Abstract
These two books make quite different contributions to contemporary media scholarship. Shani Orgad’s Media Representation and the Global Imagination is clearly influenced by, and constitutes an attempt to develop, the ideas put forward by Arjun Appadurai in his important and influential book Modernity at Large (1997). In that text questions and issues of contemporary identity were wrapped into and worked through the continuum of media representations, textual consumption and the transformation and renegotiation of individual and communal identities and processes of identification. Appadurai famously posited that in a globalized world characterized by flows of peoples and cultures, Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus is turned on its head: There has been a general change in the global conditions of life-worlds: put simply, where once improvisation was snatched out of the glacial undertow of habitus, habitus now has to be painstakingly reinforced in the face of life-worlds that are frequently in flux. (1997: 56)
Orgad’s development of Appadurai’s work is channeled through two closely related sets of claims. First, she suggests that global media representations are both ubiquitous and, as a consequence, necessarily contested. The argument is that the visibility in the media of different images, narratives, forms and markers of identity, claims and discourses exercises what Foucault would call a normative function, in that it orients and disposes how subjects see the world, and how they come to understand themselves in relation to events and other groups of people. On the other hand power and normativity always run the risk of interruption and non-compliance, for two reasons. First, the media is dominated by capitalist logics and imperatives: to gain and maintain an audience’s attention, and in order to maximize the commoditization of images, narratives and events, the media is more or less obliged to show everything – but most particularly anything that is spectacular, dramatic, or likely to produce an affective response on the part of the audience (pity, anger, sympathy). Second, exposure to these images and accounts of the other has the capacity to produce ‘a form of mediated intimacy with others who do not share one’s own spatial-temporal locale, and which does not involve the reciprocity of face-to-face interaction’ (Orgad 2012: 6). In other words, this exposure to alternative visibilities and narratives is capable of engendering an imaginative identification and empathy that challenges and interrupts the work of power (the other is not me, the other threatens me) and capitalism (the other is simply a commodity, to be consumed as a temporary and exotic diversion).
This argument is not just a development of Appadurai’s work; it also reproduces, with variations, the Enlightenment (and liberal) narrative of universalism, whereby the free flow of communication, goods and services, peoples, ideas, images and information assumes a (necessarily) beneficial and teleological status. Disappointingly, there is no mention of Armand Mattelart’s counter-narrative, produced over a number of important books (particularly Networking the World), concerning the imbrication of universalism and colonialism, neoliberalism and global cultural and political domination. This absence is telling, and explains why some of the examples that are deployed are not always convincing. Most egregiously and unfortunately the Australian media is put forward as the champions of the rights of asylum seekers, depicting ‘these refugees as being denied a voice in their home countries’ and ‘as fleeing from oppression and seeking a refuge’ (2012: 115). In a country which recently fought an election where both the major political parties sought to outdo each other in proposing harsh and decidedly non-empathic policies with regard to illegal immigration, and where in 2001 the media facilitated the election of a government by printing photographs which (wrongly) purported to show boat people callously throwing their children into the sea, the kind of media-inspired identification that Orgad refers to and relies upon is both extraordinarily rare and largely confined to media outlets (such as the ABC and SBS television networks) which do not have widespread popular coverage. The mainstream Australian media has a much better record of producing empathy with regard to foreign mining billionaires than it does for refugees.
Martin Hand’s Ubiquitous Photography undertakes two main tasks: it addresses the dynamics regarding the image, technology and photographic practices, and attempts to show how they are mutually entangled. In this regard it deals with four main developments: the relationship between photography and social change; the socio-cultural impact of the archiving, sending and sharing of digital photographs; the extent to which ‘digital photography prioritizes communication over memorization’ (Hand 2012: 191); and (to a lesser extent) the rise of ‘confessional culture’, whereby digital photography increasingly facilitates the production of a socially intimate ‘between us’. Hand’s book is much more focused and specific than Media Representation and the Global Imagination, and its examples by and large are more carefully chosen, apposite, convincing and useful in extending the range of argumentation about and understanding of the relevant issues. It is also more theoretically sophisticated and inclusive: for example, whereas Orgad’s use of Foucault’s work is unconvincingly dismissive when it doesn’t suit her argument, Hand employs the concepts of surveillance, the power-knowledge nexus and ‘regimes of truth’ in order to demonstrate how developments in digital photography are effectively discursive events; that is, they ‘are made available and possible under certain social, historical and political conditions’ (2012: 29).
The strength of this book is that it isn’t tied to any strong theoretical narrative, utopian or otherwise; rather, it is interested in how practices are informed and shaped by technological change understood as part of and produced through discursive regimes and statements. It is also capable, in a much more convincing way than anything achieved in Media Representation and the Global Imagination, of analysing how images are deployed in order to influence ‘how we imagine distant others and conceive our relations to them’ (p. 63).