IR180- Global Media
Der Derian and Santos
2.28.08
Maria Mahler-Haug
Helvetica Review

The feature-length documentary Helvetica explores the emergence of Helvetica, a sans-serif type whose popularity exploded after its development in 1957. The film is made by Gary Hustwit, a young producer/filmmaker wanted to answer his own question of; "how do we interact with type on a daily basis?" Helvetica was developed in 1957 by a little-known Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei (the Haas Type Foundry) in Munchenstein, Switzerland. In 1960, the Haas' umbrella company officially named the new font 'Helvetica,' derived from the Latin name for Switzerland. The world's embrace of this new font was astounding. It was, as one designer comments in the film, "a landslide just waiting to go down the mountain."

The film explores this question: was Helvetica a reflection of a changing society, or did the invention of this font help shape modernity? Did the popularity of Helvetica arise out of necessity or did it help breed a new culture? Ronald Deibert in his book Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia explores the answer to this question and the ramifications of this debate.

Deibert writes that the most serious flaw in traditional medium theory is that it identifies and relies on an inherent link between the introduction of a new technology of communication and changes in specific social phenomena. This theory assumes a causal link between society and technology, giving technology unproved power over social constructs and emerging social environments. Deibert writes that by giving technology an inherent generative power, the theory tends to "slight the extent to which the technology itself emerges out of a particular context and is itself influenced by social, cultural, and historical forces" (Deibert, 28). Deibert writes that instead of assuming this causal link, more emphasis should be placed on the social and historical conditions from which these new technologies arise.

The social conditions into which Helvetica was born was a modernizing world, particularly in a technological sense. The film comments on the fact that one of the reasons for the sustained spread of Helvetica was its availability on computers, both mainframe and then personal. Helvetica also describes the rapid spread of this new, crisp font throughout the world of rising corporations that were hungry for a power-makeover. Helvetica provided the perfect letterhead representation for the corporate culture: a clear, crisp reflection of accessibility, transparency, and modernity. So in some ways, one can think of the manufacturing and the rapid and vast spread of Helvetica as a reflection of changes in technology and the redesign of environments. To Deibert, this new technological spread of the use of Helvetica would not have directly spawned aspects of modernity. He writes that "changes in modes of communication have an important effect on the nature and character of society and politics. New technologies of communication do not generate specific social forces and/or ideas, as technological determinists would have it. Rather, they facilitate and constrain the extant social forces and ideas of a society" (36).

Designer Massimo Vignelli says in Helvetica that it was the new, modern social environment that required a new, modern font. "When Helvetica came about, we were all ready for it," Vignelli says. "It just had all the right connotations that we were looking for-- for anything that had to spell out modern."

But perhaps it was these modern connotations of Helvetica that helped shape a more contemporary world. The font may have been the perfect vehicle through which modern ideas could be conveyed to society. Rick Poyner, a design writer in the documentary, said; "graphic design is the communication framework through which these messages about what the world is now and what we should aspire to,…reach us."

The documentary presents the current world of Helvetica by interspersing interviews with artists in the graphic design world with urban shots of the famous font in everyday life. These urban interaction shots reveal just how ubiquitous Helvetica has become and give the viewer a taste of its widespread use. From street signs to warning labels, the Swiss font has become what designer Lars Muller calls “the perfume of the city” and left an imprint on many aspects of our environments.

Whether the font created society or society create the font, it is clear that Helvetica dominates our environment. However, does the ubiquity of Helvetica underscore its power now? If those people who are not inflicted with “typomania,” (which designer Erik Spiekermann describes in the film as “an incurable if not modern disease,”) are not actively aware of the Swiss type’s imprint on their lives, how much more powerful is the font besides providing us with clarity, familiarity, and easy-to-read signs? How closely tied with our street signs and government documents is Helvetica?

Posted by Maria Mahler-Haug at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I offer you a study of contrasts(and synchronicities), to begin a discussion on the sociology, political economy, and semiotics of the documentary award, beginning with this year's Global Media Lab in which Gary Hustwit made the case for staying indie (let's hope it's captured in the videoblog), juxtaposed to last year's GML with Eugene Jarecki and Alex Gibney making the case for selling your doc to the majors (see February 2007 archive); then watching last week (online, not primetime) the Spirit Award for the 'Truer than Fiction' category which went to 'The Unforeseen' rather than nominee 'Helvetica' (damn); followed this week by the Oscar for Best Documentary going to Gibney's 'Taxi to the Dark Side' (huzzah). My question(s): Why do we have such contests? How do we judge the success of a documentary? What should we make of the fact that Jarecki won the same Spirit award (Truer than Fiction) in 2003 for 'Trials of Henry Kissinger'? Why is the Spirit Award female (winged victory) and the Academy Award male (Oscar). Share your thoughts (and bonus point for anybody who identifies which Spirit Award honoree titled her presentation about studio business practices as"The Scum-Sucking Vampire Pig Theory of Hollywood"?

VTY
JDD

Posted by James Der Derian at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For all those who missed the screening of “Three Days of the Condor,” the film is now up on mycourses. In addition, just a reminder that the film that must be watched for next week’s discussion with Peter Almond is “Thirteen Days,” and it is also up on mycourses.
Happy watching!

Posted by Marie-Claude Hamel at 12:15 PM | Permalink

what's the availability for people tomorrow (Thursday) night at 8pm? 7pm? please feel free to comment below. and for those of you unable to make any screening, please e-mail me directly and hopefully we can come up with an alternative plan.

Posted by chk at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Willem Van Lancker - Thematic Essay

Massimo Vignelli called graphic design, and more specifically what graphic designers do, “a fight against ugliness.” He likened it to a doctor battling disease; designers are working to cure the visual disease that infests our surroundings and environment (Helvetica Hustwit). It is true that typography, and on a broader scale, graphic design, affect our response and communication to and with our world subconsciously every day. “Design is solving problems. Graphic design is solving problems by making marks. Type is a uniquely rich set of marks because it makes language visible” (A Type Primer, Kane viii).

So, since typography and graphic design make language visible what dictates how we respond to it? In other words, do we choose fonts, or do fonts choose us? Just as Gary Hustwit provided us with the anecdote of seeing the word “welfare” set in his grungy “punk-rock” font on CNN; seeing words depicted in some qualitative visual manner very often influences and even changes their meaning. The viewer instantly associates the word welfare with something dirty, wretched and negative. However, if the same text were set in a clean, modern font, the viewer’s reaction to the topic could easily be completely the opposite. This phenomenon is very apparent and obvious for some fonts and design elements. For example, if I were to use a rounded, bubbly font such as Comic Sans, the viewer would likely associate the text with fun, children, and light-hearted content. Furthermore, many fonts, though they do not fundamentally imply a certain quality or aesthetic, have become such a part of our mass-culture that they are instantly recognizable or identifiable with a particular message or an unmistakable image. Think of the Coca-Cola script; if you were to see that font forming any other word it is likely you would still think of Coke. At the same time, there are fonts like Helvetica that mean absolutely nothing at all when viewed singularly and objectively, but which can take on such a different character depending upon how they are juxtaposed, that they become the most important font families of all. It is this insidious, subconscious power that typography wields over the population that makes it so interesting. Graphic design allows us to communicate with each other but it also has the power to subliminally dictate our actions every day.

This is definitely not a modern phenomenon, as many would assume. Long before the proliferation of movable type with the invention of Gutenburg’s printing press (circa 1493), fonts have existed and been identified as products and representations of certain cultures, religions, languages and regions. These hand-carved and hand-written fonts have withstood the centuries and are now found on nearly everyone’s personal computer. Fonts like Times, Trajan, and many of the transitional serif fonts, all are rooted in ancient Rome and more specifically, transcribed from the Trajan Column (circa 114 A.D.), believed to be one of the finest examples of truly “Roman type.” The writing styles of the characters in the illuminated manuscripts can be seen on nearly every Irish pub in America, (A Short History of the Printed Word Chappell, Bringhurst). Even then, there was a sort of association by font that people adhered to, each locale having its own way of carving and designing letters.

When the printing press arrived on the typographic scene at the end of the 15th century, fonts and typography in Europe were primarily controlled by the Catholic Church. To differentiate their type style from the Catholic printings, Protestant Dutch monks designed their own letterforms that they carried on their backs to avoid persecution from the Diocese while still spreading their message, (Graphic Design: A Concise History, Hollis 68). So here we have the Protestant people or the clergy at least, attempting to identify and separate themselves as a group in part by using type. The fonts they created eventually led to the common fonts, Caslon, Baskerville, and other modern English fonts. This is where most people get lost in the slight differences between fonts, things like the subtle nuances between Adobe Garamond and Garamond Premier Pro or even greater differences like those between Verdana and Univers. The layperson sees the Target logo and the logo for American Airlines as two entirely different fonts and designs. All the while, it is in fact a careful ruse, a manipulation of the tools and devices that are at a graphic designer’s disposal (and I do not mean the computer). Devices such as leading - the amount of vertical spacing between lines of type, kerning - the adjustment of letter spacing in a proportional sense, and tracking - the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in text, color, and weight, are just a few that have allowed fonts like Helvetica to take on so many disparate forms and connotations.

Helvetica, with its rigid conformity was born out of the modernist world. The Twentieth century led to the rise of modernism in graphic design as well. The Modernist school of thought was born out of the Bauhaus in Germany as well as the Swiss style of typography. It relied on the simple tenet that less is more. Modernist designers worked out of grids, using strong contrast, and only a few fonts. Years later, during the cultural revolution of the sixties and seventies, design entered the post-modern stage in its development. All of the rules that designers had previously adhered to were often discarded in favor of “humanistic fonts” and hand-drawn designs that often were born out of mistakes in an artist’s work. This period stood in strong defiance to the order and structure of the modernist discipline. Helvetica survived this era as well.

I do not want this to become an essay on the development of typography, so here I will break from my historical and technical recap. Today, in the digital era of typography where virtually no one in the trade physically creates their designs in metal type any longer, the ease of creating type and being a “graphic designer” has become as simple as buying a mac with the latest version of the Adobe Creative Suite. In reality, being an effective graphic designer, the doctor of visual maladies and communication, takes so much more. It does not necessarily only take a degree in the discipline to make a good graphic designer. Instead, a good designer must be an artist, as well as a student of human communication and a keen observer of how people interact with each other and react to their environment. As we have entered the D.I.Y. (do it yourself) generation for nearly every aspect of life, this has led to a proliferation of unsuccessful fonts (just go to 1001fonts.com, fontfreak.com, etc to see for yourself) and uninspiring amateur graphic design.

Though we are living in a state of nearly total media saturation, graphic design still retains its fundamental influence over us, contrary to the idea that if something is such a part of our culture it becomes ubiquitous and invisible. It is entirely duplicitous and insidious in our world - on the Internet, television, the printed word and in our surroundings. However, even though we are bombarded by advertisements every second of every day, we are not immune to their power. We still recognize the giant, iconic Texaco sign as a place to stop for gas and not just a word set in Helvetica Bold.

This argument takes me back to the question that prompted this essay to begin with; do we choose the fonts or do the fonts choose us? I think that it is a combination of both. When someone sets out to find a font that expresses exactly what he or she is looking for, they fall back on the conventions that have been set by our society (i.e. trying to find the perfect font for a new sushi restaurant, nine times out of ten he or she will select the typical “ninja/Asian” style font that everyone is familiar and identifies with). So in this sense, the fonts are choosing us but at the same time this is merely a reflection of the stereotypes and norms that the globally mediated society has created. It is the groundbreaking designs in figure-ground relationships and the balance of form and counter-form that shake the foundations of these trite stereotypical communicators. This is why Helvetica has become the ubiquitous behemoth in the world of typography for the past fifty years. Paula Scher gave Helvetica the tag as the “font of the Vietnam War,” (Helvetica Hustwit) because of its representation of nearly every corporation and government that supported the war; I could not disagree with this more. Helvetica is a font that has redefined how people react to typography because it transcends any one specific tag. If sixty years ago I had told a graphic designer that in 2008 there would be one single font used by mega-corporations including the likes of BMW, Target, Staples, Verizon, USPS, American Apparel, American Airlines, the IRS, Crate & Barrel and Texaco, (just to name a few) I would have been laughed out of the building. All of these companies indeed use Helvetica as their logo typeface. Yet their individual logos each express a visual icon that communicates a powerful message to the viewer. The viewer would never think twice that they were looking at the same font family. Helvetica, has become, not the voice of the totalitarian, but the most essentially human font. So today, in a world where we are beyond modernism, beyond post-modernism, a place where everyone with a computer and an internet connection can communicate their views to millions of people, what will become of typography and graphic design?

Posted by Willem Van Lancker at 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Literature Review
By Megan Loucks

Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
By Ronald J. Deibert

Fundamental changes in the world order are related to large-scale changes in the modes of communication. Yet “Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia” is not a story of a “master variable”. Ronald J. Deibert seeks to expand on the foundations of media theory, as provided by such scholars as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, without falling into the pitfalls of technological determinism. He seeks to create a fresh analytical lens with which to view the world. Deibert continually emphasizes his attempt “to articulate an open-ended, nonreductionist medium theory approach, embedding it in a much wider evolutionary perspective on human existence that I refer to as ‘ecological holism’”. His success in this goal is clearly achieved.

Interestingly, ecology is the base foundation of his argument. It provides an overarching framework that creates good clarity for what could easily have become a dense and scattered discussion. Faulting traditional approaches for focusing on single technologies, Deibert looks at the communications environment. By treating media as such, Darwinian concepts can be applied. Thus each world order transformation is explained as a result of a “fitness” between the interests of particular social forces and the communications environment. Some forces flourish, while others are put at a disadvantage. This ecological lens sounds simple enough, but it does very well in helping to explain the relationship between emerging modes of communication and the complex rise and fall of social, economic, and political orders.

In a helpful strategy, he divides his analysis of world order transformation into “distributional changes” (relative power of social forces) and “changes to social epistemology” (collective mentality/metaphysical underpinnings). The latter is a unique inclusion, but highly beneficial for his argument. It is about the “importance of mentalités collectives in structuring and orienting political behavior”. This includes social constructs, symbolic forms, and cognitive biases seen on both the individual, spatial, and community level.

Part I “The Medieval to Modern Transformation of World Order”

Distributional Changes

With the emergence of the printing environment, the papal-monastic network of the Catholic Church found that it could not thrive as well as other forces. With growing literacy, the secularization of learning, and skepticism regarding the formalist infrastructure of the church, the communications environment favored the strategic interests of the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism. With the growth of printing presses, one religious heresy could spread ideas rapidly and cheaply to a wide audience. The single “Christian Commonwealth” of Europe faltered in step with the disintegration of cosmological ties. Deibert avoids attempting an exhaustive causal explanation of these complex changes. Rather he uses media theory to aid in our understanding of why certain things happened at that time and at that pace. The Protestant Reformation clearly would have been significantly slower or would have fizzled altogether if its interests hadn’t been so clearly in line with the opportunities created by the printing environment.

The printing environment was also conducive to the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and socioeconomic relations based on standardization, homogenization and formal contracts. This move away from overlapping loyalties (largely a result of dependency on oral communication) created a “leveling effect” on feudal social relations. This opened up the possibility of rule from one center. And lastly, this new communication environment favored state monarchs who, in alliance with urban bourgeoisie, sought to create “standardized rational policies and impersonal bureaucracies to administer them over clearly defined territorial spaces”.

Social Epistemology

Stressed in the Global Media seminar is the relationship between media infrastructure and media content. Deibert clearly agrees that this is essential. The essential properties of the printing environment, visual uniformity, mass reproducibility, and its standardized nature, fostered a certain social epistemology.

The foundations of modern individualism, the antithesis of medieval social order, were encouraged. For example copyright and authorship encouraged a novel pursuit of personal fame and fortune, while silent reading fostered abstract thinking and solitary, personal reflection. In terms of spatial biases, more rigid, linear definitions of political and social space were favored by the similar spatial biases created by cartography and the printed page.

Deibert completes this view with one last level of analysis: the imagined community. Language in the medieval world order was not delineated by political spheres. Printed language was able to achieve a “fixity” that written languages never could. This standardization of language became tied up with centralizing interests of monarchies and growing industries producing shared “national” vernacular languages. This major communication change created an altered sense of community within political boundaries, spreading the seeds for nationalism and thus the modern nation state.

Part II “Modern to Postmodern World Order Transformation”

In this section, Deibert speaks of the emerging “hypermedia” environment; an apt name to describe the convergence and ubiquity of various technologies. Tracing the military and commercial sources of technological innovation, he then focuses on the core properties of this environment: the movement from independent technologies to an integrated web, digitization, computerization, and innovations in transmission capabilities (internet, satellite, fiber optics etc).

Distributional Changes

The hypermedia environment favors those actors who have “an incentive to cross political barriers”. The ability to spread a lot of information incredibly widely and quickly encourages a trans-border flow of production ever-increasing in velocity and volume. Businesses are able to spread out risks and costs. This flow includes “multilocational flexibility”, and “transnational joint-ventures”: allowing “small locally based firms to reach a global audience” and “facilitating more flexible production keyed to the vagaries of local consumer tastes”. A high level of transparency is encouraged in everything from the political to the economic realm by dispersed centers of surveillance. All these distributional changes favor “negarchical” security arrangements while undermining “centralized/hierarchical forms of rule, or real-states”.

Social Epistemology

In the most eloquent section of this text, Deibert explains that all characteristics of this newest social epistemology surround one word: postmodernism. I predict this term has already joined “soft power” in Professor Der Derian’s categorization of painfully ubiquitous “sponge terms”. But in a refreshing twist, the second half of page 180 has an excellent definition of “postmodernism”. In this framework, postmodernism is treated as a coherent cultural development, a “species” whose “fitness” in this modern media environment is then analyzed.

Deibert proceeds to explain the “functional bias” of this environment towards “postmodern notions of fragmented identities” and a multi-dimensional “decentered” self. Previous notions of “authorship” and “sovereign voice” are not thriving in this new environment (think intellectual property rights, copyright, illegal downloading and the modification of images and video). The distinction between “public” and the “private” spheres of life has blurred (think consumer data and surveillance). On page 186 he again prevents deterministic accusations by making an important distinction: participating in this hypermedia environment does not “induce a sudden individual gestalt-shift to a ‘postmodern consciousness’”, rather it “opens up a critical space…in which the idea of a postmodern ‘multiphrenic’ self might seem more plausible…”

In explaining the transformation in spatial biases, Deibert makes one crucial point: digitization. The reduction of video, audio, graphics, and text to the common language of ones and zeros has allowed them all to intertwine and meld together. Our spatial biases increasingly lean away from linearity and towards a “mosaic” or “pastiche” : non-linear, overlapping, and discontinuous. Plural worlds are made as lines are blurred between “reality and irreality”. Juxtaposition connects contradicting and disparate ideas, objects, and images. This “intertextuality” can easily be demonstrated by a simple Google search or the moment you catch yourself channel surfing. In the years since this book was written, technological innovations have made even greater leaps in the extent to which one media melds into another.

In the broader sense of imagined communities, the media environment challenges the mass-broadcasting paradigm by favoring interactive, web-like communication regardless of geographical connectedness. This fosters the creation of overlapping “niche” communities or an “ecosystem of subcultures”.

Conclusion

A frequent focus of current IR study is the perceived decline of the state. In Deibert’s view, people are too quick to claim disappearance instead of looking closely to see fundamental transformations. From the lens he outlines, there is not a “withering away” of the state, but instead a “hollowing out” where new webs of authority are created and values are shifted. This idea is compelling and consistent with his philosophy throughout. In addition, Deibert’s expectation of conflicts being within and across states is proving true.

Global imagined communities are coexisting with multiple fragmented identities. Hegemonic “global market forces” are present with “counter-hegemonic movements of global civil society”. These diverging and converging forces, this fragmentation and integration, are operating simultaneously, creating the web we live in. With his skilled description of “postmodernism” it is no surprise that Deibert applies this postmodernist belief in the “indeterminacy” of things and the lack of a “master narrative” to his media theorizing.

By connecting modern changes to historical ones, Deibert explains transformation without neglecting the history’s inevitable continuum of change. Thus he carefully resists the frantic revolution hype typical of discussions about communication and media technology.

Deibert offers a way to view and interpret current trends with a useful lens that better adjusts to world we live in. Often we fail to properly adjust our viewing lens for our times, using instead the “conceptual blinders” of theoretical frameworks set by previous academics. Deibert realistically assesses both the limitations and advantages of creating a broad theoretical lens such as his. He is extremely self-aware in his construction of his own argument, relating it to media theory precedents and differentiating himself when necessary. His conclusions converge with those of many other theorists of different perspectives, yet he fills an important gap in IR theory. And despite his distaste for predictions, his expectations have proved remarkably accurate.

Posted by Megan Loucks at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Download file

Posted by Julia Hellman at 10:27 AM | Permalink

greetings all,

while we're waiting for the virtual/mycourses status on '3 Days of the Condor', note that we will be having a screening Tuesday at 7pm in the media space at Watson.

Posted by chk at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

GlobalMediaLab2, featuring Global Media seminar, Gary Hustwit (director of Helvetica), James Der Derian, and a virtual John Santos (with over-signifying friend)

Posted by Watsonblogs at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Note: no screening of 'Helvetica' tonight as it is available on mycourses.

And, for tomorrow: guest speaker is Gary Hustwit. see you all then!

Posted by chk at 04:12 PM | Permalink

For anyone working on a vBlog, I am available to go through a brief 15-minute crash course on using the robotics at the Jukowsky forum. I am free between 2:40-3, and anytime before 1:40 PM on Wednesdays. If you are interested, please email me at phillip_gara@brown.edu to find a time that works.

Posted by Phillip Gara at 02:31 PM | Permalink

Aside from “After 911” and “VY2K,” we now have “300,” “Wag the Dog,” and “Helvetica” on our mycourses page. Once more, if you ever miss screenings, you can watch the documentaries on your own computers after downloading Brown’s VPN software, or watch them on Brown’s library computers.

Please be reminded that “Helvetica” will be the subject of our next Global Media class on Feb. 20.
Have a great weekend!

Posted by Marie-Claude Hamel at 01:20 PM | Permalink

"After 9/11" and "VY2K" are now uploaded to our mycouses page. In order to view these from your own computers, just download the VPN software from Brown and connect through DSL. If you are using a Brown computer, just bring your headphones and you'll be all set!

Posted by Marie-Claude Hamel at 06:39 AM | Permalink

greetings all,

due to the conference going on in Watson tomorrow (and, if you have time, you should definitely check out: Changes in the Andes: Realities, Challenges and Opportunities for Inter-American Relations), the class will be meeting in the McKinney conference room (3rd floor, south side). see you all there.

Posted by chk at 12:24 PM | Permalink

Thank you all for responding to the initial blog entry and I think that the groupings are working out pretty even. Here's what I compiled according to your preferences:

Group 1.) Tues Feb 12th 6:30 PM List 510
Sarah Kay
William Leader
Meaghan Casey
Joe Braidwood
Kristian Walther
Alejandra Piers-Torres

Group 2.) Tues Feb 12th 8PM List 510
Michael Depuis Jr.
Alan Johnson
Megan
Amy Tan
Marie-Claude Hamel

Group 3.) Thurs Feb 14th 6PM List 510
Ben Mishkin
Veronica Cortez
William van Lancker
Kathleen Fleming

Group 4.) Thurs Feb. 14th 7:30 List 510
Michael Schub
Megan
*anyone who wants a second FCP run through, especially after the tech problems during the 1st group meeting.

If you haven't signed up all the spaces seem to be fairly open, so the choice is yours!

Finally, I'm still looking for a volunteer to lead the tutorial sessions with Scott and I. I watched the tapes over the weekend and the footage is a pop-culture "aesthetic carnival" of surveillance and simultaneity that would make for a great first vBlog. This project would count as vBlog credit, and you would get a cutting edge crash course in FCP editing!

Posted by Phillip Gara at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

While I won’t speak for everyone (a common mistake; misery does like company), the following is more than likely true of most seniors: we’re only now recognizing the gaping holes in our academic curricula. As a second semester senior, IR-Global Security concentrator, my inexperience with economics and the international monetary system is the latest in a series of problems for professional plans within “international development”. So, deficiency thus identified, I spent the past three weeks in a seminar on international financial crises, losing myself (and my sense of humor) to economic jargon and things about which, to be honest, interested me not at all. For the time-being, I’m perfectly happy in my ignorance, going about believing that economics can be taken for granted and, where not, explained through social and political happenings. And, while I’ll someday embrace the discipline out of necessity, thanks to the option of a preferred alternative, today is not that day. So, I’m a late-comer to the class.
Fortunately (a real overstretch of “silver-lining”), international finance and debt crises aren’t all that’s wanting in my academic portfolio: the little experience I’ve had living in an internationally-discussed climate of change and/or crisis interested me in the relationship between images of conflicts and personalities and their spatially (or socially/culturally/politically etc.) disparate recipients. The exchange of ideas and “realities” across borders is remarkable for the effects on involved parties. What’s most concerning about global media is how each exchange must every time be questioned for bias and [physical and ideological] lenses.
What then do global media accomplish? In my experience: [irrational] panic in my parents. Last summer I worked for about three months in Ethiopia, mostly in the capital, Addis Ababa. The day I arrived, the New York Times published an article that began: “In the Ogaden Desert, Ethiopia, the rebels march 300 strong across the crunchy earth, young men with dreadlocks and AK-47s slung over their shoulders” (“In Etiopia, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality,” New York Times, June 18, 2007). I can only imagine how the image of dreaded, gun-toting men, not yet learned in the best practices of the human rights regime, terrorized my mother. For those of us “on the ground,” however, we had absolutely no idea what journalist Jeffrey Gentleman and contributing reporter, Will Connors (with whom my colleagues and I later had dinner), were talking about. “What goes on here,” the article continued, “seems to be starkly different from the carefully constructed up-and-coming image that Ethiopia – a country that the United States increasingly relies on to fight militant Islam in the Horn of Africa – tries to project.”
The power of media is their projection of agendas that either increase or decrease the subject’s legitimacy in the eyes of the “global community.” The Times article cites two viewpoints on the state of Ethiopian democratic and human rights-related affairs, and my experience in the country identifies with neither of them. The media have enormous influence over the world paradigms into which we fit new information, and I’m interested to look at their many forms and get a better idea of which is most persuasive (read: persuasive ≠ objective).
Persuasion requires that an argument stand up to questioning, and Barthes makes a related point: “To question is to interpellate…so a game is set up: although each side knows just what the other’s intentions are, the game demands a response to the content, not to the way that content is framed” (319). This non-violent questioning is exactly what blogs encourage, as does this class. It seems that the strongest teacher-student relationship is that in which both parties take ownership for their speech by putting it out for public consumption and/or criticism. Writing does not as often come up against such immediate and pointed criticism except for in the new generation of media – blogging, in which, due to anonymity, ideas may be even more aggressively challenged for their objectivity. That looks to be one of the more interesting parts of this class – the exchange (albeit not in this case anonymous) of criticism of our written opinions. Writing, Barthes says, “has no smell” because of a temporal and spatial separation from the creator. I find this argument less persuasive for two – among a potential “many” – reasons: our blogs will “smell,” as did the reporting of my friend, Will Connors, who was forcibly deported to Nairobi after the second bad-press Times article ran in late July (“Ethiopia is Said to Block Food to Rebel Region”, New York Times, July 22, 2007).
As for the “over-mediated” death of Heath Ledger: it’s striking how profoundly the media have made celebrities a part of our emotional lives. The bloggers on Ledger’s death are at once so upset and so confused about his drug- and depression-related fall that you can’t help but recognize two things: first, media have a persuasive effect on what and who is important to us; and, second, media often don’t know – or tell – the half of it.

Posted by Kathleen Fleming at 12:17 PM | Permalink

Entry Assignment, William Leader

This is my entry assignment. I apologize for being late. I am a RUE student (I took five years off between sophomore and junior year) and senior concentrator in Political Science (IR track). I have always been fascinated with media. Books, films, Ataris and Nintendos mediated childhood escapism and fantasy that was much more alluring than my surroundings, which could most readily be described as a whirlwind tour of America’s most bland suburbs (my father having been an up-and-coming IBM executive during the corporation’s heyday).
My brother and I played with the first PCs made by IBM, but we devoted most of our waking hours to my father’s 8mm video camera – making primitive stop-start animation with legos and clay. What draws me to media is the power of the image. International relations is comprised basically of power relations, and the media permeates every aspect of modern life – becoming more “real” than interpersonal interaction.
I am attracted by the technologically oriented aspect of the course, along with its focus on praxis in addition to theory. The web log or “web blog” seems a particularly fitting medium for discussion of Barthes. Although technically writing, the blog more closely represents speech in its immediacy, familiarity and dissemination. This entrance assignment, and its public posting, positions each of us, the students, as subjects for analysis – by virtue of our parole vide, we are exposing ourselves while attempting to expose Barthes.
While perhaps another iteration in the motif of speaker as policeman / analysand, the implication of both audience and orator, student and teacher in speech tends to break down the inequity inherent in power. Student contribution on this level implicates us in “laying down the law” – an idea abhorrent on its face, but tantalizing.

Posted by William Leader at 05:13 AM | Permalink

same screening, same location, new time!: 8pm.

**note: the Watson Institute "locks down" at 7pm (i.e. you would need card access to get into the building). I will be there to let people in at the side door right next to the media space, so if you knock on the window to the room, someone should be there to let you in.

Posted by chk at 01:05 PM | Permalink

How can I borrow a copy of VY2K and After 9/11? Thanks.

Posted by Anne T Krapu at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

greetings all--

next week's screening (Tuesday, 7pm) will be Wag the Dog and will again be in the Watson media space. I know there will be FCP tutorials going on at that time, so do plan accordingly... again, we will try to find an alternate screening time if you are unable to make that particular screening.

(plus extra points to anyone who can write a propagandistic jingle for Albania.)

Posted by chk at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hello Global Mediaers,

It's Phil [general technical research assistant phillip_gara@brown.edu] and more virtually, Scott (research assistant in editing and ePublishing www.staticrooster.com)

So, here's the low-down on the Final Cut Pro tutorials:

The meeting times are Tuesday the 12th from 6:30PM to 8PM and 8PM to 9:30PM, and Thursday the 14th from 6PM to 7:30PM and 7:30PM to 9PM--all sessions (listed below) are at List 510] *subject to changes and popular demand posted on the blog, voiced in class or over email phillip_gara@brown.edu:

group 1.) Tuesday 12th, 6:30PM to 8PM
group 2.) Tuesday 12th, 8PM to 9:30PM
group 3.) Thurs. 14th, 6PM to 7:30PM
group 4.) Thurs. 14th, 7:30PM to 9PM

The groups will meet for an hour and a half, and I am hoping that we can organize relatively even group sizes by listing your preferences on the blog. Please respond to this post by adding your name and the number of the time that best fits your schedule (if you have no preference, please go to a relatively empty meeting period):

PLEASE READ: To teach the final cut pro tutorials, Scott and I going to be using the tapes of Thomas Levin's lecture on simultaneity and surveillance from last spring. We are looking for a student or a small group of students interested in working on an early (and awesome!) vblog that can hang around for all the sessions and act out the tutorials as we teach final cut. The idea is to make the labs real time and interactive, so on the 12th and 14th Scott and I would direct the final cut pro labs towards producing your vblog. We would not only cover the basic techniques of final cut pro, but we would also use audience feedback to begin building a narrative for your vblog. If all goes well, the process would be an introduction to interactive self-publishing: in being the magicians' apprentices during the labs (Scott and I for editing techniques and the working groups for stylistic suggestions), you would become a great magician.

I hope that the sessions will kick off a semester of great productions and I think that they will be useful even for students who already know Final Cut, because we will be discussing both documentary production techniques and all of those new FCP features that you may not know about. Finally, we'll be distributing two differernt quick start guides/cheat sheets on documentary production and editing to coerce you all into coming to the sessions.

Posted by Phillip Gara at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (305)

In the hyping of Super Tuesday, you might have missed one of the best satires (allegories?) of the transformation of the Presidential Race into an episode of the Three Stooges, featuring the late-night trio Stewart, Colbert, and O'Connor, with a cameo by Huck. Mockumentaries don't get much better:

http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O'Brien/video/index.shtml#mea=213670

VTY
JDD

Posted by James Der Derian at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

...a tile which aptly captures our current era and one among several rationales for the global media seminar, but which also references the phenomenal essay by the jack-booted philosopher Maritin Heidegger, from which we find good reason to reframe tomorrow's session. Heidegger's point, amply simplified, was that the 'death' of all-knowing/seeing god(s) and the rise of new global technologies and aesthetics make it possible, indeed necessary, to enframe our worldview with a radically new perspective: easier said than done, as born out by the armies of 'international experts' who have projected their own parochial concerns as global interests. But last Sunday's New York Times Magazine cover story, 'Who Shrank the Superpower', by newbie Parag Khanna seems to get the world picture righter than most. You will get to be the judge, thanks to the tireless efforts of Global Media (hale) Fellow Chris Lydon, with whom I will tag-team for a class-to-studio interview with Khanna. So here's the plan: Udris Productions presents the how-to in the first part of the class, and asks for volunteers to document the event for a hands-on in the second part: praxis and theory all bundled up . So read up (url of article is below) and come prepared for questions in class and for the blog thereafter.

Or as Martin put it: 'Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called into question...[when] the gods have fled the resultant void is compensated for by means of historiographical and psychological investigation of myth.'

VTY
JDD

Here's the url for the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=parag+khanna&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Posted by James Der Derian at 04:01 PM | Permalink

Update (2:39pm/Tues): We will only be screening After 9/11 this afternoon.

Unless you hear otherwise, tomorrow's screening for VY2K and After 9/11 will be in the media space at Watson (first floor, north-west corner of the building). The screening will start at 3:30. Since there are two films, please try and come for at least one. I'm not sure what the status on loaning out VY2K is, given that there is only one copy and, last I checked, it's in VHS form. For those of you unable to make the screening, please let us know via blog comments and we'll try and make the film(s) available to you.

Posted by chk at 07:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

As a junior concentrating in Modern, Culture, and Media: Track 2 (formally known as Art-Semiotics) I am looking to take my passion for and knowledge of media and film production outside of the boundaries of the MCM department and into today’s global media environment. Since I arrived at Brown I have concentrated all of my energies into the study of media theories and networks. I came in as a photographer, but have been drawn to video production, especially video editing, while at Brown. Last year I studied with Christopher Witmore, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, about the place for video documentation of archaeological sites. That work produced a short film documenting an underwater archaeological dig in The Black Sea, Ukraine that I was a member of the following summer, as well as peripatetic video (http://proteus.brown.edu/witmore/2241 - a form of interactive, participatory video to be played on media tools such as an ipod in places such as archaeological sites) of Patrick Dougherty’s site specific sculpture on Brown’s campus. This year my work has been focused with International Relations Professor, Kay Warren, for her Violence and the Media course. My research with her has involved producing a short film for her course depicting Bill Nichol’s theories of documentary and collecting material off the web from sites such as YouTube to be used in the course. My personal video work is mostly experimental video and digital images focused around the semiotics of fashion, exhibition culture, and electronic music.

What I am most interested in looking at is how new media and its constant change and innovation with new technologies re-defines both the reception of and the production of media. Current media makers adapt quickly to cultural change, converging the latest trend into a formal structure like the evening news, and without notice the viewer easily receives this modified form of news. Such quick adaptations change the conventional practices of viewership and bring up questions of freedom and control. New media appears ubiquitous and free in that every user of technology is also a producer. However I would like to look at the military-entertainment-industrial complex that builds and runs those technologies. I think it is vitally important to take the now with all seriousness and look at our post-industrial society as it shapes us.

The complex and well-developed structure of current media makes the serious work of cultural critique rather difficult. I would like to look at media in the way that Roland Barthes in “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” looks at speech, as an irreversible act. Media is defined by the thought or object of its message and the style or form of how it presents itself. Once media is presented it is instantly seared into the minds of its audience, therefore media makers work “on the side of speech.” Media uses its power of persuasion to achieve personal aims and goals often within the corporate or political party it represents. Looking at the reception of current media, we can see that we enjoy our training in unawareness of the power mechanisms of media.

Yet there is a tool against such powerful systems: theory. Barthes explains that the theory of writing is able to break down the system of language through the dispersion of its elements. Theory takes apart a situated system with specific goals into a vast field of signs and referents. Here the intellectual or artists can represents theory through giving voice to the Other, the hidden or silent forces, within the system of language from the newly revealed multiple points of interest. The viewer can distinguish this central point and see the “plurality of interpretations” for every sign within the media system. To represent media through theory takes away our ingrained desire to float with media’s structure and instead breaks down media back to its sheer materiality. It is here discovering media’s framework that the fun begins and the “war of meanings” plays out. Barthes explains it is the artists or “workers of the intellect” who have the ability to “construct a revolutionary axiomatics in which the other can finally speak.” Within the codes and method of media, the artist can represent the silent, hidden resistances and slippages that evoke truth and empower change by disarming dominant power. I look forward to working with other students in this course to break apart the power mechanisms of media and give voice to those kept silent!

Posted by Megan Goetsch at 04:26 PM | Permalink

The Economist has a (short) book review in their current issue of Marc Sageman's Understanding Terror Networks. Now, while Sageman's book doesn't explicitly deal with the media (and, that being said, neither does the article), I think the image they selected for the review is an interesting one (see above).

Posted by chk at 03:34 PM | Permalink

My name is Megan Billman and I am a third year student concentrating in Modern Culture and Media. During my time at Brown I have become very interested in the intersection of media and development and have pursued every opportunity to learn and think more about the relationship between these fields. I have worked as a research assistant on a Public Health project in Mali, West Africa and have spent a lot of time as a volunteer workshop coordinator at the local arts non-profit, New Urban Arts, where I have facilitated workshops in which students engage with the local community and present their findings in media form. I have worked in many different media, with words, with metal and most recently with movement, and am committed to a sustaining a dynamic relationship to information. I hope to pursue a career which combines media production and community engagement, in which I might continue to be experimental in my attempts to interpret and represent information and may arrive at a better understanding of the ways in which the presentation of information influences our response to it.

I would love to be a part of this seminar on Global Media. I bring to it enthusiasm for and experience in critical theory and media production and would benefit greatly from an introduction to historical perspectives on the role of media and a foundation in classical international relations theory.

As for Barthes’ “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers” I found this essay a meaningful way to attempt to come to terms not only with each other in our respective roles as students and instructors, but with the project on which we will embark. As we set out to learn more about the various ways in which we ‘inform’ ourselves about the world, Barthes determinedly reminds us of the limitations of the forms with which we work. He writes, “writing can tell the truth about language but not about reality”(320). I would like to consider the ways in which other modes of representation (for example, photography) might also be said to be “on the side of the law.” Do new journalistic forms like blogging and cell phone photojournalism subvert the law to which official language has traditionally been subjected?

Additionally, I would like to explore the relationship between class and the composition of the media establishment. Barthes writes that the proletariat occupies “the place of the unconscious” of bourgeois discourse but that though “other,” this “other” is itself but a “different bourgeois discourse.” What implications might this theory have for the relationship between formal media sources and grass roots level journalism made possible by new technologies?

I bring these questions and many more to this meeting of media- ward minds. With hopes to explore them with you all.

Megan

Posted by Megan Billman at 01:12 PM | Permalink

I am Willem Van Lancker and I am a sophomore Economics student at Brown and a Graphic Design major at RISD. When I discovered this class online I was immediately drawn to its significance in relation to my passion, media and design. In what is becoming an increasingly globalized world every day, with the spread of instantaneous media coverage, the rise of China and the integration of interests all over the planet, I understand that my work environment will demand a view of the world as a panoptic entity. Gone are the days when we can think we will be successful in our own insular domain. I want to uncover how global media has permeated our decision making over the course of history and how it has truly become a device with its own power - not just an outlet for world news. We are on the cutting edge of a revolution in how we absorb advertising and media. I want to be able to have a better understanding of the global marketplace and how I can be most maneuvering within it.

On “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers”

What first struck me after I read Barthes’ “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” was his commentary on the irreversible nature of speech, “a word cannot be retraced except precisely by saying one that retracts it” (Barthes 309). While saying this, Barthes falls into his own erratic use of language, parenthesizing all of his wayward or qualifying thoughts. When read aloud, Barthes’ piece is spoken in a stammering, difficult to follow document. However, when we, the readers, absorb it from the page, it becomes conversational and recognizable. Barthes attempts sum up his thoughts near the end of the article saying that once the written word is produced “I can objectively account for the former [writing] that ‘I’ am no longer in it” (Barthes 322).

Barthes continues to elaborate, here and throughout the article, that speech is immeasurably more powerful than writing, both for a teacher and human beings in general. Though I can agree to a point, as a student of typography and on a broader scale, Graphic Design, the written letter, word, and page hold a much more tenacious hold than the fleeting nature of a speech. Today our world is being transformed with the proliferation of digital video. When this article was written in 1971, most of the speech that was captured was very premeditated, a thoughtful act. Reading this passage brought to mind the Watergate scandal. If no one had been able to capture the spoken word, Nixon would never have been impeached. No one would believe the investigators if they had simply said, “we heard someone saying something.” The written word on the other hand, is entirely incriminating. Once the word is out there, you cannot “show the eraser yourself,” (Barthes 309). It is there; it is concrete and cannot be reversed.

This now brings me to the discussion of the power of speech in the classroom and the deconstruction of language in today’s world. It would be interesting to see what Barthes would have written had this article been published in 2008 rather than thirty years in the past. Today the contract of education that Barthes superbly lays out on pages 314 to 315 is virtually non-existent in the large university classroom. The introduction of the Internet in the classroom, where now at some large universities a student can take all of his/her classes online, has broken down the significance of the teacher student relationship. Furthermore, there is an increasing dilution of the discourse of language. If a student is sitting in his/her dorm room “attending” class the professor has no way of knowing whether or not his/her message is being received or that he/she is being boiled down to “a reduced version, dead yet substantial… not knowing if what is taken (siphoned) out of the flow of speech is erratic statements (formulae, sentences) or the gist of an argument” (Barthes 312). My closest personal encounter with something of this nature here at Brown was my Economics 11 class held in the cavernous Salomon Hall. In EC11 there was no opportunity for a teacher student relationship to be cultivated, she would stand up on stage and speak “at” us, not in a format where we were encouraged to stretch our comfort zones by participating and learning from one another. One of the most important reasons many people attend a school like Brown, is to be surrounded in a community of intelligent, motivated people. Instead, though her lectures were informative and well planned, we would sit in a passive environment one very similar in nature to staring at a computer display or television.

Today, in the in midst of the “YouTube” effect, we find that this deconstruction of language has progressed from casual speech into the media, and anyone with a video camera or phone and an Internet connection. With the introduction of video-blogging in recent years, news articles and the proliferation of ideas has become such a casual procedure that we lack the former pluralism and eloquence of writing. Watching the news today I am overwhelmed that we live in a society where even the “credible” news outlets cover the death of Heath Ledger as a “tragedy” putting on the same level of say a Mother Theresa figure (if you believe Heath Ledger affected your life or anyone’s for that matter as much as Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or the like, please let me know). A sickening repetitive cavalcade of images bombards us, blasting our senses daily. Furthermore, everyone can offer their opinion whether informed or not and much of the blind public will accept it as a fact because the person appears to have an air of authority (Wikipedia?), something Barthes pointed out as crucial for the success of a teacher or speaker.

Both speech and writing today need to return to a world where they are regarded art forms, intellectual pursuits, not as mere outlets for self-promotion or the attempted resuscitation of worn out stereotypes. “Language is always on the side of power; to speak is to exercise a will to power” (Barthes 311). Language in teaching, writing, and everyday speech is a what makes us human, our ability to articulate and convey our realities with each other and coexist in an environment where we can “float,” and connect with an “art of living” (Barthes 331). I would hate to see that go to waste.

Posted by Willem Van Lancker at 11:16 AM | Permalink

Interesting article in today's (Sunday) NYTImes--Offering New Roles to Wounded Marines

Posted by chk at 06:07 PM | Permalink