Completely Uncultured

Bios

Hugh Dauncey is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Newcastle University. His research interests include past and present French popular culture as well as television, radio, sport, music, and new media. Dauncey is currently working on a book on French cycle sport and cycle leisure.

Douglas Morrey is an Associate Professor of French at the University of Warwick. He specializes in French cinema and has written a book on French director Jean-Luc Godard and is currently working on a project on Jacques Rivette.

Quiet Contradictions of Celebrity

In “Quiet Contradictions of Celebrity: Zinedine Zidane, Image, Sound, Silence, and Fury”, Hugh Dauncey and Douglas Morrey examine the nature of the celebrity of French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane. Furthermore, they examine the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and the short story La Melancolie de Zidane to explore how media portray this national hero who is also an “inscrutable cipher.”

Because Zidane has been so resistant to communicating verbally with the masses, his celebrity persona is somewhat ambiguous, and because of this, individuals interested in Zidane have more latitude or freedom in interpreting his persona than is the case with many other athletes. This is how Zinedine becomes “Saint Zidane”, who spends time helping children; the maestro on the soccer field, who seemingly understands the moves and strategy of the game better than anyone else; and the man who loses his temper and head butts a trash-talking Italian player. Furthermore, this freedom of interpretation, the authors argue, allows his image to be appropriated for addressing political and social issues in France.

Dauncey and Morrey identify Zidane as what Braudy termed an “emblematic individual”. Though this type of person experiences the benefits that go along with celebrity, it also puts these individuals at the mercy of the storyteller in the image-creating system, so “the famous person is thus not so much a person as a story about a person” (302). Using Whannel’s concept of hybridity, or a way of understanding intersections of race and identity, the authors articulate the tension between Zidane’s race and his place as a beloved French footballer. Though Zidane was born in Marseille, his parents were both Muslim immigrants from Algeria. “Not only is Zidane a French citizen of Algerian decent, and therefore a member of an ‘ethnic minority’ in France, but, additionally, his Berber origins make him a minority even within the sub-set of his ‘beur’ identity within France” (305). As the son of Algerian immigrants, Zidane, the authors note, represents the “other’s” assimilation into French culture. Thus he can be portrayed as an out-of-control foreigner or, as in the coverage of the 1998-World-Cup-winning French team, as a member of a diverse team that works together toward a common goal.

Media Coverage of Zidane

Next Dauncey and Morrey look at coverage of Zidane in the film portrait Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait and the short story La Melancolie de Zidane.

The authors’ examination of the film is perhaps more useful for its approach than its actual findings. They note that “if this portrait [the film] looks closer than ever before at Zidane, it ultimately has no secret, no truth to reveal about the player” (309). Though the authors conclude that the film doesn’t give us any greater insight into the mind of Zidane, their analysis of the video may be particularly helpful for those of us seeking a greater understanding of methods for analyzing film or television. Especially, interesting to me was their treatment of slow motion (311-2). Also, much like the article in “Anarchy in the USA”, the music used in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, relayed an attitude, in this case Zidane’s growing anger.

In La Melancolie de Zidane, a short story that looks at the last game of Zidane’s career in which he was ejected for head butting Italian Player Marco Materazzi, Jean-Philippe Toussaint further explores the idea of Zidane and agency that began in an interview that appeared in Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. In the film, Zidane admits feeling as though the games outcomes were predestined. In La Melancolie, Toussaint frames Zidane as the victim of the impending end of his career. This is the real source of frustration that leads to the head butt, and the image of his armband slipping down is “an unconscious sign of his weariness and resignation” (316).

From Last Week . . .

We were talking about Mulvey last week, and I wasn’t sure if you’d all seen this LOLtheorist, so I thought I’d include it.

Now, on to van Dijck.

Bio

Jose van Dijck is a professor of Media and Culture and Dean of Humanities for the University of Amsterdam. She received her PhD in comparative literature from UC San Diego. Van Dijck has taught at MIT, Georgia Tech, and the University of Washington among others. Her research interests include “media and science, media technologies, the popularization of science and medicine, and television and culture” (“Jose van Dijck”). She has published multiple books including Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, The Image Society, The Transparent Body: A Cultural analysis of Medical Imaging, and ImagEnation: Popular Images of Genetics among others.

Summary

Similar to Booth, one of Jose van Dijck’s arguments in her case study of YouTube is that social networking sites have created a “need for a more comprehensive approach to user agency”(42). Her article looks at the role of today’s media consumer/producer through cultural, economic, and labor relations lenses.  Van Dijck starts by dispelling the fallacy that old media (e.g. television and radio) had passive recipients while new media allows for active environments. Even before social media sites, van Dijck argues, people still found ways to engage in activities that allowed them to express themselves about certain media. Furthermore, not everyone today is an active participant. Van Dijck says that there is a continuum of users online ranging from those who create a large amount of content to those who set up an account and rarely use it. All of these users are part of online communities, but van Dijck argues convincingly that current models are based on an active creator/passive recipient binary and do not account for user diversity.

In the next secion, van Dijck discusses economic implications of content producers and consumers. On user-generated content (UGC) sites, participants serve dual functions as content generators and consumers. Even those who don’t generate content are still an attractive demographic to advertisers. In the UGC model, sites do not have to pay for content, as it’s all provided free by amateurs, and site administrators profit from ad revenue based on the number of hits their sites accrue. Users have now become both content providers and data providers, as these sites have implemented the use of databots to harvest user data, and because users must agree to this data harvesting in order to use many sites, “they [users] lose their grip on their agency as consumers” (47-9). To illustrate, van Dijck uses YouTube and its buyout by Google as an example. YouTube has introduced mandatory commercial clips at the beginning of many videos on entertainment channels, and Google has begun shifting the YouTube’s interface toward that of GoogleVideo.

In the section on labor relations, van Dijck explores the myth that UGC sites are really driven by amateur users. In reality, amateurs make up only part of the sites’ members. Van Dijck classifies users into three groups: entertainment, career, and family. Because entertainment users will stop using the site when it stops being fun, oftentimes companies such as YouTube have felt the need to supplement amateur content with “prefab entertainment content” (51). Furthermore, many “amateurs” actually use the site to as a means of achieving career-oriented goals. Many people serious about making movies or music use the UGC medium in an attempt to get noticed or become famous. In such cases, many are “amateurs” only in name and, though they may not be making a large income from their content, they are quite experienced and are using the medium to professionalize. Responding to the need to keep the entertainment user, YouTube created ranking systems and suggestion formulas that suggest videos for users rather than letting the users find content themselves. Van Dijck concludes this section by suggesting that we need to reinvent how we view contributors and content evaluators on UGC sites. Only after we see this sliding scale of amateurism and professionalism will we be able to account accurately for trends in content or monetization.

Analysis

While I found this to be an extremely strong and persuasive argument, this article also made me realize that we have a long way to go in terms of creating methodological approaches that both allow us to portray accurately the different levels of users while at the same time creating research that can be generalizable and useful to a wider audience. I agree with what she’s saying about viewing users on economic, labor, and cultural continua, and her complication of fan cultural to include aspects of labor relations and cultural perspectives is much needed.

Discussion Question

1. Van Dijck says, “YouTube fame only counts as fame after it i picked up by traditional mass media” (53). Do you agree with this? What examples can you think of that contradict or support her claim?

Works Cited

“Homepage of Jose van Dijck”

van Dijck, J. (2009). Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, culture & society, 31(1), 41-58.

Bio

Paul Booth is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Technology at DePaul University. In 2009, he received his PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, rooting his dissertation in studies on fandom. His research interests focus on “the intersection of New Media, Technology, Popular Culture, and Cultural Studies” (“Paul Booth”). Booth has published in numerous journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Visual Literacy, Narrative Inquiry, Games and Culture, and American Communication Journal.

Summary

In “Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification”, Booth calls for the revision of the traditional understanding of fan culture. Conventionally, researchers have employed a gastronomic metaphor to describe fans’ interaction with texts. Fans consume a text and then respond to it. However, the rise of social media has created the necessity for a new metaphor that sees new media texts as practices rather than as objects (Booth 515). Viewing these texts as such problematizes the economic models previously used when examining fandom and reveals the need for new models that account for variables such as self/identity and relationships in fan communities.

In previous classes, we have talked about de Certeau’s tactical action in which producers of texts strategize ways in which they can guide fans to consume texts. Fans, in turn, can digest a text in this manner and appropriate it to serve functions perhaps unintended by producers. De Certeau refers to this appropriation as fans’ tactical action. Booth argues, though, that social media requires a more complicated theory than de Certeau’s tactical action theory because online communities not only adapt or appropriate a text but they also share, experience, or extend the text together.

Online communities complicate previous conceptions of fandom because social networking allows users to represent themselves in new ways and enables them to collaborate and distribute content in new ways. Before social media, our public display of identity was the visual sense of who we are. Online, Booth says, we are not tied to these restrictions. We can create a mosaic identity made up of fragments of ideals that we hold or messages we want to convey. Social media allows these identities to collect and form communities where they can interact with texts and each other to create new content. These new creations, Booth asserts, fall outside previous conceptions of textual poaching.

Booth continues by showing how MySpace profiles afford users the ability to create a distributed narrative, “a conception of serialized narrative form experienced in discrete units, separated by time and space” (Wheeler qtd. in Booth, 520). Distributed narratives are particularly interesting for Booth because they are fragmented. Such fragmentations encourage an understanding of these narratives as spaces or environments where meanings can be made and new content can be constructed (520).

In dissolving the de Certeauan concept of tactical reading and action, Booth suggests that fans show a new type of textual poaching through narrativized dialogue, through branched narratives, and through fan-created dialogue. Narrativized dialogue requires users to respond to other users thereby creating new relationships and identities (522). Branched narratives occur when fans extend texts outside of traditionally canonical works and allow fans to create new content and tie their own online identities in with that new content (527). Finally, fan-created dialogue combines the two, allowing fans to create communal relationships and a transmediated narrative (529). He uses instances of MySpace to illustrate each.

Analysis

Though I find Booth’s observations to be interesting, I’m not sure what I think about some of his supporting claims. I was confused when, citing Jenkins, Booth claims that youth culture sees online spaces as distinctly separate from other spaces and as spaces where people can have their own identities, but then he follows that by asserting that MySpace can complement real spaces. I understand that online spaces are online and real spaces aren’t but so much of the subject matter for both overlaps. Furthermore, Booth claims that “it is online identity that matters: all virtual personas have equal status” (521), which I cannot agree with.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you view the relationship between online spaces and real spaces? Are they distinct from one another? Are they related? Both?

2. What are your thoughts on Booth’s assertion that online identities have equal status?

Works Cited

Booth, Paul. (2010). Paul Booth. Academia.edu.

Booth, P. (2008). “Rereading Fandom: MySpace Character Personas and Narrative Identification”. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25, 514-536.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Building on what Christy has said in her blog, Raymond Williams had an interesting path to academic success. After finishing his undergraduate exams at Cambridge, he served as a specialist in artillery and anti-tank weaponry during World War II.

After his return from the war, Williams completed his M.A. at Trinity College and was a tutor in adult education at Oxford. Williams taught as a visiting professor of Political Science at Stanford in 1973 before returning to Cambridge as a professor of Drama in 1974.

Though Wikipedia has a more extensive list of Williams’ works, the most important seem to be Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973) Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), and Marxism and Literature (1977).

Summary

Right out of the gate, Williams opposes McLuhan’s view that technology shapes society. Williams begins by problematizing the statement “television has altered our world”. He classifies nine interpretations of this statement into two main categories: the first is technological determinism and the second is symptomatic technology. The technological determinist camp suggests that the invention of technology has consequences that result from the creation and presence of the technology itself. For instance, the claim that if television hadn’t been invented we’d have a higher average IQ is, too a large extent, technologically deterministic since it suggests that it was the invention of the technology that caused this social change. Based on our reading of “The Medium is the Message”, Marshall McLuhan would be in this camp.

The second group, the symptomatic technology camp, believes that media are used by an order of society to manipulate others to further its own agenda. This position states that if a specific technology such as television didn’t exist, this group would find another way to influence or control the masses.

Both views, Williams argues, are not fruitful because both assume technological research and development are self-generating. Instead, Williams suggests we view technology as an intentional process of research and development guided by “social needs, purposes and practices,” and therefore, the technology itself is a central part of fulfilling those needs (7).

Using this hybrid of technological determinism and symptomatic technology, Williams says that inventions including Blakewell’s copying telegraph (1847), Carey’s electric eye (1875), Nipkow’s scanning system (1884), and Braun’s cathode-ray tube (1897), all demonstrate that television was foreseen, and it was being sought after. Its invention was encouraged by the formation of technical communities and investment of resources by the decision-making groups (12). In this case, expanded military and commercial operations needed not only person to person communications systems but also a way to broadcast (13).

The industrial revolution marked the breakup of small farming communities as citizens abandoned farm life to work in factories. Thus, the industrial revolution marks the beginning of the mobile family, not only going toward industrial jobs but also having more recreation time to explore and take interest in places and events around them. Williams refers to this as mobile privatization. These social conditions spurred the development of broadcast media. The answer to this mobile privatization movement was the development of an affordable domestic receiver. Williams suggests that both the radio receiver and the television receiver followed the same two-step process. The first step was making the technology for transmission available. It was only after that step was completed that groups began to worry about content.

This model of centralized transmission and privatized reception isn’t without flaws though. Williams says that the need television fills, its use of relaying commentary on other events, and our dependence on it to fill that need have prevented financial backers from supporting further technological exploration and development of the medium.

Analysis

This article is a much needed response to McLuhan’s theory in which media changes us whether we like it or not. Williams’ take that identifies a reciprocal relationship between society and media are, at least for me, much more palatable.

Much like some of our earlier readings such as Marx & Engels, Adorno & Horkheimer, and Gamsci, “The Technology and the Society” seems to take control out of all of those not a part of the controlling class (what we’d expect from the person who wrote “The Base and the Superstructure”). Though, I’m not sure if Williams ever defines who the controlling class is, it seems like it’s safe to say it isn’t us.

Discussion Questions

1. What is the role of the consumer in this article? How does it compare to that in “Encoding/Decoding”? “The Culture Industry”?

2. Williams states that “within the broadcasting model there was this deep contradiction of centralized transmission and privatized reception” (24). Can this model still be relevant today? How has social media changed it?

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) (a.k.a. the patron saint of Wired magazine) was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 to a school teacher turned actress and a realtor. Wikipedia notes that though he had earned a BA and MA from the University of Manitoba, the University of Cambridge “required him to enroll as an undergraduate ‘affiliated’ student with one year’s credit toward a three-year Cambridge Bachelor’s degree, before any doctoral studies”. He held teaching positions at  Assumption College and St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto. His major works include The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), and War and Peace in the Global Village (1968).

In addition to the phrase “the medium is the message”, McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects has become an important method for analyzing media.

In addition to his accomplishments as a scholar, an article by Gary Wolf also credits him as one of the inventors of Prohtex, a formula that removed urine odor from underwear without masking other scents as well because, according to the article, B.O. was a valuable means of communication for preliterate man.

Marshall McLuhan’s legacy lives on through foundations such as The Marshall McLuhan Center on Global Communications, programs such as The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, and kick ass youtube videos including those featured below.

“The Medium is the Message”

Perhaps McLuhan’s best known work, “The Medium is the Message” suggests that new media, not the “content” on these new media, shape how we interact and see the world. McLuhan uses the railroad as an example. He claims that even though the railroad didn’t introduce movement or transportation or the wheel to humans, it caused us to create new kinds of cities, work, and leisure (p. 108). The medium of the railroad allowed us to see our existence differently.

McLuhan then goes on to discuss the influence of electricity. He argues that because the process of mechanization requires fragmentation, it can never be used as a method of understanding change. It creates a sequence and “as David Hume showed in the eighteenth century, there is no principle of causality in a mere sequence. That one thing follows another accounts for nothing” (110). With electricity, argues McLuhan, “the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again” (110). The advent of the movie marked the visualization (and the beginning of the end) of mechanization and cubism reinforced the importance of the idea of the medium by attempting to give a three-dimensional object depth in a two dimensional space, thereby undermining traditional notions of perspective in the canvas medium (111).

After explaining the importance of electricity and the role of cubism in uncovering the biases of more conventional media, McLuhan posits that understanding traditional media will not prepare people for the introduction of new media and that western civilization has “confused reason with literacy” (112). McLuhan asserts that just because we associate being able with being literate, we aren’t necessarily better prepared to understand new media. “We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation” (113).

In the middle section (esp. 114), McLuhan articulates the severity of his stance, insisting that the content of the media does not matter but only the media themselves do. “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (114). Furthermore, McLuhan asserts that the effects of technology do not just change our opinions, but they change our definitions of normalcy and our patterns of perceptions.

“The Medium is the Message” keeps with many of our readings including Hermann & Chomsky, Marx, and Williams in the way it hints at the subconscious manipulation of viewers, that is, the way that media influence our social and personal mindsets.

Clearly this foundational piece for cultural studies has numerous strengths. One of the most important aspects of this article is its focus on the medium itself as a site for rhetorical analyses. For example, instead of worrying about the programming on television, McLuhan suggests that the television itself has certain affordances that shape our interactions and changes how we interpret the world. Furthermore, McLuhan’s tetrad is a beneficial heuristic to consider when analyzing media forms.

While I found this work thought provoking, I disagreed with the severity of some of his statements. For example, McLuhan suggests, “the content of writing is speech” (107) However, historical linguists have noted that early writing systems were not created to document speech but purchases or trades of land and goods. I’m not quite sure the extent to which this would change his point, but it seemed worth noting.

Along these same lines, it seemed McLuhan’s assertion was very absolute. The medium matters the content does not. This was published in 1964, toward the end of structuralism, which may yield some explanation as to why McLuhan’s viewpoint is so extreme. I don’t quite feel comfortable adhering to the binary that McLuhan has created by saying the medium is the entire message, but after reading this I do feel that it is a larger part of the message than I had previously considered.

Discussion Questions

How doe McLuhan’s definition of medium differ from other definitions you have come across?

[In my best Dr. Moberly voice] What would Stuart Hall think about “The Medium is the Message”?

Do you see any degree of technological determinism in what McLuhan is saying?