Culture of Distraction: Imagery, Consumption and the Contrast of Koyaanisqatsi

Western culture has mostly diverged from the industrially-focused center of production that would have been recognizable to Marxist thought. The evolution of technology that is able to reproduce or mimic reality has introduced a complexity to that thought; indeed, the reality suggested by such technology has aided in the formation of a new, perhaps self-consuming, means of production. Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, the first of the Qatsi films directed by Godfrey Reggio, reveals this new paradigm of culture made from, and contained within, visual media. A plotless, wordless collection of expertly-filmed montages and sequences, Koyaanisqatsi shows the transfer from nature to human production, to human interaction with media, to culture's total immersion within itself; humanity is now out of balance but is unaware of it.

As suggested by the cinema-vérité sequences within Koyaanisqatsi, humankind--at least in the "western" world--has grown accustomed to its modern life of constant interaction, consumerism, queues and wage society. Its relationship to its own imagery has grown to embrace media that are overwhelmingly one-sided. Despite the existence of opinion polls, interactive websites, and the emergence of self-populated content in the form of weblogs and video sites, it is apparent that the masses do not control or produce its "mass" media. The majority of knowledge is disseminated through visual media, created and controlled by a limited number of corporations, which does not foster return communication.

Mobile imagery as seen on television and movie screens is fast-paced, lacking in information compared to print sources, and more likely to contain advertising, either of the corporate sort or the ideological. Even media intended to be dedicated to information delivery--such as television news--are carefully constructed to deliver sensation and attract viewers rather than to inform; its intent is a return in ad revenue rather than to provide its existing viewers with historical context. According to Chris Barker's Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, Jean Baudrillard would call this "all-encompassing flow" of visual data a "hyperreality, in which we are overloaded with images and information" (Barker 207). The masses are lost in communication, lost in information that is targeted; because we cannot "separate reality from its statistical, simulative projection in the media" (Baudrillard 579), even the ever-growing accumulation of data cannot inform the viewer, instead creating a "new species of uncertainty [...] from information itself and even from an excess of information" (580). The data is manufactured, meaningless and motivated, and is not truly information, despite the time, effort, and sociological study expended to create it.

The technology involved--digital video, high-definition television, cable channels, the Internet--is seen both as favorable and detrimental. The ability to create and access media in such an unprecedented manner has the potential for "new electronic tribalism--an achieved transparency of information and communication" (Barker 577), yet its global capacity can be subject to Marxist criticism, chained to capitalistic desires and forced to "obey the dialectic of productive forces" (Barker 577). Because mass media is still directed mostly by corporations, there is a core element of hegemonic capitalism at odds with the concept of public interest. People have always created culture, yet so now do mass media corporations, creating a "terrain of conflict and struggle over meanings" (Barker 68); the public allows this defining of its own culture and perhaps may even assume it is accurate. Meaning is devalued in such a highly technological, information-delivery world; such controlled imagery is not reality, although it tries either to reflect it or simulate its own, and such simulation of reality promotes distractedness and consumerism. It is not the imagery itself that is to blame--although arguments can be made both for its "beneficial use" and its "manipulation"--since "there is no relationship between a system of meaning and a system of simulation" (Baudrillard 579). Koyaanisqatsi supports this, being itself a collection of simulation without meaning, without intent. It shows culture, it shows reality without culture, and is culture itself. It reflects but does not simulate or imitate.

Is it a sense of postmodernism, this blurring and redefinition of visual meaning? Is not Western society savvy enough to absorb the myriad of images, sort through its content and intent, and continue to be the base of its own reality? A primary aspect of postmodern culture is the bricolage, the "rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning" (Barker 202). For instance, in Koyaanisqatsi, a sequence of modern, glass-fronted office buildings becomes a series of aerial shots of a modern city, then to a succession of microchips and motherboards; the point at which the shift takes place is uncertain, and the visual parallel between the macro-buildings and the micro-chips is obvious. This insightful culture-referencing is a valid lens through which to interpret the world, yet it is doubtful that the corporate creators of mass media are interested in such; being creatures of capitalism, their goal is the conversion of inaction to consumer activity. Television informs movies, movies inform television, and both are now subjects of this new, dynamic presentation of spasming visual content; television is "at the heart of image production, and the circulation of a collage of stitched-together images that is core to a postmodern cultural style" (Barker 203). However, simply to remix and redefine in a postmodern manner is not sufficient to transfer power; to refer to other, past meanings does not necessarily urge one to act. Therefore the quickly-rendered imagery of the mass media is not a postmodern technique to influence thought, but an ocular conveyor belt meant to influence action.

Imagery is created, hence controlled. While "we have moved away from an economically determinist linear model" (Barker 56), the concept of culture-as-politics is still ingrained within the public mind; since "Capitalism is restless in its search for new markets, new raw materials, new sources of profit and capital accumulation" (Barker 180), the creators of mass media will always gear their content toward the continued culture of pro-capitalism. The imagery is exciting, suggestive of solution, and prods the viewer toward consumerism, but not to political action. The interaction between human and media becomes one-sided due to the latter's lack of informative content, and so the public allows the media to dictate culture: "if we cannot judge cultural products, then we have to accept that whatever is produced by corporations of the culture industries is acceptable because popular" (Barker 49). An uninformed public is desirable for a controlling power structure, and popular culture is built from this confusion and removal of will, a "state of stupor" resulting from a "radical uncertainty as to our own desire, our own choice, our own opinion, our own will" (Baudrillard 579). Rather than control via propaganda or force, the makers of mass media control via confusion. Postmodern-inspired imagery from a ruling superstructure blurs the sense of inequality--Baudrillard might say that the "continual flow of images [...] establishes no connotational hierarchy" (Barker 580)--confusing the public into feeling that all is well and going according to design. By seeming to offer much, mass media actually gratifies the desire to fail to act; the images are selected, edited, and devoid of provocative content except as an inducer of brief, sympathetic emotional response. The response itself is cathartic, but not enough to cause cultural action: "the masses are deeply aware that they do not have to make a decision about themselves and the world, that they do not have to wish, that they do not have to know, that they do not have to desire" (Baudrillard 585). Without a sense of historical perspective, and without media that informs, the public cannot compare what it sees to what it knows, or should know.

This causes a shift to consumerism--the only information comes from news or entertainment, and the only solution comes from advertising; whatever is lacking is artificial, and can be fulfilled by the same source (i.e., create a problem and solve it). The superstructure in the form of media-producing corporations and governments benefits globally, due to the public's unawareness of inegalitarian reality in the world. The promptings for consumption are "constantly introduced in the upper echelons of the social hierarchy, whence they diffuse downward through an extremely efficient system of consumption-oriented communications media" (Peet 566), despite its effects on the remainder of the world which suffers to support the consuming populace. In order to maintain a capitalist system, the "powerholders have a vested interest in preserving social inequality" (Peet 564), and so the rate of images and their appeal must be increased to maintain the public's desire to consume without awareness. There is not much turmoil in this, unless the public was more fully aware of its own lack of mobility or that of the less wealthy countries which support its own consumerism; even if the public is conscious of the injustices in the world, it does not "produce great social stress as long as all environments are improving" (Peet 569), and so the one-sided media continue.

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Koyaanisqatsi highlights this seldom-shown disparity, showing scenes from many parts of existence, often unfamiliar--a ravaged street in New York after the 1977 blackout, a vast desert contrasted by a steadily-churning factory that colors its air, a sea of abandoned urban buildings with no apparent function except that they once housed people within their brick stomachs. Because there is no ideology, no drive, the scenes are simply visual, and so contain meaning as opposed to the produced imagery of television and movies; the meaning that can be culled from this scenery comes from the viewer, and is not embedded within the media itself. In this way Koyaanisqatsi counters the normally suppressive media deluge.

Much postmodern visual media is fast-paced, concerned with sound bites and explosions of interest and cultural appeal, bombarding the viewer with messaging or action. A movie or commercial may be filmed at a video game pace, its message hidden, subliminal, to be noticed only by the subconscious rather than by a discerning eye and mind. The massively-produced media "teaches us nothing at all" and have "rather restricted the limits of will and representation" (Baudrillard 584). In the case of action (such as the Transporter movies or the Bourne series, in which action is characterized by a staccato, unsteady flurry of images), this may be due either to an established hand-held filmography style or because the technology is still comparatively new, a case of "it can be done, therefore it is." Commercials are also carefully edited to transfer a maximum amount of visual advertisement within a set time limit, and so also tend to consist of this quick-cut style, where the eye is not allowed to rest upon an image before moving on. While Koyaanisqatsi predates this new imagery-barrage style of content delivery, it yet resists it; in showing long aerial shots of scenery, a human face puzzled or irritated at being filmed, or a cyclical sequence, for long minutes, Koyaanisqatsi allows the viewer to study the visuals without fear of looking away and losing what it shows. The attraction is due to the content and not the motion, and therefore the message is whatever the viewer slowly and with thought chooses to pull from it.

It seems an obvious principle that people need to be involved in their own creation of culture, "willing partners in the game of truth, in the game of information" (Baudrillard 582). There is a sense that the public of western culture has grown used to being fed its own reality, despite mass media's claim to support the public's desires. However, there are also signs that the "mass media" paradigm commanded by a capitalist power structure is beginning to falter, at least until it decides how best to adapt or reinvent itself. The newest forms of communicative technology is helping to bring this about; when anyone can create media, everyone will, and the production of media by the masses is a new culture in itself. For the time being, this technology is constrained to those lucky enough to live within a culture that provides it, but as with radio, then television, the Internet should prove to be the most democratizing of culture production--at least while it is still populated by the masses.

WORKS CITED

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory & Practice. 3rd Ed. London: SAGE Publications, 2008.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media. Trans. Mary Maclean. New Literary History 16.3 (1985): 577-589.

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. Dir. Godfrey Reggio. MGM/UA, 1983. DVD. MGM, 2002.

Peet, Richard. "Inequality and Poverty: A Marxist-Geographic Theory." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65.4 (1975): 564-571.

MySpaced Out

Having been in the web industry for over a dozen years now, I've kept careful track of online communities as they've developed. From the early days of BBS's, to message boards, to chat rooms, to networking communities.

As a comparison between MySpace and Facebook, I've come to the following opinions:


MySpace is a bit like Windows, a programmer's ugly design aesthetic with a greater potential for being hacked and abused.

Facebook is a bit like Mac, more simplistically designed with a well-considered color palette and a more rigid, built-from-the-ground-up programming structure.


MySpace is a place to BE, hence more attractive to teenagers, still desiring to create and project an identity. One's profile can be fully modified using CSS, to the point where it can be unreadable and crash your browser.

Facebook is a place to DO, hence more attractive to everyone. Facebook came out with the ability to add applications to your profile first, I believe, and opened them up to external developers. You can come back to Facebook daily, or several times a day, to use its applications. Your profile is not customizable designwise, so it performs its duty as a "networking tool" much better.


MySpace has the ability for a user to blog. Facebook does not. That's one thing I'd like Facebook to have, as an application.


I think MySpace has had to play catch-up since Facebook appeared, much in the same way that Friendster lost ground once MySpace came to be. MySpace added applications and the ability to update your status too, but the usability factor, the design, and the modular structure seems less intuitive and less appealing.

What's next? I don't know. Networking communities designed for a particular cultural niche (such as Uber.com and Pownce.com for artistic types) haven't caught on. Copycats like Tagged.com are ill-designed and too prone to spamming. Career-based sites are doing quite well, and LinkedIn.com seems to be beating the pants off of sites like Naymz.com and Plaxo.com.

Which sites am I on? LOTS of them. I'm an internet attention whore, keeping a careful balance of open-book lifestyle and attention to security concerns. Search for David Elsensohn or Polarbeast or DeadLounge or Dining in L.A. and I come up on the web a lot. I've been here a while.

Human as plastic

I empathize with Bordo's frustration in her commentary on the plasticization of the human body. It seems that the general public sees no issue with the alteration of the body--either its surface area or its interior--when pursuing a sense of social esteem.

The argument that such effacement suggests a sexist, or patriarchal, or racist, or politicizing nature is often rebuked; "what is wrong with wanting to look better?" Not that I don't also suffer from the same ideology; I also want to "look better" by losing weight and keeping my features groomed in a socially acceptable manner.

However, it's in the very wording that the ideology appears: people want to look better. What is better? Thin? Pale? Blue-eyed? Straight-haired? All the possible answers describing a "better" visual appeal means that there is a current sociological viewpoint of a Platonic ideal, a standard for which to strive. That standard has to be set by something, and it serves as an attempt to "normalize the subject" (Bordo 1103). Such unconscious concern with "obsessive body-praxis" (Bordo 1111) reveals a postmodern disregard.

The prevailing viewpoint also suppresses the knowledge of racial differences; one's eyes can now be made another color besides the "brown" that somehow is seen as negative, one's hair can be straightened so that it differs from others'.

There is, I understand, a counter-argument here: that to modify one's appearance is to create a different sense of self, an "other" that is sexually appealing because of its exoticism or its novelty. Again, though, exoticism means a departure from the norm.



Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. "'Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture"

Glad to be back in the land of Culture

It's related to popular culture, anyway, or at least regional paradigms.

We're freshly back from Springfield, Missouri, and our heads are still reeling.

I can't pinpoint it exactly. Perhaps it's because Winter is there already, cold, bleak and deathlike. Maybe there's a disgruntled political atmosphere after the country had the audacity to elect a black man for President (MO went for McCain). Maybe it's because we haven't had a vacation in a long time, and our tolerance was low.

Of course, waiting for a table at Lambert's in Ozark, just a few miles from the Arkansas border, and being the only interracial couple in a racially homogeneous room, might have had something to do with it. We felt... alien. More than usual. The evangelist-wife beehive mullets were out in force, as was the flannel and the camouflage trucker caps and the beer-sponsored racing event t-shirts. Bianca and I didn't hold hands the entire time we were in the state.

I was asked by a girl there "how is California different from here?" I had a hard time figuring out what to say, where to start. There are some similarities: Chain restaurants. Too many SUVs. Starbucks. Most of California isn't much different from Missouri. Cows, tractor supply, Wal-Mart, highways, homophobia.

But the differences--when speaking of Los Angeles--are vast. L.A. has sidewalks. Springfield's roads slope into ditches because of the rain. In L.A. you can stand in line at a bank and run out of fingers counting ethnicities. Springfield is overwhelmingly white. From L.A. you can drive 275 miles to Las Vegas. From Springfield you can drive 40 miles to Branson. L.A. has earthquakes and wildfires. Springfield has tornado warnings, heavy rainfall and hail. L.A. has parking for ten bucks, advertised by flashlight-waving men in red vests. Springfield has no lack of parking, including 60-foot spaces for 18-wheelers. L.A. has mountains and sometimes an ocean within view. Springfield has an open sky.

How do I explain the utter joy of the taco truck, silhouettes of palm trees in front of phone lines, the brute-force wizardry of shuttle bus drivers weaving through traffic? Techno music, Mini Coopers, thin women with large sunglasses and tiny dogs, goth-industrial clubs, reading books at vegan cafes, Dodger Dogs, homeless veterans at freeway offramps? Celebrity sightings, smog, the Sunset Strip, tattoo & piercing parlors, the Santa Monica Pier, graffiti? The Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame, gang signs, West Hollywood, sushi bars, Pink's, the Melrose shopping district, police helicopters? Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Thai Town, Little Armenia, Olvera Street? I couldn't say much to her.

I usually regard Randy Newman's music with the correct amount of revulsion, but the song holds absolutely true for us. We love L.A. And we're glad to be back.

The Final Essay as Ugly Metaphor

I am busy corralling my theoretical horses, marshalling my scholarly forces, and engaging in other horrible examples of metaphor in the pursuit of a "Final Paper" concept.

Popular Culture. Mass Media. Post-Modernism. Theorists. Needlessly long Sociological words meant to convey intent.

My final paper is a solar system yet in the accretion disk phase, slowly swirling around until gravity pulls it into understandable, more spheroid shapes. My planets will have great names: Baudrillard, Marx, Barker, Reggio, pulled helplessly into elliptical orbits around my central thesis sun. Sorry, McDonald, you've been shattered into an asteroid field somewhere along.

It's still fairly large until I get my head around the argument I want. I hope I can pull it off.

Sex and the Classroom

Barker mentions that the "socio-cultural world is spatially organized into a range of places in which different kinds of social activity occur" (374).

Fiske channels this into television as medium, in that the usage of camera angle, costume, dialogue, etc., has a "complexity and subtlety" that "has a powerful effect on the audience" (1095).

The episode of "Sex and the City" supports Barker, both in the sense of socio-cultural activity (the activities in which the characters engage) and of television viewer understanding (cutting to another setting to indicate passage of time or change of character focus). It also agrees with Fiske, in that makers of modern television know their formulae. The women in the show bolster their relationships in a common setting, an indiscriminate eatery, both as a "neutral" location and as a "reset" button for the viewer. The eatery is where the characters--and the viewer--gather their thoughts until the next, constrasting scene, often in a bedroom.

The mannerisms of each character are subtle indications of mood: a woman's hand wipes away a cup stain on a table, and wipes away her past and relationship at the same time. Her new boyfriend stripping her floor and repairing her home suggests a similar internal cleansing.

This episode, despite the straightforward, open conversation between women regarding sex--a departure from earlier texts in that sex is openly discussed and that women discuss it--yet holds to a societal discomfort with sex. Scenes with openly-discussed sexual conversation also contain the highest level of humor, as if jokes are meant to disarm the subject, to relax the viewer's sense of cultural intrusion. Gag after gag (no pun intended, considering the subject of fellatio) appears during the "gossip" scenes in the neutral eatery location.

Music also plays a part in suggesting a cultural paradigm. The interstitial music for Sex and the City is salsa music, chosen perhaps to convey celebration and hedonism. The use of "cha-cha" is also used, perhaps to indicate the social back-and-forth, the urban dance, in which the characters participate.

As a side note, my eyebrow raised a bit at the main character's internal musing: I always thought that the right brain (controlling the left hand) was the emotional side, the artistic side. The left controls the logical side. The episode's script, however, like the character herself, might have confused itself on this point.



Works Cited:

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.

Fiske, John. "Television Culture." (Posted on WebCT)

Commence the Dumbing

In reading Barker's chapters on television culture and Fiske's essay, I've thought of something that constantly comes up when I'm debating people online.

This tends to apply to movies more than to television, but one unfortunate way in which ideology is forced onto public consciousness is an undermining of learned authority. There are a number of movies (disaster movies, horror movies, thrillers, political movies) in which the "expert" in a field is shown to be wrong while the young protagonist, the kid, or the hero with common-sense know-how is shown to be right.

From that kind of representation, it adds to an all-too-prevalent viewpoint that knowledge is something to shun, that university professors are "liberal elitists," and that scientists are one wrong, bumbling monolithic entity, and we can't trust them. The public learns to sneer at "so-called experts" when those experts present an issue backed by scientific evidence.

Take for example the movie Arachnophobia, where the expert in arachnid biology is "punished for his arrogant knowledge" by being killed, while the everyman hero exterminator wins in the end. Consider also the difficulty of getting the public to take climate change seriously. Consider also the fact that many people still, in 2008, think that the Theory of Evolution is a matter of "debate."

Yet oddly enough, any political side will trot out its experts in the field when it needs to back up its political maneuverings. News media still interviews experts when discussing (in its ridiculous, shortsighted manner) a current issue. We still as students need those scholarly articles culled from databases. We still helplessly visit our doctors when we need to know what's wrong with us.

We need our highly educated experts, our scientists, our elite erudition. This whole sense--that our "American common sense" outweighs what some stuffy old professor or arrogant scientist says--is the entire reason why other countries are lapping us in the education department.

Television Culture

Many television programs reinforce the dominant ideology.

I always kinda felt that was fairly obvious, but hadn't taken the time to explicate the reasons for it. Fiske successfully highlights it with a number of forehead-clapping observations.

Characters are "encodings of ideology" (Fiske 1092). The man is the source of knowledge, therefore superior. The woman is subtly submissive and refers to domestic activity even when not engaged in it. The heroes emanate more class and cooperation than the villains, even to the point of makeup and dress differences (Fiske mentions the application of lipstick specifically). Even the set decoration and the camera lens are used to portray characters in a certain light. I imagine movies do this same thing, but movies seem more likely to break through barriers than television series.

This raises the question of what happens when movies or television resist the typical portraying of characters in this manner. Does it "feel wrong" if the villain is seen as classy and sensible and the hero is inferior? I do not mean blatant examples of this, but the subtle clues mentioned above: camera distance, male/female verbal intercourse, dress and makeup.

Works Cited: Fiske, John. "Television Culture." (From posted PDF article)

Forty Fuckless Years and Performative Gender

From the few scenes we saw of the 40-Year-Old Virgin, I rapidly got the impression that it doesn't fit the concept of the radical romance.

One could argue that the lead character was an odd one, and he's forty, and still a virgin because of his social inadequacies, and hey, isn't that radical? But it isn't, not really. It sticks to the precepts of the Neo-Traditional RomCom: we are introduced to the "correct" Girl, Guy is in contact with "wrong" girls, Guy gets the "correct" Girl, it ends with marriage... and it even refrains from sex until afterward. There's even kids involved, which bolsters the idea of his being such a great guy. The only thing it teaches us is that nerds are people too.

The roles played by his male friends seem typical, in bragging of sexual exploits. They provide the expected stereotypical male advice: pick up drunk girls, act mysterious and dicky, porn collections, et al. They pass an uncertain point where they are compelled to determine that he is heterosexual, after which the discovery of his mere virginity is a relief (the continuing bias and fear of homosexuality is part of what Butler addresses).

Yet they also are supportive instead of derisive. While engaging in the competitive nature of male vs. female society, they also tap into an older (traditional as nothing else is) "rite of passage," that of a manhood ritual of a fellow male. It falls into what Butler references as the imitative nature of sex: that heterosexuality must be constantly updated, and performed, in order to maintain itself.

In this sense the movie reiterates the fear of homosexuality: that to "win" the protagonist proves his sexuality. The goal has never changed.

Having an Affair on the Affair: The Graduate

"I'm very neurotic." - Mrs. Robinson

I was monitoring the symbolism during the first twenty-five minutes of "The Graduate."

A credit sequence of a pedestrian conveyor belt in an airport, a shot that would be repeated in Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Life is just moving Ben along without resistance. He does nothing to forward his own future. A man is like his luggage: moved along in an orderly fashion until picked up.

The sad clown in his parents' house. This is also Ben: desaturated in color, surrounded by gay finery, an object of merriment to everyone else, yet sour-faced, dealing with his mother still spit-smoothing his hair.

Water as solace, used also to indicate his shimmering waves of thought. Yet Ben is also encased in a diving suit, pressured by his parents in the same way he is pressured to date Elaine. He is immersed in his situation, deeper and deeper, and the camera pulls back to fade him into a grim obscurity.

He lies by the pool in dark glasses and white shorts, unconscious of his own youthful appeal... something that perhaps would later inform Tom Cruise's solitary dance performance in Risky Business.

Is it a radical romance? Sure. Mrs. Robinson insists that Ben maintain a romantic etiquette; he must open her car door, hang up her coat. Yet the affair is utterly under her control, and the ending is uncertain and cynical.

Elaine is less than her mother. Elaine lacks willpower; she lets herself be carried along by whatever whim Ben bugs her enough to allow. Mrs. Robinson bullies Ben into sex; Ben pressures Elaine into action with psychoanalytic questions. She seems to let herself be carried along for the moment, only later furrowing her brow in doubt.

Is this neurotic... or erotic? There seems to be an emphasis on the latter phrase.