Chapter four of How To See the World by Nicholas Mirzoeff deals with the screen and its impact on visual culture today. Starting with the evolution of modern film spurred on by the widespread use of the train during the industrial revolution, the chapter takes us through the evolution of cinema, to television, and then to the modern social network, which is centered around personal devices and private screens. Through this story, the chapter focuses on four main ideas:

1. Trains were a powerful influence in the beginnings of cinema and the railroad continued to shape the progression of potion pictures
2. After the invention of a global broadcasting system, communication specialized to allow us to customize our specific media diets and choose what we do and do not see
3. The screen and the network associated with it is integrating itself into our lives and changing our very society in radical ways
4. Technology and networks impose a view of the world on our lives, based on tailored preferences and filters

 

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A Summary:

Mirzoeff begins this chapter with an exploration of the beginnings of film. As he mentions, the 18-1900s were full of advancements in moving image, such as Edison’s Kinetoscope, Le Prince’s moving image strip, and the Lumière Brothers’ films of trains and workers leaving factories, which heralded the age of modern cinema. During the industrial revolution, industry created a new definition of time and space which greatly influenced moving image. This was due to train networks, which changed the world and its interconnectivity.

In fact, Mirzoeff continues, the railway created a massive change in the world. For example, Karl Marx used the train as a metaphor for modernity and his communist philosophy, time zones still in place today were first created so that trains could be timetabled correctly, and the ability to travel for work created a world-wide incremental time system and promoted the shift to long working hours.

However, quite apart from this, the train directly influenced modern cinematography. The first ‘motion pictures’ were inspired by the view from train windows, and even the making of films was heavily influenced by the train. For example, filmmakers began to use “dollies”, which cameras mounted to movable tracks to achieve the effect of motion. The Cold War brought about a shift to the train as a setting of films as well, transitioning into a ‘closed world’ and environment, in which only a set number of actions and options are available to characters.

Mirzoeff continues by stating that trains are now used significantly less in Western film because of a reduced dependency on trains, particularly in the United States, but also because of their historical context in the Holocaust, when they transferred people to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. However, in Asian countries such as China and Japan, trains are still vital to daily life and work, and so feature heavily in Asian films, for example, in Wong Kar-wai’s film 2048.

A new era of constant and shared broadcasts seemed to be emerging, marking a new era in world history, something Marshall McLuhan termed “the global village.” The idea behind the global village was that television, or “electronic extension” had brought humanity so close together that the entire globe shared similar news and experiences, becoming, in essence, a village. This village was united by a common broadcast content and the ability to see things at once that were never before possible, such as Edward R. Murrow showing the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time as the Bay Bridge in San Francisco on television, which broke the boundaries of time and distance in a way that was not possible with the human eye alone. This era of the global village sharing and watching world-changing events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, lasted from Kennedy’s death to the 9/11 attacks in the US. Other media has since taken over, and news is available through many different online sources, which everyone can see just as quickly.

Mirzoeff continues the chapter with a very important modern distinction. Broadcasting, in the televised sense, is now more about content than about form. It has changed over the years from a medium in which viewers did not have a say in what was being presented, but had wide and cheap access to it, to a multi-channel presentation based on content, like kid’s cartoons or sports. The latter development is called “narrow casting” and is, in turn, expensive and limited, with an audience that has fairly common interests. This has led to a situation in which we are fed information which suits our unique dispositions and interests, whether politically, like on Info Wars or Fox News, commercially like Amazon, or socially, like Facebook.

In the modern world, the screen is now becoming a constant in our daily lives. Whether it’s TV or the internet, phones, tablets, computers, we are always somehow online, all over the world. To make all of this possible, major reconstruction was required, especially in the U.S., which subsequently formed a “‘grid’, suggesting a uniform and even distribution of service” and, as stated by Lewis Mumford, an ‘invisible city’, without which, modern cities could not exist. Accessing the internet has also taken a turn for the near magical with the fibre-optic cable, which transmits data through light rather than electric signals, and can manage data and quality significantly better than the previous wire could. These fibres are networked across oceans to different parts of the world, and are the major source of internet traffic, all made visible and distributable by the use of screens.

However, there is a drawback to this interconnectedness. With so much noise around us, novelist David Foster Wallace argues that we essentially have an information overload every time we look at a screen, and that we seem always to be missing some piece of information, simply because there is so much and because we cannot physically take it all in.

Screens which are home to multiple simultaneous sources of information are difficult to use if the user is not an expert, and so prompts us to think in different ways, similarly to the manipulation and control video game players must learn to have over their virtual worlds. However, while the new screen-based world gives us the ability to filter through what we want to see and to act accordingly, it also controls you to an extreme degree, through parameters, search history, and essentially anything that can be calculated, like likes and retweets. All of this has dramatically changed the way the world works from its previous norms. Work is now done 24/7 because the internet makes it possible to reach you constantly, people become very conscious of debt, and war is no longer between nations or leaders, but between insurgents and rebels.

In addition to the radical changes started and perpetuated by the screen-based world, technology and screens are now entering into our personal lives, as shown by the Google Glass, and also widens the gap between the wealthiest individuals in the world and those who are not so fortunate. Technology is becoming ever more intrusive and ubiquitous, and with this new era of the screen implanted into the very fabric of society, as Mirzoeff says, it will “constitute a new digital divide.”

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A Commentary:

I found this section to be interesting mainly in the realms of perception and the modern network. There are so many philosophical aspects to uncover here, and everything is so amazingly interconnected, between people, between places, and even between eras as you trace the archetypal human thread through past centuries.

1. Choreography

As Mirzoeff explains in this chapter, even early cinema was highly choreographed; “visual surprises” seemed to be arranged for to hold the audience’s attention. This is extremely similar to modern day, and even to later in the chapter, when the author describes the society of control as measuring our successes through likes and retweets on social media – something that, as established in “Your Majesty: How to See the World Chapter One”, is largely a performance for the benefit of the viewer. So then the question becomes, like edited photos in fashion magazines, why on Earth do we still allow ourselves to be entranced by a plotline and feel along with the characters, even though we understand those on screen to be acting and we know the plotline is fake? Is it because of mirror neurons or the screenwriting of incredible films? Or are we as humans just inclined to forget and visualize another world, to fall in love with a fairytale? I would argue all three.

Standardization

The standard and globalized time network created by the train is very indicative of society today. While it has always been advisable to be on the same page, standardization, in factories, schools (via standardized tests), and in the workplace is especially prevalent to the modern, globalized era (the first corporate example I think of is banking across the world). The question now becomes, what happens when people un-standardize the world and become more and more individual, like artists and the current push towards uniqueness and individuality that did not exist thirty years ago?

Work and the Exploration of an Attitude

The train and the internet make traveling to work and working around the clock so easy, you no longer have an excuse not to do so. The motto in our current society seems to be that “when work can be done, it should be done” but things can always be done. Whether they should be or not in the interest of those working is another story. This would be a very interesting topic to explore in the way of design, and is also, I believe, an important social issue, in that the well-being of the people behind the work is very rarely fully appreciated or represented.

Immersive Experience

The idea of the immersive experience is a very interesting one. How can film, sound, and activity create this experience for the user? Is this, in essence, what UX design and websites seek to do? Make you forget all else but what you are looking at?

The Mechanical Eye

• (In relation to Dziga Vertov’s vision of motion film as an experience encompassing more than just sight and showing people things they would normally not be able to see) “…Vertov came to imagine the camera as a new form of sensory organization as a whole, affecting more than just sight. This is the meaning of his famous punning declaration in 1919: ‘I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine show you the world as only I can see it’.” (p.137)

Vertov’s statement that the mechanical eye show the world as only it can see it is a very powerful statement. This is similar to the idea of perception in two ways; first, the camera shows us aspects of the world which we may not be able to see ourselves, and secondly, the camera almost always shows a different photograph from what our eyes have seen and brains have perceived. In this way too, everyone’s sight of even a photograph is different, and the camera speaks only from how it can see through its digital or analogue (mechanical) function. So again, is this version of the world closer to the truth of what we see? Or does no one really see the truth, but rather a truth of a whole host of ideas and perceptions? Do we then create our own truths?

Connotation Is Key

It is insane and incredible how perceptions and ideas can change so much with one stroke of history. The train turned from a symbol of progress, work, and invention to one of horror and haunting, the swastika turned from a symbol of peace to a symbol of hate, the pentagram turned from a pagan symbol to a ‘demon’ one, etc. This just goes to show how much perception and association can alter the view of an object, an item, or an idea. In a phrase, connotation is key. An interesting exploration of this topic would be the varying perceptions of individuals worldwide of the same symbol, and how design can change and fluctuate to create a cohesive message in different forms, corresponding to the varying language of design in each area of the world. Design for the world is almost like translation between different dialects of an artistic language.

World Knowledge and World Ignorance

Mirzoeff mentions in this chapter that it is Chinese workers who build the laptops and electronics we use, perhaps to write about the fall of the train in the modern area, who still use trains at an incredibly high rate. In a Eurocentric world, what does it mean to us and our perception in the UK, US, and EU that we do not consider this in our daily lives? That we do not know about this? This may be part or what we train ourselves to see in regards to our specialized channels of seeing, as mentioned later in the chapter. We do not want to see the ugly truth behind what we enjoy, and ignoring it is infinitely easier than fixing it. So we just drown ourselves in our lives and let it be.

Cumulative Perception

Now that we all have tailored channels and social media angles, what does that mean for our cumulative knowledge and our cumulative perception? If we have all been told wildly different accounts of the same story, for example the difference in the coverage of the Trump election between MSNBC and Fox News, who knows the ‘truth’? This may deepen the divide between people and lead to greater gaps and animosities, simply due to the media diet of each individual, and what each individual perceives as the ‘truth’.

Archetypes and Throwbacks

Throughout this chapter, I noticed a few points which relayed back to previous chapters and ideas. Firstly, the archetype. What was the train in influence became the internet. Everything moves forward, the archetype spins on, just as it did in the first chapter explaining the evolution of the Selfie and in the second and third with their respective themes.

Secondly, with the mention of Google Maps in this chapter, I found it truly incredible how the world shifted from the view of the Blue Marble to the possibility of searching every spot on Earth through Google Maps, bringing the extraordinary into the realm or normality. This is a very constant theme with the advent of the internet and in our own personal lives; it is also a very relevant design question: how do you fight the boredom bred by the ease of having the extraordinary of the world at your fingertips and create excitement again? How do you make people look? I am immediately reminded of an acquaintance from Europe who stayed with my family in New Jersey, and for whom nothing we presented was exciting or incredible, not even New York City. This kind of boredom with the world is something I fear many people now exhibit, especially because of the ‘high’ of video games or simply the ability to comfortably know everything from the internet and fear venturing outside to discover something new. This is a feeling I definitely want to awaken in others. The world is a beautiful juxtaposition of love and hate and beauty and gashes and progress and fighting for progress to be made. Go see whatever you can of it.

Lastly, Mirzoeff kept referring to the military and military inventions coming before or influencing modern, commonly-available technology. Again, this throws back to the previous chapter; much of the idea behind internet and screens was developed by the military. War is horrible, but it is a very good propellant for invention, especially when lives, countries, pride, and power hang in the balance.

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Notable Quotes:

The World and Moving Image

• “The human eye retains an image for an instant after it perceives it, a phenomenon known as the persistence of vision. The result is that if more than 12 frames are shown in a second, an illusion of movement occurs.” (p.131)
• “Since 1895, we have watched the world as moving pictures on screen. The world we see has in turn been shaped and ordered by the way we see it, from film to television and today’s digital networks.” (p.131)
• “The difference is that whereas we once had to go somewhere specific to watch a screen, the screens now go everywhere we do.” (p.131-132)

The Industrial Revolution and the Revolution of the Train

• “…the industrial time and space created by factory work and the railway produced a way to see the world of its own: moving pictures.” (p.132)
• “The apparently simple fact of film shoots at a factory and train station marks the convergance of several key forces of modernity…That is to say, the railways were world-creating, just as today’s combination of financial globalization and networked computers has created the 24/7 constantly-updating-and-refreshed world in its own image.” (p.134)
• “The railway created a new world economy which produced its own time and space; this has been seen as leading to the invention of moving images. The first moving images were, after all, those that people saw from the windows of trains (Schivelbusch 1987).” (p.134)

• “In short, for Marx, the human mind was a train running on a set of economic tracks.” (p.135)
• “The railway changed the way people lived, creating its own time and space.” (p.135)
• “Another way to describe this would be to say that time before the train was analogue, meaning that it calibrated evenly with each place’s relation to the sun. Afterwards, it became digital, meaning that it shifted in arbitrary units of an hour (like the one or the zero in the computer).” (p.135)

The Camera and the Train

• “Both the scenes filmed by the Lumières depicted a tremendous and visible imposition of abstract order into time and space.” (p.136)
• “Our bodies adjust to the rhythm and demands of the machine.” (p.136)
• (In relation to Dziga Vertov’s vision of motion film as an experience encompassing more than just sight and showing people things they would normally not be able to see) “…Vertov came to imagine the camera as a new form of sensory organization as a whole, affecting more than just sight. This is the meaning of his famous punning declaration in 1919: ‘I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine show you the world as only I can see it’.” (p.137)
• (In relation to Vertov taking film to the Soviet people on Agit trains) “In moments such as this, the train, visual culture and the ideal of the modern interacted to create new ways of seeing the world. Train made visible worlds: worlds to live in, to work in, and to imagine yourself in.” (p.138)
• “In the Cold War era (1945-1991)…love and murder now took place on the train. Cinema had moved from being what was seen on from the train to being set on the train.” (p.138)
• “These were metaphorical depictions of what historian Paul Edwards had called the ‘closed world’ imagined by the Cold War, ‘within which every event was interpreted as part of the titanic struggle between the superpowers’ (1996). Edwards stresses that ‘metaphors, technique, and fiction’ were just as important as weapons systems and computers in constructing the hyperbolic belief that every aspect of global life could be monitored and controlled. Cinema used the train as a key metaphor for closed worlds and made them believable.” (p.138)
• (In relation to Shoah, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, and The Reader in the context of the train and the Holocaust) “In each film, trains play a key role. The train’s connection to the violence of modern Europe is more visible now than any concept of it as an icon of progress.” (p.144)

The Closed World

• (In regards to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) “What matters now is what happens within the closed world of the train, not what we can see from it. The closed world became the preferred environment of the ‘male gaze’, discussed in Chapter 1. The male characters move the plot forward but they are able to do so only within the limited options presented.” (p.141)
• (In regards to La Chinoise, directed by Jean-Luc Godard) “Inter-titles spell out the French phrase en train de, meaning in the middle of something. The pun is intended to show that the train is a space in between, a space between the infrastructure of technology (the tracks), the superstructure of ideas (the carriage space) and the actions that connect them. That space is a visual rhyme for cinema itself. When we are en train de we are in the closed world created by the overlap between cinematic and railway networks.” (p.141)
• (In relation to the Hong Kong film 2046) “The train is the closed ‘vehicle’ by which all these layers of meaning are connected and it’s also the place in which memory happens or is regained. This stylized set of connections depict the afterlife of the closed world in the last remaining Communist nation, a condition in which it is not so dead as undead, dead and alive at once.” (p.146)

The Global Village

• “One of the product of the Cold War closed world was, oddly enough, the concept of the global village created by mass media. In a village, everyone knows everyone else’s business and so the global village would be the ultimate closed world.” (p.146)
• “While satellites were primarily military, they had enormous effects of everyday life. Events could now be shown on television nationally and internationally in real time.” (p.147)
• “The global audience, all watching the same events, using the same broadcast television pictures and coming to a collective viewpoint on them, seemed to mark a new direction in world history. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called this collective viewing the ‘global village’. He felt that ‘the total electric field culture of our time’ had recreated the conditions of what he called ‘tribal societies’ (1962). For the electronic extension of the senses had reduced space to such an extent that the world was now a village.” (p.148)
• “In short, to quote his [McLuhan’s] famous phrase, ‘The medium is the message’. It was the way media work rather than what they were doing that mattered.” (p.148)
• “So in the course of just fifty years, watching a world-changing event became a routine consequence of technology, available to hundreds of millions of people who might have little understanding of how that technology works.” (pp.148-149)

The Tsunami

• “…whether by choice or not, we see a version of events that makes no effort to be comprehensive. All of us with access to social networking choose a set of media sources with which we are sympathetic, a process that media scholar Richard Grusin calls ‘premeditation’ (2010).” (p.150)
• “The end of a single media narrative is often lamented by the media themselves. Broadcasters like Walter Cronkite in the US or Richard Dimbleby in Britain are held up as lions of a lost era, in which we were all watching the same screen.” (p.150)
• “For better or for worse, we don’t just look at the world on screen, it’s how we look at life.” (p.151)
• “There is a pleasing symmetry to the idea that global visual culture is enabled by a network of cables carrying information as light.” (p.151)
• “Cinema offered a given film at a specific location: the movie theatre or later the television rerun, just as the railway offered only certain destinations and times of travel. Today’s screens are a blur of apps, notifications, downloads, updates, and other indicators such as time, signal, and battery life.” (p.152)
• “…Total Noise: ‘the tsunami of available fact, context and perspective’, Wallace realized that with so much content and context always available, we never feel adequate to the task of knowing what there is to know. That tsunami is breaking across our screens every hour of the day.” (p.152)

The Screen-Based World

• “From a computer with Internet access, it’s possible to see the whole world, either literally using programs such as Google Earth that have mapped the entire planet, or metaphorically, given the limitless and constantly updated information available with a few clicks. The screens we look at are now close to us, seemingly private rather than public, and filled with information.” (p.153)
• “This screen-directed vision is the paradigm of visual culture in the computer age, just as the dolly was to the railway world.” (p.153)
• “Just as the cinema required people to learn how to interpret the moving image – to learn that a train on the screen would not hurt them – so too does a gamer have to spend many hours learning how to play…any new player is ‘killed’ repeatedly until they learn how to visualize the environment and control hand-eye co-ordination accordingly.” (p.155)
• “Cinema offered its audience a focused, clearly defined scene to look at once they had learned to see like a camera. The point was that the camera saw for us. Watching or playing a first-person shooter game is still in that tradition. In the data-filled screens of the fighter pilot, the multi-layered video game player, the phone user, or the stock market trader no such clarity is available. Expertise is required even to make sense of the screen. If this is total noise, it is not unintelligible. Rather, it requires people to become more open to the unexpected and to anticipate differently…” (p.156)

The Society of Control

• “Because screen-world culture involves active choices about what to concentrate on and what to do as a result, it can seem to offer a greater degree of freedom. While there is some truth to that idea, people often forget that anything done online leaves traces and can be found. All the apparent freedom comes at the cost of a high degree of control (Chun 2006).” (p.156)
• “French philosopher Gilles DeLeuze called such experience that of ‘the society of control’ in which we are set limits within which to operate, unlike the previous disciplinary society that had firm rules. This is a society centered around controlling and defining your key parameters, such as your credit score, your cholesterol level, your SAT score, your GPA, even your hits, likes, and retweets – anything that can be quantified and have defined levels of success and failure. Some of this benefits the user, but it also places a great burden on them.” (p.157)
• (In regards to Google Glass) “What is emerging is a total merger between what can be seen and what can be computed…” (p.158)
• “The important point here is not what happens with Glass itself but the new level of the society of control being created by the world of information on screen. Just as the wealthiest one percent already seen to live in a different world to the rest of us, it now seems as if there is a world ‘they’ can see, which ‘we’ cannot.” (p.159)
• “More than that, such technology means that the screen interface is now potentially ubiquitous. AS it gets smaller and less obtrusive, the ability to be permanently by imperceptibly networked will constitute a new digital divide.” (p.160)
• “Software computes for us the world that we see. Google, Apple, Microsoft – or whichever digital giants succeed them – interpose themselves between us and the world, carefully filtering what we may see and know by means of screens and software alike. The view seen by the fighter pilot has become the little private world of the phone screen carried around wherever we go. While we think of this as ‘our’ world, it is one that is carefully policed and filtered for us before we even get to see it. And the world it renders for us is, above all, the city.” (p.161)

 

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Cover image courtesy of https://pixabay.com/en/navigation-car-drive-road-gps-1048294/