"Classic": Retro-grade TV in Our Digital Age

One of the three old movie channels, digital channels of local network affiliates, has an ad professing testimonials of people so happy "real" tv is back again, that they feel good about tv again and that they can let their children watch without being worried about what they'll be exposed to. These are the channels that play movies from the 30's to the 70's and many made later.  They are cheap to replay and bring in advertising revenue with films owned by particular studios now boughtbout by the media conglomerates that own the networks.  These are the movies with the most racist and sexist images, characterizations and narratives ever produced, with some of the widest distributions of their time, now getting even more distribution - and a free pass on their socially and politically retrograde storylines...they're "classics".  It's troubling to think that those testimonials might be real, at least that they might reflect many other people's idea of what 'good', 'safe' television programming looks like.

And yes, I just watched a bug-eyed Willie Best react in his "classic" stepinfetchit role to the idea of a ghost in a haunted Puerto Rican swamp while ferrying yellow-faced Peter Lorre in 1939's "Mr. Moto in Danger Island".  It just doesn't get any 'safer' than that.  Westerns also figure voluminous on these channels, most old, but many newer, very few with any redeeming, non-settler-colonial, non-genocidal qualities.  "Safe", they say.  Isn't it strange that this sort of story, much created before the bare beginnings of social and televisual/cinematice reforms of the 60's and 70's, is what they say we think is "safe"?

Oh, and with regard to those ghosts in the swamp, the USAmerican colonials....yes, colonials as in colonialism...were discussing the people that hold such ideas about Spirit beings and Ancestors and such.  They chided such claims of "ghosts" as "superstitions of a dangerously ignorant people".  (long pause)  "Dangerously ignorant".  Those are indigenous people and African descendants in those swamps.  Those are humans, children, women and men, freedom fighters in those swamps.  And don't let it slip by you that these anti-indigenous, anti-African, anti-woman narratives assume the ascendancy and presumptuous superiority of a colonial culture that deified a particularly "holy" ghost, but maybe merely a ghost nonetheless, albeit tied to a he-god and a so-called savior-son whose adherents would prove much more globally and ignorantly dangerous than any culture known to revere and keep intimate relations with their Dead.

Watching Where We Are Going

Young man texting feverishly as he walks off train into station deep underground, maybe fifty of us all walking toward the longest escalators in the Boston transit system, usually two escalators working to get commuters up onto the earth's surface. In this moment only one is working. Text-Fever guy heads assumptively toward the escalator not moving, full speed afoot, blazing speed afinger.  I spy with my little out of the corner eye his leg lift up in the air as if the steps are celestially predestined to always rise up to meet him. The analog world of blood, bone and mechanical contrivances is somehow a constant and regular bandwidth of experience in the digitized mind and body of this specimen of Post-Landline Man. 

And his rudely awakened goin'-nowhere dance was stellar!  An inebriated George Balanchine could not have produced such gross motor madness as this man stumbled back - if only for an embarrassed moment - into consciousness of a world that proves daily why our field of vision is actually about 180 degrees wide...or so I hope.  His feet groped their way back to truth then sped him back to The Matrix for his "blue pill" cocktail.  Thank goodness for him he lives in a world relatively "protected" from most semblances of natural realities like slimy snakes, scary bears, inconvenient trees and motivated stairs. The modern human did well to find a virtual place to hide from eye contact, embodied intercourse a la conversation, the perniciousness of soil and absolutely unncessary things like sacred naturo-spiritual energetic experiences and ritual that sustain our understanding of the primacy of nature and analog(ous), embodied experience as humans born into the Family of Being and Becoming (one large branch of hughly successful human cultural development calls it "All Our Relations"). 

Our little digital, virtual, electronic pseudo-world is stumbling toward an implosion of sorts. 

We are analog.  We are frequencies. We are vibrations. We are waves. We are wind.  We are rivers. We are rain. We are wings.  We are fins. We are blood and we are bone. We are not reducible to bitstreams. We are not equal to the zerosums of data. We are not predestined to accept The Singularity.  We need not take seriously the fantasies of the Terasem movement, though we must treat seriously the cultural implications.  We needn't give in to the idea or reality of immortality through matricizing with humanoid android technologies.

And we should watch - much more carefully and critically - where we are going.

(images from a Panasonic exhibit at a Boston shooping mall)

Biased Portrayals in Children's TV Persist

Today, on "THIS is for Kids" on WHDH's "THIS" digital channel, I watched a cartoon that featured a European cowboy in Africa, blue gendered gorillas and a Tarzan character with glasses. The female gorilla was amorously chasing the cowboy for some reason (I missed the beginning), then was convinced to wed the male gorilla, presided over by the Tarzan-type character. Some of the action took place in a hut that was perched on the branch of a tree. Just like the more recent Disney version of Tarzan, there were no African people present at all. This absence of Africans in Africa was echoed in a recent past episode of Gadget Boy on the same channel.

The next cartoon featured a caveperson (male) who dressed up as a female dinosaur to lure a tyrannosaurus into a tar pit. He threw a handkerchief on the ground with expectation that the tyrannosaurus would see it and fall in the tar pit in the process. When the rex saw the caveperson, he went cartoonishly ga-ga, with eyes bulging, banging its tail on its head and demonstrably drooling. The rex "fell in love" (clearly only lust) with the caveperson and the narrative continued on portraying the caveperson as a captive housewife, unable to leave the house and placating the husband rex by dusting the house after he got angry at the "wife" for daring to want to escape. The caveperson was scheming to get ouf of the house while the rex sat in an easy chair reading the newspaper and only got free after the rex saw another character it felt attracted to.

(more on this soon)

Cultural Media Literacy

(from "Cultural Bias in Prime Time Television and Teenage Viewers: Cultural Media Literacy for High School and Higher Education", pg.196)

Cultural Media Literacy, a development borne of this study, was an important and necessary advancement in the growth of general media literacy education, research and organization. While most media literacy focused adequately on the dynamics of medium production and distribution, how it worked visually, graphically and/or sonically and possible effects in society (Strasburger & Wilson, 2002), these efforts did not show a marked trend toward deeper discussion of particular social issues as a whole. All of the aforementioned organizations and efforts were spectacular undertakings and deserve to be supported and grown. The discourse must have at some point advanced more deeply into the core of the social dynamic, the people themselves. That core was the source or container of the conflict and/or challenge in values and dominant life practice around which the discussion about media and television revolved. That human core was the locus of hope for the ultimate growth in positive human development.

Cultural Media Literacy sought to advance the discussion of television in
particular and mass communications media in general as a serious motive social force, but also to raise issue with the society’s grasp of its own negative and positive tendencies, to help redefine and broaden its understanding of itself and its pattern of cultural consumption and production. The media, the empty television stations, dark movie theaters or unlit fiber-optic internet cables were not the criminals, but the ways in which they had been manipulated by some people and consumed and used by so many more could have been considered as such. The hammer was not responsible for whether it was used as a tool for construction of home or a weapon of destruction of life, so the media in general and television in particular were also powerful, desirable tools of constructive change and transformation, almost innocent by themselves until imbued with the higher intentions of the creator and consumer alike.

Cultural Media Literacy defined conventional media literacy issues and elements as important, but only a part of the larger discussion that must happen with regard to mass communications in any society. Aside from the deleterious, anti-social forces and consequences of corporate media conglomeration, within Cultural Media Literacy, the media were simply the carriers of the message and these messages are important to society’s ability to observe itself, analyze its tendencies, whether realistic or fantastic, fictional or non-fictional, and make functional, practical decisions, actions and changes in its forward motion through time. Without a substantive discussion about the actual elements that television could only raise issue about or narrow discourse on, any society would only have been spinning its wheels with regard to mentioning mass communications media, cultural issues and social responsibility and positive social development.

Cultural Media Literacy defined culture and society as an organic and embodied human force that was simply and gloriously a macrocosm of the dynamism of the individual human being. Just as the individual must have been able to have insight into its own reality, tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, so must have society as a whole been able to look at itself and through informed observation and contemplative insight been able to lessen its pathologies and increase the effects of the best elements that it had to offer itself.

Cultural Media Literacy assumed that people cared enough about other people that we should have been actively and constantly engaged in each other’s development for the good of the society and each individual within it. This concept was essential for any conscious and active society to move forward, progressively and intelligently. The history of countless cultures pointed to the necessity of this one to, like them, make informed and conscious choices about its future, in the interest of those who would carry it forward. Teenagers were the beneficiaries of our greatest failures and achievements. They found information, crystal clear and deeply flawed on the millions of small screens lit by the culturally biased images given robust life in prime time television.