Now we all have the tools to communicate. Unlike the recent past, when the tools of media production were almost wholly owned by large corporate entities, now, thanks to other large corporate entities (like Apple Computer and Adobe Software) the average person (defined as you and I) can produce media that for the most part lacks any sort of audience (defined as actual persons reading this post).
So, my imagined audience is “you.” But I need to imagine that you are reading, but I also need to realistically assume that you are not. Many, many fingers are clicking away on keyboards attached to the Internet which results in much text that for the most part goes unread (and video images that are never seen).
Obviously this moment is analogous to the historical moment when cheap paper and simple writing tools became readily available following the spread of literacy (and the leisure time in which to use these materials to produce diaries and correspondence became available as well). The divide that seems to have dissolved – one that held firm until rather recently – is that which formerly existed between private writing (represented by diaries and notes) and public writing (represented by letters and memos and such).
There must be many terabytes of drive space dedicated to private writing that never makes it to the publishable space of the web, but this is invisible to us – the Internet audience – real, not imagined as I and others do see and experience public forms of text on the web (also images, sound, and video). But, the imagined audience becomes important once communication is considered as a goal. Communication is a zero sum game by virtue of the finitude of lifespans. There are only so many hours in a day of usable time to communicate or to participate as an audience.
I imagine that an audience of some sort – I have no idea of the number of individuals who potentially comprise this aggregate, possibly none – is reading this post and I need that imagined audience in order to write this post. So the productivity of bloggers – in this example – is dependent on the goal of communication with the realization that the audience is most likely absent or simply friends, colleagues, or family (which, from experience, lack the time to read much anyway). Thus, a comment on a post is a blip communication. Sort of a message in a bottle returned – across space, even time.
Regardless, the imagined audience is necessary. It moves Internet communication from the realm of the one to the many (the multitude as absence).
There was a time in the late 1970s when the term independent filmmaking was synonymous with Lenny Lipton’s book of the same name (Lipton being the guy who wrote the lyrics to “Puff the Magic Dragon“ amongst other things). For Lipton, independent filmmaking signified the micro-buget productions of filmmakers ranging from Stan Brakhage to Fred Wiseman. These films by virtue of their small scale economic footprint (Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call it ”restricted production“) could present their vision (ideas, concepts, approach, style, content) as the work of an individual artist or creator presented to a self-selective audience of highly engaged spectators. While this style of filmmaking fit with the model of the romantic genius artist that had developed under industrial capitalism (and, in fact, in response to industrial capitalism) it also represented the actuality of the process of production that these films entailed. A single individual could craft a film based on the industrial tools available at a quite modest expense.
Tate Modern, London, August 2008.
What kind of productive dialogue can documentary studies have with new media theory? Mental Radio seeks to provide preliminary answers to this question, while opening up additional avenues of inquiry that can be brought to bear on both fields of study.
