Listening to Monocle Radio 24 each day has given me a new focus on the news of the world. The station tempers the often overly-superficial coverage of global events as dished up by mainline daily, hourly and even half-hourly news updates. The shows on Monocle present stories providing detailed background to current events and interesting context about what is happening in the world. You hear about testy and compelling issues from places you rarely hear of - or issues you know little or nothing about. The western mainline media could certainly have a similar focus but instead of informing, they choose simplistic, multi-platformed, decontextualised so-called entertaining stories that show scant relationship to broader world issues, only the homogenous world the media projects.
This is Baudrillard's hyperreal representation. When Baudrillard (1995) wrote 'The Gulf War did not take place', he observed in a wide-ranging way what the media were projecting as obfuscation. The difference was that he did not accept the mediated representation of spectacle and disconnected hyperreal images. It was, as Guy Debord (1994) stated, a spectacle of ideology:
'The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life.' (Debord 1994, point 215).
And a real lack of engagement.
Taking Debord into the virtual world, Benoit Detalle makes an Adorno and Horkheimer-like uncompromising critique of the viewer/reader and the mediated effect, noting: 'We, suspending self-critical thought, all bow before the supreme virtual event.' Detalle continues, likening the coverage of war to the direction of a Hollywood movie.
'It becomes instant history, unchallenged and unchallengeable.' (Gerbner in Baudrillard 1995;3)
But we, audience are no longer permitted to see real war action, wounded bodies or hear the cries of families, refugees and devastated children. The journalist drives through a bombed-out, dusty streetscape that could be anywhere and voiceovers an instant report from an empty place, where residents have joined the long queue of refugees walking toward the safety they hope for. Detalle calls this style of coverage 'a clean war'.
But it is only what the media chooses to show us. There is other footage, images of the dead and wounded, but on Australian television, these images are missing. War is sanitised, manufactured and manicured. It was not always like this.
I grew up in the era of the Vietnam war and watched the bloody coverage on nightly news as the family sat down to dinner. It was, as Skyhooks sings, 'a horror movie shocking me right out of my brain' - and onto the street in huge antiwar activism.
These days, numbed by the delivery of rapid-fire disconnected technovated-images in all sorts of mediums, the otherness of war is mixed in image and language with the immediacy and familiarity of sporting events where sporting heroes (significantly men) play out their games with military precision and tactics. Is this link too stark? Yes, but I am trying to reflect on my own reaction to knowing what is going on in the world and what I need and want to know about. The trouble is, I know far more about sporting heroes and celebrity antics than what is happening on the frontline in the Ukraine, Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Thailand, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Sudan and several other conflict-ridden regions. Detalle quotes Debord again:
'The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of image. It is far better viewed as a Weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm - a worldview translated into an objective force.' (Debord 1994, point 5).
Taking this spectacle into the Baudrillard's world, Douglas Kellner (nd) summarises the effect of the hyperreal barrage of images which blur 'entertainment, information, and communication technologies' in a hegemonic roll-out. The mediated 'postmodern universe' is the world of the hyperreal that delivers, Kellner says,
'experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. The realm of the hyperreal (i.e. media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior' (Kellner nd, 11).
As I write this post, I am listening to a precoverage of the European Champions League and the football World Cup on UK sportalk radio. For the moment I've bypassed Monocle 24 for the more prosaic. Monocle rarely covers sport (or religion) perhaps because it is too banal. Or because the station knows that the mainline media emphasis on sport and player as celebrity and myth has the ability to take the audience's mind away from reflecting on what's happening in the world, the conflicts on the myriad battlefields especially in Africa to and puts right up front, the sporting (battle)field in a created for TV mega-event.
The difficulty is the nexus being created - or at least the one I feel caught up in - the critique of the media and the enjoyment of media engagement. I am caught in the tantilising coverage of the Giro and the dominance in the early days of the 'green-edged' Australian cyclists, my delight in the K-pop super-hit 'I am the best' from the girl-group 2NE, and my fascination in the outcome of the big game tomorrow. Real Madrid vs. Atletico Madrid. In Baudrillard's postmodern universe, the media's seduction has won me over, while at the same time, I wake in the middle of the night to contemplate the result of this seduction, which blurs the real from the imaginary, and hypermediates my life and desires.
But personal reflection aside, and another contemplation more relevant to our course. It was a big question posed in the Washington Post earlier this year: Is religion losing ground to sports? The article by Chris Beneke and Arthur Remilard (2014) sets an historical frame to the question, pointing out that religious leaders have 'long feared that religion and sports would vie for loyalty - and that sports would win.' Again, the fine line between critique and love of the game is played out as a succulent edge-of-the-couch action packed sporting event, which for many, becomes a quasi-religious experience of excitement, ecstasy and supreme fandom.
On the other hand, as Best and Keller (nd) remind us:
'The info-entertainment society reduces all of its genres from news to religion to sports to the logic of the commodity spectacle.'
References
- Baudrillard J. 1995. The Gulf War did not take place. Bloomington, Indiana.
- Beneke C and A. Remillard. 2014. Is religion losing ground to sports? http://www.americasquiltoffaith.org/faithtoselfgovern-blog
- Best S and D. Kellner. nd. Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle. Illuminations. http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell17.htm
- Debord G. 1994. The society of the spectacle. Situationist International online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/tsots09.html
- Detalle B. 2012. Glued. http://www.benoitdetalle.com/GLUED_benoit%20detalle-1.pdf
- Kellner D. nd. Jean Baudrillard. http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/baudrillard.pdf
Image source
Pixabay: close-up foosball football games table, http://pixabay.com/en/close-up-foosball-football-games-88488/
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