“Say Yes to the Dress” portrays one of the existential dilemmas women in the age of consumer society face. It is an emotional rollercoaster of wonder, judgment, deliberation, budgeting, frustration and decision. “Say Yes to the Dress” is a reality-TV show on TLC. For some, the show might look like a scene straight out of Theodore Adorno’s nightmare of “mass deception,” the display of the human tragedy in a world of commodities. But “Say Yes to the Dress” also presents in 60-minute segments, why the critique of consumer culture misses the point: Commodities are more than the meaningless, exchangeable representations critical theory makes them out to be. Instead, commodities mean everything to people. We cry, laugh, scream, or fight over them and we triumph or fail through them.

“In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I [Iddo Tavory] have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition — the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in which social patterns set up these dilemmas that actors experience as crucial for their lives and how they define themselves.” 

I have been following Jeff and Iddo’s project for a while, and I suggest that it will help to further the understanding of the social condition if we take seriously the daily dramas of consumption, both as comedy and tragedy. “Say Yes to the Dress” is one of these social dramas, based on the very premise that buying a wedding dress really matters, that people do not make their consumption decisions lightly.

Of course “Say Yes to the Dress” is an edited and selective social drama, following a similar script each episode. The bride comes into the wedding dress shop with her entourage (family and friends). The consultant clarifies the parameters of the desired dress, first with the bride alone: What does she want, what is her budget? Then, the two pick some options in a dressing room. The bride dresses, and the trial begins. She has to face her family and friends, who judge her dream dress, taking it apart. As this process goes on, personal choice becomes collective negotiation, a struggle between the self and its public perception. Tears of frustration and joy mix, culminating in the final decision for the “perfect” wedding dress. When the bride-to-be says, “Yes!” to the dress.

How we read the social drama that unfolds in “Say Yes to the Dress,” makes all the difference. Should we shrug at the superficiality of the act? Shake our heads over all the energy, money and emotions spent on the selection of a dress that is worn only for one day, that probably has thousands of look-a-likes around the country? Or, should we suspend our judgment and really try to understand what is going on here? Why do people fight for hours over dress length, color, beading and décolleté? One answer might be that the struggle over the perfect wedding dress is as much a struggle over what kind of bride one will be, what family one will have, what life one will live. “Say Yes to the Dress” from this perspective captures one of these crucial moments in life, when past and future meet in the events and choices of the present.

That “Say Yes to the Dress” airs on TLC, the Teaching and Learning Channel, seems like a practical joke, but it is more than that. It shows the social conditioning that goes into our daily, and not so daily, consumption dramas. Of course there is socialization in the very act of “really wanting” the “perfect” wedding dress. But this should not take away from the act itself by rendering it meaningless. Instead, it should sensitize us for what goes on in these personal and social dramas, for how they connect cultural desires, economic valuations and the weaving of the social fabric in one act of emotional decision-making. To look for the social condition in consumption, means taking people’s decisions seriously, because they do.

The problem for us consumers is not that consumption is fake. Instead consumption, like the buying of a wedding dress, is, for the lack of a better word, “real.” In today’s hyper-commodified world, the social condition of the society becomes one of ever-expanding choices, symbolic meanings, and experiences. This produces personal satisfaction, but also anxiety, because choosing wrong has serious consequences for our “selves” and our social being. Choice and anxiety become simultaneously problem and principle of consumption, a social condition worthy of critical, but also respectful attention.

I recently returned from a very enjoyable and very fruitful week in Paris, combining business with pleasure. I spent time with family, and also enjoyed a series of meetings with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Dayan. We continued our long-term discussions and debates, moving forward to a more concerted effort, imagining more focused work together. His semiotical approach to power will inform my sociological approach and visa versa, with Roland Barthes, Victor Turner, Hannah Arendt and Erving Goffman as our guides. At least that is one way I am thinking about it now. Or as Daniel put it a while back in an earlier discussion: my politics of small things will combine with his analysis of the politics of even smaller things.

We had three meetings in Paris, a public discussion with his media class at Science Po, an extended working breakfast and lunch at two different Parisian cafés, and a beautiful dinner at his place, good food and talk throughout. I fear I haven’t properly thanked him for his wonderful hospitality.

At Sciences Po, Dayan presented a lecture to his class and I responded. This followed a format of public discussion we first developed in our co-taught course at The New School in 2010. He spoke about his theory of media “monstration,” how the media show, focusing attention of a socially constituted public. He highlighted the social theory behind his, pointing to Axel Honneth on recognition and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Honneth, Michel Foucault on the changing styles of visibility: from spectacle to surveillance, Luc Boltanski on the mediation of distant suffering and especially J. L. Austin on speech acts.

At the center of Dayan’s interest is his metaphor of “the media as the top of the iceberg.” He imagines a society’s life, people showing each other things, as involving a great complexity of human actions and interactions, mostly submerged below the surface of broad public perception, not visible for public view. The media’s role is to go down and bring up, deciding what is important, what is worthy of attention, to show and illuminate. As Austin was interested in the fact that sometimes the mere articulation of speech – “acts,” Dayan is interested in how “media act.” By making some things apparent, and some not, they set the agenda, both forming and informing publics.

A key activity of the media, then, is witnessing, where the media record, translate and illustrate for its public. This is Dayan’s framework, as I understand it, most interesting in the details of its application as it provides a means to consider the relationship between media and power. Daniel draws on Austin here. He makes fine distinctions concerning media expression, applying to the media Austin’s terms: exercitives, verdictives, commissives, expositives and behavitives. As he explains it, this makes sense. But I have a concern, which he and I discussed at length.

Dayan focuses on the relationship between the media and power, making fine distinctions, applying Austin as a way of analyzing forms of expression and showing, but he does not make what I take to be the important distinctions between forms of power. Not only the disciplining power of the truth regime in the fashion of Foucault, and the Weberian notion of coercive power and its legitimation, but also the notion of power that emerges from the capacity of a group of people to speak to each other as equals, reveal their individual qualities through their individual actions and then develop the capacity to act in concert. In his presentation at Science Po, Dayan didn’t present in his framework how the media facilitate political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I pointed this out, and we discussed this extensively. We did not disagree; rather, we saw the topic of media and power from different directions, with different perspectives.

I illustrated my point by discussing gay marriage, an issue in the news that day in both France and the United States. In the U.S.: the opening hearings at the Supreme Court concerning two cases, one focused on the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and the other focused on a California referendum on gay marriage was widely reported. In France: at the same time, also widely reported, there was a mass demonstration in Paris against gay marriage, against a likely new law (since enacted) legalizing marriage equality. I noted that from the American court hearings commentators judged that it is highly likely that the official recognition of gay marriage would proceed, pushed by broad popular support, while in France, the legislation yielding the same result was meeting popular resistance. There is an interesting irony here.

Media monstration of actions in the Supreme Court revealed the relationship between official power and the power of concerted action. The popular support for gay marriage was a result of a long media monstrating march, from the Stonewall Riots to the Supreme Court, LGBT rights have been emerging as American commonsense. Gay activists meeting, talking and acting together, seen by their friends and colleagues, but also by many strangers thanks to media presentations, have appeared as normal citizens, worthy of full citizens rights. As Daniel and I might put it, the politics of small things became large, through monstration.

In the meanwhile in France, marriage equality’s road to legalization was more a consequence of big politics. It was part of the Socialist Party Platform, upon which François Hollande ran. Public opinion had not been clearly formed around the issue. More popular was the longstanding traditional commonsense that marriage, and more specifically parenting, should be between a man and a woman, and not between two men or two women. The long road of the politics of small things, shown by the media didn’t exist. While in the U.S. the story was of a conservative Supreme Court trying to keep up with changes in the society, in France official power was ahead of public opinion, at least this is the way it looked at the time of our discussion.

Dayan and I don’t completely agree on marriage equality, and more specifically on the importance of parenting equality. Yet, we both saw in this example (and others we discussed during my visit and our discussions) a platform for dialogue, about the connections among the politics of small things, big politics, monstration, and media and publics.

At our breakfast, lunch and dinner, we explored this. We discussed his ideas about media and hospitality, the analogy between media and museums, my concern that we have to consider not only the media, but also media as a facilitator of all social interaction, monstration as a sphere of gesture (thus our common interest in the sociology of Erving Goffman), the media as a system of monstrative institutions, the relationship between the new (small) media and big media, terrorism as it monstrates, our topic, and Israel – Palestine (a zone of conflict about which we disagree) and “politics as if.”

The politics of the consequential and the inconsequential: people, activities, events and monstrations, the relevance of irrelevance, this fascinates us. We will continue to work on it, and we will report here about our progress, from time to time. I will explain more in my next post.

Andrea Hajek’s post on the seamy side of satire and the Italian elections  and Iddo Tavory’s post on humor and the social condition got me thinking about the promise and perils of political humor. This has fascinated me ever since I made it a nightly habit to tune into Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart as a refuge from the madness that were the George W. Bush years.

I have wondered: why has my regular dose of political satire seemed so essential to my mental health? Why has it been so appealing to so many of us? On the other hand, I didn’t want to spend too much time wondering. Most scholarly accounts of humor seem to miss the point, and they are decidedly not entertaining. I feel like responding to the authors of such serious reflections: please just relax and enjoy.

But Iddo’s analysis, which is part of our on-going dialogue on the social condition, seemed to hit just the right notes: it moved our deliberations on the social condition forward, as it helped me understand important developments in global political culture, and it had a light informative touch, focused on a joke. A Jewish father warns his son not to marry outside of the faith, finding confirmation in his warning when the son’s new wife takes the faith too seriously, insisting that her husband no longer work on Saturdays, both the Jewish Sabbath and the most important day of his father’s business week.

The joke is funny in the telling. Social structure as it is manifested in interaction makes the “funny telling” possible. Social structure – the family, religion and the economy – informs the structure of the joke, which sets the stage for the performance. As Tavory maintains: “If we attend to the structure of humor, we can see that jokes work precisely because they shine light on dilemmas that are built into the social fabric.”

Political satirists work with this, for better and for worse. They provide momentary liberation from the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) when they highlight the tensions we must live with, mocking easy, or foolish or dictated answers, the positions of the other, the distrusted, the opponent, the enemy, and even with friends, families, loved ones. But when they take their own answers too seriously, with too much self assurance, they skirt with danger, the danger we now see in Italy, but can be found in many other times and places.

I remember having a sick feeling watching Poland’s famous satirical cabaret, Piwnica pod Baranami in Krakow in the early 1970s. The cabaret was past its prime. In 1956, it was one of the key creative locations where Polish Stalinism was sharply questioned and overturned. They questioned totalitarian authority. They expanded the possible, by mocking the dictatorial. But the show I saw was odd. The audience seemed to be enjoying itself, but the performance seemed quite racist to me. There was one anti-China joke after another (this at the time of the Sino – Soviet split). I understood, as a friend explained, that when they said China, they meant and the audience heard Russia, but the mocking of the Orient was off putting. So much so that it stays with me. I thought of it then as an example of satire growing old and stale, in marked contrast with the student theater I was then observing. But now, I perceive more, thinking about my discussions with Tavory. The satire was drawn too easily. It referred to the sorry state of living in a society where a foreign power stifled daily life, but that insight was just too thin. That the Russians, or the Communists, were to blame for everything wrong in Poland explained too much with too little. Rather than confronting the social condition and providing relief from its tensions, the satire turned away from textured experience and flattened it.

On the other hand, take Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, please! (I’m echoing Henny Youngman here, just for fun) In their nightly shows, they illuminate. Mocking the dogmatic, they show how simple-mindedness stumbles over complexity, how the social condition is ignored. Colbert is more clearly aiming at the nuttiness of the right, through his Bill O’Reilly impersonation. Stewart tries to be more even handed, reporting absurdities wherever he sees them.

Not all their jokes work. Sometimes, it seems to me, Stewart mocks difficulties that he and his audience don’t understand. Nonetheless, unlike the Polish cabaret, he and Colbert work with tensions and ambiguities, posing questions, rather than providing easy answers. Posing questions, not providing answers is their democratic role, like that of intellectuals more generally, which I explored in depth in my book Civility and Subversion.

This was especially evident in their mock mass demonstration on the Washington Mall, “The “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” Stewart was for sanity; Colbert for fear. It’s interesting to note how many participants and observers wanted the rally to be partisan, and how the comedians understood that this wasn’t their role or their point. They weren’t working as propagandists for the Democrats, or just attacking the Republicans. They weren’t working with a clear political end. They were fake activists, extending their performances as fake newscaster and commentator. And as such, they revealed the transgression of the fine line between the serious and the comic by those who purport to be serious. The comics understand the difference, while so many in the news media and in politics don’t. Brilliant and funny.

But satirists may lose sight of their distinctive role, becoming convinced their jokes can substitute for serious political analysis and engagement. They may come to believe and convince their audiences, as I saw in Krakow many years ago, that their mocking illumination of the powers’ insufficient packaged answers to the questions posed by the enduring problems of the social condition is the answer. Thus, the Italian case: from a satirical V, “vaffanculo,” Day, (fuck them all day) to a party that won 25% of the vote, and has continued to follow the “vaffanculo” line. Hajek observed before the elections about the intentions of the leader of the anti-political party, The Five Star Movement: “It is indeed likely that Grillo has no intention to govern, but simply wants to obstruct other parties and bring about some kind of revolution.”

Humor responds to and illuminates “the social condition.” Herein lies its personal and political significance and power, why Colbert and Stewart speak to me as I endure my daily struggles, and why it can matter, for example, in the role satire played around the old Soviet bloc. It can be a survival strategy for persecuted minorities, Jews and blacks, for example, and majorities, women, or just anyone, for example, in Youngman, husbands and wives. And because humor and satire refer to both the concerns of daily life and greater social structure, the social condition writ large and writ small, they have potentially significant political meaning and impact. But, handle with care.

On 17 September 2012, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its first anniversary. In spite of the usual problems facing bottom-up political activism in the long term, on which Pamela Brown reported a few months ago, OWS is still alive and kicking. Protest is clearly ‘in’, as the global protests on 14 November 2012 also demonstrated. But social movements and political protest have also made it to the screen, as memories of protest and rebellion reverberated both at the 69^th Venice Film Festival and at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with Olivier Assayas’ movie about the French 1968 protests (Après mai), Robert Redford’s interpretation of a former Weather Underground member in The company you keep, and Shola Lynch’s documentary about the black civil rights activist Angela Davis, Free Angela & All Political Prisoners.

Characteristic of OWS as well as other recent protests across the world, notably the Arab Spring, is the role of social media and the subsequent global reach of the protests. In Why it’s Kicking off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions (Verso, 2012), BBC Newsnight economics editor and journalist Paul Mason narrates the course of events in both the Arab world and in a number of European countries since the start of the financial crisis, and analyzes the role and impact of social media in these protests. Starting with the Tahrir Square uprisings, “a revolution planned on Facebook, organized on Twitter and broadcast to the world via YouTube,” Mason takes us back to the 2008 clashes in Greece and Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’ in 2009, when the images of a dying Neda Agha-Soltan – discussed recently on this blog by Lisa Lipscomb – made it across the globe in a matter of minutes. Through citizen journalism, Neda became a “global icon” and a martyr, provoking a “thread of solidarity and collective mourning” both online and in the streets (see also Aleida and Corinna Assmann’s chapter in Memory in a Global Age).

In fact, globalization processes and technological developments have changed our experience and sensibility of time and space, giving rise to a “memory boom” where – in the attempt to regain a sense of community belonging – we turn to memory. Both individual and collective memories are, however, increasingly structured within national and global frames and shaped by new media technologies. As Lipscomb demonstrates in her article, these allow people not only to witness and share (global) events in a more direct and personal manner, but also to produce memory themselves, e.g. by shooting home videos. In other words, new media empower people by ‘arming them with advanced means to construct collective identities’ (José van Dijck, Mediated Memory in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 172).

These bottom-up, horizontal forms of communication offer an interactive relation to the past, present and future, which emerges at the interface of individual/local and collective/global experience, and in the mutual shaping of media and memory. The ‘mediated memories’ that are thus produced travel across borders and circulate beyond nation-states to be reconfigured – transnationally and digitally – in a global and digital memory field, as with the mobile witnessing of Neda’s death, but we may also think of the 2005 London bombings, where mobile camera phones provided personal, communicative memory of the incidents by survivors and witnesses (see Anna Reading’s article in a special issue of Memory Studies).

The strength of social media lies not only in its capacity to create mediated memories, though: they have also moved what Mason calls ‘the collective mental arena’ (p. 137) out into the real world. Put differently, mass audiences are constituted through connectivity rather than “collectivity,” so that remembering becomes “a matter of navigation in and through emergent and shifting complexities of connections in and through media” (Andrew Hoskins in his introduction to the above mentioned special issue, p. 272). Indeed, the role of Facebook and Twitter in political and social life is ever more important, both in terms of expressing solidarity and forging (online) bonds, and in terms of denouncing violence or injustice, for example by reporting or shooting it with a (video) camera or a mobile phone. I was, for example, stunned to see pictures on Facebook of wounded Palestinian citizens in a hospital in Gaza, after Israeli air raids in early November 2012, including the shocking photograph of a man carrying away a small boy whose leg had just been blown off. Public opinion is also often measured according to what people say on Twitter, a modern ‘vox populi’ where citizens can finally vent their emotions or attack politicians and policy makers.

Has the web then substituted more traditional forms of protest, such as demonstration marches, occupations, sit-ins? If the answer is yes, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, in my opinion. After all, events are ever more ‘media events’ and ‘digital events’, and experiences are no longer exclusively local or global.

As Sandy hit the east coast, many of us were watching the situation closely. This meant watching not only big media but also Facebook and Twitter, where storm-related activity was plentiful. The social media news was personal, reporting on the storm not as a large-scale atmospheric system but as the weather outside the living room window. We know whose power was out, whose wasn’t; we know who saw flooding and who just saw rain; we know who was drinking wine and who was drinking beer. We even know approximately when many went to bed. Stories in big media and even in blogspace, on the other hand, tended toward the documentary: ConEdison transformer explosion on the lower east side; flooding up to 14th Street; partial building collapse on 8th Avenue.

While the latter group may have been much more informative in the conventional sense, the former group was much more illuminating. True, the “news” version of Sandy was formally conventional, but even in the details it was macroscopic and opaque. Each detail in big media was merely a data point supporting the larger context, the bigger story. Eighth Avenue, for example, was just another dot in New York City and, more generally, the Atlantic coast, while on social media, Eighth Avenue belonged to the people living there; it became a geography all its own, rather than a mathematical point in a much larger geography. In the news, Sandy was a national meteorological event. In social media, Sandy was the particular experience of an unusual afternoon and evening by a particular community.

As someone experiencing the event from afar, the difference was stark. It was difficult to emotionally reconcile the two accounts, to see them as treating one and the same reality. It still feels as though the connective tissue linking macronews to microblogging is missing. Where is the ontological middle ground? Does our cultural metaphysics allow for it?

Of particular interest, in any case, were the Sandy photos, which comprised three genres of reporting.

News media images. The news coverage of the event provided the predictable series of disaster shots—cars floating in a parking-garage-turned-bathtub, video of a transformer explosion, a building missing a facade, and so on. These are ruthlessly documentary, but also highly selective. They didn’t show the limits of the disaster, only the disaster itself, excluding any of the terrain of non-disaster or non-damage from coverage. These lacked context. They covered the territory, but only its physical geography—completely excluded were its emotional, political, and cultural geography and context. The house without a facade becomes, at best, our own house without a facade. Whether the resulting cognitive image is just the house in question or our own house, the view is impoverished in either case in relation to the totality that is Sandy and its place in our world.

Personal social media images. On social media the expected cell-phone-out-window shots were plentiful, indirectly showing Sandy from the perspective of individual nighttime routines. These were intimate and visceral, giving a deep sense of the experience of the storm, of what the massive weather system is and feels like at the level of personal experience. There was some damage, but also a great deal of non-damage, and perhaps more importantly, much that fell in between these extremes.

Meme-style social media images. There were also, however, images on social media that operated in an entirely different way from either of the other two groups. One such image gave the satellite view of Sandy superimposed over a to-scale map of Europe, rather than the Atlantic coast. Another showed a massive storm overtaking the Statue of Liberty with help from, thanks to some Photoshop work, Godzilla, invading alien flying saucers, and monsters of various stripes from Hollywood films.

At first glance, the meme-style images are more guilty than the other two of showing Sandy out of context. But I suspect that this first glance is misleading.

Every moment is marked by a particular set of crises, and the moment of Sandy’s arrival is no different in this regard. Sandy arrives after the beginning of a new millenium beset with wars following terrorist attacks, a recent history of natural disasters and calamities with political importance, worries about and analysis of the accelerating effects of globalization, a growing worldwide public consciousness about climate change, a global economic collapse, and the resurgence of worlwide sectarian, student, and populist movements of various (and at times novel) stripes.

Other Sandy juxtapositions are to a U.S. national election with large implications for the future of many of the issues above, to ongoing handwringing about the viability of the E.U. along various axes, and ongoing instability and violence of various forms in the Middle East.

While both the highly personal social media form of reporting and the more conventional mass media news reporting of Sandy drew the circle of knowledge and understanding around the storm in geographically local ways—micro-local (“my living room”) in the case of the personal images and macro-local (“the U.S. Atlantic coast”) in the case of mainstream mass media, the meme-style images drew the circle globally.

The image of the storm over Europe pulled the two geographies into dialogue with one another and into dialogue with a global discussion on climate change and its impacts. It drew metaphorical parallels between the storms (meteorological and otherwise) currently affecting the United States and the storms of various stripes that have overtaken the E.U. and its member states. Just as importantly, it brought commenters from from around the world into policy conversation that placed Sandy properly in larger geopolitical and environmental contexts. Neither of the other genres of representation or reporting on Sandy did this. In this particular monadic image, Sandy was transformed—from a meterological event affecting the American northeast into a global event directly related to public issues, concerns, and choices shared across continents.

The image Sandy overtaking the Statue of Liberty accompanied by various monsters of film, not all of them American, situated Sandy within the global cultural imaginary, referring not just to a metaphorical understanding, but also to what Sandy portends. Once again, the event was internationalized. Here, however, it was also fictionalized (and yet, as process, nominally realized at the same time). The image drew attention to the narrativity, indeed even the restlessness of events; it laid bare the fictive, evolving, interpretive, and power-entangled natures of memory and experience. It recast Sandy as part of story that is being collectively written by humanity right now, rising action in a contested plot that begins with the industrial revolution and whose articulation and end remain unavoidably open—but always with the clear potential for—and claims about—historical, climactic, and indeed various forms of monstrous catastrophe.

The documentation of the event as I saw it inverted the conventional wisdom about news, reporting, and knowledge. The images and details in the mass media told us the least about Sandy; in them, the storm became another in a long line of archetypal storms, and the northeast of the U.S. was cast in a familiar and by now largely information-poor role: the dual-natured indomitable-American-community and community-of-victims. The storm, the locale, and the population might have been anywhere, at any time. The entirety lacked specificity, and thus historical purchase, despite itself.

The personal out-the-window photos on social media, though this genre often faces criticisms of facility and narcissism, were practically informative, giving details of the experience of this storm as separate from others, and of particular people who were not, as a result, demoted to the uninformative role of human statistics. As was not generally the case with news media coverage, using these it was possible to piece together an understanding of the specific nature and level of damage in various areas, of the degree of the emergency and the relative difficulty of recovering, as well as the general mood of this population in this storm.

But the whimsical and unashamedly constructed meme-like images of the storm told us perhaps the most, in their composition, by their circulation, and in the comments that followed them. These drew the storm into the dialogue on policy and the policy difficulties that we increasingly face as simultaneously local and global publics. They revealed as much or more about the consciousnesses and moods of these in New York, in New Jersey, but also in the U.K., in Finland, and on the Pacific Rim, than did the montage of camera phone photos. They drew our attention to the historicity of this storm, and the contingency of this historicity, placed public policy in juxtaposition to these, and reflected on the experiences and natures of present publics and constituencies that have also, after all, experienced Sandy in various ways—in fact—around the world.

I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

In today’s In-Depth post, which was presented at this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting in Denver, Lisa Lipscomb extends Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz analysis of media events to the new media and the new political environment. I am struck by how the analysis of Dayan and Katz still illuminates important political developments, and also appreciate how Lipscomb extension gives a fuller understanding of media politics of our day. Their work still shows how  institutionalized democracy is significantly constituted through television. She shows how extra institutional democratic forces, contributing to what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as counter-democracy, are manifested through Digital Events of the new electronic media.

Thus, the main events of this week and last: using the insights of Dayan and Katz, it is clear that the nominating conventions are anything but empty affairs. It is true that these conventions have long ago lost their instrumental purposes: before the fact everyone knew who the candidates for president and vice president would be, and the party platforms developed and passed at the conventions are ignored by the electorate and the politicians alike. Yet, the conventions still play a very important political role, ritualistically indicating that the election contest is now entering its decisive stage, and that it is now the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party (to paraphrase the old typing drill).

Indeed, the nominating ritual confirms both the substantial existence and appeal of and the attachment to each of the parties. They try to refine and shape their message and appeal, and in the process, they define the terms of the American political contest and debate.  In societies of the past, such rituals occurred face to face: not only in conventions and politics, but also in processions, coronations, funerals and holidays of all sorts, reported first by word of mouth, later through the written word and the printed page. The major finding of Dayan and Katz is that since radio and television, political ritual continues through a type of broadcast, “media events,”confirming the central ideals and identities of social orders, and the competing conventional alternatives, and the alternatives to the dominant ones, as Lipscomb cogently summarizes in her piece.

But things are clearly changing. The new electronic media connect citizens in new ways. The dominance of television, which Dayan and Katz assumed when they published their book in the early 90s, is now being eroded, something that deeply concerns Katz. He is not sure that the new media environment supports a common public world, a free public life necessary for democracy. He fears that fragmentation of public orders challenge democratic practice. His are real and important concerns. I applaud this former collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld for continuing to probe the political consequences of media. Yet, we need to understand how new media are now constituting political subjectivity and connection.

This is what Lipscomb’s post considers by examining the formation of a global protest, “a digital media event,” the case of the video of the murder of Neda Agha Soltan at the hands of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and its circulation through new media and old. She shows how a community of critical capacity comes to be formed, a most important development in the times of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other new “new social movements.”

To read the full In-Depth Analysis “Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Digital Age” by Lisa Lipscomb, click here.

The woman in the video was later identified by her fiancée as Neda Agha Soltan. Neda lay dying on Kargar Ave. in Tehran, Iran Saturday June 20, 2009 during a post-election protest, allegedly shot in the chest by a member of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Using a cell phone, an anonymous bystander digitally captured the moments just after Neda was shot. According to news reports, the author of the video then contacted a virtual friend he had met through Facebook who lived in the Netherlands, and asked him to post the footage. The virtual friend, known only by his first name, Hamed, uploaded the footage to the Internet and sent copies to the BBC and The Guardian as well as other media outlets. Within hours, two distinct clips surfaced on Facebook and YouTube. Shortly thereafter, the video was broadcast by CNN, thus making “Neda” a household name (Langendonck, NRC Handelsblad, 2009).

Today, I am here to talk about how mobile and social media fit in to the ongoing discussions about media’s influence on public life. I am going to make this argument in three parts. First, by offering a brief overview of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s concept of the “media event,” as outlined in their book of the same name, and more recent additions and amendments to this theory. I will then define what I call the “digital event” by looking at the capture, distribution and reaction to the Neda video. Finally, by examining the online and face-to-face response to the video, I hope to persuade you that the Internet and mobile media are able to bring about public awareness, elicit ritualized response online and in the streets, and therefore, recreate the sacred through bringing together publics in the same way that media events have.

Dayan and Katz defined a certain format of television programming, which they believed provide the public with a new way of attending a ceremony. The authors describe how a “media event” brings people together to participate in a historic, political or social occasion that takes the form of a televisual ceremony. Dayan and Katz identified three types of media events: the contest, the conquest and the coronation. Some examples of these include the Olympic games, Presidential elections, religious pilgrimages, space exploration and state weddings and funerals. Media events are unique in that, “they are, by definition, not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives” (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 5). Most often, numerous stations broadcast the event simultaneously, nationally and/or internationally, without interruption, thus monopolizing the airwaves for the duration of the event. According to Dayan and Katz, the broadcast takeover facilitates the creation of a unifying experience and ultimately an arena of sacred space (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 89). Furthermore, the time-sensitive nature of the event functions to unite the public – those watching at home and those who are in attendance – and share the experience of witnessing a historic moment. Media events manipulate space and time, keeping the viewer far, but also near. The medium is able to bring outsiders in to an event of great social, historical or political importance. Even though the television viewer is not physically in attendance at the event, they participate almost as fully. In fact, the viewer at home is given the advantage of an unobstructed view and voice-over narration that is not offered for those in attendance.

The media event is a highly structured and delineated process. The ceremony or ritual is planned, scripted and often times rehearsed. It requires the cooperation and collaboration of many different people and agencies including broadcasters, event organizers, the event audience, the viewer at home and many times, the state. Additionally, the media event oftentimes relies on tradition to dictate how the event is presented, for example, in the case of a state wedding or funeral. Since agents outside the media and the television studio organize media events, the role of the medium is to provide the channel for transmission. Here, the format promotes public unification and community through ritual, tradition and celebration.

Media scholars have pointed out that the media event does not account for disruptions or conflict; for example, terrorist events, natural disaster coverage or the spectacle of war (Couldry, 2003; Cottle, 2006). “Media Events” was published before 9/11 and the global “War on Terror” and more recent theories have addressed this issue, updating and expanding upon the concept of the media event. Katz himself later argues that, “media events of the ceremonial kind seem to be receding in importance, maybe even in frequency, while the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as disaster, terror and war are taking center stage” (Couldry, 2010: 33). As I come to defining my notion of the “digital event,” I see it situated within the contextual framework of Simon Cottle’s concept of “mediatized rituals.” Cottle (2006) defines mediatized rituals as “those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be” (p. 415). He then sub-categorizes mediatized rituals into six theoretical arguments: moral panics; celebrated ‘media events’; contested ‘media events’; media disasters; mediated scandals and mediatized public crises. As we see it, Dayan and Katz’s concept is subsumed into the category of celebrated media events. On the other hand, digital events do not fit nicely into one of these categories. Since I am relating the notion of the “digital event” to the specific mode of communication, the theoretical approach can differ depending on the situation. The Neda video could be described as a “media disaster” and a “mediatized public crisis.”

Neda’s death itself, while certainly an event, is only a portion of the narrative of this “digital event.” In this situation, I see the digital event beginning when the witness started recording the situation. After he finishes recording, he pursues making the situation public by sending the footage to a friend who is able to upload it to the Internet and distribute it to news sources. Once public, there is an outpouring of reaction from online viewers, which takes the form of ritualized digital mourning and the reproduction, reposting, forwarding and linking of the video. Those that took to the streets after her death carried the image of her bloody face printed on posters and flyers.

The digital event is digital because many of its major components take place in or are facilitated by digital media, which includes mobile media like cell phones, or digital space, including the Internet and social networking websites. Time is the obsession of television whereas space is the obsession of digital media. Space in terms of location and geography and space in terms of capacity, capacity for memory: storing, archiving, uploading, sharing, remembering. Raymond Williams’ (1974) concept of “flow” is inevitably linked to discussions about the temporal nature of television. According to Williams, “This phenomenon of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristics of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form” (p. 86). Televisual flow consists of the totality of television’s contents: news programs, documentary shows, narrative programming, etc. It has been repeated many times over that people watch television, not shows or programs. When it comes to event programming, for instance, Dayan & Katz’s “media events,” flow is interrupted. Mary Ann Doane (1990) argues that we can identify media events as such when the referent becomes indistinguishable from the medium (p. 222). Alternatively, the digital event is timely, but does not interrupt flow. In the case of the Neda video, once the mainstream media picked up the footage, they packaged and delivered it to the audience in the format of a crisis (Doane, 1990). However, the ritualized public response came as a result of the video’s digital presence and the interactions protestors and supporters were having online and in the streets.

Many actors are responsible for the success of the media event, which is also true for the digital event. Both digital and media events situate the audience in a participatory role. Granting regard in the form of attendance or visual participation establishes the media event as legitimate. Examining the technology or medium used is one way of understanding the medium’s unique characteristics and social capacities. As we have seen, the media event demands a passive audience. Although McLuhan described television as a “cool, low-definition” medium that requires the viewer to extract the meaning from a program, this is clearly not the case with media events as meaning is predetermined and calls on cultural scripts familiar to the viewer. In the case of the Neda video, the cell phone was used as an instrument of witnessing. Protestors had been recording the extreme violence on the streets from the start of the protests. Pictures and videos uploaded to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook show protesters holding their phones in the air recording what was taking place with hopes that others would also see. The digital event requires a high level of participation at every level or phase of the event. Citizen journalism was responsible for the publicity of the Neda video as well as the millions of viewers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook that eventually took to the streets in memory and protest. July 25, 2009 was declared A Global Day of Action in Paris and a hundred other cities around the world. National Geographic photographer Reza printed 500 masks of a portrait of Neda and had protestors sit in front of the Eifel Tower for a photograph.

One of the distinguishing features of a digital event is that it does not require event organizers, pre-planning or scripting. The video of Neda was recorded and distributed by two individuals and did not require the mainstream media in order for it to gain widespread attention. However, the Neda video did eventually become subsumed into the mainstream media and was played unedited on many networks. In Iran, the media is controlled by the state; however, the Internet is proving to be problematic for the government. Despite government restrictions, what is happening on in the streets of Iran is being made visible around the world by way of digital media as well as mobilizing publics in the name of ritual protest online and in the streets. Neda’s death represented some of the fundamental injustices that brought the protestors out to the streets in the first place.

The digital event takes place everywhere and nowhere. In this case, Neda’s death was only witnessed in person by a handful of people. The cell phone provided a portal to a time, place and situation that would not have otherwise been available. Spatial boundaries became fluid; those outside Iran and unconnected to the protests became witnesses with the capacity to react and respond. In fact, the video was more accessible to those outside of Iran where there are less government restrictions regarding the media and the Internet. In large part, those outside Iran came to learn about Neda through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The mass media referred to the post-election protests as the “Twitter Revolution” and the “Facebook Revolution” in that each of these social networking sites was instrumental in bringing attention to and mobilizing those participating in the opposition movement. Additionally, the U.S. State Department urged Twitter not to push out a scheduled update because it would interrupt service and the events in Iran were tied to Twitter as a source of information and communication in a nation notorious for censorship.

During the height of the protests, those in the U.S. and other countries outside of Iran were changing their location on Twitter to Tehran, Iran in order to confuse the Iranian government, who many believed were targeting and performing online surveillance on election protestors. When someone creates a profile on Twitter, they can specify their location by choosing a time zone, which then appears on their Twitter profile page. Those who believed the Iranian government was targeting protestors through Twitter thought that it would be harder to track down the real protestors if everyone was declaring Tehran as their location. One individual using the name FORIRAN2009 tweeted, “Change timezone to Tehran – Disrupt Basiji (secret police) from tracking iranians.” Those not initially connected with the election or even every having any previous interest in Iran showed solidarity for the protestors after viewing the Neda video. In the days and weeks after her death, digital mourners continued to post links to the Neda video and also created slideshow and montage Neda tributes, wrote poems and songs in her honor, posted messages and changed their profile images to read “Where is THEIR Vote,” a reworking of the phrase “Where is MY Vote” that was being used by Iranian protestors. A user going by the name “Green4Iran” tweeted, “People in Iran: Shoot as many videos as you can and upload it. World is watching. Make sure the date well noted!”

AngelaChenShui tweeted, “VERY Graphic RT See 4 yourself the creation of a martyr http://bit.ly/9PVfO #iranelection #gr88 #Mousavi #mousavi1388 #Pray #Prayer #Freedom.”

Jonap tweeted, “Will Neda’s death be the rallying cry that Mousavi could not possibly be? #iranelection #neda.”

Rootvetwife tweeted, “RT They murdered #neda, but not her voice: http://bit.ly/14cX6p #iranelection.”

Inspiredkk tweeted, “#Neda in the hearts of the world. The most beautiful martyr in history. Shame on the mulahs, shame on the government. Neda lives…”

These and many similar messages were posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over the days and weeks following Neda’s death. In response to her death, groups on Facebook were calling for her nomination as Time Magazine’s “Woman of the Year.” In 2010, a documentary called “For Neda” was released and is available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. To this day people continue to mourn, ritualize and honor her as a martyr.

Neda’s death and the image of her dying gaze were instrumental in creating a thread of solidarity and collective mourning for protestors online and in the streets. The decision to look, to witness, to grant regard, to capture and archive and then make visible to a wider public no longer requires the massive collaboration of broadcasters, event organizers or the state. Dayan and Katz demonstrated that the sorts of ritual practices Durkheim studied are observable in the televisual age. I have tried to demonstrate that such practices are alive and well in the ritual dimension of the digital.

New media are increasingly changing the way history is being written and memories are being forged. Perhaps it’s not an appropriate comparison, with the Olympics ongoing, but think of the London bombings in 2005. Mobile camera phones enabled a new and more instant form of witnessing and communication, as Anna Reading explains in her article on “Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time” (Memory Studies 4.3, 2011). Another revolutionary moment in the history of media was the advent and diffusion of television, in the 1950s and 1960s, which enhanced the globalization of information and knowledge. It thus contributed to the creation of collectively shared, public memories as it allowed for news to reach – for the first time – large masses of people in various geographical areas.

The impact of television on the collective memory of the 1960s is illustrated by the blockbuster Forrest Gump (1994): here the protagonist is given a place – occasionally through recourse to original footage – in a range of major historical events which most Americans will have “experienced” through television. It thus feeds upon a national and visual memory of those years in the USA. In Italy too visual media have had an essential role in the creation and circulation of memories of the country’s national history of the past five decades or so. This is also because Italy has never had a real newspaper ‘culture’, and for most Italians TV news reports have been the main means of information. Italian cinema, in addition, has something of the status of a national heritage product, as Alan O’Leary suggests in his analysis of Italian movies on terrorism (Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms 1970-2010, 2011), which has created a number of memorable ‘screen memories’. A news report about, say, a heat wave in Rome, for example, may start with the famous fountain scene from Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita.

But visual memories of Italy’s past can also be viewed daily on the 15-minute long program Blob, which goes on air just after the evening news at 8pm. Created by a former TV director and a number of movie critics and actors, Blob consists of a variety of deconstructed and reassembled fragments taken from (national and international) television program, TV adverts and movies. More precisely, Blob selects images from an audiovisual archive and re-organizes them in such a way so as to stimulate a critical reflection on current affairs and a rejection of institutional, mediatized and official discourses. Hence, it reveals the impossibility of a “meta-history” as suggested by the “global TV screen,” and instead gives space to other images and other histories, at times promoting a counter-memory.

What makes Blob so special is its unconventional form: rather than using texts or a presenter who unveils dark secrets or injustices of Italy’s recent past, Blob makes viewers think for themselves. This is achieved through an elaborate form of cutting and editing, which helps us make links and draw conclusions. Only a brief caption at the top left of the screen may give us some indications of the point being made. The announced political comeback – on 12 July – of former PM Silvio Berlusconi, for example, was used to bring back memories of Berlusconi’s political ascent in the 1990s. With the knowledge of Berlusconi’s various sex and corruption trials in the back of our minds, Berlusconi’s 1994 promises of a united and healthy Italy freed from corruption, today, sound ridiculous and surreal.

Clearly, this juxtaposition of the contradicting present and past images of Berlusconi, in addition to the knowledge we have gained of his problems with the law since the 1990s, works to reactivate forgotten or silenced memories, and to create moral awareness in the viewer. And if that doesn’t work, following on Berlusconi’s “outing” on July 12^th, the Blob team broadcast images of the major anti-corruption investigations Mani pulite (“clean hands”) of the early 1990s, which brought to the light the political bribery scandal Tangentopoli (“Bribesville”). The latter involved most leading political parties at the time, and the subsequent ‘clean-up’ therefore led to the emergence of a new political class in Italy, with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (“Go Italy”) at the lead. In fact, in his 1994 speech, Berlusconi strongly fed on the Italians’ distrust in politicians, which had of course increased with the corruption scandal. But Tangentopoli not only opened the door for Berlusconi’s populist “ordinary man-politics.” It also provoked a “major rift between the judiciary and certain politicians and parties,”as John Foot has noted (Modern Italy, 2003). The rift would mark Berlusconi’s political career, as his infinite anxiety about the “Communist judges” who are always on his case illustrate.

Special attention in the Blob episodes is given to Berlusconi’s political “mentor” and prime suspect in the Mani pulite investigations: Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who eventually fled to Tunis in order to avoid imprisonment. All in all, Blob recalls the fact that Berlusconi – in spite of his promise to give Italy a future again – actually continued the corruption, which was at the basis of Tangentopoli. The caption “fine pena mai,” which means something like life sentence, then ironically refers to the country’s condemnation to corruption by its politicians, from Craxi in the 1980s to Berlusconi in the 1990s and 2000s, and possibly Berlusconi again?

But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”

In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication of a selection of the photographs in book form. So what made Facebook different from previous attempts to gather the 1977 generation?

Facebook helps individuals develop a sense of belonging to a wider community, for example by joining or “liking” groups. The online sharing of photographs reinforces this sense of belonging. It prompts acts of recollection in an interactive and public context, turning the photographs into an occasion for a collective and oral “show and tell,” like the real-life viewing of, say, holiday snapshots or family albums among family members and friends.

Indeed, Facebook reproduces orality in a very similar way as when you’re going through a photo album. The tags and comments, which read very much like spontaneous, real-life or telephone conversations, substitute the pointing out of people or places in an album. This effect is amplified by the use of a wide range of special characters, text symbols and emoticons.

Facebook also changes concepts of private and public, as personal stories and identities are shared in a collective setting. Some of the most intimate photographs in Scuro’s albums, for example, include snapshots of women during or shortly before/after child labour. But then private photographs are always also public and social, in that they depend on shared understandings and conventions.

Nostalgia inevitably plays an important role here. Unlike other European countries, the 1968 protests in Italy were not a one-off event, but extended well into the 1970s, culminating in 1977. In some locations, such as the popular university town of Bologna, the student movement of 1977 had a highly creative and fun-loving character. Things changed, though, after the violent death of a student during riots in March: terrorism and heroin rapidly disarmed the ’77 generation, leaving the former protesters with little more than beautiful memories and bitter critiques of Berlusconian politics.

But the albums don’t simply reply to the generation’s yearning for what is no longer attainable: nostalgia can also provide empowerment. The 1977 photo albums on Facebook then offer a positive and progressive sense of memory retrieval, as people or events that have been left out of official history are now re-inserted into a collective and alternative history from below, thus allowing for a more inclusive history of the 1970s.

It’s obvious, though, that these digital archives don’t fix memories in time, eventually. The options within Facebook to remove tags, comments and photographs, as well as to add tags without control, allow people to manipulate the past. This may explain why Scuro decided to publish a selection of the photographs in book form, thus bringing the digitized photographs back into the analogue sphere. This underscores the unstable character of social networks while demonstrating how people, in the end, prefer the material and tangible photograph to its digital counterpart.