More Imagined Communities

Reading today’s readings in light of Anderson’s Imagined Communities, I could not help but notice the irony in the media producer’s intention of the audiences vs. what actually happened. In the first example of the Egyptian melodrama, the producers sought to bring a more modern attitude or feeling to the viewers of the soap opera, to connect them to their principles of kinship and community in this way. Abu-Lughod argues that instead, a sense of individualism is sparked. The viewers begin to view their lives in this melodramatic sense, isolating themselves in a sense by portraying onto people in their lives the positions or identities of people in the melodramas and making themselves the main characters. In addition, however, the producers unintentionally created a stronger religious community among the viewers of the show. The subtle religious praises ignited the sense of imagined religious community among the viewers.

In the Dornfeld reading on public television, the many different opinions and production aspects that go into public television all have a different assumed audience, and thus alter the direction of any given program to please this audience. Because of the so many different opinions that go into public television specifically, every one person’s intended audience never was the actual audience. Instead the “hybrid” audience that Dornfeld describes is the actual community watching public television as opposed to each person’s imagined community.

Imagined Communities of "Cannibal Tours"

One of the things that struck me about the film “Cannibal Tours” was the “in between” nature of the village as described by one of the natives. As he said, the village he now lived in was not the village of his father, in the sense that it is no longer the isolated, untouched society that the people lived in. Now discovered by the “modern” civilizations and treated as a tourist attraction, however, the village is not yet “civilized” itself. It is in a limbo of development where the villagers are still living the lives they used to, but are now aware both of cultures and people different from their own as well as their status as a tourist entertainment for others. In a sense, this can be considered an “imaged community”. Their lives are forever altered by the presence of outsiders with cameras. They continue to live their former lives, but partially as display for the tourists, altering the finer points of their lifestyles. The tourists, as well, imagine what the native people live like but still are aware of how their presence has altered their way of life. For instance, their spirit house is actually in disrepair and missing practically all of its sacred relics, but it is imagined by the tourists that it is still a sacred space used by the natives for prayer important enough to pay to take pictures of it. The natives as well pretend that it is still sacred in order to get the tourists to pay for the pictures. Both sides are imaging and performing a community that no longer exists, a direct result of the very presence of the people who are doing the imagining and for whom the performance is happening.

Cultural Imperialism a reality?

In thinking about the ideas of cultural imperialism and the possibilities of revolution through media in the context of Thomlinsom and Harindaranath, one can realize how impossible this is in today’s Western society due entirely to the fact of media saturation in our society today. With the rise of the internet, Youtube, Napster, 500 channels of television, etc., whatever media we choose to consume can be consumed and all others be avoided. We have so many options that cultural imperialism, passive audiences, and propaganda or revolution through media can no longer have the effect they did even 50 years ago. Here we can simply change the channel, store personally chosen 20,000 songs on an iPod, and download almost any movie off the internet. The media has lost its imperialist power to the consumer.

Another Brick in The Wall

In a recent road trip I took this summer, one of the prime spots we stopped at was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. One of the most powerful exhibits I saw was the exhibit on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Taking into account my bias as a huge Pink Floyd fan, the exhibit was exceptional, containing a huge segment of the actual wall used on the tour as well as other props (like the blow up model of the teacher we see in the youtube clip). Written on the wall was a quote by Roger Waters that really helped me gain better perspective on his motivation for the writing of The Wall as well as, after considering it in terms of Adorno, the concept of mass media and culture industry as a whole.
After some internet search, I seem to be unable to find the exact quote, but the idea of it as I remember is this: Pink Floyd was playing a show in Montreal during a tour for the album Animals (the two previous albums released by Pink Floyd at this time were Wish You Were Here and Dark Side of the Moon, so Pink Floyd was at possibly the height of their popularity in terms of popular culture/mass attendance at shows. Before this tour, the band and fans had the unique opportunity of being able to perform/ listen to Dark Side and other great Floyd works in intimate settings with minimal to no disconnection between band and audience. At the Montreal show, with Pink Floyd playing to mainly the popular culture consumers in huge arenas, Roger Waters told of never feeling more distant from an audience before. During one song he noticed a fan trying to climb the net that separated the “demi-gods” of the band from the mindless worshippers in the audience. Without thinking, Waters spit in this person’s face. After the show Waters had never felt so horrible, and he immediately began work on The Wall. He described his mission/motivation by saying that he could either remain “comfortably numb” to the position he now held in the realm of popular culture or use it to the extent that so many others have failed to do.
Here arrives the question of the possibility of revolution through mass mediated art. Waters’ and Pink Floyd’s art pre-The Wall clearly lost its intended meaning through its mediation into popular culture. But with Waters’ new-found realization of his place among “the masses” I think the idea of revolution he intended to portray through The Wall could possibly be more successful than a revolution attempted through mass mediated art without this self-realization.
Just to note some of the more obvious “revolutionary” points in Another Brick in the Wall, the teacher in The Wall reproaches the student for poetry, and otherwise not institutionalized thinking, but then as we see in the next scene, his lashing out at the students is really more emotionally driven by his frustration with his wife and her own domination over him. Possibly this could be a commentary on who is controlling the media/education/environment as a whole and what are their true motivations in terms of representation or even just what is and what is not mediated to the masses.
Also, through institutionalized education, the “machine” of the factory in the scene that the students are run though leaves them as the mangled, identical children marching identically to their places in society, reflected in Adorno’s essay when he comments on the muted forms of individuals we see in films and in characters, generic enough to relate to everyone, but still every individual is too specific to actually be one of the characters in the movie.
In terms of popular culture and mass media, we all have one of several options. We can either be mindless followers, eventually turned into mince meat by the presses of the institutions, we can recognize the issues and dream about revolution as does the main character in Another Brick in the Wall, or we can use mass media against itself in an attempt to change perception, as Roger Waters did with The Wall.