Adam Curtis on the struggle to tell the story on (and of) the web – Notes from The Story – Pt 2
7 responses to “Adam Curtis on the struggle to tell the story on (and of) the web – Notes from The Story – Pt 2”
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Thanks for posting this; is a great write-up. Adam Curtis’ work is consistently challenging.
I have too much to say about power apropos the web to coherently express here but these two posts from 2009 are relevant:
Panopticon singularity by me
Musings on Bruno Latour by ChloeHer observation that the web isn’t social, because it is neither subject nor object set me to thinking about the way certain people are attempting to define what the web ‘is’ from a particular ideological standpoint that best expresses their own desire for power. Problem is I don’t see that these people even grasp they are doing this or that this trick of perspective might be open to interpretation.
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Thanks, Mark.
Really like that you’re saying people aren’t necessarily aware of what they are doing in trying to cast the web as a social place in your post, Adam Curtis said that too, and also that he wasn’t making a value judgement on the status quo or capitalism, per se, just trying to get some kind of objective view of the world as it really is…
As I said, I just about managed to cling on to Adam’s train of thought at The Story, but I’m afraid I didn’t manage to repeat that feat when it came to your and Chloe’s line of argument.
I’d life to pick the conversation up in person, perhaps, but do you think you could explain it here or on your blog in layman’s terms? There were a few too many intellectual shibboleths for me to pick my way through some of it.
Once we get on to object/subject and some other ideas, there’s a fair bit of background/prior knowledge that’s needed to make sense of it. Similarly, could you be clearer about who certain people are?
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Sure, I should have been more specific. In my post I quote a chap who in a broadly pretty good piece talks about Enlightenment values, social control, etc. but then says he’s concerned about the collection of personal data today as being less about ‘customer empowerment’ and more about manipulating behaviour to grow market share. My point was that he is trapped by a viewpoint that sees only a power relation of supplier and consumer, two very specific roles that I do not personally identify with the definitions of that are implied in his post. This is a form of reductionism that is seen across a swathe of marketing sites, such as econsultancy, et. al. that aren’t about framing a broader philosophical debate, yet where judgements are made that have real implications for our view of the individual’s role in society mediated by the web. One could argue that these sites are not the appropriate forum for such consideration but, and I believe dangerously, the people framing these viewpoints can’t even consider that an alternate debate might exist.
I think you are teasing me in respect to saying Adam Curtis wasn’t making a value judgement about capitalism when you know that I am, something worth calling me out on if I appear to be claiming to make a balanced argument!
The capitalist experiment is not an end point, though our society seems to treat it as though it is. This is a fallacy and limits our perspective. Similarly we also treat the web as a ‘thing’, e.g. referring to the web ‘being social’ when, as Chloe points out, it cannot be because it has no subjective experience of its own (but might one day…!). One may argue this is pedantry, but through language we define our shared perception of the concept, e.g. the notion of the web as a ‘place’ and therefore limited by all our previous associations with what a physical place ‘means’.
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Well, Adam claimed he wasn’t necessarily making a value judgement, and I’m not sure he needs to. The revelation, or the implication, of how different things are to the way we think they are when it comes to the web is disruptive and challenging enough for starters. I think he *is* implicitly making one, but that’s a point of view.
I kind of get the point that the web can’t be social, but then I think of it was a place, as a mass of connections, as a platform, and in all of those things, since it is connecting people it can be social.
Thanks for coming back with more thoughts – they really are challenging me and I’m enjoying the conversation.
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I’m just wondering, what’s the significance of the “River Deep, Mountain High” video?
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@Baron – the video is explained in the these two bullet points:
* Adam talked about a project he worked on with a theatre group called Punch Drunk. He made a film of spliced together TV, film and news clips trying to capture a sense of what it was like to live through some momentous events in the 1960s in the United States.
* When we are living through events, they don’t make sense, they are confusing and disconnected – he said the films were emotional realism, representing the emotional experience of the 60s. I can’t find the exact piece of film he showed, but this is part of the same piece of work. -
Antony
I too was fascinated by the talk that Adam Curtis gave at The Story, and I do wish that he had elaborated more about his point regarding ‘long form content’.
As I had written a pretty disparaging blog piece on the subject of event hashtagging (yes I know I should get out more) before the event, I was fascinated by the fact that if one followed #thestory2011, the one remark that the ‘twittersphere’ leapt on from his talk was (and I paraphrase) ‘television has reached a dead end and become irrelevant’. It was tweeted, and retweeted, and retweeted, so that it eventually took over the comment stream.
Yet I remember this as one of Curtis few glib, throwaway remarks. It also struck me as a very good example of people doing exactly what he was railing against, namely the editing, cutting and pasting of a ‘soundbite’ of 140 characters which did not represent the main thrust of his talk at all.
Curtis has not written up his presentation as a blog post, which I think is a shame. Much is being made at the moment of the death of the blog, with it being replaced by people desperately pursuing online social validation through short form such as twitter.
If he took the time to write up his ‘long form’ argument, Curtis might draw attention to this depressing phenomenon. Of how the desire to share lucid, cogent argument through writing is in danger from the throwaway soundbite platforms.
Peter
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