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Sept. 9, 2011
Reimagining ourselves
HU scholar discusses rise of digital media.
BASYA LAYE
The digital revolution of the past 30 years has profoundly impacted nearly every aspect of society, particularly in the developed world. How we relate to one another and how we conceive of and express our identities – privately and publicly – have been forever altered. According to Paul Frosh, this radical shift has changed how we communicate and interact not only with each other, but with technology itself, as well as how we assimilate its presence into our cultural, social, national, moral and consumer consciousness.
Arriving in Israel from England in 1989, Frosh completed a master’s and a doctorate in communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Now a senior lecturer in the department of communications and journalism, and a distinguished scholar at the university’s Rothberg International School, he is also the author of several books, including the soon-to-be-published The Poetics of Media: Imagination and Communication. He will share some of his research with the local Jewish community when he is in Vancouver next week to participate in the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University’s Best of Hebrew U: Stretch Your Mind series.
“Like many people, I’ve long been interested in the media because they have become so important to how we perceive the world beyond our immediate physical environment,” he told the Independent in an e-mail interview. “Photography, however, seem[s] to suggest that the media’s influence is even more radical: that media have transformed the ways we see ourselves and behave on a fundamental level, in ways of which we are barely conscious.
“The three-year-old child who almost automatically poses when someone takes out a camera has internalized something radically new in human history: the idea that someone can capture an image of you and distribute it to others who you don’t know, who may not even have been born yet. As a result, we learn, from a very early age and as an automatic response, to turn ourselves into an image for the consumption of a potentially infinite number of others who we do not and may never know,” he said, describing the levels of disconnection that can occur as we participate in this process.
“At the same time, these images become separate from us, and can come to seem strange and unnatural, as when you see yourself in a picture and think, ‘Is that really me?’ Moreover, they take on lives of their own as things seen by others in contexts we can’t control, and that is one reason why it is so unnerving to receive the Facebook or Google message: ‘You have been tagged.’”
Frosh’s academic research has focused on the “visual content industry,” which is, he said, “the term sometimes used to describe the global business that produces and supplies the majority of images for commercial and publishing use.” More commonly, it is “known as the ‘stock photography’ business, but has, for many years now, produced not just advertising-style images but news photography, illustrations and advertising- and news-video footage. The leading companies (Getty Images, Corbis) also own some of the main archives of historical photographic images and the digital rights to some of the world’s fine art.”
As the provenance of mass-distributed images becomes, in some ways, less democratic, there is a “new theoretical take on the circulation of images in contemporary culture,” Frosh explained. “Most academic studies of images in contemporary culture have tended to focus on news photography, fine art and, occasionally (very occasionally), domestic snapshots. Very little had been written on the industrial production and distribution of commercial imagery for advertising, either in photography research, media studies or advertising research. I thought – and still think – that you can’t hope to understand the effects of the vast number of commercial and advertising images we encounter every day without having at least a basic understanding of the people and organizations which created them. So, the ‘old take’ tended to ignore commercial images and, when it did pay them any attention, treated them as pictures that had come from nowhere, without really probing the ways that they had been made.”
About the shifting ways that he and his fellow Israelis contemplate and perform their national identity as it relates to media and their technologies, Frosh sees the country both as unique and as part of the transformation that’s happening across the globe.
“I’m not sure that Israel is unique in terms of its current relationship to globalization and global media,” he said. “There are plenty of small countries ... in the process of producing various forms of hybrid identity and mixed cultural forms (e.g. local varieties of rap music) that express an occasionally admiring, and a frequently troubled, attitude towards global forces, especially American media and culture.
“There are, however, two things which do make Israel unusual. The first is the sheer speed of the transformation. Within a matter of a few years, in the early 1990s, Israel shifted from a single-channel monopoly broadcasting system with an underdeveloped consumer market to a highly competitive, globalized, multi-channel communication system (including cable, satellite and the Internet) and a sophisticated consumer economy teeming with international brands. This speedy transformation was extremely rare in Western-style liberal democracies, though it did characterize some of the former communist countries.
“The second,” Frosh continued, “is that this sudden shift occurred within a situation of intense violent national conflict with the Palestinians, carried out in civilian centres of population, so that Israelis’ new exposure to global consumption opportunities (for instance, shopping malls) was accompanied by the sense that these were vulnerable places, places where one could be killed by suicide bombers. This means that, while going to the mall or the supermarket is not that different to doing these things elsewhere, it is nevertheless distinctively Israeli, if only because you have to go through security checks to do it. Israelis have made this distinctiveness routine – after a while, you barely notice being searched for weapons on your way into a store or cinema – but that doesn’t mean that it’s not an important sign of what being Israeli involves.”
In his paper Media Witnessing: Testimony in the Age of Mass Communication, Frosh investigates yet another layer in the relationship between consumer and media. “What kind of moral demands can [media witnessing] make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers?” he asks.
“In general, I would argue that being constantly exposed to the lives (and pain) of complete strangers through the mass media – what my colleagues and I have called ‘media witnessing’ – has become a defining characteristic of modern existence. This means, on the one hand, that it’s almost impossible today to deny knowledge of atrocities or suffering; on the other hand, we’ve developed ways of coping with images of others’ suffering that can seem heartless: we ignore them, or carry on with our dinner, or even emit a sigh and go to bed. Few of us actually get up and do anything.
“However, I would argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that exposing suffering and atrocities to public view puts pressure on governments and nongovernmental organizations to take action on our behalf, even if we, as individuals, do not do anything more than say to ourselves, ‘That’s awful.’ In other words, the fact that I know about something through the media is a very weak form of action, which can, nevertheless, in combination with everyone else’s knowledge of the event – also gleaned through the media – become strong action: it becomes ‘public opinion.’ It works not just because everybody knows about a particular event, but also because everybody knows that everybody knows.”
The Best of Hebrew University: Stretch Your Mind conference will be held Saturday, Sept. 17, 8:30 p.m., at Temple Sholom, and Sunday, Sept. 18, 9:30 a.m.-2 p.m., at King David High School. Visit cfhu.org or call 604-257-5133 for more information or to register.
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