Entries Tagged 'iconography' ↓

Fun with Obama iconography:

Based on their latest cover, here’s a short list of who Rolling Stone thinks Barack Obama is:

–The totally awesome, glowing, superhero/savior spawn of Jesus and Superman

–A dewy Venus, majestically stepping forth from a serene ocean mist, but, like also a guy who’s running for president.

–Not just the president of the ShinySuit 3000 Club For Men, but also a client.

(via the BlogFather, Glenn Reynolds)

p.s. I haven’t check out Tim Noah’s place to see if he’s added it to his Obama Messiah Watch series.

Those of you who are interested in going deep in the weeds of Obama Messiah iconography should visit this blog.

Does it mean something that even the “Obama Girl” didn’t bother to vote?

On Tuesday night, City Room ran into Ms. Ettinger at an election-watching party in Greenwich Village and asked how things went at the polls.

“I didn’t get a chance to vote today because I’m not registered to vote in New York,” she said.

So where is Obama Girl registered to vote?
“New Jersey.”

Um, but didn’t New Jersey also hold a primary?

True. The problem, she explained, was that she was sick in New York City and was unable to get back across the Hudson River to the polls in Jersey City.

“I was in Arizona for the Super Bowl — every time I get in the airplane I get sick,” said Ms. Ettinger, who did manage to make it to the Svedka Fembot election returns party at Chinatown Brasserie at Lafayette and Great Jones streets.

Okay, maybe the Obama girl isn’t a good example of the flakiness factor evident in Obama’s supporters. But what about the very respectable Kevin Drum, who voted for Obama and then found himself hoping that Hillary would win [e.a.]?

And although Obama obviously made up a huge amount of ground over the past two weeks, what it felt like to me was disappointment. He seemed to be coming on so strong that it seemed inevitable he’d win one or two of the big Hillary states — or at least make them into close races — but he didn’t. In the end, Hillary won California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts by double digit margins. It really seemed to take a lot of wind out of the Obama surge.

The other thing inside my head that I didn’t expect was that as the results came in, I found myself sort of rooting for Hillary. Why? Buyer’s remorse? Rooting for the underdog? Guilt for having “betrayed” her by voting for Obama?

Outsize, overinflated expectations—like the insane hype created by the Obama campaign and its friends and supporters in the media—can easily lead to crushing disappointment (and even more voter apathy than the “hopeful” started out with).

I predict that young people will not be inspired to help “change” America. (For one thing: where would they go to effect that change? It’s not as if Obama has suggested, as JFK did, that his supporters actually give something of themselves to their country. So far, all the contributions have been to his campaign. What does that do to bring about “change” in America?

And that’s just one of the risks of running a vapid “inspirational” campaign. The other risk is that you’ll have much more battle-hardened and much less mushy folks, like, say, Jeff Jarvis and me (here and here and here and here, for example)—not to mention Bill Clinton—to remind you that Obama is selling snake oil:

His supporters, including many New York friends of mine, buy his image and believe he is less political and that he is indeed different. I think he’s more political and his campaign is the greatest example of the selling of the president I’ve yet seen. To state it harshly, I say that relying on these stock phrases — believing that we are going to swallow empty oratory about “change” punctuated with chants of “yes we can” — is a cynical political act.

But then again, I can’t argue with the fact that it’s working. It’s working with voters and it’s certainly working with the media, which have given Obama more attention through much of the campaign.

It worked for a while. But the media didn’t give the whole picture, as this picture posted by Ben Smith attests:

Note the many empty seats.

You won’t see this in most of the news photography, because photographers are packed into press risers, opposite whatever backdrop — a crowd, a flag — the campaign prefers.

But while Obama has held some very large rallies in some very small cities — 14,000 in Boise! — there have also been quite a few empty seats at some of the bigger venues.

Does it come as a surprise to you that the media and the campaigns worked together to create the impression of a “surge” for Obama? It shouldn’t.

I boldly predict no mo’ Mo for Barack Obama.

But I could be wrong … because hope springs eternal!

full disclosure: I voted for Bill Clinton twice, and for Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate, and for Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination yesterday. This despite the fact that I am no fan of the Clintons.

On the other hand, I don’t expect to be a fan of my president. I expect my president to work hard at the business of our nation so that I and my friends and family can go about our lives doing the things we like to do, and go to sleep at night knowing that a responsible person is overseeing the big, scary mess that is the United States of America.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

The mysterious disappearance of Madeleine McCann has become an unparalleled worldwide super-spectacular media sensation, and a lurid tabloid nightmare for her parents. The Sydney Morning Herald dubs it a “trial by new media” and a “vicious affair.”

Describing a chain of events that started with the British tabloid media “invading” the Portuguese town where the girl disappeared, the Herald suggests that the Portuguese authorities then leaked false stories about the parents in relatiation for the British tabs’ excesses.

British tabloids mocked many of these stories yet, hedging their bets, also reported them. The most lurid example was the Daily Express, which ran a headline, “Gerry may not be the father”, above a story that began: “The smear campaign in Portugal against the McCanns continued yesterday…”

The resulting spiral - unsourced British reports of unsourced Portuguese reports - created a perfect storm: huge media fascination with almost no facts to feed it.

Hmmm. This seems to focus the blame on the media. As I recall, however, the parents launched an enormous PR campaign across Europe and Britain to focus attention on their daughter almost immediately after she went missing. I wrote about it here in May, and also posted this astonishing picture, taken at a soccer stadium:

In May, writing about other abductees who were also (vaguely) in the news and who got almost no attention by comparison (such as the British journalist Alan Johnston and the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari), I tried to explain the appeal of this particular story and the hold that stories can have over us:

… I’m not going to lecture you about how trivial this one abducted child is compared to the other abducted people in the news that we could be concerned about … Nope, this is not a guilt trip about the geopolitical messages we should be listening to (although we should be listening to them, of course). …

This is just a reminder of the extraordinary, magical, mystical power of [certain] stories to capture our imagination in a way that nothing else can—that is, to capture our imagination and attention in a way that influences us. …

Most of us will never run for office in ultra-violent Colombia. Most of us will never serve in Iraq. Most of us will never report from war-torn Gaza. Most of us will never have to toe a precarious line between being a free American scholar and a devoted Persian daughter who goes home to totalitarian Iran twice a year to visit her 93-year-old mother.
But which of us cannot put himself or herself in the shoes of Madeleine McCann’s parents and which of us does not remember being a helpless child?

Surely there’s a lesson here for all marketers (of anything, whether product or idea). The lesson is this: nothing beats a great story (in which category I include heartbreaking, sad, horrifying, etc.). We will give you our momentary attention pretty readily if you make enough noise (for example: if you say something totally outrageous, like what Jimmy Carter said about Tony Blair the other day, we’ll notice). But if you want to get through to us, give us a story we can relate to at gut level.

Give us a story that no amount of cynicism or jadedness or ironic detachment can protect us from and we are your slaves.

Indeed, a lot of people became slaves to that story. The Herald continues [e.a.]:

The McCanns are partly to blame. Well-educated doctors, they have hired spin doctors and tried to harness the media to their cause. Their stated reason is understandable: they want to keep the focus on finding their daughter.

But the journalist Matthew Parris wrote in The Spectator last week that their savvy media strategy - down to Gerry McCann’s daily blog and constant photos of Kate McCann clutching Madeleine’s pink cuddle-cat - was starting to hurt them. With both reporters and the public alert and resistant to spin, the McCanns had proved “unwisely media-wise”

That seems to be an understatement, considering the backlash that has swept over the McCanns. The Herald’s James Button makes an important point [e.a.]:

[W]e have learnt a few things about the media and their relationship with the public - all of us.

I do not mean simply mainstream media, but the online world of websites, bloggers and instant public feedback. The old and new media have not just reported the McCann story. They have changed it.

Indeed, the media became an actor in the story and nudged it along on an arc that no one could predict and, worse for the McCanns, that no one could control. As they inevitably lost control of their story, it overtook them.

The harsh truth is that when you live by media, you walk the razor’s edge. The rewards of launching a PRopaganda ^TM campaign are potentially very high, as Former Spook reminds us here, discussing the media consultant hired by the diaper-wearing Astro-nut Lisa Nowak:

In a “sample” chapter from the book (posted on her firm’s website), Mackenzie claims that her efforts helped a convicted killer avoid the death penalty; more astonishingly, her fees in that case were paid for by the taxpayers of Florida, after a public defender successfully petitioned to court to add a p.r. specialist to the defense team.

However, in this era of “celebrity justice,” Nowak’s decision to hire a spin doctor is a shrewd move, indeed. The disgraced former astronaut understands that a skilled defense lawyer, aided by an equally competent “image” specialist, can go a long way toward an acquittal, or at least, a hung jury. In the case of Lisa Nowak, Mr. Lykkebak is already hammering away at the credibility of police officers who handled her arrest.

But the risks of things spinning out of control are potentially greater, as the McCanns can now attest, as sympathy for their loss has now apparently turned to revulsion at their very presence:

The online public, however, has been far more hostile. When the Daily Mail last week ran an article, “McCanns’ DNA dossier to demolish Portuguese police’s ‘pathetic’ evidence”, the 60 readers who emailed feedback to this positive story came out two to one against the McCanns.

Evi Labi of London wrote: “It’s terrible for a child to disappear but would it be possible to get some peace from the McCanns’ organised and very well-orchestrated publicity?”

A newspaper in the McCanns’ county of Leicestershire had to close an online discussion forum because of vicious comments about the couple. More than 17,000 people signed an online petition asking social workers to find the McCanns unfit parents to look after their two-year-old twins. An internet poll found that only 20 per cent of Britons thought they were completely innocent.

The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan once came close to understanding (though she didn’t use these words) that one category of infotainment—in this case, celebrity photography—isn’t all bad.

Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine. …

Nevertheless, Heffernan proclaimed her guilt about indulging in what she considered a lowly pastime: gawking at celebrities.

Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances.

I wouldn’t want to get all meta or postmodernist on her, but in fact Heffernan is strengthening certain skills. Media savviness may be the quintessential skill of our era. The people enjoying its advantages, if indeed they are advantages, are those who learn to manipulate the media the better to please audiences. Surely this cannot come as a surprise to Heffernan.

I also find it curious that Heffernan continues to flog her own guilt over her terminal lowbrow-ness while Perez Hilton, “the reigning online gossip maven,” one of Heffernan’s interview subjects, explains exactly how, as a practitioner, he ensnares her in the guilt trap [e.a.]:

“I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”

He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”

Despite even this acknowledgment that the photographs are shrewdly manipulated in order tap into exactly that place where Heffernan responds to the endeavor as deep play, Heffernan continues to feel guilty about her secret—until she meets another high-minded person like herself slumming at a certain online site:

[L]ast summer … I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.

“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.

“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, …“But this is fascinating.”

And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.

Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites. [e.a.]

Yes indeedy, we are.

Also, Heffernan should get a clue: there’s an entire area of cultural studies populated by “aca-fans,” like the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who’s apparently being referred to as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century.

You can check out the confessions of other aca-fans Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee on Jenkins’s blog, beginning here:

[Kaplan]: I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children’s and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don’t watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people’s) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don’t read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women’s literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I’m fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don’t listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow.

This message has been approved by Committee to Clarify That We Have Identified the Enemy:

Newt Gingrich and AlaskaReport.com get today’s prize for this photograph:

For no reason that I can discern, that photograph (which runs without a caption or a credit) accompanies an article about Gingrich lashing out at Gonzales:

Gingrich called the situation a “mess” caused by Gonzales and his staff. “I cannot imagine how he is going to be effective for the rest of this administration,” Gingrich said. “I think the country would be much better served to have a new team at the Justice Department.”

Gingrich has said he will decide later this year whether to seek the he Republican presidential nomination for 2008.

Well, yeah, we get that. What we don’t get is why AlaskaReport.com runs the story alongside a picture of Newt in a yarmulke.

How many tennis fans does it take for the bidding to get absurd for the as-yet-unwritten memoir of Andre Agassi?

I dunno how many threw their hats into the ring, but Knopf’s Sonny Mehta won the final face-off. His opponent was HarperCollins’s David Hirshey.

I like tennis as much as any “tennis orphan” can love the game—that is to say, I hated it when my father tried to get me to take up his passion, but I will never forget Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980 or McEnroe vs. Connors at the U.S. Open late that same summer. I appreciate Agassi’s stick-to-it-iveness, but I will always be a McEnroe fan, because his game had an unequaled inherent drama (driven by his unpredictable emotions—and I don’t mean the “temper tantrums”; I mean the pre-volcanic rumbles deep beneath the surface) and because of his masterful touch.

That said … whoever wrote the proposal for the Agassi book is aiming to give Bono a run for his money in the Most Honorable Celebrity in the World Sweepstakes, ’cause you’re there at the creation of a new myth—excuse me: I mean, narrative—about Andre Agassi.

[[See Joshua Gamson's book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I'm coming from with my celebrity obsession. It's the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

Back to that Agassi image-in-the-making:

“I recently had the privilege of meeting with top executives and editors from eight publishing houses,” Agassi said in a statement released Wednesday by Knopf. “Everyone was very impressive, but in the end, I felt the strongest connection with (Knopf head) Sonny Mehta and his colleagues at Knopf.”

“Andre Agassi is one of the world’s most popular and admired figures,” Mehta said in a statement. “He has lived an extraordinary life, and he has a great story to tell — an inspiring story of determination, competition, and what it takes to become one of the greatest athletes of our time. Additionally, he is someone who has chosen to use his success as an instrument for change in the world.”

Galley Cat’s Ron Hogan got there way before me, but: Advantage, Agassi.