[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keepin the same place.If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at leasttwice as fast as that! And so it seems today.Timing marks popular culture.Television quiz showsand advertising rates are meted out in seconds and minutes.On-demand deliveryfor parts in the automobile industry is complemented by 10:30 a.m.delivery forovernight air shipments.Sports events are exquisitely timed, as at the Olympics;and made more exciting by overtime when teams are tied.These and othersuch time-directed activities make up the kinetic quality of our era.This is oneof the two qualities that Jean Baudrillard said marked American culture.Theother is the cinematic one, visions of things that like the sugar plums in thepoem The Night Before Christmas dance in our heads.The current generation Reconfiguring time and space 53of Japanese cell phones includes built-in video-cameras that can record andtransmit about five seconds of movement.By the end of 2002, 1 million of thesedevices had been sold in Japan.Some individuals have argued that the image has triumphed over the writtenword.The printing press revolutionized the perception of the world and therebydegraded the visual; now the image is back in the ascendant. The world of images: finalists smile for the camera in the 1959 Miss World beauty con-test held in London, won by Miss Holland (© Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS). 4 Picture thisA new world of imagesToday, a picture is not necessarily worth a thousand words but it might be wortha substantial sum of money.Proof was supplied when the movie star CatherineZeta-Jones won a suit alleging damages from unauthorized and unflatteringphotographs taken during her marriage ceremony to fellow movie celebrityMichael Douglas.The photographs appeared in one British magazine (Hello!)several days before the official photographs appeared in another (OK!).Thehappy bridal couple had arranged a million pound ($1.6 million) photo-op dealwith OK! During the trial at the High Court in London, Ms Zeta-Jones testifiedthat the sum might have seemed high for some people, but it was not that muchfor us (O Hanlon 2003): 1).The commerce in images (Ewen 1988: 27) dates back to the late nineteenthcentury, when photography and printing were successfully joined.Thatcommerce explains the complaint of the publishing director of Hello! that theZeta-Jones suit was not brought about privacy but about a commercial deal. (O Hanlon 2003: 2).There s no doubt that the making of images is now a majorindustry, and the visual in its myriad forms is the principal medium by whichpopular culture is expressed.The popularity of the visual is overwhelming, asstatistics will demonstrate.Here are some to consider:About 2,700 photographs are taken every second globally, with a total ofabout 82 billion photographs taken in the year 2000.It has been estimated that over 1 billion television sets were in operation inthe same year, with an estimated 3.7 billion individuals worldwide watchingthe Olympic Games on television from Sydney, Australia.Average annual film production between 1988 and 1999 among the majorfilm-producing countries was: India, 839; China and Hong Kong, 469;Philippines, 466; and the United States, 395 (UNESCO, Survey onnational cinematography, last updated 19 February 2001).The Motion Picture Poster Almanac lists the prices of 500,000 movieposters.In 1997 the auction house Sotheby s sold a poster of the 1932 film 56 A History of Popular CultureThe Mummy for £453,500 ($725,000), the highest price ever paid for aposter.Ours has become a see-all culture in which it seems that little has been left tothe imagination, and not much has been excluded from economic exploitation.On the screen: movies and televisionIt was the screened visual experience that became the dominant one in thetwentieth century and remains so in the early twenty-first.First the public movietheater and then the private television set made commonplace what had inearlier centuries been restricted and irregular, the theater of the well-placed andwell-born.There is clear meaning in the frequent selection of names likeEmpire, Palace, Rex and Regal for movie theaters.Expressive of places andpower once enjoyed by the few, these names now implied a sociallytransformative experience in which anyone with a little money might enter aworld of splendor and delight.Interior decor often matched the theater s nameas the baroque, once the architectural expression of grandeur, was carried togaudy extremes.Outside, the main front display the marquee in Americanidiom became an electrical extravaganza as garish in form and color as theelectrician s art would allow.The marquee was the visual antithesis of the dismalentrance to Dante s Hell over which appeared the words Abandon all hope, youwho enter! Millions happily entered those palaces of distraction, the movietheaters (approximately 80 million weekly in the United States in 1938).The supremacy of the movies was soon challenged after World War Two astelevision broadcasting swept around the world.In the 1950s, these two mediacompeted for the viewing audience but in subsequent decades found the meansto cooperate in increasing that audience.The history of this unsettledrelationship began in the 1930s when television was first found feasible and whenmovies had become an established international industry.In the United States,Europe and Japan, experimentation with television equipment began in the1920s.Actual broadcasting began in a limited way in the 1930s.On 2 November1936, the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) aired the first high-resolutiontelevision program.Earlier in the same year, the Olympic Games were televisedto a very limited audience in Berlin, while in 1939 President Franklin D.Roosevelt opened the New York World s Fair with television coverage thatreached some 20 miles from Flushing Meadows, Long Island, to downtownNew York.Yet only 2,000 television sets were owned in the United States beforeWorld War Two with about 10,000 in Great Britain
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
