“the discourse of the i-pod naturalises a capitalist ideology by asserting that individualism is bought and obtained through the market and through commodities…by individualizing yourself through i-pod you merely plug yourself into another homogenous mass: the culture industry..”

This is very much along the same lines as Anita Harris when she talks about how young people are targeted as consumers with their  civil rights commercialised and reconstructed as the ideals of choice, freedom and power of consumption.  This poster in which  the girl   silently gets on with her individualised ‘euphoric dancing’  exemplifies well the limited space young people have to express themselves in an unmediated way both on and off line.

Giddens at work in his study

David Buckingham has a  way of making complex things sound  accessible and straightforward. In the MacArthur series on Youth Identity and Digital Media  his chapter Introducing Identity does a great job of presenting the positions and arguments in the field of digital media and youth which I guess I am struggling to define. He warns against the exaggerated claims of the moral panic camp who see the dangers and risks of the internet including the wholesale destruction of childhood.  Equally  he is  wary of the ‘wishful’ thinkers whose enthusiasm about the ‘net generation’ blinds them   to  the continuities that still exist between old and new media and the inherent inequalities that remain within society.   He also makes a point about the  banality of new media use not often mentioned , something that I can  relate to, recently  observing students hard at work  in the computing block on IMACs looking at the varied  images of themselves on Photo Booth.   Of course it’s what I do as well…

The collection of articles in this book focus on identity,   a key issue in online cultures.  Buckingham defines it as something we uniquely possess yet it is also what we share with others, how we identify with others, which is identification and how we vary our identities according to different social contexts. This is related to how youth acquire identity which is looked at from a variety of different perspectives ; sociology, psychology, cultural studies. There is so much in this relatively short chapter that it is difficult to summarise,  but basically he demonstrates what each one  contributes  to the understanding of  what is identity and also what the shortcoming are of some of these theories. For example in a sociologist’s interpretation of youth the emphasis is on deviancy and pathology , but equally these delinquencies are linked to social factors such as poverty and class.

Buckingham  links these theories to the various debates surrounding  online cultures and youth and guides us how to make sense of it all. One of the interesting ideas that emerges continually in this field  is  the concept that identities are not fixed, that  identity is fluid and contingent. According to Richard Jenkins  identity is  a social process “accomplished through interactions with the other”. This obviously has much relevance to the way we communicate on the internet   which is a social process   altering according to the context we are in. The early theoreis e.g. Ervin Goffman (1950′s) The presentation of self in everyday life stated that we had two selves, one which was back stage, where we are more authentic and the other front stage, which conformed to the rules and rituals of life. This suggests that we have a more real self which is our personal self, but as Buckingham states all social interaction to some extent is a kind of perfomance. This idea of identity performance  leads  to Judith Butler whose influential and provocative book Gender Trouble (1990) is included in this chapter. Butler seeks to disengage the body from gender which is seen merely as a construct;

“there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender:…identity is perfomatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be  its results” (1990)  Buckingham   links this to digital online media  theorists who have suggested  that the internet can provide opportunities for exploring facets of identity otherwise denied. The words parody, play and subversion of identity which Butler uses in her book are appropriated  by some to describe how the Internet can liberate, these are clearly the enthusiasts for the medium.  But interestingly Buckingham states identity performance is also about deception too.

Judith Butler

The idea of increasing insecurity of the self  is much talked about in this field, Zygmund Bauman is one of the  pessimists who writes about the fragmentation of identity in a global world-  Buckingham takes slight issue with this in terms of underestimating the importance of stability which can, despite fast paced technological change, despite the ideas of a runaway world, also be a way of being in the  world.

Buckingham also mentions Anthony Giddens as a key theorist who is used to illustrate our relationship with the internet and global communications.  His book Modernity and Self Identity 1991, was in fact going to be the book I was going to write about as it seems to emerge in many texts including Guy Merchant’s Identity Social Networks and Online Communication.  Giddens was writing about the self in relation to late modernity (not post-modernity which implies something new) prior to the widespread usage of the internet as a mode of communication. His ideas are currently relevant to this field as he talks about the active individual in charge of producing and performing an ongoing narrative of the self. The self is a reflexive project, something that we continually revise and work on- it is something that we present to others explaining the past and pointing towards a future-a stable self identity is one in which there are not wildly fluctuating versions; 

” A preson’s identity is not to be found in behaviour , nor – though this is important- in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.” (Giddens, 1991:54)

This is to do with one of the features of late modernity which is that we no longer have defined roles within post-traditional societies and our lives, our identities are , for us to define. It is interesting to compare his work with that of Foucault who is widely quoted by Giddens. His work in the late 70′s, Discpline and Punish, suggested how discourses that of institutions,  work to get people/prisoners to police themselves, producing ‘docile bodies’. Foucault does not talk about proper

Michel Foucault

agency , the individual has little active control of the ‘discourses’ he/she exists within, these are internalised and made into our own. It would seem that Giddens is more positive about individuals being in charge of themselves despite  the unstable environments that we live in. This is perhaps why he fits in so well with the online culture theorists who see the potentials in social networking in blogging, of creating and authoring the self.

To summarise then some of the theorists that Buckihgham mentions:

Goffman- There is ‘real’ identity but it is hiding backstage

Butler-There is no (gender) identity or inner self it is all a construct, just a way of viewing bodies

Foucault-there is no self/identity but there are imposed discourses through which the self emerges

Giddens- Identity is created through active choices of the multitude of lifestyle choices out there

The digested theorists-Giddens is less gloomy about identity than Foucault and less politicised and radical than Butler.

Another part of  McRobbies work(2000) included in the article was the idea that the identity that girls’ construct both virtual and real is linked far more with image and style as a marker of success rather than any “robust concept of citizenship” . This idea of course is not exactly a new one, and McRobbie  in her 1991 book Feminism and Youth culture had already stated that girls have never been interested in organised ‘leisure’ activities other than that which is “defined through commodities, cigarettes, clothes, make-up and magazines”.

Young women especially are targeted with a vengeance as consumers in the 21^st century by leisure enterprises, by marketing and advertising, which makes its hard to apply theories of resistance to youth in general   or to seen how any engagement with the political might occur. The public identity of young women online is linked to a “spectacular femininity” (McRobbie 2007) which is seen everywhere in popular culture and is all about being “on display as a consumer citizen”  (Harris)

The argument  for the benefits of online cultures which include blogs and social network sites sees the virtual public space as a freer alternative to the privatised public space in the real world.   Harris links some of the more politicised blogs to the   Riot Grrrl   handwritten fanzines which served as an outlet for  young women in the early 1990’s who were disenfranchised by the old feminist movement and dissatisfied with what culture had to offer them. These zines were accompanied by demonstrations,  meetings and the creation of music.

Harris states that feminist blogs only form a small part of the participatory culture of young women today ,but it is the very act of creating a public self in a non-commercial arena  which is construed as positive. The words ‘creative, playful, critical agency’  are used by Harris to stress the non-passive, productive role that young women play when engaging with these communities. This obviously can only be a good thing however sometimes it seems that our ideas   about resistance and participation are getting increasingly thin and desperate.   Foucault’s concept of ‘bio-power’ which states that power is not a dominating force but existing everywhere in society is hardly news, but it would seem to explain well how the strategies  that exist to overcome it get increasingly dispersed and perhaps personalised.

While looking at the Riot Grrrl blogs I came across this work by a ‘contemporary’ artist Valie Export who explores the way women fit into the urban, public space. Here in this image we see a woman contorting her body around some steps which can be read either women just slot in unawares into the public space, or that they should be made aware of how they can  make a statement by literally inserting their bodies into this perhaps masculinized space.

However I am realising now that the only way to find a purpose is to keep on going, the less you do, the less you have a dialogue with yourself and others. Initially it doesn’t really matter what you talk about.  Reflecting on the problem of blogging not knowing what to write, is as good a subject as any I guess.

Not carrying on with the blog-.the reasons I would give; lack of time, inspiration, response from others. This is probably if honest, the main joy (?) of blogging. Notebooks are useful for writing ideas in but they never go anywhere. With blogging the thoughts are out there, and sometimes someone might respond. You are dangling a hook waiting for a catch…It is of course not only about getting a response.

The blogging process forces you to intellectualise, especially if you are writing about something more personal in order to make it palatable or relevant,  you have to connect it to something bigger than your ‘self’ and it also forces you to take a position.   The individual’s biography according to  Anthonny Gidden’s, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world , and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.  (Giddens 1991) I guess you could apply this to blogging and how to write anything meaningful it has to connect with the outside world. Hence the difference between blogging and social networking which could be said to be just about the ‘self’, although even there you are connecting to some form of external reality…I think ?

I think that not having a stance could be one of the reasons for not blogging. The dialogue with someone forces you to make connections with other ideas that you might not have thought about. In this way, it is very beneficial especially for people who might not be used to sustaining or developing a thread or an argument about something.

The question who would I blog for ties into the above. Currently my audience shifts from students who have been instructed to visit, to the MA students and tutors. I don’t really expect any one else. If the practice of writing the blog becomes established with a kind of self-generating flow of ideas and connections then it doesn’t really matter who the audience is unless the blog really does become specialised into one area. I am probably kidding myself as I have just read Guy Merchant who talks about the importance of a sense of the audience in terms of creating a meaningful website/blog. Here he discusses the several different stories/identities, which can be played out in a blog. I used the phrase identity crisis in my last blog to describe how I felt torn between writing about film studies (work based) and more  reflective issues which might just crop up (personal).This is perhaps evidence of my own particular ‘narrative ’ of what I see as conflicting identities which I hope over time will become less compartmentalised.. 

 The evidence that the blog is being used is through the hits and the comments. I tend not to look at the hits as it makes me feel too worried, a bit like looking at your bank statement, comments are undoubtedly the lifeline of the blog without these the blog feels one-dimensional and fairly pointless. Although the practice of writing is always worthwhile.

 The benefits of blogging for me personally have been a commitment to exteriorising thoughts and overcoming the self-conscious barrier that what you write is uninteresting. As Graham Greene said somewhere “writing is a form of therapy: sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human situation” and“writing is the means that knows no limits” (Helen Cixous)  

Blog as therapy, exploring inner tensions, fantasies etc.like a diary. Blog as  a political, committed stance..to stake your position in society.Blog as creative outlet encouarging reflection and thought. Am not sure who benefits from reading mine, I  initially saw it as something ‘useful’ for a group of students. However the format didn’t encourage them to use it and a lot more thought should have gone into the reasons why they weren’t connecting, design, language mode of address. To attract the audience you must include something of the audience in the text.

 One of the unintended consequences of blogging is that it has made me much less weary of the Web’s content. I have been, as an older user of the internet, apprehensive of the quantity of stuff out there,  it put me off even wanting to read a blog, what on earth could any one have to say that can’t be read in a newspaper? I realise now how important this form of communication can be, that in effect it democratises  the news, it has put the power away from the media gatekeepers into the hands of dare I say it ‘the people’. Every one is now a journalist in their own way! Another positive aspect about blogging is the contributory factor, i.e. that instead of just consuming you are putting something in and perhaps influencing in a very small way, the bigger picture. The other consequence of blogging is that the household chores are abandoned and the children are running wild.

Look out it’s Dylan ‘performing’ in Don’t Look Back 1965

This blog is having an identity crisis… I have been trying to write about different issues and attempting to find a “voice” but  now due to  immense pressure from ahem…., one student, I am going to talk about Documentary film.. Apologies for the confusion. Perhaps I should have two blogs…?One for each facet of my very busy life... Ok here goes for Barry et al

Defining Documentary

Difficult to define documentary in a nutshell, but I would start off by placing it in direct contrast to fiction film.

Some times Documentaries are called “non-fiction” films

Literally, documentaries are filmic evidence,  ’documents’ of something, someone that has existed in reality.

Dcumentary can function as a genre- with its own codes and conventions, audiences and expectations. These differ in different moments of film history.

What do you expect when you watch a  documentary? How does this differ from watching fiction? (Think about the spectator)

Realism-

Realism   has spawned many film movements in European film history, Italian Neo Realism/ British Social realism where filmmakers have tried to make their films as realistic as possible using contemporary society as their backdrop to expose the often current conditions of the poor.  Andre Bazin, French writer and critic (see picture above) had many ideas about realism and he saw cinema as closely allied to the real as it produced i mages that were recorded mechanically.

For   Bazin, realism was a style whose chief elements were the long take, deep focus, limited editing and, when possible, the use of non-professional, or at least relatively unknown actors.  In La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz 1995) he uses these conventions as well as the use of black and white, which can be said to code reality.

One of the major issues is about the  relationship of film to ‘reality’ .  Different periods have seen different approaches to this.

British Documentary movement- Key works Night Mail- (Watt/Wright 1936) Watch it again…This movement was also called   called poetic realism.. and the Expositry Mode (voice of God)

What is real about this film, what is unreal now..?

The Public Gaze- Films that tried to democratise the viewing of films, “Housing Problems”  Look up the dates your self !  These early documentaries are remarkable for their use of ‘direct address’ to the camera,their objectification of the ‘poor, working class’ their outlining of facts and the film treating the subject  as a problem that had to be solved..  Compare the use of editing here with continuity editing in Hollywood fiction which draws you in.

Poetic or authoured mode- filmmaker gathers recorded sights and sounds to evoke atmosphere and mood- “Listen to Britain” Humphrey Jennings – (the last scene always makes me feel patriotic)

Observational Mode- Etre et Avoir (2003) Product of new lightweight technologies enable the filmmaker to enter into a tiny school in rural France and record seeminly unseen. How much control doe the director actually have over the ‘reality’ of the situation? Here there is no voice but there is tons and tons of editing

Direct Cinema was America’s big docu movement from the late 1950′s which was about the revolutionary new technology introduced into filmmaking, lightweight camera’s, synchronisation of sound enabled the filmmakers to enter into previously undocumented worlds, e.g politicians, sportsmen celebrities ‘normal’ people whose ordinary lives became interesting just by virtue of having the camera’s turned on them. Think about where you would place this movement in terms of the categories listed above.

Key films Primary (1960) Salesmen (1969) Don’t Look Back (1965)

Issue number two: documentary changes with the advancement of technology.

Self Reflexive documentaries- inexpensive video equipment-funding provided by TV, more control over filmmaker. The Thin blue Line a documentary about a man convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit, exposes the documentary filmmaking process. (Errol Morris 1988)

Self Reflexive can also be Docu comedy - or Performative Documentary- Michael Moore- filmmaker as part of the documentary.

Basic points are that documentary can never be just a faithful representation of the real, as it always already involves some form of choice. How to shoot what to shoot how to edit the footage…

Stella Bruzzi’s book on New Documentary elaborates  upon the long-running question that has concerned all of non-fiction production, “How do we know what we know regarding something, be it an event, person, or institution?”

The obsession with uncovering how film can best be used to “know” underlies her discussions of a variety of topics such as the authenticity of the  Kennedy assassination film, the rise of the docusoap genre in Great Britain, the journey film, presidential image making, and a survey of the performative documentaries of Nicholas Barker, Molly Dineen, and Nick Broomfield. Sounds a good one I am off to buy it…

Waiting to be demolished

To attempt (very rudimentary at this stage) a short film about London I took a   journey which encompassed the immense variety of different neighbourhoods   in  South East London. Cycling down Rye lane   surely  one  of the most dense  shopping roads in London  through leafy Camberwell with its grand Georgian Mansions, across Burgess park a bleak,  strangely tranquil place and into the area known as  Elephant and Castle.   Here the Heygate estate still stands, a legacy of the ‘failed’ social housing of the 1960′s.  This monumental estate with the longest concretre walk ways ever built (I think), made me think about the idea of communities and how people are forced to live in certain ways. What was the idea behind this ? Instead of connecting people the walkways were used for crime and actually isolated people. Would this have happened anyway regardless of the design? How involved were the architects in real people’s lives..As a model it must have looked impressive..

The surrounding area is undergoing  massive regeneration. The Heygate estate is to be pulled down,  the surrounding area made more people friendly with cars, the main roundabout turned into  a large public area and “boulevard”..Two huge skyscrapers are currently going up, more housing both social and private…all sounds good but again what happens to the real people who live there? As one estate agent  in a website on the project says: “Regeneration is not happening at the pace we would have liked, but it is happening ..council tenants are being moved out of the Heygate estate and properties are now starting to be boarded up in preparation for demolition..”

This is an example of yet another  district earmarked for its “huge potential” in estate agent speak, its connection to the centre of town , a “short hop from Westminster” etc..How much energy has been invested into rethinking how real people will live in this area with all its divesity of cultures, one of the most varied in the whole of Britain? As I cycled on moving northwest through more council estates towards Waterloo I ran into East Street Market   where the ‘real’ community congregates in a place that it has made its own with no fancy schemes or impressive boulevards.  Anthony Giddens in his 1991 book Modernity and Self Identity talked about  disembedding ,the “lifting out of social relationships from local contexts “, I wonder what the impact of this huge new scheme will have on the existing community whether it will disrupt the area which although far from being perfect mainly due to the dominance of the car,  has its own history and sense of place.

This also makes me think of internet cultures which also  in their own way dislocate the real, lift people out of their specific contexts and sort of reassemble them in a fantasy public boulevard.

Experimental filmmaking… There is a deadline for me to produce a film in 6 weeks and I have not yet started. This is perhaps a good opportunity to use the blog to reflect on the ‘creative’ processes. I will also use it as a way of exploring issues around (experimental) film making. First  up what on earth am I going to film? This is a good way for me to see how difficult it is to reflect on being creative..Films I like (sound like Facebook now) Tacita Dean, her time based pieces are particulary beautiful- here I should have a link..it is refreshing to have to produce something rather than theorise..I was watching a programme on Sam Taylor wood (south bank show Dec 08) (another link that i should have made) and her version of creativity was that it was just something that was in her head that needed to come out. I am not sure if this is how great art is really made. Bill Viola  (link) who also makes installation art reputedly goes away for a week isolating himself,  brainstorms, makes all sorts of connections, without the help of the internet i presume and comes back with ideas…  

Ideas at the moment;  time,  filming the real….real time..nature vesus culture (that old hat) processes.. will it just be a film to realise techniques to will their be any kind of narrative?  Can I use this to brainstorm, is this the right arena? I am weary about using this in a more personal way in that this really alienates my very invisible audience. I should be talking theory and culture and connect with the world of ideas…   what would  Zizeck have to say about creativity? I’m sure that he would have a lot to say about the real.. but the psychoanalytical real is not the same as the real in film or is it? The real in film is about representing actuality.. Andre Bazin wrote about it in length and favoured the ‘long take’ , montage editing as opposed to continuity editing which ‘sewed’ in the viewer rather than let them observe in an objective way.

This is a difficult question and one I find hard to pin down. However there are excellent resources out there. The powerpoints by Stephanie on Black Board and hand outs are obviously your first port of call-

You need to have some kind of idea what cultural studies is, it’s about looking at film from a more political perspective. It is about looking beyond the surface of the film and searching for the deeper meanings, e.g. the ideological meaning. These are the big ideas that have influenced the film, they could be completely unconscious e.g. an action film which reproduces the dominant ideologies of society, e.g The hero saving the day, the damsel in distress, the USA as the moral backdrop for the unfolding events, or they could be explicit e.g films that seek to uncover the prevailing ideas running through society..In Stephanies brilliant power point “Messages and Values:Critical Approaches ” there are many examples you could use. Victim,  Cathy come Home (in fact in any Ken Loach film he explicitly tries to undermine ideology) a film like Imitation of Life which you all saw, this tried to expose the ideologies of dominant American life in a covert way (secretive) i.e. through the mise en scene….(see picture)