Originally, Waves of Change was going to be a video series on Deep Dish, but, “There was so much good work that we didn’t want to wait for getting enough money to do a really big, produced series. We decided that we should do something now, that there was information we had to share with people, and we weren’t quite ready to do the series.” Since that original idea, Waves of Change has expanded to include a map – which is the segment I find most interesting.
Generally, maps have worked to constitute the things they visualize. In the context of the state, this meant providing rigid boundaries that previously didn’t exist, creating a sort of shape-as-logo that is now emblematic of many states. More, by linking states to a pre-existing territory, the historical contingency of borders are effaced, giving way to the notion of sacrosanct borders that merit defense, reinforcing that there is a mappable shape that deserves mapping while erasing that the map originally defined said shape. Thus, any map contains at least a dual articulation. The positional idea that “x is there: always contains a primary ontological notion nestled inside it that “x is” at all.
This ontological proposition is particularly essential for community media, as they are often overlooked and marginalized, if not somewhat ephemeral given their frequently underground status, since, according to Halleck, “in many countries the danger that independent producers and anyone who’s trying to get different kinds of information out in societies that are repressive can be a very dangerous occupation.”
Thus, by locating a particular story on the map, Waves of Change articulates not only that said story occurred but also that a specific source relayed it – proving not only the event’s existence, but the media outlet’s as well. More, by highlighting a particular outlet, it also means that its absence would become all the more visible, providing some level of accountability and awareness to the plight of community media in oppressive situations.
At the same time, locating particular places and things on the map points to a third proposition: defining not only what is, but what is important and worth mapping. Certainly nation maps do this by subtly positing that the state is worth seeing, but Waves of Change is in many ways more akin to a guide map that lists landmarks and other points of interest. Such maps not only lay out territories, but mark what within those spaces is worth doing (or, as Mark Monmonier points out in No Dig, No Fly, No Go, what cannot be done).
This idea is part and parcel to Deep Dish TV’s and Paper Tiger Television’s critique of traditional media, which posits community as an “alternative source of news that is more based on what’s important to people, what’s missing from mainstream news, and what voices are silenced by dominant media” (Hummel 1). Waves of Change visually represents this by mapping community media and their stories, thus arguing that these outlets are the “landmarks” that are worth seeing.
This purpose is doubly served as the map not only shows where such media is, but also where it is not. This highlights the gaps where such media either a. does not exist or b. is not yet mapped but may exist as a hitherto fore untapped resource for news and tactical discussion – in a form far easier to notice than a master list of outlets where geographical absence is harder to detect (especially when there are hundreds of entries, as on Waves of Changes’ blog).
Thankfully, Waves of Change is moving off of Google Maps. The push-pin aesthetic doesn’t do the idea justice and really constrains what they can do. Only a few things can actually be mapped (200 tops), and the descriptions weren’t designed to hold the rich amount of information that Waves of Change has.
Beyond making it more useable – co-producer Nicole Hummel argues that one of the most central of these ideas is adding filters to the map so that it is “searchable and viewable by different subtopics and subthemes, with some sort of index that’s tagged so you could look up media about ecology and the environment or gender issues or media literacy, or by outlet, like performance, theatre, TV, or radio.” – I really hope they also move towards more radical cartographies, which is, according to Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat, “the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change.”
Right off the bat, I can think of a few really cool directions they could take:
1. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine Waves of Change adding a functionality that flips the map in a variety of directions, subtly adding a criticism of the current “global” perspective to the project’s questioning of mass media’s focus on particular stories that do not represent the interests of many people around the world. Similarly, they could map the points to multiple projections of the world – including both the Mercator and Peters projections (pretty well explained by the West Wing).
2. To underline the critique of mass media’s skew, Waves of Change could include maps of criticism that visually prove the need for alternative media sources. One such possibility is a cartogram – a map that rescales territories according to particular features rather than attempting to reflect the physical existence of the world. This has often been used in the United States to show the population skews between various areas.
Applied to media representation, such a mapping would reveal the overabundance of representation in some areas and virtual non-existence of others, articulating a dual need for community media: one to aid in the amount of news produced within certain areas and another to emphasize the geo-centrism of many mass media outlets.
3. More abstractly, Waves of Change could use flow chart-esque maps to show the ideological factors for over- and non-representation. Ashley Hunt’s “A World Map: In Which We See…” that charts the flow of global capitalism provides an insightful model that articulates the complex, multimodal functionality of modern capitalism as a system of repression. (You can view download the whole map here, and I’d really recommend exploring the map at length. Since Blogger won't display any more text after it, a small version is at the bottom of the post)
Using such an alternative strategy could not only further discussion about how and why corporate control leads to certain stories being left out of the mainstream but also encourage a dialogue about what aspects of the current system could be played with to get more representation of alternative perspectives.
Of course, even if they don’t move beyond plotting media outlets, Waves of Change is definitely something to watch because it is already such a rich resource for information about different ways that media is being used worldwide. But it’d be really effective and interesting if they buttressed their implicit critique that operates through highlighting what is absent with an explicit presentation of what is shown and how that is determined.
No comments:
Post a Comment