Now that every one’s in post production, there are few interesting blog reflections emerging about the struggles to say what you want to say. Tessa, for example, ponders
I feel like the Seb-nudity issue is taking up quite a large portion of the delinquency themed mini-doc. But then again, this has been one of the bigger issues within my community…I feel like I’m getting too close to it.
The nudity issue is an obviously dramatic one, but perhaps it dominates to to the point of getting in the way of more subtle complex issue. Tess probably doesn’t want her community ending up seeming like it is obsessed with nudity.
Jonathon has a different type of problem in the editing room: he’s trying to resist his documentary ending up as a promotion for bike polo. Perhaps he will have to do the more interesting reflections himself, as a voice-over?
Interrogation about documentary #10: what are docos about?
According to Nichols, documentaries
address those concepts and issues over which there is appreciable social concern or debate. If a concept is not in doubt, such as the condensation of liquids as temperatures fall or the evaporation of liquids as temperatures rise, there is little call for a doco film to address it. An informational or instructional film may still be of use to explain and exemplify the concept, but its organization is strictly devoted to conveying factual information and consolidating our grasp of an undisputed concept rather than coloring or inflecting our very understanding of the concept itself. Their interest as documentaries is close to nil. It is debated concepts and contested issues that documentaries routinely address.
Debates and contestation surround the basic social institutions and practices of our society. Social practices are precisely that: the conventional way of doing this. They could be otherwise. (Nichols, 67-8)
Do you agree with Nichols, that a documentary must address concepts or concerns over which there is is social concern or debate?
If you do, you must be able to answer the question: what social institution does my documentary explore, critique and question?
Participatory culture and media communities
This lecture will explore a particular type of community, a community that exists because of a piece of media. Such communities have existed as far back as people told stories around a campfire. Now they exist online too.
The concert pianist on the stage does not generally exist in a relationship of community with her or his audience. But there are some types of performances that are as participatory as the creators of Wikipedia are. The more participatory the media, the more likely it is to give rise to a media community.
Although these media communities might base themselves on the work of a professional performer, like some types of folk culture, these media objects either enjoin the audience to join in, or are co-opted by the audiences and pass into their own culture. I will give examples of both types of media communities.
More recently, this process has been facilitated by and also reinvented by the Internet.
Shirky draws the distinction between a media audience and a media community:
Communities are different than audiences in fundamental human ways, not merely technological ones. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with technology, because they assume very different relationships between the sender and receiver of messages.
Though both are held together in some way by communication, an audience is typified by a one-way relationship between sender and receiver, and by the disconnection of its members from one another—a one-to-many pattern. In a community, by contrast, people typically send and receive messages, and the members of a community are connected to one another, not just to some central outlet—a many-to-many pattern. (p1)
Shirky is focussed on the impact of social software. By investigating a little pre-history of the internet, we can see that the ‘media communities’ that Shirky points to were in no way invented by the Web. There have always been communities derived from media, particularly when the media concerned was a live performance. We do well to name our revolutions with care—many features of social software engagement actually resemble live performance.
Communities of interest
A community of interest is a community of people who share a common interest or passion. These people exchange ideas and thoughts about the given passion, but may know (or care) little about each other outside of this area. Participation in a community of interest can be compelling, entertaining and create a ‘sticky’ community where people return frequently and remain for extended periods. Frequently, they cannot be easily defined by a particular geographical area. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_interest)
What we are talking about is a type of community of interest. The interest is the type of media.
Warping the audience–co-opting media to form a community
Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, directed by Jim Sharman), ‘Timewarp’ (CHAPTER 7 ON DVD) (available Swanston AV 791.4372 R684 or Carlton 791.4372 R684)
Timewarp, a song from RHPS, is an instruction manual for doing the dance. It worked–probably lots of you have done the dance at some time. I certainly have. Here is a short doco touching on the Rocky Horror community, indicating its co-option as a media community. By participating, the participants form a community. These communities have their own rituals, expectations, routines and etiquette, all derived from the participation with the media. Because of the popularity of sing-along re-enactments, all sorts of etiquette rules were developed.
The face-to-face community of interest has migrated in recent years onto the web. Here are a few of the 1234 comments attached to a now copyright-defunct version of the song on Youtube:
randypattiorama…
Every year at Halloween this song is a must sing and dance along with. Imagine the nurse off the Blink182 cover dancing to this and you are seeing our daughter at the Halloween 2005 party. Luv ya Whit”
HottBeeotch…
Question: Who Here Has Danced The Dance Steps To This Song At A School Dance? I have!!!! And I Even Taught My Friends The Moves!!!
MissWallen …
Me and a bunch of my friends are going to do this exact scene for the talent show. We have it all coreographed. =D
And I tried to request it at my junior prom, but the DJ didn’t play it. =(
calmclam123 …
we used to get kicked out of the cinema for lighting candles
xxbadgirlzxx …
“My older sister and friends did this on their cafeteria on their last day of school. “wierd my sister too and she embaressed me on 4th of July when she did it in front of soccer players…0.o
Phnixashes …
Actualy I think that when (if) I get married this will be the second song. get everyone on the floor and let them know that a marrage is suposed to be FUN. For information sake the first song will be Have A Little Faith In Me by John Hiatt. If you don’t know this song… download it. one of the sweetest songs I know of.
xsekcieapesx …
fucking awesome!!
tis hard to do it in tha showa mind! x
cpuchick…
tis true! very hard to do in the shower! lmao! Great dance none the less! XD
Cheerios1337…
You just have to avoid slipping.
It became appropriated by the gay community:
Hairyarmpit …
America’s first transsexual musical!(I know the movie was made in England.)The audience participation was the whole show.Wadda Tripppp!Keep on Time warping:)
RHPS made the rare transition from movie to participatory performance event:
californiadon …
It played every Friday Night in Hollywood (Sunset and La Cienega) I only saw it 43 times …
keikocat2001…
We used to go to the Roxy Theatre in Toronto every Friday night for the midnight show. Smuggled in Lemon Gin and Cherry Brandy (no mix needed) and have a drunken blast. Those were the days …
s5macky …
This show is excellent live! I’ve been to ne in London in full sussies with my ex BF LOL
blehblehpoo…
BEST MUSICAL EVER. I wish Magenta had mor esinging parts, cuz all the other girls voices are to high and I can’t sing them high. They sound good when I sing them but Its not how its supposed to sound. Wow I ramble. Sorry ^_^
aliceisnt…
everyone here should meet up at one of those places where they let you act the movie out for yourself………
Here is an example of an amateur media community re-enactment. Yes, it’s really bad, but if you know the etiquette, that’s not a problem. The comments attached to this vid on youtube show the importance of understanding the culture/etiquette:
Comments:
dollfin000 …
whats with all the screeming?? that kinda spoils it
STARMANMATT …
It’s a live Rocky show. People cheer at it when Frank comes out.
There are 100s of vids of RHPS re-enactments on youtube–a media community blooms within network culture. Most of the performances are, professionally speaking, really bad–but they are probably not there for reason of their quality. They represent a community, doing its thing.
In these examples of the appropriations and reappropriations of RHPS, we can see many different types of audience relationship with media objects being enacted–and that’s even before we start to wonder about the impact of networked media, and the participatory media cultures that networked media facilitates.
There are other movies that have developed into a live sing-a-long culture, eg there was a 2009 live sing-a-long of the Sound of Music at Hamer Hall. Apparently it was huge.
Participatory rock music
Queen is possibly the most famous example. They wrote songs that were specifically designed to be performed with the audience.
We will rock you:
Stadium rock sought to whip their audience into a frenzy. (These BBC docos, the Seven Ages of Rock, are really great but not in the library.) The doco shows how Queen, for example, wrote their songs for audience participation; Kiss fans would go to their gigs with their faces painted.
Shirky suggests there are scaling limits to the size of a media community:
…the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it must become like an audience—largely disconnected and held together by communication traveling from center to edge—because increasing the number of people in a group weakens communal communication. (p1)
I would argue that small communities function within Youtube or Flickr, but these environments are not communities as a whole. They are simply too big:
As members join, it creates either more effort or lowers the density of connectedness, or both, thus jeopardising the interconnection that makes for community. (p2)
The loose association of casual users leaving comments on Youtube doesn’t strike me as an audience, either. Consider the comments given to some of the Youtube vids of RHPS quoted above. Neither audience nor community—the engagement is too transitory for a community, but too active for an audience. These people are behaving ‘intermunally’. Some of them might go a further step, add their own vid, link it ‘in reply’ to the first one, etc. That starts the higher level of engagement and larger commitment we associate with community.
Engaged, critical, 2-way communication (I’m avoiding the term interactivity) is not captured by the concept of audience, a term which seems to place the ’spectator’ in the role of pure consumer. So once again, I’m coining the term “intermunity” to describe these looser online “intermunities of interest”, which are more proactive than audiences.
Mashup/remix as an online media community culture
My life in the bush of ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno remix site offers that higher level of interprersonal engageent that may well create an online community. Gathered around a specific interest, David Byrne and Brian Eno made their original recordings available for remixing and many people have taken advantage of this, you can go to their site and try to play them. However, I wouldn’t call it a decentralised community (often the strength of social media). Eno and Byrne are always going to be the arbiters of taste here.
Other remix cultures are less hierarchical. The machinima community, for example, is probably less pop-star driven, and the many anonymous popsong or movie mashups on Youtube sink or swim on their cleverness: Slap chop remix This culture is driven by viral dispersion. Once again, I would argue that while the ‘My life’ remix may set up close enough ties and by-in to deserve to be called a community, these viral events form intermunities, not communities.
Size matters–Eno and Byrne’s project is much more likely to form the intensity of ongoing relationships that communities offer than the respondents to the slap chop remix will do. Shirky concludes:
The inability of a single engaged community to grow past a certain size, irrespective of the technology, will mean that over time, barriers to community scale will cause a separation between media outlets that embrace the community model and stay small, and those that adopt the publishing model in order to accommodate growth.
Youtube versus My Life in the bush of ghosts–very different types of participatory media experiences are offered.
More remix examples
Remixes are when professionally produced media is recut and republished by amateurs (usually fans), quite often to humorous effect. Unfortunately, my example from RHPS has been removed for alleged copyright violation by Youtube. The law often gets in the way of the full expression of remix culture (more so in Australia than in the USA, where they have ‘fair use’ provisions).
Remix and mashup culture has become a favoured Youtube genre. Usually affectionate, these are fans remediating their own addiction. They share them with other fans, forming a derivative media community in their own right. These mashups have circulated virally around the web for years.
Remix and mashup cultures convert audiences into co-producers. The comments on Youtube are now a dialogue with the guy who did the remix, rather than an exchange between fans and the director of Mary Poppins. The relationships and expectations are thus very different. Now we are talking to our peers.
In other words the remix/youtube reappropriations reinvent audience-producer relationships. Although we don’t need social software to stick our own media on the web, social software really helps us find our peers (our community).
Fan communities
Henry Jenkins has argued persuasively how social software and the Web have aided in the development of fan media communities. He cites the Harry Potter and Survivor fan communities as interesting examples. The Harry Potter fan community generally consists of young people who are writing their own stories surrounding the Harry Potter plot. This often involves introducing new characters, or developing a minor character. These fans have been publishing their stories to a web site, such as The Daily Prophet. A film has been made about the resulting culture war We Are Wizards - Trailer. Jenkins explains it:
…the Potter wars are at heart a struggle over what rights we have to read and write about core cultural myths–that is, a struggle over literacy. Here, literacy is understood to include not simply what we can do with printed matter but also what we can do with media. Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves. Historically, constraints on literacy come from attempts to control different segments of the population–some societies have embraced universal literacy, others have restricted literacy to specific social classes or along racial and gender lines. We may also see the current struggle over literacy as having the effect of determining who has the right to participate in our culture and on what terms. (pp. 170-1)
The new styles of participatory cultures all stem, according to Kelly, from the humble link:
Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. For instance, hyperlinks made it much easier to create a seamless, scrolling street map of every town. They made it easier for people to refer to those maps. And hyperlinks made it possible for almost anyone to annotate, amend, and improve any map embedded in the Web. Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.
The reason why linking and community/intermunity are such a spectacularly successful pairing, is that people have become prosumers, rather than consumers:
The dogma of the age held that ordinary people had no need to upload; they were consumers, not producers. Fast-forward to today, and the poster child of the new Internet regime is BitTorrent. The brilliance of BitTorrent is in its exploitation of near-symmetrical communication rates. Users upload stuff while they are downloading. It assumes participation, not mere consumption. Our communication infrastructure has taken only the first steps in this great shift from audience to participants, but that is where it will go in the next decade.
Prosumers value the quality of their niche interest group rather than the quantity of their audience. Doug Kaye from ITConversations talks about his attitude to getting a high popularity rating for his podcasts:
… the best blogs and podcasts aren’t those that appeal to the largest and most generic audiences, but rather those that deliver the greatest value to an audience, regardless of the size of that audience. One might have a blog or podcast about organ transplants, for example. Wouldn’t make the Top Anything list, but for the intended readers/listeners, it would be #1. Old media can’t do that. New media can and should. Change lives in as profound a way as possible.
He points out that niche media is growing, whereas mass media is in decline:
That’s precisely why network television viewing and ad revenues have declined 19% in the past ten years, while Netflix has grown by offering the obscure and otherwise hard-to-find movies that are filling those flat-panel home-television screens.
Legal limitations on participatory culture
This type of participatory culture, derived from professional, mainstream media production, enjoys a very vexed relationship with the corporate owners of these media properties. On the one hand, they love the fame and indefinite money-making potential of a property like the Queen back catalogue, or RHPS. On the other hand, the popularity spawns copyright violations, particularly with the Internet. Corporate media doesn’t want to annoy its audience too much, but it also wants to protect its property. Thus we have inconsistent applications of copyright law, and a lot of rhetoric. As a result, the pirated versions of the Timewarp are longer available, because of a copyright claim by Twentieth Century Fox.
Conclusion: more than a movie/rock song/etc …
In one of the documentaries about RHPS community participation, one participant says “Rocky Horror is more than a movie, it’s a way of life”.
When the RHPS producers developed a product that was participatory and available for reappropriation, they had little idea what cultural impact their work would have. The same might be said for networked technologies. We now live in a mediascape that is under-written by the idea of participation, reappropriation, community and collaboration. This principles reject the idea of audience. Meanwhile, however, the digital divide is truly shaping a cultural divide, as those amongst us whose main media engagement is via network TV every night internalise and reproduce their own disempowerment in the face of an exciting and evolving mediascape of which they remain largely unaware.
References
Jenkins, H (2006). Convergence culture–where old and new media collide, New York: New York University Press.
A photo essay exploring globalization and community as it plays out on the streets of Brunswick, an inner north suburb in Melbourne, Australia.
Two signs about community in Brunswick–one with a positive spin; the second, seeming to imply some tensions.
Brunnie attracts residents from many different ethnic backgrounds. It has done so for perhaps 60 years. You can see this ethnic diversity in the streets. Greeks and Italians are now aging, and their businesses seem generally on the wane. Younger middle-eastern and African immigrants are now calling Brunnie home.
The migrants have brought with them their traditional artisan crafts, like Italian shoe-making.
The spread of populations around the world would not, to ‘globalization purists’, be part of globalization, however I think population mobility should be acknowledged as an early phase presaging the globalization trend.
The architecture has changed or repurposed to suit the desires of the immigrants to express and maintain their ethnic identity.
Meanwhile, the traditional manufacturing backbone of the local Brunswick economy has been transformed. As manufacturing has moved off-shore, many small factories are either abandoned or have been repurposed.
Many commercial buildings sit idle for a long time. The old structures are difficult to repurpose for the changing globalized economy. In terms of the local resident mix, Brunnie remains quite a poor community, although the land is expensive. it is difficult to finance redevelopment, and to many mainstream businesses, the suburb is visually unattractive. The numbers of empty factories and storefronts has been exascerbated by the global financial crisis.
However, the industries of the 1940’s are slowly being raised to make way for massive concrete warehouses.
With the abandonment of the workers to outer suburbs, working men’s cottages either go into decline, or are reinvented and given a yuppie cute make-over.
The Edwardian structures that remain can seem a little incongruous. The many working mans’ pubs struggle to reinvent themselves for a different type of clientele.
Unlike many communities which are feeling the negative effects of globalized finance, Brunnie is a community that seems unlikely to collapse. However, it wears the impact of globalization on its sleeve.
PS some time later, Harry Milonas made a great reply
As social values change, our uses of sociological terms change too. Rod argues that smokers are now considered deviant.
He might be right, although it is possibly contextual–in some situations it is acceptable, in others not. It would perhaps be interesting to analyse when it is acceptable and when not.
American sociologist Howard S Becker said an “act’s deviant character lies in the way it is defined in the public mind” (Becker 1971: 341), and so it seems in our own society that our government’s increasing criminalisation of smoking, together with its on-going attempt to win hearts and minds through anti-smoking media campaigns, has successfully shifted the public’s perception of smoking from the acceptable to the non-acceptable in 30 or so years.
A combination of criminalisation and ugly anti-smoking media campaigns “has thus effectively marginalised the smoking community, and with current proposals before government set to usher in even tighter controls, that marginalisation only looks set to deepen.”
The vast majority of smokers probably don’t even jay-walk–ie, smoking is the only way in which they are pariahs. They probably grin and bear their pariah status rather than look to more traditional deviant behaviours. Frustrating? Annoying? Unfair? Are they all trying to give up so that they can conform? Or do some use smoking as a form of rebellion? Shaping up to be a really interesting, well thought out doco, with a good, interrogative use of theory.
Rusalka has responded to Dean’s lecture on memory and social media by exploring its use with regard to her own community topic, Marysville. Rusalka’s community doco is quite a personal one, because she was in Marysville during the fires. However, she’s not a Marysville resident, so she’s also an outsider. Thus she has a very complex relationship to her subject.
She also has a complex relationship to media about Marysville and the fires:
I watched a 4CORNERS documentary on the ABC last week, the link is on my Blog’s front page under links. In the documentary made by a professional team the work included social media files in this case footage filmed by someone on the Marysville oval on February the 7th 2009 using a low resolution digital tool a phone camera I suspect and in this hand held footage, I saw myself - that is my car on the oval and I saw myself drive off when we were told to evacuate. I for some reason don’t want to look more closely at the footage and see if I can follow my movements. Seeing the car was confronting enough at this point.
Seeing my Red Volvo - Ketchup was a sad and confronting thing and seeing myself in this way has directly affected my memory of that day. It was fortuitous that Dean Keep gave us a presentation on the digitization of memory. As last week I was confronted by that very digitization of my memory. A personal document generated by someone unknown to me on the oval was broadcast on National television and as as such I saw myself and my actions on my own television in my living room but in someone else’s story. This was very different from the memories in my mind. And for the first time I saw what the Oval and Marysville was like 15 minutes after I saw the fire jump the Mountains and head towards us.
We live in such a mediated society; everyone is a celebrity; street crimes are often recorded on cctv. And here is Rusalka, seeing herself and her car on the Marysville oval. It’s like a vortex of media and media relationships… and the publication of memory?
It is very tempting to follow the issues that arise during your interviews into new territory. Tracy, for example, blogs about a new issue that has arisen for her community that she didn’t originally think of.
You have to be very careful about changing the focus half way through. It will probably mean that you can’t just ’shove’ the new theme inside what you already thought about. You have to change the whole strucutre and argument of your documentary. If you have already got a lot of material that doesn’t address the new theme, it will probably not work.
Well, week 9 is drawing to a close, and unless you have an extension or special consideration, you should be transitioning into post-production now. Hopefully this is reflected in everyone’s blogs, for example Vesna’s post, in which she explains her decisions and the structure she’s planned out, and even her ‘to-do’ list.
Perhaps people have had to put their risk-management plan into effect. You might now be able to see whether in the learning contract you accurately predicted the problems you actually have faced? A good topic to blog about.
How will you conclude your documentary? Some people might not have anything like a clear conclusion–or a clear end-point. If you are doing something very hypertextual, your viewer/reader might end up in a number of places. Does your material suit this sort of approach? Ie, if your argument doesn’t reduce to a single end-point then perhaps it does. But if you want your viewer/reader to go away with a particular message, then this is not for you.
Let’s look at some conclusions.
One inch punch
In the One inch punch , at 5:22 there is a change in theme from the punch to more general sense of future and past for martial arts. While the segue is easy to understand and well edited, the change of theme has not be presaged, its too sudden and it doesn’t refer back to the punch again. It’s a bit of a ‘fake conclusion’. Perhaps the problem is that the director never set up a strong enough problem–he had some implicit problems, like ‘is the one-inch punch a real thing?’ which perhaps he could have used more strongly in the structure. But the punch theme simply ran out of steam, and he changed tack.
His other possible solution might have been to end the doco two minutes earlier with Bruce Lee. Or to introduce the issue of the future of martial arts earlier, possibly suggesting the Bruce Lee one inch punch era was the hey day, and where’s it going now?
So the content could all have been used, but restructured and reframed.
Lost Vegas
The Lost Vegas conclusion starts at about 23 mins and lasts a little over a minute. The conclusion consists of summaries and questions. There are no real answers given. We meet again many of the people who were interviewed during the doco. The musical theme is re-used. Good use of text to summarise key points.
This conclusion works, I think. They are not forcing their opinion on the viewer, they are just leading you through the issues.
2 narrative-driven docos
1. Thirty Minutes to Move
The conclusion is the end of the story, and the story it tells is named in the title: Thirty Minutes to Move. Perhaps the simplest structure you can get.
2. Passive Aggressive Email Boxing
You’d call this a mockumentary. The structure is more complex.
Passive Aggressive Email Boxing’s narrative makes the conclusion easy and transparent, it’s when the story ends. However the pseudo-sports reporters add in a voice-of god voice over, so it’s kind-of got a double conclusion–the diegetic party invitation conclusion and the extra-diegetic commentary. Complex, but i think they make it work (the commentators are a little annoying, but that’s how they are, right?)
