Let's Not Kid Ourselves

Apology: this posting will not be very text specific.

HBO Voyeur. Gotta say, I just don’t get it. Don’t know what the content is, don’t know how I’m supposed to access it, don’t know why I should care. Thoughts?

The thing about convergence culture that this week’s readings do not deal with is whether or not it works; to put it another way, does it succeed in its (from the corporate perspective) goal in selling more content, of whatever kind that content happens to be? Henry Jenkins and others write about terms like “franchise” and the phenomenon of corporations pushing products through a virtual mélange of media, but anecdotally, the idea of convergence to sell more product does not necessarily make sense. For example, I tend to visit the websites of films for which I like the trailers. And 99% of the time I am disappointed by the offerings of these website. There is usually no more content about the films except some kind of virtual world in which I can do very little in. Maybe I can buy the soundtrack or read a synopsis or bio of the filmmakers. So what is the point? I wouldn’t get to this site anyway without the trailer, and it doesn’t seem to lead me anywhere new except to the movie theater, which I was gong to go to anyway. I guess I could blog about my excitement, but really I’d rather talk to a friend.

While perhaps the websites for films are not the most creative example of convergence culture, the example seems to point to a seeming necessity for extraneous content across media to surround a product even when this extra content is usually redundant.

So why is convergence so privileged? My question is, must we use it just because it’s there?

southpark studios & convergence?

For my screening assignment, I choose to catch the South Park episode I missed titled "Elementary School Musical". When I went to the website, SouthParkStudios.com I the first thing that caught my eye was a strip of images linked to clips of different episodes this season entitled "What Fans Are Watching". To the right of that are links telling you to "Watch New Episode", "Play South park Games", use 'South Park scene mixer", and an advertisement for '"Need For Speed: Undercover" video game. The episode was surprisingly not interrupted with advertisements telling me to buy this video game that comes out 11.18.08; although it had links around the entire screen.
Taking from what Henry Jenkins talks about in his piece about Convergence Culture, I couldn't help but see the parallels in the narrative of the episode. The episode was a satirical in nature, it parodied the High School Musical movies. Linking the Disney movies to the comedy central cartoon show, the episode displayed "a flow of content across multiple media platforms". I feel like it is convergence because the episode actually makes me want to watch the High School Musical movies now to see what its all about, as the characters did. This factor I believe is essential to convergence being a legitimate phenomenon. The participatory culture allows this type of convergence to exist. Right?

When we got this assignment, I was intent on watching Desperate Housewives. I immediately went to the ABC website, which welcomed me (slash scared me) with this man's voice that preempted his appearance and occurred before the web page even loaded. The voice belonged to some car advertisement that took up the main section of the opening webpage, a distracting motion that added to the overwhelming clutter of the page and redirected my attention from the internet to this TV-like advertisement. The ad provided a live link between the television and the internet, reminding me of my reason to use the internet as a gateway to past television - a means in which I could almost relive the past. This webpage was going to give me the opportunity to experience Desperate Housewives in its state of "liveness" that I missed that previous Sunday night. In a sense, the internet was providing me the comfort and reassurance that technology would compensate for the relentless continuum of time. This notion parallels Doane's idea of television's attempt to make a chaotic world more orderly - Internet basically acts as television's back up by "render[ing] 'natural' the logic and rhythm of the social order" (233) when television fails to do so.

Once I finally got to actually watching the show (after several minutes of necessary online test-taking...i.e."Which Desperate Housewife Are You?"), I was interrupted again by another advertisement. This time, the pop-up screen forced me to watch the advertisement, which consisted of Christina Aguilera's new music video/Target commercial. The advertisement was a continuous stream throughout the entire episode, occurring every 20 minutes or so and picking up where it left off, like some alternate sort of story line occurring simultaneously with the Desperate Housewives story line.

Diverging from the screening, I'd like to note some intriguing aspects of Caldwell's article and question his notion of "utopia." Caldwell associates utopia was a "gloss of endless diveresity promised in the new age of cable" (44), indicating the link between utopia and chaos. This relation contradicts the classic interpretation of utopia as "perfect" and "orderly." Perhaps Caldwell is implying his belief in a utopia as some sort of confined chaos - a perfect society that contains a necessary diversity in a controlled atmosphere that simultaneously propagates the spread of collective knowledge and (in terms of capitalism) produces a profit from doing so.

Media Convergence in the Virtual Event

Over the weekend I attended the “Machinima Expo”, a virtual event in the online world of Second Life. The Expo was essentially a virtual film festival with several theaters screening films throughout the day, panel discussions with voice-chatting avatars, a “live” musical performance, award ceremony, and various exhibits. When I actually begin to think about the festivities, I realized the amazing degree of media convergence present in this online space that I had totally taken for granted. The Machinima Expo was promoted on a website (http://www.machinima-expo.com/) , which contained a special link called an surl. Clicking on this link launches Second Life and teleports you to the location of the event. Here, the convergence of internet technologies with the medium of computer/video games is apparent. Second Life itself also integrates a huge amount of other media into its world: there is live voice communication (which used to belong exclusively to the telephone), text messaging, “live” musical performances, and video streaming. All are technologies that have converged on the computer via the internet, but have also found their way into online gaming. It is also interesting that the film screenings in Second Life sought to emulate the experience of real world film spectatorship. These screenings took place in virtual cinemas, complete with posters advertising the event and seats in which the avatars could sit to watch the film.




The convergence of these media technologies in Second Life were made possible by Linden Labs, the company that created the virtual world. Thus, there was definitely a commercial impetus for this phenomenon. In fact, it is part of the business model----Second Life promotes itself as a creative space that facilitates a wide variety of social and multimedia experiences. Nonetheless, unlike most online games, Second Life is a world that is constructed almost entirely by the free labor of its players. Thus, the theaters and exhibits of the Machinima Expo were built by Expo organizers after renting virtual land from its current owner. This labor functioned primarily for the users, but also benefited Linden Labs because people wanted to enter Second Life in order to attend the virtual event. This is a great example of the symbiosis between the users who supply the free labor and the corporation that makes the technologies available---both parties benefit from the arrangement. However, this model of free labor in Second Life is complicated by the existence of Second Life’s rich market for virtual goods and land which users can buy and sell for actual cash.


Virtual Concert In Second Life:

Convergence

What struck me the most about my "screening" assignment this weekend was the convergence of different media that was so clear in the fan cultures surrounding TV shows. It started when I noticed on the Six Feet Under website that there was an entire section on "Claire's Art." For those of you who don't know, Claire is a character on the show who goes to art school, and episodes often show the artwork she is working on/has created. On the website there are pictures of some of her art, accompanied by comments by the producer as well as the artists that actually created the art. This ties the form of visual art with the televisual show. In addition to this, the page also provides links to interactive games, providing yet another medium. Under the title "community" the show is also connected to online newsletters and blogs. Of course, the very fact that I was finding this on a website is yet another example of a combination of media.

For those of you that are familiar with the show Weeds, you know that the theme song of the show is played by a different musician or group for each episode. Each of these versions is available on the Weeds website, thus linking music to the televisual. A similar thing is done on HBOVoyeur; there is an emphasis on the background music, which you can even select in the lower left corner of the screen. The mixing of these different media is beneficial to both sides, as musicians gain fans of the show and the show gains fans of the music. One Tree Hill offers yet another example of this more indirectly, by using the name of a song as the title of each epsiode.

I found Jenkin's article on Convergence Culture extremely interesting and would love to discuss further in section the implications of it. I think the concept of interaction between viewer and producer is extremely important to the changing culture of media and is changing our perception and expectations of media. I feel like this relates back to Keenan's ideas on which way the window is pointing; the relationship between the different directions of light is becoming more complex.

For the my "screening" this week I watched the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" on the popular television website hulu.com. Interestingly enough my experience could hardly be considered exemplary of convergence culture. One would think that such a popular website would utilize media convergence to the fullest extent to reap the maximum benefits from its capacity to do so, but I found that this was not the case at all. Unlike the website for "The Hills" that was utilized in lecture earlier this week, media convergence played an extremely small part in the advertising on the site. In fact, any advertising at all (as well as any convergent devices) was minimal. More than anything the site seemed to operate like television with less commercials. The ads had nothing to do with the program. I believe the ad shown during the show was for a car. There was no option to buy Charlie's sweatshirt or Dennis' preferred hair gel or whatever other ridiculous products are hawked in conjunction with other television shows on the web. I didn't have to watch any promos for upcoming episodes of the show, nor could I even find a link to the shows official website! Three thirty second ads and a small banner ad were the entire extent of the advertising I encountered.  Other aspects of convergence culture within the site were limited. There was a tab for discussion about the episode/show and for reviews of the episode. That covers just about all of the truly "convergent" aspects of the site.

So why bother to create such a site? Or, rather, why would one create such a site and not utilize further convergent technologies? The site provides a place to watch television with less ads than actual television and more control over what one is watching and when, but nothing more. It occurred to me that the site seemed to actually become an advertisement for the act of watching television itself. Most of the "advertising" on the site was for other shows also featured on the site. Below the video player there were links to other TV shows featured on the site and clips from other shows as well as other episodes of "Always Sunny." The site becomes something of an advertisement for itself more than anything else. This poses an interesting challenge to the supposed trend of convergence. One of the most popular television websites on the internet hardly utilizes any convergent mechanisms at all. How can we view this site in terms of convergence?

Enjoy the best video quality online: watch full episodes with our new player.

For my online television experience, I decided to catch up on a show I had watched quite religiously at home but neglected since my move to Providence and the chaos of the corresponding transition. As the streaming video page header helpfully informed me, "episodes are available 8 days after broadcast"; however, my intent to start at the beginning of the season was dashed when I realized that, quite reasonably, these streaming episodes are only up for a limited amount of time. Television networks may be buying in to the free on-demand content aesthetic of the new digital economy, but they will only go so far when their profits depend mostly upon TV advertising. Any forays into the digital field will only be sustained so long as they do not pose a threat to the central business of TV, which is of course television. Needless to say, I was quite put off not to be able to pick up right where last season's dramatic finale had ended (another tried-and-true television technique to keep viewers engaged during and beyond the months-long summer break between new material). Not having much choice within at least the legal realm, I submitted to my disappointment and sat down with the oldest of the new episodes still available.

I was immediately met with a dull, black screen, and then prompted to install a special Fox video player, which I was assured offered "the best video quality online". After this process was complete, I again got ready for the familiar opening teaser of an episode of "House". Not yet. The now ubiquitous commercial into to online television reared its ugly head, advertising a new show on the same Fox network. I would not realize how annoying this ADD burst of lie-detector intrigue could be until I had seen it five or six times, once (at least) at each of the predetermined commercial breaks programmed in to the Fox player. Also to my intense displeasure, the initial thirty-second clip was replaced in subsequent viewings by a version seemingly identical but somehow twice as long.

Finally, the actual episode began. I had been watching it quite happily for a good ten minutes or so when the program, as television often does, faded out - only this time it didn't fade back in again. I waited for a little while to no avail, then gave in to the natural tendency of an Internet native: I clicked around hoping that something would happen. It seems I had been caught unawares by a prescheduled Internet equivalent of the "commercial break", a luxury available to networks when the use of their own, special video player is mandated. In retrospect, this made sense, as the progress bar was broken in multiple places by a short vertical line - billed, no doubt, as an easily identifiable stopping/starting point but functioning more as an excuse for more advertising. Unfortunately in my confusion I managed to stumble upon every commercial break except the one I was looking for, meaning I watched an identical ad for that inane Fox program five times consecutively. (In an unlikely dose of kindness from the network, I later found that the commercial breaks I had already cleared were not triggered a second time as I went through after this. Small comfort.)

The viewing from here was largely uneventful, with the exception of a few more frustrating commercial interludes I had missed in my mad rush to save the streaming video. The web site surrounding it, though, was an ideal exemplification of the new media reality. A list of episodes with thumbnail image was displayed prominently below the viewing area, a come-hither intended to appeal to lapsed viewers like me or more generally anyone susceptible to the flow encouraged by television in any context. All of these were marked with a five-star rating scale determined by the online audience; surprisingly, despite a large discrepancy in the number of votes included between the various episode averages, the groupthink averaged out at 4 stars every time. Not bad, "House". Beneath these episodes were conveniently placed "online extras", likely exclusive, in which the actors discussed the episodes above. One of these, I might point out, in its title alone gave up the secret of a SHOCKING TWIST that I had not yet seen! Oops. Below was a series of "user reviews" which seemed to be focused quite negatively on the video player itself, with a few passionate defenders standing up to the mob of detractors. Yet despite this disproportionality, the average star rating here was a perfect 5. Finally, below this was a convenient series of links to MORE Fox streaming programs, with a list of thumbnailed "Most Popular Episodes".

The material here exhausted, I followed a link to the "official site". A "House-isms" bar greeted me at the top left, with an EKG-inspired countdown to the next new episode (4 days, 22 hours, 55 minutes, 55 seconds at this writing. Mark your calendars.) below. The same links to recent episodes and websclusives were prominently displayed at the center, with a backdrop image of the man himself looking appropriately sardonic. Below thse videos were a pair of essential reminders: a timeslot change to Mondays starting in January (New Year, New Night) and an "extended" upcoming episode (Set your DVRs and VCRs accordingly -- the Nov 25th episode runs until 9:08pm!) Interestingly, these reminders were links back to the page on which they appeared. Next, we are reminded that "Election Time Isn't Over Yet", tapping into our Obamenthusiasm with an entreaty to vote for Hugh Laurie for Best Actor in the People's Choice Awards. Finally, we are implored to join the "Community" with links to the official House Facebook, the House wiki, and the four most popular topics in the House subset of the Fox forums. In a similar vein, a link at the top of the page marked "Bookmark and share this page" expanded to reveal a helpful array of possible tasks, including but not restricted to: bookmarking, Facebook/Myspace posting, digg, MSN Live chatting, and, my personal favorite, MORE.

Just another night in the world of Internet television.

Beyond televisual flow

     This week's lectures brought up the emergence of new technologies and their relation to convergence culture.  Television no longer, simply television, but rather extends online through games, forums, blogs, chats, shopping, and so on, as was brought up in lecture.  How does this effect the notion of "flow" as Raymond Williams describes it, which is so central to television?  Television when analyzed within its programming still very much relies on flow, though even here it begins to diverge as the audience is prompted to access MySpace pages or other external sources.  Thus, a new flow seems to emerge.  Is this flow fundamentally the same or different from the televisual flow described by Williams?  It would seem that now, the flow that once characterized television, is a cross-medium, all-encompassing flow.  

     Williams says that the phenomenon of "planned flow" is the defining characteristic of broadcasting (86).  The planned flow is the "sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence," which he says follows from the innovation of commercial advertising and trailers of upcoming programs (90).  Williams' argument must now be re-evaluated as the television audience is increasingly prompted to continue the flow created by television, outside of television.  This goes then to Jenkins' discussion of convergence as both a top-down and bottom-up process (18).  From the top, the consumer is prompted to act in certain ways and indeed is provided with a certain limited set of options.  Conversely, the consumer has the choice of what prompts to act on and indeed, it is in the nature and to the advantage of firms respond accordingly.  Though, the consumer would seem less empowered in light of Terranova's article, "Free Labor."  

However, to return to Williams', he states that while "the items [on t.v.] may be various the television experience has in some important ways unified them" (95).  Reconsidered, the cross-medium flow now unifies even more disparate items while also unifying otherwise disparate technologies.  Furthermore, the flow, which Williams says "is always accessible, in several alternative sequences, at the flick of a switch" (94) is now accessible at the flick of switch or click of a button be it on one's computer, cellphone, or other PDF.  It seems we are truly in a web of our own making, forever entangled in an extension of the televisual to the all-encompassing technological flow.  The only escape would be to take oneself off the map entirely, with the consequence of losing touch with an imagined community that seems increasingly to define "reality."  

Take a Cruise (?) on our Animal (loving?) Planet

Logging onto the Animal Planet website to watch WHALE WARS ( a wholly SWEET show about sea pirates who chase off whaling ships) I was greeted, like Alex, by a frenzied onslaught of images, links, mini films, advertisements: serious media convergence. 

Was I supposed to read the text? Was I supposed to listen the 'crashing of waves' that suddenly played over my itunes? (which was playing 'love in this club' by usher---psych. just kidding.) Was I supposed to link to some an advertisement for clorox-- side note: isn't it a bit ironic that a bleach company is advertising on a green-centric, save the planet-style website? doesn't bleach kill the environment?

Anyway, after clicking the 'find out more' link (yes, i'm a sucker i know for even doing that) I discovered that I could (a) read about the greatness of the show (as reviewed by animal planet reporters, hmmm..) (b) tell a friend to watch the show (email them via yahoo) (c) watch a preview for the show (only after downloading  media player x, y, or z) but not actually WATCH the whales. oh, and on the side of the screen I could click to learn how I could cruise to the Caribbean for under $300!  -- because people who like watching whale-hunters get attacked obviously like the ocean and marine life and thus obviously like the Caribbean and thus clearly want to cruise there in a giant white prison ...(maybe even actually hitting and killing a few whales on the way and definitely dumping oil into the sea.)

As you can tell, I was underwhelmed by the site's blatant material focus and even more unimpressed by the fact that I couldn't watch WHALE WARS. 

My quest continued though and I clicked on one of the dozen or so pull-down menu options at the top titled "videos" --> "watch entire episodes". At this point I was met by offers to watch shows on TLC, The Discovery Channel , or Animal Planet ---and told that I HAD to download "The Player".

I hate TV. and I hate it when it mixes with the web. so to add mandatory downloads and ads was not good .

I ended up watching a take2 version of Grizzly Man called "Living with the Wolfman".

Guess how it ended?

okay, so not as violently as Grizzly Man--but even my viewing experience online was marred by a mandatory show (however brief) of ads before I could watch it. And then some more at the end (and more links to click on for what to watch next.).

Did I do it? Ha. take a guess.

What did I think of HBO Voyeur?

Well, it did remind me of Rear Window (a trick I think was intentional on the part of the designers--> a way to say "oh, look how much we know about film. If you know as much as we do you will get this allusion and then we can smile about it together") and although the ads seemed more 'toned down', they really were just as present as ever. 

OUR analysis

So Monday night I watched South Park.  I’m sure you all had similar encounters with convergence, so I won’t really delve too much into that.  I found the most interesting part the ability for the viewers to blog and leave comments (even suggestions and comments).  The comments were surprisingly constructive (“GOD DAMMIT STOP DOING FREAKIN MOVIE PARODIES!” –SLBPanda). 

 

The forum is an obvious example of Anderson’s notion of an imagined community (as is the site as a whole).  Everyone’s voice is heard.  Discover tidbits that went unnoticed as other fans dig into the subtleties of the episode.  Share those that you found that maybe others missed.  The forum guarantees that everyone is on the same page.  Yes, the episode of Obama’s election was a parody of the Ocean’s series.  Did everyone catch that?  Well, in case you didn’t, you now know.  On one hand this weakens intra- and interefferentiality (may have made up that word) as it is no longer a personal boon to discover these “treasures.”  Certainly personal pleasure still exists, but when it is plastered on the forum walls then it seems to lessen the excitement either because you were TOLD about it, or because so many people now know. 

 

This opens up another exciting level, though, which relates to Levy’s idea of collective intelligence.  Because all opinions are input into the forum, the entire episode can be picked apart.  Together we can understand as much as possible about this episode.  The set of fans that partakes in this (mass) ceremony now becomes expert in the eyes of those who may just be casual or passive viewers.  We crave to suck up all this in order to get the most out of our viewing experience, even if it doesn’t fully tie together until post-episode…

 

I guess I will give a nod now to the HBO voyeur website.  Whereas the Comedy Central website was very unsubtle (play games!  Read reviews!  BUY STUFF!), HBO’s site was subtle.  To me it seemed that its hook was not in games or forums (the fake forum was allegedly “frozen”) but in the investment into something just odd.  One may just sit there and ask, “What is this?”  After one gets sucked in, the creators may just be hoping for one to click on the little HBO link at the bottom of the screen.  It seems to be effective because it tries to avoid the splattering effect of other websites of convergence…because it’s so different.  Ultimately the viewers will acknowledge that HBO has provided this interesting experience, and that will hopefully, for the company, be enough to attract the voyeur to other experiences (shows) that it has to offer.  

Convergence Culture and New Media

I found this week's readings as a whole fascinating, mainly because they deeply examined a connection that I had never quite drawn before: The intersection(s) of convergence culture, new media, and the exploitation of "free labor" that comes with these trends. Monday's lecture and the close reading of the website for The Hills in particular got me thinking about the steadily deepening ties between Web 2.0 and video, most obviously manifested in video streaming services and IPTV. The Backchannel game online reminded me of Dunder-Mifflin Infinity, a social networking site created for The Office that seemed ludicrous at the time (and, quite frankly, still does) but fits in perfectly with media conglomerates' attempts to suck viewers in around the clock.

After the close reading, I decided to more closely examine a site I visit quite frequently: the NBC homepage. I tend to visit it on at least a weekly basis, either to watch The Office or clips of Saturday Night Live, since I rarely have time to catch them on the air. This new air of convenience is just one of many ways in which this and similar sites appeal to me and my particular "demographic". The front page features a rotating advertisement for four markedly different shows (Knight Rider, Life, Law & Order, and 30 Rock) above a link to the Jay Leno interview of Sen. John McCain and a series of "Web Exclusive" videos (which are consistently advertised after almost every show on NBC). Prominently featured are links to the News and Sports section, for the more serious among the audience, but perhaps the most intriguing are the links towards the top right of the screen: Mobile, Community, Games, and Extras.

The Mobile section has links to download cellphone games based on NBC shows, making sure consumers have entertainment from NBC available at their fingertips even when they lack access to a remote control and/or a keyboard. The Games section has basic online social networking games and sweepstakes, for the subset of viewers who would rather play Dunder-Mifflin Infinity than watch The Office. The Extras has links to esoteric off-shoots that appeal to still more specific niches, such as "Green Programming" and "iVillage", which appears to be a women's/parenting website. And of course, the Community section features groups, blogs, and message boards for all variety of audiences to voice their interest and follow their favorite shows.

So what can be taken away from this? On NBC.com, visitors can do any of the following:

- Find schedules for their favorite TV shows
- Watch shows and clips online
- Get exposed to new NBC programming
- Read up on news and sports
- View specifically targeted ads, both on the site and before clips
- Join social networking games and contests for their favorite shows
- Download games to their mobile phones
- Read and create blogs and message board posts
- Get "behind-the-scenes access" and watch "Web Exclusive" clips
- Find out about everything from environmentally friendly programming to diversity initiatives, whatever that even means
- Find out about NBC's partnership with United Airlines (no phone service or internet? No problem)
- Buy branded merchandise for any NBC show and become a walking advertisement

Perhaps we should stop asking ourselves what's at stake in this convergence culture - what's the point? There's clearly no going back. There's an episode of the show Futurama in which the characters reveal that the ads of the future are broadcast into their dreams; though the premise seemed ludicrous enough five years ago, I doubt I would be laughing today.

The Labornet

I think the “free labor” discussed in Terranova’s essay has always been present in, and in fact an integral part of, every segment of the entertainment/media industry. Music and movies at the first inception were never only marketed by their employed advertisers, but much also by word of mouth and personal recommendations. The updated conception of “free labor” embodied by “NetSlaves” and AOL chathosts merely reflects a side of cultural diffusion more akin to the notion of “labor,” or “unenjoyable work that is expectedly compensated monetarily.”

The free labor of things like blogs and Facebook obviously isn’t intentionally promoting the respective responsible media-parent (except in cases where people might say, verbatim, “Join Facebook!”); rather, it is the textual manifestation of social discourse. Were there a segment of the media industry that “allowed verbal social exchanges,” it would undoubtedly be considered a proponent of “free labor.” Just as the media industry previously capitalized on the human ability to speak, it is now capitalizing on the human ability to communicate over the internet.

The fact that 7 out of 15,000 AOL chathosts decided to “rebel” and ask whether AOL owed them money (ask, rather than demand, for they must not have had any conviction, knowing themselves to be “volunteers”) I think is another side of the stereotypical American “sue anyone for anything” desire for capital. That particular mindset seems to have, from what I know, appeared around or during the time of the Internet’s rapid growth. In fact, the two perhaps came together, but would it be mere coincidence? Though free labor did exist long before the advent of the World Wide Web, did perhaps its textual manifestation result in the American’s sudden realization that they were doing the media industry a favor, and a consequent demand for reparation? Did the Internet cause the lawsuits that led to the labeling of coffee cups with “Caution: Contents Are Extremely Hot?”

PS – Apparently not, since that was in 1992 and it’s extremely unlikely that the very first implementations of the Internet were already having such an effect. But maybe the Internet accelerated the production of such lawsuits through its more confrontational relationship to free labor (I believe we can say “definitely” if we count for the fact that it helped spread the story of that lawsuit widely very quickly).

Interpreting Information

One aspect of The Conversation that I thought we didn't mention in class was the main character's flawed interpretation of the information he found. This reminded me very much of Lisa Parks's article about "Crisis in Darfur", the Google Earth initiative.

The key point of this article, which Parks reiterates numerous times in her conclusion, is that such "information interventions" need to be analyzed with care and proper perspective. She criticizes the "congratulatory discourse" surrounding Google Earth, saying there has been too little "scrutiny and discussion of the implications of its visual capital" (11). Parks writes in-depth about the necessity of a different mode of perception in relation to such information; she argues that merely "letting the facts speak for themselves" does nothing, an assertion that hearkens back to Keenan's Sarajevo article in which the assumption that images catalyze action is proven horribly, horribly wrong. Without recognizing the challenge, she argues, mere data and pictures are useless; without the proper viewpoint, no improvement can be expected.

This crucial understanding of the limitations of information is what is played upon in The Conversation. The main character takes only what he knows from the conversation and assumes, along with the viewer, that the lives of the "lovers" are in danger if their secret is exposed. The seemingly innocent, unthreatening tryst allows the movie's namesake to paint the rich husband as a violent and inhuman boss, instead of what he actually is: a scared, depressed, paranoid man fearing for his own life, facing murder at the hands of those who he trusts most. All of the facts are given to the main character, but for whatever reason, he picks an interpretation from his uninformed point of view - and it is the wrong interpretation. The information is there, but it is, quite simply, not enough on its own. Keenan and Parks, then, would almost certainly be in agreement with the movie's core message: information is nothing without perspective.

"Just as the photograph was (and in some sense still is) a powerful signifying artifact because it is an image of which one can usually say that it is an image of something, so too the epistemology of the 'realism', of the 'effect of the real' produced by classical continuity editing in film is fundamentally based on the referential surplus value of photochemical indexicality."(Levin, 583)

My question deals with the notion that cinema that "classical continuity editing in film" maintains a type of realism associated with the photograph. It's difficult to understand how any type of editing is not similar to the "photoshop" effect. Unless cinema were to portray a continuous take as the entire work, then any type of editing would ruin the authenticity or "effect of the real". Methods of filming similar to the "Blair Witch" style attempt to depict the real, but fall short of the "effect of the real produced by classical continuity editing..."

An Unintended Warning

The shift of focus this week to the idea of surveillance, as clearly registered in the choice of films at our screening, had already recalled in my mind Thomas Keenan's citation of the Panopticon, a sentiment corroborated by Levin in his article. While Levin prefers to focus on the concept of surveillance as it applies to the cinematic medium, I was struck by the inescapability of surveillance in our everyday lives. The train station, a convenience store, a museum; these often unrecognized intrusions of the technological watcher into our lives and actions comprise much of our time spent outside the home. In short, only the home is fully insulated from the hidden eye of the outside watcher (and our films would seem to suggest even this stronghold is not secure). Indeed, while it has so far shied from the recording of images in private residences, the U.S. government has already demonstrated through the tapping of phone lines a willingness to push the boundaries of this sort of remote witness of its citizens. Yet institutionalized surveillance is only one element of this structure. With the ubiquity of recording devices in private businesses has come an even greater jump in personal cameras and camcorders, allowing any human being to become a potential surveillant. And perhaps the most important question in all this is that of what is done with these recorded images, taken without our knowledge or consent: with little to no oversight over the private surveillance of businesses, what assurance is there that this footage is later destroyed or erased? It is more than a bit unsettling to imagine the various videos and images that, over the years of our public lives, could have been created and stored while we remained oblivious. Levin brings these uneases up as eye-catchers in his introduction, discussing the statistic of the 12-camera daily average for a person living in New York City, but to him, their significance is in the context of their relationship to the cinematic medium. Perhaps our fascination with surveillance of others in cinema is some sort of projection defense mechanism, allowing us to continue to disavow the reality of our frequent, if not near-constant, observance by forces alien to us by tying it to that of a fictional cinematic world. Yet on principle, I would look at this in a different light, expanding upon his offhand citation of the Panopticon. I think the analogy is frighteningly sound in modern society: except in places where a video camera is prohibitively visible, we cannot know precisely when or where we are being seen, or who is watching. Within this theoretical comparison, the only dramatic difference between our world and that of the Panopticon is that we succeed in a massive societal disavowal of the panoptic forces that could be watching at any time and place. Because of this disavowal, modern surveillance, unlike that of the Panopticon, does not always succeed in the prevention of crime, but rather seeks to enable the capture of the perpetrators after the fact. So, does the simple act of walking out our door plunge us from security and privacy to 1984? This would certainly be an exaggeration. Still, some of the most ridiculous aspects of a film like Enemy of the State have been vindicated by advances in military and government technology in the past few years. If a company like Google can publish an aerial picture in which my car is clearly visible, the resolution available to the government elite is clearly far superior, as implied by Levin. While our disavowal of surveillance in public frees us from the horror of life inside the Panopticon, it also cripples us from doing anything to ensure that this power is being used within reason and with legitimate oversight. The world of cinematic surveillance is not so far removed as we might like from our own.

P.S. Did anyone else notice that the NSA file picture of Brill was actually an image of Caul from The Conversation? I doubt I would have picked up on it if we hadn't watched the films one after the other. A little cinematic nod to the self-referentiality Doane ascribes to television.

Diegetic Spectators

When watching “The Conversation” and especially “Enemy of the State”, something I noticed numerous times was the presence of a “diegetic spectator”. In “Enemy of the State” the NSA watches Robert Dean and his family through various cameras in his house. During several of these scenes, we cut from the characters at home to the NSA agents watching them on screens. These agents sometimes comment on what they are watching (for example, Jack Black talking about the nanny’s legs) and often, they seemed more like reality TV spectators than sinister government agents. Their presence foregrounds the act of spectatorship and there seems to be a really interesting relationship between these agents and us, the film spectators. Through their monitors the agents are, in a sense, viewing a segment of the movie, thus mirroring our own situation. Furthermore, although we identify with Dean and the film encourages us to root for him in his struggle against the corrupt government officials, the camera allows us to also identify with the systems of surveillance and the surveillance agents themselves. The extra-diegetic camera through which we see the action unfold can be viewed as an omnipresent surveillance camera, and perhaps the film spectator could be considered the ultimate surveillance agent. Not only do we watch Dean, the object the government surveillance systems, but we also observe the diegetic surveillance agents in the act of surveillling. However, there is an important distinction between the spectatorial position and that of the surveillance agents.The act of surveillance is more active than the passive position of the film spectator. The surveillance agent must often watch large, unfiltered amounts of banal footage, looking for important details, actions or phrases with a specific intent (acquisition of information, capture of evidence, etc.). By contrast, the film spectator already has everything lain out for him/her. The film has been painstakingly constructed, edited, and timed to provide absolute clarity (unlike the often ambiguous surveillance image) and narrative flow.

In Lisa Park's "Digging into Google Earth" article google earth is criticized for not including dates on many of the photographs included in its content. Parks claims that this lack of dates perpetuates the view that Africa is a continent constantly in crisis, but I don't necessarily believe that this is true. First of all, from a practical perspective, it is highly doubtful that many users would pay any attention to the date of the photographs let alone would this detail affect the way that they perceived the crisis in Darfur in any particular way. Much like television the "Crisis in Darfur" feature is closely tied to immediacy and liveness. The images and information utilized in the google earth feature are portrayed as what is happening now. This emphasizes the immediate need for intervention. I believe the lack of dates on the photograph actually seeks to emphasize this liveness rather than to paint Africa is a continent in constant conflict. Humanitarian efforts for intervention are closely tied to liveness and require it for success. The lack of dates emphasizes that this problem is going on now and may continue to go on if no action is taken. It does not suppose that the crisis is a perpetual pattern, but rather does almost the opposite. By leaving out dates the crisis is completely tied up in the now and no other time emphasizing the need for immediate intervention. This is not to say that google's feature is not highly flawed or that it is particularly effective in any way (I don't think that it is) merely the the lack of dates on photographs within the feature may not be as problematic is initially supposed by Parks and may actually serve as an advantage within the humanitarian based format of the program.

Videotaping Surveillance

Before I start, I don’t think Levin is right to call “Enemy of the State” a remake of “The Conversation.” They share the idea that the main character is under surveillance, but that seems to be all.
Anyways, I thought his paper was a neat exploration of cinema’s incorporation of surveillance into its diegetic and structural worlds. I found the most compelling cases to be “Snake Eyes” and “The Truman Show.”
“Snake Eyes” seems to foreground surveillance as a narrative device not only through its overbearing presence in both the cinematic space and plot, but also through its incorporation in structural use, such as the shot reverse-shot with Nicholas Cage looking through the security camera at the man in the security booth. The “endlessly identical hallways” (589) at the end of the film are symptomatic of the kinds of shots regularly surveyed by the CCTV cameras. Breaking with this highly focused emphasis on regular surveillance by the “impossible” tracking shot only serves to further enunciate this point.
“The Truman Show” is a like an unholy montage of all things surveillance, what with switches between standard camera shots and those of the surveillance cameras hidden throughout Truman’s world. The difference between these might well be ambiguous until he realizes he is being watched and begins to address those surveillance cameras with his gaze. Unlike “Time Code,” there is only one subject of this movie, so as far as surveillance goes, there is only one object of interest, and this allows a feeling of surveillance to be maintained for the fictional audience of this show without showing multiple screens at once. The film can’t help but announce the presence of the camera used to shoot non-surveillance shots, bringing another level to Truman’s “watchedness.”
These movies seem to indicate that cinema is becoming more interested in its variants, such as security, but they do not fall far from the extremely reflexive or foregrounded films of Godard and others.

Airport Security and Catastrophe

    In her article "The Culture of US Airport Screening," Lisa Parks argues that "the x-ray sequence ultimately exposes the state's inability to regulate the flow of objects and matter in the age of globalization" (Parks, 186).  One aspect that I found interesting about Parks' statement is its relation to Doane's argument that in television, catastrophe is inherently linked to technological failure.  Doane comes to define catastrophe as the "conjuncture of the failure of technology and the resulting confrontation with death" (Doane, 229). Granted that Doane is discussing catastrophe specifically in terms of television, it is worth consideration in terms of Parks' discussion of airport security.  

     Like television, airport security relies on a continuous flow of objects that are potentially or are, in fact, catastrophic; their "escape" through security is precisely the failure of technology and the resulting confrontation with death.  This is perhaps a little overdramatic as most illegal items that get through security are probably not intended to be used in life-threatening ways, but more likely are the result of the forgetfulness or overconfidence of the owner of said pocketknife, wrench, etc...  Nonetheless, there are several parallels between the x-ray sequence and the televisual flow.  To begin, they are both characterized by a continuous flow of fragmented, disparate images.  Also, it is easy to simply glance at either screen; however, in both cases the viewer is alerted by specific indicators.  Altman discusses the significance of the televisual soundtrack in alerting its audience to significant events.  While audio track is, for now, not a part of the TSA visual, other elements draw attention to the screen: superimposed images, coloring, and so on.  However, most important is the element of catastrophe; for both television and airport security are characterized by a continuous flow, interrupted by the rare catastrophe.  

However, indeed the sense of catastrophe is not synonymous in these cases; it is more likely that a catastrophe in air port security would result in a later catastrophe presented televisually.  Furthermore, the televisual catastrophe's emphasis is on the "now" whereas the catastrophe in air port security is realized, more likely, after the fact and perhaps, brought to the attention of such security workers through television itself.  

      What is the nature of airport security x-ray screen?  They are constantly in the now, but unlike television, they are not characterized by a temporal diegesis.  Unlike cinema, they are not overly concerned with space.  The x-ray is only to concerned with the object itself; the object as presented by the machine and interpreted by the human element.  The x-ray screen makes the invisible visible; the private public.  Airport x-ray security and indeed surveillance overall demands a reinterpretation of what it means to invisible, to be private.  

TV informational?

Doane claims that “TV thrives on its own forgettibility” (226) of each fragment as it strings segments together to form one unifying stream, a cohesiveness that dictates the “liveness” of television. Doane notes that this unification exemplifies television’s attempt to make our chaotic world more orderly by “render[ing] ‘natural’ the logic and rhythm of the social order” (233). One of the key contributors to this unification is the charismatic broadcaster who has the “ability to cover the event with words” (232). I find the duality of the term “cover” intriguing here. In one sense, it implies the broadcaster’s purpose to provide a unifying blanket over fragmented events and information, yet it also indicates a feeling of hiding the truth or “covering” the event with their (either the broadcaster or the station as a whole) own interpretation. And the intentionality of this influenced interpretation is arbitrary – information is constantly being transformed, and, in a sense, television, and media as a whole, undergoes (what I would like to refer to as) an inevitable “telephone effect.”

TV’s “telephone effect” makes me question’s Doane’s comparison between television and cinema in terms of representation. Doane claims that while cinema “represents” reality, a quality achieved by its use of Renaissance space, “TV does not so much represent as it informs” (225). She continues to state that TV is a flat, two-dimensional realm of information – a blunt medium that that “make[s] visible in the invisible” (226). However, I don’t see how it is ever possible to achieve a totally two-dimensional state of pure information export. As Doane says in contradiction to her previous argument, TV “acknowledges the limits of the eye in relation to knowledge, information is nevertheless conveyable only in terms of simulated visibility” (227). It is this “simulated visilibility” and the idea that “television is a construct” (227) that is key to the contradiction – through the act of “constructing” television, one inevitably peels it away from the realm of pure information and automatically renders it a representation.

My question is: isn’t representation a key attribute of media? Since information is intangible and transient, one must use representation in order to spread it – therefore automatically intertwining influence and interpretation. However, surveillance seems to be under its own category entirely separate from media since it does not involve any interpretation. Therefore, I disagree with Doane’s assertion that TV is informational - surveillance is the only pure form of information, rendering it the most intriguing form of spectacle for any viewer.

outmoding codes

“By adopting the rhetorics of real-time broadcast so characteristic of television and a certain economy of CCTV – not to mention that of webcam culture – cinema has displaced an impoverished spatial rhetoric of photo-chemical idexicality with a thoroughly contemporary, and equally semiotically “motivated” rhetoric of temporal indexicality” (Levin, 592).

 

This “temporal indexicality” is pretty much impossible (as far as I can see) in cinema.  These surveillance shots that are supposed to enhance realism in a film, have still been handpicked in the editing process of a big-budget film.  These are codes meant to increase scopophilic pleasure through the visual invasion of something “more real.”  One may take the “shaky camera” seen in the Blaire Witch Project as a tactic laced with temporal indexicality.  Impressive at first, but as time goes on, the code seems to have become naturalized.  Cloverfield is one movie that, although I admittedly liked it, seems to have relied too obviously on this particular method of signification.  The problem with this in cinema is that I every scene has intention…if not before shooting, then after shooting in the editing process.  Maybe these movies would be more effective if they were posted anonymously on Youtube.  

How Looking has Changed

Something struck me when Josh brought up the functions of surveillance images during Wednesday's lecture (part 2 of the lecture). Specifically, i'm not so sure I agree (or perhaps I need more explanation) with the idea that "cinema has always been complicit with surveillance". Though in terms of cinema as a catalyst for voyeurism, the issue I want to highlight here is language . Though perhaps Josh's statement is valid, it seems that an alteration in the term surveillance must have occurred in order for it to be so. 

Take for example (as Josh did) Lumier's footage of factory workers leaving their workplace. This has been categorized as surveillance recording, and I suppose it is...if you look at the definition of surveillance. The word comes from the French (I think, though originally from Latin) 'sur' - meaning over - and 'veillar'  - meaning to watch. With this in mind, Lumier clearly 'surveyed' his workers in filming them. He watched them, in my mind, for no apparent reason. He was looking for the sake of looking (and most significantly for the sake of using new technology). 

Surveillance today, however, has become entirely more dangerous.  The OED cites the definition as "watch or guard kept over a person, etc., esp. over a suspected person, a prisoner, or the like; often spying, supervision; less commonly, supervision for the purpose of direction or control, superintendence". The connotations of the word have become far more negative than before, largely I think because of the rise of technology and its aggressive use by governments. Looking, in terms of surveillance, is of a different nature. It is looking to know something (that you think is there hiding from you). It connotes curiosity and at times paranoia within the viewer. In connotes malintent within the object being looked upon. It connotes intrusion. Were any of these connotations present in Lumier's video? Can surveillance today really be compared with that of the 19th century? It seems technology has altered the way we see, hear, perceive, react to and now even use language.

The Decontexualization Machine

In Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, what is, incidentally, probably the most AWESOME piece we have read in this course thus far (sorry for prosthelatizing), Mary Ann Doane argues that “television is the preeminent machine of decontextualization” (225). In Josh’s lecture yesterday, he talked about Levin’s claim that “films both teach us how to see the world and register a general sense of how our culture is doing exactly that…” (584). The convergence of these two ideas is exemplified in a film as gloriously contemporary Hollywood mainstream as Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State.” By way of a specific example, I’ll lift the idea of movement Josh mentioned in his lecture. In “Enemy of the State,” Scott’s camera never stops moving, even when it might have done him a service (for example, in a scene of intimate conversation at a table). More blatantly hyperactive are the action scenes, the climactic gun battle of which is totally incomprehensible on account of the rapid camera movement and quick cutting.
The idea behind the camera movement and rapid rate of image changes seems straightforward enough: anything without women in lacy black lingerie, violence, humor, or “movement/action” is boring. Therefore, a scene with subtle dramatic dialogue must be juiced up by the one of the aforementioned four things. The film has evolved to the point where even the action is taken out of context in that things happen too quickly for any context to be established. They become all about the movement, the constant predictable stream, something like television’s flow. Everything else, like characters, become irrelevant since there isn’t time to evaluate them. And the hyperactivity is a fairly recent phenomenon, too, probably coinciding with the explosion of the web. In Tony Scott’s 1993 “True Romance,” which also concludes with a similar climactic gun battle, things actually make sense. He slows the scene down, cutting between shots fired and bullets hitting. The action is decipherable.
The claim I think this is moving towards is that mainstream cinema is becoming more like television and vice versa. It’s too bad. They ought to take it from Barthes. When you slow things down so that you can look away, think, and look back, that’s when art takes on a life of its own.

NOTE: While I am incredibly interested in Doane’s claim that “catastrophe might finally be defined as the conjuncture of the failure of technology and the resulting confrontation with death [!],” I don’t have anything interesting or critical to say about it (229). If someone else has any insights on this, though, please share them tomorrow!

Group Project

Hey,

I'm pretty sure Shane and Mike joined a group with me at the end of Friday's section, but I think Shane joined another group so we need at least one more person. Mike, please let me know as soon as possible if you have joined another group as well.

If anyone else wants to work with me, please email me at harrison_heller@brown.edu. Thanks.