Hyperreal Blogging

Perusing Michael Wesch’s favorites on Youtube (he has some fascinating videos), I ran across this interview Tom Brokaw and Edwin Newman did with Marshall McLuhan on the morning after the presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976.  Amazed at what McLuhan was saying - it almost rings true to what has happened in the 2008 presidential and vice-presidential debates.

To what extent are the candidates pandering to the crowd, to the moderator, or to the camera itself? It’s a trick of the television, of the medium, according to McLuhan. Interesting insight.

With the recent world financial meltdown, I’ve been trying to grasp the vast nature of its overall essence.  It’s been a cancer among mortgage institutions for years, slowly growing, metastasizing, keeping quiet until 2008.  This year it broke free of its world of imitatio and made its own name known when it has a solid root base in our society: subprime mortgages.

I think to really understand the meltdown, we need to realize that our economy is really nothing more than a figment of our imagination.  It exists, but yet it doesn’t.  For instance, take out the money in your wallet.  How much is there?  That is the only bit of “real” money you have - that which you can hold in your hand.  In and of itself, that money is hyperreal: it stands for something that doesn’t exist, yet is given the power of real economical power.  That which is in your checking account, savings account(s), retirement account, 401k, bonds, stocks, real estate, credit cards, mortgage(s), and loans is merely valid on paper or on your computer screen.  A bunch of symbols that have meaning only to the viewer and no one else.  The problem is that when people, groups, banks, and lending institutions start to trade in “good” and “bad” mortgages - virtual capital of varying statuses - people  trust that their equity is the equivalent to what they can hold in their hand.  And it’s not.  It’s virtual.  It does not exist.

Propagating the dilemma is the solution forwarded by the politicians: a bailout or rescue package, depending on who you hear about it from.  700$ billion.  How big is that?  How many pennies is that sum total?  Can you hold 700$ billion in your hands?  A check is not the same - it is one, not 700 billion.  So our solution is based on the idea of a hyperreal solution - a way for our government to keep banks in check (pardon the pun) and retain eternal power over the struggling capital mongers.

How do we solve our financial crisis?  We can’t.  There are experts working on that as we speak, and I am not one of them.  I merely have an opinion.  My opinion is that I see this as another crack in the world of our perceptions, forcing us to deal with the real world rather than that of the virtual.  What we believe to be real - the financial crisis - is nothing more than a false sense of safety because of its enormity.  The only way to truly grasp the impact of this financial crisis is to see the effects of this dreaded cancer, the outcome of these mistakes in power and control.  

Talk to the people who have lost their jobs, who cannot pay their mortgages, who choose between paying bills and eating lunch.  In a recent edition of the New York Times, an article talks about the 9.3% unemployment rate (almost 10,000 people) as a result of the cancerous economy (click here for the article).  That is what’s real - the only real effect that matters in all honesty.

By popular demand (mainly from this blogger and his wife), Beaker has decided to make a run for President of the United States. Although there’s only a month to go before the elections, he feels the American people deserve better than the two candidates in front of them: “”Meep! Meep! Meep!…Meep! Meep!”

Joining Beaker on the ticket will be Bunson Honeydew, a conservative at heart but “maverick” when it comes to forward thinking and change.  Ecstatic about the nomination for Vice President, Honeydew told the press “Well I’m just so excited. Now, Beaker, we’ll just flip this switch and 60,000 refreshing volts of electricity will surge through your body. That should jump start this campaign. Ready?”  Beaker was not available for comment.

If elected, President Beaker will make sure to put in place a cabinet of qualified individuals that will help him make qualified, insightful decisions.  This cabinet includes:

• Chief of Staff - Ms. Piggy
• Secretary of Defense - Animal
• Secretary of State - Sam the Eagle
• Attorney General - Rowlf the Dog
• Secretary of Health and Human Services - Miss Piggy
• Secretary of Homeland Security - Fozzie Bear
• Secretary of Education - Gonzo
• Secretary of the Treasury - Dr. Teeth
• Secretary of Transportation - Rizzo the Rat
• Secretary of Education - Scooter
• White House Chef - Swedish Chef
• Good Will Ambassador Abroad - Kermit the Frog
• Ambassadors to the United Nations - Statler and Waldorf

Remember: with Beaker and Honeydew, anything is possible!

Make sure to rock the vote, and cast your ballot for Beaker on November 4th.  If you don’t, well, Animal might not be all that happy and when Animal gets angry, chaos ensues.  Trust me.

I’ve been avoiding trying to be one-sided in this recent election year, especially since I’m teaching a political communication course, but I want to mention something about the recent VP debates.  Prior to the debates, the media, pundits, and even my students were saying the same thing: it’s a make or break night for Sarah Palin. If she does well, then it will help the campaign, but if she stumbles it will hurt McCain.

And so the debate went on, as scheduled.  It was an interesting night, me twittering with my students while keeping a keen eye to Palin’s rhetorical strategy.  She started off well, and seemed to show a coherent, cogent response to Gwen’s questions.  She had several gaffs - shout outs to school kids, Joe Six-packs, and others which commentators have already mentioned - but overall we could understand her responses.  For the most part.

What irritates me is the media’s tolerance of her performance.  Most commentators said the same thing - Palin didn’t make many major mistakes and he was coherent.  So when was this ever a requisite characteristic by which to judge a potential Vice President?  Sure she was coherent, but did you hear these same comments about Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, or anyone else in the past?  Even Dan Quayle made it through the debates in tact.

Forget content.  For Sarah Palin, success is judged by coherence.  And for one, I’m scared about this new criterion.  ”Aww shucks” only goes so far.  Johnson got away with it.  Bush has even gotten away with it.  But from Palin, we call it a “folksy syntax” (something I heard right away from CBS commentators that night).  

In a commentary on the recent financial fiasco and politicking about the bailout, Bob Schieffer said it well:  ”our politics have been dumbed down.”  And the recent VP debates shows how this is so very true.  I don’t want a “plain speaking” outsider coming into Washington, especially one claiming to be a maverick, ready to lead the country and all they were judged by was whether there was a subject and predicate - and they were in the correct order.

Quit dumbing down your analysis my friends.  Call it like you see it.  Sarah Palin’s responses were vague, trite, rehearsed, and had absolutely no depth to them (and those were the ones she actually answered).  I’d rather elect my favorite muppet,  Beaker, to office - at least I understand him.

Perusing stories on Digg, I ran across this CNN video comparing the Sarah Palin interview with the parody on Saturday Night Live.  Take a look (it’s short - less than 2 minutes).

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The commentator’s comments are telling - life imitating art, and art imitating life. Here we have one of those interesting moments - a hyperreal moment - where the parody is more compelling than the actual interview itself.  Would the real interview get that much publicity?

Just something to think about as we get deeper into this campaign.

Very true. So very true.

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www.strk3.com

When politics comes to town, so does political satire. And I love it. It’s equal opportunity humor my friends. But why do they do this? Why make fun of political ideology, especially since it’s held so close to us - right there with religion and family values. But as one of my students recently said, “politics is entertainment, isn’t it?” And that which puts a smile on our face, makes us think. 

I ran across this poster through Digg.com. It comes from www.strk3.com, a site that produces quite controversial political items. I think it makes a rather interesting point. Visually it’s quite stunning, but in one fell swoop it pokes fun at religion, politics, and so much more. Like a good editorial cartoon, it is complex and full of symbolism and metaphor. Its visual grammar is quite refined actually.

What…you don’t like it? Blasphemy you say? I can understand that point of view and I respect your position on it. But please realize that I’m not making a political statement, but rather I’m putting it up here as an example of political satire and its ability to engage the general public on several levels. If this sparks a discussion, great. If it makes you think about a political ideology, great. If you realize it’s visually striking and indicative of our country’s core rights and beliefs, great. It means you are thinking about issues and what’s important to you. Don’t forget that.

And if someone has a Democrat Jesus poster out there, send me a copy; I’ll stick it up there alongside this one. But if there’s a Ralph Nader Jesus poster, then I might have to take issue.

image from www.asa.org.uk

I teach in a communication program that has a track (area of concentration) in journalism. The courses are like most you would find - print journalism in all of its grand traditions. Our instructors are industry trained and they do a good job. I tout our teachers every chance I get. But what happens when new technologies are rapidly becoming the norm, and print seems to be the way of the past?

Through one of my many listservs, I was introduced to a story about Alana Taylor, an NYU journalism student that happened to be a proficient blogger and first-time contributor to MediaShift. Her initial story was called “Old Thinking Permeates Journalism School,” a reaction to one of her classes called “Reporting Gen Y.”  The short version is this: she writes about her disappointment with the NYU classes approach to teaching journalism - from an old school perspective - and criticizes her faculty (in a fairly balanced way actually) about the need to recognize new media technologies as outlets for reputable journalists.  Teacher gets ahold of this blog and tells her, and the class, they cannot blog or twitter about her or the class.

Enter Mark Glaser (from MediaShift).  He puts on his investigative journalist hat and picks up the story where Alana left it (at the behest of her teacher).  He asks whether there is an NYU policy about no blogging in classes and whether there are first amendment issues at play here.  In the end, he asks for opinions on who was “right” and who was in the “wrong.”  

And being the intrepid rhetor that I am, my fingers took to the keyboard and I gave my own two cents on the subject.  ”I know its the medium of this generation, so why not utilize it in class?”, I cried out.  Use it to your advantage, as a teacher, and show the students there’s more to it than just finding out your BFF is ROFL.  

We are at a crossroads of sorts.  We can either embrace the technology and use it to our advantage or we can be left behind and attempt to keep up the best we can.  We are a rapidly growing digital nation under one operating system with gigabytes and storage space for all.  It sounds rather Orwellian, but the fact is technology isn’t going away.  It is a culture within a culture, and if I am a teacher worth anything I will embrace it and use the medium to not only reach my students but teach them how it affects them and the end consumer.  We shouldn’t be used by the technology - we should use it.  

I may not teach at NYU, but I do teach.  And teaching is not always about living in the past and doing it old school.  Students have, in turn, shown us the power of their interconnectedness.  Now it’s time to show them how to harness that power and use it to their advantage.  Let’s make our students better communicators by becoming more thoughtful users.

The other night my wife and I watched “102 Minutes That Changed America” on the History Channel.  It was a rather unique program that took viewers through the chronology of 9/11 as seen in the videos, cell phones, cameras, and calls of various eye witnesses and workers.  Edited together without commercials, soundtrack, or credits, it gave a very unique point of view of that rather fateful morning: that of the viewer not previously heard from.  

I’m not writing this post to lament the event or discuss the political ramifications of the attacks.  Rather, I find myself thinking about the visual nature of that program and its (future) place in history.  It is, in some respects, an event twice removed from the actual event.  Our knowledge of and memory of it comes not from being there on Manhattan island, but as a viewer watching some local or national news channel.  And one view does not constitute complete “knowledge” of an event, but rather one particular point-of-view.

In Impossible Exchange, Jean Baudrillard writes of an event’s meaning in the media-saturated world of televised spectacle:

The singularity of the event, that which is irreducible to its coded transcription and mise-en-scene, that which quite simply makes it an event, is lost. With this we enter the transhistorical or transpolitical realm - the realm where events no longer really take place, precisely by dint of their production and dissemination in ‘real time’; where they disappear into the void of news and information…If we see history as a film (which it has become, whether we like it or not), then the ‘truth’ of information consists in the post-syynchronization, the dubbing and subtitling of the film of history (pp. 132-133).

In and of itself, the program was a rather powerful reminder of that awful day. It gave us pause. But it also reminded me that this is just another set of visual artifacts that gives meaning to an event which is meaningless to some and meaningful to others.  It is an event that has meaning to those who were there; they went through the terror and explosions, anxiety and panic.  For them, it was “real.”  For me, it was meaningless.  I was not there, did not hear or see the explosions, and did not feel the panic and anxiety of not knowing what was happening.  I was safe behind the warm glow of my Sony television set, far away from the big Apple.  I have no meaning for that event.  For me, the only realness is that which I see from others.  I cannot experience it like native New Yorkers; it is impossible.  I believe this is what Baudrillard is getting at in the passage above.  Meaning resides in the void between the viewer and the event - we make meaning by what we see, even though it is not real.

Which brings me back to “102 Minutes.”  After the program, there was a 20 minute documentary that interviewed some of the people who contributed their video footage.  It was amazing to see how many of them felt the urge to pick up a camera and start recording it for the sake of history.  It was as if they felt obligated in some way to do what they did.  Here is a link to an interview with Evan Fairbanks, one of those videographers.  

Some of them were professionals, some of them were just in the wrong place at the right time, and some were merely amateurs.  What bound them to this event, and perhaps to pick up their camera, was a desire to understand it - not from the perspective of the media announcer or the cameras high atop another building - but from a human, individual perspective.

We live in a visually mediated society.  Images bombard us at a rate that surprises even the most pessimistic of individuals.  But how do we really know what it is we see?  Is it through our senses, our experiences “here” or “there”?  No.  Is it through the sheer number of images?  No.  It is through the lens of another, and edited through a lens of a second party, and shown through the lens of a third party, and so on.  History is a film; one we can replay over and over and over again.  This film has lost all deep meaning in some way.  But in another, it is the person on the street that realizes they must fill in the gaps that history has left behind.  ”102 Minutes” is just that type of living history - living rhetoric so to speak.

Click on the picture for a larger version.

I teach a course in Visual Communication using a text written by Paul Martin Lester.  It’s a fairly good text and I supplement it with various pieces that I feel are missing, like most teachers do.  One of the chapters is entitled “The More You Know, the More You See.”  Yep, I got it right - “know” before “see.”  And it makes sense.  The more I learn about the ways in which we understand and process visual stimuli, how the perceptual process works, the more I can visually dissect images to better understand the hows and whys of their creation.  In turn, this gives me insight to their creator.

Here’s the ironic thing - last week a student reminded me of that concept in a totally different class.  She had taken my Visual Communication class before, and now she is taking my Introduction to Speech Communication class (a hybrid of the discipline).  So when we were talking about the ways in which we construct our world through communication - aka, world building - language becomes merely a tool, much like the way in which we understand how images work on multiple levels.  It took a student to point out that which should have been so obvious to me.

Don’t overlook that which you see all around you, especially with the plethora of presidential ads on our televisions.  In this day of a visually-mediated society - one where images bombard us on a daily level, take the time to really see beyond that which is in front of you.  Take the blinders off.  Utilize the media you have access too.  Check the facts and don’t take things at face value.  And realize, that an educated person doesn’t always mean the person with the most degrees - it’s the person that takes the time to look beyond just the surface.  The more you see, the more you know; and thereby the more you know the more you see.