Mass Media: Enemy or Tool? Workshop video from Food Not Bombs World Gathering

Enjoy the lush view of my backside as I talk about media structure and how opposition media workers can use it for their own ends.  Things get interesting towards the end when Vermin Supreme drops by!

A Note: Car Radio, Space, and Class

A sudden insight and clarification of the piece on car audio that I'm working on.  It all hinges on Zizek's notion of paraconsistent logic, transferred in a somewhat crudely metaphorical form to the social realm.  The car radio is an instance of technological work that, at the same time, helps extend the atomized form of the early 20th century suburban/suburbanizing white middle class into the space of the car, and also produces its obverse, in the form of car radios used as broadcasting platforms that disturb both urban and, later, suburban ideals of middle-classness as they are linked to quiet/the lack of disruptive 'noise.'   This is linked to the idea that even with the earliest forms of electronic networked communication, the middle classes/knowledge classes began to transcend or escape from the physical space of social life.  At the same time, the development of a working-class vernacular of car radio as noise producer was a work of bringing power and meaning back into space.

The middle classes used the car radio to connect themselves over great distances to projects of national identity and development - for instance, during World War II, radio listening was conceived as a kind of patriotic duty.  These were early experiences of networked identity.  By contrast, the subaltern-identified usage of car radio as a broadcasting platform in local space - specifically, in the emergence of the 'boom cars' that we're all so familiar with now - was a resistance to the networking of identity, and a reaffirmation of localized identities formed in physical spaces.  It was not just a rejection of and attack on middle-class cocooning, but the articulation of a different logic of community altogether.  It is crucial to this understanding that the main media channels for boom car culture were rarely actual radio broadcasts, but physical media, in an era that roughly coincided with the democratization of the production and distribution of these forms - the appearance first of the cassette, then later the CD, then the CDR.  These were not vast networks of high-speed, ephemeral, space-binding broadasts, but much more time-binding, coherent 'records' (in both senses) of highly developed, increasingly local worldviews.

But is there an inconsistency to using Zizek, who in his take on Hegel rejects the notion of socialized reason and history as a project of "The Cunning of Reason," in an argument that hinges on the presumption that these processes play out some sort of structural problem-solving?  I'm not sure.  More generally, I'm not ready to comment on the legitimacy of Zizek's notion of paraconsistent logic - I can frankly say that I know I am well inside that mindset, and I still don't have many of the tools that I'd need to take a step back and place it in the context of the history of ideas.

All of this came to me as I was reading the exchange between John Gray and Zizek in the New York Review of Books and Jacobin, respectively.

Characterizing the Japanese Music Industry

I've been trying lately, as I move toward the end of my time in Japan (for now) to do a little summing up - to think about what I've learned, how I can structure it meaningfully, and what holes I want to plug before I leave.  Much of what I've learned revolves around the daily lives of musicians, but I want to place that within the broader context of the general conditions within which they're working.  So what can I say about Japan as a context for the production of music?  As an initial stab, the Japanese situation is one of:

1. Intense stratification and hierarchical control.  For musicians who want to reach a mass audience, there are no strong alternatives to the major labels and management companies.  For a variety of reasons (including strong-arm tactics by dominant management companies and, just maybe, high-level ties to organized crime), it is almost impossible to access television except through these channels. Where in the U.S. we've become used to seeing independent musicians on late-night talk shows, hearing their music on commercials, etc, there's no real equivalent to this in Japan.  Meanwhile, for musicians who bow to the structure, management companies tightly control their talent (even those with genuine musical talent), approving and limiting their releases as well as non-music projects.

Do you really even need to listen to this?

2. Partly as a result, there is Palpable Contempt for Mass Audiences.  This is not a cultural constant - Japanese pop music from the sixties and seventies was of high quality and often aesthetically or culturally progressive. But music of the recent past is simply insulting, pandering to an (admittedly often true) image of mouth-breathing otaku and blandly disinterested housewives. Of course, AKB is the apex of this (the recent CGI affair is only a rather patent manifestation of the plasticine idiocy they represent), but it's everywhere - teenage girls singing meaningless lyrics over cookie-cutter tracks.  Even artists who use visuals promising something interesting usually . . . aren't.

3.Thorough Domestication, at least at the top. The very biggest Western artists still get some traction (for instance, currently, Lady Gaga), and there is a genuine 'Korean Wave' of bands like Girls Generation.  And if you look at the culture more broadly, of course, there's a huge engagement with, in particular, Western (mostly American) pop, rock, jazz, soul, and hip hop from the fifties through nineties.  But charts are dominated by domestic artists. This might not be a problem, maybe not even notable, except that this insularity is self-fulfilling in the export market - the failure of the Japanese pop machinery to engage with global aesthetic developments over the last ten years has left Japanese pop relevant abroad only to a marginal, if not exactly small, group of international otaku. Again, this doesn't apply nearly as much to indie and underground acts, for example bands like Boris, Acid Mothers Temple, and Melt Banana who are active, relevant contributors to global music.

Crowdsourcing Safety Information: Twitter and the Japan Earthquake

I've spent most of the last three days perched in front of my computer, watching Japanese news, trying to sort and filter the various streams of information coming in via the internet and TV.  Much of this is obviously self-interested, as I've needed to make sure I wasn't about to get poisoned with nuclear fallout or crushed in a particularly heinous aftershock (still not out of the picture).

But I would also like the think there's an element of service to it, as Twitter has become an important new channel of news, and it relies on the participation of a lot of informed people to shape the narratives that emerge from it.  While I'm still not quite able to provide instant and accurate translations of the news coming to me over Japanese TV, I am still in a somewhat privileged position - the U.S. media, with the safety of distance, seems to be getting a little hysterical, while the Japanese news is engaged in a constantly updated filtering of crucial information.

Adelstein

Weirdly, though, the best example of how Twitter can work both positively and negatively has come from someone within Japan.  At about 3pm Japan time on Sunday, Jake Adelstein, mostly known for his fantastic reporting on the Yakuza, started posting claims that elevated radiation levels had been detected in Tokyo, and encouraging people to take precautions including iodine dosing.  He claimed this information came from a well-placed inside source whose identity he could not reveal, and he has sustained a drumbeat of warnings since then.

Adelstein is claiming that the Japanese government has a track record of deception regarding public safety threats - certainly true.  He's also claiming that it's better to be safe than sorry - "I'm posting what I consider the equivalent of O-ring warnings. There is a possibility of disaster. People should know that it's there." But there's a hitch - he's been pushing the iodine thing pretty hard, and at least as far as I've been able to tell, iodine tablets are actually pretty difficult to get in Tokyo.  I'm never in favor of ignorance, but in this case it seems there is no "safe" in the "better safe than sorry" argument, short of a mass evacuation that would probably itself cost lives.  When Adelstein cites unnamed, shady sources claiming hazardous radiation flowing into Tokyo, even if he's right, he's potentially sending people into a panic that can't actually lead them to greater safety or peace of mind.

There's something interesting happening on Twitter around Adelstein - people are studiously ignoring him.  There seems to have been no secondary confirmation of his claims, either from official sources or from any Japanese twitter source that has crossed the language barrier so far.  This is particularly notable given the stew of overstatement that has surrounded the nuclear situation in the English twitterverse.  There are two forces at work here, in real time - those of fear, caution, isolated rumor, and worst-case scenarios, arrayed against those of sanguinity, trust in authority, false security, and even-headedness.  Obviously, each can be characterized as either positive or negative, and only time will tell whether Adelstein is being prudent or alarmist, and whether those ignoring him are being sensible or delusional.  The bigger question is whether Twitter is helping sort this out better than traditional media, but again, I don't think we'll really be able to figure that out until a little ways down the road.