Media forms, from their inception, are constantly debating between veracity and virtuality, between the representation of “truth” and the practice of storytelling. The practice of photography once thought of as an unfiltered representation of reality went about a radical break with the introduction of dark room manipulation. The way media was viewed went through a similar break when European philosophers like Ferdinand de Saussure made a distinction between the sign or word and its signified. Such thinking exposed that it is the gap between the image and its signification where meaning is produced. Critical theories of media begin here and developed throughout the 20th century with technological advancements in media and further expansions in thought on media.

In our current global political arena as an information society saturated in media there is a much greater need for seriously thinking about current media forms. Inspired from John Phillip Santos lecture in the Global Media Seminar at Brown University on Wednesday, March 12, 2008, this essay will argue that in order to have any form of resistance in our current era of information culture, critical theory and practice of media must examine these chasms between reality and illusions, especially in how they differ from previous forms.

Media comforts a viewer, as she or he is allowed to be outside of oneself in front of a canvas, in a movie theater, or even browsing the web. This comfort as Guy Debord gives the spectacle in his famous book, The Society of Spectacle, is aligned with the passivity of viewership, the promise that the sole message of “a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned” is “What appears is good; what is good appears.” Due to the saturated and sheer numbers of images that strike us every day, we desire a moment of rest leaving us vulnerable to media’s force. Critical theory arose in order to fight this passive reception and investigate media’s power. The evolution of critical theory is a genealogy or evolution of human consciousness. Critical theory in other words is the understanding of how humans are manipulated by media’s modalities.

The evolution of media theory, which in essence is media itself, is a fairly recent story in the realm of history. The story begins with the emergence of photography in the 1800s. The work of William Fox Talbot and his predecessors created images that were considered “a pencil of nature.” The prevailing context of photography for 25 years was that the photographie represented reality. Even from the start of photography it was evident that the meaning of an image as a piece of evidence was complicated by the factors that shaped it: ownership, cultural settings, and viewing context. For instance Matthew Brady’s civil war pictures brought the battlefield to the public in a political context. Viewing the actual photograph was much powerful than the engraved newspaper image, but the same message came across and the public became image weary all the same.

By the 1880s, the illusion of reality was crushed when it became evident that manipulation in the darkroom was possible. Photography went in two directions. Some photographers took up the practice of storytelling in their photography. For instance one of the most famous hoax photographers was the writer and artist Lewis Carol and his fairies series. While others stayed dedicated to the practice of truth telling, this divide was also inherited in early cinema. The camp dominated by the Lumiere Brothers filmed a train arriving at the station, workers leaving the factory. While the work of Georges Melie created artifice with his film “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). Media began to create a space that constructed both reality and artifice for a viewer. The Lumiere Brothers’ film about a train arriving at a station made early cinematic viewers jumped out of their seats in fright of a reality that was too real. While at the same time, voyeuristic films for pleasure and the cult of stardom became extremely popular. The line between illusion and reality in society began to blur.

In the realm of philosophy similar advancements went on, most notably with the work of linguist philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure broke the notions of a unified sign and signified to reveal that not only are they separated but also there is a gap between the two that produces meaning. “Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance. ... The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself, the individual is incapable of fixing a single value.” This thought that meaning is socially constructed lead to media theory, which took as its aim the underlying issues that structure media. No longer was the issue of reality versus fiction, but how reality is turned into fiction and fiction into truth through media.

This field of discourse surrounding media brought to light importance issues that shaped media, most significantly temporality and ubiquity. The temporality of a photograph and film, a frozen moment or a moving past, complicates the space of time for a viewer. This issue becomes more pronounced with the introduction of live transmission, but media is instantaneously present from the moment of projection yet not immediately evident. The ubiquity of the medium was that anything, one, time, where was subject to its presentation in media. This unimaginable concept complicated the issue of surveillance and the creation of subjectivity in modern society.

In the 1920s at The Frankfurt School, a German school of neo-Marxist critical theory, a group of philosophers who had the impulse to theorize media emerged and developed the foundation of media theory. These theoreticians began to look at how culture is influenced by media and look into the deeper sources of social meaning. For instance one member, Siegfried Kracauer, developed the idea of the “mass ornament” in every day culture. The “mass ornament” was in ordinary places, especially urban, an antecedent to theories on mass culture. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer progressed the concept that industrial processes were also a factor in constructing cultural meaning. The most famous forerunner for media theory, Walter Benjamin and his essay “ The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” developed the aesthetic side of culture in an industrial, mechanical age. His work, unlike his other colleagues, inspired strategies of resistance against the mechanized culture. As readers, thinkers, producers of media, one was an actor and poetic agent. The producer has the power to redefine and alter media rather than be a victim to the conforming system.

The institutional media systems, Hollywood and Network Television, developed throughout the 1900s and were rarely critiqued, especially in America. Resistant work and critique were silenced or non-existent. With technological advancement in media production and contemporaries of The Frankfurt School finally beginning to speak, independent media emerged by the 1960s. In the 1970s, Marshall McLuhan developed popular theories critiquing mainstream media, in particular television. His theory was that the proliferation of information flows was deeply complicated. On the technical side, handheld cameras became accessible and a “do-it-yourself” media production industry began to develop. Television, a medium that crystallized the American social dynamic, was one important place for such change. Politically and socially television held the most influence and access to the American public, particularly seen in the American presidency or historical moments caught on television. It was a space that allowed for short documentary series in news shows, for example CBS’s “CBS Reports.” The independent movement gained momentum with such broadcasting.

Another factor in this story was the globalization of subcultures. Mass media allowed for a globalized virtualization force or as Paul Virilio, in his essay “The Visual Crash,” warns us the seductive “globalization of the collective imagination.” The most famous example of globalized subcultures is the Rock n’ Roll media artifact, most notably seen in Beatlemania. The ubiquity of music makes it perfectly transmittable through various media modalities from the radio the television. As non-local connections set in with a single beckon of meaning, it was possible to connect non-local people. Media environments and ecologies began to take hold. With this came the understanding that an unfathomable number of global media environments existed and there could never be a single frame for the entire concept of media. This fact, supported by postmodern theories of subjectivity, made new forms of resistant media and critique necessary to create self-sustaining media apart from the conforming and generalizing mainstream media.

Baudrillard:
"This could be a strategy of the media, to offer spectacles that are more hollow and meaningless than reality – hyperreal in their stupidity and therein giving spectators a differential possibility of satisfaction…Somewhere, we carry the mourning of this naked reality, of this residual existence, of this total disillusion."

The globalized independent media movement took place in the 1980s, although its roots lay in the 60s and 70s. Its form was documentaries that worked to shape and redirect political culture. Video art also began to emerge at this time. This fusion of theory and media practice worked on how images produce meaning. The crucial year for this movement to be independent was when the UN took up the McBride Commission in 1980. This commission worked to create a global media equity program; the result was the “Many Voices One World” or McBride report. The 1990s gave way to documentary culture in a culturally remarkable way. A documentary vernacular was developed and amplified with increased broadcasting.

Documentary rhetoric’s and modalities shape meaning. Bill Nichols is famous for his modes of documentary, but inevitably a documentary will use various modes in order to create complex effects for the viewer. The most interesting forms of documentary are not the mainstream modes, but the forms that break away and alter those stereotypical forms. These forms of documentaries take theoretical backgrounds and speak to current conditions of subjectivity. For example when an elliptical form complicates the classic literary documentary, as seen in Chris Markers film “A Grin without a Cat” (1973), history is rethought and restructured for the viewer. Most recently, radical forms of documentary immerse the viewer in aesthetically arresting array of images and animations in order to reintegrate a sense of self in an environment saturated with images, see Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy.

Presently we live in massive media environments. The globalized world has exciting possibilities for unprecedented creativity and invention as never seen before. However we must be cautioned. Lev Manovich writes that we must think of the “trajectories through the space of cultural history that would pass through new media, thus grounding it in what came before” in order to come to terms with current media. As media producers we need an understanding of what has come before as all culture and history has passed through media modalities. To return to the point that meaning is in the chasm between veracity and virtuality, I will turn to Baudrillard in his famous book from 1993, “The Precession of Simulacra”:

"We are no longer in the society of spectacle, of which the situationists spoke, nor in the specific kinds of alienation and repression that it implied. The medium itself no longer identifiable as such, and the confusion of the medium and the message (McLuhan) is the first great formula of this new era. There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real, and one can no longer even say that the medium is altered by it."

In our controlled society constantly under surveillance the point is not to draw the line between reality and illusion, but to understand how that line has been blurred. Virilio fears that we will reach a “visual crash” where the disinformation of capitalism will become the truth that we comfortably believe, this warning may be a reality now. Resistance is found by creating a space between the capitalist virtual stories and conceptions of raw reality, a space where the apparatus is exposed. In an age of great possibility, the task is ever more complicated.