The propaganda of the deed
8 02 2005Made curious by Marika’s enthusiastic post a while back, I got hold of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication on interlibrary library loan (thanks to the alma mater).
Lucky. Because I was feeling more than a little jaded about new economy/new media hype, more than a little sick of sitting in front of a computer screen, creating yet more ineffectual noise about the potential for digital technologies to empower more people to make more media noise. Which, I’m quite certain, I’ll get over, but this is just the cool drink of water I need.
From angelology to the history of the gift, recorded sound as suspended dialogue and empathy as communicating with aliens, there’s some wonderful stuff in there.
And this bit made me think about just why it is that sitting in front of the computer screen makes me feel jaded, and more importantly, why I think digital storytelling is more important than peer to peer filesharing, and why livejournals about the pain and banality of everyday life are more important than A-list political bloggers: against everything I’ve ever been taught in cultural studies, it’s to do with authenticity, it’s to do with presence.
To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body.
[…]
Touch, being the most archaic of all our senses and perhaps the hardest to fake, means that all things being equal, people who care for each other will seek each other’s presence.
[…]
Touch and time, the two nonreproducible things we can share, are our only guarantees of sincerity. To echo Robert Merton, the only refuge we have against communication fraud is the propaganda of the deed.
Anyone else taken a stroll through this book?
Justin Hall went a bit beyond jaded (quicktime).
Dear Jane,
I feel a little bit less enthusiastic about new media and authenticity. You really think that people read blog in a different way from what they do for movies or Tv fiction? I’m not so sure that is really possible to perceive “authenticity” in any kind of mediated communication. I was quite impressed from Justin Hall’s video, it’s an extraordinary field to observe how people perceive blog’s reality. Well, some people comment Justin’s media saying “Powerful” “You Rocks!”… and so on. What are they observing? A real “emotional breakdown” o just a media product? Is Justin touching them? I feel/think that they are relating to Justin’s dark-night in the same way they relate to a CSI episode. That means (from the audience point of view) to be able to use the represented reality to start self-observation and identity construction processes. That means to be able to say “hey Justin, I had my own emotional breakdown some years ago…”. Observing media to be able to observe ourself. The authenticity problem, of course, occurs when we look at the bloggers (or at people who makes media); but once media are in the mass communication system they could only be observed trough the narration lens (that implies a second order observation). A friend of mine said that blogs (and new media) are mass media for the masses; well that’s when observe the production process, but when you go to the audience the only thing that change is that the distinction between production and fruition is just a temporal distinction.
Luca
The Hieroglyphic Breath of Justin Hall
I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, except that I’m having an intense experience of turning inward. I guess my web site design now reflects that. It’s difficult, but it’s not unpleasant. - Justin Hall, comment on Links.net, 10th Jan, 2005…
“the only refuge we have against communication fraud is the propaganda of the deed.”
Stunning. Then again, my email address *is* ’saccharin metric’, so maybe I’m biased. I’ve got a bit of a sweetness-of-gesture obsession, which you can see in not-at-all sensical action at http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~Mccrea/
I will go to the library today and forage for the book; it seems to be precisely what I’m looking for. Thanks.
The Hieroglyphic Breath of Justin Hall
I’m not sure exactly what’s happening, except that I’m having an intense experience of turning inward. I guess my web site design now reflects that. It’s difficult, but it’s not unpleasant. - Justin Hall, comment on Links.net, 10th Jan, 2005…
I’m trying to go trough the problem of authenticity for a while and I’m quite sure that blogs are a good field to observe these phenomena. Of course I approach communication a and CmC from a constructivistic/autopoiethic point of view. I guess that observing communication as it occurs on blogs is observing 3 different moment: the production; the audience experience; the authors experience (self observation). All of these processes contain something interesting: 1) producing media about ourself implies a dramatization of our own life and experiences, dramatization that is often obtained using mass communication strategies. (It would be interesting to look at communicative strategies like suspense, unexpected events… adopted in blogs). 2) Observe what is narrated could carry the audience to start identity construction processes based upon content of these narration… that’s not necessary different from mass media. So authenticity and intimacy could exist only in audience’s eyes. Last point, that maybe is the most interesting, is what happen when author and audience could be the same person, how identity changes when we’ve got the opportunity to observe the history of our thoughts? is it different when the observer observe it’s own observations?
still working on it (sooner or later I’ll find the time to translate something in English and to set up a blog)
Oddly enough Roger Silverstone suggested I read this and I’m going to be taking a look at it shortly. Tune in to the blog and I may end up posting something about it too! (Will try to remember to trackback).
Luca, sounds really interesting - I think you’re getting at something close to what I’m interested in terms of the breakdown of the production-consumption divide. In fact, I think a lot of conceptual problems in trying to understand digital culture are caused by the “media” metaphor, especially ideas about spectatorship and audiences. I prefer to think about a continuum of participation, which can be peripheral (reading a blog post), through to intensely networked participation…I think I explain it a bit better in today’s post (above)
Further to that, I think Justin has always been more about the hyperreal than the authentic, and he knows it…
[…] Which got me thinking again, if not talking, about the idea of ‘presence‘ or of ‘becoming real’ as a key element of social communication. Offline, some of the greatest communicators are great not because of their verbosity, but because of the sheer energy and warmth of their presence: online, the only way to mark presence in both the temporal and [meta]physical sense is to talk…and talk, and talk, and talk. For the last few weeks, my students have had to engage in a class discussion via a chatroom, which seemed to encourage the reticent to speak, but by the students’ own admission led to a whole lot of talking without a lot of listening - participation for participation’s sake. Which in turn reminds me of an ongoing worry I have about where and how and for whom the read-and-write (as opposed to read-only or write-only) literacies are going to emerge in new media. Where ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ are not to be taken literally [pardon the pun] but are metaphors for catching and leaving traces of all kinds. […]