Personal Reflection on the Class

Well, where to start?

I think it's best for me to break this down by issues in the class.

Mediation:

I, personally, found the creation of wiki pages more useful than the rest of the assignments. I like to work as part of a group and develop an idea rather than work by myself. I also like the blog - it gives me a place to put my ideas without necessarily making them part of the text of everyone else's responses like Ning. With this class and how this semester is going, I'm incredibly paranoid that I'm not understanding the readings, but when I read other's comments I find that I'm actually on par. I think my paranoia goes down the more separate my ideas are, unless they're working directly with the ideas of others. I guess I don't like the "call and response" type of threaded conversation Ning provides. I also wish these were all in the same location.

Flow and Interruption:

This was obviously a problem for me in that I had personal interruptions in my work in the class (as evidenced on Ning and the wiki in particular). But I also think the flow of the class struggled because we took on huge topics each week (not a bad thing, mind) and each had posting to do, but when it came time for commenting on each other's work, we were limited by the time that they posted or by the time that we posted. I think to really flow, this class would have to have multiple due dates for the same posts so that people kinda "cycled through" an early turn-in date and a later one. I also think some more overlap in teh schedule between weeks would help - it seems that we often drop an author or issue when the readings change.

I'm not sure how I can prove that I've worked on this class since my big interruption - I'm not sure how to bridge the interruption and return the flow. I've been posting all my work on my blog. I feel ashamed for turning work in on Ning after everyone else, like I'm asking them to go back and give me feedback or like I'm chiming in out of sync in some horrible rendition of some horrible song, off-key and a beat behind.

Scope:

Any class that is titled "Media Culture" can be expected to have a very broad scope, but I found it odd that it was so "western" in thought. I think it'd be really interesting to look at works that really either come from other cultures or from a range of historical periods - like Plato's Phaedrus, or something - to develop a more historical and global understanding of media culture.

Representation:

I don't feel as though I can best represent my understanding of each of the readings and questions online. I felt more comfortable using Prezi or some other kind of representation for some of the ideas that felt so abstract - representing them visually or with other types of text really helped me.

Final Essay

Here is the text of my final essay:

Anne Coyle

Dr. Anne Wysocki

ENG 742: Media Culture

Final Essay

16 May 2011

Knowing All the Plots: The Relationship Between Audience and Mass Media

When Norma Desmond descended the stairs of her mansion, ready for her close-up, it was impossible to not draw parallels to the images and stories of fallen Hollywood starlets. Though Norma is fiction, her story is all too familiar to anyone who, even sixty-one years after the debut of Sunset Boulevard, is familiar with the machinations of the Western mass media. Joe Gillis, the everyman of the story, works with Norma in an attempt to develop a screenplay that might allow him to pay his bills and pursue his lady love. As those who have seen the film will know, he fails because Norma does not allow him to alter any of the script, which she jealously guards, deciding based on her perception of herself and her desires what the public should receive. The work is largely a commentary on the cult of Hollywood, with such memorable lines as: “We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!” (Wilder). How Sunset Blvd. conceptualizes the way Hollywood, as part of the mass media, works, is evident in exchanges between characters that discuss the role of the writer in producing content for the screen. Joe’s film about Okies and the Dust Bowl played out on a torpedo boat, as one example. Another example focused on the screenplay Joe and Norma are writing: Betty notes that “Oh, the old familiar story. You help a timid little soul cross a crowded street, she turns out to be a multimillionaire and leaves you all her money” and Joe replies “That's the trouble with you readers, you know all the plots” (Wilder). And readers do know all the plots.

Having the readers know all the plots seems counter-productive in a capitalistic system in which the marketability of programs is the primary concern of the business. However, as theorists Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and later Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard find, reproducing the same material repeatedly works to influence the culture and consumptive behaviors of the masses. Mass media, even in the revelations the function of the system in Sunset Blvd., serve to control the interests of their audiences. How the masses function as either producers or consumers, and what their role is as audience, is the means to discovering how the mass media can be altered to function less as an industry reproducing a culture and more as an active exchange between all participants. Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer locate not what humans should be doing in their interactions with media, but instead focus on what they observe as human relationships with media. Enzensberger and Baudrillard, however, move from how media and humans negotiate the intersections of their interests and more on what they should be doing with technology and media. Through close analysis of the mass media theorists listed above, I explore the relationship between audience and mass media before developing a sense as to how the system can be challenged. As we have moved towards supposedly more participatory media in the digital age, it is important to locate the qualities that indicate a difference between passive reception of media and the active interaction that lead to genuine conversation and inclusion.

Walter Benjamin, writing from the middle of the Great Depression, identifies the shift between the medium though which sensory perception happens and historical circumstances. He states that “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (Benjamin). To support this claim, Benjamin begins with a reflection on earlier works and traditions of art, identifying the qualities of the social institutions surrounding the works as well as to what purpose the works were put. Through his reflection of the language used to describe art, the functions of art, and the political systems and social behavior surrounding art, during different periods of time, Benjamin establishes a theory of art that focuses on the exchange of art between those who produce and those who consume. More specifically, he calls attention to the way in which art is consumed. Following the technological ability to mechanically reproduce works of art, the reaction of the masses changes, such as how “The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public” (Benjamin).

The enjoyment of the public, as well as their criticism, is dramatically altered by what Benjamin identifies as their ability to pay attention to the artifact. “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.” The constant changing, the movement of images and sound through movies is what disrupts the viewer’s ability to process the discrete elements of a film and “constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind” (Benjamin). And, as Benjamin states, “Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.” But just as Benjamin notes that Marx’s criticism of the capitalist system began when the production system was in its infancy, Benjamin’s criticism of film may have overlooked how the mode of analysis changes with the mode of production and the mode of consumption.

Benjamin’s analysis of distraction and concentration states that these form “polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art,” rather than being absorbed by the work of art. Benjamin’s analysis of film focuses too much on the discrete elements, as though each individual frame, each sound were open to interpretation. However, even with painting, which he identifies as an art in which the audience concentrates, rather than becoming entertained and distracted, the audience does not grasp all layers and discrete elements, even when concentrating. He does, however, note that the distraction, while negative, works hand in hand with the exposure it provides to the masses; “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (Benjamin).

What Benjamin assumes about the audience of mass media such as film is that they are passive in their reception of the artifact they consume. He assumes that the shock of constantly changing and moving images and sound overwhelms them. “The spectator’s process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind,” but which Benjamin does not see in film. Passive audiences do not challenge that which they receive, but instead receive it in a state of distraction. But Benjamin does acknowledge that the masses become critics through the medium of film, because through the distance between the performance and the audience, the performer is unable to adapt to the audience. The audience becomes critical because the performance is unable to adapt appropriately to their reception. But while their “Reception in a state of distraction […] finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention” (Benjamin). If they become critics because they have a distance from the actor that isn’t present in theater, but they aren’t attentive, then they are simultaneously present and not present, critical and uncritical. Thus, the critical capabilities of the audience, the masses, is present but impotent.

Written before World War II, Benjamin’s analysis is less pessimistic of mechanical processes in media and reproduction than Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, I would argue precisely because it was written before the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis had not yet become common knowledge, though their Fascist aesthetic was prominent[1]. Their chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment criticizes the media and industry for creating the “culture industry”, which is “the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.” The goal of this system “forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.” There is nothing outside of the system, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, because the system subsumes dissent by either silencing it, by refusing to disseminate it, or adopting it as part of the norm and adopting it to the existing structures and styles. Adorno and Horkheimer focus on the way the culture industry perpetuates its own interests through the dissemination of content designed to be consumed by the masses in predictable and scripted ways. As they say, “The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. [...] Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him.”

Like Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer note the “They [the mass media, in particular sound films] are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.” The viewer is forced to passively observe the rush of relentless facts - if they were to think about what they were experiencing, they would miss the next experience, much like the shocks Benjamin noted. Unlike Benjamin, though, they point to the alertness required for the perpetuation of the mass media agenda. They note that “The entertainment manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses” (Adorno and Horkheimer). Benjamin saw this as distraction, rather than alertness. And in one way, they are all speaking to the same issue: alertness without thought is not far removed from distracted criticism. After all, the illusions of the culture industry leave “no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.”

Adorno and Horkheimer go farther than Benjamin in their criticism in the role of the audience in contact with mass media. Benjamin, who noted their passivity, did not go as far so to declare that “No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided” (Adorno and Horkheimer). Here those who own the structure work to eliminate the thought that may challenge what is presented. Referring to the mid-1940s, they note that “Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm bond between the consumers and the big combines” (Adorno and Horkheimer). And that bond is effective in keeping consumers roped into the system because “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them” (Adorno and Horkheimer).

What Adorno and Horkheimer notice, but fail to account for, are alterations in the interaction between audience and media either based on the work of individuals that refuses to engage with the system or the progression of technology to disrupt the producer-consumer system. To them, all dissent is absorbed by the culture machine, all technological media are mass media in which the line between producer and consumer is jealously guarded. Benjamin recognized that as printing progressed technologically and became more prominent, readers increasingly became writers as well. He states: “For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers” (Benjamin). While he did not see this trend in film, he was writing from the early age of talkies, in which films with sound became increasingly easy to reproduce following the invention of filmstrip that could economically provide synchronized sound and image. The shift from the strict segregation of producers and consumers of mass media content is what Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes up in his essay “Constituents of a Theory of Media”.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger draws a distinction between older media, which he argues is non-communicatory, and new media, which allows for participation from the masses. Though his work was written long before what we conceive of as the newest, most recognizable participatory media, I believe the principles apply. Old media, according to Enzensberger, prevents communication that requires reciprocal action, much like Adorno and Horkheimer’s statements about the lack of response available in film. He states: “In its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver; technically speaking, it reduces feedback to the lowest point compatible with the system” (262). In other words, without a response, or reciprocal action, it is simply delivering information, not communicating. The audience is restricted to the role of observer, which would allow the culture industry to continue to perpetuate itself without dissent that it couldn’t absorb.

One example of this is what Enzensberger points to as a common feature of nightly news shows on television. He describes the “Democratic Forum” portion of the news, in which "There, tucked away in the corner, 'the reader (listener, viewer) has his say,' which can naturally be cut short at any time. As in the case of public opinion polling, he is only asked questions so that he may have a chance to confirm his own dependence. It is a control circuit where what is fed in has already made complete allowance for the feedback" (Enzensberger 266). An easily recognizable type of interview that fits as a “Democratic Forum” segment is the “man on the street” interview, in which a reporter will ask targeted questions of the interviewee to later edit down to a shorter section that will actually air. In fact, editorial decisions could potentially eliminate dissention from interviews. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, originally published in 1988, explains that the American broadcast media form what they call a “propaganda model”, a variant of the culture industry offered by Adorno and Horkheimer. This model is described as “an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” (i). Financing is very important, as Enzensberger’s examples show – if the media equipment that allows for the production and dissemination of content is expensive, only those who can afford them have the ability to produce. But if the equipment becomes cheaper, like contemporary smart phones, then more of the masses can become producers, thus providing the opportunity for consumers to become producers and pushing against the monopolistic propaganda model and culture industry.

Expense aside, the main feature that makes this reciprocal action possible is allowing for each party to become both a consumer and a producer. Enzensberger states “The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance” (266). Essentially, the older forms of media that Enzensberger says restrict reciprocal communication and instead become lines of transmission do so by relying on the one way transmission of producer to consumer, but the consumer has no option to communicate in return. New media, according to Enzensberger, are more productive, allowing for material to be recorded and reproduced at will and for consumers to also function as producers. In this way, “The new media are oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition” (265). And these new media should be social and “accessible to anyone” (265). And because these new media are defined by a structure that allows for the complication of the producer-consumer binary, “The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures” (266). However, to believe that "Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism which, decked out in contemporary colors, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests" (Enzensberger 267). The only way to effectively make use of new technologies that allow for the consumer to become producer and work against the interests of those who traditionally held power over mass media is to organize, according the Enzensberger, because new media demands interaction.

Enzensberger’s analysis is challenged by Jean Baudrillard, whose “Requiem for the Media” argues that Enzensberger gets caught up in a transmission model of communication. Revolution against the mass media, Baudrillard says, requires revolutionary models of communication, rather than agreeing to the function within the mass media’s communication model. Baudrillard points to the flaws of a producer/consumer transmission model and focuses on how such a model simplifies the message intended, reducing it to two-way transmission and not an exchange of genuine immediacy, in which "there are neither transmitters, nor receivers, but only people responding to each other. The problem of spontaneity and organization is not overcome dialectically here: its terms are transgressed" (286). While identifying an existing medium that fits this description is difficult, we can see how complicating the back and forth of the transmission model is when instead of a reciprocal action, there are multiple responses. Instead of allowing content to flow both ways in the media, Baudrillard is pushing for a media that allows responses from more than two parties in a way that requires a response from the parties – a continuing conversation among groups and individuals with the goal of producing genuine interaction. The transmission model, is as Baudrillard says, “This ‘scientific’ construction […] rooted in a simulation model of communication. It excludes, from its inception, the reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange” (285). And as he notes, using an example similar to the “Democratic Forum” Enzensberger describes, “On a more practical level, the media are quite aware how to set up formal ‘reversibility’ of circuits (letters to the editor, phone-in programs, polls, etc.) without conceding any response or abandoning in any way the discrimination of roles” (286). An endnote explaining this statement points out that “Underestimating the ability of the system to integrate its own revolutionary innovations is as delusory as underestimating the capacity of capitalism to develop the productive forces” (288). By integrating the revolutionary innovations as part of the system, Baudrillard identifies the absorption of dissent evident in Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis.

The audience, for Baudrillard, is not deprived of the technological means to interact as both producers and consumers, but is instead deprived of voice. He states “It is a speech that answers itself via the simulated detour of a response, and here as well, the absolutization of speech under the formal guise of exchange is the definition of power” (Baudrillard 281). The transmission model is based on the consumer participating in a system in which their response is either pre-determined or detoured by the apparatus of the system itself. Using the technology in the way in which it is prescribed merely perpetuates the existing order of the interests of mass media producers. The audience, by participating in the system designed to silence their voices, is silenced. Only by removing themselves from the transmission model and revolutionizing the function and structure of media can they overcome their technological laryngitis and challenge the authority of the existing homogenizing structure. It’s important to note that no one has any idea what such a system would look like, much less be able to identify it in practice, with the exception of Baudrillard’s example of graffiti. Graffiti, he says, responds immediately to the presence of media, responding against the design on the system by literally placing itself alongside or over the material to which it is responding. The saboteur becomes a full participant by refusing to participate in the role prescribed for him by the mass media. How this might look in other forms, though, is unknown.

Whether or not today’s digital media, the new media of production Enzensberger identifies, is actually allowing more consumers to become producers is only to be judged on the merits of interaction. It’s not enough to be able to write or create and disseminate that information, because according to Baudrillard, the same interaction takes place, reproducing the transmission model and perpetuating the culture industry. To refuse to be passive, to defy classification, to interact against the grain, is what humans should do to combat the culture industry and promote their own interests over the interests of those who have the power. Like poor Joe Gillis, the masses can hope that as producers, they can work “writing words, words, more words! Well, you'll make a rope of words and strangle this business! With a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongues!” (Wilder). But unless they act in the moment and respond outside of the system, the function as they have been told. Without dissent, there progress is arrested, voices are silenced, and the masses navigate media without reflection.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Web.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Requiem for the Media.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: MIT, 2003. 277-88. Class PDF.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Marxists.org. 1936. Web. Feb. 2011.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of Media.” The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. Cambridge: MIT, 2003. 259-75. Class PDF.

Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. 2^nd ed. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

Wilder, Billy, dir. Sunset Blvd. Paramount, 1950. Web.

---

[1] See Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn for a full description of the Fascist aesthetic.

The Post-Project Reflection

How was working on -- thinking through -- your project different from thinking through a seminar paper?

My project was easier for me to work through than my paper, not because I was more familiar with that type of composition, but because it helped me work through my ideas like I tend to in class conversations. It seemed like working with the text was like having a conversation with a partner or friend, like I was trying to explain my ideas without having to explain everything verbally.

How are you mediated differently through your project than through your seminar paper?

My project shows, rather than tells, what I'm trying to work out in my paper. It's almost as if I get to present my ideas they way they appear in my head - when I think of the video examples I want to use, I just use them - instead of having to fit them into the conventions of academic writing. I love writing, and I love academic writing, but this seemed much easier for me. It felt more fluid in general. Though, at the same time, I felt more restricted by my disability. When writing, I don't get caught up in my tendencies to try to make everything straight and symmetrical and I don't get distracted by videos. But I think overall it was a good experience.

I think I might start using Prezi as a tool to help me develop my arguments, to discover how things fit together, in the future.

What sorts of differing thoughts about your topic/area of interest arose for you because you approached this work through differing media?

Well, actually, focusing on how to design my project made me realize that structure and design were the areas I wanted to focus on in my essay. It made me more objective, I think, though I know my essay is still based on my own subjective experiences.

Reposting My Final Project

I don't know why, but apparently Blogger was having problems and deleted all posts between Wednesday night and this morning, which means that I have to repost this. Enjoy, again.

Final project!

Here's my final project.

Okay, scratch the link. Sorry about that - I'm not sure why it won't open for you guys. I thought I'd made it public, but here it is: