Open source and Communities

Terranova's essay certainly raises an interesting point, but has several flaws that appear obvious to me (most likely because of my historical position). First of all, the comparison of open source labor to "AOL community volunteer" labor is a problematic one, and ultimately breaks down. We must remember that AOL is a company, and has invented the title/myth of "community volunteer" that AOL users are free to identify themselves as. Open source certainly operates on ideological levels, but almost operates counter to AOL; volunteers do not recognize themselves as subject to a company; instead, they recognize themselves as subject to a community. This idea of community as Subject is something that runs through all of open source and even (to a limited extent) Web 2.0, and is further revealed by the fact that it is often the community, not the company, that controls the evolution of the web site/service/product (take for example, the Digger's revolt over the removal of a story revealing the HD-DVD encryption key (09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0) (also see: http://blog.digg.com/?p=74, where the power of the community over the company (or rather, the inclusion of the community as controllers of the company) is made incredibly clear), or the Monome community's forum theorization of the definition of Open Source Hardware (http://post.monome.org/comments.php?DiscussionID=2646&page=1#Item_34; note that this is something done collectively, creating a synthesis out of diverse opinions in an almost Hegelian manner, and while the operator of the Monome 'company,' Brian Crabtree (aka Tehn) offers opinions, he does not control the debate) (and on another side note, I realize that this theory is lacking without proof of concept from the Linux community, something I am unfamiliar with and don't entirely understand (except to say that the fracturing of Linux distros has served to create communities rather than subjects of Linus Torivald). The community, through expression, revolt, and use/abuse of the construct of the community/product/software created by the controlling company, is able to control the company's (and the software's) development Other examples can be found within communities such as Wikipedia. Of course, this interpellation is drawn into question by the events of Yahoo's takeover of Flickr (which prompted a mass exodus from Flickr, and caused Yahoo to make little change, but did not actually affect the original point of contention; that is, the switch from a Flickr ID to a Yahoo ID for signing in), or in the recient failure of the Facebook community to 'roll back' Facebook to the "old" state, cases in which a company managed to overcome the community formed by their service in reasserting their ideology. Essentially, my theory is limited in the fact that while Web 2.0 communities can use their voice to control the evolution of the community/product/software, it still ultimately rests under the control of the company. Another problem comes from the fact that many open source projects are "managed" by Foundations or Corporations (in the case of Linux, the "Free Software Foundation," in the case of Firefox, the "Mozilla Corporation"). However, I again stress that my knowledge of these particular communities/projects/productions (Linux and Firefox) is limited.

It all makes sense now....

The article by Ien Ang that we read this week reminded me distinctly of a book I read a few years ago by Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, the concepts raised in both works are exactly the same. Unfortunately, I don’t remember very much of the book, not nearly enough to propose a thorough analysis by any means. It was recommended to me because I had, at that point, taken to a strange fascination with entropy. When I read it, I really had no clue what part entropy played in the plot of the novel. All I could tell was that it was about the breakdown of communication and a crazy lady who was hallucinating all the time. Now I see how it all comes together. It was written during the sixties, a time of much turbulence and uncertainty. One of the subplots of the book is about this subversive, secretive courier service whose members often send meaningless letters to one another, leading the receiver, not the sender to create the meaning of the message, and showing, as Ing says, effective communication is not simply getting the message from sender to receiver. The courier service’s symbol is a muted post horn, depicting the failure of communication. And this group contrasts and is opposition to the USPS, who is trying to impose a structure upon communication.

Voyeur

I would have to agree that the artist group of scenes in voyeur was by far the most intriguing and chilling. When I first looked at the scene i was uninterested as it looked relatively normal, but watching it a while certainly changed my view.
What I found interesting about it was the way that the project made me notice the inferences that films force us to make. Just as a our eyes automatically take a series of quickly flashed images and make it into motion, our minds fill in the blanks (when the characters are not in the rooms, what the people are saying that we cannot understand). This was accomplished by offering us a omnipotent point of view, one that goes through walls, yet leaving some parts of the plot to take place in an arena invisible to us. Violence takes place behind the walls, yet I can only see the anticipatory stage and the phase after it, not the part i actually DO want to see.
At the same time, this small flaw in our sweeping view also sets the media up to shock me, as I cannot take in inputs that i normally can in the sounds. This was especially poignant in the part where the artist is tapping on the wall to lure one of his other audiences towards the wall. I couldnt hear or see clearly what he was doing, but was suddenly hit with the shock of seeing him with his gun. It seems strange that in film one can portray a variety of different views, so why should we only be able to see one field at a time, or what criteria should be used to decide WHICH fields we do see.

That wasn't how it was supposed to have ended

I made the initial mistake of watching all of HBO’s voyeur forefront building’s storylines simultaneously. Immediately oversaturated with things to look at, the individual story lines required my gaze yet I could only offer them at most my glance. I ended up zooming in on a single story and focusing on that, acknowledging that I was not only missing the other plots, but also the way my story line was interwoven with others.

I then progressed to other parts of the city -- the Housewife scene in particular. While interacting with this story I was struck at how much was left unsaid. Snippets of lives were presented for our judgment, leaving me falsely feeling that I had more agency in determining their destinies. When the husband ended up getting killed (shown only by the wife dressing up the kids in black for the funeral) I felt frustrated at the lack of input I had, perhaps subconsciously confusing my desire for voyeurism for that of intervention.

I couldn't stop spying on imaginary people.

When I first experimented with HBO Voyeur, I found myself a bit bored. However, after a few minutes I quickly became engrossed. In trying to figure out why, I came up with four tensions which kept me interested in these people's arguably mundane affairs:

1) My freedom in contrast with the characters' containedness.

2) My hyperawarenness in contrast with the characters' naivety.

3) My absolute invisibility in contrast with the characters' explicit and constant visibility.

and, differently,

4) My immobility in contrast with the characters' mobility.

I particularly enjoyed the scene where I was spying on two men who were spying on their neighbor, as well as the one where the corpse was being photographed. I could try to connect these to notions of viewership that we've discussed in class, but frankly I think HBO Voyeur is just plain fun-- indulgence in voyeurism and the novelty of a new media object? Yes, please.

Collective Intelligence

Computers and computer networks have been argued that they enable the emergence of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is intelligence that is distributed and constantly enhanced to enrinch individuals. Collective intelligence can also be defined as a form of networking enabled by the rise of communications technology, namely the Internet. Computer networks highlight the unique value of human intelligence as the true creator of value in gaining knowlegde for oneself, and an economy as a whole. Our country is always striving for new technology, new ideas, and more knowledge. The internet is a way to increase the well-being as a whole.

This statistic is from "Principles of Economics" (pg. 523)

COUNTRY LIFE EXP. LIT. RATE % INT. Usage %

USA 77 99% 55%
Germany 78 99% 41%
Japan 81 99% 45%
Mexico 73 91% 10%
Brazil 68 86% 8%
Indonesia 67 88% 4%
Pakistan 61 42% 1%
Nigeria 52 67% <0.5%

Although there is no cause and affect response to internet usage and life expectancy, there is a corrollation between the two. There is a sigificant drop off between 1st world countries and 3rd world countries and there related life expectancy and internet usage. The more "developed country" or the country that allows its citizens more access to the internet is also a country with a higher life expectancy rate. A more developed country also has more investment and productivity of capital. The internet is away to extract as much capital (knowledge) as it can and use it for value. As a user of the internet, how else would we be able to post on this blog? Let alone have a blog if it weren't for the internet. Long distance communication can be made instantly within the realms of internet as long as almost every question one may have. With the internet, ideas are channelled into a single space of framework for almost everyone to see. Our society is quickly conforming with the masses into cyberspace and creating a social phenomena.

Wired in

On the subject of HBO Voyeur, I was wondering what everyone’s favorite show was. Being unfamiliar with Voyeur, it took me a little getting used to, but eventually found the Artist at West 34th Street. I wasn’t too convinced beyond the general draw of crime drama until I noticed one thing: the canary in the Artist’s apartment; seeing that made me better understand Barthes’s idea of the punctum. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The detail of this project is incredible. At the same time, I think it’s interesting that aside from the details, until the viewer gets to the action, this is, in all honesty, pretty boring; but sitting it out is rewarded. The Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance style moment where the Artist kills the police officers took me by surprise. Here I am sitting at my computer, but I feel like I should be calling the police. The watcher is both incredibly active, choosing who to follow at what time, and irrevocably passive, incapable of the changing the actions which we voyeuristically witness and are entangled with. Even more shocking is the moment when the Artist picks up binoculars and looks at the viewer, echoing Rear Window. Watching this show, my first thought it: What have I gotten myself into? And why am I here? There’s a painting psycho-killer holding a gun and coming through the streets of New York to find me, and I’m trapped in my desk chair, wired into an LCD display. The sense of both expansiveness and claustrophobia in this convergent world is fascinating, but even for a blog-reading web 2.0er like me, this particular dramatization is a little freaky.

Uncertainties

1) No way out?!

All the texts read in this section of the course thus far – and particularly those by Ang and Terranova – seem to take it for granted that participation in the media is a universal experience, virtually positioning the entire humanity inside a media-dominated and media-regulated realm of existence. Terranova, for example, uses such general(izing) notions as “human intelligence” – suggesting that the status of participant in the media is universal when she discusses the relation of "human intelligence" to the media – with the Internet, more specifically – (p.38: “the Internet effectively functions as a channel through which ‘human intelligence’ renews its capacity to produce”). Ang, implying participation in the media as “the way things are”, poses the question of resistance and its correlation to power – power as connected to the media –, looking at multiplicity of meanings and at diversity as possibly consistent with the logic of power as well as generated by it (multiplicity and diversity are “in the script”). Situated within the “capitalist postmodernity as a chaotic system” (Ang, p.163) and thus within the media, the human subject is – so these theorists appear to suggest – incapable of resistance, since resistance itself is created/inscribed by/in the “logic” of the media. But couldn’t non-participation in the media be a valid and perhaps most effective mode of resistance? Is non-participation – or, at least, reduced participation – in the media (for example, refusal to watch TV, to use the Internet,…) still an option? Even though I am aware that what phase of media–dominance the contemporary world has reached and whether the line beyond which there can be no return to the un-media-tized has yet been crossed cannot be assessed, I would argue that non-participation in the media is the only true form of resistance available in the contemporary world and still possible at the level of the individual (and perhaps even of the community). However, I am not certain about what the consequences of this deliberate non-participation might be for the individuals – or collectivities - who take this option…

2) A question of importance

In his “Introduction: ‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’”, Jenkins states: “In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms” (p.3). There are two aspects that I find particularly disturbing in this assertion. Firstly, what are the criteria for assigning/determining (the) importance to/of the “stories” – and to/of everything, in fact – in a “convergence culture” in which the arbitrary, the “unpredictable” (p.2) appears to be the sole ‘reliable’ criterion? What does it mean to be “important” in the culture of convergence? Secondly, I am intrigued by the repetition of the term “every” in this formulation, which apparently calls attention to an interest in the individual, in the particular. Isn’t this rather implausible focus on “every” thing essentially the ideology of the “convergence culture” – the “story” it tells in order to camouflage the very erasure of individual value/ the value of the particular?

3) "Down to Earth"

Could the present-day economic crisis be the correlate of the essentially un-productive (on the material level) digital economy functioning on "immaterial labor" (p.41, Lazzarato cited in Terranova) that Terranova refers to in her essay?

These are some of my uncertainties in a world that seems to operate on the principle of uncertainty at all its levels (are we to blame Heisenberg for being the first to formulate it scientifically?). Intrigued and de-stabilized as I am by them, nevertheless, I still have (at least) one certainty left as a point of reference in my positioning towards the contemporary political, social, and cultural contexts: however freeing and promising an ‘organizing’ principle it might be, uncertainty is a limitation. Postulating uncertainty as a mode of existence (as “the way things are”) – as Ang seems to do in her essay – appears to me, in light of this, to be a mode of not actually addressing the matters at stake as well as a potentially self-refuting thesis (if everything – including meaning – obeys the principle of uncertainty, then the theory claiming uncertainty as a universal principle is itself uncertain). Which is not to say that uncertainty should not be taken seriously: a world whose very existence is defined by uncertainty might just as well be a world that has reached its limits. I am uncertain if there is/can be anything beyond these limits.

Viewer Freedom Vs. The Lens' Gaze

I was struck by a comment on a message board from IMDB's page on the HBO Voyeur program. What's the point of this? Asked the anonymous user. What do they want us to get out of this? What are they selling? I think it's rare for users to immediately question the marketing strategy behind pieces of entertainment; the commenter's jump seemed, to me, to be less indicative of a general cynicism and more a result of the confusion of positions of spectatorship that this internet-narrative creates. Unlike the televised component of HBO Voyeur (which received lower viewer exposure than the website), where the viewer's gaze is directed by the camera (which is always framed by the rims of binoculars--much like parts of The Rear Window), the online program has no set direction for the gaze, or fixed duration for viewing specific scenes. The viewer's gaze is completely unstructured, forcing them to direct their eyes along their own narratives--thus the program's intriguing interactivity and sense of realism, thus also the confusion that led some viewers, like the IMDB message-board commenter, to balk. I think this feeling of uncertainty in position of spectatorship led the commenter to jump immediately to a more obvious structuring of viewer/content--forget the confusing endeavor of establishing one's one optical narrative, let's just look at the ad.
Of course, though, there is a larger narrative that the individually-structured sequences of viewing are supposed to uncover. The fascinating second-step to the HBO Voyeur program is the littering of false web pages over the internet, created by HBO for the fictional characters shown in the computer program--Flickr and Photobucket accounts, fake blogs, all with clues to the interconnectedness of the characters and more information about the situations in the original program. This way, the entire internet becomes the setting for a narrative that becomes less about the stories discovered and more about the circuitous, viewer-established sequence of discovery; the viewer's choice of web pages to view replacing the traditional guidance of the camera's eye.
One last, potentially unrelated thing--I'd like to point out the genius of the lack of sound in Voyeur. Hitchcock played with the realism that street sounds and overheard snippets of song can contribute to a feeling of "being there," observing. While also interested in creating a position of voyeurism, I think the scenes viewed through the Voyeur program really divorce themselves from TV programming and film with the use of silence. It really places the viewer in a physical relationship to the scenes viewed--definetely close enough to see, but not to hear.

Seems related to what we discussed in section...

I just got this headline and mini-article from the New York Times. It seems related to what we talked about in class today.

COMEDY, FILM

America’s Funniest Found Videos

The Found Footage Festival, born of discarded exercise tapes, unintentionally hilarious corporate training videos, mind-bogglingly weird home movies and late-night infomercial clips, finds a home at the 92nd St Y in Tribeca this weekend. Expect themes like pet massage and cheerleading, special guests (David Cross made an appearance at a recent screening) and a few sing-along homages.

Privacy is a state of mind

I think that it is interesting the way that people react to the notion of people monitoring their conversations as an afront to their privacy, when many of them go out of their way to spread the details of their personal lives to others.

For example the social networking comment wall serves the same purpose as the social networking message, the only difference is that one is visible to everyone and the other to only you two (or at least a number of people closer to that). Why then, would anyone willingly choose to use the wall post? Why would anyone bother with twitter, telling people not only about your location and current activity, but even what surveillance technology cannot, your thoughts and feelings as well. How can someone act shocked and appalled that the government can monitor their lives in the name of national security when they release their personal lives to people who are interested just for the sake of voyeurism? I of course dont support increased government control over my privacy, but I still find it strange that there is such a double standard.

Nerds

One thing that was interesting to me about both of the films this week was the capacity of techno-philes or "nerds." Those we see making use of this surveillance technology are insiders. They are skilled and can navigate the technology which enables this level of intrusion into the public sphere, and as such, have a level of immunity. Jack Black and Jamie Kennedy are some of the few NSA operatives left standing at the end of Enemy of the State, and they have a level of distance from the "bad" things that were done throughout the film. Gene Hackman struggles with his role in survelliance. He doesn't know what his level of agency is, beyond his ability to gather information. So, what is the role of this skilled professional in this technological world where surveillance is an art, a craft and a trade? Is the NSA operative a voyeur, or simply a scholar or a technician? It seems to me that this role depends in large part upon the individual; the act of struggling with the transfer of information, a moral dilemma on seeing how this invasion of so-called privacy is used is enough to redeem those who gather the information. However, how would an NSA operative, private detective, corporate spy, etc be seen in our world? How does that compare with the treatment of such a person in the narratives we have seen? The voyeur in these characters seems to resonate with the voyeur that each viewer knows exists within herself, but how would a person with this role in society be treated? What does voyeurism mean in society in comparison with its meaning in narrative?

Leopards & $3.50 water

As I was reading Lizzie's post, I remembered a story I recently read on BBC news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7696188.stm

This year's winning entry to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 award was a snow leopard hunting at night. Except that instead of the photographer personally having taken the photo, he set up surveillance cameras and waited for the leopard to be snapped when it triggered motion sensors. Where does the art in this lie? Is it staging of the cameras? Or the positioning of the lighting? Or the fact that he just got very lucky with his photograph? And what is to be said that the picture actually won the award?

I also enjoyed Park's point in her TSA airport article regarding the 'odd economies of re-distribution that have emerged as an effect on the war of terror'. If the travelers are the so-called losers (being stuck in security lines and having to pay $3.50 for a bottle of water) then who are the winners? Al-Qaeda? The security companies paid to instal CCTV cameras in airports? The TSA staff taking home your new bottle of after-shave when passengers forget they can't take liquids on-board? These new markets deserve to analyzed, in relation to both surveillance and media.

Google Earth

I find myself taking issue with Lisa Park's interpretation of Google Earth, mostly because she ignores one main thing: the central philosophy behind the operation of Google. In an article in Wired magazine, Chris Anderson writes that "Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required." Namely, Google doesn't use models, but rather a "brute force" method to 'improve' results. While this may be able to work (to a certain extent) with advertising and search results, the issues with this method become very clear with humanitarian benefits.
First of all, Google Earth (as far as I know) does not serve ads. The only way Google earns money off the program is by offering extra features in a priced "pro edition." However, the one thing Google can do is "brand" their service. They want to create as much positive information as possible about their company in order to attract new customers (after all, they do believe that the more they are linked to, the better). This is what I feel lies at the center of much of Park's argument but remains unspoken: namely, both that Google wants to draw as much attention to itself as possible and that it measures its success in "number of hits/downloads/links" (which is represented by the media's declaration of the "success" of the 'Crisis in Darfur' layer), both of which stem from the operating ideology Google maintains.
However, there's another part of Google's ideology that seems to run counter to this notion of "brute force"; namely, the company motto, "Don't Be Evil." While its methods ignore culture, its handling of internal affairs and decisions certainly don't. They want to generate attention and links, but they seem to be concerned about the nature of these links. The reason is rather obvious; while the organization of search results should be (according to Google) objective, the nature of these actual results cannot be. It's why Google's various failiures have been humorous; typing in one word only to be asked if you actually meant something else completely antithetical, or the massive widespread linking of a website using derogatory terms (like the association of "George W. Bush" with "Fail," or something like that; I don't remember the exact terms). Google realizes that, while its methods must be objective, the results of the method are subject to interpretation, and thus moves to prevent as much negative publicity as possible; that the cliche "all publicity is good publicity" is not true. Efforts like the 'Crisis in Darfur' layer serve to undermine potential criticisms of the company; by casting themselves as "good," they will not just draw attention but customers who actually try out the services after reading about them. This, to me, is about as far as Google participates in "disaster capitalism."
But, let's assume, just for a moment, that Google, regardless of any monetary gains or potential markets, actually does want to end the genocide in Darfur. This would be impossible for the company to do. Google focuses on links and information, not so much on real world action. The "Don't Be Evil" motto even focuses on these two things; if people see a link that is described/interpreted as "good," they will click on it; it is still contained by the digital realm, the world of media. It doesn't take into account interpretations of viewers; their ability to interpret information and compare it to information they already know, as well as their ability to act on it. Google only takes into account the first of these three steps, ignoring the other two (which are essential for actual action to occur). The one thing I truely do agree with Parks on is that the use of a "future imperfect"; this would theorize a reaction for the viewers to take, building it into the interpretation and pushing them to take action. It is still ultimately up to the viewer, but I believe that this method is much more effective.

Panopticism

While watching Enemy of the State, I was interested most by how hyper-visibility was used to discredit Will Smith's character. In a Keenan-esque fashion, light penetrated Smith's life, exposing the darkest corners. In connecting this with Parks' wonderful essay on airport screening culture, a trend emerges. Airport screening, in rendering us transparent, seems to purify us. It ensures uniformity and safety, granting a sort of nebulous wholeness to what was previously compartmentalized and restricted. All of this reminds me of the Panopticon, which used the omnipotent and omnipresent gaze to remedy criminality. This Puritanical ideal of the transparent, homogenous individual, rendered flat and fully readable seems to have persisted throughout the centuries. Even in the case of Will Smith, panopticism seems motivated in this way; the only way surveillance is able to hurt him is by exposing immoral sectors of his life for which he is rebuked. The panoptic gaze seems to provide a collective superego, perpetually scolding us, reminding us of pending (or instantaneous) judgement, and venerating the pure or aligned.

What-is-going-on

In her essay Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, Mary Ann Doane argues that “television’s conceptualization of the event is heavily dependent upon a particular organization of temporality” (p.223) that insists on “present-ness”. In light of this assertion, I would now like to address the potential implication of such a dominant (in the contemporary world) temporality for the human beings – turned – TV viewers’ (general) perception in/of time. As starting point for my exploration I will use the Kantian postulate that (consciousness of) time is an a priori intuition (together with space) – and, thus, that all human perception happens in time (and space) – as it is dis/proved by the mode of perception ("out" of time) that the temporality associated with television generates.

By insisting on “present-ness”, by putting everything in the present tense continuous (“this-is-going-on”) – even if it happened in a more or less distant past – , television, I shall argue, radically distorts its viewers’ perception in/of time – if it does not erase it altogether. In a certain sense, this phenomenon accounts for a sort of “indoctrination”, as a result of which the TV viewer becomes unable to “locate” (the temporal equivalent of this term is what I mean here) events in the past, present and future - depending on the situation –, and to position him/herself at a (critical) distance from them – as Barthes and Bazin’s category of “that-has-been” allowed him/her to do. Associated with this inability to perceive in accordance with a tripartite structure of time is also an erasure of (in my view, personal and collective) history, as Doane also indicates: “Television, too, has been conceptualized as the annihilation of memory, and consequently of history, in its continual stress upon the “nowness” of its own discourse.” (p.227). This phenomenon suggests a decreasing value attributed to the past – as well as to the future – by the television viewer, with multiple potential social (threatening the very identity of societies), political (non-engagement in political action, passivity), and, most importantly, ontological (the human being becomes another type of perceiving-machine than he/she used to be) implications.

Thus, when everything “happens” in the present, the category of time (in the Kantian conception of it) ceases to frame human perception. Metaphorically put, television blunts the a priori intuition of time.

Notes

1) In his essay Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”, Levin states that “films teach us how to see the world and register a sense of how culture is doing exactly that” (p.584). Extrapolating, I would suggest that this is the case with television as well – perhaps even more so than with films, possibly because of the goal of television - as identified by Altman (that of keeping people from turning the TV off). Paradoxically, even though time is the “major category of television”, television affects precisely the human perception in/of time.

2) Another important implication of the mode of perception (“out” of time) that television generates is the substitution of information for knowledge that characterizes the contemporary world. Information, in my view, is perfectly compatible with the “blunting” of the "intuition", whereas knowledge requires a perception in/of time (with its tripartite structure).

Televisual Catastrophe

In Doane's essay, one key statement she makes is that television's greatest technological prowess is the ability to be there. (pg 238) The ability to be there at the scene while being in your living room is the edge television can bring to the viewer. Without televison, how would the 9/11 coverage have been? Or any other crisis or catastrophe? It would be like we were living 150 years ago. Another aspect televison brings to us from catastrophes is the loss of life aspect. As human beings, we usually connect death with catastrophes. As viewers it bring us closer to the reality of death. Especially knowing that people who have died may have been around the same age as the viewer and had a whole life to live.

Doane argues that televisual catastrophe is everything it is said not be, expected. She argues that catastrophe magnifies death over and over again and it becomes the norm of televisual practice. I totally agree with this statement. Flipping through CNN how many times have I heard about death in the world by some terrorist attack, earthquake, or some other event? Too many too count. As a spectator to this, I have become somewhat used to it. The only way us Americans as a whole react so strongly is when something happens to one of our own. When terrorism happens in Israel or Pakistan do we sit glued to the tv hours on end? Maybe some do, but not nearly to the magnitude of an event like 9/11, Hurrican Katrina, or Columbine.

Pat! Riot! Act!

The idea of surveillance in association with cinema reminds me of Rear Window. When the naked eye wasn’t enough to keep Jeff up to speed on his surveillance, he brought out new technology: the telephoto lens of justice. And when that couldn’t provide enough, they sent in the spies. It is that compromise of privacy in order to catch criminals. Although justice was served, I really doubt Jeff’s Rear Window ethics. We wonder why Jeff thinks its okay to look into people’s windows, but his actions are justified when he indirectly witnesses a murder, or even when he attempts to save Ms. Lonelyhearts. Once surveillance thwarts danger, we can’t touch it. It becomes something that saves us and we certainly should not be ungrateful to that.

[Disclaimer: I am going to sound like a neocon... don’t judge me]
This leads me to reflect on my most recent travel experience: spending the past year in Israel, a country where security measures are far more prevalent, visible, and arguably more necessary than in the United States. But without the metal detectors in every entrance of train and bus station, the multiple step scanning process in the airport, border patrol checkpoints, the country would not be as safe. Israel is a country that has a long history with terrorism and thus is a superstar in the security and intelligence field. Maybe that is why I felt more inclined to cooperate and put up with security on our way to and from Israel than say, if I were traveling to Canada (who wants to blow up Canada?). That is why I was willing to put up with the hassle of getting my bags X-rayed whenever I want to take an intercity bus in Tel Aviv and give up some of my right to privacy whenever I wanted to take a train from Akko. I probably would have put up with x-rated x-rays and interrogation, because I know that Israel needs to assure that I don’t get blown up and that I don’t plan on blowing anybody up. Israel has always been a country where national defense and national security, as Parks discusses, are one and the same. In America, an armed guard on every bus would not fly, but is a common thing in Israeli cities. This probably stems from the fact that it is not as threatening to Israeli citizens because they all have or will serve in the IDF.
Then the question is why do I feel okay about this and not about having my wires tapped, not even in Israel (although I know that the Israeli government probably has better things to exert their energy on than my phone) It is the consent. I control what I put in my bags and I know ahead of time that they will be x-rayed. In relation to the Patriot Act, wiretapping, and tracking every time I use the word bomb on the Internet (whoops!), on principle I think it is a violation of my privacy. A line is crossed when the surveillance intrudes upon the private, to be Kennanesque, into a space that someone assumes is safe, like into the home, private phone conversations, internet history, even public bathrooms and fitting rooms. It is scary when people cannot even rely on these spaces to be secure.

Auteur

The direction that advanced technology takes the position of the artist is pretty disturbing, and confusing too. The position of authority offered by surveillance technology, and arguably by photography to a certain extent, is the lack of human interference in capturing the real. Where is the artistry? When it comes to surveillance technology as an art form, the artist is more of an orchestrator, his auteur-ship more a practice of securing means of production than guaranteeing accurate depiction. I think its interesting that, in this way, the auteur seems to attain a higher level of importance and authority not as an artist but as exerting some kind of economical or maybe even political control through the possession of technology, rather than a traditional definition of artistic talent.