Artifex - Block Notes - All Consuming Images

Reviews.
All Consuming Images, by Stuart Ewen - review by Giancarlo Nicoli

Special feature:
Memoirs of a Commodity Fetishist
Milestone Essay for Mass Communication & Society, by Stuart Ewen

The Media Monopoly, by Ben H. Bagdikian - review by Giancarlo Nicoli

All Consuming Images, by Stuart Ewen - review by Giancarlo Nicoli
Basic Books

This book is a powerful tool.
It is eye-opening and thought-provoking. While giving you some insight and a point of view to look around you with a better focus, it lets you better know yourself.
The author examines the power of the image in our society, showing how, with the birth of photography, the image of an object became more important than the object itself.
Ewen reminds us how style, images and propaganda affect our lives, by making people dissatisfied with the things they have (houses, cars, razors, sweatshirts), still good and useful and efficient, but lacking in the newest touch -- to make you buy what you don't need.
There are a few ads discussed, so you can learn how to analyze ads on your own.
You'll find how appearances work, so you can get rid of them.
Use your critical thought and read this book with a grain of salt.
As an example, the author - to make his point - quotes Karl Marx three times. While Marx, the father of Communism, certainly influenced the lives (and especially the deaths) of millions of people, much research shows that he deliberately collected false data to write his book...
Also (see pages 186-187) the author somewhat condems the spread and use of computers and machines. I just don't agree, here. The advent of computer, for example, made my job as a pharmacist much easier. And I have to thank the Internet and the computing power of machines if I can run my publishing house and if I'm able to get in touch with people around the world who share my interests.
Please remember that this book is a history of the role of image and style in western societies - especially the USA one - and that the author is a Professor: in my opinion, a few chapters are not much interesting, because they don't give the reader information he can use.
I usually underline the books' parts I find more interesting, and I write down in a separate sheet the page number where the underlining occurred and why I did it. This is one of my most underlined books!
A few quotations from the book follow. I think they shed light on its value.

"Every element of politicians' public lives, every utterance, every countenance, every policy statement, every carefully chosen background setting is routinely passed through the image mill. Focus groups are staged, public perceptions painstakingly monitored, chiefly for the purpose of generating what one knowing "New York Times" reporter has termed "more potent propaganda."".

"Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master."

"To (...) modern architects of persuasion, independent public deliberation was something to be avoided at all cost. In its apparent capacity to advance a worldview in a bedazzling moment, and to stun the public mind into submission, the image was conceived to be an effective antidote to critical thought."

"In a highly mobile society, where first impressions are important and where selling oneself is the most cultivated "skill", the construction of appearances becomes more and more imperative. If style offers a representation of self defined by surfaces and commodities, the media by which style is transmitted tend to reinforce this outlook in intimate detail. They continually offer us visible guideposts, reference points to draw upon, against which to measure ourselves."

"As style becomes information, information becomes style. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in television news. "Newsroom" sets are styled to create the look of a command center, to offer an imagistic sense of being "plugged-in" to what is happening, to convey authority. Television journalists are selected and cultivated for their looks, their screen presence. From an authoritative, medium-shot vantage point, sitting behind a formidable desk, the anchorperson is constructed to transmit an appearance of incorruptibility, and of omniscience. On occasion, the camera moves in for a close-up, to impress a connotation of gravity upon a story, to show the audience that this newsperson "cares". From opening logo to sign-off, all information, all stories are filtered through a veil of appearances."

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Special feature:
Memoirs of a Commodity Fetishist
Milestone Essay for Mass Communication & Society, by Stuart Ewen

Dear Giancarlo: I just read the review you wrote of my book, All Consuming Images. I think you might be interested that I also disagree with what I wrote about computers in that book. In the years since it was written, I have become increasingly familiar with computers as creative tools. I use them for writing and for visual artwork.

This is the text of an essay I wrote for a journal, Mass Communication & Society, which was published at the end of 2000. This essay, in slightly different form, serves as the new preface to the 25th Anniversary edition of my book, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, which has just appeared from Basic Books (June 2001).

Click here to download the file.
(Word 98 document, 61.5 kb)

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The Media Monopoly, by Ben H. Bagdikian - review by Giancarlo Nicoli
Beacon Press

It makes you understand "how it all works".
Now you have a map: it's up to you to decide where to go. "The Media Monopoly" gives you all the elements you need to understand how the mass media "world" works. Your decisions are now informed ones.
The author kept his writing short and simple. Well and clearly written, this book raises questions that are to be addressed, sooner or later (you'll find plenty).
It explains you why media companies merge; why they have so much power and how they exploit it (to pay less taxes, for instance). How they select editors and journalists: who they fire, who they keep, why - with real cases examined -.
It also explains why their big size is dangerous, and it reports a few uncelebrated examples of self-serving behaviour (after p. 39).
Here is their power: "In 1949, for example, William Randolph Hearst, head of one large publishing empire, and Henry Luce, chief of another, Time, Inc., were both worried about communism and the growth of liberalism in the United States." Enter "Billy Graham, an obscure evangelist holding poorly attended tent meetings in Los Angeles. (...) Hearst and Luce interviewed the obscure preacher and decided he was worthy of their support. Billy Graham became an almost instantaneous national and, later, international figure preaching anticommunism. In late 1949, Hearst sent a telegram to all Hearst editors: "Puff Graham". The editors did - in Hearst newspapers, magazines, movies, and newsreels. Within two months Graham was preaching to crowds of 350,000."
A hint: don't dismiss this example because it took place so many years ago and because it involved an anticommunist: mass media "puff" products, persons, politicians every day.
I have to say that here and there I don't agree with the suggestions or with the opinions of the author. As an example (see p. 41) Mr. Bagdikian somewhat condemns intervention of owners into the content of news. I'm an owner of a (small) publishing house, and of course I do intervene in the content of news! It's my job to do that!
I also elsewhere don't agree with the author - alas, this is a review and not a critical essay. My point is: please, as you always should do, keep your critical thought well awake when you read this book.
That said, it tells you truths that are awkward for you to deal with. If you want to live better your time, this book is a must.
Note: as an Italian, I'm not able to wander through US bookshops and see what's new, what's hot and what's not. I bless Amazon for its software suggested me this book, and fellow readers for their fair reviews helped me buy it.

A few excerpts follow.

"Six firms dominate all American mass media. (...) These six have more annual media revenues than the next twenty firms combined."

"As usual, Rupert Murdoch, with his bottomless contempt for his audiences, has led the way with his Fox network and movies. Worth an estimated $3.2 billion, Murdoch spent $800,000 on Washington lobbying and obtained waivers from U.S. law denied others. Murdoch's firm is News Corp, based in Australia. He owns Fox network and many of its affiliated stations even though the law says no foreign-based firm may own as much as 25 percent of a broadcasting station. Through his satellite and cable units, he will be able to reach more than three-quarters of the wired world. According to "The Economist", his British holdings have had $2.1 billion profits, but by creative bookkeeping and political influence, he has not paid a shilling in British taxes.

(...) When China protested, Murdoch's HarperCollins book contract with Chris Patten, retiring as governor of Hong Kong after Hong Kong reverted to China, was canceled. Murdoch issued an abject apology to the Chinese government. When the Chinese expressed irritation with the BBC for its China coverage, Murdoch canceled the BBC on his news service."

"The "Journal of the American Medical Association" has said that children between the ages of two and seventeen watch an annual average of 15,000 to 18,000 hours of television, compared with 12,000 hours spent per year in school. Children are also major targets for TV advertising, whose impact is greater than usual because there is an apparent lessening of influence by parents and others in the older generation. Prof. William Damon, director of the Stanford University Center on Adolescence, has said, "There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world". Whole neighborhoods are adultless as single or both parents work during the day or much of the evening. Television increasingly has become the national educator, sex instructor, voyeur, baby-sitter -- and substitute parent."

"[Media Corporations] can decide what the public will not read. (...) Bertelsmann, with its multimedia control, especially in Germany, successfully concealed a Nazi past that it had previously minimized or denied. When German sociologist and writer Hersch Fischler looked into the archives, he discovered that despite its claim of resistance and suffering under Hitler, Bertelsmann, throughout the Nazi period, has published anti-Semitic tracts for Hitler's Brown Shirts and members of the German army, praising Hitler and the Nazi movement, and also a book, "People Without Space", a work that justified Hitler's invasions of nearby countries. Fischler could not get his findings published in Germany, given Bertelsmann's influence there. They were published by a Swiss magazine and ultimately in the United States in "The Nation"."

"Today, the desire of most corporate leaders is not to become president of the United States; it is to influence the president of the United States. The magnitude of that influence depends on the magnitude of media power."

"Interlocked boards of directors have enormously complicated potential conflicts of interests in the major national and multinational corporations that now control most of the country's media."

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