RYNSA: WORDS

Yesterday, I joined my wife and two of our friends at the colossal El Con theater for a matinée viewing of James Cameron’s (newest) cinematic opus: Avatar. It was quite the adventure, right down to the NASA-sleek, black, horned-rimmed 3D glasses handed out to us at the box office. We brought our own snacks, of course (microwave popcorn and seasoned almonds), and Yan got her first taste of the big-time American theatrical experience. All in all, everyone seemed to have a really good go of it, even despite the stiff $9.50 ticket price and the bladder-test of a two hour and forty-one minute runtime.

Like most big-budget holiday blockbusters, Avatar had been highly touted in the mainstream press, and it continues to garner rave reviews from a multitude of professional film critics. From the venerable Roger Ebert, to AO Scott (one of Ebert’s replacements on At the Movies) — both of whom likened their Avatar viewing experience to the first time they saw Star Wars in 1977 — to Manohla Dargis, Joe Morgenstern, David Edelstein, Michael Phillips, and many more, nearly everyone seems to dig this movie!

It’s important to note that Avatar was an incredibly expensive film to produce, coming in at just under $240 million officially. It currently ranks as the fourth most expensive film of all time, according to Wikipedia, and still some sources suggest that this exorbitant number falls way short of its true cost. The NY Times, for example, estimated Avatar’s price tag at much closer to $500 million, particularly considering Mr. Cameron’s personal financial contribution and other international marketing expenses.

And yet there is every indication that Avatar will make back all its money and then some. According to Box Office Mojo, in only one week of release Avatar has already raked-in upwards of $160 million domestically and over $255 million from foreign cinemas. With several more weeks in theaters and a slew of future sales in DVDs, books, children’s toys, video games, clothes, etc., there is no doubt that Avatar will be a monumentally commercial success.

So, after the screening, and with all this pop-cultural buzz in mind, Xu Yan returned to her reclusive comfort zone in the back corner of our rental house and I ventured out to a local bar with the rest of our group — my fellow Tucson film nerds — to drink beer and discuss the movie in greater detail. Generally speaking, like everybody else, we were all impressed with Avatar’s motion-capture animation technology and the fantastic art direction. But we also each held serious reservations about a number of the film’s nonsensical plot points and the problematic socio-political message(s) therein. Here’s a very rough overview of our more pointed criticisms:

• One friend wondered why there weren’t more portrayals of color, namely blackness, both within the fictional, blue-skinned race known as the “Na’vi” and the invading human population, and he scoffed at the utter lack of LBGT representations among both their ranks.
• Using a feminist lens, my other friend expressed concern about the long-standing Hollywood habit of perverting reality and distorting images of the female body, particularly evident in the unrealistically slender, muscled and sensuous physical features of the lead female character, “Neytiri.”
• And, finally, in keeping with my own political struggles, I lamented at what seemed to be a complete denial of economic class stratification in the filmmakers’ decision to assign antagonist credentials to a cliche military machine and NOT the greedy, callous, Earth-based corporate interests that were ultimately responsible for initiating both the imperial pursuit on the distant planet Pandora and the genocidal violence against the indigenous people. Argh!

Clearly, Mr. Cameron has much to learn about storytelling if he is to satisfy our little gang of disgruntled Tucson film-buffs. Race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, class… we definitely tried to hit ‘em hard, as it were, and in the end Avatar was left somewhat wanton. The fatal flaw of this film, in my opinion, is its unwillingness to acknowledge and celebrate sentient diversity — a fear of difference.

Let’s get right to the point: the Na’vi people are an incredibly homogeneous species. As one of my friends described it that afternoon in the bar, “no one has an eating disorder,” and he’s exactly right! In some ways, what we don’t see is more telling than the great spectacle (heavily marketed in the media) that we all paid so much to experience in the first place. We don’t see any fatties, no one with a physical or cognitive disability, no one who expresses political dissent against the Na’vi leadership, no variation in skin color, no kinky fetishes, no dialects, no slang, and on and on. In essence, we don’t see any of the things that make civilization simultaneously rich with meaning and also very, very challenging.

Cameron and company have pretty much edited out the complexities of life in a naked attempt to force an emotional bond between the movie-going public and the super-human (by definition) Na’vi people. Avatar’s version of “noble savagery,” as portrayed through the main protagonist’s intimacy with this idyllic, peaceful, and spiritually-connected little nation of stretchy smurfs, might make for compelling (even romantic) fodder for the big screen but it is ultimately a kind of bad anthropology. This film can in no way serve as a poetic allegory — much less a visionary model — for anything we might make manifest in contemporary society, for this day or tomorrow. Though they have been carefully and painstakingly crafted by a contingency of talented artists, writers, and computer technicians, the Na’vi are little more than giant blue puppets, hollow signs for a director that doesn’t want to get his hands dirty trying to flesh-out something “real,” something we can all recognize within ourselves, a common humanity; Cameron ignores all those tedious little differences that distinguish sentient beings from inanimate objects.

This failure to appreciate the importance of diversity is certainly disappointing.  However, to Cameron’s credit, Avatar is not merely a character study in interpersonal dynamics.  Regardless of any imperfections three dudes in a bar might find to beef on, Avatar still stands-out as a coherent, beautiful, entertaining, and sometimes even awe-inspiring cinematic achievement precisely because the filmmaker has bigger goals in mind. Beyond the sexy bells-and-whistles of how it was produced, not to mention two surprisingly effective performances from young actors Zoe Saldana (“Neytiri”) and Sam Worthington (“Jake Sully”), Avatar ultimately serves as a vehicle from which to advocate for a grander and more complex understanding of our global network systems, be they ecological, cultural or even technological.  In other words, we are not-so-subtly asked to remember that everything is connected.

There is one scene in particular that fully articulates the praise-worthy underlying ethic of Avatar.  During the final third of the film, Sigourney Weaver’s “Grace,” the rugged and passionate botanist in charge of the Avatar science program, implores Giovanni Ribisi’s “Parker,” a sarcastic, upper-level corporate lackey and the top-dog behind the mining effort on Pandora, to reconsider his insistence on removing the Na’vi and destroying the land.  The dialogue proceeds in rapid-fire [SPOILER ALERT]:

JAKE:  You say you want to keep your people alive?  You start by listening to her.
GRACE: Those trees were sacred to the Omaticaya in a way that you can’t imagine.
PARKER: You know what?!  You throw a stick in the air around here and it’s gonna land on some sacred fern, for Christ’s sake!!
GRACE: I’m not talking about some kind of pagan voodoo here.  I’m talking about something real, something measurable in the biology of the forest.
PARKER: Which is what exactly?
GRACE: What we think we know is that there is some kind of electro-chemical communication between the roots of the trees, like the synapses between neurons.  And each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora.
PARKER: Which is a lot, I’m guessing.
GRACE: It’s more connections than the human brain. Get it?!  It’s a network.  It’s a global network and the Na’vi can access it!  They can upload and download data — memories at sites like the one you just destroyed.  Yes!
PARKER: (beat) What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They’re just goddamn trees!
GRACE: You need to wake up, Parker.
PARKER: No, you need to wake up!
GRACE: The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground, it’s all around us!  The Na’vi know that and they are fighting to defend it…

In this dark era of slash-and-burn disaster capitalism, environmental degradation, and a plague of massive disinformation campaigns from a handful of elite economic entities hell-bent on maintaining their power and turning a profit at the expense of the natural world, Avatar offers a timely, grand, and much-appreciated word to the wise. I sincerely hope the audience is paying attention.

LINKS:
Wikipedia: Avatar
Review: At The Movies

It looks as though the world’s multinational corporations have graduated from Maoist ‘reeducation’ camp just in time for the Summer games. According to this article in BusinessWeek, global companies, some from the United States, have recently taken a decidedly nationalistic approach to advertising in Chinese media, and all with the goal of wooing new customers to their brand. 

This is really not much of a surprise. Foreign companies wrapping themselves in the flag–in this case a bright, red one–is nothing new, and it was bound to happen sooner or later in China. There’s certainly a lot of money to be made from the emergent market that is the Chinese mainland, especially so during the Olympics. Corporate interests know this. They’re not gonna let a golden opportunity pass them by.

However, I do worry that corporations are stoking an already healthy fire. National pride is dangerous regardless of the nation in question. When that particular passion is combined with large numbers of disenfranchised people (China in a nutshell), it could spell future chaos in the form of violence, mob rule, or, in the American context, mass adoption of brutal foreign policies (ie, the asinine Bush Doctrine). 

In any case, it’s important to remember that flattering advertising does not a comrade Lei Feng make. Please believe me. As a well-seasoned serf in the global fraud that is economic neoliberalism, I know of what I speak. These corporations couldn’t give two chopsticks what happens to China.

This coming Sunday, June 1st (which is tomorrow), the newly-established One Laptop Per Child, Australia crew will be hosting a conference in Sydney. I’ve got another volunteer opportunity this weekend (more on that in another post), which makes getting to New South Wales virtually impossible. Otherwise, I’d probably be there. Maybe. I don’t know… meh.

My hesitancy stems form the fact that OLPC News (among others–TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Gizmodo, Engadget), has been reporting on what appears to be a major shift in OLPC values. It seems that Nicholas Negroponte–the co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and the proverbial grandfather of the OLPC project–has agreed to align himself and the initiative with Microsoft. The new generation of OLPC laptops will all include simplified versions of Windows XP.

The problem here, of course, is that this will happen at the expense of Sugar Labs, the newly-formed company that created the educational, open-source, GNU/Linux-based operating system that currently lives, albeit temporarily, on the OLPC XO 1. Moreover, this is a relatively clear departure from the stated constructionist mission of the whole OLPC project in that the use of proprietary software (Windows XP) subjects children, it is sometimes said, to “a regime of social control.” Windows, which makes up over 90% of all operating systems in use worldwide, represents a more hierarchical, capitalistic, top-down instructionism. Or at least that’s what the OLPC fans are saying online. 

Honestly, I’m on the fence about all this. The idealism behind Sugar, etc., is certainly admirable, but it may be a little foolish in the face of global poverty. There’s a tendency in the privileged world (ie, the United States) to confuse techy, middle-class intellectual discussions with reality. I would venture to suggest, however, that the heated debates taking place online now have very little to do with the impoverishment experienced everyday in the ‘developing’ world. Trying to choose between constructionism and instructionism, for instance, is a radically different bargain than choosing between your child’s education and food for the family.

My understanding here, also, is that the OLPC project moved towards XP precisely because poor countries were demanding it. Whether correct or not, government and community leaders in the ‘developing’ world felt that independent, open-source software like Sugar’s wouldn’t be as useful as XP. They wanted their youth to learn on an operating system that was considered ’standard’ around the globe, and common to practices within business, government, education, NGO, etc., of wealthier countries.

Despite the fact that it emboldens Microsoft’s monopoly, and contradicts the premise of the open-source OLPC project, I can’t blame the disenfranchized and impoverished for wanting XP. They are making pragmatic decisions that reflect difficult, real-world circumstances. In this regard, I suppose I would rather protect and promote the rights of marginalized people to make (potentially) bad decisions, than force-feed them an idea that may not be useful. I mean, the technology isn’t as important as the people.

However this conflict is resolved within the OLPC community, I do think it behooves social justice activists to educate themselves simultaneously about technological alternatives and real-world contexts. Not every good idea is a workable one. Were it so, we’d have discarded with neoliberalism a long damn time ago.

A week ago, Ars Technica had a brief but interesting article on the meager unveiling of YouTube’s so-called ‘Citizen News Channel,’ a user-generated media project with aims of “…highlighting some of the best news content on YouTube.”  They’ve got a well-spoken young woman named Olivia Ma serving as the ‘News Manager.’ 

The fresh-faced Ma, a Harvard grad, appeared slightly awkward but enthusiastic in her jump-off post. The two-minute ‘welcome’ video was very optimistic, as you might expect from a corporate launch, during which time she proclaimed, ever-so-bubbly:

“This stuff is awesome, you guys! And we want to see lots and lots of it. Because we believe that you YouTubers out there are changing the world of journalism.”

Hmm. Well. We’ll see.

To Olivia Ma’s great credit, Dan Gillmor, director of a the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the esteemed author of  We The Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For The People (which was released on a Creative Commons license, by the way), has given his hesitant approval of the project. Gillmore blogged his initial response to the online channel on the Center for Citizen Media website, stating: 

So far so good — another worthwhile experiment in citizen media. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works… But as they monetize this, I hope they’re going to find a way to reward the people who are doing the work. As I’ve said again and again, I’m not a fan of business models that say “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

I’m a little more skeptical of YouTube’s ‘Citizen News Channel’ than is Mr. Gillmor, though I will withhold judgement for the time being.  But, and just to keep things in perspective, I do feel compelled to remind people that YouTube is owned by Google, a publicly traded multinational corporation and a global goliath in the tech industry.

As of late, Google seems to have strayed a bit from their much-publicized motto of ‘Do No Evil.’ The company has been called to task for participating in what some have identified as unethical, media-related human rights abuses in the ‘developing’ world. Many feel that Google, and other western tech and info firms, have given away their moral legitimacy in China, for example, in order to cash-in on growing economic markets overseas.

The NY Times Magazine had a fairly comprehensive article on Google in China. I don’t personally agree with the equivocation made between offenses of capital and that of the state, as presented by columnist Clive Thompson, but this text will give you a good start on what amounts to a very, very complex issue. 

That being said, then, some folks are rightly concerned that media are increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people and with damning consequences on the quality of news journalism. Ironically, one of those concerned citizens is Dan Gillmor himself. In this YouTube video via PBS (will the irony never end?!?), Gillmor hints at the web censorship taking place all around the world (00:01:48). Though he doesn’t connect the dots as clearly as I would like, it is readily apparent that wide-spread restrictions on internet use by foreign governments are enabled in large measure by western (i.e., American) corporations that seek only to earn money abroad. And Google is right in the middle of this global phenomenon.  

For a more playful analysis, check out this animation entitled ‘iRepress’ from former journalist turned citizen animator, Mark Fiore.

So, in my mind at least, the potential in YouTube’s efforts to promote citizen journalism, incidentally or otherwise, is kinda behind the curve.  I mean, in Web 2.0 terms, they’re really, really late to the party. There are currently many well-established, NON-profit alternatives in the field of participatory news media, and their reputations haven’t been called into question with the fervor of a gazillion pithy tech writers. Here’s a brief list of the citizen journalism websites I frequent:

Indymedia
Witness: The Hub
Global Voices Online

The wisdom of the academics and media advocates notwithstanding, I guess I’d have to encourage people to avoid mainstream versions of citizen journalism. Start with what is already known to be truly humanitarian, not to mention supported by means outside the narrow agenda of capitalistic enterprise. Maybe Google (via YouTube) will make of a fool of me later on down the road. But for now, I will be holding the ‘Citizen News Channel’ at arms length.

This morning I found this new video from TED in my iTunes podcast list featuring the design work of Swiss entrepreneur Yves Behar.  He is probably best known for his role in designing both the OLPC XO and the Jawbone.

Initially, I was draw to this video and his presentation because of the title: “Creating Objects that Tell Stories.”  The thinking was that this was some new invention or concept, ala the work at MIT’s Media Lab or the art of Andy Goldsworthy, for example, that would provide new methods for helping people–real world, flesh-and-blood people–to tell their stories.  Perhaps this betrays my community bias, but new technology, no matter how sexy or well conceived, is fundamentally useless as a subject.  Humanity is subject, technology is object.  That is to say that technology is merely a tool, a resource, inanimate and inert, and therefore kind of boring.  Its existence is only significant when meaning is ascribed to it by human beings.  A loptop could be a tool for storytelling, or it could be an expensive paper weight.  The key variable here is the conscious human.

There is a tendency among some in the so-called ‘creative industries’–of which I mean designers, coders, graphic designers, web engineers, musicians, videographers and editors, etc.–to overly anthropomorphize the things they create.  The language they use to describe these artifacts is beyond positive, its downright poetic!  Quite literally the words they use to express the potential of a given thing, a technological product, are words that would otherwise be relegated to the human experience.  There is no differentiation.   

Far be it from me to be the semantic police, but this lack of distinction between thing and human is problematic for me.  The sci-fi coolness of cyborg philosophizing aside–which I actually find very compelling–the expansion of language ultimately distorts, or even hides, very real human circumstances and conditions.  It makes it exceedingly difficult, moreover, for human populations to effect change where and when change is needed.  Put another way, if a television and a mother share the same descriptors, how then should we raise our children?

I believe that there is a distinct financial incentive for blurring the lines between subject and object.  At one point in the TED presentation, for example, Mr. Behar betrays his allegiances by saying, “…We bring intellectual property, you know, we bring a marketing approach, we bring all this stuff.  But I think at the end of the day what we bring is these values, and these values create a soul for the companies we work with.” (00:10:30 – 00:10:40, timecode). 

It’s that word ’soul’ that bothers me.  How can an incorporated, for-profit, private enterprise have a soul?!?  Obviously, it can’t.  But the concept is none the less pervasive in the contemporary cultural imagination.  It is a common myth, the humanity of industry.  It is an insidious trope, disseminated by wealthy companies who seek, through elaborate PR and marketing campaigns, to animate their business practice and their products.  

My criticism, to be clear, is not against Yves Behar as an individual, or his designs, or the use of those creations in the public sphere.  I’m simply uncomfortable with the terminology he and his colleagues use to describe their work.  The convergence of the organic and the inorganic may be inevitable, but the liberalization of language most definitely privileges one over the other, and we should always remember that.  We should try to be more conscientious about how we ascribe meaning to technology.

UPDATE:

For real objects that tell stories, check out the Labcast from MIT’s Media Lab, and the invention of these amazing little things they call Siftables.  Imagine the human storytelling potential of these tools!  

Lately, I have noticed that there is a significant debate among those in the field of digital storytelling: should we use the latest and greatest technological tools, or whatever is available and useful at the time?  In other words, ‘high’ or ‘low’?

For me this represents a false dichotomy, as is often the case with such stark dualisms of this kind.  Actually, when it comes to digital anything (cameras, computers, whatever) there’s really no such thing as ‘low’ tech.  This is a conceit of privileged, ‘first-world’ artists and activists who have been enjoying regular and consistent access to electricity, leisure time, and thriving new tech markets.

That being said, there is a difference between a $10,000 HD, three-chip digital video camera with XLR inputs, for example, and the disposable, point-and-shoot, cardboard and plastic cameras you can get at an American gas station for twenty bucks.  So, there certainly are useful points to be discussed from both perspectives.

One argument that is made towards using costly, ‘high’ technology in the classroom, community center, or other such environment, is the importance of introducing disenfranchised individuals to otherwise inaccessible state-of-the-art production tools.  This is of value not only for general knowledge of how high quality media, etc., is created and distributed, but also for the psychological affect of encouraging marginal folks to see themselves as within reach of the mainstream production systems.  Sometimes it is enough that people have access, or feel that they have access, to excellence, whether or not it is actually utilized.  According to the professional literature presented to me at the VCA, this ideas is referred to generically as ‘avowal,’ as in the acknowledgment or affirmation of participation or belonging.

On the other side of the debate, some CCD (community cultural development) practitioners prefer to take a decidedly streamlined, DIY approach to media education and digital storytelling.  These professionals (and amateurs, for that matter) see access to production tools as an inherently political issue, and one that cannot be divorced from larger, global economic realities.  They believe that technology, whether low or high, simply does not exist in a vacuum.  Without verging too much into Marxism, current neoliberal, capitalistic, global circumstances require distinct class divisions, wherein some folks have and other do not.  Therefore it is seen by many as a terrible mistake to facilitate the desire on the part of disenfranchised digital storytellers to participate in the mainstream media systems that have consistently sustained their marginality.  The discussion is not about ‘high’ and ‘low’ tech so much as it the political contexts of the human being who use it.

If you couldn’t tell by my writing, I am leaning towards the latter in this game of high-low.  Though I recognize the value of certain psychological impacts to CCD work of this kind, I also understand that we cannot build a movement of informed and engaged, tech and media savvy citizens on good feelings alone.  My belief thus far is that there should also be some meta-level talk around the political and economic context of digital storytelling.  If professionals in the field considered the bigger picture in this way, then I truly believe we could move beyond simplistic, materialistic debates and focus more consciously on the liberating potential of our work.  The people are more important than the tools they use.

So, my answer to the question of using ‘high’ or ‘low’ forms of technology is easy: yes!