[xmca] Less Mediated and More Mediated Media

Today is June 4th, an important day for anybody who lived in China during the year 1989. About two years later, the poet Yang Lian wrote:
 
After all, 1989 was a very ordinary year.
 
When I told him that it didn't seem like a very ordinary year to me in retrospect, he said: "That only shows that you did not die in it."
 
Yet there is something quite extraordinary when the news appears without newscasters, and then it appears with newscasters and you can hear gunfire in the background, and the next week the newscasters show up dressed entirely in black and refuse to look at the camera.
 
Nor is it ordinary when they are replaced by new newscasters the next week, and these newscasters dress ENTIRELY in white and look ostentatiously and unblinkingly at the camera with a relentless gaze that somehow also suggested that something other than the dictionary meanings of the words is being suggested.
 
All that happened nineteen years ago, but people outside China never heard about it. I guess for most people outside China the events of that year were mediated not by words but by some video footage shot from a window of the Beijing Hotel, showing a man with a shopping bag and a raincoat stopping a column of tanks and eventually getting up on one of them to talk to the tank driver.
 
This footage WAS actually shown at least twice in China. When I saw it, I remember the voice-over excitedly describing how the savagery of the rioters was such that they cast themselves bodily against the tanks of the PLA.
 
No trace of sarcasm could be detected in the voice-over, which is, I suppose, how it got broadcast. But I don't think anybody who actually saw the footage (as opposed to merely listening to it) could have missed the irony.
 
It was exactly the same tone of voice my student used when she was asked to "correctly identify the nature of the counter-revolutionary turmoil in Beijing". She said excitedly, and without a trace of a smile, "counter-revolutionary turmoil is turmoil that is counter-revolutionary, la!". (This was in Guangzhou; the Cantonese use "la" with everything.)
 
I heard later that the footage was shown again, and this time the voice-over described how the behavior of the tank driver gave the lie to Western reports of civilians being run over by tanks and gunned down in the streets of Beijing. I didn't hear it, though, so I can't say anything about the intonation of the voice-over or what the overall effect was.
 
The media is, of course, always heavily mediated. What is not at all ordinary is when we are made so very conscious of that mediation; it's extraordinary because when we become conscious of mediation we start thinking about what a less mediated reality might be like.
 
The problem with living outside China is not that the news does not come mediated; it's that people are so much less conscious of that mediation; it's so much harder to start thinking about what that less heavily mediated reality might be.
 
For example, in March there were race-riots in Lhasa, and many of the buildings near the Jokang where Chinese friends of mine lived were burned. CNN broadcast footage of the riots which showed the police, but meticulously cropped the violent demonstrators beating up and killing elderly Chinese and burning Muslim shopkeepers and their children alive in their stores.
 
A Chinese CNN would have handled this very differently. The rioters would have been clearly visible, and the voice-over would have commented that in their ferocity the racist mob apparently did not realize that some of the Chinese they were trying to murder were in uniform.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

      
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Tue Jun 3 19:45 PDT 2008