#1: An intro // On media, the 24/7 news cycle, and image ethics
It's a long read, but upside is you get a horrifying photo of Mark Zuckerberg surfing with a face slathered in zinc.
Hi friends,
A newsletter! Yep. First off, a bit of ‘why’.
I used to write. A lot, actually. At various points in my life I’ve been more or less enamoured with writing - dating back to my childhood pipe dream of being a novelist (or an Olympic ice-skater, I wasn’t picky). Yet more often writing gets shunted aside in favour of other creative pursuits, or worse, becomes a CV bullet-point that I whip out unenthusiastically as a technical skill. Simply put, I’ve realised I miss writing - about things I think and care about, for enjoyment, for community. Plus I think I’ve been annoying my friends and family lately by constantly forwarding articles and expecting them to respond immediately so we can engage in Discourse in the middle of the workday. So! Here’s what I’m imagining this newsletter will be:
A dash of observational writing: my musings and cultural criticisms on life/love/current events/whatever.
Links to long-form journalism that has struck me, and sometimes my opinions on it.
The occasional recommendation of something cool I’ve listened to or laughed at or eaten lately.
A splash of pretentious soliloquising, cut with a healthy dose of self-effacing humour. Maybe a meme or two.
More than anything else, though, the guiding idea behind this newsletter is a compulsion to slow down. To consume media in a mindful, thoughtful way. And to share it onward, in that same mindful way.
So welcome to Cold Brew: hot takes, served over ice. Join me - it’ll be fun.
On that note,
I have long nursed a latent irritation with the way we - myself wholly included - consume and contribute to viciously quick and never-ending media cycles. Like most millennials, I was raised on a steadily increasing diet of technology and have a love-hate relationship with it. Frustration has been percolating in my mind for a long time, exacerbated and brought to surface by these ~unprecedented, uncertain, challenging times~ (please watch, it’s great). In many ways, the 24-hour news cycle is inextricable from the condition of living in the modern world. And particularly in these months of heightened global turmoil, the ability to access breaking news in real time has been crucial.
But let’s be honest - fully aside from how our least favourite alien, Mark Zuckerberg, is probably single-handedly sinking the notion of liberal democracy - we all instinctively know that doom-scrolling through rapid-fire opinions on the latest catastrophe is not healthy or particularly constructive. There is a responsibility to be informed, and often to telegraph calls for urgent direct action. But we also can’t live in a reactionary state all the time. What we really need is media literacy and bias training, and a general reimagining of the ruthless systems of production that govern the pace of our lives - right down to how we obsessively consume and then discard concepts, trends, and news items in an SEO-driven spin cycle. But in absence of that, we need time to process. We need ways to divest, as much as is feasible, from this rabid/rapid consumption in pursuit of a more thoughtful and less reactive way of interacting with media.
Thank you to the NY Post for reporting this cursed image. Just a normal human doing normal human things in a totally normal way.
Much has been written about the impacts of omnipresent technology on the large scale, so I’ll do you a favour by not rehashing. But what about on the individual level, particularly in relation to our work-life balance? Last week I stumbled across an evocatively titled piece by Anne Helen Petersen: How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole. It’s an excerpt from her book Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. The piece is full of salient nuggets, such as this one about digital workplace performativity - i.e. posting on work-adjacent Slack threads just to demonstrate how #engaged you are - in a remote world:
‘People who do “knowledge work”—those whose products are often intangible, like ideas on a page—often struggle with the feeling that there’s little to show for the hours we spend sitting in front of our computers. [...] We’re desperate to show we’re worthy of a salaried job, and eager to demonstrate, especially in this economy, how much labor and engagement we’re willing to give in exchange for full-time employment and health insurance.
We’re performing, in other words, largely for ourselves. Justifying to ourselves that we deserve our job [...] No wonder we spend so much time trying to communicate how hard we work.’
On a personal level, this was affirming to read. My first job after university was as a social media associate for a ‘lean-in’-esque corporate-feminist startup. I was expected to be responsive online nearly all the time. I remember once being on what at the time felt like the most romantic date of my young life (you guys, I was like 22 so grain of salt here): watching a picturesque sunset at the beach next to a boy with whom I was briefly infatuated. It was all very Nicholas Sparks. And then my phone buzzed: it was my daily 7pm notification from Hootsuite to post to the company socials. I figured I’d give it a moment. At 7:02, a message from my boss - in a team-wide channel - asking why I hadn’t posted yet. The ‘work day’ had, technically, ended two hours prior. But my personal mobile phone was my desk, even when I was away from my real desk. My time was not really my own.
Rule number one of the Internet is that you should never read the comments section, but (surprise!) I did anyway for Petersen’s piece. A few commenters noted that this conundrum - to be a worker in the knowledge economy and suffer from the affliction of being Extremely Online - is an incredibly privileged situation to be in. This is, of course, a good point, and exemplifies the many subsets of privilege and lack thereof within each rung of the proverbial socioeconomic ladder. Most interesting to me, however, were the numerous commenters who, from deep within this sphere, took a bit of a high-horse position. More than one commenter wrote that perhaps the problem isn’t the ubiquity of apps and digital noise, but rather Petersen’s lack of focus. ‘I just make to-do lists,’ contributed one helpful individual, themselves a social media manager, ‘and then I tick them off’. This feels like a colossal missing of the point. How can we possibly place the full onus of being distracted on the consumer, when these digital products are literally designed to be distracting? Or maybe this anonymous commenter is actually (plot twist!!!) secretly Petersen’s editor, neurotically watching her employee’s online activity for signs of laziness. Rinse and repeat.
And now the same core topic, different direction.
I was in New York recently and went on a walk through Central Park with an old friend. Not sure how we got to it, but we wound up having a long chat about the ethical issues surrounding viral videos of police violence, and I was reminded of a truly stellar essay from the New Republic I read back in May entitled White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching. [Feel I should offer a content warning right about here for any POC reading this who don’t have the emotional bandwidth or desire to get into the weeds on this topic right now. Fellow white folks, stay with me please]. This piece, written in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, is a sophisticated and superbly-reasoned dismantling of the pervasive belief ‘that passive viewership can translate into structural justice’ - an idea, she argues, that is ‘as misguided as it is old’. Author Zoé Samudzi refutes the commonly held ‘liberal’ white notion that watching/forwarding a video of a gruesome lynching is some sort of badge of moral fortitude, that it signals a commendable refusal to look away from the truth, that it helps in any way at all. Rather, she situates these videos and the act of watching them within the problematic white racial imaginary.
Anyone who knows me knows I am endlessly interested in image ethics, gaze, and trauma - intersecting subjects on which I’ve based most of my academic career. In fact, I cited Samudzi’s piece as a source in a paper I wrote a few months ago about the South African documentary film Miners Shot Down (dir. Rehad Desai, Uhuru Productions, 2014). [Again, a content warning for anyone clicking the link to the documentary: it contains scenes of highly graphic violence.] Miners Shot Down was effectively the whistleblower in 2012’s Marikana massacre, the largest act of state-sanctioned physical violence since the end of apartheid (some background here for non-SA readers). This footage was initially disseminated as part of a highly-effective impact campaign, utterly shifting public and opinion/knowledge of the situation and course-correcting the path of the enquiry commission which followed; it proved that the South African Police Service had not been shooting in self-defence, as authorities had initially claimed.
Production image from Miners Shot Down.
Dating back to the apartheid era, documentary film has long played a crucial role in South African consciousness as a means of engaging support for the struggle; often this meant films, made by and for oppressed people, depicting individuals protesting, organising, and being subjected to state violence. Scholars situate this as an example of Third Cinema - oppositional, anti neo-colonial cinema which represents truths left out of mainstream coverage and places a focus on viewer participation, not spectatorship. But is it ever really that straightforward? The daughter of one of the slain Marikana miners stated to the Mail & Guardian that being forced to re-witness her father’s death repeatedly in the media was painful: ‘Death was a private affair,’ but she and her family were ‘never afforded that privacy’.
And so in a globalised, plugged-in world where tech and social are so connected to our methods of media dissemination, the frenzied public viewing of Black individuals being graphically, systemically, and frequently abused or killed (and the imagery often framed in ways optimised for easy clicks and winning algorithms as opposed to recognition of shared humanity) raises troubling questions of whose pain - and whose dignity - is valued more by media consumers and society at large, and whether the preservation of this dignity is valued as much as privileged outrage is valued. In the case of Miners Shot Down, the footage had enormous impact: bending the arc toward justice. But clearly what justice means on a personal level isn’t always the same as when scaled to a societal level.
So to be honest, I don’t have a neat conclusion here other than to say the obvious: that digital media is a slippery beast. We all knew that already, right? Perhaps Samudzi’s piece is particularly pertinent to the American context for which she wrote it, and various countries have different contextual backgrounds and therefore different terms of engagement with such imagery. But moreover, what likely matters most in colouring the situation is (as always!) the question of: who is constructing the gaze, who is the intended audience to consume this imagery, and to what end?
I really do welcome opinions and thoughts on all of this - I think there’s endless nuance to this conversation.
Some stuff I’ve appreciated lately:
One more article for the road: Eat, Pray, Conspiracy: How the Wellness World Embraced QAnon. From Jezebel, an insightful and terrifying look at why the ‘wellness’ industry and its adherents are remarkably susceptible to conspiracy and radicalisation.
My chaotic but very tasty October playlist:
Hauntingly beautiful poetry from ‘Atmospheric Embroidery’ by the late Indian poet Meena Alexander.
And in conclusion: This perfect dog.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading - this whole newsletter thing is an experiment, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride. Tell your mates. Leave a comment, if you’re feeling it. And I’ll see you next time, whenever that is.
Maddy
superb!! excited to read the next newsletter already