Triumphant Return to the Blog: Palin and Wikipedia

So it seems that my "brief" break turned into the entire summer. This is probably normal in the academic calendar of blogging, and it was amplified to a large extent by my exam reading. Well, I'm happy to report that the written portion of my exams are complete, and with the return to school this week, I now have more of an obligation to be tapped in to the world outside my own head. Hopefully regular updates will ensue.

In that spirit, a return to the kinds and quality of scandal that media can generate (and to which media can respond) these days with a word on a story that broke yesterday about Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. No, I'm not referring to her pregnant teenage daughter. I'm referring to the quality of information that is circulating on the net about her. The International Herald Tribune reported yesterday that a single Wikipedia user made massive edits to Palin's Wikipedia profile ... exactly one day before the announcement that she was chosen as McCain's running-mate. The user later revealed him/herself anonymously as a volunteer in the McCain campaign. Noam Cohen reports of this semi-scandal:

While ethically suspect, the idea that a politician would try to shape her Wikipedia article should not come as a surprise. In modern politics, where the struggle is to "define" yourself before your opponent "defines" you, Wikipedia has become an important part of political strategy.

I find this situation incredibly problematic for a number of reasons. Theorists such as Henry Jenkins (in his book Convergence Culture, among other articles) have lauded Wikipedia as a potential source for the democratization of knowledge, the formation of a "knowledge community." Moreover, such genuine communities were unable to be formed without the technologies provided by Wikipedia's Web 2.0 interface, which allows all users to continually edit one another's work in order to create the best possible knowledge. The interface also provides several tools to track any changes made to individual entries over time, tools that some idealists ironically find to be overly authoritarian, potentially limiting the kinds of changes that can be made to knowledge over time.

And yet, this is an instance in which timing is clearly everything. The linked article above reports that another regular happened to be editing the entry at the same time, and was thus able to neutralize some of the more overtly partisan language in the first user's edits. Some might see this as a vindication of the kind of communal construction of knowledge that Jenkins rhapsodizes about, or, at least, as an instance of the kinds of small transformations in the interface that allow it to produce what Alan Liu describes (in a lecture given at Indiana University last Spring semester) as "good enough knowledge."

However, I see it as something of a cautionary tale that the way in which we frame discussions about Wikipedia and other "convergence" media has veered too far in the direction of posing epistemological questions without proper consideration of the larger political commitments embedded in the kinds and qualities of knowledge that we choose to valorize. Along with Rick Johnston, I have argued recently (in an article to be published in a forthcoming volume about South Park and culture) that a consistent fallback position in recent years for conservatives is an appeal to a perfect end justified by a knowledge that "feels" right: what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" has the consequence of generating a kind of affective knowledge that is deployed more often than not for culturally and politically conservative ends. The problem here is that so many of us forget that Colbert is not calling for a return to a crude rationalism: his focus is less on "facts" than on how such constructions are mediated in politics, the press, and popular culture in general. In other words, because of the focus on "fact" that inevitably becomes entwined with conversations about "good enough knowledge"--because of the focus on accuracy--we forget to examine how such knowledges--whether "good enough" or even "best"--are deployed culturally for specific political purposes.

This instance shows yet again the lesson the Left should have learned a long time ago: that the political Right is better equipped to deploy knowledge in an effective manner. Certainly, we know that a single user added thirty entirely positive edits to the post (and we know this, ironically, because of those very tools that at first glance seem to be most authoritarian and controlling), but the damage was already done: as the above article reports, there were 2.4 million views of Palin's entry the day her candidacy was announced, and the knowledge that those millions viewed was coded in a politically partisan manner.

While knowledge communities in web environments like Wikipedia may prove a potential forum for contesting the kinds of knowledge that count as "good enough," it also proves a forum over which the political implications of these contested knowledges are also fought. In some ways, this is a reminder of the kind of "control society" that Gilles Deleuze describes, in which the breakdown of a central authority over discourses results in the continual and instantaneous political control over knowledge from multiple vantage points. Rather than becoming "disciplined" into objective fact for specific ideological purposes, knowledge is affectively controlled in a constant ideological contestation. Such control society thus certainly poses the possibilities for the kinds of utopian promise Jenkins sees, but, as in this case, it also offers the possibilities for more indirect and anonymous control in the constant battle to curry ideological favor. There was some corrective in this case, but just imagine if the knowledge under question was something more important than the "definition" of Alaska's governor....

Uwe Boll, Anti-Fan Activism, and the Tensions of Convergence Culture

Uwe Boll has long been something of a joke among the cinema-going and gamer communities, not only because of the generally reviled quality of the films he makes (adaptations of often classic games criticized both by film connoisseurs and by video game afficionados), but also because of the manner in which he has continued to churn out films (see below).

But this joke is now taking an interesting turn. Several months ago, some Boll anti-fans put up a petition asking him to retire from making films. And now, in an interview with FEARNet, it seems that if he garners a million signatures, he might actually quit. StuffWeLike reports on this development:

So there you go. A chance to make cinema history. While we wonder if 1 million people have even seen a Uwe Boll movie, we will still hope that the petition (currently at 21,000+) gets a magical boost by the Will of God.

I sort of wonder whether he'll actually do this. He did challenge critics to fight him in the boxing ring, and he put his money where his mouth was in that case. Of course, that was kind of lopsided: he had been an amateur boxer for years, and he fought a bunch of out-of-shape film critics. One wonders whether this kind of pride will extend to his entire career.

Even so, beyond the novelty (absurdity?) of the whole situation, it fascinates me on a number of levels. First, in terms of fan cultures and taste culture in general, this is merely another example of how aggressive our defenses of "good taste" can be. Certainly, this is something resembling fan activism, but it is a curious anti-fan activism in which people are actively calling for the end of what they perceive to violate their sense of good taste. A number of critics have shown over the years how hierarchies of taste are necessary among taste cultures (and fan cultures) in order to legitimize the authority of those who judge, to legitimize the very subjectivity of those within the culture against those who are outside of it.

But we tend to forget that these hierarchies are also something of a zero-sum game. While those tastes that exist outside the norm set by the taste culture are necessary to some extent in terms of the power dynamics involved, it doesn't mean that the taste culture doesn't still want to eliminate other tastes altogether. Barbara Herrnstein Smith comments in her fabulous book Contingencies of Value that the effort to evaluate requires both the assumption of a natural, objective understanding of what is "good" and an attendant assumption that those who cannot recognize such "quality" are necessarily pathological in some way. There's the assumption in some older criticism (think of the New Critics, but this goes back, according to Smith, to Hume and Kant as well), for instance, that people unable to appreciate great works of art were not only "deviant" but also somehow socially unfit: in other words, there's a kind of natural selection that weeds out those less sensitive to aesthetics. This doesn't merely apply to cultural elites, though:

The first [point] is that communities ... come in all sizes and that, insofar as the provincials, colonials, and other marginalized groups mentioned above--including the young--constitute social communities in themselves, they also tend to have prevailing structures of tastes and may be expected to control them in much the same ways as do more obviously "establishment" groups. (41)

In this context, (mostly) gamers are performing the same kind of pathologizing of bad taste as Hume and Kant. They are simply doing it on a larger scale and with more consequences: rather than waiting for Boll to be weeded out by a process of natural selection within the taste community, they are actively requesting that he remove himself from the kinds of social circles that would even possibly interact with them in the first place. This is activism of a highly reactionary order, one which doesn't only ignore the contingencies which define that value, hoping to naturalize and universalize these tastes. After all, this is something like a Final Solution for a particular taste culture, actively attempting to eliminate the Other that authorizes and threatens the authority of the taste culture as a whole.

The second point of interest for me is what this means in terms of how consumers are engaging with new forms of production and distribution. Boll's films are not only critiqued for their quality, but for their mode of production. After all (the argument seems to go), it's as though the guy has seen The Producers too many times: Boll uses a particular loophole in German tax law that is intended to stimulate investments in German-made films and thus boost the national film industry. Oddly enough, though, the tax law stipulates that films that make no profit become completely tax deductible. In other words, Boll corners the market on movies that he knows will tank in order to reap the benefits. He and his investors win. According to his many detractors, the German government and the movie-going public loses.

Boll in some ways serves as a manifestation of the weird ways in which capital circulates to produce things that nobody really wants in order to continue its own perpetuation. He is in this way not postmodern in the way that Jameson and others characterize "late capitalism" (seriously, does this mean that capitalism will be "ending" soon?!), but rather in a more Deleuzian sense of how capital operates as a purely productive force: productive of commodities, certainly, but more importantly productive of pure capital (out of nothing, seemingly) and of desire as a byproduct. This process is very rarely so nakedly displayed for consumers, and Boll's spectacular display of his own production/distribution methods has drawn sharp criticism. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes the ways in which this new transition in media culture is above all a convergence between producers who are producing capital and desire in new ways and consumers who now have more power and potential avenues through which to understand and engage with that capital and desire. Jenkins proposes a new political activism to be one possible consequence of this convergence, a possible avenue toward an "achievable utopia." I sort of wonder whether this is what he had in mind.

In case you're wondering: yes, I signed, not to assert anti-fan allegiance but rather as some feeble mark that I can make regarding the weird ways in which these new practices of capitalism in global convergence culture can be exploitative of the average consumer. For the record, there were 18,000 signatures when the interview was publicized, and, two days later, I became signature #100,505. So the numbers are skyrocketing. If you would like to jump on the bandwagon for whatever reason, you can sign the petition here.

***Update***

As the number of signatures on the anti-Boll petition approaches 165,000, Boll has responded by claiming that he's "the only fucking genius in the business."  See his video response here.  Or, if you feel kinda bad for the guy and want to show "support," sign the pro-Boll petition here.  I say "support" because the justification for saying that Boll should not be forced to quit in this petition is basically that his films are so detestably bad that they're worth a good laugh....

Belief in the Everyday on the Blogosphere

People may have stumbled upon the 90DayJane blog in the past couple of weeks, in which an anonymous young woman claimed that she would commit suicide online in 90 days. The blog was something of a phenomenon, with people immediately jumping into the comments boards with many different kinds of reactions, from empathy to encouragement that she do the deed.

Unsurprisingly, the whole thing turned out to be untrue, and she’s now taken the site down. Reactions to the fact that the site was a lie have been interesting: Kim Voyner at Cinematical reports parenthetically of the “personal art project,” “that’s ‘hoax’ to you and me,” and the Defamer piece that initially broke the story is filed under “Webtards.”

More provocatively and productively, Voyner frames the entire incident as an example of the manner in which mediated versions of the “everyday” have penetrated into how we actually live in the everyday:

Jane certainly isn't the first person to document her troubles, real or imagined, on the internet. I remember several years ago, back when the word "blog" was not yet a buzzword, happening across the website of a young man purporting to be documenting his sucky life, which largely consisted of being poor and miserable (but not too poor to afford a computer and internet access, apparently) and popping his mean, bitchy grandfather's boils and carbuncles. Thankfully, he was not documenting that experience on video for the world to see. Point is, between Google Video, YouTube, and blogs that make it easier than ever for the average Joe -- or Jane -- to put videos out there, anyone can become a documentarian of his or her own life, however exciting, mundane, depressing or asinine it may be.

The claim here is the somewhat familiar one that the public forum constructed through the internet and convergence video technology have encouraged an unprecedented interest in the workings of everyday life. While popping boils was not on the menu for this particular site, the implication is that people still would have tuned in to see it. This thankfully isn’t the standard argument about the lack of privacy that this encourages, but instead poses the interesting suggestion that the glut of the everyday seems to eliminate its overall impact, that we are no longer able to use mediated narratives of the everyday as a legitimate investigation of its functions.

Henry Jenkins recently returned from the DYI Video Conference at USC in which precisely these kinds of issues about the mediation of the everyday were posed. Not surprisingly,

I find myself taking a different perspective, drawing on the old feminist claim that "the personal is political" and thus that many of the films about "everyday" matters might still speak within a larger political framework. A case in point might be a disturbing video shown during the youth media session (which was curated by young people from Open Youth Networks and Mindy Farber): a young man had been filming in a school cafeteria when a teacher demands that he stops; when he refuses, she leads him to the principal's office, berating him every step along the way, and then the two of them threaten to confiscate his camera, all the time unaware that it is continuing to film what they are saying. The young man distributed the video via YouTube, thus exposing what took place behind closed doors to greater scrutiny by a larger public. Read on one level, this is a trivial matter -- a misbehaving youth gets punished, rightly or wrongly. But on another level, the video speaks powerfully about what it is like to be a student subjected to manditory education and the strategies by which adult authorites seek to isolate the boy from any base of support he might have in the larger community of students and feels free to say and do what they want behind closed doors.

For Jenkins, even the most mundane documentations of the everyday can become an overtly political act, even if he’s still wary about the individualized focus of these forays. But it may be instructive to think of other media at the moment which offered new potential for a collective (re)experience of the everyday and which threaten constantly to disengage the individual from the collective, thereby taking the critique out of the documentation of the mundane. For instance, for decades now, critics have opined how movies had started out as a collective experience with genuine potential for social change and has increasingly become individualized and alienating (a process increased by the rise of home entertainment and digital formats for distribution). But if we stop our nostalgia for a moment and examine the medium itself (and, in turn, the internet as well), we can still find a productive power that is immanent in the kinds of networks it creates. In Cinema II: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes of the invention of new worlds through the documentation of the everyday: “[I]t is because the world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality. Man is not himself a world other than the one in which he experiences the intolerable and feels himself trapped” (170). In this manner, for Deleuze (and this is implied in Jenkins as well), the purpose of art is to construct an idea of “the people” in which we can believe:

Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment of the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here’, the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute. (217)

It is the purpose of all art, of all media, whether film or the internet or the new digital convergence of the two, to play not toward a preconceived understanding of the masses, but to invent an idea of how people should live in the world. It’s idealistic as hell, an ardent plea for a genuinely productive power that can have the power to create new networks of people in which to live and die together.

At least superficially, Jane claims that the goal of her blog was to create this kind of network, to create a “people” in which her death would leave a void. In her final farewell (for the blog, not her life), she writes,

I thought this mirror might reflect the isolation everyday people feel and the lack of true human connection on the internet.

It is my feeling that the internet is the best and worst example of human interaction. This was painfully proven to me by reading every comment and every email. I believe I owed that to everyone. I know we all saw the dark side of the reactions in the blog comments. There was so much hate, immaturity and apathy. But, I truly wish everyone could see the beauty and honesty in the emails; many people feel like Jane (me). People have been more real and heartfelt than I thought was possible. I owe them a debt of gratitude for showing me the difference between people's reactions and their true feelings. I understand.

She frames the site as a kind of artistic investigation of the effects of a media formation’s impact on how people relate to one another, on how they’re “networked,” if we’re using the language of the medium itself. But the results of her own “art project” are kind of unsurprising: people can be hateful, people can be helpful. This is really where I feel that she falls short and where the label “webtard” may be fitting: it fails to dig deeper beyond the purely superficial. She scratches our collective skin but refuses to dig her nails under it, to penetrate the everyday and to produce the everyday as a kind of allegory in the manner that Deleuze envisions: Jane’s journey is cut short artificially once it gets too “real” and, rather than allowing the blog to persist as a forum through which a “people” could genuinely emerge, the forum is closed down with a kind of smug self-satisfaction that borders on an exploitation of those who genuinely either believe in the power of art to produce or in the tragic deaths that can be a real result of our hyper-mediated age.

To close this media sermon, I’ll let Deleuze have the last word, both because (unlike Jane) he saw a real glimmer of hope in how we interact with media art and because, like so many people, he was also so overwhelmed with his pain in the world (from lung cancer) that he actually took his own life. He wrote:

Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. . . . Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). . . . . Because the point is to discover and restore belief in the world, before or beyond words . . . . It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named: the ‘first name’, and even before the first name. (171-2)

The necessary question to pose here is, when we’re mired in the insincere, sensationalistic, exploitative world of “artists” like 90DayJane, in our current transition into a new kind of convergence technology, what kind of a belief do we have the ability to produce? What kind of people will we create to populate our brave new world? What kinds of bodies will we construct, and what names will we eventually give them?

Let us hope that they are not given the name "webtard".

DVD Killed the Video Star

A recent NY Times article by Dennis Lim (citing IU's own Barb Klinger as a source on the implications of media viewing technology), discusses the death of VHS technology. The article is essentially an advertisement for Michel Gondry's latest film, Be Kind Rewind (which will hopefully be less soporific than his last, The Science of Sleep), and it's final message seems to be, "Well, it had a good run, at least."

But it raises a lot of significant ideas about the associations we hold for different kinds of media in different contexts. For instance, Klinger notes how the medium has become a marker of authenticity for a particular generation of viewers (citing the uproar over the digital alterations to the original DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy), while Lim notes that, at least during the period in which the medium rose to prominence, it held the fairly alienating connotations associated with its role in surveilance and pornography.

We often examine the implications of various media formats historically: it's a variation of the kind of technological determinism initiated by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan in the early 1960s. After all, Boogie Nights is a pretty substantial thesis on how video technology drove pornography in new and more exploitative directions, and Baudrillard's revision of Foucault's understanding of surveillance would not have been possible without video technology available as a material ground to some rather abstract theory. And, I have to admit, limiting the field of available questions to the effects of media technology alone is something of which I am occasionally guilty mysef in my own writing (see either of my two of my previous entries on digital technology to see what I mean).

But this poses a fundamentally different kind of question about how we relate to the effects of media technology. What is the process by which we somehow change our cultural attitudes toward different kinds of media as they become superceded? How does our understanding of a technology shift from that of invasive surveillance and hyperreal porn to that of the "authentic" text? My initial instinct is that this is actually a marker of how we have always perceived this technology. Video's sense of "authenticity" is precisely what had previously been deemed so disturbing in those earlier trends: its seeming authenticity, its "uncut" aesthetic fueled the sometimes violent fantasies that gave such success to the porn industry in the 1980s, and it also aided the paranoia of being "caught" in real time in live footage, even do something as mundane as walking through a parking garage or riding an elevator. But the question remains as to what cultural conditions are necessary for this quality of authenticity, deemed so menacing at the technology's origins, to have the potential to become (retroactively, of course) the basis for a fond nostalgia once the technology has died?

I suspect that arguing that the death of the technology alone is responsible would fall into the same old trap of technological determinism. Rather, to account for this transition from the threat to the fond memory of authenticity, we need a more sophisticated understanding of how affect operates at a larger cultural level, a more nuanced theory of how our investments are articulated by a host of issues shaped by the rise of convergence technologies, which in turn articulate a whole new politics of "authenticity" and its uses in media.

The Costs of Digital Technology

A few days ago, Michael Cieply of the New York Times reported on the literal rise in costs for film preservation through the constant changes in digital technology:

The problem became public, but just barely, last month, when the science and technology council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the results of a yearlong study of digital archiving in the movie business. Titled “The Digital Dilemma,” the council’s report surfaced just as Hollywood’s writers began their walkout. Busy walking, or dodging, the picket lines, industry types largely missed the report’s startling bottom line: To store a digital master record of a movie costs about $12,514 a year, versus the $1,059 it costs to keep a conventional film master.

Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is “born digital” — that is, produced using all-electronic processes, rather than relying wholly or partially on film — pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the equivalent camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault.

It gets even worse. He goes on to report that the digital storage of film can can become completely unreadable, often in less than a decade. Compare this to the costs and efforts required to remove the scratches from traditional film stock.

This doesn't come as a huge shock to me. I've always attempted to temper the utopianism of technological advancement with a healthy understanding of the materiality of these technologies. After all, many people mistakenly believe (or at least tend to ignore) that the digital information that floats around online doesn't simply drift in the ether: it has to be kept someplace, stored in massive server somewhere. Anyone who has ever lost an important piece of writing due to a computer crash the night before a deadline knows all too well the dangers associated with the materiality of information.

But I have to admit that I didn't quite see this coming. The disparity in costs and the dangers of the loss of important cultural artifacts is shocking even to someone as pragmatic as me about technological matters.

Even so, I think this poses an important question: where exactly do we go from here? Should we attempt to continue the convergence of our digital technologies (distributing film in various digital media formats, turning television into digital code that can be downloaded onto a cell phone, etc.), or do we find an alternative route? Clearly traditional analogue film stocks had their problems, which we attempted to address with digital. And despite being relatively new as a dominant cultural technology, digitization is dominant enough that it is creeping into scientific discourses as the paradigm for explaining how the universe itself operates. Whatever comes next, will it be as alien to us 21st-century digital boys and girls as digital was to 20th-century analogue types? Thoughts?

DVD Technology and the Cinema Experience

Over at the Film Freak Central Blog, Alex Jackson recently posed the question of how DVD technology has amplified and potentially surpassed the traditional “cinema” experience. He offers Capturing the Friedmans and the special edition DVD of Platoon as examples of the ways in which the text of the films themselves become problematized, clarified, expanded upon, and, in somewhat of a counterintuitive manner, completed by the supplemental materials available on DVDs.

The question is one worth pondering, and his post seems to take a debate that has been running in literary critical and media theory for the past half of a century in a curious direction. At least since Roland Barthes proclaimed the critical shift from "work" to "text" (and perhaps even long before then), our critical rhetoric has frequently extolled the value of "opening up" texts, by examining how they operate within their own margins. It’s a theory that paved the way for major scholars today (see Henry Jenkins’s blog, for instance) to discuss fan culture, as one example, as a practice of consumer freedom, reworking “source” materials through our constantly expanding convergence technologies to make a “text” limitless, ever expansive in a way that allows for different kinds of political engagement with cultural objects like film. In this way, much recent cultural criticism has shifted away from the study of "objects" because they are too intimately bound up in the kinds of limitations that avoid inter- and extra-textuality.

Which, perhaps, brings us back to the original proposition. Because Jackson seems to be suggesting that, rather than the limitlessness that has been something of the norm in academic accounts of convergence technologies, it is precisely the limits which such technologies impose that allow a more important political insight into the way texts relate to viewers (it’s no accident, after all, that a punk critic fan of the avant-garde would choose such politically-loaded films as examples here). The idea of a limitless freedom has never really appealed to me: it is much more pragmatic to understand that fashioning a political identity (even a viewing identity) relies on a specific grammar, a code that closes off possibilities and opens up possibilities for intervention. In this sense, Jackson’s proposition is a nice corrective to some of the unchecked idealism going around in media and fan studies today, precisely because it opens up the possibility for a more pragmatic way to construct ideals about what film and other media technology actually do to us as we watch/interact with it.

An example to complement Alex’s own: the special edition DVD of Tim Blake Nelson’s O is fascinating as a cultural object. The film is extremely underappreciated, especially because it’s so up-front about its own adaptation from Shakespearean source material (but the question of adaptation is really a different issue altogether). But the DVD makes it even better. The publicity materials are alright, and the director’s commentary is appropriately reverential and humble about the social work it’s trying to do. But the real treat is the entire hour-long silent feature of Othello starring Emil Jannings. The film predictably focuses the action in a baroque court setting, while the white actor does his best black-face routine. The entire feature encourages the viewer to stare slack-jawed with the understanding of the kinds of representations Nelson was working against, what he had to subtract from our culture’s understanding of the Shakespeare play, even as the other materials explicitly inform us of what he was trying to add.

In this sense, the move toward seeing a film as an object, even as a different kind of object than we normally see it as, can allow us to better understand the kinds of connections it makes in its circulation across time. Hopefully we'll be able to practice this kind of criticism more consciously here at F-Bomb.