Teletubbies, Digital Zapatistas, Viral Marketing, Sign “Bombing”

Guerilla Media Class is nearing the end of the Spring 08 semester. Students are preparing their final community media projects and updating their blogs. I will report on the final projects soon.

The projects range from persuading Loyola Chicago’s Public Safety office to donate ‘found’ or abandoned bikes on campus to the student Bike Club, (who will place them for free around campus), to unconventional promotional efforts for a new musician, who is giving away his music online for free, to sign ‘bombings’ on a variety of issues, including guerilla support for 3rd Party Political candidates, as well as a project that documents “random encounters” on the Chicago El by the women’s rugby team, in full uniform and covered with mud.

Our readings on guerilla media, our guest speakers, our field trip to CANTV and LUC’s new Information Commons have helped us to see the digital spectrum as ranging from political activism to viral marketing, and to think through Habermas’s ideas of the ideal public sphere. The public, the market and participatory culture redefine how politics, economy, art, and pop culture interweave and overlap in old and new media arenas. From blogging in Ethiopian elections to radio listening clubs in Malawi, from the Guerilla Girls to Second Life, the participatory power of new media is obvious.

The futures of traditional newspapers, film studios, broadcast radio and TV stations are in question right now because of how they are financed, promoted and distributed. Advertising and access issues are shaking out in front of us every day, with reporters’ firings, FCC meetings, mergers, bankruptcies, etc… What is clear is that pressure is being applied from both the ‘bottom’ and the ‘top’ in terms of regulation, public access, and market control of new media issues. Things are happening horizontally across the globe too—borders and nation-states aren’t recognized in quite the same ways anymore. Everyone can play World of Warcraft.

We need to keep that pressure on! Make it creative!
Have some “serious fun,” as Henry Jenkins suggests….
Keep it participatory and political!

The market and the government will respond to our interests and demands for access and participation.

We’ve been thinking in class about a few, very different examples lately: the Teletubbies and the Digital Zapatistas.

1. Teletubbies, “consuming” children, cyborg desire

As Nicholas Mirzoeff says in his article about the Teletubbies, perhaps the world’s most popular children’s television show, “The adults are not happy. The television critics are uncertain. The cyborgs are in raptures.” (440) Each Teletubbie has a screen and an antenna. They are cyborgs. The show was initially created by Ragdoll Productions to connect children with technology, to help them overcome their fear or resistance, to make them consumers of it.

The infants are in charge in this world. And so are their desires. Each Teletubbie occasionally receives TV signals from the outside world, showing ‘real children’ playing on the screens in their stomachs. This is where it starts–the younger techno-savvy kids leave their older Luddite parents behind, starting with their TV shows. Jerry Falwell attacked the Teletubbies for being “gay”–with purple outfits, carrying red purses, and having male voices. Other critics see Teletubbies as part of the consumerization of childhood, which is compounded by the success of Harry Potter books/films/products and video games. The “child has become a privileged locus for the generation of hyperprofit–the new generation of profit that results from the successful catching of mass attention.” (447)

Guerilla marketing tactics often target the young. You can see viral marketing in city graffiti, hip hop culture, on billboards, and YouTube. Teletubbies products are all over the world, in Toys-R-Us, on airplanes, etc… But Mirzoeff notes how Teletubbies has been reappropriated as an “icon of nonconformity” and that the TV show does not respect ownership–”goods appear magically.” Mirzoeff compares this “cyborg consumerism” to Napster and its threat to the music industry–their desires and distribution of information aren’t just one way. He finds the Teletubbies both threatening and comforting in their infantile tendencies to reject the capitalist market in favor of cyborg communication.

Nicholas Mirzeoff, “Teletubbies: Infant Cyborg Desire and the Fear of Global Visual Culture” in Planet TV: A Global Television Reader, ed. Lisa Parks and Shanti Kumar. New York: New York University Press, pp. 439-454.

2. Political, performance art meets guerilla activism–Digital Zapatistas.

Jill Lane’s article “Digital Zapatistas” in The Drama Review 47, 2, Summer 2003 describes the experimental, digital activism of Electronic Disturbance Theater and their support of the Zapatista’s political efforts in Chiapas, Mexico in 2001. The Zapatista Tribal Port Scan project launched nonviolent “attacks” on various online organizations through writing digital code that would invade open cyber ports and endlessly repeat a “fragmented, bilingual poem about the struggle for peace with dignity in Chiapas.” (130). This incident is an early form of digital activism on a global scale, which grew out of earlier guerilla ‘performances’ by the Zapatistas, who recognized that get the world’s attention, they would need to use ‘alternative’ methods for delivering, documenting and advocating stories, incidents and issues. The Zapatistas have used well-publicized guerrilla tactics for peaceful, nonviolent protest–e.g. the Zapatista Air Force threw paper airplanes through barbed wire at Federal soldiers. (Lane, 130)

~ by ecoffman on April 16, 2008.