Narcotics or Knowledge?

Well, I feel duped, as well as a little bit prescient (such a good word - I saw it for the first time today, and then just discovered it again in this week's chapter). I read the wrong chapter for this week, but seem to have already blogged about the chapter that we were actually supposed to read. As such, and since I had already written the following by the time I discovered this error, I'm just going to publish it anyway. Do with it as you please.

Here's the duped and prescient me, as a visual (and unrelated) segue between my introductory comments and my actual blog.

My mom always taught me that you can find whatever you're looking for wherever you go.

While she meant drunk college parties vs. intellectual study parties, this principle holds true of the quest for the good in a world we're told is full only of the bad.

Let's speak of mass media (since that happens to be the title of the chapter I read). If you want to point out the misuses and abuses of mass media, you'll find them, easy. But there are plenty of good things about it, too. Sturken and Cartwright present the argument that it creates a narcotic effect by "convincing people that being informed about a social issue by seeing it covered in the media is the same as doing something about it" (165). This negative kind of thinking seems to be calling us all silly sheep. Silly drugged sheep, at that.

I hold a different view. The way I see it, being a sheep implies that one is gravely uninformed. However, being properly informed on relevant issues actually is an important step in doing something about them, and indirectly, is the same as doing something. Try and shatter my idealism if you want, but I'm a firm believer in the power of my well-informed vote.

By being informed, we hold within us the potential power to effect change should a complicated issue ever come to a vote. (Now when would a vote ever be complicated?)


Another bit of wisdom my mother imparted to me is typical advice from a physician: prevention is always better than a cure.

By being informed beforehand, we preclude the need to enact change by preventing a problem from ever occurring in the first place.

Certainly, part of being "informed" is also being critical of the information we are presented with. And it would be ignorant to say that simply being informed is enough. Maybe nothing is enough. But if you're going to go around looking for the negative, go and do it over there, because there are plenty of us who are successfully looking for the positive in this nearly overwhelmingly powerful, connective tool we call The Media.

Cave Picturam! (Beware the image!)

In Biology, we often see carefully drawn images that are meant to be scientific: the view from a microscope, the details of a bird's wing, et cetera.

But wait. What?

Image as science falls prey to our previously discussed myth of "photographic truth" - even more dangerously so when we're talking about drawings, not photographs. Anyone who's done a Biology lab knows how hard it is to draw what you see in a microscope. The lines blur together and overlap and we don't always clearly see what we know we're supposed to, so we tweak our drawings a bit to get the lab done. It would take hours to draw it exactly how we see it. Even those who are actually visual enough to draw exactly what they see may be prone to a little idealization.

Such was the case with Ernst Haeckel, who in the 1800s published drawings of embryonic development to make a case for Biogenetic Law (which says that vertebrate embryos go through similar developmental stages due to shared ancestry).

Unfortunately, some of his drawings were tweaked. In fact, they were drawn based on his earlier observations and idealized to support his theory. Sounds kind of like a student who looks through a microscope, decides what the figure should look like, and then goes off in a corner and draws what it ought to be, mostly based off the image in the microscope, but fixed up a bit where needed (or forgotten).

Now, this isn't to say that Haeckel was a bad guy. In fact, he was quite the accomplished embryologist, and his drawings of nature are quite beautiful. Simply put, though, his embryo drawings remind us of the wisdom of the "perspective"-phobic Greeks. They understood that one should not trust art that claims to be anything other than art, or (as Sturken and Cartwright put it), "that one should not paint a painting that might "trick" a viewer into thinking it was real" (116).

Silly Haeckel. Must have missed that memo.

And of course, silly us for so readily trusting images (a big no no!) just because they're "scientific." Psh.

Voyeuristic Pleasure?

Does allowing yourself to be displayed in a film or a photograph mean that you are also thus exposing yourself to voyeurism? This chapter described the camera as a tool of power, because it allows the viewer to see without being seen.

There's a song by Duncan Sheik called "Magazines."
Here's a snippet of the audio and here are the lyrics to go with it:

I wondered if I would be punished for
my voyeuristic pleasure

Now I know
and you're in magazines

When I first heard it a few years ago, I thought, "Oh, that's an interesting song. I wonder what voyeuristic means." Then I looked it up (you can find the definition in Chapter 3 of our book, as well). I didn't like the song very much any more.

But on a less extreme level, aren't images all slightly voyeuristic?

Let's talk Facebook.

Until my Freshman year of college, I refused to get a myspace or facebook account. I felt that they dumbed down communication, wasted countless hours of my hopelessly addicted friends, and exposed everyone to unwanted stalking. But I cracked under pressure from my roommate and signed up for a Facebook account only a day or so after moving in to my new residence hall. I became par t of this online book of faces (and phone numbers, and drunken pictures, and random information).

With Facebook, as with so many online 'communities,' one can theoretically determine exactly how much information and which pictures are displayed. And then we're free to roam about the rest of the site, looking at everyone else. Without being seen.

We almost develop a false sense of security about it. Unless someone posts a response under a picture, we have no way of knowing who has looked at it. Maybe nobody cares - maybe nobody looks at it. Maybe it's okay to put more interesting information up. If it doesn't seem like anybody's stalking us, then we start to feel safer about revealing ourselves. It's almost the opposite of the panopticon that the book discussed, where the inmates of a prison all behave, because they know they could be being watched by a guard at any moment. On Facebook, we know we're open to being "Facebooked" by others, but it only adds to the dare. And also, the more we post, the more others will post, right?

For one of my jobs, I'm a video technician for the Experiential Learning Center. Part of what that means is I sit behind one-way mirrors and monitor multiple cameras pointed at rooms full of Business students. They can't see me, but I can see them. It's not a secret that they're being taped (and they aren't always). It's not meant to be invasive. It's to help them learn how to give better presentations, and to work together better as a team by watching clips of the exercises they do. In fact, the ELC is a brilliant addition to the Marshall School of Business.

Sometimes, though, the people in the rooms forget that that mirror they're admiring themselves in has a hallway on the other side. They forget that those cameras up near the ceiling are connected to a room full of monitors. Every now and then, we'll be sitting in our control room, doing our tech work, and suddenly we'll see a group show up in one of the rooms and start practicing karaoke. Naturally, they want to see how they look, so they face the mirrors - and the cameras, and we're back there cracking up.

Facebook and my ELC job are obviously not on the same level as the kinds of magazines Duncan Sheik was singing about, but it seems that media has brought to us a more accessible kind of toned-down voyeurism. There's something about being able to see and not be seen that makes us feel powerful...and perhaps a little evil.

Image Assignments

Part II Studium/Punctum

When I saw the image of a guy relaxing under a tree on a blanket (RF39), I looked for something that would maybe tell his story. I looked around the picture, and I noticed what looked to me like a flower down by his feet. It could just be the leaves positioned in a strange way that just look like a flower in the black and white image, but to me, it's a flower. It's a punctum flower.

The man lying on the grass is just a man under a tree until you see the discarded flower.

Then I saw the tattoo on his arm, and upon closer inspection (zoom in, zoom out), discovered it was of a woman. Now, he could just be a typical guy, obsessed with women in bikinis, but there’s that flower. If there is a connection between the woman on his arm and the flower thrown away at his feet, then I wanted to draw attention to it, so I used similar colors to highlight both, and darkened the lines of the tattoo to make it more visible. The tattoo, however, was too near the guy’s face, which draws a lot of attention to it. To bring more attention back to the flower, I created more flowers.

Part III Sign Systems

This project is currently destroyed by my computer. However, before its destruction, it was a leaflet targeted to undergraduate students studying engineering or math who may potentially become statisticians. The goal is to encourage them to pursue graduate studies in the field of statistics.

The front is color-coded red. It says, “50% pick up this side.” There is an index: a circle in the middle for reflective foil, to act as a mirror. When the person picks up the leaflet, they see themselves, and think, “I’m that 50% who happened to pick up this red side.” There’s a pie chart for a symbol. Half is red, and half is blue, and it says “50% This side” for the red and “50% The other side” for the blue half. Below the mirror it says, “Don’t be just a statistic – be a statistician!” All of the text is also symbolic (inherently arbitrary). The icon is a picture of a person picking up a leaflet (under which it says “Statistic”) next to a picture of a person with graduation garb (under which it says “Statistician”).

On the other side of the leaflet it says the same thing, but the colors are switched, so that everything that was red is blue, and everything that was blue is red.