Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field
My previous musings on the opposition between McLuhan and Aristotle imply a two-dimensional continuum for locating various forms of media. If we let the term “narrative” cover what Butcher translates as “plot” in Aristotle, and we classify the four kinds of media discussed by Manovich, then he have the following structural table:
| Spectacle | Narrative | |
| Database | - | - |
| Story | - | + |
| Game | + | - |
| Film | + | + |
This table is an example of the classic structuralist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all possible variations of an opposition are laid out in a kind of truth table. A plus sign (+) means that the category is present in the item, while a minus sign (-) indicates its absence. These tables are useful for generating ideas about how elements in a given field — in this case, media forms — are related to each other, generating further questions. For example, it emerges that databases are the strong opposite of films, while stories and games are weak opposites.
The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimensional field, where the named column headers become the X and Y axes of a discrete Cartesian plane, and the values in the first column become values in the field. This is the sort of device made famous by Bourdieu (see Distinction). The advantage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more precision. Here’s what I have in mind:
March 18th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
May I borrow this? In my POSC290 course on media & identities in the Middle East & North Africa we have begun to consider in slightly more depth than hitherto blogs and bloggers in repressive societies. Where do we locate blogs in the Cartesian plane above? Much western reporting on ‘Weblogistan’ (the Iranian blogosphere) has apparently assumed that the medium is indeed the message, projecting onto Iranian blogs assumptions about the liberal leanings, pro-reform and pro-western orientation of the bloggers - apparently considering blogging a western medium, and making their assumptions from there. The Iranian authorities may have been doing some of the same (with a different normative evaluation, of course).
I can imagine blogs clustered within a circle at the intersection of the axes, or else diffused throughout the plane. Wildflowers growing where they will, defying categorization. What are your (and readers’) thoughts?
March 18th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
There are all sorts of assumptions running wild here, wouldn’t you say? Iran is a country in which much is proscribed. Vision. Movement. Speech. Journalism. Publishing. Music. Cinema. You name it! That it is the largest nation of bloggers is as much related to the fact that it is largely a nation of made up of citizens that are younger than 30. The older gen. died in the Iran-Iraq war or made lots and lots of babies around the time of the revolution. I digress…. The bottom line is: They’re hip, technologically savvy and opinionated. Also Iran is a nation where a significant portion of the population has been educated in the university system. Yet, it is a nation with a high unemployment rate. The Media: TV/ Radio is government controlled and the news, while completely riveting in its reports on the nations infrastructure, is often simplistic and by all standards propagandistic. While Iranian movies are recognized by many Western critics as tactily humanistic, and aesthetically stunning, they are so by virtue of system of regulations prescribing the modesty of the gaze. A medium that relies on the visual has to come up with extra-ordinary solutions and it did.
Also, you can get anything on the streets of Tehran, yet virtually none of it is legal,or at least that’s what’s said. Iranians have access to much of what we do in the West, but they have few public outlets for an open circulation of opinions about the things they have access to. This is a nation that is publicly religious and privately secular. If there is any real discourse it happens in private settings. Or spaces where one’s anonymity is ensured.
These facts alone should lead one to reconsider the above assumption regarding the liberalism, pro-reform attitudes and ,its pro-western orientation. In any case what we consider liberalism, reform and even a “pro-western attitude” is often times at variance with the such definitions on the ground in Iran.
These are my thoughts. I don’t know of clusters, intersections, axes or wildflowers.
March 19th, 2009 at 6:27 am
Ed — Please borrow and modify as you wish. I’d love to see if/how it maps onto the Iranian blogging scene. In that connection, have you taken a look at Doostdar’s “Vulgar Spirit of Blogging”? (2004; see http://www.doostdar.com/articles/vsob.pdf).
March 19th, 2009 at 6:37 am
Another thought — bringing Doostdar into this, the concept of vulgurity is a category of media criticism actually used by Aristotle, at least implicitly; it seems closely associated with spectacle, and therefore just the sort of criticism that would be directed toward any medium that employs spectacle. Blogs are an interesting intermediate form, being able to conform to a variety of styles along the continuum.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Negar, you raise lots of issues that this very simple grid is not intended to cover; but thanks for the injection of messy realism into this abstracted topic! I would say, along the lines of Mary Douglas (Natural Symbols), that in Iran, certain media forms are then the effects of a High Grid and High Group situation. The interesting result is a kind of “Aristotelian” aesthetic, in which blogging is seen as “vulgar” by cultural elites.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Negar - absolutely right. What we were discussing in my class is how wrong the assumptions of casual western observers about the Iranian blogosphere can often be. I think the best visual argument against this kind of medium/message confusion is the work of John Kelly and his colleagues in the ‘mapping the Persian blogosphere’ project: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/2008/Mapping_Irans_Online_Public/Iranian_blogosphere_map One fascinating trend has been a move from the religious authorities and their youth wing shunning blogs as inherently corrupting (early 2000s) to some/many of them now embracing blogs as a platform for their views.
But as interested as I am in Iranian (and Egyptian, and Turkish, and Israeli, and…) blogs, here I am trying to abstract to understand blogs as a medium in general. They may well be ‘vulgar’ in the sense you suggest, Rafael, partaking of the spectacular, but I’d guess the majority of them remain fundamentally textual.