From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Dec 31 2005 - 14:54:58 PST
>
>
>> how do we as
>> individuals watch something, what frame of reference
>> do we put around
>> it, and what are we not seeing, how do we relate to
>> this not-seeing?
>
> I think you are saying that people will respond to
> media differently as individuals here? Not really sure
> why you say that.
>
Not responding to media but in understanding texts (in the wider sense,
films, videos and so on), for example if I watch Craig Baldwin's
Tribulation 99 I can watch it 'knowing' the politics and 'knowing' the
conspiracies, and I can look at its style and contexualise that as
experimental documentary cinema and found footage art and so on, these
my frames of reference. However, somebody else may watch it who is an
expert on old science fiction movies, and they may contextualise it via
an appreciation of sci-fi bricolage, neither reading is right or wrong,
but each is specific to the frame we put around the watching of the
film. In terms of mainstream film the frame of reference may also
incorporate a wider metanarrative that includes advertising, interviews
with actors on tv, book tie ins, and so on.
>>>
>>>
>> Or, worse, the news agenda we are thinking about is
>> set by the
>> mainstream media.
>
> I'm not sure what you meant here.
>
The spectacle. We think about famine in East Africa because the
mainstream media reports on it, but when it doesn't report on it the
famine is still there, but the news agenda has moved onto something
else. Look at the flooding of New Orleans, for a week or two it was
everywhere, but now it is forgotten, it is no longer news worthy, but
clearly there are still many stories about it, but pictures of.... I
don't know...say, for example, poor people cleaning houses aren't as
exciting as pictures of flood waters rising.
Watch Outfoxed about Fox TV news, a great documentary that is in part
about how the news agenda is constructed.
>
> You could self publish and I know people that have.
>
> You also don't have to get it out there in the shops,
> you could just create a "vanity publication"
But if you want people to read it you need to distribute it, same as
with a film you need to get people to see it.
Jack
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.