Levels of online discourse on message boards

After perusing two comments sections that relate to the Virginia Tech massacre - one section under the killer's video on YouTube and the other under a column written by a Dartmouth student on the NYTimes page - I've come to the conclusion that there are many different levels of discourse online. At first, it appears as though there is only one - the shrill, profanity-laden dialog you see on high-profile, heavily trafficked sites like YouTube. There's lots of talk of the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, and how it will result, inevitably, in mean-spirited discourse. But its likely that the majority of online discourse takes place "below the surface" of this level of discourse, involving groups of people with similar values who are less likely to flame one another.

The more "public" the discussion is (that is, the more hits that website gets), the more likely the discussion is to be about pecking order. The more "private" it is, the more the discussion will be about sharing information. To say that online discourse is uniformly public just because it can all be accessed by anyone misses the point of how we actually use these spaces to interact with others. We use them according to our particular tastes and desires, which are largely pre-determined by our real-world circumstances (our upbringing, what neighborhood we're living in, our profession). The way sites are linked together continues this trend of linking like-minded people to one another, resulting in smaller, less angry conversations. YouTube is a place for looking at what everyone is looking at. Blogs (where smaller groups of people congregate with like-minded folks) are the place to discuss them.

Then there's the matter of moderation (the NYTimes blog comments board makes more of a point of letting people know that its being moderated than the YouTube one). Presumably, the smaller the site, the less moderation would be needed. But that wholes process (what gets cut, why it gets cut, how many comments get cut) is never really clear. Not that we seem to mind.

Viral Violence and the End of the Powerful Image

The fear of contagious media violence was put forth most forcefully and articulately in Videodrome. So its odd that I was going to screen that movie today for my History of Media class while the whole thing seems to unfold on the news in front of me.

On Keith Olberman's MSNBC show, an FBI pundit advises MSNBC not to play the videos that the Virginia Tech killer has sent to NBC News. He says that while describing the existence of these videos would inform us without causing us harm, the kind of visceral images depicted in the videos results in, at the very least, copycat attempts, and at the worst, copycat murderers. Brian Williams makes an allusion to the potential "negative social consequences" of showing the videos. But its too late - all major media networks have played the videos. Let the experiment begin.

MSNBC is desperately showing totally unrelated clips of heroic acts performed by people over the past few years, including a man who selflessly risked his life to save someone from being hit by a subway in New York. Would this "balance things out," making up for the contagious visceral images? They play the videos, but seem to be desperately apologizing for playing the videos at the same time. The whole thing plays out as a self-loathing attempt to keep people informed.

At moments like this, I almost feel pity for TV news, and TV in general. Perhaps the logic behind airing the videos is that they will be on the Internet, and TV news is competing with the internet, so they need to show the videos. But the videos have a power on TV that they don't have on YouTube or on the internet. Hangings and beheadings have been on the internet for years now, but there is no palpable fear around these videos. I think this has something to do with the fact that its easier to resist clicking on a video or going to a website than to turn away from a news broadcast. And with a news broadcast, there is a human face, a trusted anchor, a personality. The internet is just this anonymous, wide-open repository of human desires, while the TV aspires to tell us what's important. But right now, TV is clearly going through an identity crisis.

There's this idea that by disseminating information about the violence, we are causing it to happen again. If we do not air the image, if we elect to show the heroes instead of the villains, then it will be less likely to happen in the future.

But we're back to this issue of looking at freaks (real or fake), of seeing an unpleasant side of humanity that we had been able to ignore. First, we gawk or laugh. Then we feel guilty about giving them our attention. But then, we get over it, and we assimilate unusual behavior. Given the increased visibility of unusual behavior that is just starting, we're going to have a lot of assimilating to do.

In any case, these videos are likely to change the public understanding of online videos, to bridge the gap between the beheading snuff videos and vlogs. Perhaps a video conversation, with more vlogs than ever, will erupt. We'll normalize these new images by drowning them in our own. He'll be quoted, edited, remixed, parodied, bootlegged, and forgotten. With its unending torrent of vlogs, online video has reduced video from icon to conversation. At the end of last semester, my students and I speculated about the impact of the immanent video of Saddam's hanging. Sure enough, someone was there with a cellphone camera and several iterations of the video ended up on YouTube. But what impact did it really have? Where is the Saddam hanging now? Buried under a mountain of Colbert Report clips and hockey fights. Out of a need to dis-empower the killer, we will continue this trend. This may be a huge step towards the total disappearance of the power of the video image. Maybe the power the video image was more about the exclusive ability to create and disseminate than its verisimilitude.

I ended up not showing Videodrome in class, instead using the time to go over the history of the contagious media violence theory, as well as an informal discussion of the idea. As bizarrely apt as a screening of Videodrome would've been, I think that the decision not to show it was one of the best I've ever made. I suppose that by not screening it, I bought into its central premise: that videos can be deadly viruses, infecting us with murderous or suicidal inclinations. This time, at least, conversation seemed like the best way to communicate.

Neither Melodrama nor Satire

With whom do we identify when watching a TV show/Movie: the writer or the character?

In examining my own feelings for a fictional narrative, I find that I go back and forth from moment to moment between identifying with an imagined author (or audience) and a character. Maybe the most interesting stories, the stories that last, are the ones in which you seem to inhabit both positions. You feel distanced from the fiction, able to pass judgment on the actions of characters, and yet you're also part of those actions.

I think my experience of The Sopranos bears this out. Most times, I'm laughing at Tony, at his malapropisms, his child-like impatience, his lack of foresight. I feel as though the author is making a general point about society (or a certain type of person) and the audience is understanding that point. The point might be something like: the contemporary American pursuit of professional success and familial stability and/or attempts to live by an old, outdated code in a modern world can often lead to absurd situations, or a feeling of hollowness (my interpretation only).

At times like this, the show plays as satire, at which points I feel as though I'm identifying with the imagined author/audience, agreeing with their critique of society. Other times, I feel immersed in the fiction, just as happy or as upset as the characters are.

The moments from the series that stick with me, that pop into my mind periodically, are just that: moments. Not extended stories, not concepts, not even actions. But moments in which characters seem to reflect on their lives. How odd that this visual medium that concentrates so much on action and spectacle only really sticks with me when I'm watching characters who are thinking. And I suppose that they mean more to me because I only have a sense of what those characters are thinking and feeling. Its never spelled out in a voice-over.

Example: Season 6.5, Episode 1: Tony sitting at the edge of the lake after getting the shit kicked out of him by Bobby.

What makes this moment resonate with me? Its everything around the moment, the long history of the character leading up to that scene. I'm only able to feel that sense of weariness because I've seen Tony go through so much, and I know that he doesn't like to lose, but that he has a reflective side, and is capable of seeing the hollowness of his pursuit of power.

The scene also sticks with me because of how its presented. The fact that the sequence features a straight-on close-up of Tony, battered and bruised, and a POV shot of the lake, with no music, make it mean something different than if it had been a single, slow dolly shot circling the character who is expressing his thoughts through dialogue to another character with poignant strings on the soundtrack. In fact, the scene (if I'm remembering it correctly. Maybe its a later scene) punctures the idea of non-diegetic music guiding our emotions by having the radio that's on in the background switch away from "This Magic Moment" to news coverage of the war in Iraq. This reveals the narration to be less manipulative than I thought it was, and pulls me (with Tony) out of my reverie.

Its all based around whether or not the character is aware of the absurdity of his/her situation to the degree that we, the audience, are. What I love about The Sopranos is it goes back and forth, giving me a break from identifying with the characters, allowing me to step back and laugh at the entire situation. It doesn't allow me to settle into that glib, above-it-all point of view that most satires prompt, but it doesn't rely on cheap tricks to guide my emotions the way most televised melodrama does.

Its not that I think melodrama or satire are inherently inferior to this hybrid mode of storytelling/identification, but I do believe that the stories that allow us room to vacillate between identification positions, between author and character - are ultimately the stories that we keep coming back to, the ones that withstand the test of time, that become classics. Stories with a fixed audience identification position (melodrama, horror, satire) are, in a sense, disposable. We cycle through them at a faster rate. They're like amusement rides or non-fiction essays. That said, there's plenty of subtle satire within a lot of melodrama (Douglas Sirk comes to mind), and some melodramatic moments in your average satire. But I haven't come across many shows or movies that balance the two in the way that The Sopranos does.

Its likely that its conclusion will be filled with more earnest, reflective moments than distanced, satiric ones. Here's hoping we're allowed to have another laugh or two at Tony's expense. Or at least Little Carmine's.

Online Video Archive - Reconsidered

After seeing a talk by Richard Pedersen of the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, I've decided to reconsider my position on YouTube as a superior media archive. With a lot of Web 2.0 sites (wikipedia and YouTube), whether or not they are "good" comes down to how we use them, which is, in part, contingent on how we refer to them. The fact that Wikipedia is compared to encyclopedias (which happens in part b/c of the "pedia" in its name) is good, b/c it helps people to understand that wikipedia is a starting point for research, just as encyclopedias are. Problems occur when people use wikipedia in lieu of scholarly journals, published books, or more substantial forms of established knowledge (which is what a lot of people are doing, unfortunately).

With YouTube, if it is viewed as a replacement for film and video archives, that's a problem. As Pedersen said in his talk, YouTube isn't backed up anywhere, videos come and go, the quality is awful (though I find it frustrating that those who attack YouTube use the term "poor quality" as if it were an objective assessment), and there are plenty of chopped up, fraudulent version of things floating around on it. Fine, its not an archive, and its completely inadequate for scholarly research. But so what? Does that mean its not going to be a part of the way the public at large learns more about its mediate past? If we use YouTube (or the pay per view archive taht may follow) the way we use Wikipedia, as a starting point, we're all going to know exponentially more about media than we do now. I can't help but suspect that part of the resistance towards collective archiving of media online isn't the same knee-jerk defensiveness that all experts feel towards Web 2.0. Let's define it as a different kind of knowledge, less perfect but more fluid, use it to benefit our cultures, and move on.

So what do we call this? Its not exactly an archive, and its not exactly a library. Maybe there's never been a name for something like this: an imperfect, expansive, fluctuating catalog of our collective mediated past (or, in the case of Wikipedia, our knowledge present). I suppose we need to stop looking to the past for metaphors, b/c they just get us into trouble. Better to begin to study the ways in which people use the information they get from these sites. The longer they're around, the more opportunity there will be to study this.