Occasionally Asked Questions


1.  Why is there nothing about farming on this website?

Oh but there is, and you can find it on every page.  My metaphor of farming our culture refers to the urgent need for critical responses (mediaturgy) to public forms of TV/media production.  In short, now that we have acquired free and simple tools to grow, build and cultivate varietals of media, it is no longer logical to sponsor exploit-and-move-on communication.  We must differently watch and challenge those who produce (and teach) TV/media... that is to say, more closely.  For after sixty years of “one-way-street” non-reciprocal TV, all media production continues to obfuscate through ever-exploitive forms of mediamongering.  It is why we see such utter despoiling of our public TV/media environments.  No true ‘public’ can effectively subsist by corporate ‘hunting-media’ practices alone.  The time for critical farming has come because... Our techniques of media production are expressions of (political) power by other means. 


2.  Who works at Cultural Farming, and who is your target audience?

Me.  You.


3. What do you want viewers to take away from Cultural Farming?

“Take away” is an odd choice of words since this entire project is about re-gifting rather than taking.  But Cultural Faming completes itself when viewers recognize that all media production, including their own, must help to bridge the problematic voids growing between media consumer, media intellectual, media critic, and media builder.  Mediaturgy’s promise depends upon new, collective, experimental approaches to critical investigation that propagate ethical, balanced mixtures of these traditionally separated “specialized” domains -- new approaches that can be grown by almost anyone with persistence, courage, and curiosity, right in the comfort of their own homes.  And if you order today you get two for only $19.95.”


4.  What kind of equipment do you use to make your videos?

A seven year old Macintosh, an even older 9” Sony TV, a personal video recorder, iMovie editing software (HD 6.0.3), and little else.  Why?  It is because we are witnessing most all digital media (regardless of size, medium or device) evolving into a kind of TV.  So I practice Cultural Farming here, at the easiest entry point possible, where anyone can join in, even with the simplest tools available.


5.  How long does it take you to collect all these clips?

It’s hard to answer that.  I am never not working.  I’m continuously and simultaneously surfing, watching, ripping, reading, writing, editing, building.  It’s just how I spend my days... and my nights.  I’m doing it now as I answer this.


6.  Can I follow you with RSS, or on Facebook or Twitter?

You cannot.  The idea of compulsory huckstering for “subscribers”, “friends” or “followers” with just a click of a button is anathema to my modus operandi.  You can, however, click the “comment” link at the top of most every page to contact me at any time... I’ll reply... even though email is now considered obsolete in a world where “presence” demands an “always on” virtual omnipresence.


7.  How do you make money with Cultural Farming?

I don’t, nor have I ever.  I accept no subsidization.  This non-commodity approach to content creation and dissemination affords certain very real (ethical) freedoms unavailable to most other forms of monied scholarship.  I sleep very well at night knowing every project in Cultural Farming was made by me alone, by hand, on my nickel, exactly as I see fit, and given away freely to anyone interested.  It is my gift to television, in a form of potlatch, which is very hard to repay via one-upmanship.


8.  How much does it cost to make and maintain this website?

Very little.  Only a few hundred dollars to start up, and less to sustain it.  The real cost is in time.  But, time is an essential expenditure for any longitudinal, ethnographic project.  And I have all the time in the world to spend.


9.  How does Cultural Farming differ from typical media literacy projects?

Well, media literacy is a complex, wide-ranging and oft-debated term, but broadly conceived ML concerns itself with notions of deeper viewing and content analysis.  However, for Cultural Farming this is but the tip of a very big media-iceberg that demands ‘below the surface’ examination.  To Cultural Farming, literacy involves not just reading, but also writing, critical theory, reflexivity and craftsmanship.  Where there is a wide literature regarding media analysis, there is a dearth of investigations about how one produces critical-ethical media content.  Until media literacy embodies this full-monty approach, media educational efforts fall dangerously short.  One simply cannot gain “literacy” without fulsome competencies.

   

10.  What exactly do you mean by “production practices”?

I am referring to how we intentionally make our media communicate, rather than simply interpreting what the content ‘says’, because our practices throughout ‘production creation’ are always the first step in meaning-making.  Put another way, consider Larry Lessig’s popular maxim: Code is Law.  Now extrude that notion to a logical conclusion:  Code is architecture.  Architecture is design.  Design is a kind of critical thinking.  And purposeful thought should always be behind how a hammer hits a nail, which line is drawn in CAD, or why we choose between crossfade, dissolve, or collision.  In short, it matters how we prepare our media presentations.   Enacting our production techniques and having these techniques reciprocally enact our communication conditions what can be socially embodied, performed and received.  Examining these “conditionings” allows vital insight into both communication and culture.


Thought is to action as theory is to practice.  Thus, what I’m mostly concerned with today is the profound lack of reflexive, (C)ritical craftsmanship throughout professional and social media production, because whether we realize it or not, our production choices are expressions of power, and thus political.  Much of my work is an attempt to shock into awareness the notion of media tools and techniques as an originating “mouthpiece” of ethical media communication... and to do it through surreal, comparative appropriation and remix.  Here, I’ll offer two quotes: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (McLuhan, 1968); and, “The cameraman and the machine are now one...we hardly know what goes on between the hand and the metal” (Benjamin, 1936).  Likewise, I submit in 2010, we continue to neglect how we become -- through our media production practices -- both what we behold... and hold.


11.  Why don’t you call your videos “documentaries”?

While every project in Cultural Farming enacts a kind of (empirical) documentation, the term “documentary” is just a wee bit too precious today, don’t you think?  How about “video essays”... or, “modelbooks” (Brecht), or “percepts” (McLuhan), or better yet, how about James Joyce’s phrase “feelful thinkamalinks”?


12.  Why don’t you post your videos on YouTube?

For starters, YouTube promotes “Broadcast Yourself”.  Cultural Farming is nothing about that.  But also, I don’t particularly like or trust Google.  Despite their corporate claim to “DO NO EVIL”, they remain a hugely influential filtering-machine that often practices ethically questionable policies.  I use Google to search, but why give them my videos?  After all, they have the ability to take whatever they want anyway, right?  As for YouTube, their fine-print policies speak for themselves... not to mention that YouTube was launched by three guys from PayPal (‘nuf said).  At bottom, it is important both for intellectual diversification and for “quality control” to host all my content under the oasis of a private banner.


13.  Are you located in Canada in order to skirt U.S. copyright restrictions?

Heavens no.  I live in Canada because I choose to.  My wife and I love it here, although we both retain our U.S. citizenship.  Calgary certainly beats Boston, where we lived for almost 25 years.  Regardless, go read copyright law.  Today’s law clearly allows Cultural Farming’s brand of fair-use appropriation and remix.


14.  If you were a professional visual designer, why is Cultural Farming’s

website black-and-white and so bland looking?

Wouldn’t it be better to ask why most websites feel the need to proffer templates of phantasmagorically-ill-composed-riots-of-attention-deficit-sights-and-sounds?  Design is a primary component in all communication.  All my design choices throughout this website are measured and thoroughly self-reflexive.  So now, you tell me, what might Cultural Farming’s design layout be saying?


15.  How are we to tell which parts of your videos are “real” and which parts you have manipulated?

This is a very common question, and I answer it way: Why does it matter if each story rings true?  Would my work somehow be less scholarship if it were entirely fiction?  Might something be lost if my manipulations were “meaningfully different” than TV’s original transmission?  But for the record, very little of the content I remix is altered.  Maybe 5%.  And I do this exactly to ensure a kind of ‘ethnographic accuracy’ in the retelling.  Cultural Farming is less an exercise in quantitative collection than a qualitative expression of how TV’s grammars help produce meaning.  I retain the ability to occasionally shift certain audio, make certain clips aged or grainy, etc.  But upon close examination, it is readily apparent that, beyond ‘reordering’, the overwhelming ‘manipulations’ in Cultural Farming are merely cut-and-paste, fade in-out, and dissolve.  As ethnographic ‘tone poems’ constructed to capture the essences and styles of contemporary TV practice, I need do little more, since the original content is typically already manipulated well beyond the logics of rational discourse.


16.  How well is Cultural Farming received in academia?

Funny you should ask. To my knowledge it isn’t received at all, yet.  In academia, as in the medical profession, doctors are dotingly revered, whereas ‘nurse practitioners’, like me perhaps, are dismissed as something considerably less... although ultimately equal in value.


17.  If you are not a professional, or an academic, and you don’t make

documentaries, what are you?

I’m a citizen, a TV ex-professional who is now hell-bent on illuminating to other citizens how our common media production practices often condition social meaning-making.  Of course, over time I’ve anointed myself with a variety of funny monikers like “tyro ethnographer”, “public intellectual”, “misanthropic flaneur”, “critical culinaire” (as in Brecht’s notion of “culinary”).  My latest appellation is “mediaturg pamphleteer”.  I like this one a lot.


18.  Why do you keep saying “cameras are guns”?  Wouldn’t you rather be

shot by a camera?

I wonder... and so should you.   When cameras became guns, the first casualties were objects that ‘happened’ before the cross-hairs.  Shortly thereafter, any and everything became fair game as media battle-lines were redrawn between what was in front of and what was behind the lens.  This too lasted only a short while, as gun-against-gun equalized into camera-against-camera.  Oddly today we remain largely unawares to a world where most all media is now gun, as it is camera.  Moreover, it’s not just the endless unleashing of these new weapons into an unprepared world, it is also the increasing speed of their bullets.  For example, from our media to the military, from pharmaceuticals to equities trading, everything --EVERYTHING-- is happening much too fast, and it is all facilitated by technology.  Don’t get me wrong here, I am a strong proponent of innovative technology.  But until we insist that our new technologies launch with harnesses, steering wheels, and rules of the road --along with their promises of benefit-- we will continue to find ourselves ‘behind the eight-ball’.  Theory and critical proficiency must not always be a digital day late and a dollar short.  Thus the growing (deadly) problem we face today is this seemingly ungovernable speed of new technology.  Cultural Farming is but one mechanism for  s l o w i n g   d o w n  this reckless, seductive advance.


19.  How many “hits” does Cultural Farming get?

Hard telling.  Since its inception, Cultural Farming has received somewhere in the range of 700,000 unique page views.  But this number is somewhat skewed since one particular project, Media Nipple, was given its highly ‘searchable’ title precisely to garner attention.  Today the average number of visitors to Cultural Farming has noticeably decreased.  This is partly due to Google prohibitions, but also due to a sharpening of pedagogical focus, which lessens resemblances to typically hyped ‘social’ media.  I also surmise it is because I refuse to ‘play’ insidious, obligatory, web-promotional strategies.  I could care less about ‘juicing’ my internet rankings.  That said, I’m guessing most scholars never get around to my most important content --watching the videos-- and casual viewers are likely scared off by the big blocks of written text throughout.  ‘Stickiness’, however, is something probably more important, and the average visitor does hang around this site for quite a while, although I do not bother tracking every visit to every project... there’s just too much work here.


20.  Who visits Cultural Farming?

I have no way to determine this exactly.  Interestingly, North Americans seem not to be my main audience.  That award currently goes to europe and the UK particularly, maybe because of their embrace of practice-led research.  Oddly, right now I seem to be getting an inordinate amount of traffic from Korea.  Go figure.


21.  Who are your most influential theorists?

If you look around Cultural Farming, names like Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht should almost fall off the screen and onto your lap for reasons clearly articulated throughout.  But many other “interlocutors” have deeply influenced my work as well.  These names run a gamut from Sontag and Denzin to Baudrillard and Gramsci.  In (visual) anthropology, it’s people like: Jean Rouch, David MacDougall, George Marcus.  In TV/media: James Carey, John Fiske, Robert McChesney.  In media-art-education: Paulo Freire, William James, Henry Giroux, John Dewey, Robert Stam, James Elkins.  In performance ethnography: Denzin, Madison, Turner, Conquergood, Schechner.  In theatre: Robert Edmond Jones, Donald Oenslager, Bel Geddes, Craig and Appia continue to top my list.   But interestingly, a few longtime academic “whipping posts” like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman have also been influential.  Neil was very kind and encouraging to me in the 1990’s.  Back then I knew nothing about critical-anything.  His writings were extremely accessible, clear, noble, sharp-witted.  Today, much of academia sniffs at Postman’s body of work; too quick to compartmentalize his oeuvre into a kind of convenient foil of simplistic “determinism”.  Postman deserves to be re-read, historically, in light of the enormous changes within both media and education today.  He has a lot of good, controversial things to say and remains an excellent “entry point” for autodidacts like me. 


22.  It’s hard to watch all the fast-paced violence, anger, nudity, and stupidity in your videos; can’t you make them another way?

Trust me, I would if I could.  I don’t like it either.  It is much harder to make these videos than it is to watch them.  But, in order to accurately retell TV’s techniques ethnographically, there is simply no way to avoid ‘ugly’ data.  And that exacts an emotional toll on me too.  But then, if I unethically chose to ignore my actual (data) content collection or insisted on translating my findings into some language other than TV-speak, I could simply write a book like everyone else.


23.  How can you say your videos are somehow “representative” when each clip in every montage is so un-contextualized?

We should remember that our notions of contextualization are also socially constructed.  Moreover, we have come to accept many forms of extreme, illogical discombobulation as simply part of our everyday communicational processes.  My videos provoke this normative.  All TV, from news to commercials, comes to us in endless streams of dis-contextualization.  Importantly, these unexamined surreal practices lay both at the heart of TV’s inability to communicate, and offer unique opportunities to re-purpose surrealism into a lens for deeper examination.


24.  Why don’t you ever use clips from popular shows like “24”, “Lost”, “CSI”, “American Idol”, or daytime TV?

Hey, I’m just one guy.  I can only watch so much TV, and I only rip what I’ve actually viewed.  Maybe these other genres could become your ethnographic project?   Journalism, news and information, and other non-fictional screen media reside within my particular interest and expertise.  I care little about fictional TV, because in my opinion, it can be made in any manner suitable... it’s fiction.  News, on the other hand, must never embody fictionalizing practices.  But as we all know, it too is dangerously seduced by eyeball-grabbing mediamonger techniques.


25.  At your age, why are you still in school?

Ha, one should never be “out of school”.  The problem for me, however, is finding any school interested in, let alone championing, Cultural Farming’s approach to critical media ethnography.  This too will change, but by the looks of it, not any time soon... and not without a struggle.


26.  Do you really think that practicing “Cultural Farming” can significantly change media or social conditions?

I wouldn’t hold my breath.  But it certainly has worked miracles for me.  And that’s a terrific start.  One down, 6 billion people to go.









                                                      











HOLLAND WILDE:

An American, living

in Canada, now spending his life experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography.

 
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