hijacking the media

8/6/2019 Hijacking the Media

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Hijacking the Media. What is a public?

The notion of ' a public' is strongly connected to the media and the myriad possibilities to

'speak' to a public through the media. However, it is highly important to distinguish between the

terms 'audience' and 'public'. While the first term refers to a non-homogenous mass, but, rather,

collections of individuals subject to wide demographic variations (Davis, 2007: 152), the latter is a

wider term, often referring to the social sphere.

Generally speaking, a public shares at least one common characteristic and it exists only if

someone has something to communicate to it. One of the ways to communicate to a public is

through the media: a televised election debate communicates to a public of residents who have the

right to vote; newsreels communicate to all residents in a certain country and so on.

The media and its rituals

Media theorist Nick Couldry turns to anthropology in his self labeled post-Durkheimian and

anti-functionalist attempt to find out ''how are media involved in contemporary societies' holding

together, if in fact they do”(Couldry, 2003: 5). Couldry refers to the three understandings of the

term 'ritual' in anthropology and stresses that media rituals are distinctive from habitual actions

and they refer mostly to the other two meanings of formalized action and action involving

transcendental meaning and value. In his view, media rituals become:

(…) any actions organised around key media-related categories and boundaries, whose

performance reinforces, indeed helps legitimate, the idea that media is our access point to

our social centre. (Couldry, 2003:2)

The media themselves do not perform these actions, but the actors performing them are

people who follow the media, namely the public. The range of these actions is very wide, from

specific, ritualised forms of television viewing to reactions to media celebrities and behavior in

media-related settings and they all work, in Couldry's view, toward the reproduction and

reinforcement of media legitimacy (2003:2). Nevertheless, the question of legitimacy implies the

issue of media power which has been largely discussed in media studies and has produced a large

amount of theories, from the widely accepted then highly contested theory of media effects

working as a hypodermic needle on its public to the theories that stated that media sets the public

agenda for discourse through the topics it chooses to cover. However, Couldry's media rituals

theory attacks the myth, which states that “the concentration of symbolic power in media



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institutions is legitimate”(2003:2). In other words, media do not necessarily have an intrinsic

power; they do not affect the social sphere because of their direct influence, but because of the

media rituals performed by the public, which work to reinforce the legitimacy of the symbolic

power of the media.

Through media rituals, the public is reinforcing the legitimacy of the media but does the

public truly believe in the symbolic power? My argument is that the border between truth and lie

is blurred in what the production and reception of the media information is concerned. The public

carries these media rituals with a tacit 'understanding' with the media; they follow the framework

of suspension of disbelief. This type of relationship is similar to what anthropologist Fanz Boas

described about shamanic rituals. Taussig quotes at length one of Boas's accounts:

a great part of the shamanistic procedure is based on fraud; still it is believed in by the

shaman as well as by his patients and their friends. Exposures do not weaken the belief in

the 'true' power of shamanism. Owing to this peculiar state of mind, the shaman himself is

doubtful in regard to his powers and is always ready to bolster them up by fraud. (Franz

Boas, 1966:121)

Taussig proposes that we read the term 'fraud' differently and substitute it with simulation or

mimesis (Tausig, 2006:133). In this new understanding, especially the term mimesis strikes as

resonant with the above mentioned media rituals and the formalised actions of the public in the

presence of media sites, people or other types of media-related situations. Arguably, while

performing these actions, the public suspends any disbelief in the legitimacy of the symbolic

media power and replicates or mimics the actions demanded by the ritual. However, this does not

imply that the public is not aware of the phenomenon. On the contrary, this account highlights that

the publics' expectations are met by the media for as long as the appearance of the truth is kept; if

the media is exposed, its credibility is destroyed, just as the shaman is killed if exposed.

Creating a spectacle

What is the media then covering, what is it communicating to its public? One answer to this

question would be that the media covers the events that take place in society. Guy Debord and the

Situationist movement would argue that society being one of the spectacle, media is responsible

for, in turn, creating and covering this spectacle. Debord believes that “The Spectacle is not a

collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images”

(1995: 12). The spectacle is therefore as much part of the media as it is present in society; it is not



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the collection of images, yet it is images presented in the media to which publics react. Following

this line of thought, the only way to make your point heard is through the media, but by appealing

to detournement, essentially hijacking the media by creating your own spectacle.

Although some of the Situationists writing at the end of 1960s were promoting a guerrilla

warfare in the mass media, setting forward examples of sieges over newspaper headquarters in

order to issue protesting orders and slogans (Rene Vienet, 2004: 182), hijacking the media in

contemporary society should be understood more in the symbolic sense of the term. On the other

hand, why would one want to hijack the media, now that the myth of the centrality of media power

has been shattered and a widely accessible range of alternative means of promoting social

movements are at hand (videologs, podcasts, blogs, social networks etc)? My argument is that the

main reason behind going for a symbolic hijacking of the media is its still believed in power and

legitimacy. Some of the public's media rituals (remediating media content on blogs or offering

media the raw material to then create news from, such as phone camera recordings of events) do

not threaten media legitimacy, as it was believed at some point, but rather reinforce its established

formats and rules.

One of Guy Debord's statements in Society of the Spectacle has an even stronger value of

truth now with the easy access to technology than it had in 1968: ”9. In a world that really has

been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (Debord, 1967, 1995: 14). The public is

now a part of creating, reproducing and representing the spectacle, as it is part of 'consuming' this

spectacle. Fueled by the new participatory media template, the public is ready to suspend its

disbelief and to loosen the borders between truth and falsehood. Moreover, as Thomas de

Zengotita notes:

Real isn't real enough. That's the tell-tale sign of an otherwise invisible tipping point in the

historical balance between representation and represented. It marks a threshold of

saturation, the point beyond which no real entity can survive in public. (2005: 102)

Therefore, the symbolic hijackings of the media need to appear false enough and actually be

true or on the contrary, more than real so their legitimacy is contested. The most successful media

hijackings have somehow encapsulated one of these two precepts and received incredible

coverage, reaching a wide and diverse public.

My first example stems from more of a commercial than social background but its success is

worthwhile mentioning. In 2009 a campaign was started with the main objective of creating

awareness of the Islands of the Coral Reef on an International level. It was also known as ‘the best



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job in the world’ campaign. However, it was revealed as a campaign only after its reputation had

spread worldwide and the media coverage had reached the equivalent of hundreds of millions of

dollars. It started as something that could not be real, a newspaper advertisement for the position

of caretaker of an island of the Coral Reef. Following the lines of the society of the spectacle, the

applicants were required to keep a videolog on the website and fifteen finalist were chosen to go to

the island for interviews. In a world where the truth appears to be false and vice-versa, this

campaign managed to symbolically hijack the media, achieving incredible estimated media

coverage of over 150 million US dollars adding to coverage by CNN and a BBC documentary.

But is this type of commercial endeavor the only successful way of media hijacking? Could social

movements that aim at communicating though-provoking messages to the public follow this

example as well?

I will now return to Debord and one of the examples he quotes as a successful revolutionary

movement, more exactly the Caracas students’ armed attack on a French art exhibition from which

they stole five paintings which they later offered to return in exchange of the release of political

prisoners (Debord: 2004, 160-161). Debord believes that this detournement is what releases art

from the entrapment of a demystified society and offers it the chance to “ bring back into play

what really matters in life.“ (Debord, 2004: 161) Debord’s account implies both a manifest and a

latent revolutionary critique where the established value of the artwork is set into the symbolic

field of political values and then compared to the value of a person’s freedom.

The issue of the value of art alongside issues of truth and falsehood are questioned in

contemporary society by artists like Banksy, who uses subversive street art to symbolically or

really hijack the media. Some of his actions, sometimes called mere ‘stunts’ are statements that

use art to question political situations, such as his satirical paintings on the Palestinian side of

Israeli controversial West Bank Barrier, portraying tourist-like images of islands and

mountainsides. His projects reached an incredible international media coverage and have tackled

very diverse political issues. In 2005, he placed a life-size replica of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner

on the grounds of Disneyland in California. Apparently, the replica remained there for around

ninety minutes before the park’s security closed the ride down and removed it.

All the above examples rely on the undetermined grounds between truth and falsehood in a

society that produces, covers and then consumes its own spectacle. The public is willing to

suspend its disbelief, however it needs to be awaken from a trance-like routine with something

that is questionable in its sheer state of truth or falsehood. In other words, real not being real

enough, the public’s interest and potentially its actions must symbolically hijack the media, and in

some sense also hijack their attention with a reality-challenging fact, be it true or a hoax.



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Bibliography

Couldry, Nick (2003) Media Rituals. A Critical Approach London: Routledge

Davis, Aeron (2007) The mediation of power London, New York : Routledge

Debord, Guy (2002, 2004) ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art’ in

Guy Debord and the Situationist International . Texts and Documents, Tom McDonough (ed.) MIT

Press: London

Debord, Guy (1967, 1995) The Society of the Spectacle New York: Zone Books

De Zengotita, Thomas (2005) Mediated. How the Media Shape Your World London: Bloomsbury

Taussig, Michael (2006) Walter Benjamin's Grave Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Vienet, Rene (2002, 2005) ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics’ in Guy

Debord and the Situationist International . Texts and Documents, Tom McDonough (ed.) MIT

Press: London

Art prankster sprays Israeli wall, accessed 17.05.2010

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4748063.stm

Artist Banksy targets Disneyland, accessed 17.05.2010

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5335400.stm

Best Job in the World Case Study, accessed 17.05.2010

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/best-job-in-the-world-case-study/