Long before he was a television host and celebrity Nat King Cole was an accomplished jazz pianist and song stylist. Over the course of a very successful musical career Cole recorded hundreds of songs with his innovative jazz trio including a series of records featuring classic song from Latin America including pre-Castro Cuba.

In his most recent compact disk release, “David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole (En Español)” (3d Family 2011; 3d Family.org) saxophonist, composer, and arranger David Murray revisits some of these classical Latin American recordings by Cole. David Murray’s reinterpretation of Nat King Cole prompts me to rehear The Nat King Cole Show, especially in the context of black televisual presence in today’s digital platforms. What Murray has done with this remarkable project is to signal some of the radical possibilities in sight and sound, hemispheric transnationalism, border crossing, and the politics of representation that Nat King Cole gestured toward in the short run of his television show. David Murray’s sonic riff on Cole’s often commercial and sometime brazen south of the border collaborations is no mere project of nostalgic recuperation either. David Murray links Nat King Cole’s sonic presence on television to a powerful musical tradition and diasporic conversation.

Murray’s exploration of Cole’s Latin music archive provides the chance to reflect on Cole’s impact on 1950s American television sonically (through Murray’s sound, arrangements, and reconnections to what Jelly Roll Morton called the Spanish tinge) rather than just visually. Indeed for me Murray’s recording suggests a conception of Cole as Ellingtonian, a figure exuding the celebrity persona necessary to command a television show and cultural gravitas to disturb (even if momentarily) the racial order of things. Murray, who came of age politically and culturally in the 1960s, uses the musical and television legacy of Cole to take listeners through the history of exchange, collaboration and borrowing from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico; Murray places Nat King Cole in the company of black American composers and performers (e.g. Randy Weston, Sarah Vaughan, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, John Birks Gillespie, Miles Davis, Melba Liston, and Sonny Rollins) who musically probed black American diasporic connections to Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Forging connections to the political and racial history of the US and Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s is fraught since it is saturated as much by nostalgia for the good old days of resorts and playgrounds for the wealthy as by illicit commerce, Jim Crow racial terror, economic inequality, and authoritarian governments. Yet, it is precisely these collaborations, both Nat King Cole’s original work with musicians in Cuba, and Mexico and David Murray’s contemporary collaborations with musicians in Cuba, Argentina, Spain and Portugal, that continue the complex sonic transactions that go back to the founding moment of black Atlantic exchange and exceed the boundaries of the national and the visual.

Sonically, Murray manages to do what television could not or perhaps, more to the point, would not. That is, make explicit Nat King Cole’s (and black America’s) cultural and aesthetic alliances with diasporic communities of affiliation in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. After listening live and on record to David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble play the Spanish music of Nat King Cole when I see black and white television footage of Nat King Cole on fifties American television it is not just though the patina of nostalgia for the golden age of television or the liberal American gesture toward racial tolerance. (Anna McCarthy’s excellent, The Citizen Machine: Governing By Television in 1950s America analyzes, in rich and fascinating detail, the role of American broadcast television in the story of liberal racial tolerance.)

This is a double move too. Cole’s musical collaborations with musicians in pre-Castro Cuba occurs at the same time as black artists like Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Paul Robson in the US and revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Cuba were helping to imagine and usher in a new world. In his embrace of Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, both Nat King Cole and David Murray continue to forge sonic links among black diasporic speaking communities in the global south and the global north.

What better translator to reanimate this imaginative possibility for our time than David Murray. The songs featured on “David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole (En Español)” include some of the most recognizable and frequently recorded Spanish language material—“Quizás, Quizás, Quizás”, “ Cachito”, “Piel Canela” “A Media Luz” and “Aquí Se Habla en Amor”. Murray’s arrangements update the Nat King Cole songbook without sacrificing the soul of the music or the richness of its tradition.

To hear this material and to look at that old television footage now is to see different black Atlantic communities with distinct cultural histories engaged in diasporic collaboration and celebration. While this collaboration is neither original with Nat King Cole nor unique with Murray today (others worth noting include Steve Coleman, Jerry Gonzalez, Roy Hargrove, Stephan Harris, Regina Carter), with this recording Murray conjures something valuable and important, what I would describe as the invitation to hear visually and to see sonically in the black Atlantic sonic and visual imagination.

This raises the question thus, of what The Nat King Cole Show and the Latin American songbook might mean for black televisual presence in the US today with the new crop of new black owned, themed, and focused broadcast platforms: OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network cable network which partnered with The Discovery Channel), Bounce TV (broadcast network started by Ambassador Andrew Young and Martin Luther King III), TV One, BET (Black Entertainment Television). Ironically, like the broadcast environment in Cole’s time, these days black original programming is a rarity in the contemporary prime time schedule. Unlike television in the mid-nineteen fifties, black characters and black story lines are considerably more dispersed and visible across broadcast and cable programming schedule.

What is more, it is not surprising that more black owned cable and media platforms appear with the transformation of the digital television environment and capacity to identify and reach distinct demographic niches. For the new black focused networks, access to the archives of global entertainment companies like Viacom makes syndicated programs and reality-based appeals to race, gender, and lifestyle more cost effective than expensive original scripted programming. Russell Simmons, BET, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions demonstrated that they could brand and market blackness across different media platforms. BET and then TV One proved the financial viability of stocking the broadcast schedule with low cost and high return programming. So viewers turning to recent ventures emphasizing black themed content will find a mix of old movies, sports, syndicated situation comedies, in-studio talk shows, and canned programming from the archives of parent and affiliated companies.

What, I wonder, of the histories, collaborations, aspirations, and memories in this generation of broadcasting platforms aimed at black audiences? The programing offered by these new ventures model middle class arrival and tutor viewers in normative ideals of citizenship and self-improvement that turn histories of struggle and collective action into iconic images and heroic individual efforts. The poor, displaced, and most marginalized sectors of our communities stand as the limit of what is morally permissible and at the limit of a social order that continues to be ordered racially. David Murray’s homage to Nat King Cole’s Español recordings and The Nat King Cole Show taken together evoke, for me, the hidden histories of black diasporic collaboration and circulation. Unlike Murray, the account of our present and the programing choices presented in the new black owned platforms remind us as much about the exploitability of the black market niche for corporate investments and brands as they do about the unwillingness of sponsors a generation ago to invest in The Nat King Cole Show, because it defied the racial order.

Image Credits:
1. Nat King Cole en Español Album Cover
2. David Murray

Please feel free to comment.

As I settle in for the Ohio winter after a decade in Southern California, it is hard not to think about temperature. Much of my time is spent putting on and taking off layers of clothing as I move between house, car, coffee shop, and classroom. I’m surprised at how much effort and expense it takes to keep a building warm (in the United States, half of all the energy we use in our homes is for heating and cooling).1 When I was living in Santa Barbara, I rarely thought about these things, not only because the weather tended to stay within a twenty degree range, but because my job and social standing kept me within easy reach of heated and air-conditioned environments. In Ohio, I still think about temperature far less than I might in many other places, where technologies of warming and cooling are completely inaccessible. As is true for much of the infrastructure supporting modern life, we rarely perceive systems of temperature control, noticing them only in their absence.

As media scholars, our object of study appeals more directly to our senses of sight and hearing than to that of thermoception. Nonetheless, temperature has been important not only to the discourse of our field (in large part due to the influence of McLuhan’s work on “hot” and “cool” media), but also to the material development of media technologies. In this article, I sketch out some of the critical insights to be gained from an analysis of the seemingly banal processes of temperature manipulation. This investigation takes on more weight today as digital media generate an unprecedented amount of heat – a shift with infrastructural, geographic, and environmental consequences.2

Like us, media technologies operate best within a specific temperature range and require mechanisms for warming and cooling their environments. The first modern air-conditioning system was designed not for cooling people, but for cooling media. Constructed by Willis Carrier in 1902, it was used to stabilize changes in temperature and humidity in a Brooklyn printing plant (which were causing the printed pages to expand and contract, and as a result, their colors to blur). Archives, whether preserving documents, films, or photographs, go to great lengths to reduce heat and humidity (both of which speed up deterioration). Temperature manipulation has also helped to open up new viewing environments and extend the paths of media circulation. Air-conditioning, for example, has been critical to the marketing of summer movies and the success of the summer blockbuster (prior to its introduction, cinemas in hot and humid climates had to close in the summer). In fact, movie theaters were among the first places that people encountered artificially cool air. Systems that stabilize temperature, like numerous other technologies of modernity, have made consistent reproduction possible, enhanced media durability, and expanded zones of consumption.

These systems rarely attract the attention of users or viewers, in part because media’s required temperature range is typically much broader than that required for consumption. For example, my Sony television’s ideal operating conditions are between 32º-95º Fahrenheit, but luckily, the temperature in my house has never dipped below 32 degrees. Exceeding 95º is a similarly rare occurrence, and overheating is likely to happen only if the television is placed in a location with little ventilation and many other electronics. In other words, media have historically been less demanding than humans about the temperature of their environments, and as a result, they can usually go most places that we do.

We are currently undergoing a fundamental shift in the temperature requirements of our media technologies. Digital media relies on heat-generating computer processors, and as a result, is much hotter than its analog counterparts. If we were to include all of the cables, servers, and operations centers required to distribute it, the internet would be the hottest medium thus far. Apple TVs are more likely to overheat than analog television. The overheating of video game consoles, such as the Xbox 360, can limit the amount of time one dedicates to gameplay. To get a sense of this shift, you can download programs such as Temperature Monitor which display exactly how much heat is being emitted at each part of your computer, and in doing so, reveal the direct correlation between digital media use and the warming up of the environment.

Without cooling technologies, digital media exhibit a death wish. They will generate so much excess heat that they inhibit their own operation. Without the heat sink in a computer, the processor would quickly overheat and burn out (if you wanted to, you could cook bologna on it before it does, see video below). If one were to shut off the air-conditioning at a data center (where our internet content is stored), the servers would overheat and our information would disappear. At times more energy is needed to cool the systems – to offset the production of heat by computer processors – than is needed to operate the computers themselves. Indeed, it is this cooling process, and something as seemingly unimportant as air conditioning, that constitutes a significant part of digital media’s environmental impact.3

The need for cooling is shaping the geography of global internet distribution. All other factors being equal, it is more difficult and expensive to extend digital media infrastructure in places that are hot than those that are cool. During my visits to undersea cable landing stations (the sites through which internet content gets funneled on its way out of the country), a point of focus and discussion is almost always the air-conditioning system (the bill for this can run tens of thousands of dollars a month). The transition to the “cloud” means that we increasingly depend on groups of computers in data centers, which concentrate heat emissions, and thus require cooler and cooler environments. For this reason, server farms are being located in colder climates. Facebook is building a data center in Sweden, which despite the cold weather will still cost $72 million a year to power. Google has a new seawater-cooled center in Finland. When I visited internet companies in New Zealand, they suggested that their country could also be a possible site for data centers, in part because of their climate. As our media exchanges increase and continue to heat up (literally), this could be accompanied by a move of content to the northern and southern latitudes.

While much of the discourse about the move to a post-industrial society charts a path to a cleaner, information-based mediasphere, dominated by an aesthetic of “cool,” the total heat emitted by computers is steadily increasing.4 Taking digital media’s temperature makes clear that as the virtual worlds we engage apparently multiply without end, they do so alongside processors, servers, fans, and air-conditioning, technologies that are in turn dependent on finite (and primarily carbon based) energy supplies.

Thanks to Jeff Scheible, Rahul Muhkerjee, and Ethan Tussey for their insight and suggestions on this essay.

Image Credits:

1. Facebook’s planned data center near the Arctic Circle
2. Using air conditioning to market movies
3. Temperature Monitor (Screenshot by the author)

Please feel free to comment.

1. U.S. Department of Energy, “Chapter 2: Residential Sector,” Buildings Energy Data Book (2011), http://buildingsdatabook.eren.doe.gov/ChapterIntro2.aspx (last accessed, January 2012).
2. For a discussion of the environmental dimensions of cinematic and digital materialities, and their relation to the energy economy, see Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
3. Data centers were responsible for approximately 2% of all electricity use in the United States in 2010. See Jonathan Koomey. 2011. Growth in Data center electricity use 2005 to 2010. Oakland, CA: Analytics Press. August 1. http://www.analyticspress.com/datacenters.html; see also Sean Cubbitt, Robert Hassan, and Ingrid Volkmer, “Does Cloud Computing Have a Silver Lining?” Media, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2011): 149-158.
4. For more on the aesthetic of “cool” and its relationship to digital media, see Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

Before I complain about how incredibly lucky I am, technologically speaking, let make something very clear. I am a grateful occupant of the present moment. I am not interested in going back to the 1970s, to a childhood populated by stuck-key typewriters and televisions the size of Buicks, not to mention germy pay phones, tissue-paper airmail, and film strips with wobbly-voiced narrators. Even worse is the prospect of time travelling back to the 19th century, when booming 3D movies and sleek smart phones had not yet supplanted the minstrel show and abacus.

If anything, the recent holiday season has intensified—and complicated—my gratitude for the technological here and now. Like many of you, I am the proud owner of a new iPhone, the latest addition to an impressive electronic arsenal that keeps me from falling out of step with the slightest twitch of our culture’s nonstop media frenzy. Now more than ever, I live in a constant pirouette, spinning between news updates, push notifications, and urgent work emails flashing on the various screens that surround me even when I sleep. Websites, television programs, text messages—they barely register in my mind before I flit to the next jolt of electrons that might bring some flicker of joy.

It would seem a perfect match between product and consumer: the glittering wares of the postmodern media bazaar versus the anxious drudgery that characterizes so much of contemporary American life. But the more I stare into the expensive screens that I am lucky enough to possess, the more I feel a vague anxiety stirring. Why I am so stimulated but rarely satisfied by this orgy of electronic activity? Why does disenchanting reality haunt my fantasies of blissful connectivity? Why can’t I simply enjoy the show?

I’d write it off to the quirks of personal psychology, but I know that I am not alone in feeling something amiss in the emerging mediascape. How many of us have a secret or even unconscious longing to escape the constant looking and seeing, buzzing and Tweeting, of our seductive screen culture? The iPhone has barely celebrated its fifth birthday, but already it’s an addictive presence that follows us everywhere, even places where it should never be. For instance, our hospitals are now staffed with iPhone junkies, including, as the New York Times reports, a “neurosurgeon making personal calls during an operation, a nurse checking airfares during surgery and a poll showing that half of technicians running bypass machines had admitted texting during a procedure.”1

Even if techno-mania doesn’t induce medical malpractice that will shorten my life, the incessant beeping of everything everywhere is driving me slightly mad—-so much so that I wonder what it would be like to live without it all (once again). I’m am not talking about a quick Internet holiday or a symbolic “TV turn-off” day, but instead something unthinkable in our present state of mind: the permanent unplugging of all media devices, from TVs to computers to smart phones to video games, in one big Luddite freak-out. To even evoke such possibilities seems wrong and dangerous, like something out of dystopian science fiction. Surely it would result in roving bands of Mad Max villains and Kevin Costner drinking his own urine on a sea of post-apocalyptic despair?

Strangely, we’re willing to imagine such grim scenarios in general, whether it’s the Christian “rapture” of the Left Behind series or the apocalyptic landscape of I Am Legend or The Terminator—-but not in regard to our beloved consumer electronics. How can we account for the rapidity with which these devices have become forever superglued to our bodies? How can we explain our waning ability to imagine anything else? It is one of the great aporias of our times, a strange hole in our collective imagination.

Perhaps high tech is the only game in town, the only place where, as Charlie Sheen puts it, we’re winning. A friend of mine, the anthropologist Norman Stolzoff, made this point to me recently. As he put it, technology is the rare part of our society in which we have something concrete to show for all our bluster about innovation and amelioration. Taking away our greatest success story would just be cruel.

Yet… are we not curious about how it would feel to experience the “great unplugging”? Would we relish the ensuing silence as we restore the old ways of communicating and connecting with one another? Or would we lapse into a languorous funk without Google and HBO, Avatar and Annoying Orange? Would we feel permanently stuck in the isolation tank of our own boredom, marooned with the hideousness of our own organic thoughts? Would we start sketching the “Real Housewives” on the walls of our condos in crayon, breathlessly narrating their erotic adventures like an ancient bards singing the tale Odysseus and the sirens? Would we pine for our iPhones, laptops, and flatscreen TVs like postmodern amputees cursing the loss of our cyborg appendages? Would we grieve for our machines?

Probably. But what fascinates me is how loathe we are to even imagine this scenario. We are increasingly unwilling to contemplate the absence of the various screens that convey so much of our entertainment, sociality, and labor. Like Francis Fukuyama’s Cold War “End of History” argument in which capitalism’s apparent triumph over socialism foreclosed any discussion of alternatives, the new media juggernaut is so powerful that it has blotted out our ability to imagine anything else. We are all hopeless screenagers now.

Once, long ago, in a land just before TRS-80s and Colecovision, Americans could still imagine cutting the umbilical cord to mother media. In 1977, former ad-man Jerry Mander wrote an influential book called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which takes aim at what he deems “a totally horrible” and “irredeemable” technology; “we’d all be much better off without it.” His critique was blistering. “Television offers neither rest nor stimulation,” Mander lamented. “Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind.”2 Of course, Mander encountered resistance even then. “Are you really going to advocate its elimination?” he was asked repeatedly while researching the book, even by people who claimed to hate television. Much to his astonishment, even the haters were unable to imagine life without TV, prompting him to wonder, “why it is so unthinkable that we might eliminate a whole technology?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today, Mander’s bold renunciation seems as much a relic of the 1970s as Billy Beer and Barry Manilow. As TV has been joined by a host of new media devices that offer endless distraction (and increasingly endless labor), we only hear tepid, partial calls for individual reform, never systemic abolition. In the first days of 2012, Pico Iyer wrote a searching piece in the New York Times about “trying to escape the constant stream of too much information,” but his solution was simply the occasional act of personal renunciation: a morning without email here, an unplugged week in a Benedictine monastery there. Although Iyer acknowledges that “all the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images,” he can only suggest that we leave our cell phones at home during a Saturday walk, or find some recompense in the organic rigor of “yoga, or meditation, or tai chi.”3

Writing in a similar vein a few days later in Slate, Katie Roiphe wondered if we could even go back to an unplugged world:

If you ask any 60-year-old what life was like before the Internet they will likely say they “don’t remember.” How can they not remember the vast bulk of their adult life? The advent of our online lives is so transforming, so absorbing, so passionate that daily life beforehand is literally unimaginable.”4

Literally unimaginable is the part that stuns me. Unless it’s just a shallow reflection of unfounded bourgeois certitude, a kind of upper-middle class Whiggism that assume that history moves in one direction—toward my comfy perch on a Pottery Barn sofa—Roiphe is describing a disturbing sort of cultural rigidity in the contemporary US. It’s what politicians used to call a failure of vision.

Of course, a few Americans are able to imagine themselves shorn of “all mod cons,” not just the latest iPhone. In his book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly looks at the Amish, whose rejection of modern technology seems impressively complete on first glance. Yet what Kelly discovers is that even the Amish remain dependent on the hidden benefits of technology for the kerosene in their lamps, metal in their tools, and cotton in their clothes, which means that their renunciation is dependent upon our system of manufacturing and high-tech distribution. In other words, the Amish renunciation is in symbiosis with our techno-lust. “The Amish lifestyle is too familiar to poor peasants in China or India to have any meaning there,” Kelly points out. “Such elegant rejection can only exist in, and because of, a modern technium.”5

Kelly is a practical, adaptive sort: he wants us to use the tools that make our tasks easier, whether it’s a chainsaw or an iPad. And he is right. Atavism is not the answer to our technological woes: thoughtful adaptation is. We are in a transitional moment—when are we not?—in regard to the proliferation of new communication technologies in our midst. Their sudden omnipresence is a boon to the consciousness that homo sapiens have evolved over 100,000 years, but also, almost imperceptibly and certainly without fanfare, a splinter in our eye as well.

I think it is this both/and perspective that I would emphasize. I’m tired of well-funded techno-utopians shouting out a few ragged techno-Cassandras in an “either/or” battle for the soul of our culture. Instead of ignoring (or exaggerating) the downside of our proliferating screen culture, we could weigh the benefits and the drawbacks in the same thoughtful conversation. Ten years ago, in The Rise of the Image and the Fall of the Word, media scholar Mitchell Stephens gestured in this direction when he reminded us that all technology comes with a price.6 Digging into the Greek origins of the word, Stephens noted that “techne” comes from the Greek for “knowledge about how to make things,” and that this knowledge is what Prometheus stole when he took fire from the Gods and passed it to humans. His punishment for sharing the intellectual property of the gods? He was chained to a rock where a vulture ate his liver daily (assuming your gin-bloated liver weighs a full pound—otherwise, the price is 6 ounces of healthy liver). For Stephens, the moral is clear: the price of any technological know-how is a pound of flesh. In other words, new technologies always come with a price, one that is often hidden or obscured in the hype that accompanies each new advance. Cultural maturity, I would argue, allows for this sort of both/and thinking in lieu of hysterical polarization.

By thinking more dialectically about new media, we could even ask some useful questions: how can we minimize the pound of flesh that we sacrifice to our beautiful new devices? How do we prevent our employers from colonizing our spiffy new devices, sneaking in more and more work obligations where creativity, relaxation, and community might be found? How can we minimize the jolts to our psyche that we experience in a mediascape of constant interruption? How do we bring greater depth to the luminous surfaces of our iPhones and laptops?

I’m not giving up my techno-goodies: they’ll have to pry my iPhone from my cold dead hands. And I’m not volunteering to become an information hermit, vainly shutting out the noise of the world with fingers in my ears. Still, I’m glad that the Amish and other techno-skeptics are out there somewhere in our cultural imagination. Their quiet renunciation reminds us that we could, and perhaps at times should, live without these sleek machines that we find deliriously addictive, pleasurable, maddening, and exhausting. After all, our technology may improve and enliven our lives, but not without a price. We should never forget that pound of flesh.

Image Credits:

1. iPhone Abacus
2. Mad Max reaches for his iPhone
3. Recent interview with Jerry Mander

Please feel free to comment.

1. As if going to the doctor weren’t bad enough: “As Doctors Use More Devices, Potential for Distraction Grows,” New York Times, December 15, 2011
2. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (NY: William Morrow, 1978) 347, 211.
3. Pico Iyer, “The Joy of Quiet,” New York Times, January 1, 2012.
4. See Katie Roiphe’s essay on the Freedom app
5. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, (NY: Viking, 2010) 231.
6. Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image and the Fall of the Word (NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).

In an earlier essay, “Bad Image, Good Art: Thinking Through Banality,” we made an argument for the appreciation of an aestheticized banality as an artistic resource that might be useful in visualizing the extraordinary ordinariness of everyday life. Those who commented on the essay challenged the notion that truly banal images could effectively represent everyday life, and the point is very well taken. Here we want to emphasize our commitment to banality as an aesthetic that operates precisely at the point of tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary, and to suggest how that point can become an aperture for exposing processes of “normalization.” In that first essay we addressed the problem of visualizing the economic recession; here we turn our gaze to to the problem of visualizing war and violence in the post-cold war era.

The good news is that war is killing fewer people now than in the first half of the twentieth century, and modern war kills fewer people proportionately than does warfare in premodern societies; and civil violence such as murder and mugging has been decreasing steadily around the globe with the spread of modernization. By contrast, the rates of death by conflict in primitive societies were staggering—roughly 15 percent of the population—and the carnage included torture, the slaughter of women and children, and genocide as relatively common practices. If violence was not quite the statistical norm, there was nevertheless a habituation to cruelty that was understood to be normal. This is not to deny the appalling rates of rape and domestic violence, gang and state warfare, and other forms of violence in our times, but it is notable that sexual and domestic violence has to be hidden, gang violence is contained to very specific localities, and state terrorism and other institutionalized violence is rationalized and denied. The conclusion seems clear: modernity has made human beings less violent.

Or not. While the relative body count has dropped over time, the expenditure on warfare has increased enormously since the end of the last world war at midcentury. And while the so-called “great” nation states have not engaged in direct military confrontations in a world of mutually assured destruction, it is hard to ignore the 5.4 million killed in the Congo (including mass rape and sexual mutilation), another 800,000 in Rawanda, and also the Balkans, Chechnya, and the dirty wars of Latin America, not to mention the 40,000,000 people who are currently displaced to other countries, usually by war and often to refugee camps that can become permanent stateless settlements. And let’s not forget the massive increase in spending on private security forces—and their significant escalation in weaponry and related technologies—which looks like something that was taken for granted by the Medicis and other elites accustomed to a culture of lawlessness. More could be said here, but the point is that rather than to celebrate a major step forward in moral progress, we might be better served by considering the possibility that we are experiencing the first waves of a new order of violence with its relatively benign features arriving first and its more vicious features arriving later.

The more one looks into the moral dilemma, the more one can see how the case for modernity depends on who is counting and what is being counted. Are drug wars to be considered wars? Is the war over if the camps still exist? Are prisons less violent than public beatings? And if something important is being missed in the calculation of moral progress, can it be seen? It is, of course, this last question that concerns us, for photography has long been an important medium for habituating civilian populations to wars experienced from afar. And in this context it is notable that those once dubbed “war photographers” are now called “conflict photographers,” an indication perhaps of a shift in perspective that warrants attention.

Conflicts are more common than wars, of course, but they are also less likely to share a common definition or narrative even if they are just as deadly for those being killed. One result of this is that conventions of war photography become less useful as photographers are now trying to make sense of scenes that are not so readily legible. Instead of Grant and his staff in the field, or Ike meeting with his troops in anticipation of the D-Day invasion, we are shown a truck bed full of child soldiers not likely to be restrained by the one adult who is driving the vehicle. In place of bodies on the fields of Gettysburg or on Buna Beach, we are shown a child looking at a pair of prosthetic limbs. In short, the transformation of war from major state conflict to a shadow state of globalized violence has required a refocusing of the camera’s lens both politically and morally.

Space precludes comprehensive consideration of the visual vocabulary that appears to be emerging out of this transformation, but one of its central components is the substitution of banality for drama. Drama provides heightened attention to the extraordinary as it emphasizes human action and volition. And violence, of course, is understood to be the extraordinary disruption of the normal. But how does one account for violence that has become so thoroughly normalized that it is either (a) untethered from specific political aims or easily identifiable leaders or martyrs that provide any kind of check on its ferocity or longevity (see Linfield, The Cruel Radiance), or (b) made by regime-made disasters in which military and other state powers are used to degrade civil society in an occupied area to near the point of collapse, and then keep it there (see Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography)? One strategy has been to complement or challenge familiar exemplars of wartime photography with images that underscore the utter banality of violence.

As we indicated in our first essay, the banality that concerns us points to the dull, ordinary routines of everyday life which normalize an attitude of habituation to the world around us and, at its worst, undercuts the impulse to change. To talk of the banality of violence is thus to consider the ways in which we all too easily accommodate to (and are accommodated by) the normalization of so-called “low-level violence.” If violence is typically understood to be spectacular, measured in respect to how it invades, appropriates, and otherwise invokes something like shock and awe, casting it in terms of its banality can underscore the gaps between a war or conflict’s purpose (if it has one) and the experience of everyday life. The troops leave to great fanfare, but someone then has to go home to an empty bed; snipers and suicide bombers are a constant threat, but a soldier may be preoccupied with brushing his teeth; homecoming reunions are uplifting, but bedrooms that are kept unchanged for children who will never come home call attention to how war’s effects include many decades of silent grieving. And when the war or conflict doesn’t have a recognized and sustainable purpose, representations of such banality become the final measure of its destructiveness. Banality can reveal not only the loss of life and limb (tragic enough in their own registers) but also how civil society is corrupted by making trauma routine and routines forms of extended violence.

Examples abound, but two should make the point. The first takes place in Beirut, 2008. Violence had once again erupted and the slide shows were awash with images of third world street violence replete with burning tires spewing oily smoke, all manner of debris strewn here and there, and young revolutionaries strutting their stuff in defiance of an oppressive regime. But then amidst such scripted and conventional images we find what may be the most disturbing image of all.

The caption reads, “After Shiite fighters seized control of parts of west Beirut, a gunman, right, took a break to drink coffee on a street corner.” The disorientation is palpable. The scene is the epitome of a worker’s coffee break: thermos, a smoke, a joke. It could be an image of civilization at its best: making the impersonal curb into a place of conviviality. And look at his feet: stylish leather loafers and no socks. See the military vest as a life jacket and he could be waiting for his boat to be put in the water. But of course they are not out for a pleasant afternoon on the water, but are obviously normal human beings who are nonetheless habituated to a cycle of violence that has them moving in and out of war on an hourly basis as if they were working at their day job.

The routinization of war takes many forms, but when it carries a tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary it can open up a space for much needed reflection and critical judgment. Consider the two photographs below. The first shows the aftermath of a suicide bombing outside of a Sunni mosque in Ghundai, Pakistan.

Although the effect of the explosion on those within must have been amplified by the brick walls, the solid construction no doubt saved many lives. But what is more notable is the apparent solidity within the local community that matter-of-factly gets on with the business and responsibility of living together. The river of blood has a deadening effect on those of us not accustomed to such events, but for those involved in the clean-up there appears to be no anguish at all. Indeed, the scene is devoid of any drama whatsoever. The bomb goes off, and out come the hoses and brooms with each person recognizing his or her function in getting the job done as if there just another everyday routine. The practicality of these ordinary people in responding to disaster is simultaneously admirable and stultifying. The scene appears too ordinary to be a picture of war, and yet one can only shudder at the thought that this passes for the alternative.

If the photograph was altogether unique one might challenge our reading of it as being esoteric, but there are many other images that tell the same or similar story. With the photograph below we move from the tragic to the ridiculous, but the aesthetic framework is unchanged.

The individual in the middle is a member of a bomb squad in Kathmandu, Nepal leaving the scene of a false alarm. He is carrying a pressure cooker, which apparently was the cause for the alarm. The image has a cartoon quality to it that makes it seem altogether silly. And yet notice how it captures the way in which any society can become habituated to monstrous distortions within everyday life. The overstuffed suit and massive headgear could be a metaphor for the national security state, but more to the point, the photograph is an allegory of how cycles of violence have become routine disruptions within civil society. Like the bystanders in the photo, we give the security apparatus momentary attention and then get on with the business of living, even though we have just seen something that appears alien and excessive.  And so we become habituated to local adaptation rather than confronting systemic change, and the cycle of violence goes on unabated.

The conclusion here is a simple one, though perhaps no less important for being so. Banality carries the dual recognition that ordinary people adjust to violence and deprivation and of necessity can become accustomed to anything, and that this capacity for survival can be used against them. By documenting small gestures instead of dramatic events, photographs that draw upon banality as an aesthetic resource reveal what otherwise risks going unseen: how violence is being normalized. Or to put a bit differently, banality is the condition in which violence can be seen as violence rather than as a means to an end.

Image Credits:

1. Buna beach Life 1943
2. Beirut gunman coffeebreak
3. Bloody mosque
4. Bomb suit Kathmandu

Please feel free to comment.

Celebrity gossip magazines such as Closer, Now and heat are notorious for their irreverent attitude towards famous figures in general, and for their slightly mocking presentation of female celebrities in particular. These texts favour gossip over staged promotions and candid celebrity images over commercial collaboration with the stars. And although such publications are keen to reveal the troubled romances, tawdry secrets and trivial stories of the rich and famous, the fact that they rarely distinguish between an A-list Hollywood actress, a critically successful singer, a popular socialite or a reality television contestant tends to reduce female celebrity to a personality contest and relegate contemporary stardom to a debate over appearance and attractiveness. This is not to say that female celebrities are not proficient performers, talented vocalists or skilled models, it is just that for every leading lady we are offered a wealthy heiress and for every award-winning musician we are given a Big Brother evictee, and each incarnation of famous femininity is given equal and undifferentiated coverage in these magazines.

I would suggest that even though the female celebrities who dominate these magazines tend to be hard-working, disciplined and indeed talented individuals from the entertainment world, the way in which these celebrity texts speak of lifestyle and leisure activities over discourses of labour and performance blurs the boundaries between fame and talent. Publications such as heat negotiate hierarchies of female talent and professional achievement in favour of distinguishing between surface appearances, ranking sartorial styles, grading weight fluctuations and categorising the celebrity life in motion. heat appears to devalue female celebrity by reducing professional success to a discussion about body sculpting and shopping, however, it is necessary to reiterate the point that while the women who dominate the magazine are skilled, talented and accomplished, it is the reporting of such figures that reduces work and labour to a discourse of superficiality and surface appearances.

Much literature in the field of film stardom and celebrity culture can be seen to form a consensus as it comments on the undeserved character of modern fame, foregrounding the role of the mass media in producing unworthy personalities and highlighting the lack of skill, talent and achievement in the celebrity sphere.1 Magazines such as heat seem to support Joshua Gamson’s work on fame when he comments that ‘surface has overwhelmed substance, image has overtaken reality [and] the values of “lifestyle” and consumption have pushed aside those of work and production’, at least in relation to the contemporary female celebrity.2 My point here is that extant literature from the field says little about the character of modern celebrity and much about the gendering of the celebrity gossip sector. David Gritten makes this point when he states that ‘the media find it easier to write vacuous nonsense about famous women [because] their appearance, their fluctuating weight [and] their dress sense are considered legitimate subject matter’.3

Even though existing research suggests that we are living amongst ‘a new generation of celebrities whose fame owes nothing to achievement and everything to appearance’,4 I would suggest that even a cursory glance at the pages of heat magazine makes it clear that the women who dominate the front cover and the regular feature articles are those who have demonstrated professional skill and working talent. Indeed, a closer examination of the text in question provides evidence to suggest that the vast majority of the women who are presented in the magazine are famous first and foremost due to their accomplishments and achievements in their chosen field, be it performing, modelling or presenting.

heat depicts all female celebrities in relation to surface appearances, attractiveness and sartorial choices, without a single reference to their modus operandi or their particular reason for fame. This is not to say that these women are lacking talent in their chosen fields, but rather, that the commentary on them relates to weight gain, weight loss, fashion successes and relationship disasters. In this same way, there is very little acknowledgement of the work or labour involved in maintaining a successful career or even regarding the amount of effort and organisation that goes into preserving media interest. David Marshall may have said that ‘it takes effort to be famous’,5 but there is no acknowledgement of such work, labour or effort in the celebrity gossip magazine.

Indeed, as I have commented elsewhere, the publication is only keen to talk about star labour in relation to the superficial skin care practices, diet programmes, shopping excursions and exercise regimes of the female celebrity.6 And yet although the text might seem to delight in exposing and dismissing the hidden efforts necessary to maintain the celebrity body, any relationship between professional work and career success is overlooked and seemingly unwarranted.

What is of concern here of course is not merely the dismissal of talented performers, but what the devaluing of female celebrity means to girls and young women who read these texts. A wide range of popular news media has suggested that the growth of ostensibly talentless female celebrities are distorting the professional aspirations and career projections of an entire generation, with recent statistics telling us that 89 per cent of girls would rather be a recognisable celebrity than a talented, skilled yet unknown professional. Due to the representation of female celebrity in magazines such as heat, young women believe that being a celebrity is an unskilled job that demands little in the way of work, labour or commitment. Therefore, rather than look to a career that demands qualifications or an occupation that benefits from hard work, we are being told that fame and recognition appeals to the younger generations because the trappings of celebrity look like a career structure in themselves, devoid of any actual professional efforts or working achievements beyond appearance and attractiveness. However, I would once again state that it is not a lack of talent per se, but the reporting of celebrity that is devoid of a dialogue about skill, performance or accomplishment.

And yet, the fact that heat and its imitators outsell more reverential celebrity titles such as Hello! and OK! leave us to conclude that readers are more interested in reading about the superficial and candid representations of female celebrity than they are about the value of work that is highlighted in the glossy monthly publications.

Image Credits:
1. A Typical heat Cover

Please feel free to comment.

1. Turner, Graeme (2004). Understanding Celebrity, London: Sage; Wilson, Cintra (2001). A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations, London: Penguin; Johansson, Sofia (2006). ‘Sometimes you Wanna Hate Celebrities: Tabloid Readers and Celebrity Coverage’, in Framing Celebrity, eds Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, London: Routledge, pp.343-358 and Hartley, John (1996). Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture, London: Edward Arnold.
2. Gamson, Joshua (1994). Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, London: University of California Press.
3. Gritten, David (2002). Fame: Stripping Celebrity Bare, London: Penguin.
4. Cashmore, Ellis (2006). Celebrity Culture, London: Routledge.
5. Marshall, David (ed) (2006). The Celebrity Culture Reader, London: Routledge.
6. Feasey, Rebecca (2006). ‘Fame Body: Star Styles and Celebrity Gossip in heat magazine’, in Framing Celebrity, eds Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, London: Routledge, pp.177-194.

From time to time, I find myself having a bizarre genre of conversation with colleagues in other fields—usually from those untouched by Anglophone media and cultural studies traditions. When television comes up, my interlocutors declare “I don’t watch television. I don’t even have a television.” This would seem like standard-issue distinction behavior (cue the Bourdieu 1984), except what comes next undermines that reading. Invariably, my interlocutors begin to catalogue all the shows they like and watch on other platforms, usually involving a computer (since this conversation happens often with administrators, The West Wing is frequently mentioned). For most of the medium’s history, watching television meant watching a television, a sensibility still well-established in practical reason and everyday conversation. But of course, this is no longer the case. We now live in an in-between moment, when it is possible for educated and thoughtful people to spend many hours of their lives watching television shows and yet not think of themselves as watching television.

While it is tempting to consider this a problem of self-assertion and taste on the part of the person making the “I don’t watch television” claim, the ambiguous semantic space between watching television and watching a television gestures back to a long and fruitful line of inquiry for television scholars. For that space gets at the problem of defining television. The productive confusion over the conditions under which one watch television would seem to emanate from the ambiguous status of the medium at this moment in its development, or more accurately, its dilution, as has been well-documented by many other Flow writers.

I use the term diluted deliberately. For most of its history, television has been thought of as a medium. For most of the 20th century, the word media has been the preeminent technological figure for thinking about communication. But today, other technological forms of communication may matter more in many contexts. I just finished a book on a format, the mp3, that I argue matters much more than a “new medium” of sound reproduction at this particular moment. We can put our ideas about television through a similar filter. It is not that television is no longer a medium, it is that its status as a medium has lost density and gravity—in a word, its status as a medium is diluted. This is why we can read announcements in the paper that YouTube is trying to be “more like television” when it already contains television.1 Today, television’s relationship to various infrastructures, formats, platforms and protocols may matter more than its relationship to itself as a coherent medium.

Although I’m putting a presentist spin on the question, the problem of defining television has dogged its intellectual history, from Leo Bogart (1956) and Raymond Williams (1992) on down to Anna McCarthy (2001). As James Hay has argued, there is a dual tendency in academic television criticism to treat television as a medium like any other, or a medium like no other; one instrumentalizes television as anything; the other deifies it as everything (2001, 205). Riffing on Williams, he writes that we should consider television

as an assemblage of practices, as a social technology dependent on and instrumentalized through a broad array of practices and technologies. Within the interplay of exchanges, the televisual refers to mechanisms linked by/to particular sites and by/to other mechanisms at these sites, and it refers to mechanisms adapted to particular tasks of linking/delinking subjects and places. Thinking about the televisual in this way requires not only a different logic of mediation but a different understanding of TV as site. TV criticism’s focus on the internal properties of texts and of their subjects, TV studies’ preoccupation with the distinctive features of the medium or its audience, generalize the site of television or dwell on TV’s separateness as both identity and sphere/site. They have tended to see the site of TV as language and the psyche or to ascribe it to culture as a distinct and separate sphere in social relations and history. Television, I propose, matters or matters differently at different sites (211).

Reading back eleven years, this passage looks positively prophetic against the profusion of platforms, protocols, technologies and sites through which one might engage with television today.
Another set of issues arises if we set Hay’s definition of television next to Lisa Gitelman’s definition of media. For her, media are:

socially realized structures of communication, where structures include both technological forms and their associate protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collection of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation [….] If media include what I am calling protocols, they include a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus […] so telephony includes the salutation “Hello?” (for English speakers, at least), the monthly billing cycle, and the wires and cables that materially connect our phones. E-mail includes all of the elaborate layered technical protocols and interconnected service providers that constitute the Internet, but it also includes both the QWERTY keyboards on which e-mail gets “typed” [again, for English speakers] and the shared sense people have of what the e-mail genre is (Gitelman 2006, 7–8).

Gitelman goes on to qualify her definition further, pointing out that the technological nuclei of media are not permanent or stable over time, and neither are the protocols or practices associated with media: “it is better to specify telephones in 1890 in the rural United States, broadcast telephones in Budapest in the 1920s, or cellular, satellite, corded and cordless landline telephones in North America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Specificity is the key” (8). As far as I can see, Hay and Gitelman are singing the same tune, and by this measure, they have given us a more nuanced definition of television and of medium.

A careful reading shows that the definition of medium is itself historically specific. E-mail works as a medium in Gitelman’s definition from a contemporary perspective, but in 1974, it would likely have been subsumed under computers or some other hardware-based definition, despite the fact that mechanical and electronic media have always existed somewhat independently of their technological forms: sound recording and sound film both existed in several technological forms at once throughout their histories (this is well-understood in sound studies, but is only beginning to be accounted for in cinema studies; see, e.g., Acland and Wasson 2011).

The connotative shadow of hardware looms large over any definition of media today, even though media forms, like e-mail, seem ever less attached to any specific form of hardware (since you can do your e-mail on a computer, PDA, mobile phone, kiosk, or for that matter print it out and treat it like regular mail—and may in fact do all these things in the same day). Looking back historically, writers tend to associate telephony with telephones, radio with radios, film sound with cameras and movie projectors, sound recording with phonographs, tape recorders, CD players, and portable stereos. This is why television can be conflated with a television set in everyday conversation. Yet the mediality of the medium lies not simply in the hardware, but in its articulation with particular practices, ways of doing things, institutions and even in some cases belief systems.

So what binds together television on a TV set, a game system, a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet? The institutional and technological weight we normally associate with the idea of television as a medium seems too heavy to sit comfortably in all this different hardware, especially as the hardware becomes more and more of a variable. The ideal of television as a kind of text is equally unsatisfying if we think about textuality purely interpretively (rather than also considering its conditions of production and circulation), for what inside the text ontologically separates shorts made for YouTube from television shorts on YouTube?

We will need a handful of middle-range concepts to navigate this space, and I will offer but one in conclusion: format. Like media, the term is certainly baggy. It can designate a file format (.wmv, .doc, .mov); it can designate the sensual characteristics of what is seen (color; high-definition; stereo or 5.1); and in television, it can also describe programming trends and practices (”presented in a talk-show format”). But the form offers a way into thinking about the combination of standards, technical routines and sensual characteristics of those things we call television. Writers have often collapsed discussions of format into our analyses of what is important about a given medium. McLuhan’s claims about “coolness” and TV came from descriptions of screen size and color (McLuhan 1964, 22), which today seem less like fixed aspects of a medium and more like hardware variables (though we should give him credit for using “definition” to talk about the sensory dimensions of TV already in 1964). I am suggesting that an emphasis on format helps us separate our conceptions of media from their manifestations as (what we now call) consumer electronics. Format points us back to the conditions under which mediality occurs.

To take an obvious example from the present moment, consider the digital spectrum and high-definition broadcast. Since the 1940s, North American analog television has been filmed and broadcast with a 4:3 horizontal / vertical aspect ratio. A 1936 report by the U.S. Radio Manufacturers’ Association Television Committee first suggested the 4:3 aspect ratio, which was then set in U.S. Policy by the National Television Standards Committee in 1941. 4:3 was chosen because that was the aspect ratio for Hollywood films. In part as an attempt to compete with television, Hollywood stepped up ongoing efforts to adopt wider screens (Boddy 1990, 34–35; Gomery 1992, 238–46). Thus, to this day North American analog televisions have a 4:3 aspect ratio, and audiovisual content from other media (such as film which is often 1.85:1) or formats (such as high definition, which is 16:9) is reformatted to fit the 4:3 TV screen when we watch it on analog TVs—either through “letterboxing” or through re-editing. Cue the McLuhan (1964) and Bolter and Grusin (1999) about media containing their predecessors.

This disclaimer, once ubiquitous on videotapes of Hollywood films released to VCR, is miraculous for the layers of meaning it contains. It is meant to signify editing to change the proportions of the image. But in fact by definition anything that appears on television screens has been “formatted to fit your screen”—it has been subject to a host of data processing routines and is presented in a particular sensuous form. If the image was not formatted to fit your screen, you wouldn’t see it on your screen. You may not like how it fits on your screen, but that is a separate matter of playing with the aspect ratio on your remote control. Thus, format is a place where aesthetics and storage and transmission come together, as anyone who watches HD content and reruns of shows made for what we now call standard definition (that used to be just television) can attest.

When it goes the other way, television’s formatting and formatted qualities are actually more pronounced. HD shows are compressed and chopped up to be seeded over torrents. They are recoded to appear in variously-shaped video windows in VLC player, Quicktime or Windows Media Player, or transcoded to be streamed off YouTube, Vimeo, or Critical Commons. But because of their combined institutional and aesthetic histories, they are still somehow television. I am not proposing format as a replacement for medium. But I believe it is one of a handful of words—infrastructures, platforms and standards are a few of the other places we need to be poking around—useful for thinking through television in its condition as a diluted medium, and in turn diluting the concept of medium as a central touchstone of how we imagine the technological dimensions of communication. In this sense television remains a typical medium, for while TV retains its specific cultural, technological and institutional histories and trajectories, all media today are more or less diluted.

Image Credits:
1. Josh Bancroft via Flickr
2. Screen capture from http://youtube.com/shows, 1/23/2012
3. franciscominciotti via Flickr
4. Screen capture from YouTube, “Opening to Space Jam (1996) VHS,” provided by author

Please feel free to comment.

Sources Cited

Acland, Charles, and Haidee Wasson, eds. 2011. Useful Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press.

Boddy, William. 1990. Fifties Television: The Industry and its Critics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bogart, Leo. 1956. The Age of Television: A Study of Viewing Habits and the Impact of Television on American Life. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gitelman, Lisa. 2006. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gomery, Douglas. 1992. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. London: BFI.

Hay, James. 2001. “Locating the Televisual.” Television and New Media 2 (3): 205-234.

McCarthy, Anna. 2001. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Williams, Raymond. 1992. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

1. The “more like” in this case has to do with keeping people on the site for the purposes of raising advertising revenue.

Showing interracial couples on television is not necessarily something new. In 1968, Star Trek aired what is widely regarded as the first black-white interracial kiss on television between William Shatner’s character, Captain Kirk, a white man and a black woman, Lt. Uhura, when the two were forced to kiss against their will by a galactic enemy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, over thirty years later, media reports play up the idea that the numbers of interracial couples, both on-screen and off, are skyrocketing, and push the idea that these unions are so common that interracial relationships barely raise an eyebrow. Yet according to 2010 Census data, only eight percent of all marriages are interracial. While real-life interracial marriage remains low, interracial couples may be cropping up more frequently on television. Do the growing numbers of interracial couples on television signify increased racial acceptance and color-blindness or do these depictions overwhelmingly reproduce long-standing societal notions about the deviant nature of interracial sex and the location of these relationships in the margins of society?

Looking at the contemporary representations on television, interracial relationships are most often found as temporary relationships (lasting just a few episodes), in side-storylines or otherwise marginalized. These relationships are almost exclusively depicted as comical misadventures, introduced as part of a criminal case, used as symbolic of the different worlds that are being portrayed, or play on perceptions of difference, highlighting that racially matched characters are the norm.

Even among newer shows that are heralded for their diverse casts or cutting-edge approach, interracial representations are arguably problematic. There may be a trend to present interracial couples without mentioning race but that does not mean that these representations do not carry familiar racial messages. Still a number of television show producers maintain that they have adopted a colorblind strategy, which they argue transcends race. For example, on New Adventures of Old Christine, Christine is a divorced white woman who becomes interested in a black teacher at her daughter’s private school.

Initially they can not date because of a school policy which forbids dating between teachers and parents. The creator Kara Lizer stated,

It’s shocking to see how segregated comedies are…I don’t see (race) entering their personal relationship. It’s not a factor and there are enough factors for them to deal with. It’s not a fresh area and I would love it to be a non-issue.1

Race is rarely discussed other than in flippant comments about the black teacher like “Who knew diversity could be so gorgeous?” Similarly on the popular new show Parenthood, Jasmine is engaged to Crosby.

Much of the comedy centers on their differences: Jasmine is organized and prepared while Crosby is scattered and non-committal. While racial and cultural issues are never discussed, portraying the couple as complete opposites reinforces the idea of racial differences. The racialized message is still received yet in a color-blind package like contemporary racism and promotes an assimilationist perspective that encourages the view that race does not matter.

Putting characters of different races together is also used for comedic or shock value, where the two are clearly mismatched and the “Otherness” of the minority character is emphasized. On the NBC comedy Modern Family, Gloria, a beautiful Colombian woman is married to Jay, an older white man.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The interracial relationship makes for many laughs, based on the “cultural” differences between Gloria and Jay. Also Gloria’s character is always sexually clad with an exaggerated Spanish accent, and fiery temper, which is reminiscent of the racialized “Hot Latina” image that Hollywood has produced for decades, Rather than challenging racialized stereotypes, these depictions play with racial and ethnic differences, leaving us with virtually the same stereotypical images.

On television, when we do see an interracial relationship, it tends to involve a white man and a woman of color. The representation of a woman of color dating a string of white men, sometimes at the same time and often to the exclusion of men of their own race appears throughout a number of shows. Nip/Tuck, a popular primetime cable network show on FX, featured a multi-episode guest appearance by the African American actress Sanaa Lathan, who played a woman torn between her “rich tycoon husband and the plastic surgeon Christian Troy treating him,” both of whom are white.

The actress, Sanaa Lathan described the relationships, “I have so much respect for [Nip/Tuck
creator] Ryan Murphy, because my character could have been any race. But race never came into it, and I love that.”2 Unfortunately looking at patterns of representation, casting choices are not as race-less as this actress may believe.

What about a show like Grey’s Anatomy, which features many different interracial pairings and even multiracial families, which are particularly rare on television? Like the color-blind approach of shows like Parenthood, issues of race and ethnicity are not discussed on Grey’s Anatomy. The creator/executive producer Shonda Rimes espoused this color-blind approach, stating that they simply “cast(ing) whoever we thought was best for the part.”3

Despite this philosophy, the show doesn’t stray too far from the patterns identified. For example, Dr. Lexie Grey, who is white, is dating Dr. Jackson Avery, who is biracial.

Yet this relationship will be short-lived because Lexie really wants to be with Dr. Mark Sloan, which even Jackson’s mother could see. The other two main interracial relationships involve women of color. Dr. Cristina Yang, an Asian American, first dated Dr. Preston Burke, an African American, where their relationship was depicted similar to Parenthood’s Jasmine and Crosby as complete opposites, though race was never addressed. Now Cristina is married to Dr. Owen Hunt, who is white. The other serial interracial dater, Dr. Callie Torres, a Latina, first married a white intern George in the 2007 season, then had sexual relations with a string of other white men before realizing she was a lesbian and settling down with a white pediatric surgeon Arizona Robbins.

While separated from her partner Arizona, Callie becomes pregnant by Dr. Mark Sloan. Callie, Arizona and Mark decide to raise the baby together, becoming one of the few multiracial families on television raising their biological child. While this may be cutting edge, it still places the idea of interracial unions and multiracial families, outside the margins of mainstream society. In contrast, at the same time, the main characters Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd (both white) are attempting to adopt an African baby girl, who was brought into the hospital for surgery. Intricately wrapped in the representations of interracial unions are the ways that whiteness, blackness, and racial Others are represented. When interracial relationships occur, if it is not shadowed in a world of deviance, the person of color involved is presented as an exceptional person, usually removed from their racial community and the “goodness” of the white person is explicitly confirmed through the relationship.

The question remains, if interracial coupes are portrayed in these problematic ways, then why do television shows feature interracial relationships at all? I argue that by showing interracial relationships yet parodying or fetishizing them at the same time, the shows can maximize their audience without alienating others. Difference sells, yet the presentation must be constantly adjusted to fit the contemporary discourses on race.4 Using interracial sex to push boundaries is widely recognized. Dana Wade, the president of advertising agency, Spike DDB, discussed this idea with television ads, arguing “certain brands might use interracial couples to convey a hip image” adding that “the whole personae of the brand is kind of risky, or on the edge.”5 Ironically these “hip” and “cutting-edge” depictions are actually just barely repackaged stereotypes.

On-screen interracial relationships, particularly between whites and blacks, are either alienating (not even shown), taboo and shown as problematic, or a fantasy, fetish that allows the viewer to dabble in difference, living vicariously through the TV characters, yet still existing as marginal storylines rather than centered. Multiracialism and consuming color as exotic may be tolerated, even purposefully marketed, yet this fits in with the historical pattern where whites have been simultaneously appalled and intrigued, offended and attracted to racial Others sexually, while monitoring, disciplining and indulging. As Stuart Hall argued, “there’s nothing that global postmodernism loves better than a certain kind of difference: a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic…’a bit of the other.’”

The particular patterns of representations reflect the stories we know and the stories we want to continue to see. While journalists like Ann Oldenburg and Carmen Van Kerchove, co-director of New Demographic, a diversity training company argue, “the more people see positive and normal representations, that will lessen the fear and taboo,”6 referring to many of the television relationships discussed here, I argue that these representations are not normalizing interracial relationships or lessening the novelty. Rather than represent a color-blind multiracial utopia, these depictions of interracial couples overwhelmingly reproduce our long-standing notions about the deviant nature of interracial sex, and the location of these relationships in the margins of society. Just because race is not discussed does not mean it does not exist, rather in its deliberate denial it can be ever more present. As Henry Giroux argues about the sexually suggestive interracial Benetton clothing advertisements, these depictions do not increase racial tolerance and awareness, because they are “decontextualiz[ed], dehistoriciz[ed], and recontextualiz[ed]” and reproduce the dominant social relations rather than challenge them.

The fantasy of interracial relationships can not be bogged down with the unpleasantness of racism, inequality, and discrimination, so it erases these structural and institutional realities that shape everyday social interaction. Interracial relationships may be popping up more frequently on television but they do more to reinforce the current racial situation rather than challenge us to move beyond it. Still in contemporary television the fascination with interracial sexuality may be more acceptable than the reality.

Image Credits:
1. Grey’s Anatomy
2. Grey’s Anatomy
3. New Adventures of Old Christine
4. Parenthood
5. Nip/Tuck
6. Grey’s Anatomy
7. Grey’s Anatomy
8. United Colors of Benetton
9. United Colors of Benetton

Please feel free to comment.

1. Braxton, Greg. 2007. “The Hot Button of a Casual Embrace” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 2007.
2. ibid.
3. Oldenburg, Ann. 2005. “Love is no longer color-coded on TV,” USA Today December 20, 2005. Washington: Smithsonian.
4. Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media Culture: Cultural studies, identity, and politics between the modern and postmodern. London: Routledge.
5. Kuriloff, Aaron. 2005. ‘The Racial Undercurrent,” ESPN.com (Accessed February 3, 2005 at http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1983393&type=story.
6. Oldenburg, Ann. 2005. “Love is no longer color-coded on TV,” USA Today December 20, 2005. Washington: Smithsonian.

“Someday all of our technology will learn to emotionally manipulate us. Your smartphone is already doing it. Your desktop computer has been doing it for years. As your possessions learn to fill your emotional void, your need for the comfort of other humans will continue to decrease. Eventually we’ll be a society of sociopaths. I’m already halfway there.”1 – Scott Adams , May 27, 2011

I have a reasonably significant web presence. I have a print blog, a video blog, a web page, and I blog pretty much everyday, in addition to blogs that are written about my work, and articles that I contribute to as an interview subject. Just Google me, and you’ll get a lot of hits. You’ll also get a Facebook hit, which is interesting to me, since I am not on Facebook, and have absolutely no intention of joining Academia.edu, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, MyLife, Google +, Tagged, Orkul, Hi5, Myyearbook, Meetup, Badoo, Bebo, Friendster, Sociopath (yes, there is such a site), Twitter, or any other social networking site, because I profoundly believe that these networks are nothing more than massive marketing tools to create vast databases on whomever is shortsighted enough to sign up.2

If someone wants to get in touch with me, it’s really easy – search my name in Google, go to my webpage, and voila! contact! – and I have an actual – as opposed to virtual – group of friends with whom I can interact, both on and offline. Facebook now has 800 million users, but as I noted in a blog on my own website, this hardly gives me any room for comfort. Rather, I find it deeply disturbing. Because as far as I’m concerned, all of these people have left the building. They live online, and not in the real world.

Recently, I spent some time at the house of a friend while on vacation, but soon discovered that I might as well not be there at all; my host spent nearly all her time on Facebook, updating her profile and posting pictures for her online friends, and here I was, having come some 1500 miles to visit, while she pounded away at the keyboard, oblivious to my presence.

I should point out here that I never write directly on a computer – I hand write all my books, articles, and essays – then have them typed up, and use the computer only to edit, spell check and format. Thus, when I write, I have more time to think, without being potentially sidetracked by hyperlinks, pop up web ads and messages, just having a blank page to fill up, cut off from any outside distractions. Incidentally, I recommend this approach to all writers; it just makes for a more thoughtful end result.

But in my own way, I’m just as bad, I’m sure; when I get started on editing a project, I hammer away at the keys to get it done, and anyone else in the room vanishes into thin air, but that’s why I now try to schedule my work time, and my online time, for those occasions when others aren’t around, so I can concentrate my energies on my work without “checking out” on the present. But most people don’t do this; even if they’re in a room with you, they’re constantly checking their iPhone for messages, or their Blackberry, or shutting down with an iPod; anything not to be in the here and now.

In the 1960s, an oft-heard mantra was “be here now” – center down, appreciate your current existence, be sensitive to your real surroundings. Now, with FarmVille, World of Warcraft, and other online role playing games too numerous to mention, to say nothing of online gambling, porn, and poker sites, the motto might as well be “be somewhere else – anywhere but here.” Social networks are one narcotic escape, but massively multiplayer online role-playing games are equally addictive to much of the population. I don’t think this is a good thing.

As Wikipedia defines them, succinctly but all too accurately, “massively multiplayer online role-playing games are large multi-user games that take place in perpetual [my emphasis] online worlds with hundreds or thousands of other players. MMORPGs can also include computer role-playing games in which each player controls an avatar that interacts with other players, completes tasks to gain experience and acquires items,”3 and as with Facebook, the idea is to never get off, to always be online, and to live your life entirely in a virtual world. The attraction, presumably, is that your own life is so empty that anyplace is better than where you really are, and also that you lack the creativity to create imaginary worlds of your own, digital or otherwise. So you sign up to participate in someone else’s fictive construct, for literally unlimited amounts of time.

Of course, the argument could be made that one experiences a similar phenomenon every time one goes to the movies; you sit in a darkened auditorium with hundreds of strangers, and submit to whatever is presented on the screen. The same is true when you watch conventional television. But these are one-way experiences; unless you’re a theorist who is deconstructing the images presented to you, or else a lay viewer entirely caught up in the narrative, you can always switch the television off, or leave the theater. And television is a passive medium in any event, almost designed to be background information, while you get on with your life in the real world.

In interactive games and social media web sites, one has the illusion of control, in that one can manipulate avatars to do one’s bidding, just so long as those avatars remain within the confines of the game, or on social media websites, add and/or delete “friends” at will. But once outside the game or social media site, the avatars cease to exist, as well as the “friends,” and so does the world they inhabit. What happens to the game player then; does s/he cease to exist as well, assuming that they’ve spent an enormous amount of time on line? And what about your virtual “friends”? Are they your friends when you’re not online?

The other factor, of course, is quite obvious; everyone is the “star” of his or her own Facebook profile, and so the world becomes very small and insular, as if you’re someone special. But you’re not. You’re just another of the 800 million people on Facebook. Facebook, of course, wants to personalize the experience, and make you feel like real communication is going on. But all that’s really happening is data mining, and a series of tenuous on-line “relationships” that can evaporate with a few keystrokes.

And the online world can be awfully seductive. As I noted in my blog Frame by Frame4 on September 30, 2011:

In 1956, Charles Eric Maine (born David McIlwain in 1921) published a superb, often overlooked science fiction novel, Escapement, which posited a bleak virtual future. In Maine’s novel, tech mogul Paul Zakon, head of the “3-D Cinesphere organization,” builds a worldwide network of “Dream Palaces,” in which millions of “dreamers” lie immobile in isolation chambers, hooked up to electrodes and put into a semi-comatose state through a combination of IV drugs and liquid protein.

These “dreamers” spend most of their lives existing only in a fantasy world, from which they emerge only when they’ve run out of money, and are taken out of the system. Then, like the addicts they are, the erstwhile “dreamers” desperately work at whatever menial job they can find until they can scrape together enough cash for another 6 months or so in one of Zakon’s “Dream Palaces,” and then the process repeats all over again.

His unwilling associate in all of this is Dr. Philip Maxwell, whose research has created the “Dream Palaces,” in which millions of men and women are electronically fed dream scenarios more real than life, and experience a simulated existence of power, wealth, and sexual abandon. As Maine prophetically writes, describing the rise of Zakon’s “Dream Palaces” – and remember, this is more than half a century ago –

“At first the thing had been a novelty, an expensive novelty, demonstrated in a handful of specially adapted theatres in the major cities of the States. But the novelty had also been an enormous success. The Cinesphere studios converted their sound stages into psycho-recording sets, and ambitious productions were recorded on miles of brown plastic tape. Lavish, spectacular and sensational productions, loaded with romance and glamour and an aphrodisiac innuendo of sex. [. . .] In the space of four years psycho theatres – later to be called Dream Palaces – were installed in their thousands throughout North America. [. . .] Dreamplays were produced that ran continuously for days, and then weeks, and finally, years.”5

As Maxwell becomes increasingly uneasy with the growth of Zakon’s empire, he starts to move against his employer, but finds that Zakon’s hold on both the populace and the law is too tight. People want what the novel terms as “unlife”; otherwise, why would it be so popular?

Eventually, a quarter of the world’s population is sequestered in isolation tanks, and as they increase the length of their “dream” escapes, they gradually default on mortgage payments and other responsibilities, and so the Cinesphere corporation acquires their property and cash savings, exponentially increasing Zakon’s empire with each passing day.

As he tours the facility with Zakon, Maxwell stops to examine the isolation tank of one Paula Mullen, 27, who has signed up for a dream entitled “woman of the world” – length, eight years of uninterrupted synthetic fantasy – in which she imagines herself alive, awake, and the center of worldwide media attention. In reality, of course, she is an immobile, nearly corpse-like husk in an oversize filing cabinet, but Zakon sees nothing wrong with this. As Zakon tells Maxwell,

“There’s nothing anti-social about unlife, Maxwell. In fact, it acts as a scavenger of society, and removes the more anti-social types from active circulation. Take this Miss Mullen [. . .] and try to imagine her as a useful member of society. She chose to escape from society for eight years. That proves she was one of the many millions of maladjusted people living out their lives in dull unending routine. The kind of people who find no creative pleasure in work. Who seek their fun in furtive sex relations and objective entertainment. She’s better off here. She’s happier than she ever knew and she’s no longer a burden to society.”6

One can’t help comparing the operations of the fictional Cinesphere corporation to the real life virtual worlds offered on the web, to which hundreds of millions of people subscribe, and spend countless hours, and real (as opposed to virtual) money to “exist” in a more attractive, alternative universe. Digital technological advances have long superseded the mechanics of Cinesphere’s fictitious operations, the fact remains that for many, online virtual life has become an addiction, and more “real” than the physical existence they so desperately hope to escape.

I take long walks nearly every day, and when I do, I just take myself along, and use the time to think about what I’m going to do next. I listen to the sounds of the wind in the trees, the birds, traffic, other people who aren’t wired up, and actually engage in conversation with passersby. I don’t listen to music; I walk, I think, I take in my surroundings, and I contemplate the world as it is. This is valuable, and increasingly rare work. It’s where new ideas are generated. Being unplugged gives one a chance to think about the forces that our shaping our society today. Being online all the time offers nothing but an overload of information, which can’t possibly be sorted out.

Luis Buñuel recognized this when he decried in 1980, just three years before his death – long before the digital revolution took hold, but with typical prescience – the ceaseless profusion of meaningless images that confront us at every turn. As he noted in his essay, “Pessimism,”

“The glut of information has [. . .] brought about a serious deterioration in human consciousness today. If the pope dies, if a chief of state is assassinated, television is there. What good does it do one to be present everywhere? Today man can never be alone with himself, as he could in the Middle Ages. The result of all this is that anguish is absolute and confusion total.”7

Recently, I designed a t-shirt, which I propose as a default uniform for everyone who spends more time online than in the real world, assuming that it is by choice, and not because of a work requirement. All it says is “I’M NOT HERE” in bold cap letters. You can see it above; feel free to adopt and use it as you see fit. I think it’s the only mantra that really summarizes the 21st century.

If you’re listening to an iPod, you’re not here. If you’re on Facebook, you’re not here. If you’re on FarmVille, you’re not here. If you’re playing an interactive videogame, or a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, you’re not here. If you’re checking your e-mail, your Blackberry, or tweeting, you’re not here. If you’re not here in the here and now, then you’re not here. Virtual realities don’t exist; virtual unrealities do. And when you check into them, you become unreal, as well.

Yes, we live in a digital age, and some online time is needed, enjoyable, and useful. No one would want to go back to the analogue era, simply because of the many conveniences, especially in the world of moving image studies, which the digital world can offer. And yes, one could easily say that reading a book, or listening to a CD, or going to see a movie are all related experiences, as I note above, and that for the duration of those experiences, you aren’t here, either. But those experiences have limits, while the goal of Facebook and all its allies is to get you online and keep you online, for as long as possible – forever if possible, as in “keep me logged in.” And when that happens, as far as I am concerned, you cease to exist in the real world.

Image Credits:

1. I’m Not Here (The image was created by Wheeler Winston Dixon.)
2. FarmVille
3. World of Warcraft
4. Facebook

Please feel free to comment.

1. Adams, Scott. “People Who Don’t Need People,” The Scott Adams Blog, May 27, 2011, . October 5, 2011.
2. “Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites, October 2011,” eBizMBA, . October 5, 2011.
3. “List of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games,” Wikipedia, . October 5, 2011.
4. Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Escapement, or Virtual Unreality,” Frame by Frame, September 30, 2011, . October 5, 2011.
5. Maine, Charles Eric. Escapement. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956: 182, 184.
6. Maine, Charles Eric. Escapement. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1956: 207.
7. Buñuel, Luis. “Pessimism,” An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel. Trans. Garrett White. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995: 258-263.

Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (USA-México 2008) is a feature-length extension and development of his investigation into the questions raised by globalization’s accelerating interconnections and interdependencies involving labor, migration, and experimental technologies that he introduced a decade earlier in Why Cybraceros? (USA 1997). The short video makes a satirical critique of the Council for California Grower’s Why Braceros? (USA 1959), a privately financed domestic propaganda film that presents itself as a “public service.” Deploying the conventional arsenals of expository documentary—a rational, masculine, white-sounding-but-well-intentioned voiceover that unequivocally interprets meanings from a disparate series of visual images—the film attempts to convince U.S. citizens that “imported” labor from México benefits them. The film’s formal strategies erase racialization from technical solutions to the “age-old burden” of finding “stoop labor,” broadly defined as “farms jobs that are tough, dirty, or unpleasant,” through a lively montage of images of (male only) Mexicans not being exploited but receiving medical attention, food and water, live entertainment, and access to television [images 3-6]. The film further uses the secondary evidence of testimony from a Mexican politician, dubbed into Spanish-accented English, that U.S. policies do not exploit Mexicans.

The film’s primary voiceover, however, inscribes racialized differentiation at the level of language. In anticipation of “new and remarkable experimental equipment,” the voiceover assures audiences that “Mexican citizens”—“sometimes called nationals or Mexican nationals” but “the term most commonly used is braceros”—benefit the United States through policies that ensure braceros only appear “in right place at the right time.” The film closes with the explanation that “in Spanish braceros means someone who works with arms and hands, but in American lingo they are called lifesavers” to “the housewife, the grocer, transport, the canner and the processer” and other industries that are closely interlocked and dependent on domestic agricultural production. The film’s deception is its erasure of the underlying conditions that drive transborder migrations.

With Why Cybraceros? Rivera un-erases racialization within transborder migrations. He questions Why Braceros? for its limiting notions of rationalism, based on scientific reason and logical thought, and its limiting notions of progress and development, defined in terms of efficiency and profitability. A female voiceover conveys alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric that some “Mexican workers” stay “illegally” in the United States or “cross the border illegally and then blend in with the bracero workforce,” so that “no matter how they arrived here, the presence of braceros contributed to a climate of racial and economic suspicion” that is framed to continue more than three decades after the end of the Bracero Program (1943–1964).

High-speed Internet connections facilitate the digital interface of globalization, so that a technical solution becomes economic and social as well. Mexican workers manipulate video-game controllers in México, which translates into real-time movements of remote-control “robotic farm workers known as cybraceros” that perform stoop labor in California [images 7-10]. “For the worker, it’s as simple as point and click to pick,” announces Rivera’s narrator; “for the American farmer, it’s all the labor without the worker.” “In Spanish, cybracero means a worker who operates a computer with his arms and hands,” she continues; “but in American lingo, cybracero means a worker that poses no threat of becoming an citizen—and that means quality products at low financial and social cost to you, the American consumer,” atop stock images of a blonde white woman in a modern supermarket.

Sleep Dealer extends this analysis of power relationships within this transnational connectivity of being connected, literally and metaphorically being “plugged in.” Whereas the (white) Council representative places a telephone order for a desired and legally sanctioned number of braceros [image 11] in Why Braceros?, the (brown) protagonist of Sleep Dealer, Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), does not have the agency to initiate or execute transborder migrations. He must rely on clandestine connections of “coyoteks,” technologically savvy “coyotes” (smugglers). Memo is literally connected by optical fiber cables attached to nodes inserted into his body, mostly his arms since his labor, like a bracero’s, is mostly manual [image 12]. Subsequent scenes show the robot, controlled remotely by Memo controls, on the steel girders of a construction site in the United States. Memo works physically in a factory where other Mexicans plug into distributed network.

The trailer for Sleep Dealer offers the story’s context: “Mexico… the near future. The border is closed… but the network is open….” The near future, I would argue, is really an already past. The thirteen words describe conditions of the Mexican-U.S. borderlands, not only since the invention of the Border Patrol in 1924, but specifically since the War on Drugs (1971–2011) through the ratification of NAFTA (1994) and into the War on Terror (2001–present). The term “sleep dealers” refers to factories where digitized labor is outsourced across the militarized border into the United States. The factories are corollaries to actual maquilladoras where labor performs repetitive actions, such as inserting smart-phones and laptops into protective packaging.1 The film depicts the border in its fractal multiplicity: it exists not only in physical walls that extend into the ocean but also in physical factories inside México where labor is digitized and performed in real time in the United States.

The border is also performed across the ubiquitous screens, including the one that Memo’s brother watches. Channel surfing becomes a means of describing and critiquing transborder racialization, particularly through the reaction shots of Memo and his brother as they respond to images broadcast within and into México. Like the montage sequence in Why Braceros?, these images construct some of Sleep Dealer’s central arguments. The first are black-and-white images of singing and dancing from classical Mexican comedias rancheras (“singing cowboy” films). Both young men smile at the familiar gendered structuring of visual relays from looking male faces to fragmented female bodies [images 13–14]. Next appears an advertisement for “Trunode,” a service that allows people to sell digital representations of their memories and stories, linking television spectatorship in rural México to the transnational flows of capital and information. Later in the film, Memo will meet Luz Martinez (Leonor Varela), who sells her memories as a means to make a living. Luz’s memories, however, are forms of decentralized information gathering. The only ones that sell well involve “rebels”—and later Memo, who is suspected of links to terrorism.

The next images are a talking fry followed by a talking head for the reality game show Drones. The images of the screen continues to convey power and conflate security with corporate privatization, as a fly-through camera shows images of a dam that produces drinking water, threatened by protesters, combated with remote sensing technologies that locate potential security breach points, calibrate with information of “aqua-terrorists” and terrorist organizations, so as to identify security breaches and destroy targets from remote locations.2 Memo and his brother’s responses move from initial amusement (“dude”) over potential recognition of their village as the target location for the live show to disbelief (“no way”) and horror (silence) over images of their father, a milpa farmer, being remotely assassinated by the drone [images 1–2, 16]. This response differs from an earlier scene in which Memo’s brother exclaims “right on!” [image 15] over the target’s destruction.

The show Drones attempts to construct a racially/ethnically and nationally undifferentiated “soft” spectatorship; however, it does not fully succeed in erasing racialization within its construction of heroes and terrorists. The show’s visual display of heroic American masculinity as transborder power expands from the cocky white host to the patriotic Latino American contestant, Rudy Ramirez (Jacob Vargad), to sustain the illusion of an ever-expansive masculine whiteness inflected by multiculturalism until Rudy aligns with suspected aqua-terrorists to liberate the privatized water supply. He refuses to perform a type of racialized labor that Sharon Willis defines as the “guest figure” in Hollywood cinema, the token person of color in the role of the doctor, the judge, or the police officer, for example, who represents the system that historically supported white-male privilege.3

Hollywood films from Blade Runner (USA-Hong Kong 1982; dir. Ridley Scott) to The Matrix (Australia-USA 1999; dir. Wachowski Brothers) and Source Code (USA-France 2011; dir. Duncan Jones), along with films produced at the margins of Hollywood, such as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (Canada-UK-France 1999), have explored human/labor rights by structuring a dystopic “system” that resembles a distributed network with a seamless digital interface and game-like narrative where racial/ethnic tensions are erased, as in Keanu Reeves’s non-presence as Hapa or Asian American.4 Sleep Dealer, however, disrupts erasures of networked racialization.

Image Credits:

1. Sleep Dealer (dude)
2. Sleep Dealer (no way)
3. Why Braceros? (medical attention)
4. Why Braceros? (food and water)
5. Why Braceros? (live entertainment)
6. Why Braceros? (television)
7. Why Cybraceros? (highspeed connection)
8. Why Cybraceros? (remote control)
9. Why Cybraceros? (digital interface)
10. Why Cybraceros? (transborder labor)
11. Why Braceros? (ordering braceros)
12. Sleep Dealer (performing labor)
13. Sleep Dealer (singing male faces)
14. Sleep Dealer (dancing female legs)
15: Sleep Dealer (right on)
16: Sleep Dealer (remote assassination)

1. Maquilapolis: City of Factories (USA-México 2006; dir. Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre) brilliantly includes scenes of female workers, who stage performances of the motions of the repetitive labor that they perform inside the factories.
2. The fictional Mayan Army of Water Liberation suggests the actual Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation), whose online and onsite protests against the Mexican state’s destruction of indigenous nations were sometimes criminalized in U.S. news media.
3. Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham, USA and London, UK: Duke University Press, 1997): 5.
4. Cronenberg’s earlier film Videodrome (Canada 1983) is an analogue precursor to these digital films in which the white female character of Nicki (Deborah Harry) becomes a contestant on a live-broadcast (snuff television) game show from Malaysia. The film represents globalization as having analogue (videocassettes inserted into sexualized openings in the human body) rather than digital (nodes and masks) interface.
   

The UK morning talk show The Jeremy Kyle Show is an ongoing national success. The show consists of confessions, DNA tests and lie detectors and is a result of Kyle moving his confessional talk show style from commercial radio to UK television screens. Since the show started in 2005 it has averaged just short of 2 million viewers every weekday morning, becoming one of the most popular daytime shows of the 2000s. Kyle’s show follows in the format of previous UK daytime talk shows such as Vanessa and Tricia, but Kyle has a much more direct approach and aggressive approach he claims is all about being open and honest in order to confront them participants with difficult truths, “I always say exactly what I think and not what people want to hear…It’s very important to get to the truth and sort things out, then move on – we’ve only got one life, it’s not a rehearsal…Ordinary people come on the show – but you usually find that they have extraordinary lives, that’s what fascinates me.” 1

Now Kyle’s show has made the move across the Atlantic to the US – the show retains a similar format with Kyle’s honest, somewhat angry, forthright approach. The show has also realized a relative success and has been renewed for a second season which will be shown across at least 50% of the United States. 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

But what is it that makes Kyle’s show so appealing? For many critics the show is seen as trash television and has been labelled by a British district judge as equivalent to “human bear-baiting” that exposes and exploits a dysfunctional feral underclass within British society. 3 But perhaps we can look to cultural theory to gain a greater understanding of what the show offers to audiences across a number of discursive and pleasurable levels.

In a culturally positive sense it can be claimed that talk shows such as The Jeremy Kyle Show offer a space within the contemporary public sphere for the discussion of issues that are pertinent in society at a particular time. Lunt and Stenner make the argument that talk shows offer the opportunity for people excluded from the media to have their say and express their opinions, lifestyles and social difficulties. 4 In this sense the show offers an outlet for people deemed outside of the middle-class mainstream. These participants are therefore representative of particular aspects of society stereotyped as afflicting the lower class: they are the unemployed, members of the broken home and the drug addict.

But, there is an aspect of The Jeremy Kyle Show which is much more problematic and negative for the public sphere in a discursive and ideological sense. Looking more specifically at the show as a media text, it can be seen that there are clear discourses of authority and class at work:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the above example we see clear authority represented. Kyle is the middle class man, well dressed, directing the discussion from a standing position. This is presented in opposition to the underclass, which presented as sitting down, being spoken to (or more clearly ‘at’) by Kyle. Our middle class representative is the one in control – of information, of audience interaction and of ultimate judgement about social behavior and action/inaction. Even when a representative of the ‘underclass’ stands up and verbally and physically attacks Kyle he is stopped – not by words, but by Kyle’s ever-present security team. When discursive authority fails the ideological sense of authority is backed up and reiterated by physical action.

In shows such as these there can be no ultimate challenge to the sense that the middle-class authority and judgement should be the one that is dominant. It is Kyle’s voice that sets the standard and he who is applauded for telling the underclass to ‘get a job’, ‘put something on the end of it’ or to ‘man up and be a father’. If there is any challenge to the host he claims that ‘it’s my name on the wall – this is called The Jeremy Kyle Show’ essentially silencing any challenge to dominant ideas about class, morality and this closes down the notion of a full and democratic public sphere within this text. With Kyle, you get what you expect as an audience member – an exploration of social issues but from a judgmental middle class perspective. This perspective must be adopted as a viewer to enjoy the text and this is achieved through sharing Kyle’s cultural position or viewpoint and so internalized ideologies are reiterated. As a participant it must be adopted to join the realms of a normalized, acceptable and naturalized class system.

Kyle is presented as the conduit through which ideological redemption can be found, and this is not only through the medium of television. Recently Kyle even shared a stage with Chancellor George Osbourne at the Conservative Party Conference as he chaired a fringe meeting to discuss ‘Getting Britain Back To Work’. This meeting was sponsored by right-wing tabloid The Sun.

It seems that Kyle has the tools to put the ‘underclass’ back on the right (wing) track and offer them the hegemonic hope of joining the realms of naturalized and settled existence. On the show the work to change the ideological direction of the underclass is often represented through confessions, admittances of guilt and tears and all of this is facilitated by Kyle as middle class ‘expert’ and naturalized voice of authority. He often refers to his ‘aftercare’ team who continue to work with participants to get them into rehab, arrange visits to their children, find jobs and such like. For those who refuse to confess and embrace their sorrow Kyle presents lie detector results to expose infidelities and then ridicules those who have been unfaithful and dishonest. This offers a discursive punishment. This ridicule has even found its way to YouTube with remix videos highlighting some of the key phrases and judgements made by Kyle in a form of cult fan activity which celebrates the discourses of the show outlined above:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, the middle-class position is constructed as settled, moral, organized and worthwhile. This is seen as something of an ambition for the participants – if they don’t see that immediately, they often do by the end of their segment. Although The Jeremy Kyle Show is considered as harmless early morning entertainment, it can be claimed that it encapsulates many of the fears and concerns of UK and Western cultures. This relates clearly to a variety of cultural contexts in the UK at the moment and mirrors a number of positions taken by news coverage of social issues and class problems by right wing newspapers in particular:

The discursive contexts shown above and via The Jeremy Kyle Show only serve to reiterate the distance between the lower and middle-class discourses of how society should be in an ideological sense. This reflects a cultural anxiety about the difference of a ‘feral’ underclass and their threat to middle-class values and potentially links to deeply held social anxieties about welfare, family, sexual behavior, ambition, capitalism and crime. What we see in such media texts is essentially “…the antithesis of the autonomous, rational subject we are encouraged to be.” 5

Image Credits:

1. Jeremy Kyle
2. Kyle with UK Chancellor George Osbourne at Conservative Party Conference
3. The Daily Express
4. The Daily Mail
5. The Daily Mail
6. The Sun

Please feel free to comment.

1. Kyle, J. (2001), ‘More about Jeremy’ (ITV.com) http://www.itv.com/lifestyle/jeremykyle/abouttheshow/ – accessed 24th November, 2011.
2. Brzoznowski, K. (2011) Jeremy Kyle Show to Return for Second Season in the U.S., Published 18/11/11 (WorldScreen.com) http://www.worldscreen.com/articles/display/32325 – accessed 24th November, 2011.
3. Ward, David. (2007) Judge attacks ‘human bear-baiting’ (London: Guardian Media Group), http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/sep/25/television – last accessed 24th November 2011.
4. Lunt, P. & Stenner, P. (2005) ‘The Jerry Springer Show as an emotional public sphere’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 27(1): 59–81. London: Sage.
5. Lawler, S. (2002), ‘Mobs and Monsters: Independent man meets Paulsgrove woman’, Feminist Theory, 3 (1), 103-113. London: Sage.