IM lecture week #4

Some of the main points I found interesting from this weeks lecture. (And some random nots)

1. Why has reality TV become so popular? Why is it that we are so interested in seeing ‘real’ lives on TV as well as stories?
– Reality TV, while there are elements that we find familiar, it’s also watching something that isn’t like our own experiences.
– The interactivity – For shows such as Australian Idol – Viewers determine the fate and contributing to the content – they have an influence on content – There’s a desire to be involved.
– The idea that Television depicts a continuos story was raised. This keeps viewers with a vested interest.
– We also watch for the exaggerated personalities, aspects and stories but we always find a way to connect it back to our lives.
– Concept is an interesting hybrid – Media is not going to sit in a box.
– Reality TV is a hybrid – picks up ideas/concepts/elements from game shows – Quiz’s which came from radio and moved into TV… it also is the place where computer games meet television – quest, playing arena, rules, judgments, level gaining … all relates to computer games.

– Computer games are the biggest entertainment media on the planet, and has mutated itself into television land.
– So why do we like video games and Reality TV? We’re all constrained – they’re hero quests – mirror our experience of the model world – about our own ability to complete tasks – just like the purpose of reality TV shows

2. Have we lost Habermas’ notion of the ‘public sphere’ with the widespread use of mobile technologies?

3. Is there a chance that the accessibility of media nowadays ruins film making instead of ‘liberating it from the old’?
Combining the two questions together…
– Ruin is a strong word – It’s just more different, personal.. self expression. There is no ruining – if you know the skills,  you’re still going to create a good shot.
– Liberating – allowed for a more democratic forms of communications – more possibility
– There are shots you can’t get on an iPhone. However, in saying that, two objects/versions/concept can exist simultaneously (e.g. vinyl records and MP3’s or CD’s.)
– Everything we film isn’t always a “film” – grandma filming birthday shots – not a movie.
– Unedited aspect – the most interesting work is sketches. rather than more polished – leaves the beautiful stuff out, the raw, real stuff.
– Contains us = we keep thinking this is film, our language can’t keep up with the technology – there is no film involved with video iPhone – there isn’t even video – it’s something else completely different – the only thing in common is that its time based media. (Our language can’t keep up because there isn’t terminology rather we are liberating from the old- constraint – we keep judging it from the old)
– korsakow = not narrative based media – its something else. In this subject, we start to think what this ‘something else’ might be.

– Everything in the world is not a story just because we narrate it, doesn’t mean it’s a story – Our lives are NOT a story
– Narrative – story causes to describe things in the scene
– Description – moment of description – story has paused to describe. story – cause and effect. We see this in a book when a character is describing how they feel – by the time they should have thought about something in real time, the thing they were thinking about would be over, but in story time, the story pauses.
– Narrate is not story.
– You don’t kill off a character accidentally
– There is no such thing as an accident in fiction – That is why our lives aren’t stories – your lives are defined by accident and reactions to those accidents
– Scripts are deliberate

The most interesting part of the lecture for me was the idea that our lives aren’t stories. This was really odd for me, and I could see both sides of the argument (huge thank you to the student who raised some ideas against Adrian’s POV, it was really interesting). We’re always told our lives are stories – in advertising, you hear things like ‘it’s your life, your story, make it count…blah blah blah’. But then, Adrian is right; a story, in general terms, hints towards fiction – a world in which the writer controls everything. Our lives are only controlled by us (in some way the author of our own lives) but only to a certain extent. There are elements that are out of control…. As Adrian pointed out, we could walk out of class and get hit by a bus… and then well, dead.