View Single Post
Old 11-18-2006, 12:14 PM   #24 (permalink)
roachboy
 
roachboy's Avatar
 
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
host:

i think we have different approaches to thinking about this kind of question. while i am interested in the cnp, who they are and what they do, i am not inclined to think in terms of a cabal when you have other factors at play at the same time that are materially right in front of you and which have particular effects that you can see repeated at almost every level of the informational context that makes contemporary conservative ideology possible.

i was at a conference-thing last weekend and saw a presentation by d.a. pennebaker and chris hegedus--they were talking about making "the war room" and hegedus pointed out something that appeared obvious after she said it, but which i had only really noticed in the context of baseball games--that television is not a particularly visual medium--it is a talk medium that uses particular types of truncated imagery to ground the talk in the illusion of "reality"---pennbaker talked about running into a wall of television cameras positioned entrances to hotels--what they were after were shots of the Agent in Question--in this particular case, al gore--entering or leaving the hotel. that shot is enough--the relevant story is told to you, and the image of passage into or out of a door adequate to assure you as a viewer that what you are seeing is "news"....

on the other hand, i should say that i do not watch television often at all any more--i stopped on 9/13/2001 in fact. the only exception is when i find myself in a hotelroom--which is basically a television watching station--and am bored. i watched a TON of tv news, with my head a bit rattled by meeting a bunch of documentary film-makers during the days and evenings that i was there. of course, my perverse self-flagellating side required that i watch alot of faux news, and of course i was treated to (for example) a sundaymorning talking head from the dnc talking about whatever the democratic congress might do about iraq as behind him ran a loop of american military vehicles exploding somewhere in iraq. over and over and over. this is the kind of cheap shit one expects from faux news...but i was quite fascinated by the way in which information is framed, truncated, chopped up.

now it may be that at some level the cnp is a part of this in more ways than i know about---but that does not lead me in any way to think that the nature of the central information-relay system that operates in the states is suddenly not an interesting and important matter to consider. and this because even if the cnp turns out to have played a fundamental role in reorienting something of the politics of corporate media, that still says little to nothing about the medium that they might have reoriented---which they did not invent.

i sense a rant starting and have some other things i need to tend to so i'll cut this off here.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite
roachboy is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360