How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle
A narcissist enjoys punishment as much as praise. Maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word, but criticism is preferable to no attention at all. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a classic example of our country’s narcissistic impulse. Attention was never on the Iraqi prisoner-victims. Instead we focused on how bad this made us look. How bad we were to let those bad people move up to high ranks.
The iconic photos were all about America — about us. And after several years, there is no singular image of an Iraq victim — out of the context of American imprisonment — that captured our attention the same way.
The Abu Ghraib images created a remote sense of guilt — anger more than sympathy. If the attention is on our own terribleness that means we can change (or pretend to change.) In the end, justice was carried out on those bad apple soldiers (or seemed that way.)
Compare that to the unblinking attention the famous image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc requires of a viewer. The photograph told the world the only way they could correct this wrongdoing and put an end to her suffering, was ending the Vietnam war entirely.
There are many photographs of the Iraq war as powerful as that picture of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but none has marked the public consciousness the same way. I bet most people couldn’t recall a single image of a victim other than the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think that has to do with how we are adjusting to new ways of reading news.
The shift toward Internet as a primary news source didn’t cause the Iraq war, but certainly made it more convenient. You don’t have to eat your peas before desert, you don’t have to sit through fifteen minutes of world news to find out what celebrity got married today.
Maybe it is knowing that we can always access information about Iraq that keeps us from doing so in the present. If it were that ABC News only showed Iraq footage at 6 pm every night, maybe we’d be more likely to tune in because then the footage would feel like an event — something we had to know, that we could only glean within a certain time frame. Without an event framing it, the sense “I should watch this now” is lost to the understanding, “I can watch this later.”
The problem I see in terms of editing online content seems to be the absence of “frames.” Time frames as well as frames as a metaphor: ways of segmenting information so it doesn’t overlap with other content or ideas, complementary or not. Creating scarcity when there is abundance and understanding how to work with the desire that grows in anticipation of something.
I can’t remember the comedian — I want to say someone Saturday Night Live affiliated — but he was making a point about repetition in sketch comedy. You tell a joke once and it’s funny (well, sometimes, in the case of SNL.) Tell it again, it’s not funny. Tell it a third time it’s funny again. The next several times it’s really not funny, but if you keep repeating it after ten times and keep going, each of those times the joke is funny (this is, of course, a total perversion of the law of diminishing marginal returns.)
Art filmmakers are aware of the boredom they inflict when they hold a certain shot just a moment too long. Horror films especially are cruel games of anticipation. It is agonizing to watch the girl go down the steps to the basement tiptoe after tiptoe sooooo slowwwly.
The great change we are waiting for, the one that will make newsworthy information part of one’s daily media diet is online content that will acknowledge and work around a user’s lack of patience. This means creating an event out of what is being presented.
The challenge is designing a news website that encourage immediate and full attention. The Washington Post’s web chats with authors and public figures is a good example of this. The opportunity to communicate directly with a person of prominence cannot be done later, nor can one participate in a chat with only half his attention. I would also point to the book readings and events staged in Second Life, if Second Life didn’t seem so pet rock to me. A smart website would start using video conferencing software to have its writers interact with readers. The trick is not to archive the footage immediately. Make viewers mark in their calendars for it. Make them miss it if they miss it.
I really think a return to live chat is where web 3.0 (or whatever it is called) is going. Maybe we’ll also see a move toward call-in online video. Live email, instant messaging, and live Skype chats with the hosts.
Images by Yang Shaobin.
Update 7/23/08: Ekstasis made this great point:
This is why ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), like the famous I Love Bees, are so incredibly effetive, the reason I am so drawn to the old telephone poetry projects like Dial-A-Poem. Such projects make the passive recipient of information into an active participant…not “participant” in the more commonly used internet sense, not a creator of information, but a physically participatory comsumer of the given media. ARGs turn information consumption into a game, or at the very least an adventure. Something like Dial-A-Poem, or in the same way a radio call in show, turns the comsumption of media into a community actvity. It takes one outside of themselves into the very over-rated but nevertheless important realm of external reality. Everybody loves it, when they are participating. Everybody forgets about it when they go looking for “the next big thing.”
It’s true, the most exciting media right now is game-related. It will be interesting to see how the New York Times or others tries to implement games with their media (as I’m sure they will.) Wouldn’t it be great to get a free subscription to the Sunday paper if you get the highest score on a news quiz? Things like that will make such a difference.
Looking over this post again, which I didn’t really expect anyone to pay attention to (ha!) it seems like two different points and discontinuous. But the point of my intro on Abu Ghraib is that the one detail about the Iraq war people really know about and fixate on is more about us than about the Iraqis. It’s kind of like, if the only thing people knew about Vietnam were My Lai.
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One Response to “How to Frame the Internet: Attention and the New News Cycle”
Posted by: ed - 07/27/2008
I’m very curious if you’ve managed to see Errol Morris’s latest documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” in light of this distinction. Morris juxtaposes the American “guilt” over Abu Ghraib almost exclusively in the way that the soldiers chronicled their experiences through photographs — offering thumbs up signs, easily adapting into the role of chroniclers over humanists, the like. And yet the one aspect of Morris’s film that doesn’t sit well with me is the way that Morris is somewhat complicit in this American mentality. He took all the subjects — including Lynndie England — away from their native environments, paid them money, and filmed them in Cambridge. This struck me as giving into this selfsame American-centric urge of distance and solipsism that he was there to recontextualize. And it says something very troubling indeed about the American psyche that the encouraged way of documenting our present is through some exclusive engagement with the self, as opposed to some method which encourages our empathy and attempts to expand upon our ignorance.
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