Back to Volume 13
	The New Reality By Frank Walton

For two weeks in April 2008, the Kirov Ballet, along with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre from St. Petersburg, Russia, performed at New York City Center. Rather than performing complete ballets from its repertoire, the Kirov presented at each performance a series of excerpts, pas des duex and small ensembles from the great ballets associated with the Kirov. Mostly works of the legendary late nineteenth century choreographer Michel Fokine, the performances were both stunning and intimate.

It was two weeks of the greatest moments from the greatest ballets from a company renowned for its astonishing technical and physical strength, discipline, and accomplishments. (The company that produced Pavlova, Nureyev, and Baryshnikov.) The reviews sometimes noted a missing dimension of emotion, but all acknowledged the astonishing physical bravura of the soloists. The Kirov at the relatively intimate setting of New York City Center was almost spooky. The dancers — live, in a small theater, closely accessible to an equally live audience — accomplishing seemingly physically impossible movements, with almost unbelievable stamina and grace.

The Kirov experience is, of course, a nineteenth century experience. But those nineteenth century ballets — and their counterparts in the opera — were the multimedia extravagant horizons of the media of that era. The prima ballerinas and dancers of the day, the leading opera singers, were truly rock stars. (And they personally were often no more “normal people” than Michael Jackson.) The impact of their accomplishments (and those who emulate them two centuries later) is based on phenomenal physical strengths, massive commitment and discipline to training, and unmediated public exposure of their personal performance.

These performers are also absolutely known. No anonymity — the dancer’s performance is his; every person in the audience knows the performer’s name; there are no retakes or edits. A stumble or a momentary loss of balance — it is both lost to history (because there is no recording), but it is also immortal (because the reputation of the dancer is sealed or broken by each double jeté).

Fast-forward two centuries.

At the time of this writing, the sandboxstyle action-adventure video game Grand Theft Auto IV has just been released. The physical prowess and capabilities of the hero, Niko Bellic, promise to redefine the phrase “state-of-the-art” for online gaming using Rockstar Games’ RAGE game engine combined with the Euphoria game animation engine. Niko and the other characters have levels of realistic movement, facial expressions, and speech unlike anything yet seen or heard. Grand Theft Auto IV also accommodates up to sixteen players, introducing a level of complexity — and community — available just about nowhere else on the gaming Web. Niko’s stamina, courage, prowess, and invincibility just leave Vladimir Shklyarov (Kirov soloist) in the dust.

Or consider Robert Zemeckis’ 2007 film, Beowulf. The character Beowulf ’s encounter with the monster, Grendel, is a state-of-the-art bravura performance of what the human body, with digital amplification, can accomplish. The performances of the actors (Ray Winstone as Beowulf, Crispin Glover as Grendel, and Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother) are uniquely and genuinely impressive — yet accomplished only through the contribution of Sony Pictures Imageworks’ animation. The film has used the most advanced capabilities of “motion capture” digitally enhanced live action. The physical combat, endurance beyond imagination, and defiance of gravity must humiliate Leonid Sarafanov (another Kirov soloist).

The contrasts presented here are not for an instant to suggest that Ray Winstone as Beowulf leaping from turret to turret in his battle with the dragon is any less extraordinary than the Kirov’s Igor Kolb dancing the role of the ghost in Fokine’s Le Spectre de la Rose, with his own extraordinary leaps in and out of the window. Yet the contrasts tell us something about our Web-infused environment.

A third perspective: Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday: 2007) makes a point. Web 2.0 gives all of us access. (That is an exaggeration, of course. “All of us” means those of us on the “have” side of the digital divide, and among this group, the ones who want the access. But there are genuinely fewer obstacles now than at any other time in history for an individual to communicate with the world. To reach out and — perhaps — be heard). 

Keen notes, “Truth, to paraphrase Tom Friedman [New York Times columnist], is being ‘flattened,’ as we create an on-demand, personalized version that reflects our own individual myopia. One person’s truth becomes as ‘true’ as anyone else’s. Today’s media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile. To quote Richard Edelman, the founder, president and CEO of Edelman PR, the world’s largest privately owned public relations company: ‘In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.’”

Now, we all know that’s just dead wrong.

If there is one kind of truth in Leonid Sarafanov’s balance, strength, and turns — if there is one kind of truth in Crispin Glover’s and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Grendel — there is not the same truth in “Batting Stances: Red Sox,” a three-minute YouTube video from “BattingStances” (it is not known if “BattingStances” is the person in the video or the person making the video, or both, or a company, or something else), listed as the number one featured video on April 21, 2008, with a four-star rating and 143,888 views.

In the video, a young man with a baseball cap on backwards is in somebody’s back yard, parodying a baseball batter. No balls are really thrown, so there is no necessity for successfully connecting bat with ball. There is no physical feat attempted or accomplished. There is only the demonstration of what our digital technology can accomplish: It can record harmless hamming it up in the backyard and deliver the video record of that goofing off to hundreds of thousands of people.

As of April 21, 2008, 143,888 people saw “BattingStances” on YouTube swing at an imaginary ball in his buddy’s back yard. That same number of people did not see Leonid Sarafanov’s astonishing physical performances with the Kirov in New York City. Had Sarafanov wavered on a landing from a leap and a turn, we would all know that he had failed “BattingStances” is anonymous (to the vast majority of the 143,888 YouTube viewers) — his success or failure, accomplishment or not, really does not matter — there is no possibility of failure, no possibility of truth. Is the truth of “BattingStance” the same as Sarafanov’s or Zemeckis’?

Full disclosure: I love YouTube. I have spent many hours watching videos from Iraq and from somewhere in southern California where an English bulldog is great on a skateboard. And if you have not seen twentyyear- old Chris Crocker (“itschriscrocker”) do his “Leave Britney Alone!” (19,320,996 YouTube views), then you have missed one of the highlights of American pop culture in the twenty-first century so far. (Irony. Parody. Guts. Imagination.) (The population of the state of Florida is 18,000,000. More people have watched Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone!” than live in the state of Florida.)

I would also encourage any reader to go to YouTube and view the music video produced by nineteen-year-old “beevmeister.” Watch his/her four-minute “American Soldier — Toby Keith (tribute)” (602,596 YouTube views). You will see images that neither the U.S. government nor the U.S. media has shown to the American public. A soldier in a flying kick to knock down a door, weapon held — ready. And flag-draped coffins. Lots of them. All this superimposed over the highly patriotic soundtrack of country western singer, Oklahoma-born Toby Keith’s song, “American Soldier” (from the album Shock’n Y’All on Dreamworks, 2003).

For another perspective on the Iraq war, you can view “Battle on Haifa Street, Baghdad, Iraq,” videotaped by a U.S. soldier, “MNFIRAQ,” in January 2007. We can watch U.S. soldiers shelling Haifa Street with their mortars. So far, 2,630,484 YouTube views. No music on this soundtrack.

What does all this mean to the communications professional, the media professional, and the artist?

Since about the invention of film, philosophers and aestheticians have debated the meanings and the impact of mechanically produced images. One of the most famous and seminal essays in modern cultural studies, Walter Benjamin’s “The World of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” from 1936, claimed a new and transcendent status for images and messages captured and conveyed through electronic technologies.

Benjamin states: “Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments that are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality that is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”

A generation later, another equally influential essay, Susan Sontag’s “On Photography” (Penguin, 1977), captured the imagination of nearly everyone who cared about media. Sontag pointed out both the ubiquity of photography by the late twentieth century, but continued to see challenging and sometimes disturbing power in images captured so easily by technology. She wrote, in her typical, oracular fashion, with wide-ranging insights about mechanically produced images:

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity — and ubiquity — of the photographic record is photography’s ‘message,’ its aggression.”

The common themes of Benjamin and Sontag help us understand our contemporary media environment and how we must work within it. Just as Benjamin noted in 1936, probably the most important aspect of the mechanically produced image is that it is a fragment of reality. Our whole orientation to the new communications and media technologies acknowledge this. We talk about communications fragments: “sound bites” and “video clips.” E-mails are not meant to be long. The enterprise is not to create multidimensional or complex views of reality. The goal is to create the most compelling fragment.

As Sontag points out, the vast majority of these fragments in our environment are quite easily produced, by amateurs and professionals alike, and they are now truly ubiquitous (photos held up by magnets on our refrigerator doors as well as YouTube videos that you can e-mail to a friend). There are estimates that Americans are subjected to more than 2,000 advertisements (marketing media fragments) each day. There is certainly still a digital divide in the world, but the threshold for crossing that divide is increasingly and speedily being lowered every day. Cell phones with digital cameras are nearly a commodity in developed economies.

And finally, there is at least the potential for these ubiquitous fragments of reality to be political, or, in Sontag’s language, an aggression. (We all know the instances of an amateur video online wreaking havoc with a multinational corporation’s reputation and dignity.) In the realms of public relations and politics, these fragments we produce (the sound bites and video clips) are weapons in whatever battle in which we are engaged. (Senator George Allen, Republican from Virginia, in August of 2006 destroyed his political career by being captured on camera and YouTube referring to an interrogator in the audience as “macaca” — which may or may not have been racist; but the intention doesn’t matter — the video clip does.)

New media does not demand from us the sustained effort, the discipline of the Kirov ballet soloist. That dancer practices for years, most of his or her life, to deliver a sustained performance. There is an obvious and necessary physicality. The context of new media is entirely different; its impact and success does not rely on a lifetime of rehearsal and training and discipline; its reality is one of the perfect shot, the bull’s eye, the clip — the fragment — that tells. New media’s power is a different kind of precision — a precision of speed and unlimited ability to be reproduced. (The most accomplished Kirov dancer can only complete a have dozen double turns, and he cannot do that all that many times in his career. Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” on YouTube has been viewed nearly 20,000,000 times — and there is no reason it cannot be viewed 20,000,000 more times).

It’s been said many times: The Stone Age did not end because the earth ran out of stones. Humans discovered other more prom materials and technologies: iron — plastics — silicon. And even in the twenty-first century we have craftsmen and artists achieving astonishing accomplishments with stone (check out the work of British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy). The dancers of the Kirov, and their successors, will certainly be with us for the unforeseeable future. But in the future they will always be performing side-by-side, in our cultural mind space, with Chris Crocker and Robert Zemeckis.

If there is a danger — for professional communicators, for teachers, and for parents — in how we think about and enjoy media, it is only this. We need to remember, and to teach our children, the New does not replace the Old. The New adds on. Communications media is absolutely not, and never has been, a zero sum game. The cave paintings in Lascaux, France (from 32,000 years ago) have more than a little in common with the contemporary, anime-inspired work of Takashi Murakami. The muscle and sweat and discipline of the Kirov soloist is not replaced by the technological sophistication and imagination of the programmer and digital artist.

The new reality is the old reality. Just seen again. The old reality is not “the past.” It is the present reality, but our predecessors had their technology to capture it. And we are lucky to have it all.