The Abercrombie Audience

"It is all about power of course... In the end... The power to seduce... the luminous event and the drip, drip, drip of ideology." (Silverstone 1999)

I always thought of myself as an active audience, even a resistant audience. The type that not only sees objects but notices them as signs, symbols, constructs, facades, mirrors, trick-mirrors, representations. Like, I watch tv ads but read them against-the-grain, pointing to the artifice of the image and the insincerity of their address. I consume trash tv but I am not a couch potato; I am in on the joke. Or so I thought.

When I entered Abercrombie and Fitch's flagship store in London, I was, yes, seduced by the luminous event and felt the drip, drip, drip of ideology. And of my own drooling too. For starters, the store-greeter is a superbuff model with his shirt off.

The whole place was moody dark instead of department store-bright. The music was pounding and loud, like at a gay nightclub, instead of the typical soft background fare. The entire store--and all the clothes--smelled like your jock classmate's after-shave. And the salesmen were, umm, real live moWdels displaying their oiled biceps.

They'd be such teases too with their shirts riding up to reveal their undie-straps when they reach for that shirt you like on the top shelf.

Needless to say, I was a powerless audience. I blew off wads of cash. Though you forget about it when you're there: I think it was highly strategic that they assigned the prettiest guy as the cashier in order to wipe your guilt away at the crucial minute. A minute you'd wish to last for an eternity. Yeah, I swear, he was thatcute.

The media scholar Ien Ang once said, "The active audience is not a powerful audience." And to that I say, as I always do apparently, "ABS-SOLUTELY."

Geek Fantasy Movie

After a week of writing essays and journal articles (in fairness!), I gave myself a night off yesterday to watch 21. 21 is based on the real life story of an MIT maths whiz who used his genius to win big in Las Vegas blackjack. My friend and I were shocked when we arrived at a fully-packed cinema for a Tuesday late-night screening, especially since most of the undergrads are home for spring break. But then again, it should really be no surprise that the geek-gets-rich-and-Kate-Bosworth storyline plays well in Geektown.

21 is directed by Robert Luketic, the ultimate ditzy geek director. He covered ditzy in Legally Blonde, his ode to perky sorority girls the world over (My fave quote: "You got in to Harvard Law?" "What? Like it's hard?"). Now he gives geeks their due in 21.

Their casting of little-known Jim Sturgess in the lead role of Ben is perfection. With his scruffy hair, dewy eyes, and too-pale skin, he stands in for that effortlessly cute nerdy classmate you (I?) adored in college. The kind who rarely recites but gets you all excited when he does. Even if it was too profound for you (me?) to take in. :) Anyway, Ben uses his braininess and shyness to good use in the cardgame. Where in reality he's very reserved, at blackjack he's cool, methodical, rational, with probability and variance as his secret powers.

Sigh.

Yeah okay, Kate Bosworth's casting as an MIT rocket science major is a bit of a dubious representation. But me thinking that her role is underwritten actually means that she got me interested to know more about her character. In their geek version of Ocean's Eleven, she plays the low-profile cardplayer who signals Big Player Ben when a table "gets hot" (i.e., when the big cards are about to be played). The scene where she and Ben get hot together practically drew cheers from the Cambridge crowd. Here's a hero who dreams to build a robot, enter Harvard Med School, and get the sexiest smartest girlfriend in campus. Talk about identity as being and becoming!

And like Legally Blonde, the moral is staying true to oneself. Needless to say, I loved it. 21 demonstrates that one should never underestimate geek powers. The power to discourse analyze and deconstruct a text. The power of dialectical and integrative thinking. The power to summon quotes at will, complete with author, year, and sometimes even page number. All these will get me somewhere. Yes, I'll keep telling myself that.

Media Ethics Revisited

Cross-posted from the media studies discussion website Mediapolis:

Cambridge hosted a big-time conference last weekend. Entitled The Ethics of Media, it brought together philosophers (Onora O'Neill, Sabina Lovibond), media theorists (Daniel Dayan, Lilie Chouliaraki), media anthropologists (Georgina Born, Mirca Madianou), and journalists (BBC's David Edmonds) to discuss the central question: Can we construct a media ethics, and how might it look like?

There's a million things to discuss! Including (my unexpected fave) "What if Foucault Had a Blog?" But perhaps the most significant issue that came out during the conference is the tension among different camps in answering whether we should construct an ethics for the media at all.

On one hand, the philosophers and theorists were ready with their prescriptions of what media ethics should be premised on. Some advocated a deontological approach, that is: ethics based on duty or obligation. Roger Silverstone's prescription of Hospitality was key here. But even then, there were disagreements: Justice and Freedom were also floated as alternative primary norms. Some others advocated a virtue-ethics Aristotelian approach that looked at journalists' identities and intentions themselves and how they strive to do the Good and live out virtues of accuracy and sincerity.

On the other hand, there were calls for a bottom-up approach to ethics. Georgina Born, famous of course for her ethnography of the BBC, argued that practical ethics should come first, with institutional and universal ethics to come later. It is important to look at government policies, institutional structures, as well as journalists' resources (skills, equipment, etc.), and output all helping or hindering 'ethical' media production.

And there were those, such as Barbie Zelizer, who raised the impossibility of speaking of a universal ethics at all. Her main argument is that because of differences in context, across time and space, it is impossible to prescribe catch-all standards to judge what is good or bad journalism. Her case study was on about-to-die photographs. She said that about-to-die paintings of greek gods and Cleopatra were deemed aesthetic in the past. Then in the 1950s, a journalist won a Pulitzer for taking a photo of a woman falling from a building mid-suicide. But then in NYC 50 years later, a similar photo of a college student was published by the NY Post but was widely criticized for its insensitivity. Then in 9/11, such photos of people jumping from the Towers were excised from American media accounts but were circulated in other countries. Notions of 'good' and 'bad' photojournalism were also contested in circulating photos of Saddam Hussein's capture, Daniel Pearl's kidnapping, and the torture of prisoners. Across time and space then, she said notions of 'good' and 'bad' vary: how can we construct a universal standard then? For her, relativistic ethics is then what we should have.

Now, as participants in the global space of appearance, what do YOU think media ethics should look like? How might your own text of the Kyoto Agreement for Media Ethics read like? Do you agree with Daniel Dayan who argues that journalists have to be Priests, have to be Superhuman, have to sacrifice their own rights to be subjects?

THIS is the podcast with Barbie Zelizer (UPenn), Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths) and Don Slater (LSE). Joanna (30:00) presented a lively and against-the-grain reading of Foucault with "What If Foucault Had a Blog?" Interesting also, during the Q&A, in the 1:20:00 mark, Daniel Dayan comments how his arguments were "powerfully destroyed" by Barbie. He then proceeds to launch his own very powerful yet humble comeback to Barbie.

Jon with Daniel Dayan, the Pope of Media Ethics

Geekgasmic.