Paul sez:
> I'm going to refer again to a book I think I mentioned early in the life of
> this list: "Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics" by Herb Zetl.
> It's a college-level textbook by one of the deans of media education. It
> might not be in print anymore.
It is, and I've just ordered it from Amazon. The author's name is
Zettl, btw -- or at least amazon.com thinks it is.
Sometimes I feel like such a neophyte -- that *surely* somebody
has already thought about these things before. That one day
Stuart Card or Janet Murray are going to pick up their heads
momentarily and say, "Oh, that's been settled years ago. Here's
what you need to read."
Well, in return for the reference I'll let you know what my
wife, older kid, and I were talking about just before we all
went off to do various things, I to do this.
Real Sports on HBO had a show about how sports radio had in
many markets had turned into "guy talk" radio, which led my
son to note that altogether it might not be such a bad
thing, considering that the people who know all the sports
statistics were uncommonly boring and, more importantly,
unrepresentative of sports fans.
Which led me to remark on how guy talk was a poor substitute
for storytelling. Every day on ABC radio during my young
adulthood, I knew I could find Howard Cosell, and that every
day, rain or shine, he would tell me a story. That was
Cosell's secret: not his absurd mannerisms, but the simple
fact that he knew what a story was, he knew how to find
one in the morass of statistics that constitute sports,
and he knew how to tell one.
This brought to my wife's recollection the show C-SPAN had
not long ago where they visited the aircraft carrier and
how deliberately untheatrical the production on C-SPAN is.
Typically, the camera would pan around a room on the ship,
then settle in on a head shot of a naval officer or sailor
talking about what action takes place in that room. Talking
about action, but never under any circumstances showing it.
C-SPAN is the raw material from which the audience (I
believe) is expected to construct a story. Well, guess
what. Constructing a story is damn hard, and expecting
the audience to do that is, I think, either (a) an
utter misreading of the purpose of the medium, or (b)
the use of the instruments of television to create what
is essentially a new and different medium.
And the visual elements on C-SPAN are there *solely* for
the purpose of lending verisimilitude. While a director
at a major network would cut to tears running down the
cheeks of an audience member or an audience member yawning
to tell the metastory -- or to tell a story of her own --
C-SPAN's audience shots seem designed only to show that
an audience was there. Pure, non artistic context for
a story that's relentlessly textual.
Which leads us to a rather interesting tentative
conclusion: story comes not from the linear text, but
from the elements (metaphor, layout, hypertext, depiction
of action, interaction) that lie above the text -- the
elements for which the text is the ground.
As an example, the text at my wife's Tudor England
website: http://home.hiwaay.net/~crispen/tudor/ is
admittedly lightweight. But what she's quite deliberately
doing is using the graphical elements and the page
layout to deliver a substantial portion of the message
she intends to convey.
She's groping -- we're all groping (at least in this
household).
--
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Music shouldn't be held responsible for the people who listen to it.
