Stuart Noble

James Nachtwey on TED

TED simply provides one the most creative and innovative online forums. I first discovered TED while researching Al Gore’s climate presentations. I soon found myself “losing” hours at a time clicking through various speaker presentations.

H/t NCN for bringing this “low-tech” (for TED standards) yet utterly stirring presentation to my attention:

Photojournalist James Nachtwey was one of the 2007 recipients of the TED Prize. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it brings people from these three worlds together to spread ideas, mostly by challenging fascinating thinkers to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. These talks are available on-line at TED.com. The annual prize winners are given a $100,000 award AND granted one WISH to help change the world. James Nachtwey’s wish is to “break [a story that the world needs to know about] in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digitial age.” That story will break on October 3 both on-line and around the world. Don’t miss it!

Given my growing interest in the intersection of photojournalism and visual culture on political culture and democratic society, I’m particularly interested in how online technology may be able to “rescue” the image from the “crisis” that Hariman and Lucaites so convincingly demonstrate in their landmark book, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy.

Arguing against the conventional belief that visual images short-circuit rational deliberation and radical critique, Hariman and Lucaites make a bold case for the value of visual imagery in a liberal-democratic society. No Caption Needed is a compelling demonstration of photojournalism’s vital contribution to public life.

Here Nachtwey and TED look to reinvigorate the role of photojournalism, understood as a critical tool for liberal-democratic citizenship, and place it back into a central space in our public discourses. Here it’s interesting to see how the internet, a major enabler of media over saturation can be redeployed to cut through all the white noise.

Stay tuned, today is October 3, 2008.

Clinton Obama Debate Recap

This is by far the most succinct summary of last night’s debacle of a debate TV show hosted produced by ABC News Disney Entertainment. This captures the essence of what is, “the postmodern condition” of US politics.

But David Brooks (not surprisingly) writes in his indefensible defense of the Media, “No Whining About the Media”

Final grades: ABC: A, Clinton: B, Obama: D+.

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The War on Housing Crisis, DIY Commandos to the Rescue.

The New York Times has got to be kidding, right? After last night’s debate, ABC’s agenda became blatantly clear to anyone paying attention. Distract, distort, discredit, destroy. In a word, disgusting. So what do I wake up to in this morning’s online NY Times center cover story “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Solvent” by Joyce Wadler.

IN these times of mortgage crisis and credit card debt, of people living over their heads and losing their homes, it may be instructive to visit David and Gina Giffels, proud owners of an exquisitely renovated 1913 Tudor house, with six fireplaces, a solarium and a billiards room, which is well within their means, in part because they paid $65,000. More »

Gendered politics in the media

Last month I posted this piece exploring photojournalist representations of Hillary Clinton. Historiann recently commented;

“This is an interesting analysis of the photography of the campaign, and I agree that the photo at the top (Clinton apart from the 3 men) is highly revealing of the dynamics of the race a month ago, before Edwards and Richardson dropped out.”

She continues;

“While it may be true that “The Times, and other msm outlets have been all too willing to portray Hillary as the American Madonna of politics,” at least with photography, that’s not AT ALL the content of the broadcast media, which is riddled with gendered language and stereotypes that are deployed against Clinton.”

This is spot on, and I’m glad she points this out. Furthermore, there are many photographic examples of this as well. My analysis was in fact very specific to that time period, roughly between Iowa and New Hampshire. The narratives are constantly changing both textually and visually. We may even see a return of the Madonna or some other incarnation. I think Historiann’s main point however, is to remind us of an underlying gender bias which continues to be a constant in much of American society, which certainly is reflected through much of the media.

Mette Bertelsen, who recently finished her thesis on gender, politics and Hillary Clinton, will be contributing here in the coming weeks. I can’t tell you if she’ll be specifically looking at media narratives, which is one of my interests. But she will be addressing gender in US politics, so stay tuned for more.

Finally, a small disagreement. Historiann concludes;

“I would say that for her to be running as strong as she is now against Obama is especially remarkable, given the hostility of most broadcast media outlets to treating her with the same consideration as male candidates for the presidency.”

I’m not sure I’d go this far. Should Clinton not win the nomination it won’t be because of media hostility or gender bias. That’s not saying it isn’t or won’t be a factor. Clinton started her campaign as the media and DC establishment’s pre-ordained front runner and nominee, but oh are “they” fickle. No, should Obama win the nomination it will be because his team was ultimately better at realizing the full potential of the internet and the many online grassroots communications tools available today. I think this was supposed to be Hillary’s year and she may still become the nominee and even become the next president. But I don’t think anyone really expected to see online activism and mobilization, which really began with Dean’s 2004 candidacy, explode into the force it’s become.

Ok, that might also be taking it a bit too far.

The main reason for this post when I got up this morning was to introduce two people to the AC, Mette, who will be joining us shortly she assures me, and Historiann, who’s been on our blog role for some months. I was just delighted she stumbled across our little blog and left a comment.

“Historiann is the not very clever pseudonym of Ann M. Little, the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (2007) and several scholarly articles and book chapters on early American women’s and gender history. She is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Colorado State University.”

A Post-Broadcast Politics

One of my “hobbies” as it where, is studying and reflecting upon political imagery. This image here reminded me of a photo I saw last June on Michael Shaw’s blog, Bag News Notes.

Shaw has a new piece at American Photo, “Campaign Visuals in the Age of Facebook.” In it, he interviews photographer Stephen Ferry to discuss this photo which resembles a “Facebook mashup.” Ferry says his photo captures what he calls the, “Facebook zeitgeist.” He explains the action of the photo thus, ” this is a photograph of a transmission: from subject into camera and from camera onto the Web.”

I’m intrigued by the act of transmission and how transmission is reconceptualized within a digital culture. In the Ferry photo, the subjects are both Obama and a “fan taking a photo” ready for immediate upload onto Facebook or some other online social media. In this image above, there are also two subjects, but they are not Hillary and the person shooting the video. The “real” Hillary is blurred, the campaign sign is even upside down. However, the digital image of Hillary is clear and focused which is connected to the video camera being held by an anonymous hand. The two subjects are thus machine and digital image, even the human hand is secondary. From this perspective, the image portrays a postmodernization of political campaigning. It’s the political reflection of TIME’s 2006 person of the year as the new citizen journalist. The digital transmission onto the Web is naturally assumed.

However, this image for me captures more than just the “Facebook zeitgeist.” It also reflects the shift away from the hierarchical broadcast model of information transmission to the decentralized network model of inter-subjective community driven “transmission.” Perhaps this could be called the era of post-broadcast politics. The centrality of the camera’s view finder, which invites everyone into the role of transmitter reinforces this shifting narrative. What do you think?

photograph source unknown

UPDATE: Matt Stoller has an article in the Nation, “Dems Get New Tools, New Talent,” where he analyzes the impact of internet technologies on Democratic campaign organizing.

We are in the middle of a massive wave of campaign innovation, led by organizers who will eventually spread outward to every nook and cranny of progressive politics. The larger significance of this architectural revolution in progressive politics isn’t clear, but it is the first sustained challenge to the dominance of television and direct mail in the political system since those media displaced urban party machines in the 1960s.

Fair Use of Digital Media

MediaCommons reports, “YouTube purges: fair use tested“

Last week there was a wave of takedowns on YouTube of copyright-infringing material — mostly clips from television and movies.

Fortunately, since we regard these sorts of media quotations as fair use, we make it a policy to rip backups of every externally hosted clip so that we can remount them on our own server in the event of a takedown.

This is their fair use statement. I’m personally more liberal with what I’ll post here. However, if you are in doubt, this is as good a guideline as any.

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of “fair use.” If such quotation is necessary to a scholar’s argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar’s original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text — but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it — we must defend the scholar’s right to quote from the media texts under study.

In Media Res, a MediaCommons project, has an innovative “blog.” They “provide 30-second to 3-minute clips accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic responses.” See the latest post, Two Words: Chuck Norris here for example.

Image: “Steal this Album” by The Coup