Author Archives: Bradley Dixon

Lectorials, Media 1

Medium theory and technological determinism

In today’s Lectorial the concept of medium theory was introduced, as well as the role technology has to play in wider social and cultural development.

Medium theory is the study of particular types of media, and the way they differ (physically, psychologically and culturally) from other types of media. To me it seems related to the idea of media affordances, but on a much broader and more philosophical level. There are three main metaphors that are used to answer the question “what is media?”:

  1. Media as conduit, otherwise known as textual analysis (i.e. media contains codes and messages that can be decoded and analysed)
  2. Media as language (i.e. particular forms of media have a unique language and grammar)
  3. Media as environment (i.e. the analysis of media without regard for content [textual analysis] or grammar [affordances])

Technological determinism is the idea that shifts in society and culture are caused by technological advancements. This theory contrasts with an instrumental approach, which says that a society develops and uses the technology it needs as it needs them.

I can see how technological determinism might be an attractive theory in consideration of the industrial revolution, when advancements in manufacturing, transport and communication revolutionised many aspects of society and brought with them large-scale changes to the way society is organised in a relatively short time (i.e. modernity). But is it still applicable today, where the pace of development has greatly accelerated and is more or less continuous?

I remember before the iPhone came out – the mobile web was still in its infancy (text-only WAP browsers), and apps were basically not a thing. There was a strange year-long period there where you could actually SMS questions to a service and some person in an office somewhere would research the answer for you and send it back. Weird times. Did the introduction of the iPhone, arguably the most significant technological advancement so far this century, cause the rapid improvement of the mobile web, a shift to the app economy, and related developments? Or is it that there was an invisible, unarticulated demand for these things, and the iPhone just happened to be the first device that managed to satisfy that demand? It’s probably an impossible question to answer, which is what makes gauging the validity of technological determinism difficult.

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Media 1, Thoughts

Human Rights Arts & Film Festival

Since January I’ve been volunteering on the Human Rights Arts & Film Festival team as Awards Coordinator. It’s been a great experience, working with a very small team with tight deadlines and a lot of hard work required, and since I believe strongly in the ideals of the festival it’s been rewarding on a personal level too.

For months now I’ve been organising and facilitating three jury panels of industry experts to determine the winners of HRAFF’s annual awards: Feature Film, Australian Short and International Short. The panels are made up of representatives from the world of media and human rights, who each bring their own unique experience and knowledge to the table helping to amplify human rights issues through film and art.

Last Friday we presented the Best Australian Short Film award to Darlene Johnson’s Bluey, which is a spirited film about redemption and courage. Darlene was absolutely stoked to receive her award, which was a particularly joyful moment for me.

The festival continues in Melbourne for another week, so I definitely recommend you check it out if you have the time.

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Cinema Studies

Documentary and Grizzly Man

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) presents itself as a documentary portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a nature filmmaker and self-styled friend of grizzly bears in Alaska’s Kodiak Island national park. Using Treadwell’s own material, which he recorded over many years camping in the wilderness, the film sets out to discover what made Treadwell tick and the circumstances leading to his death.

It is a synthetic documentary that blends many different types of documentary form: there is a framing narrative that occurs in “current” time (following Herzog as he talks to Treadwell’s friends and coworkers, watches Treadwell’s footage, etc.); talking heads interviews with people speaking generally about Treadwell’s life; and archival footage and images captured by Treadwell himself during his summers in Alaska. The story is not told in chronological order, nor is it governed by cause and effect, and it contains no fictional reenactments or recreations (with actors, staged lighting, etc.), but it does contain several sequences where real people explain to the filmmaker certain events in current time, such as an aeroplane pilot walking through the wilderness and pointing out the location where he discovered Treadwell’s body.

By manipulating Treadwell’s footage — deciding what to present, and how it is presented, as well as narrating the footage with his own words — Herzog articulates his own thesis about the nature of humanity using Treadwell’s life and work as supporting evidence. Though it presents itself as a portrait of Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man is actually a more nuanced and complicated essay film, with some similarities to the rhetorical form of documentary that sets out to convince the audience of a particular viewpoint.

This is a particularly subtle demonstration of the idea that documentaries are never true depictions of reality, no matter how convincingly they present themselves as such. Herzog manipulates the objective reality of Timothy Treadwell’s life and death, and uses it to craft and present his own worldview.

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Lectorials, Media 1

Institutional values

In today’s Lectorial we discussed institutions, and particularly the way that institutions can represent extremely different things to different people. To demonstrate this, we completed a little exercise where we came up with some attributes for a particular institution, for example:

Facebook:

  • What is their relationship to their audience? What is their mode of address? Facebook is a platform that in some ways attempts to be “invisible” (i.e. Facebook is your friendships, not just the platform on which you maintain your friendships). Facebook also uses inclusive, informal language to encourage casual everyday use.
  • What are their core values? Sharing, openness, building social ties and networks.
  • What is their status? Facebook is a trusted Silicon Valley success story, enabling revolutionary forms and levels of communication around the world. But in some circles Facebook is seen as a monolithic overseer selling its user’s personal data to unscrupulous advertisers.
  • How are they more than a business? To many people Facebook is a news source (for some, their only news source), a social gathering place, an indispensable communication tool, etc.. Facebook performs many functions outside their core money-making activity.
  • What forms of regulation constrain their activities? Laws and codes of conduct restricting the use of identifying information (cookies, Do Not Track, etc.) could affect their ability to use targeted advertising. Privacy legislation is the primary way that Facebook would come up against regulatory activity.
  • In what sense are they conduits for flows of power? In localised social groups (e.g. high schools, groups of friends, workplaces, etc.) Facebook either enables or denies certain people power. It is also big enough that it can affect real-world political issues, such a same-sex marriage debates in the United States.
  • What other institutions are they related to, engaged with or aligned with? Facebook owns Instagram, another major social networking website/app. It also maintains relationships with major advertisers, governments and regulators all over the world.

I also completed the exercise for NPR, which is an institution I’m personally interested in and contrasts in many ways to an organisation like Facebook.

NPR:

  • What is their relationship to their audience? What is their mode of address? NPR is primarily a broadcaster – traditional radio stations, plus creating content for syndication and online streaming. As a public broadcaster it retains a certain level of trust as it is less beholden to commercial imperatives than other major networks, and in general it is seen as an authority in the world of news and information exchange.
  • What are their core values? Community, inclusion, education.
  • What is their status? As the major public broadcaster in the American radio sector, NPR is very highly respected. However, it also garners criticism of left-wing bias, and as a (partially) publicly funded organisation it receives periodic accusations of being a waste of taxpayers’ money.
  • How are they more than a business? NPR contributes to the ongoing cultural conversation in the United States, and also exports its ideals and values internationally. NPR is also a training ground for presenters who go onto perform on higher profile platforms.
  • What forms of regulation constrain their activities? Broadcasting laws and regulations constrain.
  • In what sense are they conduits for flows of power? As a mass media broadcaster, NPR’s inclusion or exclusion of particular people/groups/communities from its airwaves gives them great power to influence discourse.
  • What other institutions are they related to, engaged with or aligned with? Partner radio stations, content providers, sponsors, other public radio organisations like PRX and Panoply.
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Media 1, Readings

Audiences

The “audience”, since it first became codified in the 18th century as a term for those who are consumers of an event of some sort, has been evolving along with the rest of thought around media/communication ever since. First it was extended to the mass consumption of media such as books in the 19th century, and then again expanded with the development of cinema and television in the 19th and 20th centuries.1

A mediated audience is one whose experience is restricted or directed — by, for example, the publisher of a widely-read newspaper. The publisher’s decisions about what to include in their newspaper, and what angle to take on particular issues, places them in a position of power as a kind of “gatekeeper” to the audience’s experience. Throughout history this has led to huge amounts of power being restricted to a very small number of (white, rich, old) men.

The development of the internet completely broke down this paradigm, as one-way broadcast media was quickly replaced with interactive, two-way communication. Now, instead of having to watch a news broadcast on television at 6:00pm, consumers can discover news direct from the source in real time. Instead of having to buy a DVD copy of a television show, consumers can stream it whenever they like. Publishers and broadcasters, who used to wield the majority of the power in their relationship with their audiences, lost much of this power to democratisation and the increased choice of unmediated experiences offered by the internet.

Today, audiences are just as likely to be creators as consumers. We have seized the means of production from monolithic overseers (through blogs, podcasts, web series, etc.) and have transitioned from passively consuming media to actively engaging with it through discussion, discourse and sharing.2 The fundamental distinction between creator and audience essentially no longer exists, and although there are remnants of the Old Way still present in society, they are actively losing power and relevance, not gaining it.

  1. Morley, D. (2005), ‘Audience’ in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Bennett, T, Grossberg, L. & Morris, M (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, pp.8-10. ↩
  2. Rosen, J. (2006), ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, PressThink, June 27. ↩
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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Don’t read the comments

In my personal opinion comments have a net negative effect on the quality of discourse on the internet. For every wonderfully considered, well written and pleasant comment, there are a thousand hissing piles of disgust and vitriol, from the racist and misogynist to the plain incorrect. I genuinely don’t believe that the potential for constructive, positive comments justifies enabling the internet’s worst tendencies by allowing people to place their comments on the same page as an article.

For publishers to place peoples’ comments at the bottom of an article is to say “your opinion is as valid/worthy as the author’s”, which is now and has always been wrong. Everyone is entitled to hold an opinion, sure, but they’re not necessarily entitled to have their opinion legitimised. Some opinions deserve to be amplified more than others. This is a fine line and opens the door to nebulous accusations of “censorship” and “political correctness gone mad”, but the alternative is to enable racists, sexists and the absolute worst of humanity to promote their terrible opinions to the world unfettered – which is infinitely worse than some casually racist bogan from Ringwood feeling “restrained” from expressing their opinion of Muslims on an article on the Herald Sun website.

As Karl Pilkington would say… comments: get rid of ’em.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 inspiration

I happened to download this Planet Money episode on class action lawsuits the week we were choosing topics for PB4, so I listened to it with interest hoping to find formal elements we could borrow for use in our own essay. It turned out that Kat and Emily really liked the format too, so we decided that a Hack/Planet Money style podcast would be the perfect format for our PB4 audio essay.

Specifically, the elements we will be using in our audio essay include vox pops, a host providing context and driving the narrative, interviews with expert speakers, and sound effects/musical cues. With such a short production schedule and limited length our essay will necessarily be less in-depth than this Planet Money episode, but I think it’s still a handy model to try to emulate in limited form.

For the video component, Kat brought to the table a fantastic series of essays by PBS called Idea Channel, which “examines the connections between pop culture, technology and art”. There are dozens and dozens of such videos in the Idea Channel stable, and although they have a very particular style and personality (which we won’t be recreating exactly), some of the broader conceptual ideas on which Idea Channel is based will provide excellent reference for our own work.

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Cinema Studies

Style and The Age of Innocence

The following is a blog post written for my Introduction to Cinema Studies class, re-published here so all my work is in one place.

“Style”, when applied to filmmaking, is the unique pattern and use of stylistic choices common to a particular director or group of directors. Style can be identified in several dimensions:

  • Single director, that is, the stylistic signature of a director’s work across their career (e.g. Edgar Wright’s style involves techniques of visual comedy and frame matching, fast-cutting mundane actions, a mobile camera using plenty of zooms, etc.)
  • Genre or a collection of directors, such as film noir, or the unadorned style associated with the Dogme 95 movement
  • A country’s national cinema, for example German expressionism’s heavy reliance on angular compositions and high-contrast lighting to create a distinctive visual character

Although the costume melodrama is not a genre that Scorsese worked in often, several elements of the director’s personal style shine through in The Age of Innocence (1993).

Prominent narration from the point of view of the film’s protagonists or major characters is a device that Scorsese often uses to provide exposition and clarify his character’s mental state. The Age of Innocence utilises narration heavily, but it is spoken from the point of view of an omniscient outsider, who provides the audience with a wider range of knowledge than the characters on screen.

The Age of Innocence also contains a beautiful long take, which follows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) walking through several crowded, ornate drawing rooms upon entering a party. Long takes, with the camera moving between and shifting focus on several small details in the scene while following behind a main character’s movements, are another Scorsese trademark.

Less obvious stylistic elements are also common to much of Scorsese’s work, such as the use of darkness and colour to express a character’s moods, and timing editing with musical cues to create a fluid, romantic pacing. These and many other elements combine in a unique, identifiable way to make up the signature style of Martin Scorsese.

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Media 1, Thoughts, Workshops

Trigger warning

An interesting and, I’m ashamed to say, surprising conversation was sparked in our Workshop this week. The concept of the trigger warning was raised and I was shocked that in a group of twenty or so young university students there were very few who defended their existence and use.

I honestly (naively) expected the bulk of my class to fall on the same side as me on this issue, but I turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Most of my classmates seemed to agree that trigger warnings had gone too far, and there were some cries that they somehow curtail the inalienable right to free speech or artistic expression. (Note: we don’t have an inalienable right to free expression in Australia, and there are plenty of forms of speech that we as a society have deemed appropriate to curtail.)

It’s so easy for people who have never experienced any real trauma to complain about people (usually rape and domestic violence survivors) asking not to be exposed to material that could have long-lasting harmful effects. But I think if they actually knew the level of damage involved, most people would change their tune.

I understand that it might be slightly annoying to have to go out of your way to post and read trigger warnings, but does your desire to avoid that slight inconvenience trump a DV survivor’s wish to avoid a severe anxiety attack after randomly being shown a video of a woman being choked into unconsciousness in a university lecture (which we were actually shown in our Lectorial three weeks ago)? Personally, I think no – my right to say what I want is less important than the right of another human being to not randomly suffer an attack of PTSD, no matter how important I think what I have to say is.

I’m sure it was also really annoying for people in the 1960s who felt like they were no longer “free” to openly tell racist or sexist jokes in public – but that right was deemed less important than the right for women and people of colour to not be offended or discriminated against.

It’s important to note, though, that nobody argues that content that could be a potential trigger should be censored, necessarily — just that it should be labelled as such so people can make an informed choice to avoid it. We already have classification advice on films and TV shows, and language warning stickers on albums, and trigger warnings are in many ways the same thing — only driven by our desire to be respectful of others. To me, that’s a good thing.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 research

Our initial research into topics we could tackle for PB4 mostly consisted of representations in media:

  • Gender and sexuality
  • Race
    • Comparing the depiction of Aboriginal Australians in media to Maori and First Nation peoples
  • Subcultures
    • Music subcultures, particularly punk and hip hop
    • Skinheads / racists
    • Drug culture
  • Media (i.e. how creators and media technologies have been depicted in media over the history of cinema/television)
  • Technology (i.e. the development of techniques like long takes, jump scares, etc.)
  • Genre / subject matter
    • Musicals and the appearance of musical numbers in non-musical films (e.g. Magnolia, (500) Days of Summer, etc.)
    • Romantic comedy and its reflection of wider societal values
    • Time travel

After this first round of brainstorming we settled on the depiction of drug use and drug users in media, because the subject matter appealed to us and we thought it would be easy to find resources and references in an area that has seen significant research.

The day after we settled on that topic, we discovered an article that discussed the rise of sequels in mainstream American cinema, which appealed to us all as an idea. We decided that we would change the topic of our PB4 essays to non-original narratives, i.e. sequels, prequels and remakes, and trace their rise from basically non-existent in the early days of cinema to practically dominating the box office today.

There is a vast body of research into this area in academia, and there are some incredibly interesting examples and case studies that we could explore. We’ve also already managed to secure interviews with a film journalist, a film producer and a media academic to drive our essays, which will hopefully provide an interesting baseline of opinion to build upon.

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