By: Holland Wilde
Re: "Is Google smarter than sociology?: How a farm boy learned to
stop worrying and enact the visual.": Seminar Session Oral Text
International Visual Sociology Association
New York University, 2007
Good afternoon. I'm a student at the University of Calgary. I'm going to talk today about how I came to this queer practice of “envisioning theory.” I'll start with this:
AP Release - Dateline: October 9, 2006 “Google Inc. announced today
that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for
people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for
$1.65 billion. The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media
platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
If that wasn't final proof enough, I would suggest that any sociological discussion of “visual essay potential” is at best a lagging indicator of what the much of the first world has long embraced. So, one implication of my talk today will revolve around this semi-silly rhetorical question: Is Google smarter than Sociology?
Of course, I'm not going answer this question. Instead, I will tell you a story. My story will be told in three parts; and in true auto-ethnographic fashion I will locate myself and my work throughout each part…
…I was born in 1953 on a small farm in western Michigan. The Korean War was winding down. Sergei Eisenstein, the great Russian stage designer, turned filmmaker, had been dead for five years. His contemporary, Dziga Vertov would die within 8 months. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, already performing ethnographic film for almost 20 years, were returning to their exotic locales, like Papua New Guinea, to study the dramatic changes from exposures to a wider world. Richard Flaherty's Nanook of the North was 30 years old; and Jean Rouch, my vote as the first truly great ethnographic filmmaker was just beginning to incorporate portable cameras with synchronous sound for recording African rituals. And Positivism still ruled the world.
Of course, I knew none of this. I was a farm kid. My visual realities were cornfields, the woods, and my dog. But throughout the 1960's, my mother and I habitually consumed TV news. Every night we would sit and watch, and then discuss at commercial breaks, what it was we had just seen. These were the days of Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Howard K. Smith, and Frank Reynolds. Together we sat entranced by the possibilities of having the world seemingly delivered to our farm by anchor men so intelligent, clear, and insightful. I liked TV news even better than Look magazine.
In 1968, at 14 years of age, I joined a cross-state school-bus pilgrimage to Detroit with hundreds of other kids to see the new musical sensation - the Monkees. I recall very little of that concert, but to this day I vividly remember our yellow school bus driving through block after endless block of utter destruction all scrolling past the window. Major portions of Detroit and been burned to the ground, just weeks earlier, by rioting African-Americans. The devastation was profound. Why hadn't I seen this, this way, on TV news. Detroit was less than four hours from my home - but it was a world away. I was a fully aware teenager. I knew that both King and Kennedy were dead; the war was wrong, and I laughed at the weekly parodies of the Smother Brothers. But, at the same time, TV told me little of my own backyard, and nothing of French students marching in Parisian streets.
In the summer of 1969, my Mother did the unthinkable; she splurged on a very modern color TV-HiFi stereo combination. It came disguised in a huge coffin-sized, colonial-styled box. There were sliding louvered doors to cover the screen. I had never seen such a combination of media, technology, and style. She said she did it so we could watch the moon landing in color. As a junior in high school I spent hours on the living room floor genuflecting in front of this machine -headphones on- listening to the new Woodstock triple album, watching TV with the sound turned off. I came of age right there - learning about drugs, sex, Vietnam, and myself…
Nearing the end of what Norman Denzin calls the Modernist Phase of qualitative research; my senior year of high school was filled with many farm-boy firsts. I saw my very first theatrical production, Death of a Salesman. I remember being so shaken, I cried as Willy Loman struggled to comprehend the changing world. I went on a field trip to my first art museum to see the installation of my hometown's crown jewel, the very first NEA funded outdoor public sculpture: Calder's finest stabile - La Grand Vitesse - endlessly reshaping itself in space. I saw my first opera, Turandot, in all its exotic Chinese-ness. I was clueless about everything, but curious. The world seemed to be a thousand dots - and I wondered, even then, if they were all somehow connected.
But being poor folk, my options after high school were limited. I was lucky enough to have pulled a safe number in the military draft lottery, but in order to attend university; my Mother had to take on a secretarial position at a small nearby college so I would only be charged one-half tuition. During my first summer break, in 1972, I worked the night shift at a local bakery, and watched the political Watergate hearings play out every day on TV. Then, during my sophomore year someone casually mentioned the theatre department as an easy pathway to grade inflation. I enrolled in Theatre 101, as a lark. But the joke was on me. I exploded. I had finally found something: technical theatre. It spoke to every sense in my body. Backstage was somehow home. I took every available theatre production course offered, and then, I transferred to the Arts and Media department. It was there, amongst life drawing, cartography, and 3D design classes (as my former US Representative Gerald Ford was pardoning Richard Nixon) that I first handled a 1/2” reel-to-reel portable video camera. I loved it, but it didn't speak to me as clearly as theatre. And it would be another 30 years until I touched a video camera again.
Because… It was in the theatre where I began to understand ritual, production as performance, and the profound implications embedded in textual visualization. As I honed my skills as a budding stage designer, I painted every script in my path. Trompe l'oeil, bricolage, assemblage and juxtaposition all became second nature. I realized very early on that words love images - and that images need words. And it was there, on that small college stage that I was introduced to strange sensorial galaxies like: the Joffrey Ballet and the Alwin Nicholai Dance Theatre, to The Mothers of Invention, to Andy Warhol film, to Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, and to the parodic humor of Mort Saul and Dick Gregory. It was 1974. I had already designed a little TV studio set for a local affiliate - a onetime children's production of The Beauty and the Beast. And it was increasingly apparent that visual vocabularies were designed into everything around me, and that these genres were blurring into explosive moments of personal awareness.
After receiving my Bachelors, I was offered an opportunity to study at the University of Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. There I was introduced to the Dubrovnik Arts Festival where I greedily indulged the spectacle of outdoor living theatre: Christopher Columbus on a fishing vessel in the Adriatic Sea; A Midsummer's Night Dream performed in a deep, dark, windswept wood; and a walking performance of Hamlet amongst the old city's ancient Roman fortifications.
I returned home to work in a local scene shop for the next five years and began to cultivate a design voice; building, painting, and dressing 9 or 10 stage plays each year. I was getting bigger; western Michigan was getting smaller. And so, in 1979, I decided to launch a road-trip to look for a theatre MFA program to further hone my skills. I would travel to Yale to speak to the great Ming Cho Lee… to Banff in Alberta Canada to meet the even greater Czechoslovakian scenographer: Josef Swoboda… and to NYC to seek out Richard Schechner and the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage.
Eventually, I landed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The program was an important member of the elite, and newly formed, League of Professional Theatre Training Schools. I would study nonstop for 3 years under the tutelage of Bill and Jean Eckhart, to be indoctrinated into the exotic performativities of Broadway. But upon receiving my MFA in 1983, and winning an invitation to audition my portfolio at Julliard… it was increasingly clear, to me at least, that Nature trumped NYC. Besides, at the age of 30, my interests in further commodifying 42nd Street spectacles - like Broadway Cats on roller skates - grew ever less appealing. I was looking for the new Arthur Miller's, the Edward Albee's, the Tennessee Williams', the Ibsen's, O'Neill's, Brecht's, the Beckett's. Where were they?
I wanted to address-inform-inspire the world, not just entertain it. So, about the time the Macintosh was just being introduced, I accepted an assistant professor position at Wheaton College, outside of Boston, which at that time was still an all-female student body. From there, I spent two years at Tufts University as theatre technical director and lecturer. I would make Boston my home for the next 23 years.
During those first years on the east coast, I tried my hand at high-profile theatre, collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon satirist Garry Trudeau, of Doonsbury fame, to produce his new musical parody of then President Ronald Reagan, entitled Rap Master Ronnie. It was successful and we moved the show to Washington DC where, on opening night, film director Robert Altman took me aside and told me my designs had a cinematographer's sensibility. To this day, I still have no idea what he meant by that. What was clear, however, was that I was experiencing what could only be called a personal “crisis of representation”.
I knew I had bigger ‘fish’ to fry. It was now 1986, at the turn of what Norman Denzin calls the Experimental Fifth Moment in qualitative writing and participatory research. I still felt the world could be improved. And as much as I believed theatrical performance was a brilliant pathway, I could feel the genre fading for me as a vehicle for change. So I wondered… if big media is a more effective ‘delivery system’… then maybe it was time for me to jump in. I started snooping around advertising firms. I was certainly clever enough, but few Boston agencies could interpret my checkered career. But, as it turned out, public television did. WGBH-TV was full of ex-hippies… and many of them came from theatre. There would be possibilities for occasional design, but I would be hired as a scenic artist charged to paint everything that came through. There I began to understand the musculatures of the camera lens in relation to composition. I saw how framing was much more than pointing; how written texts were reconstructed visually; and how editing transformed all I was witnessing in the studio. I cut my TV teeth designing WGBH's nightly news launch with Christopher Lydon. I designed for Alistair Cook and his Masterpiece Theatre. I painted for Vincent Price and Mystery. I did American Playhouse, NOVA, pledge drives… you name it.
Then one day a new client came in... along with a very rare opportunity. It was the Christian Science Church. They where planning to spend mountains of money to launch a cable news network to mirror their venerable printed publication: The Christian Science Monitor. I was given the chance to solo-pitch a studio design. I not only won the project by wowing them with a unique direction, I was also awarded several prestigious awards for visual creativity. Suddenly, just like that, I was a nationally established expert in news design.
My career took off, and over almost 20 years, my work appeared everywhere: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, WB, ESPN, Telemundo, Encore, Turner Networks, E! TV. I designed globally in Argentina, Netherlands, and India, as well as in every major U.S. media market. I was given numerous awards including 10 Emmy's for my design efforts. I served five years on the board of directors of the international Broadcast Designers Association - with 5,000 members in 22 countries - where I encouraged the membership to consider their visual actions with speakers such as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, author Bill McKibben, and film director Michael Moore.
During this heady time, 1996, with my career exploding, and ethnographic poetry and fiction were beginning to be taken for granted in academia; Bill Clinton stepped up and signed a new telecommunications act, allowing unrestricted media ownership and competition. Go figure: A new era of televisual exploitation was about to be unleashed.
I felt the TV industry change almost overnight. My newest clients were increasingly younger, inexperienced, they moved up the corporate ranks quickly, but their careers were short-lived. Journalism was rarely mentioned anymore during design presentations. I was no longer hired on expertise, but pressured to participate in vapid competitions, where the only designs bought were the prettiest, the most sensational, the most carnavalesque. Long-standing principles of visual communication were ignored in favor of eye-grabbing grotesque. I called it “techno-rococo.” What was happening? If theatre had failed me, and news and journalism were dying on the vine, what would be my next move? Where did I fit in - visually? What was I missing in order to structure my thoughts? All signals pointed in one direction: I needed context, methodology, and theory. Maybe that would be the answer…
OK… That first part of the story took half of my allotted time...
It was the reflexive, contextualizing portion. Why include it, because most North Americans share very similar histories. We have all been socially constructed within the sensorial and evolutionary worlds of tightly interlaced performative media. We have never lived in a world that simply privileges the word, nor the visual. This alone is reason enough to embrace every method that embodies our socially constructed perspectives. To ignore the visual in my scholarship would not only be nonsensical - it would be a lie. I remain a visual communicator first and foremost. …Now, let's move on to “Envisioning Theory”…
…In 2004, I quit my TV career. After an enlightening yet most frustrating project designing the launch for the 24hour news channel in Delhi, India, I came home and just stopped answering the phone. I couldn't be party to TV news anymore. I released my three assistants, closed shop, and I walked away. I retired. It took me almost a year to “detox” from the industry rush. Meanwhile, I set out to discover the best communication and culture programs I could find. I knuckled down and applied to nine of them, and months later, I received nine rejections. Apparently no school understood me, or the reasons why I might want to, at the age of 51, turn my back on a lucrative career and go back to school for a second terminal degree. “What was my gimmick?”
So it took me two long years of knocking on doors until, finally, the University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada offered a letter of acceptance. We sold our beachside Boston home and headed for the Canadian Rockies. Now, I've just finished my year of coursework, and I am reading for my comps. I have a long way to go for a PhD. And here is how I came to my plan to visualize my research.
It was during that long waiting period, 2004, after I had left TV for good, that began to watch television news with new critical eyes, looking beyond the visual to see how it combines with all aspects of production, text, performance and ideology. I was flabbergasted. News was changing so fast; I blinked for one season and I was missing it already. Was I the only one watching this moving target? How could I pause this endless spectacle of deviance long enough to study it? I went out and bought three TiVo's and began to archive whatever struck me as I watched it. Concurrently, made a radical discovery: My little $200 digital still camera had a button on it called video. I noodled with it… and immediately rediscovered the exhilarating experience of making moving images I had first known in 1973. I was addicted. I made movies every day, in sheer, unadulterated ethnographic fashion, creating little observational stories. Immediately, I could see the potential - and the problem. Would I make movies in the manipulative mannerisms of big media? Would I jack up each video with silly, vacuous content? Would I use every special effect offered? Would I go for the quick and easy joke to keep my friends entertained?
So, I set a few restrictions to scaffold my approach. Each movie could only be 60 seconds long, with minimal effects, and I could only use free tools, like Apple's iMovie, to construct the content. Looking back now, it was clear that I was experimenting with every facet of mise en scene without even knowing the term. I made hundreds of little videos. Editing to music, using color, framing and composition, adding text…it was all there. As I built this corpus of shorts, I also began to review my TiVo archives. I could see, repeated again and again, the female body startlingly exploited on TV in every manner conceivable. This was nothing new, of course… but then little I do is ever new. I was just playing, slowing down media, distilling, concentrating, re-editing, and remediating content, which is so profoundly familiar to us, I fear we can no longer see it. I was finding a new voice, and I was teaching that re-edited voice to communicate.
I began to examine pornography and, with Photoshop, I experimented to see if I could re-construct these images in order to parody - or deactivate - their erotic exploitation. Moreover, I started to see that I could blend actual TV footage with this content into curious constructions. It was my beginning foray into semiotic critique, and Brechtian “alienation.” I was making the strange familiar - and the familiar strange.
A pathway was opening to me. Could I build from this approach a methodology to connect the critical theories of the Frankfort School of Adorno, Gramsci, and Benjamin; to the culturally situated Birmingham School of Hall and Williams; to the visually pragmatic Chicago School of Dewey and Becker; to the technological biases of the Toronto School of Innis and McLuhan; while perfuming it all with the diaphanous Parisian philosophies of Baudrillard, Barthes, Bourdieu, and Debord. What about the political economies of McChesney and Chomsky? ...And the truly avant-garde like Breton, Duchamp, Man Ray, Magritte? …What of the early Russian filmmakers like Vertov and Eisenstein? Was it possible for a farm boy from Michigan to weave these stunning similarities with all I had seen and experienced in the TV news production? Could I write with pictures? The jury is still out, but my hair is on fire once again… and all the while, James Clifford and Marcus & Fisher whisper in my ear about the untapped potentials of ethnographic surrealism.
So, naturally, I built a website to collate my newest work. I named it Cultural Farming. I was dedicating myself to becoming a visual farmer - “subsistence living in a mediated world”, as I like to call it. In early 2005 I added a video blog called Media Nipple, where every day, for an entire year, I uploaded broadcast video clips ripped directly from my home TV for deconstruction, theorizing, and lampooning. I began to make compilations of my strongest videos and soon realized I could actually tell my own stories using TV content alone. It was a revelation. Throughout my entire life I had watched TV… now, finally, I could talk back to it using its own language and technique. To date, Media Nipple contains approximately 500 daily posts with almost 2,500 individual video clips. All are free for visitors to read, rip or re-mash. In 20 months I've had almost 500,000 page views from visitors from every corner of the globe. In a very real sense, Media Nipple is accomplishing that noble academic triad: Research, teaching, and informing the public. How does this compare to publishing a typical academic tome?
I was getting bolder, and my pieces were getting longer. Then, in February of this year I completed my first long-form 60-minute montage remix to experiment with Visual Essay construction. I called the new piece Difficult Images. It is a multi-modal, inter-textual interweaving of image-word-theory… and it was screened here yesterday at IVSA. It was only one beginning attempt of an entirely new way to approach my research. And then… this last April 16, the news of the shootings at Virginia Tech broke. I ran all three TiVo's for one entire week, ripping raw content from all three cable news networks: CNN, FOX, and MSNBC.
I created a 105-minute, twelve-chapter, ethnographically surreal video compilation of the event and called it Cameras or Guns: How Cable News (re)Massacred Virginia Tech. It has been my most difficult project to date since very horrifically exploitive news image utterly spoke to the profound sickness in broadcast journalism, and indeed in our culture, where sadistic voyeurism and narcissistic self-congratulation are incessantly repeated as dominant themes. But, I took the Virginia Tech footage and re-edited it using the principles of Vertov's Kino Pravda, incorporating early Eisenstein montage to capture the explosive collision of two meanings to create a third. I visually reconstructed a clarion call for a renewal of the journalistic standards and practices found throughout the writings of James Carey, Todd Gitlin, and John Fisk. But mostly I heard Jean Rouch and Jay Ruby as they held my hand and walked me down the path of ethnographic film as epistemology…
…Alright… that's the end of part two.
Now, in my remaining time, I want to briefly suggest that the import of sociology is to study in our culture, not around it, or after it. TV could, I suppose, be seen as some exotic, tribal Other, but it remains the fattest visual pipe into most homes today. And while none of us can predict the future, contrary to recent obituaries, TV ain't going anywhere. Ruppert Murdoch knows it, and so does Google. In fact, it is hard to find any newscast that does not regularly include unattributed video from so-called “social media” venues - like YouTube and FaceBook - aired as legitimate news content. Today, we're witnessing a critical rupture in traditional communication, with every man for himself. Media rules and regulations - like copyright - are in stunning free-fall on all fronts.
But there is a bright spot. Within the voracious greed of unbridled capitalism there are moments like this in history when hegemonic fluctuations err on the side of citizens. In the lust to fulfill manufactured consumer demands a deluge of new emancipating technologies are being unleashed. Video cameras are now cheap enough to slack-jaw every Sol Worth Navajo. Non-linear editing tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars only a decade ago, are now free. User-friendly distribution venues for global dissemination abound with the advent of broadband that now penetrates 50% of North American homes. Every person in this room can be their own TV station at the drop of a hat. And people are choosing to do exactly this, to the tune of about 175,000 new blogs created each day - and most all these involve visualization.
And so moving images can once again be seen as the visual fabric of our social world. It is our responsibility to engage these opportunities while we can, before al la carte pricing, or anti net-neutrality and fair-usage rulings slam these doorways closed to most citizens. But what will we do with this unique opportunity? If we need not recreate our efforts in the image of big media… what will we make, and from what principles? Today, I choose to work in the shadow of Richard Leacock, David McDougall, John Collier, Marcus Banks, and Jay Ruby - ethnographic storytellers all - making personal media as observational scholarship that has been the promise of three generations of scholars. Isn't it time to expand logocentric representation and upgrade our definition of the “written?”
Google certainly gets it. In YouTube's first year alone, it showed 100 million video clips… and now uploads 65,000 more each day. YouTube was worth $1.65billion to Google. And so, as our old, natural world is metabolized by screen reality our socially constructed worlds, with their languages and grammars, change as well. So I ask, shouldn't there be a sociological revisiting of the original claims of technological determination, and of media effects? Can citizens reclaim ethical journalism? Can Google's personal media emancipate both the individual and the community? Can the airways be recovered from corporate piratization?
If scholars have yet to fully visualize television research - how will we ever catch up to social media, to Second Life, or to Google Earth? If there were ever a need for visual communication theory and practice, it's now. But remember, little can be accomplished without visual competence. This is no time for academic extremism, clumsy scholarship, visual literalism, or sophomoric design. Bad visual sociology is worst than using no visuals at all.
It is time to exercise our visuality in research… exactly as we do writing. So give it a try. Pick up your little digital cameras - and I know you all have one - and stop talking about the potentials of visual essays… and start learning to make them for yourselves? The whole world is watching.
Thanks for this opportunity to speak.