CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CULTURE, COMMUNICATIONS + HYPERMEDIA
Ron Burnett
In the last twenty years many claims have been made with respect to video technology and its effects on the cultural and political landscape of Western countries. The last decade in particular has seen hundreds of pieces in the media on the importance and impact of video. From the VCR to the Camcorder, from the role of video recorders in the home to the impact of video stores on everyday life, there has been an endless flow of prognostications and evaluations, compounded by poll taking and symptomatic readings of video as a signpost for changes in the social fabric of advanced as well as developing countries.
All of these assessments (not limited to the popular press but also suffusing a variety of journals, television shows and public policy reports) have concerned themselves with the impact of video on the public at large. They have been guided by a set of presumptions about viewing, images and truth, the role of video as a window onto the world, its special qualities and potential as an artistic and political device and most importantly as an innovative technology. The concept of innovation is crucial to the way in which the medium has been understood and the way in which it has been historicized — with a modern and postmodern emphasis on the new. (The phenomena of evaluation of new technologies by the media themselves — reached its peak with Nightline which recently featured an extended documentary entitled, Revolution in a Box. Ted Koppel narrated the changes which both television and portable video have generated. The apparent self-reflexivity of the show was bracketed, if not undermined, by its reproduction of manipulation theories of the media.)
When new technologies appear they are accompanied by written, verbal and media texts which help create public and private contexts within which various types of discourse are exchanged and debated. The articulation of change, the evaluation of shifts in norms, the assessment of impact, are for the most part situated in a complex environment of discursive exposition and a struggle with interpretation and understanding. These processes contribute to the formation of communities of people inside and outside of the institutions which sustain and creatively engage with the new technologies themselves.
Often, the metaphors which underlie this process promote the idea that machines are somehow able to outstrip their progenitors and their users. The negotiation of change circles around this paradox. Subjects, agents, the people who use new technologies are placed into the position of respondents, as if their discourse will inevitably be transcended by the technology. A rearguard struggle is then fought with the technology. An effort is made to humanize the machine, although its history is, of course, the result of human intervention and creativity. What is at stake here is the degree to which the machine can be conceptualized as being in the control of humans. The idea that the machine is more powerful than the people who created it confers an even greater sense of strength onto the technology. This conferral has had an impact on the institutions designed to respond to and solidify the usefulness of technological innovation.
The shaping of this paradox has influenced the way in which video technologies have been used and understood since the invention of the porta-pack in the 1960's. Many of the claims for the porta-pack, including its ability to create new venues for communications and creativity, suggest at one and the same time that the machine sees what the eye cannot, or is able to observe what people themselves tend to leave out. This foreground-background problem, the relative play of surfaces and the relativistic assumptions which follow, are synthesized in Marshall McLuhan’s proposal that electronic images are not like the more photographically oriented images which preceded them. And while this argument has some strength to it (photography and television are not the same, though they share similar concerns) any suggestion that the electronic image shows what the eye cannot see, leaves out the question of who is doing the seeing. It also transforms the technology into an autonomous vehicle with a set of formal concerns which are not derived from the pragmatic context into which the technology is placed. The early idealization of the porta-pack as a vehicle for change is in part situated in this elevation of the formal into an ontological category.
Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia is a set of resources on the World Wide Web developed by Ron Burnett in Vancouver, Canada. All rights reserved. ©Ron Burnett 2007