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Media Defined

The type of communication the course is focused on is media communication. Many researchers and thinkers express different points of view of what a medium is. Here are just some of them: [slide]

“In the broadest sense of the word, a medium is the channel through which a message travels from the source to the receiver” Joseph R. Dominick

What is a medium?

[Comment: sound and light waves, as well as cameras, microphones, computers]

“When the medium is a technology that carries messages to a large number of people – as newspapers carry the printed word and radio conveys the sound of music and news – we call it a mass medium. In our culture we use the word media and mass media interchangeably to refer to the communication industries themselves. We say, ‘The media entertain’ or ‘The mass media are too conservative (or too liberal)’.” Stanley J. Baran

What is a medium?

[Comment: The mass media we use regularly include radio, television, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, sound recordings, and computer networks. Each medium is the basis of a giant industry, but other related and supporting industries also serve them and us – advertising and public relations, for example.]

“Medium is a particular communication technology through which information is communicated; the term means “middle” or that which comes between two things.”

Brian L. Ott., Robert L. Mack

What is a medium?

[Question: Think of a general idea of what a medium is.]

“Mediation, however, is a force that can both reconcile and divide (to mediate is to divide – at least – in two), and that can stir reaction as well. … The image can be that thing that binds us and makes strangers to every other.” Brian Price, John David Rhodes

In the first chapter “Separation Perfected” of the book “The Society of the Spectacle” [slide] Guy Debord deals with the changing relation between direct experience and mediated representation in modern times. “The Society of the Spectacle” is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism (is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value). Now I would like to read a number of paragraphs from this chapter and at the same time to screen a part of the film “Society of the Spectacle” made by Guy Debord based on his book. At home as a part of your assignment you will watch the remade and adapted to the time we live in version of the film [performance: screening and reading 9:37 total]

Reading Text:

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.

The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings — dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from that society and established an independent realm in the spectacle can be explained only by the additional fact that that powerful practice continued to lack cohesion and had remained in contradiction with itself.

The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.

The social separation reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern state — the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.

In the spectacle, a part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.

Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.

Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.

I would like to summarize the main ideas and discuss the concepts developed by Guy Debord in this first chapter “Separation Perfected”. These concepts are the image, the spectacle, the reality, and the separation.

What is the image?

The image is the representation of what once was lived; it is detached from every aspect of life; it is autonomous, where deceit deceives itself. “For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings – tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior”

What is the spectacle?

The Spectacle Is…

not a decorative element or a collection of images, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

a means of unification and the official language of separation; the language of the spectacle is composed of signs of the dominant organization of production.

a part of society where all attention, all consciousness, converges; at the same time it is the locus of illusion and false consciousness, the autonomous movement of non-life, the bad dream and the guardian of the sleep.

The Spectacle…

governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself.

manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute, “Everything that appears is good; whatever good will appear” . It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production.

demands passive acceptance, is immune from human activity, the opposite of dialogue, as the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself.

turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.

What is the separation?

Separationis part and parcel of the unity of the world, of a global social praxis that has split up into reality on the one hand and image on the other.

The spectacle is hence a technological version of the exiling of human powers in a “world beyond” (“a fallacious paradise”) – and the perfection of separation within human beings.

[Screening “Playtime” 47:51-50:33; 31:00; 1:51:19]

Reading:

1. “Separation Perfected” by G. Debord in The Society of the Spectacle.

Watching:

1. Jaques Tati “Playtime” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6s1BGAkKgQ

2. G. Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, Part One at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV6k_SKkHKQ

3. G. Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” remade and adapted at https://vimeo.com/60328678

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