LAST POST
LEO
July 29, 2007OBVIOUSLY
July 31, 2007One last post before I batten down the hatches and push through this last week of work on the east coast.
I wrote the following in response to TiCK’s commentary on the Fox News vs Channers video that’s been rolling round the internet.
TiCK posted:
I read that shit all the time and I don’t give it another thought, because, after all, it is the internet.
However, the second someone says something like that on television news it comes off as incredibly shocking and horrible (rightly so).
Here’s the difference:
On the internet, there are literally millions of things you could be doing at any one time. So in order to do anything effectively on the internet, you must be able to discern what is worth your attention and what isn’t. Call this “internet literacy”. Internet literacy is a special case of media literacy. In fact, I would say it is a more sophisticated form of media literacy since the internet is interactive. Not only do you need to discern the importance and meaning of particular items, but you also need to know how to appropriately respond to those items. If you are scrolling through hundreds of YouTube comments, one racist remark just fades into the background noise. It is barely worth attention, and not at all worthy of a response. Anyone who is internet literate knows this; otherwise, then the internet is just an overwhelming chaotic mess.
On television, however, FoxNews can only show you one particular thing at one particular time, so they decide what is worth your attention, and everything that is put on the screen is something they think you should see. This gives everything on television an exaggerated importance. A racist comment shown on TV isn’t just background noise, but it is the most important thing to consider at that moment, and everyone watching that station at that moment knows that thousands of other people are also considering that particular racist comment at that exact same time. Watching TV requires a kind of media literacy too, but it is a much more visceral kind of literacy. While the television viewer must also discern what is important from what isn’t, the TV takes a much more active role in helping the viewer make these decisions. Unlike the internet, television is designed to provoke emotional responses that are entirely disengaged from any kind of action or interaction; the viewer can remain almost entirely passive while they are deliberately fed all the information necessary to know what is going on.
The kind of situation shown in the FoxNews vs channers video is just a case where the internet is repackaged for the TV literate. Those of us who are literate in both media know how poor the translation is. Remember, the internet is young, so this kind of repackaging is still relatively new and rare, and it will take some time before TV producers figure out how to successfully translate between media. And that’s fine; its not a case of “old media vs new media”, any more than trying to turn a novel into a made for TV movie is a case of old vs new media. As the internet matures, there will be more people who are internet literate, and fewer people who are internet illiterate, and so these poor translations will be harder to justify and take seriously. And that will just take time.
