Dramatising natural history documentaries

'Natural history can be pretty dramatic' (Steve Hewlett, 8/1/2014)

I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Media Show, this morning in which an interesting discussion took place between the host Steve Hewlett and Wendy Darke, the head of the BBC's Natural History Unit. The discussion revolved around the extent to which the new BBC prime-time natural history series, Hidden Kingdoms, was built upon artifice.

The series starts on January 16th 2014 on BBC1 - check out the trailer below:

This is a show that has been two years in the making and focusses on the lives of very small creatures, who are very difficult to record in their natural environment. Consequently, in order for the production team to reveal the lives of these diminutive animals they have had to resort to using controlled situations and have filmed captive animals, sometimes in studios, shot against blue-screens so that the 'drama' of their lives can be revealed.

Hardly natural?

The BBC has come under fire from certain quarters of the news media in recent years, especially when it comes to deceiving the public in it's natural history output. Much was made in the press about the 'fake' polar bear birth sequence in the Frozen Planet (2011) series. In that series, a polar bear family was followed in the natural environment, but the scenes of the animal giving birth were actually of a different bear who was housed in a Dutch animal park, in a purpose built enclosure that allowed for unprecedented camera access. Even the snow was fake. However, the viewing public would not have been able to easily distinguish between the natural and artificial sequences, leading to questions of duplicity and declining viewer trust.

At the time the BBC revealed that such staging of footage was common-place amongst natural history output. In an interview on the UK TV show This Morning, Sir David Attenborough responded to the criticism and suggested these sequences were not designed to mislead the public - rather, they were used to enhance the audience's understanding of the animal's lives.

The question is, during the middle of this scene when you are trying to paint what it is like in the middle of winter at the pole, to say, 'Oh, by the way, this was filmed in a zoo.'
It ruins the atmosphere, and destroys the pleasure of the viewers and destroys the atmosphere you are trying to create. It's not a falsehood and we don't keep it secret either. But to say actually in the middle of that sequence, I mean how far do you take this?
Do you say this is a penguin, but actually it was a different penguin colony than this one and this one is a different one? Come on, we were making movies.

At the end of the first episode of Hidden Kingdoms there is a 10 minute sequence that explains the various types of filmmaking techniques that have been employed to create the documentary footage contained within the main show. This is something the BBC have been doing for quite some time in relation to their natural history output, going at least as far back as Planet Earth (2006). Indeed, it's arguable that these short featurettes have become a staple part of the BBC natural history output, and speak to the twin-pronged audience desire to know about the natural world as well as the challenges of capturing the exotic footage presented.

Upfront honesty?

In the Media Show interview, Darke responded to Hewlett's criticisms that the show does not reveal the levels of artifice for dramatic purporses to the audiences in advance by suggesting that production is very honest with the viewers via the 'making of' featurette, as well as via information contained within the show's website. Indeed, viewers are warned in advance that special filming techniques have been employed - providing they visit the BBC's media pack for the show.

However, the level of detail revealed in the media pack is underwhelming. Here's an extract from the website that details the extent to which the material presented in artificial:

What is it like to be a dung beetle caught in an earth-shaking wildebeest stampede? Or a mouse facing a tsunami-like flash flood, which to us would be nothing more than a gentle trickle? Combining their skills as wildlife filmmakers with blue-screen filming allowed the team to recreate real-life events as experienced by the animal stars, giving viewers a unique new perspective on these dramatic worlds within worlds.

When listening to the interview between Hewlett and Darke, it becomes clear that animal runs were built and captive creatures were forced into contexts that didn't occur naturally.  Nevertheless, the BBC are clearly anxious to not fall foul of the same criticisms levelled at it circa Frozen Planet. This level of transparency is clearly an attempt to address earlier failings. However,  this hasn't always worked, as Mark Lawson has pointed out:

I think that there is a problem with the methods used and that it has only been increased by the openness about what has been done. Watching the show is like living with a liar: you start to question everything.

Lawson goes on to discuss the privileged position that viewer of natural history programmes finds themselves in - namely, that they want and expect to be stunned with footage that seems almost unbelievable. Given the extent to which Hollywood-driven CGI has become a staple part of our filmic culture, it may not be surprising to see such techniques being employed in nature documentaries. Indeed, it may be exactly what is required in order to keep this type of flagship programming at the heart of the television schedules.

All documentary is constructed 

What seemed to be absent from the debates around these shows and their varying levels of authenticity or artifice is an acknowledgement that all factual forms are constructed and can never give direct access to the real. While I understand that natural history programming fits within traditions of public service broadcasting and realist aesthetics, it doesn't negate the fact that the editing together of images from multiple cameras, overlaid with some kind of explanatory narration, fosters an environment in which audience interpretations of events are being carefully cultivated - often in a highly narrativised and in an anthropomorphic manner.

Whenever debates around documentary and artifice take place I can't help but think back to Bill Nichols's work on the varying modes of address within the genre (especially chapter 6) and their implications for audience understanding. Nichols identified 6 different modes of address or 'inflections'.

Whenever I see the BBC evoke the making of featurettes at the end of their programmes, I am reminded of Nichols's 'Reflexive Mode' which calls attention to the assumptions and conventions that govern documentary filmmaking. Typically, this mode increases audience awareness that what they are watching is a constructed re-presentation of reality rather than unfiltered access to the real.

The easiest way to explain this idea is by means of a comparison. I frequently use a cropped version of Rene Magritte's painting 'The Treachery of Images' in classes where I remove the text 'Ceci nest pas use pipe' and ask my students what they are looking at.

If the students haven't seen this example before, they usually say that what they can see is a pipe, before I tell them that they are wrong. They are looking at a painting of a pipe.

If they have seen the example before and say it's a painting of a pipe then I usually tell them they are wrong again. They are looking at a version of the painting that has been captured as a digital file before being recompiled and projected onto a screen so that it resembles a painting of a pipe. Never did Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' from 1936 seem more prescient.

It's not a huge leap from Magritte to Jean Baudrillard's examples of Disneyland as hyperreal America (in Simulation and Simulacra, 1981) and the claim that first Gulf War did not happen (in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1991) - despite the documentary evidence to the latter that an event called the Gulf War did take place in Kuwait in 1991. However, Baudrillard's point was about the way in which the images of that war were mediated to construct a version of events many times removed from the actuality of the incident (watching laser-guided Maverick missiles explode over featureless targets via cockpit videos).

The point that I am making is that the interview that opened this post seems to assume that there is a way to accurately represent the reality of the natural world that is somehow free from the problems of representation and narrative construction. Access to an objective reality becomes increasingly problematic and untenable once we acknowledge that all media forms are subject to certain types of artifice - whether deliberately acknowledged or not.

Still, the debate in The Media Show will be a helpful teaching aid for anyone wanting to quickly cut to the issues of documentary. We all love a little bit of 4K/HD 'nature porn' while we are sat in front of our big screen flat-panel televisions made of rare earth materials that may have been mined in conflict zones around the world, from unsustainable sources.

At least we get to watch the lovely, pretty pictures.

What's the point of a degree?

Earlier today I stumbled across a student of mine expressing some doubt as to why, as a Sports Journalism student, he should be studying "audience research about batman"[sic].  Given that he clearly tagged his post with the module code (MAC201), I'm of the impression that he wanted me to read this post and and wanted a response - after all, as the module leader I'm responsible for the management of the content. I responded via Twitter but the character limit is a little restrictive, hence this post.  I need to make it clear that this module is in no way orientated around the study of Batman. Rather it is a module that deals with two distinct themes:

1. The production of media content (in this case, the creation of news and its implications as a constructed form of discourse)
2. The consumption of media content (in this case, the ways in which discourses around engagement with cultural forms have been mobilised)

In fact, this is what the module guide states:

Content Synopsis - This module aims to develop the concepts and approaches introduced in MAC101 through an analysis of non-fictional television texts and discussion of a range of perspectives on media consumption. It consists of two sections:

Television Texts: news and documentary - This part of the module explores concepts such as ‘realism’, ‘discourse’, ‘ideology’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ in their application to contemporary developments in television news, current affairs, documentary and ‘reality TV’. The relevance of work on narrative and genre to these areas of television is explored, and the significance of the production and institutional contexts is assessed. Throughout, you are encouraged to engage in close textual analysis in developing your arguments.  

Media Audiences - This unit begins by examining early work on media consumption within ‘mainstream’ mass communication research, before going on to explore issues raised by more recent work in the cultural studies tradition. A range of academic and industry perspectives on media consumption is considered, and you are invited to reflect on appropriate theory and method in audience research. You are also introduced to debates about specific cultural audiences for contemporary media output. 

In relation to the second half of the module, what a tutor or a student chooses to focus on by means of illustrating the arguments emerging out of audience research is going to be context dependent: it may be audience research about the reception of Batman, it may not.  It could easily be about audience research into BDSM practices, music consumption in economically deprived urban areas, violent video games, football consumption by hooligans or the middle classes, etc.  Focussing on the topic under analysis is to miss the point, but this can be forgiven at this stage, as the student above is responding to the first session in this section of the module.

What example is being explored is peripheral to the main point of the module - how is knowledge about these kinds of audiences produced (ie how does the approach and method impact on the kind of data generated?) and what are the implications of these approaches (ie how do we situate knowledge about any given example socially?). The point here is that students should complete the module familiar with the ways in which knowledge is produced and under what contexts and what limitations. It's very rare that any knowledge production is problem free.  

As students on a UK-based degree programme, it is expected that when they graduate they will be some of the brightest and articulate people in the country, capable of thinking laterally, being critical, interrogative and methodological in their learning, after all, not everyone is suited to Higher Education.  Let us not forget that a UK-based degree is one of the best in the world. Graduates should be able to understand the complex ways in which the world is constructed and recognise their place in that - especially if they choose a career which involves communicating information about the world to a wider public. One hopes they will never be uncritical of the information they are required to employ.

Reading for a degree should be intellectually challenging - it should force students to 'think outside the box' - or else, what distinguishes a degree from any other training qualification?

MAC201 essay 2 considering technology...

This is a quick post for a few of my MAC201 students who are considering approaching the second assessment focussing on technology in relation to audiences, so I expect it to have a very niche interest (if any).

A quick recap...

Over this section of the module we have dealt with a few methodological issues and contextual themes.  The first few weeks were spent looking at different ways to conduct audience research (quantitive approaches, qualitative approaches, ethnography, methodological triangulation, etc) and identifying how the chosen method can impact upon the way questions are asked, as well as the data produced.  We looked at some of the assumptions inherent within the effects paradigm (flawed methodology, disciplinary assumptions, poor definitions of subject matter, etc) - see the critique put forwards by David Gauntlett here for a recap.  We also looked at the shift away from the assumption about what the media does, to what sense audiences make of their media (circa Stuart Hall and David Morley).

The overarching concern here was with making sure students are able to take a critical position when consulted with the supposed certainty of research which seeks to make specific claims about our relationship with media forms, texts and practices.  Certain assumptions about these relationships seem to  recur, often through the pages of the popular press, yet we should take a more nuanced and considered approach to these claims by being sensitive to the contexts in which the empirical research took place.  Quite often, being sensitive to the methodology employed is a wise move as it helps avoid the rather sensationalist claims like this headline: "Television bad for children: Canadian study".  You can listen to Steve Hewlett take some of the claims to task in this week's Media Show.  Fast forward to 11 mins in to hear him discuss some recently published research from the University of Montreal (Canada) which featured in the American Medical Association's Archive of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Quite clearly how we approach research (the pre-existing assumptions we make, the way we define the study, etc) will impact upon the material produced.

Recent weeks have looked at issues like audience taste, technology and gender.  These all bring with them a series of different and specific assumptions.

The generic advice...

To date, the generic advice I've given to students has tended to fall into the following camp: divide the essay into 2 sections - one which summarises some of the general methodological and historical approaches; the other looking at an empirical case study which considers the sense audience members make of their media use. Let's be clear, this is a crude essay plan but it should look like this:

• 1000 words summarising approaches to audience research and some of the problems inherent within this long history
• 1000 words outlining a specific case study in which you reappraise the methodological approach and subsequent results against the backdrop of previous approaches to audiences
• 500 words for intro/conclusion

This is just one of several different approaches that can be undertaken.  In reality, the case study you pick doesn't really matter - what you are looking for is the methodological approach employed so that you can comment critically on its significance in producing data.

However, as I mentioned above, there are themes we've explored in recent weeks (taste, technology and gender) and these can be used to approach the essay slightly differently.  For instance, it may be fair to say that there are commonly-held assumptions about specific forms of media use that may be the by-product of supposition or even inappropriate methodologies (eg pornography and it's negative 'effects').  Students may want to select a case study that takes a user-centric or ethnographic approach to understanding the meaning-making processes that take place in such a context, as a means to reappraise those aforementioned preconceptions.

Technology...


In last week's lecture I spent some time talking about the ways in which technology has been spoken of as the driving force of history (technological determinism), as both potentially liberating and constraining.  See the slides below for a quick recap:


In the workshop, the 6 students that bothered to turn up (out of 51) considered some of the ways in technology has been used to track our relationship with specific media forms (eg the 'passive people meter') whilst being completely unable to address the issue of what sense the audience makes of it's media use.  The slides for that session are here:


There are a number of case studies on SunSpace which attempt to explain and situate technology and its social position in everyday life (like social networks, the iPod, video gaming, the home computer, etc) as opposed to media forms (like soap opera, pornography, violent movies, etc).  It is perfectly feasible to approach these examples with a different essay plan, perhaps like this one:

• 1000 words exploring the social shaping of technology/quantifying the success of technology
• 1000 words outlining the way in which the case study selected takes a qualitative approach to technological forms in order to ascribe human agency to their success
• 500 words intro/conclusion

Say for instance, students decided to look at the Michael Bull study of the iPod, then they may well want  to begin the essay by pointing to the success of the consumer product (branding, marketing, sales, etc), then go on to consider the way in which Bull's approach differs from simplistic quantitive exercise.  Or, students may look at Sonia Livingstone's article on teenagers, privacy and social networking and they'd be well positioned to talk about some of the general societal fears associated with this practise (as manifest in the popular press?) before calling for some empirical work (ie the case study).

Needless to say, the more familiar students are with arguments around audience research the more sophisticated their analysis should be.  By the end of this week, it is expected that students will have spent 100 hours of taught and independent study time preparing for this assessment.  That should be enough to pass the module

Children of the net..

I was recently reading a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman, a research fellow at the Berkmen Centre for Internet and Society, which got me thinking. I normally like what Ethan has to say and I encourage you to check out his site which touches on his thoughts about 'Africa, international development and hacking the media'. In the blog post he talks a conference he attended in which Don Tapscott (co-author) of Wikinomics fame presented.

Essentially, the blog post summarises Tapscott's major argument in the book, something I've touched on in the course of teaching my Cyberculture (MAC281) and New Media & Society (MAC309) modules. I've mentioned him a couple of times on this blog. For those of you unfamiliar with the thrust of the main argument it goes something like this...

Tapscott watched his kids grow up in the 1990s and was amazed by the effortless way in which they used technology. The demographic born between 1977 and 1996 was the first to 'grow up in a digital age ... bathed in bits' (2008: 47), which Tapscott refers to as the Net Generation. This generation is distinct from previous ones due to the myriad ways in which they not only consume media, but scrutinise it, and re-purpose it. In Zuckerman's blog recounting Tapscott's presentation, the latter claims that the kids of this generation are more interested in reading web content rather than reading books (he cites Rhodes scholar, Joe O'Shea, as an example) or watching television.

We might conclude this is a problem, or we might embrace this. “If you spend 24 hours a week being a passive participant, consuming tv – as Baby Boomers did – you get a certain sort of brain.” If you spend those hours searching, researching and building connections, you get a very different brain

I feel Tapscott sets up a bit of a false argument here, which Zuckerman reiterates (nb: I'm not trying to suggest that Zukerman thinks this - he is recounting Tapscott). He claims these are not passive consumers but rather, are driven by a desire 'for choice, convenience, customization and control by designing, producing and distributing products themselves' (ibid: 52). There seems to be a dubious binary set up which equates:

old media vs new media
television vs internet
passivity vs activity

There is a wealth of ethnographic research from European Media/Cultural Studies scholars which disputes such a simplistic understanding of audience engagement - something we cover here on our Media Studies modules (MAC201). Qualitative research in this area paints a varied and complex set of cultural negotiations and competences from, say, a television audience. The work of David Buckingham, David Gauntlett, David Morley, Charlotte Brundson, Ien Ang, Janice Radway, Dorothy Hobson, etc all point to this being the case.

Overall, Tapscott's desire to challenge the assumption that the Internet is making kids dumb by focussing on the ability of young people to forge new connections, engage in distributable editing, scour and research a topic using online tools results in their being an overemphasis being placed on the power of the Internet.

I can see why he wants to embrace the optimism of the Internet especially when online behaviour seems to be coming under attack from neuroscientists like Baroness Susan Greenfield and Gary Small, as well as cultural critics and authors like Andrew Keen and Nicolas Carr (you can watch some footage of Carr below, taken from a forthcoming BBC Digital Revolution project). We can add to this the concerns of educationalists who fear that student use of the Internet is fostering an uncritical and superficial sense of engagement with information.



Implicit in this camp is the assumption that there are some potentially problematic changes occurring - the Internet has encouraged a new form of informational engagement - one which sacrifices depth for sporadic leaps from section to section or site to site. Carr fears we have sacrificed our contemplative approach to thinking. This sounds like the passivity mentioned by Tapscott in relation to TV in another guise.

I'd like to think that is a middle road here, what sociologist John Thompson refers to as an 'interaction mix' - that consumption of media is nebulous and works across platforms. Creating artificial divides between media use is misleading at best. What are we to take from Tapscott's argument: that television is a passive activity or that the reading of books is inferior to Internet-use? What do we take from the opposing camp: that new media habits are potentially changing how we make sense of information? It seems to me that this divide between old and new media is a straw man argument - one sets up the other to create a false argument that serves the best interests of those starting the posturing.

All new media forms will require new literacies - the argument over whether one is better or worse than another is misleading when taken in isolation.

Ethnographic study into new media use amongst the young

I noticed a tweet by Howard Rheingold today which alerted me to a new study published by the MacArthur Foundation entitled 'Living and Learning with New Media'. The study was headed up by the cultural anthropologist Mizuku Ito, with a number of contributions from Heather Horst
Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, and more (28 in total!). boyd has a variant of her contribution hosted here entitled 'Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life'

The larger project was started back in 2005 with the goal being to gain an understanding of

youth new media practices in the U.S. by engaging in ethnographic research across a diverse range of youth populations, sites, and activities

The study looks at the different media ecologies young people negotiate with on an everyday basis, taking in themes such as intimacy, friendship online, families, gaming and more. It promises to be quite interesting and initial press response has been quite positive in claiming the report should placate worried parents obsessing over the amount of time kids seem to spend using technologies and going online.

The project will culminate in a book to be published by MIT Press (entitled Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media) later in the year, but for now there is plenty material to get to grips with.

A short two page summary of the findings can be located here

A 58 page summary white paper can be accessed here

The final report can be found here (handily divided into quick access subsections)

The MacArthur Foundation's press release material can be found here with some video interviews with Ito. I've embedded one below:



This clip below is from June 2007 when the project was in its second year:



The study aims to look at how teenagers are using technology from the perspective of the participants rather than some distanced, academic viewpoint. Any of my students on MAC201 wondering what kind of case studies they should be thinking about for assessment 2, then look no further.

Engaging students 101?

It's been a while since my last post, mainly because I've been back at work preparing for a new semester of teaching (it was Freshers Week last week too) and my upcoming wedding. One of the things that has preoccupied my mind recently has been the issue of innovation in education and how to translate that to student engagement.

I run a large core module for my second students (MAC201 Media Studies 1) which I have modified this year to include an hourly workshop which focuses on helping the students apply what they have learned to an example. I did this mainly because I had a lot of students come see me through the course of last year needing personal tutorials outside of my established office hours and seminar times, effectively doubling my work load, but also because I recognize that not all students are suited to the lecture/seminar/independent study format. A quick show of hands in the workshop on Wednesday revealed most of my students hadn't been to the scheduled screening or read the required reading material.

This isn't in itself unusual. However, there are 180 students on this module and only about 35 turned up for the voluntary session. Now, either this is because 140+ are so confident that they know what they are doing or that the 35 that turned up were those with doubts and were seeking clarification, or that it can be difficult to engage students in the first week back. Who knows? Despite this, I felt the session went well and next week's session will build on the groundwork covered yesterday.

NB: any students reading this can go to WebCT VIsta/SunSpace and access the additional resources I placed there for you yesterday afternoon

I'm also developing a new module at level 3 (MAC309 Media Studies Special Topic) and I've been thinking about a completely different way to engage students and assess them. I've been taking my inspiration from two people in particular, namely Howard Rheingold at Berkely and Stanford University and Tarleton Gillespie at Cornell University. Rheingold delivers two courses, one in Digital Journalism and the other Virtual Communities/Social Media, and its the way he gets the students to interact with the course and its materials which I think is innovative and advantageous. Both of those courses are powered by Socialtext wiki software, and require students to actively participate in their own learning by keeping a blog and a personal wiki which is assessed at the end of the term (along with other modes of assessment too).

What is impressive about this model of engagement is that it encourages the students to take owenership of their own learning and evidence it on a week by week basis, with plenty self-reflection regarding the learners individual responsibilities to themselves and their academic development. I'd like to roll out a similar format myself. Week 9 of the Social Media course even has students meeting in Second Life! There may be problems in implementing this as I am not sure if we have a wiki or if the University's PCs are up to scratch to run Second Life. My 6 month old iMac on my desktop at work can hardly do that.

I think that this kind of course delivery would help to avoid the the situation I had in MAC201 earlier on in this post when the vast majority of students failed to turn up. I'm going to keep an eye on the attendance for this module and see how the students engage with the material. I also have an online discussion space setup in WebCT but, historically, this has been poorly utilized by students. Time will tell if these measures will help the students.

The Byron Review

In case you missed it, back in September 2007 the UK government commissioned a review of the risks children faced from exposure to harmful or inappropriate material on the internet or in video games. As someone who has researched and taught in the area of 'media effects' myself I was expecting the typical tirade of simplification and behavourist assumptions that tend to dog these types of investigations.

I have to admit that I was a little bit dubious as to the outcome of Dr Tanya Byron's review. However, it seems I need not have been so concerned as the study seems to have been very well considered and quite constrained. I think Byron and her team deserve some praise and recognition for a balanced review.

I have not managed to read the full review document yet, so I may still change my mind, but I am impressed with what I have seen thus far. Of course, there are bound to be a few fall outs from the findings - in particular the advice for a hybrid rating system for games under and over the suggested 12 certificate may lead to more parental confusion than assist them in making informed decisions but one could argue that the present combination of BBFC and PEGI advise already does that.

The full report can be found here