° pixelkraut.net
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'your objectivity will be
televised. ecology, economy and affect in news media.'
The title of this project is problematic in more than one way. First,
it raises the question of objectivity and promises to televise the very
objectivity it seeks to outline, but also refers to three other notions
that have a pre-established meaning and relates these to the topic of
news media.
Although ambivalent, this is
nevertheless intended to describe the problematic the project seeks to
examine in the context of news media and new media art. The notion of
objectivity is brought in here because it is regarded as critical in a
trend that has been bemoaned by media professionals and media and
communications scholars alike, what they dubbed the
“commodification of news”. The commonplace
interpretation of this description means that the news, previously
regarded as the independent (i.e. not state-controlled) bearers of
public opinion, increasingly engage in a trend which emphasizes style
over substance opposite to what is regarded as the actual duty of the
news companies and corporations, namely to deliver quality, that is,
in-depth coverage, in public information rather than quantity, meaning
a sheer superficiality in news reporting.
From a theoretical perspective, the
‘commodification’ claim is debatable because its
methodology and genealogy are inconsistent. The argument assumes that
in order to raise profits, news corporations around the world,
especially the ones which expanded into transnational media
conglomerates, put less investment and effort in
‘actual’ reporting and more effort into appeasement
of the consumer, such as human interest stories and fancy layouts,
therefore turning it more and more into a ‘sheer’
commodity, a consumer product. This backtracing of the current state of
news media to its non-commodified origin is contradicotry from a
historical perspective, since the first emergence of a commercial mail
system with a regularity in occurrence of delivered messages, out of
which the forerunners of the modern newspapers arose, took place during
the time of the mercantilist states of Venice and the beginning of
long-distance trade between European kingdoms during the late middle
ages and the earliest onset of the Renaissance. The technology of
transport and the delays in the shipping of goods required the
merchants at the time to not only have detailed lists about the
contents of each shipment that was sent out, it also required them to
gather meta-data about non-local events that might affect their ability
to trade.
In that sense, the “news” has always been little
more than a commodity, a virtualized system of information relating to
transactions of commodity trade and their distribution. Rather than
trying to account the news for being responsible of current shifts in
the commodity relation towards news media, one has to examine and
understand what motivated contemporary culture to regard news media not
as “just” another commodity and why some
individuals (among them media professionals and scholars) perceive that
the commodity relation of the news media has changed in the past few
decades. The underlying reason for that is not so much that the
commodity relation of the news media towards society and culture has
changed due to novel ways of its distribution, which is a case of cum
hoc ergo propter hoc, but that the conditions of emergence for the
commodity relation of news media have undergone shifts in two ways,
economically and politically, which do not only affect the news, but
the whole commodity relation in general and therefore contemporary
capitalist culture throughout all strata and nuances.
The underlying idea of this project is
that these shifts formulate and organise themselves in procedures which
operate on the basis of affect towards the individual human perception
and therefore are able not only to create a teleological event or a
series of them, since this would imply that these events could be
separated from an instance or period of their absence. The
virtualization, repetition and recursion of affective strategies create
an ecology, a “climate” of events which perturbate
and overlap each other in a way which is no longer clearly traceable on
the individual receiving end and in the collective further processing
of these pieces of information within the culture itself.
The current range of media types and
formats in terms of news media, even by giving credit to the critics of
the increasing conglomeration of news companies, and the way the
information distribution operates on a commercial level create a
complex system of interacting, overlapping and recursive moments of
affect, a system which might be called an ecology in the absence of a
linear causality which would have the ability to clearly trace every
cause to its effect, a methodology of observation which by default
inherits its own limits and inaccuracies when related to empirical
analysis.
It is not only along the lines of the
commonplace knowledge that “only bad news are good
news”, meaning that only the coverage of catastrophes sell,
it is their simultaneity and the reiteration of the sound- and
video-bites that contribute to an interwoven memory imprint in the
individual out of which new the possibilities of new communication
emerge. The tsunami threat and the global appeal for funds thereafter,
the missile threats of North Korea and of the Hezbollah and Israeli
armies, the daily war casualties in Iraq, sporadic features on
Afghanistan and the closing down of international airports, the rising
prices for crude oil and the falling dollar along with the latest
medical breakthroughs in stem cell research and face transplantation.
To analyze these incidents as isolated events in the context of an
analysis of news media and affect would not do justice to the initial
concept of the scheme. It is the clustering and overlapping of these
pieces of information and the complexity of their entanglement that
necessitate a different methodology in terms of an observation under
the notion of an ecology to be able to address the phenomena of
pattern-forming or the emergence of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari called a machinic phylum.
For that reason, it is important to not
only identify the components and their relations of such mechanism
independent phenomena, because in order to relate this back to a notion
of a informational ecology and to analyse its consequences of reception
it is also necessary not to completely reduce the moment of perception
and reception of information to an act disembodiment and intangibility.
As stated above in the context of neurosciences, it is the reception of
information in terms of its breaking down and filtering as a bodily
function that constitutes the act of receiving, decision-making and
feeding back into the communication system.
If the relation of information towards its own environment and the
feedback of the human body and the gap in its perception, which, as it
has been stated above, should be taken into account in an analysis of
the process of individual processing of information and
decision-making, can be seen as a system which possesses the
characteristics of an ecology, then, in turn, it is not too far fetched
to relate the informational characteristic, be it in the form of binary
language, text, film or even an image, back to the interpretation of
the body itself.