"real" media coverage

In the writing Satellite Panoramas, Lisa parks discusses the media documentation of the shoe-maker-levy 9 comet’s collision with Jupiter to emphasis her concept that the images captured are connotative to the occurrences. The images captured by the Hubble Telescope of the collision and star formation offer the citizens of planet earth a window to another cosmic world.

While this astronomical view enabled us to see what was happening in outer space, the media dispersed the images and information to show the world as it was happening in “real” time. The media portrays the truth as “real” and the audience accepts it, though, it goes through the process of media agenda, the demand for viewer ship and generating money.

Media coverage of an event such as this one generated to believe that the images and footage taken are of immediate exposure. Though, while the footage was shown on the media outlets the event has already happened, time has passed by, and real time was already the past. Through the process the media engages in to produce news the truth gets reconstructed.

The media gains from people wanting to watch the material they produce; they make the agenda suitable to attract viewers. Parks states that these still images taken by the Hubble telescope don’t have meaning and the news media built a story around them. As a story is constructed based on social events, they get over dramatized and details get added, it’s not necessarily what happened if one was physically present. Thus making the fact that real time connotation does not exist.

In a worldlier example we can examined the images shown on the news media outlets to the public about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thought the United States is far from these locations, the public does want to gain knowledge about what is happening. The media uses images that have been taken in the past and reuses them to create meaning of what is happening right now on the grounds. When the news covers what is happening in the war, they will not show you images of the soldiers as they fight in the desert, images of sand, or in the middle of an operation. This is because of the fact that in “real” time the audience who is watching the television coverage would not be able to make out what is really happening, as they would see sand, unclear sound, and blurry images.

In their coverage of war affairs the media will use an already written story, with edited footage of soldiers on the field, or weapons or any images that relate to the story. These images are clear and enforce the message that the media wants to speak about. Also this footage is also accompanied by audio and commentaries from an individual who has some sort of authority and credibility on the subject. However even the commentary is preplanned and produced because the individual got the topic, the questions, and the information he was going to discuss ahead of time. Thus proving the point that even though the media portrays their coverage as in “real time”, the content of the coverage has been prewritten and preplanned to air.

In their interest to gain audience, get high ratings, and make money, news media outlets take the coverage of the war and shows what they think will draw audience. They do not necessarily show what is the most important, or what would be most important for citizens to watch. Rather, a producer who wants to draw people to watch, constructs a story line, that may have facts, but is not actually what happened in “real” time. These kinds of events had to be filmed; a story line had to be written, then edited a number of times, and finally broadcasted through the media. The story it self went through a process to have meaning and importance for our world to have an understanding of what was happening.

The media incorporates images, raw footages, audio, and commentaries to try and make the situation comprehensive to people. Reality does not always make sense; the media constructs an explanation based on what society values to create an understanding that makes sense. By doing so the media is not really showing real time footage of what is happening, rather they are exploiting the occurrences and creating their own description to the public.

The war footage as well as the Hubble satellite images was purely connotative as they both were being used as a discursive narrative dictated by the media to reveal this phenomenon that never occurred before. The news media could tell the audience many events and occurrences that are happening at war in many different ways. Though, these things are told to the audience using arguments and stories that are socially familiar to us. News media coverage in “real” time does not exist; rather a given discourse of what is happening is produced for the audience.

The Gathering Storm

Throughout the chapter “Satellite Panoramas” in the book Cultures In Orbit, Lisa Parks reinforces the idea of the media utilizing satellite-captured imagery to exact 'remote control' over the audience. The application of both imagery and “expert” interpretation through television broadcasts reinforces unsubstantiated fears and long-held ideologies in American popular culture. The same way in which interspace satellite imagery is applied to the media can also be observed through the months of the year known across the southeastern United States as 'hurricane season'.

Hurricane season is a time that is characterized by obsession and, at times, hysteria. Such states of consciousness are primarily media-driven, leading the American populace to become rabidly consumed with statistics and facts about a storm, despite the facts that they are virtually all incomprehensible to their audience and that the storm is merely a tropical depression just forming off the northwestern coast of Africa. However, this is a crucial time for the media to beging to recondition the American psyche, and it begins with this barrage of incomprehensible facts and statistics, which leads people into a state of worry and concern, thus constantly tuned in to their trusted station for weather news. As the storm initially progresses on a path in the general direction of the southeastern United States (as it typically does), the next phase of the media's assault is engaged. The media transitions into treating the storm as if it is an invading army gaining momentum as it destroyes anything and everything in its path. Statistics to show its increase in size and strength are plastered all over television screens. Then, right on cue, visual evidence in the form of third world countries being devastated (which harkens back to previous class discussions on “shock” photos), which acts as a warning to Americans to either prepare accordingly or end up like a third world country (infrastructure and building sturdiness aside, of course). As Parks wrote in regards to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashing into Jupiter, “this practice of presenting live coverage of catastrophic events happening elsewhere has become one of the dominant television news conventions of our time”(p. 145).

If the storm should happen to impact the Caribbean, then the imagery is taken to another level, aided by NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) and transmitted by every news outlet across the country (and especially so by the weather stations and local television news in the southeastern US). First is the classification of a storm into a category (1-5) which are repeated as if it is a reverse DEFCON level. Next is the implementation of what is referred to as the “cone of uncertainty”. It is essentially a standard deviation of a hurricane's projected path, but more importantly, it serves to maximize the range of potentially impacted citizens, thereby maximizing the base of the audience. It is at this time that anywhere within the “cone of uncertainty” that even capitalism begins to kick in. What were once the bare necessities known as a “hurricane preparedness kit” has now ballooned into a “hurricane survival kit” (implying of course, that you need everything on this list to merely survive). What is coincidental (or not) is that the list requires you shop in virtually every kind of department store (grocery, hardware, electronics, clothing, etc). Never has there been a more combined influential mechanism over such a large group of people than that of fear and capitalist consumerism.

The calculated media, and eventually capitalist consumer, campaign based on fear in the form of tracking a hurricane is one that is as formulaic as it is effective. The efforts to paralyze an entire region's psyche with just a handful of words and images behind the basis of a governmental agency and the transmission by every news outlet is, year in and year out, roundly successful. From the outset of grabbing the citizenry's attention with what could potentially down the road have a chance of turning yoru city into a third world to the ultimatum of “buy or die”, the non-stop assault on the fearful American and the American consumer is exemplified by that of a hurricane's path. It is not just the hurricane that is the gathering storm.

- William Jennings

Limitless Connotation

the Great Eye of Sauron


After reading Lisa Parks’s chapter on “Satellite Panoramas,” which focused heavily on the Hubble Telescope and discourses surrounding it, a class discussion of the text ensued. During this discussion, William Jennings, a classmate of mine, had an excellent point. He said “all satellite images are pure connotation.” Since our class examined Barthes’s “The photographic message,” connotation and denotation have been the subjects of analysis and William had excellently and eloquently brought that knowledge into our discussion of Park’s work. But what Parks’s writing omits is not only images from distant space are subject to these varied connotations, but really any image that appears “alien” to the audience could be subject to a seemingly endless range of connotations personal to that individual.

While discussing Hubble telescope images, Parks claims, “These [satellite] panoramas are not tranquil vistas of outer space; rather, they are contested discursive terrains that are activated as the conventions of astronomical observation, digital imaging, broadcasting, and filmmaking are combined and brought to bear in their production, circulation, and interpretation.” These images are not just merely pictures from space but rather images that spawn various connotations and discourses among humans here on Earth. They are not simple snap shots of the far reaches of space, but an amalgamation of a telescopic image married with media techniques such as digital effects enhancement and broadcasting promotion. What we see through the television are rendered images, prepared for human eyes by scientists, and then re-prepared by television producers and the audience is left to decode and make sense of these images. So much goes into the preparation, for example the enhancing of the thermal part of the images so the human eye can witness gamma ray bursts that customarily we wouldn’t be able to see.

As it is for obscure satellite photos, the same could be asserted for images gathered from the darkest depths of Earth’s oceans or down inside a volcano or the bottom of an ant hill buried in a tropical jungle to even images carefully gathered during a routine colonoscopy. Any one of these images being unfamiliar to a viewer, seeming as alien as the dark reaches of the universe, would then be subjected to the vast associations in that persons mind. Just as the picture included in this blog entry of a ring of cosmic dust around star Fomalhaut can appear to be an image from the film Lord of the Rings. Park’s says “although Hubble images document outer space phenomena they can only be interpreted at all in relation to what we more intimately know, that is histories, societies, and cultures on Earth.”

What appears to one audience member as a dark corner of space may look like an image of Jesus Christ illuminating from starlight. Occasionally humans can see what they want. Humans insist images of the Virgin Mary have appeared under highway overpasses, clouds, fireworks displays, and in even in grilled cheese sandwiches. Some audience members can look at satellite images and see what might be the beginning of human time, while others look at it and see the end of human time. Amateur speculation could be as endless as the human brain’s capacity for imagination. Some images can appear so foreign to an audience, literally and figuratively, it becomes rather easy to find limitless connotations within them. We see them and make sense of them with our human eyes and in our Earthly mind sets.


-Author Does Not Exist

Deja Vu

The film, Déjà Vu starring Denzel Washington, is an exceptional film to demonstrate the concept of the televisual described by Lisa Parks in her essay titled “Satellite Panoramas”. Parks explains the integration of technology as an epistemological system. She uses the satellite images captured by the Hubble telescope to exemplify her argument of technological observation. “Televisual epistemologies are the specific knowledges and knowledge practices that form around technological acts of distant observation.” The observation of outer space brings about different interpretations and meanings that can be constructed from such observation. The parallel between the Hubble telescope and the mechanism device to control the past in Déjà Vu is the topic of discussion in my essay and its use of technology as a means of epistemological systems.

In the film, Déjà Vu, Washington is playing a detective to solve a murder case and embarks on a journey to locate a secular group that operates a technological device that displays moving images of the past. They are watching the victim in her final days of living through satellite imagery on a large screen as an attempt to solve the murder. The panoramic view of the past is what allows Washington to solve the case. This is the same type of observation Parks argues in her essay: “When Hubble images move beyond the ground station and into the mediascape, they become satellite panoramas. These panoramas are not tranquil vistas of outer space; rather, they are contested discursive terrains that are activated as the conventions of astronomical observation, digital imaging, broadcasting, and filmmaking are combined and brought to bear in their production, circulation, and interpretation.”

Another aspect relating to Parks essay is the remote control. In Déjà Vu, Washington discovers that the panoramic view of the past is not just an observational mechanism, but an active engagement that can be communicative to the subject within the image. He is able to send signals of warning to the victim prior to her death in an attempt to save her life. The technological mechanism is a live broadcast of the past which can be manipulated to enable a different future. “Embedded within Hubble’s capacity for distant vision is a discursive strategy of remote control.” It can be said that the possibilities of outer space as well as the operation of the past are infinite, making us wonder how we would like to construct it.

The visual aspect as well as the discursive strategy of remote control is what make the film, Déjà Vu, relevant to Parks’ essay. The film demonstrates that our use of technology as an objective observational device cannot be used as such due to the manipulative discourses that are allowed through the televisual. The significance of the televisual in the film comes from its use of technology as a mode of observation to engage in epistemological systems. The device in Déjà Vu and the Hubble telescope are modes of observation, which are presented as objective televisual technologies, but rather are visual displays of images left up to subjective interpretations which are malleable.

The Midnight Ride of Israel Bissell

History will be what it is taught to be. Who decides who gets notoriety? American history is filled with omissions and false information that many interpret as truth. Michel Foucault comes to mind when discussing these falsehoods. Foucault mentions the idea of “authorship,” that no one is truly an individual and there is no original work. One aspect of authorship is that an author is assigned for legal reasons such as copy right. History is filled with certain individuals that are given credit in history for the legality of it, not the significance.
Most history books discuss the American Revolution and key players in the success of the American colonist. The start of the American Revolution began when the British (Red Coats) were drawing near the Massachusetts shore. Paul Revere is noted as being the man that warned the American colonist that the British were coming.
The role Paul Revere as the messenger in the battles of Lexington and Concord is considered common knowledge. However this is not complete truth. Revere’s role was not popular until after his death. In the poem Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Ladsworth Longfellow, written 40 years after Revere’s death, Longfellow credits Revere with the ride from Boston to Philadelphia. Many historians and history book believe this to be true and Israel Bissell is not mentioned at all,
Israel Bissell was a post rider who also alerted the American colonist that the British were coming. Bissell covered the 365 mile journey four over four days with his warning. However, Bissell is rarely mentioned or seen in many history books. Unlike Revere, Bissell received much recognition during his life and was featured in newspaper articles. Revere only rode in Concord and did not make the complete journey to Lexington. The reasoning behind giving Revere the credit for the ride is that Longfellow thought more rhymed with Paul Revere than Israel Bissell.

'Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear—
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

Furthermore, the rides of Paul Revere and Israel Bissell are journeys that many others took that night but there names have fallen into obscurity.
As a result of the significance of the poem, fiction was transformed into fact and new history created. The copy right and the mass production of the poem allowed it to become history. In effect to the poem, a respected author was established. The name Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s name has significance. His name is published in history books and his false poem is regurgitated to youths as truth. He was not original he just happened to become popular.

Apocalypse How?

In Lisa Parks’s essay, Satellite Panoramas, she examines the Shoemaker-Levy 9 collision with Jupiter, and how this kind of “catastrophe coverage” functioned to reassure our feelings safety, good fortune, and even gratitude and luck that this is isn’t happening to us. Not to say, though, that it never will. This kind of news coverage is comparable to the overwhelming coverage of the Haiti and Chili earthquakes, as well as anxiety about tsunami warnings, and how this is just another harbor for the ubiquitous human fear of the imminence of end days and the possibilities of 2012.

Lisa parks makes a reference to Susan Buck-Morss: “The air is full of rumours and announcements of various terminations, of the end of humanity, of the end of history, of the end of the planet.” (144) And then Parks goes on to describe the collision as becoming an icon for an “imagined end to civilization at the end of the twentieth century”. People are somewhat obsessed with this apocalyptic notion. While news media has not explicitly related this to the 2012 apocalyptic prophesy, there are plenty of blogs, articles, and public opinion to be said about the relationship of these recent catastrophes to future prophecies. And the idea of opinion driven information has become just as popular as actual, objective news. People trust in Glenn Beck and O’Riley like they would C-SPAN reports.

By watching the comet hit Jupiter in 1994, people were essentially watching what could have been a disaster if it hit us, just like with the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chili, but it didn’t happen to us. Parks says, “This practice of presenting live coverage of catastrophic events happening elsewhere has become one of the dominant television news conventions of our time” (145). But this isn’t surprising, because subconsciously, people know the world isn’t going to end. Time and time again, we watch the world be slated to end, and then breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t. And 2012 is another doomsday date that we are set to watch. Unlike Y2K, which had a more objective, pseudo scientific undertone (with computers thought to crash and all that), 2012 is more of a mystical thing where news outlets are able to perpetuate people’s fears by spreading why people are afraid. So, again, 2012 is generating the 2nd round of premillenial anxiety, and people will be there to watch the date come and go, so that it may further ensure our civilization’s feelings of permanence and well-being.

Science and Culture Interrelate

In Practices of Looking, science and culture are discussed as interrelated subjects that “are always mutually emerged.” As time passes, more knowledge is gained and helps culture grow to embrace new concepts that become the basis of ideologies for that time period. The use of photography is a significant tool that has benefited the changes made in the science field and has shaped what we know as the norm. Photography utilizes the separate entities of science and culture and is combined within Michel Foucalt’s term of biopower to regulate individuals. “Images help to shape the meaning of the body in ways that tell us a great deal about ideology, gender, identity and concepts of disease.” Images, beginning with photos are the clues to the giant puzzle of science and the more they are evaluated, the more they are engrained into culture. In this blog I will discuss Foucalt’s ideology of biopower and how photography has been used to monitor social organization.

The art and use of photography in the nineteenth century started the modern developments found within science and medicine. To visually document medical findings and experiments, photography enhanced what the human eye couldn’t see and improved accuracy into what was being observed in the medical field. With its widespread growth in popularity in the medical field, Foucalt explains how photography also became a tool set to classify people in systems in his term, biopower.

According to Foucalt, the use of biopower, or the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects, “could be used as a means of social organization and control.” With the documentation and classification of the individuals who were permanently or temporarily staying in the public space, the camera was and is still used today to capture different cases and classify residents “into groups on the basis of empirically visible features thought to signify features that marked common identity characteristics.”

Specifically, photographs were popularly used to help identify the cases and residents who had visible features of a mental illness. Prison managers used photos to classify the physical features of criminal types as well as having individual records for repeat offenders. Hospitals and prisons looked for similar characteristics in cataloguing subjects by their visual appearance to compare signs of what was perceived as abnormal physical features that put them in the categories of being crazy or a criminal. The inaccuracies in classifying a person based on observation of his physical characteristics is a part of the ignorant ideologies of the time.

Today, doctors look not solely on the outside but have the technology to see activity within the brain that can be a way to detect chemical imbalances in individuals who may be mentally ill or monitor brain wave activity to explain ones neurological reasons for behaving a certain way. What was catalogued and stereotyped then to be crazy or harmful about a person is still a misconception we bare in our society. We know it is very common for one to have a mental illness therefore our tolerance has increased in knowing that many people can cope with the disease with help of medicine and therapy. Still, due to the nineteenth century practice of separating “crazy” people from society and studying them based on their mannerisms, people associate mainly negative connotations behind hearing about the mentally ill still to this day.

Foucalt's practice of biopower is still seen in today’s society and the use of photography in science has only grown to what seems to be limitless opportunities within the unknown boundaries of technology. In a society with more knowledge and more technology at our fingertips, people are still classified into groups and systems that manage humans. The reason behind separating the mentally ill or prisoners for instance has surpassed the surface of racial profiling yet we rely on past meanings to claim the universal truths that have been culturally interrelated.

Science and culture do intersect and biopower is Foucalt’s description of how social cataloguing is seen today. It is hard to unlearn something that is taught to be true for society and with the help of photography, images have become a favorable key into learning the surface of what can be learned about an individual. Now in the digital era science is learning more about the genetic makeup of the internal picture teaching us new and accurate “truths” about the social classifications discussed in this blog.


~Tiffani Wilshire

Is it a boy or a girl?

"Is it a boy or girl?" is usually the first question the couple will ask when their baby is born, but sometimes the answer is not so clear-cut. Sometimes a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia that are difficult to classify as male or female. Or the baby's chromosomes may indicate one sex, but its genitalia and reproductive organs indicate the opposite. In such cases, the baby is not exclusively male or female, but intersex.

A broad definition of an intersex person is someone whose sex chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or secondary sex characteristics are a combination of male and female. There is this huge societal issue that intersex individuals will not be socially accepted. There s only space for two genders in this world: female and male. In Practices of Looking, it is explains that we the people “make meanings of the world around us only through systems of representation, and they, in effect, help to construct our experience of the material world for us.” This is the prime example of class, gender, ideology, and work practice.

Just because a person may have both chromosomes does not mean he or she is weird. So when a child is born, the parents automatically want to change their child’s gender to be one or the other, not both. But why? It is not like their child is in any danger of being physically hurt. But in today’s society a parent wants their child to be socially accepted by their teachers, friends, acquaintances, business partners, and etc. We live in this socially constructed world where discrimination is still among us and a person must be accepted by others. Its not like an intersex person has the choice of being “different,” but it’s just not traditional. According to the Practices of Looking, “the identification of visible and measureable differences in skin tone and color and body shape and gender (and still are) means through which stereotypes are constructed and discriminatory practices are carried out and justified.”

In any case, our society has trouble understanding that these differences of gender may be part of our diversity as a human species; like sexual orientation or even other human characteristics that differ in biological gender. Of course we accept that hair and eye color varies and that those characteristics have no implied meaning yet we can’t seem to do the same for biological gender.

Sociologically, seeing how the cultural norms favor one category over another for specific types of traits, demonstrates not only who has power in this society but also how we attribute meaning of society. If we don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge that there may be more than two types of sex categories, then what does that mean to us as a culture and to people as individuals?

USA Wuz Here

American Imperialism is a term that the United States has been trying to shake for over a century now. It became popular after the Spanish-American War and has subtly lived on for decades through the United States' national egotism and "Holier than thou" attitude towards the rest of the world. It is known that America is the first country to step in when controversy arises, whether it is a global skirmish or a disaster area in need of rescue and as long as it is for the right reasons stepping in is correctly justified. While I agree that sometimes it is necessary to help fellow man I do have a problem with the United States NASA program discovering the “new frontier” for only the benefit of boosting its own national pride. Ever since the late 60's when J.F.K. announced we were going to land a man on the moon, America found refuge in an otherwise problematic time in history for the relatively new country. But while we were gaining new ground in civil rights here in the states we could not adopt these ideas into a secular notion. Rather, we reverted back to our capitalist ideologies when venturing into space. It then became a race to the moon with only two countries in the race, the USA and the Soviets. To the “winner” gets the spoils of national acclaim and newspaper headlines.

Never have I seen addressed the irony in the famous quote," One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" spoken by Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon then place a giant American flag on the surface like a space-age Spanish Conquistador landing on the Americas for the first time. If this achievement truly belongs to the human race why would we find it necessary to nationally tag a world only visited by twelve Americans. Our idea of ownership should not be brought onto other worlds. Earth is our planet good or bad, and while I think it’s necessary to explore space through national programs (for funding), I believe it should be for the benefit of knowledge and understanding our own planet as a whole not for the benefit of a singular country. Have we not learned our lesson of claiming land that truly does not belong to us, and are we doomed to repeat history yet again? If we are fortunate to discover some other life form on a distant planet, are we going to learn from their culture, wine them, dine them, just to ultimately destroy their land just as Europeans slaughtered the Native Americans?

America is one of the best countries in the world when it comes to opportunity and equality and nothing can change that. I celebrate my freedoms everyday and I am a proud American and it is not my intention to down patriotism. In fact, I would like to further a global patriotism especially when it comes to space travel, we should be joined together in the cause of pursuing knowledge and resources in order to make everyone's life a better one. If we succeeded in this we could finally shake our imperialist title in at least one facet of our countries' history.
-James Battle