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npr news is slow.
it operates in a slow audio context, littered with human interest stories, taken with the artificial audio markers of realism--you are "there" here's an "authentic sound"---and trades those again providing context.
television is in general an even slower audio medium. seemingly concerned that a viewer might go all renegade and interpret imagery independently, television is a voice medium. what makes it slow is that space has to be created for the imagery to cement the illusion of immediacy, or there-ness, which substitutes for context.
everything shown is equivalent in its there-ness.
so everything shown is integrated into the same control grid.
you, passive, are presented the world as continuity.
you, passive, integrate all information into a stationary viewpoint.
you, passive, reduce all information to accounts of actions which unfold against a horizon of self-contained, self-explanatory, self-referential objects. now you are in a desert. now you are in a hotel. now you are in baltimore. now you are on a yacht.
watching, you integrate the already integrated; discontinuities are reduced to transitions. now you are in cairo, now you are on your sofa.
so while npr radio may choose to erase the space for context or complexity in the interest of providing markers of there-ness in order to heighten the radio-ness of the experience, and may for marketing reasons also choose to focus systematically on the united states to the exclusion of the rest of the planet (proportionally speaking, as over against, say, bbc's news hour), television effectively operates on the assumption that a picture of an environment IS context.
i wonder sometimes about the linkages between the assumption that information is a public good, part of the commons, and the artificiality of much european television as over against the very different characteristics the assumption that information is a commodity and american television programming, which seems more intrusive because more part of an environment, a mobile sector of wallpaper, a constant companion, a portal through which streams surface features of a "world.."
the main general distinction seems to be the the presence or absence of an assumed fourth wall.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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