Rei Zhang, September 24, 2020
Post-productionAilee mentioned in class the concept of producing media for itself and not for an audience, and gave the example of making films because filmmakers love the genre. Instinctively, I found that I didn’t think that media can exist without an audience, so I wanted to consider this idea of an audience-less media and see if I can find a counterexample or counterargument.
Take the example of art films, which are typically not made for mass market appeal, focus on aesthetic/visual goals, and/or fall outside mainstream standards and trends. However, these art films are still made with an audience in mind because they, as a form of media, must communicate some message. Even if the film is made out of the love of art, I would argue that the film is communicating the filmmaker’s love of the genre. Just because a film or a piece of media isn’t made to appeal to a specific audience doesn’t mean that it’s audience-less. Instead, the media, by virtue of existing as part of the process of communication, must reach some audience, somewhere.
Looking forward to digging further into the relationship between audiences and media next week – I think the ties between media and its audience when using media for a specific purpose (ex: political) and the audience’s role and influence on that media has many nuances to discuss.
Emily Yu, September 18, 2020
Post-productionAfter Group 1’s presentation this week, I was left questioning the position of the anthropologist in their diagram in two ways.
First, Grace acknowledged that they intentionally placed the anthropologists within the production of culture, noting the anthropologist’s role is to not merely be an outsider viewing the inside. In other words, the fact that the anthropologist is observing a culture means that they are embedded in their culture and their presence has an impact (like that funny cartoon shown at the beginning of class). If the anthropologists’ presence impacts the interactions of the people they’re observing, I am left wondering how it can be that the anthropologist could be able to systematically deduce some version of “truth” if their very presence alters the interactions and observations they make? I think back to Mitchell and how this is the very question that he asks and the solution he poses is that there is no “truth” but merely versions of “truth” in certain time periods and histories. Then, I am left wondering if it is possible for anthropologists to measure or systematically describe their own limited location and knowledge in relation to the people they are observing – would they need another person to observe how they are observing? But perhaps that isn’t the point as long as one is able to accomplish ethnography and thickly describe, then perhaps not being able to completely describe your positionality as an anthropologist is ok.
Second, I’ve been thinking more about the position and role of the anthropologists. Ginsburg notes that there is a responsibility for anthropologists to support unarticulated voices and to critically analyze the way in which those with power use media. Looking back on Group 1’s diagram, they placed the anthropologists between knowledge and power, and I would also think about adding another arrow from the anthropologists to the “outputted culture.” Ginsburg notes the unique position that anthropologists have: “But our stance as intellectuals is what enables us to articulate and make public our critical analyses (22).” By adding this arrow from anthropologists to outputted culture, anthropologists have a stake in the production of knowledge where they can use the same knowledge that is going to those in power but select, represent, and articulate that knowledge in a different way. It’s like what Geertz has said, the role of anthropologists is to open human discourse, and I suppose what I am concluding from Ginsburg is that opening human discourse means offering different forms of media other than those shaped by positions of power.
Zack Kurtovich, September 18, 2020
Post-production Throughout the past week, Mitchell’s description of Orientalism as reflective of “a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world” has really stuck with me (Mitchel, p 314). As I briefly mentioned in class, I believe this line underscores an important point: power isn’t just exerted when one when an army invades a neighboring territory, or a disgruntled faction executes a successful coup d’état. Rather, in many ways, true power lies in the ability to control a population through the limitation of their conceptual pathways, the restriction of their imagined possibilities. As Foucault once explained, “there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Discipline and Punish, p 27). It is this entrenched power-knowledge matrix that pits working class people against each other, forcing us to compete for a select number of roles and resources while the elites that exploit us hoard their wealth like dragons lying on a pile of gold. From eugenics to climate change, there are countless other examples of how knowledge and “truth” have been used to justify, legitimize and perpetuate harmful dynamics of power. Thus, those with the status, privilege and resources to structure knowledge, and transitively the subsequent systems that derive from it, to their benefit are the ones that enjoy true power.
So how do we break this cycle? It’s a tough question, and honestly not one I have a good answer to. I’ve wrestled with this intellectual dilemma for the past few weeks, and extreme transparency is only solution I’ve been able to identify. To disrupt this reiterative process, I think we will have to expose the interests and biases of the man standing behind the camera like Mitchell did in his essay. Obviously, the practicality and feasibility of accomplishing this on a widespread scale is questionable at best.
Using this power-knowledge matrix as an analytical lens, it becomes clear that we live in an unprecedented and transformative era where the relationship between knowledge and power is being simultaneously cemented and re-defined. In the past, low literacy rates and high poverty rates acted as gatekeepers, restricting access to formal mediums of knowledge such as literature. As a result, most knowledge was controlled and dictated by a selective group, or nobles, industrialists or clergymen. While in many ways these elites have simply been replaced by a tech oligarchy, the advent of the Internet and social media has also decentralized this process to a certain extent and removed many of these barriers, allowing many marginalized communities to contribute to public discourse.
Who knows, maybe social media truly has broken society, perhaps we really are trapped in an inescapable cycle of knowledge and power that makes equitable progress forward close to impossible. However, I’m not sure I see it that way. I think there’s something to be said for the democraticization of knowledge. Of course, there is a dark side (fake news, increased polarization, etc), but there is also potential for enormous good, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement or the Arab Spring. At the very least, the emergence of these new forms of media provide us with the opportunity to circumvent some of the “noise sources”, like network television, that would have mitigated the flow of information in the past, allowing us to reclaim some of our power as individuals. Thus, instead of the beginning of the end, maybe this is just the end of the beginning.
Matthew Gancayco, September 18, 2020
Post-productionFor this post, I wanted to go back to identifying the difference between people who study media and ethnographers that we were discussing in class. The topic for this week in ANT 300 was specificity, which I believe pertains to this discussion. Ethnographers are able to approach media and its audience with more specificity then media analysts. On page 13 of Media Worlds, the text states that anthropologists study the ” actual ways that audiences engage with media.” In other words, anthropologists don’t analyze media and reactions to it as simply a cause and effect relationship. They also study the background information and thinking process which are unique to each specific audience.
Again on page 13, specific examples are given that express how specificity is important to truly understand why an audience reacts a certain way to media. Sponsored broadcasts in different parts of the world had varying results depending on the audience. In certain locations like Puerto Rico, sponsored broadcasts can have a unifying effect. On the other hand, the audience in politically repressed or struggling nations can react unfavorably toward sponsored broadcasts. These nations are dealing with unique situations that lead to similar reactions. Anthropologists study these environments with detail, whereas a media analyst may only see that sponsored broadcasts cause dissent.
Specificity is even more crucial in explaining the reactions of Thailand to media. State sponsored television programs involving the royal family were successful in creating national identity and pride. National television programs caused outrage as they were representing a disjointed reality that did not display the struggles on the streets. A media analyst might find this confusing, as some sponsored media was successful and not others. Anthropology dives deeper into each audience and tracks the how and why each reaction occurs.
Jerome Desrosiers, September 18, 2020
Post-productionFor this week’s post, I want to discuss more the cartoon that Professor Himpele showed at the beginning of class. We talked about how the anthropologists’ subject were scrambling to hide their technologies like phones, Tvs and lamps. This made me want to touch back on this notion of representation and like Rei said in her post, “accurate” representation.
Let’s say the anthropologists represented in the cartoon come and study this new culture. After some time, they believe they have an accurate representation that is ready to be shared in some form of media. The problem is, they missed a whole side of their subject’s culture (IE the technology in this case). To the anthropologist, they have studied and recorded this new culture to the best of their abilities but will always fail to share everything of that culture. Does it even matter if they didn’t see some aspects of their lives? Will the media they produce be wrong or inaccurate if it is exactly what the anthropologists observed?
Rei’s post reminded me that this is also something I have been struggling with while diving deeper in anthropology over the past two years. If the goal of anthropologists is to study and communicate their findings, how can they be sure they were able to experience every turtle ? And finally, does it even matter if one turtle was left out?
Cynthia Vu, September 18, 2020
Post-productionThe Claude Shannon model of the “mathematical theory of communication” depicts the distribution of information in a very linear fashion. However, I think it is too simplistic of a model to be applied to an anthropological understanding of the distribution of media. One element that complicates this model is the active participation and engagement of the people who act as “receivers” of media.
These ideas about the influence that an active audience can have on both the processes and content of media production came up in class. I had brought up examples of most recent Star Wars and Sonic the Hedgehog movies, which were productions that received such extreme public backlash that the directors and producers changed major plot points and design decisions. A lot of this public backlash was made known to the producers and studios through social media, and then the negative reception was also picked up by major news outlets which recirculated information about these events with more context and different perspectives. One of the most remarkable things about this engagement is that the intended audiences did not act as passive “receivers”, but rather they took an active albeit non-traditional role in the production of the media they would consume. As we discussed in class, the relationship between culture and media is inherently social because the relationship between producers and consumers is inherently social. All producers of media content are also consumers of media content, and consumers of media content are oftentimes producers of media content in one way or another. These examples reveal the complexity of the media distribution system.
The above examples originate from the entertainment industry, which has a significant impact on culture. Entertainment is also a space wherein minority or underrepresented groups can depict their local culture for either local or global audiences. But how should we think about the anthropologists who seek to produce a work of media (especially film, TV, video, etc.) in order to depict an ethnographic account of a culture? This is a task with a fundamentally different goal from entertainment which implies the necessity for a different approach. I think that this shift in approach also lends to a more complex reading of Shannon’s graph. There are many ways to envision the position of the anthropologist in the media distribution system (a topic also brought up by Breakout Group 1). One way to apply Shannon’s model is to place culture in the role of the “information source” and the anthropologist in the role of the “transmitter”, the person who interprets the information about culture and conveys it to an audience. However, I can also see value in an interpretation where the anthropologist occupies the role of the “information source” while the “transmitter” just refers to his or her chosen media method of transmission (the aforementioned film, TV, video, etc.).
Either way, considering that anthropology is a discipline of study but one that relies heavily on social analysis through social interaction, I’m curious about if and how an anthropologist’s intended audience can influence the media that they produce. How would an anthropologist respond to backlash from their intended audience, whether that is the cultural group they’re engaging with or someone outside of that cultural group? Like with a work of entertainment, is the anthropologist amenable to incorporating that audience input into the creation of their media? Or is this a matter more similar to journalism, which is less likely to allow audience input to influence their content? I am referring to input that comes from the general public rather than an academic peer. I would be curious to see how the media creation and distribution chart might be depicted on a case-to-case basis for different anthropological projects.
Grace Logan, September 17, 2020
Post-productionIf I went back to edit the model that my group made after our class discussion today I would do more to show the dialogue between media and culture. I think that our model was made with the idea of culture as context on our minds. And while I do think that this has some truth, Professor Himpele’s diagram with culture at the center and several webs of context coming off of it made me think that our big homogenous culture circle may not be the best representation of this relationship. To reiterate in another model I would like to show the feedback between media and culture better as well as the multitude of interpretations of both.
A note on particularity: I struggled a bit when putting together our model and recall at one point suggesting we make an executive decision to label it “Relationship of State produced Media and Culture”. This thought occurred to me because I felt as though it was difficult to create a general model for all media and all culture ever. I think that Group 2’s model that divided up different producers of media and showed different routes of mediation was an interesting conceptualization that addressed the issue. Narrowing the model down to show a specific piece of media, specific producer of media, or even a specific media platform would make the exercise easier. Thought maybe easier is not what we are going for. It’s possible that my trouble with this part of the model exemplified what Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin call for – that is a theory of media that takes a more ethnographic approach to instances of media and how the fit into and influence the cultures they appear in rather than defaulting to a theory and model of homogenizing mass media. It may be interesting to construct a model through looking at several particular instances first and then try to revisit my group’s model. Perhaps it would prompt me to break down “Media” further into categories, identify producers and audiences, and to recognize it as a process.
Maya Stepansky, September 17, 2020
Post-productionDuring our discussion about Media Worlds, I was particularly interested by the way we can think about media’s ability to convey meaning/ideas/concepts to an audience and possibly communicate the direct motivations by the media creator. First question I had was–is this even possible? Can media truly translate the creator’s exact meanings/feelings/messages/purpose for creating this media to an audience? Or is there something innate about media as a method of communication, such as its representational nature (like the added “noise source” in Shannon’s communication diagram, or the added glitches or lack of face to face communication described in the “Why Zoom Is Terrible” NYT article) that gets in the way or makes it difficult for audiences to fully understand the true messages/intentions that are trying to be communicated by the media creator?
This topic made me think about a conversation I had in my music major junior seminar the other day when we pondered how composers are able or not able to convey the original meaning/intention behind their compositions to an audience when it is being played by another performer. Is the composer able to fluidly convey meaning to an audience directly through the performer, or is this a more fragmented process where meaning can get lost/shaped differently through the medium of the performer? And even from the performer to the audience — is the audience truly passive and therefore do they receive the meaning from the performer exactly as the performer had intended for them to? Personally, I see the communication of musical meaning/purpose from composer, to performer, to audience as a fractured one–and so, naturally, this made me then think– is there a similarly fractured communication of information from media creator, to media, to audience? My inclination is to say that communication is similarly fractured through media in the same way that it is from composer-performer-audience (like the game of “telephone” that I mentioned in class)–but at the same time, a media creator has more control over the media that they create, than a composer who, instead, has another performer playing their music to an audience. In that vain, the performer is certainly more of a “noise source” to an audience than media is. Unless, of course, the person who comes up with the intention behind the media is different than the person who actual creates the media, such as in a movie where there is a screenwriter who may have their intentions for writing the script and then a director who may have a different vision of how the story will be communicated through the media.
I think I am leaning towards the idea that communication through media is generally fragmented but that some creators can be more successful than others in conveying their intended meanings to audiences–this is of course a continually developing idea which I hope to continue to flesh out and think about further is we continue this course.
Joe Bartusek, September 17, 2020
Post-productionI really like the use of Shannon’s communication/noise model for thinking about the more complicated paradigms of exchange we see in instances of media and culture. Just as, in its more technical interpretation, it provides a theoretical basis on which computer scientists can study error-correcting codes and statisticians can study forecasting and regression, I think it’s useful to recontextualize it as a theoretical basis on which to study the cultural causations and implications of media, as we’ve been doing so far: we split a signal (some piece of media) into its ground truth (the “message” in Shannon’s model) and the layers of cultural influence that obscure, change, and complicate that truth (the noise).
I think it’s inherent in media to require this type of analysis because for an idea to be presented to an audience, it needs to be transported to them in compressed form. from the producer’s perspective, this happens on multiple levels: storage and bandwidth limitations usually require some data to be lost for the most important data to be delivered quickly, and time limitations require a producer to approximate ideas as best they can. Compression can be seen as noise, but subtractive noise—information is lost in and before transit, leaving gaps in the message to be filled in by the audience.
We were talking in class today about the notion of active producers and passive audience/consumers, and I wanted to talk more about how this dichotomy could be seen as incomplete; the audience’s act of filling in gaps in the message and creating their own ground truth is just that, active, whether conscious or not. I think it might be interesting to also view this act of interpolation as part of the noise in our media-culture Shannon model.
If this were true., noise in the media-culture relationship would not in fact be under any one actor’s control, due to the complexity of the feedback processes we discussed at length in class today. All parties involved affect how ideas evolve in transit and how they’re received in the end.
I’m excited to start looking at case studies in Media Worlds because I think that will be really instructive for further determining how a media-culture Shannon model would look.
Rei Zhang, September 17, 2020
Post-productionI want to discuss the complicating concepts of identity, context, and (accurate (?)) representation, especially when it comes to the anthropologist and the role of the audience in providing meaning to media. We discussed in class a little about how a strength of anthropology is its focus on non-Western and/or “other” places and cultures, and how the role of the anthropologist is to study and record culture.
Say, for example, there is a piece of media in a culture, and an anthropologist immersed in that culture experiences that piece of media alongside the “normal/indigenous” population. Do the anthropologist and the indigenous audience experience the media in the same way? Do they “receive” the same message? How much of the meaning of that media is encompassed in its consideration of the intended audience (the people that belong to that specific culture in which it was produced for)?
Ultimately, if the goal of the anthropologist is to study and communicate the messages, meanings, and webs of meaning, culture, and context embodied in that piece of media, how can they be sure that they’re exporting a “real” representation of that media and its meaning?
Everything seems so interconnected and tangled to me now, especially when you consider the role of the anthropologist in it all – it really might be turtles all the way down.
Ailee Mendoza, September 16, 2020
Post-productionAs we all know, I am super interested in the cultural exchanges and social processes that take place in the production of media- specifically in the world of Hollywood filmmaking. You could imagine that I was geeking out over this reading.
One line that stuck out to me in the introduction was: “Objects shift in meaning as they move through regimes and circuits of exchange…the meaning of texts or objects is enacted through practices of reception.” It immediately reminded me of our discussion yesterday, when we talked about how the production of knowledge is inevitably influenced by the geographies, histories, politics, etc. that constitute the unique environment in which the researcher is situated. Well, doesn’t that also go for the production of media?
Mapping out the production of a feature film all the way from screenplay to final “object” becomes extremely mind-boggling, as we have to not only account for all 3000 pairs of hands that contribute to this process, but for the infinite degrees of uniqueness and cultural backgrounds that shape all 3000 of these people. I mean…that’s A LOT of turtles. In this way, even in the editing stages between the director’s cut and the final cut, there are so many tiny decisions made that will irreversibly transform the film’s meaning- what will be conveyed to the audience. The remnants of the film’s original screenplay or the original story idea before any words were even written down are involved in one giant circuit of exchange; the bare concept changes and grows as it is handed off and received at different stages in the film production process.
In the same way that I wonder what is the use in trying to peel back layer by layer of representation if we’re never going arrive at the true, untouched “reality,” I wonder what is the use in…ethnography. I know that this is a gigantic question, but as we dive further into reflexivity and into the blurred boundaries between “objective truth” and “personal narrative,” I am very perplexed about the purpose of our discipline. Is it just glorified storytelling? Is ethnography art?
Anna Durak, September 11, 2020
Post-productionWhile I was reading Mitchell this week, I found myself both thoroughly confused and yet simultaneously enlightened by his arguments on reality and representation. Last semester, I took a class in the anthropology department called museums, monuments, and memorials. In this class, we discussed the representation of certain cultures, people, and events in our histories and how they illustrate a particular narrative to their audience and the effect of that narrative on our perception of the world around us. I believe that this reading would have fit very nicely in with that class and its topics that centered around the untold narratives behind the representations of history. This further reminds me of our discussion of Kyle Rittenhouse and the Rodney King trial. In these two instances, people of authority (ie Trump and LAPD) have injected their own “perceptions” of the disputed media which we both have consumed. Because of the station of authority in which these narratives were delivered, many people are then unable to perceive the event in an objective manner and thus this representation becomes their reality. I find this dilemma to be rather frustrating and wonder where the role of the anthropologist plays into this “maze” of the reality of our society. On page 21, Geertz states that the anthropologist “confronts the same grand realities that others… confront in more fateful settings: Power, Change, Faith, Oppression, Work, Passion, Authority, Beauty, Violence, Love, Prestige; but he confronts them in contexts obscure enough… to take the capital letters off them.” While I am still confused by the implications of what I am trying to convey, I feel like this Geertz article helps me comprehend our role in this labyrinth of reality. We are not to find the overarching meaning of all of these “profundies” as Geertz calls them, but rather to create representations of realities that renounce each other and create further discourse and paradoxes. I am not sure if any of what I just wrote makes sense but I hope at least some of it does.
Lauren McGrath, September 11, 2020
Post-productionIn this blog post, I wanted to continue our class discussion in making connections between what we discussed in terms of creating a context in the Rodney King case and reality versus representation. I was thinking back this morning to a comment one of my group members made this week: Trump, in discussing the Kyle Rittenhouse video, and White, in defending King, employed similar methods of arguing that “all the proof is in the video”. It struck me that two individuals, arguing about who is at fault but with polar opposite causes and beliefs, pointed out that the significance in action lies in the film, not the interpretation. The phrase “you all see what I see” is in this case incorrect, as interpretation is the summation of the image and context, together.
Building off of this, I wanted to touch on Ailee’s comment in class yesterday, when she said that for something to exist as reality, it has to be represented first. The films of Kyle Rittenhouse or King suggest to the viewer that there is a reality outside this representation. However, I’m thinking about how to combine all these layers and upon each other: the film is a representation that there is a reality, but the representation depends on contextualization to generate an interpretation.
In terms of the dynamic between representation and reality, I wondered if their relationship could be tied to the statement, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound”? According to Ailee and Mitchell’s reading, one would believe that a tree wouldn’t make a sound because there was no one in a close enough distance to create a representation of the tree, in the form of a video, memory, descriptive writing, ect. Can this same dynamic be applied to the emergence and virality of police brutality videos? For our society, there is a standard that a reality has to be represented in order to be accepted as occurring? Thinking about it in this way makes me upset and angry, in that representation is “needed” before reality is legitimized.
Jeffrey Himpele
Comments
Emily – I like how this two paragraph post starts with questions of the impact of an external anthropologist on their field sites and on the knowledges they create. But it seems to answer the problem posed by shifting the terms to one of relationships. That is, by thinking about the forms of engagement and connection entailed in anthropology. This inherently social approach seems much more fruitful than the image of discrete billiard balls knocking into (i.e. impacting) one another!