Media stories... sometimes the most interesting ones are not covered by major media. After my graduate political communications class (I'm a teaching assistant and took this course a year ago), where we saw historical footage relevant to the use of fear as a political tool and debated current coverage of the U.S. mid-term elections in the media, one of the students commented about the journalist killed in Oaxaca and the elevator debate, with another Latin American student, was interesting. New York City has a confluence of bright young students who are worldy in their thinking.
The story is of Brad Will, his effort to tell a story and how it killed him. He was an indepedent journalist known in the activist circles of Manhattan and elsewhere. His tale, is about how new media is allowing alternative perspectives to be seen that otherwise might not be told... at least in this way. (If it isn't on CNN, is it real?) Will, 36, was a longtime member of New York's IndyMedia Center. Last Friday, Will was filming on the outskirts of Oaxaca in a place where no other American journalist had ventured. He captured on an 80-second film a story that is now up on YouTube. Will was shot in the stomach by government supporters in a truck as government protesters threw rocks at the truck from the street. Brad is heard to cry out and his camera continued to film while he fell and died a few minutes later. Initial press reports claimed he died in a crossfire.
Through blogs and other forms of new media, an alternative story, was created and formed for the world from the journalism tool in the hands of a dead man. It might have been a nothing story from our neighbor in the south since the powerful control the narratives (in the modern tradition, but we are now postmodern).
With new media and real-time communications, the conversation becomes active, disrespective of nations and geographical boundaries, and sometimes it becomes viral. The point-of-view and the truth residing in a very displaced space -- this reminds me of the thoughts from a philosopher born in the 17th century, George Berkeley (the Amerian campus in California is named after him). Berkeley's theory of subjective idealism, "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived), is the idea that an individual can only know something if it is perceived by the mind and all anyone knows is what their mind perceives.
Sometimes old ideas become extremely relevant in new changing times. The idea of alternative narratives and truth perspectives becomes relevant, theoretically. So... what is real is all in the eye of the beholder.
Students and others in NYC care about many causes and Michael Breen writes in his BikeBlog about bike culture in NYC how a ghost rider on a ghost bike was made as a tribute to Will and he has photos which I think are very artistic. The ghost rider reminds me of the descanos, the decorated tributes resurrected at the place of death so familiar to those who have bumped against the Hispanic culture as it lives in the U.S. He writes about a bike ride in Manhattan that was a tribute to Will and he has additional photos. "Not since China's Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 had a Third World nation witnessed such a massive and intractable public protest," he writes.
If media were not a passion of mine, I wouldn't be able to share the passionate way new media is being used. We don't know much, as a culture, about many places. Therefore, we are open to the stories and take them as the truth. This is the subject of a fictional character who has become a real life entity and the place is an obscure country. Heard of Borat? That is part of my midterm research and I'll cover that later, but Tim Footman in Thailand has an excellent philosophical write-up on it on his blog and linked to the philosopher Berkeley. All part of the way perspective and stories and the way that truth is all in the telling... it is up for grabs and often the unreal becomes the real.
Will's last film is on YouTube and has been viewed 6,359 times as I post. There are other versions and iterations (including one in English), but this one is in Spanish.
A different day of the dead, media-wise. Dead men do tell stories.
Related Post: Censored Stories: Media, Trenchant News & Corruption
content by MotherPie, cc licensed
I'm confused. Is Will real?
Posted by: merry mama | November 04, 2006 at 10:09 PM
Yes, Will is real. Or he was real. Now he is real dead.
Posted by: MotherPie | November 05, 2006 at 08:07 AM