Zizek's guide to ideology, Netflix tackles TV, digital dualist conservatism

• I haven’t yet been able to see The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes’ follow-up to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dan Adleman reviews the film in the Mainlander:

Other ideological “masterpieces” that Žižek points to are much subtler, precisely because they occupy more prominent positions in the western cultural imaginary. He reads Jaws as a condensation of all the “foreign invaders” that privileged societies like upper-middle-class America worry will disrupt their peaceful communities. Part of what makes Fiennes’ film such a great showcase for Žižek’s approach to cultural studies is the persuasive effect of supplementing his explications with film clips. After listening to Žižek’s account of the ideological coordinates of the film, it’s difficult not to notice that all of the beach-goers scrambling to make it to the shore in one piece are affluent white Americans.

• Writing for Memeburn, Michelle Atagana considers the strategies employed by Netflix in trying to “win television”. The strategies include producing original content, feeding binge habits, and using product placement.

If Netflix refines its model and signs on more shows, chances are it will make a formidable foe of big cable players such as HBO. The model that the company is currently working could also be exported to film, essentially making the next cinematic experience wherever, whenever and on whatever device the audience wants.

• The Society Pages’ Cyborgology blog is one of my favorite resources for probing and provocative analysis of new media issues from a sociological perspective. One of the most interesting concepts considered by the blogs contributors is the notion of Digital Dualism. A recent post by Jesse Elias Spafford refines the digital dualism concept:

I posit that digital dualism, in fact, draws from both the ontological and the normative analyses. Specifically the digital dualist:

1. Establishes an ontological distinction that carves up the world into two mutually exclusive (and collectively exhaustive) categories—at least one of which is somehow bound up with digital technology (e.g., that which is “virtual” vs. that which is “real”.)

2. Posits some normative criteria that privileges one category over the other. (In most cases, it is the non-technological category that is deemed morally superior. However, charges of digital dualism would equally apply to views that favored the technological.)

Arrested Development returns, Star Trek analysis, Facebook's free speech, and more

• ​This Sunday 15 new episodes of cult-favorite TV comedy Arrested Development will become available on Netflix. In anticipation of the show's return NPR posted an impressive guide to the running gags throughout all three original seasons. Poynter has an article about the app and creator Adam Cole, the NPR reporter who pored over the episodes to track the jokes.
  
• I haven't seen the new Star Trek movie, and am already tired of hearing about it, but David Banks's article at Cyborgology is worth reading if you are interested in analyzing the political overtones (i.e. 9/11 and the War on Terror) of the film or just a fan of the franchise. My favorite bit from the post:
  

The cosmopolitan multiculturalism of Deep Space Nine and the late second wave feminism of Voyager are one 14-season-long transgression of the never-ending-present that The Next Generation sets up. Q, the omnipresent trickster god that saw it fit to put all of humanity on trial is now physically assaulted by Benjamin Sisko and romantically rejected by Kathryn Janeway. Janeway goes one step further and, in a deeply underappreciated series, stands in literal judgment of the Q continuum itself for its desire to keep one of its own from committing suicide. In a trial of her own, reminiscent of the time Data defends his sentience and Spock is tried for treason, Janeway actually rules in favor of individual autonomy over the Foucauldian power of the state to regulate life and death:

• Posting at memeburn Graeme Lipschitz discusses the assertion made recently by Facebook attorneys that clicking the "Like" button is "vital" to free speech.​

The court ruling states that “likes” do not amount to a “substantive statement” where “substantive” can mean “real” or “independent in existence or function.” Many have said that “liking” something on Facebook is similar to putting up a sign on your lawn endorsing a particular point of view — this is protected by free speech in the US. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a brief which cites examples like re-tweeting, signing a petition, and donating to a campaign online as examples of media that are created by “one-click” that are similar to Facebook’s “like” that are protected by free speech. It is thought that if the ruling is upheld, these forms of expression will be under threat too.

• Lastly, this is an older post I just came across on Mediaknowall about race and class in Django Unchained.​

Repost: Netflix moves to top of Internet queue

Last week WIRED reported that movie rental and streaming site Netflix accounts for 22% of U.S. broadband traffic, taking the top spot from peer-to-peer file sharing site Bit Torrent. CNN.com republished the article under the headline “Most content online is now paid for, thanks to Netflix.” The headline indicates the paradigm shift here, the real reason this story is newsworthy and my main for taking interest in it: the continued shift in Internet usage from communication to commerce. In his essay “Digital Seductions” (published in the anthology You are still being lied to edited by Russ Kick), Norman Solomon writes:

“The Web has been extensively integrated into the commercial twenty-first-century Zeitgeist – reflecting, hyping, and boosting a consumer culture – to the point that the notion of the Internet as an “information superhighway” now sounds antiquated.”

Solomon’s essay also charts the “rampant commercialization” of the World Wide Web by analyzing news articles about the Web from 1995 to 1999, showing how reportage on the Internet shifted from focusing on the medium as a knowledge source and communication tool to emphasizing the commercial potential (References to the “information superhighway” decreased from 4,562 stories in 1995 to 842 in 1999. Mentions of “e-commerce” increased from 915 stories to 20,641 during the same period.).

Author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff contributed an essay to the same volume titled “The Information Arms Race”. Rushkoff recounts the feelings of nearly Utopian optimism shared by members of the emerging cyberculture regarding the potentials of the Internet, feelings he evinced himself in the books Cyberia and Media Virus! Evoking the rapturous mysticism of McLuhan’s religious vision of the electronic unification of consciousness, Rushkoff writes:

“To some, it was as if the human race was hardwiring its members together into a single, global brain. People talked about the Internet as if it were the realization of the Gaia Hypothesis – the notion that all living things are part of the same, big organism. Many believed that the fledgling communications infrastructure would allow for the beginning of global communication and cooperation on a scale unimagined before.”

In the subsequent paragraphs Rushkoff laments the squandering of this initial vision for communication as the revolutionary potential of the Internet materialized as more of the same. The “great trick,” Rushkoff writes, in corrupting the Internet into a controllable mass medium, was to replace communication with information. Differing from common conceptions of the Internet, Rushkoff argues that the read-only nature of the Internet renders it incapable of fostering true communication.

“We don’t socialize with anyone when we visit a Website; we read text and look at pictures. This is not interactivity. It is an “interactive-style” activity. There’s nothing participatory about it.

Instead of forging a whole new world, the Web gives us a new window on the same old world. The Web is a repository for information. It is dead. While you and I are as free to publish our works on the Web as Coke is to publish its advertising or The Gap is to sell its jeans, we have given up something much more precious once we surrender the immediacy of a living communications exchange. Only by killing its communicative function could the Web’s developers turn in the Internet into a shopping mall.

The current direction of Internet technology promises a further calcification of its interactive abilities. Amped-up processing speed and modem baud rates do nothing for communication. They do, however, allow for the development of an increasingly TV-like Internet.“

Rushkoff drives the point home by revealing the engineering of the Internet into more TV to be the endgame of the media establishment.

“The ultimate objective of today’s communication industry is to provide us with broadcast-quality television images on our computers. The only space left for interactivity will be our freedom to watch a particular movie “on demand” or, better, to use the computer mouse to click on an object or article of clothing we might like to buy.”

Finally, Rushkoff warns against being fooled into believing that we have won the Information Arms Race just because we have the right to select data with a computer mouse instead of a TV remote. He has also said that the corporate control of the Internet in the U.S. will not resemble a top-down Chinese style of control, but that American consumers will simply surrender their agency in exchange for entertainment.