The Film Experience Versus the Television Story

Blog Post #3 3-4-11

Before experimenting with my use of television and film, I did not realize how differently I was effected by each of them.  I use both television and film as an escape.  They both take me to an alternate world, where for a period of time I am invested in other people’s lives.  However, I find in my own life, television to be much more prominent.  Ever since I was little, I have had a set of T.V. shows I have watched every week.  This year I watch Gossip girl on Mondays, One tree Hill on Tuesdays, and Vampire Diaries on Thursdays.  A film on the other hand is not regularly scheduled.  You experience it for two and a half hours, and then it is over, and unless you know there are sequels coming, that is all the impact it can have on your life.  This week I am also doing a project on Atonement. Even watching it in my room on my computer, I found Atonement to be a hot medium.  This is because I realized there is so much more to look for in a film then in T.V.  T.V. is more about a story, about the various events of the characters, while Film is about everything they can fit into a two hour time period.  In Atonement, there is the story of the main characters.  However, there is also this magnificent estate covered with beautiful gardens and ponds, centered around a gigantic mansion.  The score of the movie focuses you in on the sound of the typewriter, as a source of tension and climax in the film.  Then you have the various symbolism throughout the film.  Atonement is about much more than the story, the film is about taking you completely to 1930’s England.  McLuhan’s chapter Movies: The Reel World describes how “film has the power to store and to convey a great deal of information.  In an instant it presents a scene of landscape with figures that would require several pages of prose to describe”(288).  Film needs to fit so much into it in such a short amount of time and make the escape of seeing a film, so real, that much more then the story is required to make it successful.  Being a hot medium, the film has to suck the viewer in, focusing them in on the screen for two hours, so many more elements are needed than in T.V.  

 Atonement Movie Trailer

Watching my weekly T.V. shows I find that the shows are much more about the story.  They are set in the same scenes every week, and no sets are that elaborate.  The music is usually a rock or acoustic song that involves a current artist who’s emotional lyrics fit that of the scene.  No original scores are added like in a movie.  

T.V. finds success in its audience’s deep connection to the characters.  This connection is what keeps the viewer coming back week after week, so it is much easier to become trapped in the fantasy of T.V. in my case.  One tree hill has been my favorite show for eight years.  In the words of Meyrowitz in his novel No Sense of Place these characters have become my “para-social friends.”  I talk about them with all of my friends who also watching the show saying “I can’t believe that happened to them” or “oh my god I feel so bad for her.”  It is completely ridiculous I feel so connected to these characters, but through my experiment this week I found out that T.V. is about this connection.  Brooke Davis is my favorite character and for the last eight years, I have wanted her clothes, her boyfriends, and her career.  I also have wanted her to succeed and grow, and as she does so I feel like it is one of my friends growing up.  Nowadays, there are sights such as www.tvfanatic.com that allow you to go on the site, find the music played in the episode, look at quotes from the night, and find spoilers, for those like myself who are too anxious to wait for next week.  If we were not so invested in these characters then what would we come back for.  With movies, if you do not connect to the characters, but the movie is visually appealing and the characters bring something interesting to the table, then there is still an appeal to a two hour movie.  However, if I hated every character on One Tree Hill, no way would I keep going back for more.  We follow these stars fictional lives and clothing trends, almost as much as our own.

McLuhan’s chapter Movies: The Reel World centers on the idea that “the film pushed this mechanism to the utmost mechanical verge and beyond, into a surrealism of dreams that money can buy”(290).  I think this quote applies to both film and television, because both represent certain ideals.  Twilight the movie and The Vampire Diaries both take us to a world we could only ever find in a fantasy.  They are both about vampire boyfriends providing the allure of dangerous gorgeous men, who we know we could never have in real life.  They make the relationships of vampires and humans work to form an ideal loving relationship.  They also make the female protagonist, normal, middle-class, small town girls, so they directly address who is probably most interested, creating a dream world we begin to live in.  These fantasies, suck us in at the time, providing the best escape we could imagine.  However, they also provide the most dangerous, as none of this can ever come true, even after we spend week after week, or hour after hour hoping.  Films and Movies have different functions, but they both result in the same thing, the escape of fantasy, an escape that I use all the time.

The Vampire Diaries

Vs. 

Twilight

Work Cited

McLuhan, Marshall. “Movies: The Reel World.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  MIT Press, 1994. Print. 284-296.

Meyrowitz, Joshua. “The Separation of Social Place from Physical Place.” No Sense of Place.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.  Print. 

Print Versus Pictures: Which is the Best Way to Experience?

Blog Post #2 2-20-2010

Every Saturday I read Us Weekly.  Read is a term to be used lightly in this context, because what I am more so doing is scanning the images. For me, photographs are a quicker and easier way to provide information.  In articles like the one in Us Weekly about Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal starting a romance, http://www.usmagazine.com/celebritynews/news/first-photos-jake-and-taylors-romantic-thanksgiving-day-stroll-2010112, the photos were a fast way to describe the new couple, as well as proof that the couple was actually seen together.  Susan Sontag’s book On Photography describes how “photographs furnish evidence”(5).  Sontag also notes that photographs “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe"(3).  Us Weekly is all about providing evidence of the life of celebrities as well as deciding that these are the people that are important enough to be photographed and placed in the public eye.  Photographs play many other roles in my life through family photos, Facebook, and understanding significant events.  Facebook is about photographs more than anything else.  In order to keep up with my friends in college I look to see what they are doing in their photographs.  When they tell me about a fun party over text, the proof lies in their photos.  I look to see what they are wearing and how they look.  Facebook has contributed to the vainness of my own society.  Profile pictures are meant to be the best picture of yourself that you want to be the representative of you to the world.  Before information your profile picture is what everyone sees.  However, if there was no profile picture or photographs you would just have information.  People want the whole package with Facebook, and it allows for us to see the visual and personality in one.  However, today it is extremely easy to make both of them lies with the use of photo editing.  Sontag considered photographs to be also used as a way of “memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of the family”(8).  My dorm room is not full of writing about each of my friends and family, but pictures of me on graduation day with my parents and friends.  My walls are covered with pictures of my Mom and Dad on special occasions, pictures of my theatre group in our Winter Musical, and pictures of all of my friends preparing for prom.  Photographs are used as ways to remember something, with an exact image of how it happened. It is impossible to explain these events, the way a photo can capture them in a moment.  Kracauer quotes "the photograph does not preserve the transparent aspects of an object but instead captures it as a spatial continuum from any one of a number of positions" and that is another difference of photos and print(53).  Photographs provide no back story, no other information other than what you see at the exact moment.  While I love to reminisce with my parents about photographs of me as a child, there is no way to truly understand what is going on at the time.  Finally I look to photographs to find understanding in significant events that writing about them cannot do the same justice for.  As the events of Hurricane Katrina occurred, I read about people’s experiences and read about the damage done.  However, it was pictures like these, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/olso4158/architecture/Hurricane%2520Katrina%2520Response2%5B1%5D.jpg, that truly showed just how much damage was done.  Pictures of the event were what sparked the most emotion, because of the shock I felt.  The pictures put into reality, the events that I could not even imagine.  

Compared to my relationship to photographs, print for me is a lot more intimate.  When I decide I am actually going to read something, I sit down, usually isolated, hopefully in a quiet spot, and actually engage with the text.  A picture takes a moment of my time, and while at the time the pictures make an impact, reading requires much more of my focus.  It was fast to look at a picture of Katrina, but to actually read an article about the pain everyone was going through I had to sit down and be involved in the articles.  Unlike pictures which require participation and sharing, print is a hot medium.  This means it all consuming.  Photographs are more of a collective media in my life.  When I am on Facebook I am looking and commenting on other people’s pictures, interacting and talking about them with my friends.  In US Weekly I discuss the trends I see in the images.  In terms of family photos, I break them out at family parties to involve my family in laughing at how we used to look.  To me, print is personal.  I feel like pictures can be seen anywhere at anytime, but when I read I need to turn off my music, pause whatever I am watching, and go into a private space.  I cannot read unless I have complete quiet and I believe that makes me a more engaged reader, when I actually get the chance to read.  Even the newspaper or magazine articles I choose to read put me in an isolated reading zone.  I do not necessarily think this means it is not a collective experience at all.  I think the media I read connects me to a whole different community, a world of people I do not know exist reading the same thing I am reading and gaining the same knowledge I am.  I also love to connect with others after I am done reading.  To get others opinions on books read, or others interpretations of books gets me even more invested in my own thoughts.  

I agree with McLuhan’s idea that “perhaps the most significant of the gifts of typography on man is that of detachment and noninvolvement-the power to act without reacting”(173).  However, I believe it can be used for both print and photos.  When I read and see pictures of current events, I feel like I know what is going on but it is important to remember that I am not actually as emotionally attached as those who are there.  Print and photos both allow us to experience a certain event, but it allows us to do so in a mediated way.  I never experienced Hurricane Katrina physically, so I almost feel bad of how emotionally effected I was by the experience, when I know it was detached compared to people physically being there.  Photos and print differ greatly in how I take them in, but they are similar in how I use them to live an experience I cannot physically be involved in.

Work-Cited

Kracauer, Siegfried.  The Mass Ornament.  Harvard University Press, 2005.  Print.  46-63.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism.” Understanding Media:

The Extensions of Man.  MIT Press, 1994. Print. 170-178.

Sontag, Susan.  “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography.  New York: Picador, 1977. Print. 

3-24.  

Living Today Like It Was Yesterday: Sustaining From Media

Blog Post #1 2-5-11

I knew the task of cutting out media would be difficult, but I was not prepared for the anxiety having no cell phone or access to Facebook caused me.  The last weekend in January my phone had coincidentally broken, so I thought it would be the perfect time to cut out my use of the computer for a day and try to watch less television.  The thing about the computer is that it is not just something I go on when I’m bored.  In entering college as a freshman, I left behind my closest friends.  We stay in contact based on the internet and our phones.  We have a Facebook message where we all describe any exciting events that happen to us.  I send and receive at least one text to/from all of them everyday.  College may have separated us by distance, but I feel as close to them as ever, because of our constant media outlets.  Without social technology for a day I felt so out of touch.  McLuhan, although writing in the 1960’s had an amazing insight into present technology.  He observed media technology had “overthrown regime of time and space”(McLuhan 16).  He could not have been more intuitive about 2011’s technology, because with my phone and with Facebook, I have absolutely no problem talking to my friends anywhere at anytime of the day.  He later describes, “we now live in a global village, a simultaneous happening”(McLuhan 63).  My friends and I are able to still be there for each other whenever needed.  They are my community, they are my world, whether we are together or not.  Facebook today is the “middle region” Meyrowitz describes in his book No Sense of Place.  In his definition, “Middle Region behavior develops when audience members gain a “sidestage” view.  That is, they see parts of the traditional backstage area along with parts of the traditional onstage area”(Meyrowitz 47).  With things like Facebook and Skype, I can be at home, in my bed doing whatever I want, but have to have the “frontstage” action of talking to an audience.  I can be in a place where no one is present and suddenly be entertaining my friends or talking to teachers through email.  I become in two worlds, a world in private, my backstage, and a world where I am adhering to the public.  According to AOL techcrunch, “teens spend thirty-one hours on Facebook a week”(AOLtechcrunch).  It is sad that people are spending more than four hours a day on Facebook when they could be spending those hours where they actually are, physically with people.  However, at the same time it allows people to keep in touch, you never have to lose friends because of distance and time anymore, which I think makes for longer lasting, stronger relationships.  

In being without a cellphone or computer, I found myself needing to keep going every minute.  I could not stop because any moment of relaxation, I used to find myself talking on the phone or using the computer.  However, I found the experiment effective in putting me in a definite physical space.  I am always connected in some way to the people from home and it was important for me to truly be where I was at college in New York for a day.  Without technology, I found myself needing a new way to relax, so I joined a yoga class.  Cliche I know, but I needed something to get me up and awake that was not technology, and it was fun being in a place where everyone was cleansed of technology for an hour and a half.  During the day I stayed close to my college friends to keep me occupied and I definitely think the experiment taught me to spend more time with them and less time with Facebook.   However, going out at night without my cellphone is a difficult task.  It is basically my security blanket.  I check it whenever there is an uncomfortable or quiet moment, and without it I found myself much more anxious and nervous to be there.  I felt much more thrown out in the cold.  According to MSNBC, the “average american teen sends and receives 3,339 texts a month”(MSNBC).  That is about one-hundred and eleven a day, so apparently I am not the only one who uses their phone so much.  

                                                          (Choney)

Two people who were unimpressed by my ability to go without technology for a day were my parents.  They love the ability to still keep in touch with me all the time even though I am out of the house and out of the state.  McLuhan writes, “Our new environment compels commitment and participation.  We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other”( McLuhan 24).  Even though we no longer live together my parents can be just as involved in my life as they were before because of technology.  They call, they text, they email, so that they can know how I am doing whenever they miss me.  Technology has certainly eased their worries about me a lot with their ability to still participate in my decisions and talk to me whenever they want to.

I cannot fully say from this experiment whether or not technology has changed my life for the better or worse.  McLuhan’s book The Media is the Massage is spot on in determining how the internet and text-messaging would effect our relationships and form our communities.  However, I worry about the effect of technology in our lives at all times, I think it is always important to stop and take a look around where you physically are.  

Work Cited

Choney, Suzanne.  “Average American Teen Sends and Receives 3,339 Texts a Month.” 

Technolog: Msnbc.com. 14 October 2010.  Web.  5 February 2011. 

Deleon, Nicholas. “How do you compare? Teens spend 31 hours a week online.”  

Crunchgear.  10 February 2009.  Web.  5 February 2011.

McLuhan, Marshall.  The Medium in the Massage.  Ed. Jerome Agel.  Berkley, CA: Gingko Press,

          2001.  Print.  

Meyrowitz, Joshua. “Media, Situations, Behavior.” No Sense of Place.  New York: Oxford University

         Press, 1985.  Print.  35-51.