[Conducting a little test here, giving the del.icio.us daily blog posting function a try.]
In Regarding the Pain of Others
To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge … one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned … when confronted with evidence of what human beings are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood…. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.
Sontag’s essays in Regarding the Pain of Others
The images in the essay are generating some discussion about — among other things — whether or not they are pornographic, whether or not they glorify rape, whether or not they glorify war, whether or not they have any aesthetic significance. I could probably pick any of these, choose either side, and make a compelling and passionate case for or against. What I cannot do, however, is rescue the photographs themselves from what they really represent: the exact sort of psychological immaturity, superficiality, and demonstration of ignorance that Sontag is referring to. The photographs — by virtue of their distance from anything that would actually cause us to consider the realities of war — become little more than the kind of cliche aptly illustrated by their worn out title, Make Love, Not War.
It’s not, of course, necessarily true that all photography of war reflect it’s subject realistically, and I wouldn’t make that claim about photography of any subject. But that doesn’t mean choice of subjects doesn’t matter; the photographs are all integrated under one title, showing obviously related themes that were the explicit choices of the artists involved. As with all art, it is the artists’ choices that are fair game for evaluation and critical assessment.
The photographs don’t strike me as being about war at all. If I pitched a tent in my back yard, donned some military fatigues, slapped some mud on my face, and brandished a squirt gun (even a really big squirt gun), you wouldn’t call me a soldier. You might think I was playing soldier, and question my sanity, but that’s about it. The “soldiers” in these photographs seem about as soldierly as me and my tent; in both the actual appearance of the photographs and the way the models are portrayed, they’re only playing soldier too; or not even playing soldier, just playing.
The images of the men, though, are at least not overtly offensive. The men are, in nearly all the photographs, shown as happy, alert, enjoying an experience in the moment. In the women, however, there’s something else, made even more apparent by contrast with the appearance of the men. In photo after photo, the faces of the women suggest one of two conditions: semi-consciousness or pain. From the America’s Top Model mannequin-like pose in image 3, to the distraught and unfocused or visibly pained eyes in almost every other image, the women are most definitely not being portrayed as living the experience in the same way as the men. Disheveled, dirty, confused, and in pain, the women are so succinctly reduced to objects for the amusement of the men that the conclusion that the images glorify rape is a reasonable one, if not a wholly accurate one. At least early-modern attempts to objectify women (as toys for men) usually showed them looking good. Vogue Italia – in treating us to a helping of soft-core, military-style, repetitious, dull, and vaguely annoying porn — can’t be bothered, and instead serves up images that include … yes, you guessed it, mud wrestling….
To be continued….
A few days ago, cooper left a comment on my post Why We Study History, in which she said:
… it would seem if we truly used history correctly we would not repeat it so often….
Since then, I’ve been carrying that thought around in my head, considering different ways that I might respond. This is not my response.
She’s absolutely right, of course; it’s impossible to study history over any time period longer than twenty seconds, without noticing cycles in human actions and reactions that seem to generate essentially the same social and cultural conditions. Clothing and hairstyles change, and dialogue and postures shift a little, but the broader results often seem about the same. Keeping my generalist hat on for a moment, let me just leave it at this: history repeating itself is as much a cliche as it is an actual historical condition; and as both of those things, it deserves a healthy dose of skeptical analysis.
And that is actually my main point, about all I could explore in this tiny post. When we talk of history repeating itself, we can’t stop there. We can’t really start there, either…. instead, I think we would need to latch on to some specific element of the cycles we’re trying to unravel, and, starting there, pull all sorts of interdisciplinary tricks to search for common threads and relationships among history, science, art, literature, economics, politics, and technology. It’s these things, along with the philosophical ideas that mold them and drive them forward, that define historical cycles. I can’t think of any theoretical reason why history has to repeat itself, or why history, as cooper stated, has to dictate anything … yet it would seem it has and still does, in cycles that are getting shorter and shorter and shorter….
From the Project for Excellence in Journalism comes a study describing differences between the kinds of news stories featured on the web sites of traditional media outlets, and those featured on user-driven sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, Digg, and Yahoo! News. The authors of the study describe it as providing some initial answers to the question: “What would a world in which citizens set the news agenda rather than editors look like?”
The study is certainly worth examining in detail; one of the things I noticed immediately was this:
The three top categories for news stories presented by the media outlets the study examined were: foreign news stories, disasters and accidents, and U.S. foreign affairs. The three top categories among the first three user-driven sites listed above were technology and science, lifestyle, and government.
I might have liked to see technology and science separated for the purposes of the study, though I can understand the difficulties in making that separation. I would expect, however, that the technology-orientation of user-selected stories was stronger than that of science. Regardless, it’s not at all surprising to me that stories tagged on sites like Reddit, del.icio.us, and Digg are heavily weighted toward technology: I think the simple fact that the technology is still new to so many people is reflected in a sometimes restless and nearly frantic gathering around stories that help us all understand it and use it better. I know I’m abstracting from personal experience here, possibly a little too much, but when I look at at my own stories on del.icio.us, I see a pattern that very closely mirrors the results of the study. Why? Well, because like so many people I’m trying to understand how to use the technologies, trying to find the best ways to use them, and I’m still asking myself questions like “What the hell is StumbleUpon for anyway?”
As is the case with all emerging technologies, though, this discovery phase is only temporary (good luck defining “temporary”); and if the authors conduct the study again in a few years, I would be very surprised if the categories of user-tagged stories don’t start to shift. While it may still not necessarily reflect the selections being made by traditional media, I’ll bet you’ll see a convergence between the two. The study lays some excellent groundwork for the future research; and that may even be more valuable even than it’s current conclusion:
For now, the percentage of Americans who rely exclusively on news from user-driven sites is just a fraction of what it is for mainstream news sites. And in this increasingly fragmented era, many who visit Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit may also be reading the online versions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. But whether or not we see further divergence between user-driven sites and mainstream media over the next few years will surely remain a key question for researchers, journalists and of course, citizens.
A few days after I posted this brief rant about television, I saw this Computerworld article, Survey: Internet on the verge of surpassing TV as ‘essential medium’. The article describes a survey done by Edison Media Research, that ranks changes in consumer perceptions about different types of media and how those perceptions have changed in the past five years. You can find the company’s press release and summary of the survey findings here.
Overall, the Internet is closing in on television as the essential source for information and entertainment. This certainly echoes my own experience; like the respondents to the survey, I’m much more likely to turn to the Internet first for news stories and information. For me, that is entertainment. And I’m certainly not surprised that others are finding a growing amount of information and pure entertainment all over the net.
If trends highlighted by the survey continue, the Internet will expand as not only an alternative to television, but as a challenge to it. Whether that challenge improves the quality of television programming, from news to “reality shows” to your favorite cop shows, is a huge unknown right now … but I do hope television executives are paying attention. I was a little surprised to see the survey result that respondents thought television quality had improved over the past five years; I wouldn’t have expected that result for the major networks at least, though I might have come to that conclusion about some of the more popular cable channels.
It would be fascinating, I think, if a survey of this type was conducted with a more detailed comparison of actual uses of the different types of media. A hierarchy seems to be emerging where television and the Internet are competing for the top spot, with radio trailing behind both in its own niche, and newspapers falling quite a bit behind. The newspaper, as many of us have grown up knowing it, is probably close to dead, though wrapping itself in technology may make it useful to us in different forms. Whether or not The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal present themselves as primarily digital content or on paper isn’t critical; their cultural role is the same regardless of the form they take. But they will need to adapt well to the new forms, or they’ll make themselves obsolete.
I have this uninformed opinion that all forms of media constantly create their own buzz, and that interest in moronic “celebrities” like Paris Hilton is completely fabricated. And, once fabricated, the buzz simply takes on a life of its own … fueled not nearly as much by the general public, but by media itself and the money machine that goes with it.
The television networks, as far as I can tell, have all but given up on creating anything of any artistic, dramatic, or cultural value. Whatever pops the ratings at any given time and snags a few advertisers is good enough, and the frenetic pace with which the latest pops appear and disappear keeps them all thinking they’re actually a success. But if you look a little more closely, you’ll see that the dominant programming trend is one of delusion and self-deprecation; the media spends a tremendous amount of its energy creating caricatures of itself. As its race to irrelevance accelerates, NBC — which, until a decade or so ago, remained moderately respectable and relatively independent — takes its most recent step off the cliff:
Original source: AtlMalcontent, The High Price of Infamy
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“[He] renders it blatantly insane … without any recognizable expression of premeditation.”
