about symbols, the habituation to images and the impulse to document

Yesterday, at the start of the "Real Virtualities" module we discussed the impact which media coverage of events of world-wide significance, such as the terrorist attacks from September 11, have on our perceptions of what is real. An interesting tendency that the text from Assignment 1 specifically refers to is the "habituation to images" which accompanies the process of dynamic circulation and rapid change of visual material in the coverage of important news. Initial shock and subsequent habituation are seen as the polar ends of the emotional gamut within which our responses to the television coverage of tragic events take place. In unison with this note acknowledging the lack of a single and universal reaction to images, and favouring instead a model of gradual transformation of attitudes, Patricia Mallencamp claims that while initially producing anxiety "television coverage of catastrophe also has a therapeutic effect"(quoted in King,2005).

 Another aspect of media coverage that the text focuses on, and that I would find interesting to examine in future research, is the gradual transformation of the image into a symbol; the point where an image begins to encompass much more than what it visually represents. Only two years after the terrorist attacks in the United States, to give just one example and one not necessarily linked to the imagery-theme, 9/11 entered as an official term the Longman Disctionary of Contemporary English. This rapid transformation of a whole event into a byword provides the clearest illustration of the act of symbolization that the text refers to. The notion of the symbol considered in this context is interesting. While on the one hand, the symbol (or the sign, as it is traditionally defined by semiotics) suggests an expanded vision of the fragment of reality provided by the visual representation of an event, on the other hand, it refers to the flattening of the image: a single shot encapsulates a whole tragic event. In the course of time, we remember the images from an event and we are able to instantaneously recognize an event from its visual representations, but the real-life experience (even our own) of how it all happened and how it all felt fades away. By becoming accustomed to the images that media provides us with we become less sensitive to the pain, to the tragedy, to the real-life aspects and implications that we found so striking when first experiencing the event. Without elaborating too much on this question in my blog I would just like to consider whether the "deadening of the initial impact" necessarily has to do with the repetitiveness of images and media or is rather a naturally occurring stage of reconciliation with the facts as they are. Then, as a counterexample, the 9/11 Survivor game (www.selectparks.net/911survivor) pops into my mind: it turns into a game what only recently it was too hard to even talk about.

During our first class of this module we also considered important to examine the means by which media determines the proximity between news consumer and news material: how it influences our definition of ourselves as either participants or spectators in respect to the material we observe. I would be more interested to examine a different position and a different stage of the event: I would like to consider the very moment of action and the ones involved in it. This, I believe, is the moment most revealing of the scale and nature of the impact which media has on us. What is it that makes us think about media in moments of shock and of danger? What is it that makes us want to film (to document) an event while our life or the lives of those around us are endangered? Both in the attacks from 9/11 and in the bombings in the London Tube, people involved in the event either directly or as witnesses filmed it with their mobile phones. Only minutes after escaping death by miracle and witnessing the death of tens of others, survivors in the London underground filmed the scene of the tragedy while making their way out through the tunnel.  It is in these moments that our involvement with media becomes most apparent. Media makes us think about media.

Of course there are important ethical and moral dimensions that can be considered here but it is the very impulse to film in moments of shock and of danger that, I think, deserve our attention. In it interesting in this context to note how the very notion of "being informed" expands with the development of media and its attempts to achieve immediacy in which it increasingly relies on eye-witnessed accounts and encourages amateur journalism. To what extent and how exactly does the filming of death ( and very often the individualized death of recognizable people such as those jumping from the burning towers and those dieing helplessly in the underground) enhances our knowledge of a given event? How is it useful as information? Is there an ethical and respectful distance to death which should be kept in providing visual representations of tragic events? I feel that through the popularization of "subjective" material as valued information disseminated along with the materials of traditional press death often becomes a curiosity.