
Memo to Hollywood: Stop Dividing Up the World and Enclosing the Commons.
Why Not Join a True Global Commons, Ecology Movement?
In a series of Hollywood pictures and videos documenting the noise and images of life in Los Angeles -- particularly the opening night of the
HollyShorts Film Festival -- the surreal, celebrity flows of light, sounds and images were revealed to me in powerful and disturbing fashion. I saw the incredible hunger that exists for more and more celebrity images. This celebrity machine, of course, exploits digital channels like the World Wide Web. At the same time, my graduate studies introduced me to the material consequences of corporate Hollywood's attempt to restrict how content flows through these new digital channels. When these phenomena encounter one another -- a closed, corporate logic that fears new disruptive technologies, yet promotes a hunger for worldwide celebrity images -- our common space becomes enclosed and the very light and sounds between us all becomes fragmented. This was evident in my photos. For those of us who care about a "
knowledge ecology" movement and the emergence of a global digital commons, humility is called for as we move forward.
I've been exploring the sounds and spaces of LA in different locales, public and private, ranging from the downtown Disney Hall to the streets of Hollywood to our pubic parks, all seen and heard from a fresh angle, all contributed to this emerging
digital commons. Thanks to
Josh Kun and the larger
sound studies school, I began this exploration.
In an audio culture seminar, Josh Kun instructed my fellow students and myself to keep a "sound journal." This meant shutting up and recording sounds heard everyday, semester-long. It was mind-blowing experience. We developed real critical listening skills. Previously, I had no real practice slowing down and taking a breath. Children play and fully engage their senses. But adults in an over-networked world easily forget the importance of slowing down, of play, of shutting up and listening to the amazing sounds around us. I saw and felt how much of my everyday life omitted a range of sensual, sound experiences. I began to hear the clinks and clanks of construction -- girders hitting girders, noises of skateboards whishing by, rhythms and rhymes of birds. We are all too over-networked, too plugged-in to our mobile or i-Pod blockages, and simply too busy, stressed and economically insecure to really slow down and listen. At least I was and still often am.
We live in a world where sounds and images flow through digital networks faster than ever before in history. These images and sounds can be of
a young girl stoned to death in Iraq or
the latest celebrity photo-shoot at the grand-old red carpet. My Hollyshorts opening night photographs reveal how our public, common spaces - here the courtyard at
The Egyptian Theatre -- are distorted and fragmented.
The beautiful Egyptian Theatre's courtyard, its natural light, or darkness, was so overwhelmed and inundated by the streams of flashes that, if a photo was taken without a flash (as I did), then the actresses, actors and other human bodies, shapes, and figures appear fragmented and distorted. In other photos, the images are blurred and unclear and in all, the common space between us was roped off and enclosed. The photographic result created an almost Cubist, collage-like effect. Check out
my photo-stream for examples. Of course, the flashes eventually move on, but traces remain in the images that zoom around the world.
It is human nature to want to share memories, to pass along images, to recommend sounds from one friend to another. Entrenched industries are always scared when technologies give consumers new, disruptive tools through which to use established products and services. In contrast to the spread of celebrity images, which when taken in their "natural" state reveal a distorted use of light and fragmented bodies and depend on enclosures around our public commons, there exists the emergence of a different network, one that wishes to open up access to knowledge, to promote a global commons - a
knowledge ecology international movement. I discovered the existence of these networks in my
Set Top Cop seminar with Cory Doctorow. One label used is the "
Access to Knowledge" (A2K) movement.
As I looked at the fragmented images revealed by my photos, as I wondered how easily our commons spaces are purchased -- how fragile any common space truly is -- I realized just how often we all experience and accept the loss of such spaces (that night: our common courtyard). We settle for faux public squares, managed by private security guards and landscaped with Vegas fountains.
The corporate Hollywood studio mentality embraces this managerial, enclosed logic in the extreme. Hollywood enjoys having it both ways: feeding a celebrity culture and controlling how these images spread through the web and other channels. There is a specific ideological logic at work here: one that divides up of public spaces - red carpet and not; one that encourages the spread of images, but only under certain conditions, then sends its take-downs.
Seth Schoen, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, documented this specific, material Hollywood ideological reach and its resulting impact in his
talk , which was part of
Cory Doctorow's Fulbright series public talks. Seth compared how Spain and Portugal carved up the world via the
Treaty of Tordesillas in 1492 to Hollywood. With the Pope as a trusted mediator, these countries allocated "the new world" for their colonial selves. Traces are still visible today in how Portuguese is spoken in Macao, African countries, Brazil and elsewhere. Of course, no one asked the Africans for their permission.
Hollywood, too, has carved up the world to fit its consumerist, corporate agenda (Seth begins this part in the 10th minute). This reach is evident when one examines the now historical artifact of the
DVD region code map (Seth addresses this in the 10th minute). Back in the late 80s and 90s time preceding the introduction of DVD players, the globe was divided up into DVD Regions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Yet very few of us "see" the material impact of Hollywood's RIAA/MPAA ideological campaigns. While an amazing coalition over the last two decades composed of third world activists, first world NGOs (DC's
Knowledge Ecology Intl. is a leader), feminists, artists, "DIY" video-makers and many others have been building a "knowledge ecology" or A2K human rights movement, Hollywood business affair lawyers and senior executives have been busy dividing up the globe to fit their mercenary logic and winning the propaganda war (no, students did not change with the advent of the WWW; they just want to share music like you did with tape cassettes, not "steal").
Later in the 90s when that thing called the Internet grew and that other thing called the World Wide Web became impossible to ignore, Hollywood tried to control and restrict the Internet, and only partially succeeded via the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act. However, the use of "take-down" clauses has resulted in a real, if misnamed,
a chilling effect, one that prevents the World Wide Web from flourishing in all its digital commons potential.
Our age is one where, as Seth Schoen's talk illuminates, critical decisions are made by corporate entertainment industry senior executives behind closed doors, which have a huge impact on everyone, worldwide, on how we see, view and understand the world and our lives (it's not called a "dream factory" for nothing). These closed-door decisions effect how we can use technologies like HD-DVDs, our DVR set top boxes and computers. They determine the basic things: are we able to use our own digital tools as we like or are they pawned and managed by corporate benefactors?
Now we live in an age where a generation of young Americans are content to create cool digital "social network" identities in return for losing their privacy. While we all may "connect" via their space to MySpace from YourBook to their Facebook, our personal, private data is no longer in our control.
We are about to enter the next stage of technological, "social media" innovation and digital media convergence. The press may call this the "Web 3.0" phase or the "social web." In contrast to the hype, we should all step back, listen and look at our digital and public spaces and ask what images - of ourselves and our world - do we want our next generation to see? Do we finally want to take back some control over our own tools?
Final message to Hollywood powers that be: we are not your enemy; we simply want cool, interactive tools, ones we have control over. We want to be able to share content with our friends. A century too late, history, finally, may be on our side. Maybe.
Labels: Hollywood, knowledge ecology, Los Angeles, public spaces, set top cop