Reviewing my degree so far, one idea that’s come up and I thought was very interesting was the idea of media capitals, specifically the idea of places that create media as existing in middle spaces.
A meme in media production is that media centers are at the heart of culture. The places that make the TV and the radio programs and the ads tell themselves they are part of the center of the culture and their values are representative of that culture as a whole. This is a meme as much as it is a myth. The production centres of the world, the big places that make shit, are places that lie not in the cultural centers but actually at cultural edges. Being able to export and produce for multiple markets creates demand that you create media that pursues some values but doesn’t violate others. Hollywood likes to imagine it’s a liberal bastion, because it doesn’t even consider the ways that it, itself, produces media that’s pre-biased to non-liberal values.
Without specific examples, think of the number of Hollywood movies you’ve seen that handle a trans character well. Or a gay character actually well. Then consider once you’re doing that, how many of those movies handled more than one gay or trans character. Consider how many movies strive to include things they don’t understand, even though they have all the potential effort to find out. This is because of the twisted values of media capitals. Media capitals declare their values, often in opposition to existing sources, but they don’t then examine those values. You don’t have to be super duper ‘in’ the trans scene to get that casting a trans woman to play a trans woman character is common sense. Hollywood has it in its ‘head’ – such as a thing exists – that it is progressive, and therefore, it knows what to do in these situations. If they did they’d probably realise how silly it is to cast a cis man as a trans woman.
This is a really well understood thing, by the way, in media studies. Media capitals are a point of study – you can learn a ton about cultures that collide by looking at the media capitals that exist in their overlap. Media capitals that produce different things overlap different values as well! You can look at advertising, where to maximise impact of a dying industry, ads are produced to maximise appeal across multiple language barriers and cultural barriers – which brings with it a raftload of values. Did you notice you don’t often see people wearing white sneakers in ads? It’s because white sneakers are symbolic, in some cultures, of criminals. This pushes nonwhite actors to the edges, as I’m sure you can guess – it’s often a sign of luxury that a company can produce ads that are only useful in say, England and America and maybe Australia.
Now, then.
The internet is a coalescing, collapsing, ever-interconnecting blob of its own cultures. It’s possible to be from the internet, as a cultural background. And it’s creating this new whole level of cultural overlap that’s creating big problems in how we examine and talk about media.
Moviebob jokes at times that Videogames Come From Japan, which is to say, upper middle class thirty year old dudes from America got NESes which is to say, they are used to the idea that all videogame media is Japanese, which is to say we already have one big cultural overlap right there. Japanese media is not made necessarily with a non-Japanese audience first and foremost in mind. You might not believe me when I say this, but Japan is as a country, generally more interested in the opinions of Japanese people than it is in the opinions of other people. Controversial, I know, but there we have it.
The creation of videogames in Japan and translation to other countries for export is making a new media centre that again, spreads across a wide variety of values. And one of the things we’re doing – quite a bit lately – is standing with one foot in the west, one foot in the internet, and clucking our tongues that Japanese media isn’t doing what we are doing in our culture, with our values, and our mores.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, about ethnocentrism in media values, and the way the internet is creating this third place. Worse, the internet is a place with plenty of media pull but less economic pull than it thinks. It can get a lot of attention to things, but the actual % of economic weight that internet attention leads to is kinda about the same as in the normal population. Upshot is that it can be very hard to perform the alchemy of turning outrage into impact. What’s more, the internet’s values are really amorphous, so you don’t know if this week your production is a bold queer space that cheekily subverts its own cultural context and gives people room to indulge, or if it is a queerbaiting tool of the patriarchal overlords.
(Both. It’s both.)
This means that sometimes we’ll judge people by our standards (which is not unreasonable) then act as if they should know better (which can be unreasonable). In some cases we’re talking about big issues and the assumption that our little slice of the internet world is indicative of everyone and everything feels like it might be naive at best and really, really condescending at worst. Some of the things we value in online spaces – and like, I don’t even mean things like issues of representation, you can expand this out a ton to things like autosaving and texture resolution and accessability or language settings? – are things that matter to us, and the idea that we can impose our values on everyone, in all cultures, as if we’re inherently right makes me uncomfortable.
Still, the overlaps also allow us interesting contrasts! We can look at a culture striving to accommodate ideas it doesn’t quite get (see also Hollywood’s presence of The Magical Negro trope, for example where an effort to contradict racism just expresses the same racism in a different way). We can look at the way these ideas sometimes transform together to create accidental spaces that are helpful to people who need them (consider tumblr’s narrowcasted spaces). I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about these things, but I feel understanding these overlapping, sometimes human-agnostic media values, can help us understand how things happen – and help us manage the conflicting ways we all engage in media spaces.