Original Image sourced from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dickuhne/71015015/sizes/m/
*this is a paper I wrote for university this semester just passed- an attempt to correlate the random shite that spews from my brain in a vaguely coherent fashion*
MEDIA HYPE AND THE POLITICAL ATTENTION ECONOMY
The pervasive and ubiquitous nature of media hype validates the notion that it is a fundamental means by which a media event garnishes the user’s attention. The immediately manifest example of this is the case presented by political communication. In particular, the 2008 US election provides an exemplar situation of the importance of media hype and the impact that pre-emptive media attention had on the final result. It is through this specific media event that the nature of media hype as an attention device will be investigated.
This paper will undertake a slightly alternative approach as a means of examining some of the fundamental processes that shape our understanding of and negotiation with media hype. It will present the fundamental theory of general relativity and the spacetime continuum as an instrumental allegory for conceptualising the way media hype develops and operates. By equating media and communication theory with explicitly ‘scientific’ theory, attention is drawn to the crucial temporal and spatial implications of media hype and our interaction with it. The paper will demonstrate the inherent correlation identifiable between general relativity and media hype and how this can serve as a useful way of conceptualising media hype. The mediascape within in which media hype operates will also be examined and quantified and the way in which this space has been altered particularly through the use of ‘new media’. The existence of space also births the opportunity for the existence of ‘noise’ and coupled with the potential of the collective intelligence will be considered particularly in terms of their political ramifications.
‘General relativity’ is a theory that was developed in an attempt to comprehend the apparent effect that the gravity of objects with a significant mass appeared to have on ‘physical’ and time and space (Plabenski & Krasinski 2007 p1). It builds upon ‘special relativity’ that in essence dictates that the speed of light is constant for every observer. Each observer operates in his or her own inertial frame of reference and everything in his or her immediate vicinity belongs to that frame. The crucial difference however is that motion is relative to each frame of reference. To the observer viewing another inertial frame of reference, the procession of time and motion of the secondary observer will appear distorted. Critical to the theory is the fourth-dimensional continuum of spacetime formulated by Hermann Minkowski to essentially place the occurrence of ‘events’ in space. For the purposes of general relativity, spacetime is visualised as a malleable, flat sheet. When objects are placed upon that sheet, their gravitational field will indent and distort spacetime, an occurrence most evident in the way it distorts the passage of light.
The passage of light is the crux of the analogy. As it is in the ‘physical’ world, light is essentially the transmission of information for without the reception of light from an event, in effect that event has not occurred in the inertial frame of the observer. If we equate that observer to the media user and the transmission of light to the transmission of information, we can draw a parallel between an event’s occurrence in the physical world and in media space. Likewise Minowski’s four-dimensional spacetime continuum equates to the topological, cybernetic media system (discussed hereafter). The effect of social and political entities upon the topological mediascape is represented by the effect that gravitational fields have on the spacetime plane.
Hypothetically, if you could somehow manage to accelerate faster than the speed of light, it is considered not impossible to travel time (in relation to the observer watching your movement) (Graunbaum p70). Given that light is the transmission of information: what results when that information is transmitted faster than the occurrence of a given event, in this case, a media event? This notion demonstrates the phenomenon that is media hype. Media hype involves the projection of an event before it occurs before itself in the psyche of a given collective. This projection can initiate from the proprietors of a media event or from the consciousness of the users, either way this projection is a consciously constructed representation of the product.
The disregard for ‘real’ time and space is proclaimed as one of the defining characteristics of new media information exchange (Abrahamson et al., 1988 p4-5). But rather than a disregard, I would propose that new media in fact appropriates these two fundamental elements with which we negotiate environments. Spaces induced by media use are inherently, all though not exclusively, intangible and therefore initially are generally not assigned equal value in terms of their substantiality as their concrete counterparts. However, understanding the very ‘real’ and dynamic nature of these spaces is crucial to grasping the extent of their influence, particularly within the domain of political communication.
Pertinent to this understanding is to recognise the indivisible, symbiotic relationship not only between media time and media space, but also to the ‘physical’ world. In this context the physical world is not only that which exists in the corporeal realm, but the social and political entities whose actuality we readily accept. For instance, although they are not tangible, we accept that our relationships exist and have bearing on our environment. Historically media space has been ‘characterised by a dangerous distance from the world of the flesh’ (Terranova, p42), associated with a dichotomy of irrefutable virtuality/reality. This misconception has resulted in the dismissal of the crucial ‘physical’ component in media space. To overcome the limitations of this dichotomy, it is more constructive to visualise media space as a complex, cybernetic, topological system. Here the ‘topological formations’ are formed by the flow of information fed into the system by the presence of the aforementioned ‘physical’ entities. Thus the constant interplay of virtual/real components interact together to create meaning and thus create space. This idea is intensified by Couldry and McCarthy:
‘..the artefactual existence of media forms within social space, the links that media objects forge between spaces, and the (no less real) cultural visions of a physical space transcended by technology and emergent virtual pathways of communication.’ (MediaSpace, p2)
Where there is space however, there is an opportunity for infection. Infection in terms of communication theory is termed ‘noise’ i.e. they are the peripheral actors that corrupt a message and alter whatever it may have originally intended to have been. Noise inherently thrives within and cultivates the topological media scape and carries with it the ability to change our perception of the ‘physical’ world. Despite the negative implications of corruption, noise provides the opportunity for the manipulation of representation and therefore meaning. Evidently the control of meaning is essential to the production of political messages. B. Axford presents the term ‘technologically enhanced politics’ (New Media and Politics, p53) to illustrate the copulation between political entities and the affordances of new media to inject the desired agenda into representations of media events. In the technologically enhanced political arena, the image and representation is placed in greater esteem than policy and thus the aestheticisation of political life is of paramount importance. This significance of promotion in politics is no more evident than in the astonishingly vast amount of capital injected into the media campaigns of the leading candidates of the 2008 US election. On television advertising alone Barack Obama and John McCain spent US$250 million and US$128 million respectively (Kaid, p418), even more remarkable when considered the average length of a sound byte has been reduced from 42 to less than ten seconds (Axford, p52).
Reciprocally the realm of spatial noise does not fall solely within the domain of carefully constructed media representations but also encompasses attempts to pre-emptively deconstruct a media event’s reception before it has ‘occurred’. In this way the media space is pre-cultivated to negotiate and interact with an event in a certain way. Given the dominance of the image in new media culture, the mediascape is saturated across all platforms with visual references to a given political entity. The most pertinent example of this was perhaps the development of the Obama 08 iPhone application (Kaid p419). The iPhone, the supreme advocate of the cybernetic ethos, provided the opportunity to seamlessly and constantly inject the visual iconography of the Obama 08 Campaign into the user’s daily life. Because of this incessant pre-conditioning, when the event does actually occur, in this case the Obama’s victory, it is received with a pre-cursing agenda or at the very least resigned acceptance. The user is so accustomed to the saturation of Obama within their own political microhabitat, when he assumed the presidency; the occurrence of the event had in effect already taken place before it had in ‘reality’.
This appropriation of time presents itself in a crucial and unique fashion in the dynamic, topological mediascape: in simultaneity. Although simultaneity would suggest a disregard for time and space, as mentioned previously it merely appropriates our negotiation with it. The very structure of the network implies an eradication of hierarchy and the democratisation of access and information value. This also entails a democratisation of the user’s experience of time. Given the user’s access and exposure to media ‘events’ that occur on the new mediascape particularly when mediated through social networking, this gives the impression of everything occurring simultaneously. Paul Virilio extends this further into the field of political communication. He believes that this simultaneity results in a sense of fatalism in the user experience. If everything occurs concurrently, there is no room for cause and effect and therefore a sense of inevitability ensues. Inevitability facilitates the breeding ground for media hype. A resignation to or pre-acceptance of a political outcome, in this case the outcome of the 2008 US election, already occurs before itself in the user experience. The continuous projection of the media event through online discussion and engagement embeds itself firmly in the collective psyche long before it has ‘actually’ taken place.
Another dimension to regard in the multifaceted notion of media space is collective intelligence. The championed proponent of Web 2.0 is the concept of interactivity and it through this process of information exchange that new knowledge is formulated and added to the communal information reservoir. The blogosphere is the obvious example of a situation where through the interaction and exchange of user information, more content and therefore more ‘intelligence’ is produced. But this goes beyond merely creating more content and serves to consolidate Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, a task that were previously the domain of mass communication broadcasters. Pierre Levy skilfully documents this shift by proclaiming ‘the new humanism’ (Levy, Collective Intelligence, p1) where we have evolved from the old humanist mantra; ‘I think’ to today’s ‘we think’.
I would extend this notion further to encompass the notion ‘we cultivate’. In order for media hype to ensue, the transmission of information needs to precede the occurrence of an event and embed itself within a collective psyche. It is implicit in the very nature of network dynamics that the audience is not merely passively receptive to the proprietors of a media event but actively contributing to the propagation of media hype. The most immediately apparent way within which information is pre-emptively transmitted throughout the collective consciousness is by means of viral media. Viral media has been traditionally manufactured and distributed by the user but counter intuitively (and often covertly) by media proprietors. It is postulated that a pivotal moment in deciding the end result of the 2008 election was Katie Couric’s interview CBS Evening Show interview with Sarah Palin (Wegner &MacManus p427). Palin’s lacklustre performance was circulated ab nauseum not only on broadcast networks but also within the blogosphere and user producer facilitators like youtube. Spoofs of the performance (perhaps most notably Tina Fey’s parody of Palin) were copied, manipulated, appropriated but most importantly spread throughout the data sphere and thus firmly implementing a user-generated representation in the collective user consciousness.
The cultivation of collective political intelligence as demonstrated by the 2008 US election is not limited to party promoters. The Drudge Report is an influential aggregated source of political blogs that documented 798 million views during the month of October before the US elections were held (Kaid p420). The formidability of collective intelligence has ironically affected the proprietors of media events to counteractively respond by subsuming the modes of communication traditionally the domain of the information recipients. Perlmutter documents the case of Obama’s 2008 personal blog post regarding his defence for Democrats who voted for John Roberts’s nomination in the Supreme Court (Blogwars p187). The post was reportedly reflected upon for weeks thereafter as the use of a democratic and communal information channel seemingly equated Obama with ‘the people’ and therefore effectively pre-emptively embedding himself within the collective consciousness before the elections had occurred.
It is crucial to keep in mind that media hype is generated through the input and exchange of information into the mediascape. Given the inherent democratic structure of the dynamic network, it is also important to remember that the generation of this information is not limited to the realm of media proprietors but also emanates through the exchange of information amongst users that comprise the entire collective consciousness. Hence, the attention is not confined to the engagement between user and media event but extends to encompass attention between individual nodes of the network. It is through this mutual awareness and attention to the network that media hype is developed and sustained and in turn it is through the media hype that attention to the media event is recruited and persists. The political attention economy is sustained by this mutual awareness and attention. Furthermore this mutual awareness emanates from a mediated spatial awareness that is wrought by the presence of political entities. Modulation of this space emanates from our attention to and hence interaction with these social and political factors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Abrahamson J.B, Arterton F.C, Orren G.R.
1988 The Electronic Commonwealth, Basic Books Inc. New York
Anderson, Benedict.
1983 Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, New York
Axford, B.
2000 New Media and Politics. Sage Publications Ltd, London
Courldry, Nick. McCarthy, Anna
2004 Mediaspace : place, scale, and culture in a media age , Routledge, New York
Graunbaum, Adolft
1968 Geometry and Chronometry in Philosophical Perspective, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Kaid, Lynda Lee
2008 Changing and Staying the Same: Communication in Campaign 2008, Journalism Studies, Routledge, London
Krasinski, Andrzej. Plebanski, Jerzy
2006 An Introduction to General Relativity and Cosmology, Cambridge University Press
Levy, Pierre
1988 Collective Intelligence Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Media Age (translated by Robert Bononno), Plenum Trade, New York
Perlmutter, David D.
2008 Blogwars, Oxford University Press inc, New York
Terranova, Tiziana
2004 Network Culture: politics for the information age, Pluto Press, London
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