action like Barber, he similarly concludes by calling attention to the role of information in our evolving global society.  He explains that the economics and politics of our relatively cocooned “nation state” are dependent on “conditions [which] are increasingly rare in the days of global marketing, frenetic foreign exchange dealings and enterprises located at multiple points around the world” (74-5), and that, as information has facilitated many of these innovations, so is it integral to adapting to the consequent changes (97).

            With this fresh in mind, I could not help but reflect on my position in relation to globalization and my heretofore perspective of isolationism.   This led me to my second realization: that every day when I skip sections of the paper, I undermine Barber’s position by undermining the “information-grounded” media’s ability to reach me.  Of course not all that purports to be “world news” is worth a critical eye, and I do not think my local newspaper is exactly the best source, but my attitude thus far has been clear: I would rather stay secure in the problems with which I’m familiar than take the risk of exposing myself to the reality of the world around me.  As both Webster and Barber point out, my world is changing, and to understand and appreciate my agency in this changing world, I must have access to information. There seems to be no dearth of information; now I just need to choose to access it.

Barber, Benjamin.  “Think Globally, America.”  Op-Ed.  Los Angeles Times.  20 Sept. 2012: A19.  Print.

Webster, Frank.  Theories of the Information Society.  3^rd Ed. Routledge: London, 2006.  Print.

 

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[1] Here is a link for the rest of Barber’s text:

 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-barber-interdependence-20120921,0,5337193.story

The Voting Public: Power and Mass Culture

According to Bolter and Grusin, remediation of the self involves the reflexive influencing of media by social conventions and of social conventions by media.  Adorno and Horkheimer, conversely, see the remediations of the self by media as a direct result of society’s power structure perpetuating itself by appropriating media for the purpose of shaping “selves” into “the masses.” Specifically, in their chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” they explain, “It is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance.  The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows even stronger” (1113).  For them, the culture industry functions as a means for social control by remediating consumers’ needs to suit the political and economic objectives of the few in power who wish to stay in power.

This shaping of individuals into consumer identities has social and political implications in a much more direct sense as well.  In his discussion of voting behavior and public ideology in Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jurgen Habermas provides the following excerpt:

Were one to compress into one sentence what the ideology of mass culture actually amounts to, one would have to present it as a parody of the statement, “Become what you are”: as a glorifying reduplication and rejustification of the state of affairs that exists anyway, while foregoing all transcendence and critique (216).

The excerpt is followed by an end note, and I incorrectly assumed that it stemmed from an earlier reference to Raymond Aron.  All the same, I could not help but write “A&H” in the margin, and as it happens, I did so for good reason. When I looked it up, this statement did indeed come from Theodor Adorno. 

            With this reference, Habermas links voter participation and the political decisions of the public with already established power structures.  Habermas connects political ideology to mass culture, and from there, calls upon Adorno to connect mass culture to the stifling of public incentive to action.  The insidiousness of the phrase, “Become what you are,” lies in its apparent espousing of the greatness of being yourself while it simultaneously implies that there is no need to attempt improvement, no room for personal change or growth.  Like the consumers who believe their cultural preferences reflect who they are as individuals, voters recognize themselves the most when supplied with ideology in line with what they already think.  Hearing their own views simply “generate(s) a rather homogenous climate of opinion” (Habermas 213), and from that perspective, hearing opposing views only realigns voters all the more with theeir own party. 

            The prescience of Habermas’ observation is striking.  Here we are, over forty years later, approaching an intensely polarized and hostile presidential election: both the party leaders and the voting blocs which pledge allegiance to them have abandoned any pretense of fostering a public united in its efforts toward a common good.  Instead, each party strives for extremism because their constituents know their way is the right way so the more extreme their opposition to their foes, the more justified and righteous they feel.  The majority of the voting public is aligned with one or the other extreme position, whether they believe in them in their entirety or not, just as sports fans are aligned with teams and consumers are aligned with particular brands, both without question.  Identification leads to loyalty, loyalty fuels identification, and how and with what we identify shapes who we are and how we act.  Rather than practice a critical self- and social awareness, these voters sustain their senses of who they are by sustaining the status quo. 

Works Cited

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.

Habermas, Jurgen.  Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society.  1962.  Trans. Thomas Burger.  Cambridge: MIT, 1989.  Print.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno.  “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

Deception.” Excerpt from Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947.  The Norton Anthology of

Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2010.  1110-

1127.

Remediating Identities

 In Remediation, Bolter and Grusin write:  

“This is the claim implicit in most cultural studies analyses of popular media: that film and television embody or carry economic and cultural ideologies and that we should study media principally in order to uncover and learn to resist their ideologies (Kellner, 1995).  Although it is true that the formal qualities of the medium reflect their social and economic significance, it is equally true that the social and economic aspects reflect the formal or technical qualities” (67-8).

To understand this conclusion, we first must accept Bolter and Grusin's theory of the reflexive nature of the relationship between older and newer media.  Specifically, newer media contain vestiges of older media, re-forming them in order capitalize on audiences' existing attraction to them as well as their desire for something more immediate, an improvement upon the sense of immediacy provided.  This relationship is reflexive, though, because older media are just as capable, and in order to stay relevant, just as likely to remediate newer media.  The result is a dialectic of remediation which blurs the lines between older and newer media.  The above quote is an extrapolation of this theory of reflexivity to apply to the relationship between media and identity.  

Here's an example: 

The image constitutes the cover of an older medium: the ink and paper magazine.  This older medium remediates the even older medium of written language by juxtaposing it in a hypermediated way with the medium of "realistic" photography.  The remediations don't stop there, however, as the reflexive relationship of remediation is pronounced by the language of the text: "Life is a series of reboots."  Here, the older media of written language and paper magazines remediates the language of computer technology.  

In line with the notion that media contain social and economic significance, this remediation of the language of newer media functions as a remediation of the real.  By reframing "life" in the context of computer speak, the creative forces behind this image imply an intrinsic connection between our immediate experience and computer technology.  Our sense of ourselves in  the "real" world is shaped by this association, and it is hard not to proceed from there to the idea that we are then more inclined to further understand ourselves in relation to computer technology and other "newer" media. 

Although Bolter and Grusin seem to almost defend the innocence of media by suggesting an equality between media shaping and being shaped by culture, this reflexivity is all the more reason why culture and media should be analyzed together.  There is no need to blame media for shaping culture any more than there is a need to blame culture for its media, but using the material evidence of media--both what it represents and what message that representation sends--we can better understand how and why our culture functions as it does.

As the above image illustrates, there is a valuation of newer media as more related to our lives today than older media, and this valuation appeals to the sophistication of users of newer media to get them to use this older media.  The reverse is also possible: users of older media (e.g. magazine readers) gain a sense of authenticity in the hypermediacy of realizing they recognize a technological reference--they are more technologically savvy than they might have thought.  Either way, the attraction of newer media is valued even in an effort to protect the value of older media, and this is indicative of both a representation and the further shaping of contemporary cultural values. 

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.

Linked Media: Hypermediacy, Immediacy, and Remediation

The very fact that the "new media" of video games, social networking sites, and movies simultaneously achieve both immediacy and hypermediacy, and that this can be assessed in terms of their remediations of other media, shows that there really is no "new media" at all.  Using Bolter and Grusin's Remediation, we first analyzed the online video game, ATV Pizza Delivery from Freeaddictinggames.com.  

http://www.freeaddictinggames.com/game/atv-pizza-delivery/

In its remediations of older home-console video games, and even further removed, arcade games, it aims for a degree of authenticity through immediacy: the car follows the basic physics of driving by spinning out or stalling out upon collision with other vehicles, and there is an immediacy in the response of the car to our manipulation of the keys that attempts to replicate the experience of manipulating the controls of a vehicle.  However, hypermediacy dominates, as is typical of most internet-based media.  There are advertisements popping up around the game's window, and there is not only the option to stop the game, skip games, and replay the game, but also to open up a whole new window and explore other media without completely leaving the game.  Further, what seems like a poor attempt at immediacy--getting the car to do what we wanted by pressing the keys--actually functions as hypermediacy in its calling attention to the game's frustrating limitations.  But, circling back, the limitations of this "contact point" (30) between us and the "car" provide a double sense of immediacy by replicating the experience of driving a car at high speeds (since they are difficult to control), and further, by manufacturing an authentic and immediate experience of frustration that corresponds to what is commonly felt while driving in traffic. 

Next, we looked at Sasha Ordowskij's profile page on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/sasha.ordowskij

This, too, screams of hypermediacy, and only through this hypermediated experience do we achieve any semblance of immediacy.  The immediacy of photography is called upon and remediated into digital photography that is then incorporated into a hyper-(re)mediated collage of information including other pictures, videos, text comments, and links to a remediated resume and a remediated biography.  This experience of Sasha, however, is not diminished by hypermediacy; rather, the saturating barrage of information purportedly selected by her provides an immediate sense of “knowing” her that surpasses the degree of knowledge one would gain just by meeting her face-to-face.  Once again, remediation replicates authentic experience in the interplay between hypermediacy and immediacy.

Finally, we watched a scene from Leon, the Professional:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQZlHnwqhgM&t=1m48s

This appears to be more immediate than the video game and Facebook page in its timely and realistic dialogue, its grittiness, the design and furnishing of the living space, and the expected interactions and reactions of the characters.  This immediacy is achieved through the filmic remediation of photographic technology with each shift in camera angle and the editing and cutting of scenes facilitating the progression of story and time.  Hypermediacy is also used in the service of immediacy in the process of remediation.  For instance, the hypermediacy of products available at a typical grocery store is remediated into Mathilda’s immediate experience of shopping which rings true for viewers who expect shopping to be like that.

These three “new media” certainly offer avenues toward an authentic experience, but evidently, none of them are actually “new.” As Bolter and Grusin explain, “Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other” (55), and this shows the dependence of what we think of as “new” media upon what is “old” as well as how “old” media can remediate what is “new.” This, in turn, highlights the interdependence of the concepts of immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation.  They are defined by each other, just as newer media is defined by its relation to older media.  Each medium attempts to create an authentic experience by appealing to its audience’s desire for relation and connection; that two seemingly opposing strategies must be used in tandem reveals how complex modern rhetoric must be in reaching a diverse audience.
 

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.