The Politics of Watching: Visuality and the New Media Economy

What does it mean to consume and produce images non-stop in the new media economy? Images can be captured, uploaded, downloaded, and disseminated with ease in digital platforms, raising the need to understand how these acts of image capture and circulation are embedded into the familiar and everyday as well as the extraordinary where images can re-negotiate cognitive realities and re-frame notions of authenticity and truth. This new media visuality is characterised by new consumption rituals and practices which transgress the boundaries between private pleasures, personal memories, and voyeurism, on the one hand, and public communion, witnessing, and expose on the other. This paper examines the notion of visuality in digital platforms and its consequences for postmodernity in terms of subjectivity, new forms of engagement and disenfranchisement. DOI: 10.4018/jep.2012010101 2 International Journal of E-Politics, 3(1), 1-11, January-March 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. on the Internet enables civilians to become image creators when events happen across the globe. The act of recording through mobile technologies and the ability to circulate images across the world crafts new rituals where the bystander through the act of recording bears witness through technology. This material act of bearing witness through technology unleashes a new visibility where the civilian gaze can narrate events without the mediation of news makers onto multimedia platforms which can potentially invite non-stop viewing from audiences around the globe. With broadcasting and the availability of multi-media facilities on the Internet, there has been a privileging of the eye with an emphasis on visuality. In postmodernity, technology can bring new forms of existence in spatio-temporal terms and reconfigure the horizon in which human interactions are placed and unfolded (Lattas, 2006, p. 31). Roger Silverstone (1994) in his theorisation of the domestication of technology postulates that the meaning and significance of all our media and information technologies depend entirely on the engagement of the user where the cognitive participation can both blur the spacio-temporal spaces while reinforcing it. Media technologies and their domestication are seen as playing a crucial role in the ontology of everyday life. Life is experienced through both the formal (rituals) and informal (mundane) structures of the everyday (Silverstone, 1994, p. 169). It enables the translation of the new into the familiar and the unfamiliar to be objectified, integrated or distanced through the meanings imposed in the private realm. The world around us is streamed through broadcast and online platforms engaging us beyond the realms of our situated domesticity. Media technologies enable new forms of signification and integration over expanded spatialities. The dissolution of distance, temporality and the inscribing of new values through the representation of images signify a global media economy where the transportation and dissemination of materials happen non-stop in our media saturated environment. Paddy Scannell’s (1996a, 1996b) seminal writings implicate the mass media in everyday schedules (i.e., radio and television) contributing to the emergence of a mass consciousness shaped by technology through the rituals of broadcasting, its incumbent temporality and the communion of the masses through the act of watching. Broadcasting through its ‘dailiness’ provides a ‘continuity, reliability and a familiarity.’ The entwining of the personal with the mediated broadcast space signifies the coalescing of imagination to form our cognitive realities of the wider world. The media space is the stage where the ‘global’ is narrated through the dailiness of news and documentary where our secure ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991) are constantly juxtaposed through the presentation of ‘imagined others’ who inhabit the globe. Benedict Anderson constructed these communities not through the reality of their existence but the ways and forms they are imagined. This intrinsically implicates the biases in communication technologies where the eye may be privileged over the ear or in specific terms where visuality may prevail over orality. Moving beyond the arguments of bias posited by Harold Innis (1950, 1964), Anderson invoked the rituals of communion where media artefacts and consumption provide the means to base this imagination. Imagination is then both limited and governed through the different types of medium. Like television, new media provide forms of voyeurism where one can ‘travel’ the globe and imagine it through both the non-stop narratives that are streamed in via video platforms on the World Wide Web. The wider world is constantly constructed through one’s active engagement with content and technology and equally through the mobility this medium enables. Space is a recurrent metaphor in media theory for it signifies the construction of cognitive realities such as public spheres where we debate and scrutinize issues consequential to our public and private lives. Throughout the trajectory of media studies, media is theorised as ‘doubling’ (Scannell, 1996b) or even a multiplying of places (Couldry, 2000) or perhaps leading to a sense of ‘placelessness’ (Meyrowitz, 1985). International Journal of E-Politics, 3(1), 1-11, January-March 2012 3 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Media’s role in shaping our cognitive reality, temporality and notions of distance has been well documented in media theory. The socialization of mass consciousness through the broadcasting space and its role in creating mass spectatorship of media events is largely dependent on the visual. Kathryn Moore (2003, p. 26) reasons that the concept of visual thinking is deeply embedded in our culture and an intrinsic part of our lives. The role of images in structuring or perhaps restructuring reality has consumed much of the debates both in art history and equally in the field of photography (Barthes, 1977; Sontag, 1977; Zelizer, 1998, 2001; Sekula, 1984; Mitchell, 1994). Often the image is a short-hand for both objectivity and subjectivity and creating ‘a crisis of faith in optical empiricism’ (Tagg, 1992). In C. Wright Mills apt description of our ‘second-hand world,’ this constant circulation and repetition of images constitute a terrain of mediation where images are not innocent of cultural formation nor are they innocent of forming culture. The disembbedding of both temporality and context reconfigure the consumption practices on the Internet. Lisa Parks (2004, p. 38) in reviewing newer media forms observes that the ‘meanings, knowledge and experiences of time/ space and movement have themselves shifted with different technologies, geographies, users and socio-historic conditions’. In critiquing the ‘annihilation of time-space discourse’ against the web environment, she points out that it has led to the creation of a fantasy of ‘digital nomadism’ where the user in the Internet environment is free to roam through the electronic terrain and assume different identities. Parks contends that our cognitive realities are limited through a combination of geographic, artistic, linguistic and visual systems of signification. Our power economies within the home and the outer world as well as our cultural systems of signification both define and constrain our imagination of the global and our sense of ‘otherness’ that can emerge in our postmodern condition. Distance and temporality are negotiated through new interactive technologies which not only connect the world but create new visibilities by highlighting remote parts of the world. Our intrusion into these hitherto inaccessible spaces constructs the globe as one that is wired and open to media intrusion enacting a pervasive gaze that can capture the human condition when it’s faced with new travesties or trauma, where new media events and cultural tropes can be created through these technological visibilities and connectivity. Spectacle and Representation New media technologies enable the act of making something visible and as such invoke public spectacle and its moral gaze. John Thompson (2000) contends this has lead to the radical transformation of public visibility. This ‘mediated visibility’ conflates making visible with making public and in this sense electronic media creates new structures of proximity and distance which can influence cognitive realities. Making public cannot then be deemed as an altruistic act that functions in the interest of the public but inversely can undermine and manipulate public sensibilities. John Thompson’s (1995, 2005, p. 32) ‘interactional theory’ posits that by using communication media individuals create new forms of actions and interactions which have their own distinctive properties both in terms of consequences and risk. Guy Debord (1995, p. 12) surmised that an immense accumulation of spectacles occur in societies with modern conditions of production. In such societies ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation’. The notion of spectacle both distracts and depoliticizes the public from the full potential of human agency. The spectacle for Debord detracted from lived experience, turning people into consumers of images which in turn reproduced life. The conjoining of technology, image and mass spectacle has without question raised issues about the ethics of watching, the perversity of the human condition and the loss of aura and authenticity of art through relentless mass reproduction in modernity. Walter Benjamin (1969, p. 96), described photography as transforming ‘misery into an object of consumption.’ 4 International Journal of E-Politics, 3(1), 1-11, January-March 2012 Copyright © 2012,