Page 191 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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176 Now
took over last November, he introduced himself to the troops
with what has become the perennial ‘it’s about the story-telling
speech’. As Van Gorden Sauter preached in the 1980s, news
needs the emo, and executives now understand that the emo
comes from the gut, the gut makes the wow, and the wow
makes the money. It’s not the content that matters – food, sex,
or news – so much as the autonomic form.
(Kaufman 2005: 9; emphasis added)
Kaufman argues that the media disproportionately assumes an
excessively emotive approach. This is the basis of social porn and its
ubiquitous and pervasive presence. It is built upon a society-wide
over-dependence upon the camera-generated imagery of the society of
the spectacle that now has exceeded the theoretical expectations of
then. To the extent that cultural studies as a discipline sought to
politicize culture in a fashion akin to Benjamin’s hopes in his Essay
for the politicization of aesthetics (to counter the Nazi aestheticiza-
tion of politics) it has failed because capitalism is extremely adept at
bringing all cultural forms down to the common political denomi-
nator of the commodity form. The hungry eyes of the camera
merely locate food for the equally hungry maw of the culture
industry – quite literally as we have seen in our discussion of Food
Network television. Social porn is thus a combination of:
1 The innate ‘greedy eyes’ property of the camera
2 The complex intertwining of the camera’s innate voyeurism with
wider commodity values.

The theorists of Part 1 demonstrated the cultural harm caused by
this development and this chapter showed that with the advent of
social porn and Banality TV: ‘The historical world becomes reduced to
a set of simulations … The webs of signification we build and in
which we act pass into fields of simulation that absorb us but exclude our
action. Referentiality dissolves in the non-being and nothingness of
TV’ (Nichols 1994: 46; emphasis added). Pre-inscribed and carefully
manipulated emotional affect is made to effect what was previously
still protected from commercial values by a generally accepted
discourse of sobriety that traditionally protected the ‘serious’ parts of
our culture. The next chapter explores in more detail the negative
cognitive and political effects suffered by a society in which, true to
Kracauer’s fears, objects and processes permeated by cognition have
given way to the image-idea.

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