Thursday, February 18, 2010

Friday 11 AM Section - Time & Technology

After reading McKenzie Wark's article about "weird global media events", I immediately began thinking about the media coverage I watch everyday and about why those events aren't classified under Wark's definitions. News stations pride themselves on being "live" and "up-to-the-minute" but when we watch a live newscast how "live" are the stories actually? Most of the news bits are prepackaged and slickly produced. Any cuts to an on-site reporter for live coverage usually just shows the reporter surveying the after effects of whatever event he/she was covering.


Thus, when we truly are presented with a "live" event such as 9/11 we scramble to make sense of the happenings. It makes us feel the way I felt adjusting to the filming style of Time Code. Here there were so many different things going on and it was frustrating to only focus on certain quadrants of the screen for fear of missing out on something vital in one of the other screens. And indeed, the rest of the movie plays out as a minute-by-minute account of the going-ons inside a Hollywood studio and I have to admit that this unlimited access did not make me feel more informed but rather left me more frustrated, confused, and at times bored. It was not as revolutionary as I expected.


I also found it interesting how Wark mentions the very "global village" discussed in Ang's article. The idea for Wark is that today we are more connected; that we can experience events that occurred halfway around the world as well. Yet, in the final pages, Ang writes, "It should be clear that the unstable multiplicity of this essentially deconstructive world no longer makes it possible as modern discourse would have it to tell a single, total story about the world today... in the postmodern episteme, there is no fixed site of truth, no absolute presence; there are just multiple representations, an infinite number of rewritings." (179). It's fascinating how much these blog posts fit into this scenario. Collectively, we are creating and shaping a community but our blog consists of everybody's ideas and interpretations of the readings. I find ironic how in this global village we still feel compelled to carve out our own individual niche. Thus, as the world becomes more connected via technology are we really more in tune to each other?

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