I stumbled upon an essay by David Hockney in The Guardian that I wanted to share... It's kind of all over the place (it goes off on at least one tangent I think) and I don't know enough about medieval European history to judge whether his analysis is accurate. (Many Guardian readers disagree with him, apparently.) But I think the following is paragraph pretty great food for thought. Reading it helped me realize how happy I am to be living in era when people are making video clips of Big Dog Beta and I'm able to watch them.
The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What's now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.
Check out the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/27/religion.filmnews?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
6 comments:
congrats on yer first post, Odori! Although, you do have like ummm...pro experience.
He makes some great points, my favorite being the one you pulled out, Odori. I do think this point is often overstated, though. So may are saying the new technology of content creation and sharing is going to be the ultimate democratizing force in culture. Maybe that's more true for leisure (YouTube is probably the purest example), but I think information is a different story. Google's search algorithms are closely guarded secrets, and Wikipedia is run like a police state. And where's "YouNews"?
Being, you know, in the Media, what's your take on this, Odori?
I had a great lunch with Odori a while ago and we discussed some of this. I got the impression that bloggers are already making the "YouNews" phenomenon kind of happen, but I don't see this as a democratizing force, either, Pone. Democracy suggests that the masses (or elected officials) vote on standards for the community to follow. The internet is much more an anarchy in the broader sense–-society without any governance–-since here, anyone can choose to believe whatever the hell they want and find volumes of "information" to back them up regardless of conventional beliefs. Maybe for more of a democratic system there's sites like Digg and Reddit, but those are purely content distribution rather than content creation.
And I think that's why democracy fails on the web. Democracy works because you've got investments in a particular country forcing you to stay and obey their crummy laws and it's rather hard to immigrate to somewhere with better weather.But what forces you to stay at a particular place on the web? You can't mandate parents to send their kids to Brainpop to homeschool them when the ID educational website (or Time cube) is but a click away.
And I love Hockney's work and I liked how he contrasted art and image, but I don't know. We apparently have conflicting biases, but the decline of the church in Europe has more to do with camera phones than science...? A common ground is more likely via the rise of the internet in general and availability of information, but then WHAT ARE WE DOING WRONG HERE IN THE US? We've got access to the same internet as Europe does, so where the hell does this come from? Okay that's specifically about evolution, but still (btw, that's a great site. Scienceblogs, I mean. And that's a great magazine. Seed, I mean).
What I want to know is how those countries magically ordered themselves according to their acceptance of evolution.
That connection between the manufacturing of cameras and the fall of the church did seem a little kooky. The way I've always heard it, it had more to do with manufacturing in general.
But yeah, it's funny that we've been spared the same enlightenment. Maybe it has to do with the frantic beliefs of those who settled here--but Australia isn't full of criminals anymore, so does that argument hold any water? Yes, it does, probably; because a father who teaches his daughter to pick locks is likely to be seen as a scoundrel of sorts, whereas a father who teaches his daughter to be afraid of an insecure magic creature who lives in the sky is more likely to be thought of as a pillar of the community. Faith is a successful survival trait in this environment, and it is passed on, ironically enough. Our cultural DNA is sick with faith.
I think you're right about democracy on the web. there may be democratic systems in place, but the thing as a whole is a mess. Furthermore, on the internets, it's much easier to find yourself selectively confirming what you already believe than challenging any notions you might have. I really have to stop reading Digg.
A citizen news service called OhMyNews did so well in South Korea a few years back that it challenged the mainstream and mostly conservative South Korean media. And from what I read, it helped propel an opposition leader into power in 2003. (I think Fugu and I talked about this during our lunch...)
See the NYT article on OhMyNews:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6D7153FF935A35750C0A9659C8B63&st=cse&sq=ohmynews+south+korea+election&scp=1
ｶ OhMyNews launched an English language version a few years back, but I found the articles clumsy and cumbersome.... The Korean language site must have had better quality control if it was so popular, though unfortunately I have no way of verifying my assumption...
ｶ There's an American site called Associated Content that I've been to a few times. But I run into the same quality problem there. (It calls itself "a platform that enables everyone to publish their content in any format on any topic.")
ｶ I think for news, quality control is absolutely key. I'm not going to read a story that starts off with a plodding, boring first paragraph. And I don't want to have to wade through a story to figure out what it's about. So I tend to seek my news from professional sources...
ｶ Reporting also takes time and money. Not many people can devote full days - or months - to covering this court case, or that political campaign, for no pay.
ｶ I think those might be some of the things preventing a robust YouNews...
ｶ The problem now, I think, is that newspapers are laying off professional reporters by the hundreds because fewer people read them. There are going to be fewer people out there getting this news for us. Who is going to report the news instead? I don't know if anyone will.
Already, neither Honolulu paper has a reporter assigned to cover the environment. They used to, but not anymore... Ditto for Native Hawaiian issues.
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