What does understanding television mean?
To aid my own understanding, over the last 14 years I have accumulated and contrasted much of this historical televisual change. My aggregations trace the primary premise of contemporary media making: to perfectly hypnotize ourselves and others, like frogs floating in pots of slow-boiling water, until we are perfectly cooked. And then in return, agreeably under its influence, we perfectly respond by demanding even more heat. This hegemonic perversity should not be an overriding premise of any communicational medium. But it is.
“We believe we understand media and media making, but we are ill-trained ... amateurs, professionals and academicians alike.”
We believe we understand media and media making, but we are ill-trained -- amateurs, professionals and academicians alike. We now find little reason to think about communication before we act. Because of this we have rapidly transitioned, in just one human generation, from passive mass-spectating to complete and voluntary individualized media immersion. This comes with great risk to both the idea and practice of historical human communication.
I have, over the course of this project, critiqued thorny Tower of Babel talk like “We are the media!” (Even in its newest rendition: Je suis Charlie.) I would counter expressions like these with my own, “We are not media, rather we are humans on Earth who communicate badly with many forms of media machines.” But today, I am not so sure. Maybe we are becoming our media. At the very least, we eagerly encourage media-makers to make us into their media images. And this mechanical mystification is where most of my Cultural Farming projects come into surreal focus.
Best-practice farmers understand that growing good soil comes well before growing good plants. And this is the challenge of Cultural Farming: to longitudinally compare, recontextualize, diversify, cultivate and harvest healthier media, which naturally requires heavy-lifting, tilling, planting, mulching, weeding, pruning, fertilizing. Like any farmland, we need to work our mediascapes toward simpler and healthier production, and further away from genetic (technological) modification. Why do this? Because Form reforms Function exactly as Accuracy reforms Truth. This, intellectually, is a much different premise than re-mix parody, or snapping smart-phone-selfies, or dumping video into YouTube, or grunting for celebrity in 140 characters, or even gaming the craft of Journalism for profit -- and it is radically different from much of so-called ‘documentary’. For these mostly unreflexive methods foster little more than toxic vast wastelands.
“When artifice becomes natural no amount of description adds up to depiction.”
I do so by refracting historical televisual practices through the colored lenses of Critical Theory using ethnographically surreal methodologies. My purpose here is to edit against the grain of too-familiar TV practice, and towards a higher form of media memory, understanding and response: reciprocal verisimilitude. This is the true “work of art” in the age of its mechanical reproducibility: to identify and recover sacred boundaries. For when artifice becomes Nature, no amount of description adds up to depiction.
Thinking is not a performing art...it is why we need an Art for Thinking.
Cultural Farming is wholly designed for personal intellectual profit. And I do it all without ever touching a camera; in part because one of the very first lessons gleaned from applying Cultural Farming to media understanding is that pushing-a-button today is too often the same as pulling-a-trigger. I mean this literally, not as metaphor. Hence, in reply, I employ TV against itself through forms of symbolic exchange by critically collecting, reciting and contrasting the languages and techniques of contemporary communication in order to return its gifts. This reciprocation is a necessary, sacred and liberating form of media potlatch.
We assume technology will solve every conceivable human want, and beyond. But today’s technological weaponization of communication holds dire consequences for every living thing on our planet. This new pornography, which can be likened to a righteous mechanical form of theocratic dominionism, is the false promise of a poisonous new fidelity mutually designed by the lords and vassals of these new communicating machines (read: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Amazon, Netflix, et al). It heralds a violent informational Dark Age of more dead metaphors, false equivalency, flaccid journalism and mechanical sadism across the so-called Seven Mountains of Culture: media, government, religion, family, business, education, and arts and entertainment. Beating plowshares into swords, however, must be rebuked with equal force. Cultural Farming can help to repay.
“Beating plowshares into swords, however, must be rebuked with equal force.”
Technological lethality pervades two ways. First, by converting any subject into object. Second, through its binary alienation -- self/other, near/far, local/foreign. Both help stoke growing tribal outrage over social beliefs. Hence, humans living in a mediated world need critical methods for fulsome response. Citizens need sharper methods for replying to today’s growing one-way interpellations. We must craft these replies clearly and immediately, even when critical comparison demands an equal shaming usage of the very same ‘doublespeak’ grammars (Orwellian Newspeak) mediamongers so perversely master.
How should viewers watch these video essays?
What does understanding television mean?
How do I understand television?
Can you discuss one of your videos?
What was discovered in this research?
What if viewers still don’t ‘understand’ television?
An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming
