Silverstone, Roger.Media Media and morality: on the rise of the mediapolis. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. (S. 2f)
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I have a memory of an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on The World at One during the height of the war in Afghanistan which followed hard on the heels of the attack on the World Trade Center. It was with an Afghani blacksmith who, having apparently failed to hear or understand the US airplane based, supposedly blanket, propaganda coverage of his country, offered his own account of why so many bombs were falling around his village. It was because, his translated voice explained, Al Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles. He was not, of course, entirely wrong.
‘There is much that is striking in this otherwise insignificant piece of reportage. And much of what is striking goes to the heart of what I want to explore and argue during the course of this book.
Nach dem Angriff auf das World Trade Center und die US-amerikanische Vergeltung in Afghanistan erklärt ein afghanische Schmid in einer Radio-Aufnahme der BBC den Grund der Bombardements. Das kommt daher, dass Al Qaeda viele Amerikaner und ihre Esel getötet und einige Schlösser zerstört hat.
The first point of note has to do with the blacksmiths mere presence in the British media. The second has to do with what he says. In one sense presence is all - a certain kind of presence that has transcended geographical, social and linguistic distance; a certain kind of presence which brought this voice into the living rooms of suburban England, not just from a war zone, a soon to be replicated war zone, our war zone which is almost by definition, now, somewhere else, but from another age, distant in time as well as space. This was a real voice, but an unfamiliar voice. And its unfamiliarity had everything to do with, was overdetermined by, the black smith’s capacity to offer an account of us as well as to us: we, in the West, with our donkeys and our castles, we with our losses, we in our equivalence. His understanding, his misunderstanding, was touching, naive, easily patronized. Yet it was true: a translated truth, a cultured truth, and a truth meaningful for him. Just as we had and have our views of what life might be like for a blacksmith in Afghanistan, he has his views of what life, and death, might have been like in downtown Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001. In both cases those views are, at best, filtered through the prejudice of ages and the immediacy of images. At worst they enter into judgements and through judgements into actions which, for those who have the power, are likely to be consequentially misinformed and fatal in their consequences.
His appearance in our mediated space, albeit in this case his audible appearance only, represents the appearance of the other, the strange and the stranger, in the familiarity and comfort of home. He appears to us as a representative, a rare representative, of the doubly distant: the proverbial man in the street, or in this case the man in the smithy, and as someone as far away from us, perhaps in time as well as space, as it is possible to conceive. Ordinary and usually unheard. But now speaking about our misfortune as well as his. And his appearance represents a life, too, when we might otherwise only see ~ indeed we normally do only see a body. A silent body, a body perplexed, a body in pain, a dead body. A victim. So here is the blacksmith speaking, and he is speaking, albeit briefly, about us, Here he is talking about us in his terms, through his view of the world. Are we going to listen? What are we going to hear?
His appearance is only an appearance. And it is his only appearance. For one lunchtime only. His forty seconds of fame. It is, of course, a mediated appearance. The voice, because it is radio, is disembodied. It is translated. It is heard somewhere else, somewhere where he is a stranger. We can try and imagine what he looks like, where he is sitting. We can try and imagine, and will indeed imagine, because we have a stock of images and sounds on which to draw, the setting. The bombing, the dust, the children, the distant women. But can we imagine him imagining us? ‘What will he have seen or heard about the attack? And can we imagine ourselves to be his strangers? This unnamed blacksmith is a double, and his appearance, his representation, involves a doubling. Actually it involves many doublings. The sound bite is a tiny shard mirroring the conventions of western media discourse, representing, misrepresenting, naturalizing us. Indeed his appearance involves representation in many dimensions. He is represented, characterized as an Afghan, as a blacksmith, as someone who can speak and, thanks to the BBC, can claim an audience. But he is also representative. Chosen to speak on behalf of others.
The blacksmith’s doubling is, of course, also unusual insofar as we do not often see, nor indeed do we often allow, others to comment on us on our screens, The continuing dismay with which Al Jazeera is received in western societies, most especially in the United States, is not only because of the graphic horror of some of its images (we provide those on a daily basis) or the ferocity of the political rhetoric (likewise). It is much more fundamental. It is based on the breaking of a medial taboo and the reversal of the customary taken-for-granted nature of media representation, in which we in the West do the defining, and in which you are, and I am not, the other.
So in the massive inequalities of global media power, the blacksmith’s appearance, and his version of the world, is relatively rare. But it mirrors, however faintly and briefly, the much wider representational culture of western media, whose gaze, alternately crystalline and cloudy, but always culturally specific, dominates the screens and speakers of the world. And for those in the West, or indeed for those in the UK, he is who he is only on those screens and speakers. He has no existence otherwise. He, in his unfamiliarity and distance as speaker, on the one hand, but in his familiarity and closeness as visible or audible presence, on the other, is a presence that those who hear him can neither touch nor interrogate.
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My argument in this book builds from this rather modest and unexceptional beginning. It conncerns the role of the media in the formation of social, civic and moral space. ... Of course different media allow us to do diffferent things; they provide diffferent social and political affordances. But together, in the array of possible technologies, delivery systems, platforms, discourses, texts, modes of address, as well as in the patterns of our use of them, they define a space that is increasingly mutually referential and reinforcive, and increasingly integratd into the fabric of everyday life. The media are becoming environmental.
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In the context of the present discussion then, the morality of the media refers to the generality of orientation and procedure within which the world is constucted by the media and within which the other appears. Or, to put it the other way round, this because the media provide, with greater or lesser degrees of consistency, the frameworks (or frameworlds) for the appearance of the other that they, de facto, define the moral space with which the other appears to us, and at the same time invite (claim, constrain) an equivalent moral responese from us, the audience, as a potential or actual citlizen.