I had a hard time engaging in this week’s viewings. They kind of bored me. So, as Helen pointed out for Engage Media, I thought, perhaps I am not the target audience?
I was slightly intrigued by the secrets posted in Post Secrets, but mostly they just made me sad. I thought the videos in La Buena Vida could have been really interesting… except I got bored because of the way everyone was asked the same questions each time. (Their answers would be sortable in a spreadsheet, but with video, it takes a hella long time to make connections). And the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank is a valuable historical archive, I didn’t draw me in.
Should these sites be more interesting? Are they trying to reach people like me? Or are they for future generations? Are they for researchers? Journalists? Will decision makers look at them? Are they promoted, or just archival?
The Hurricane Digital Memory Bank gave me the most pause because I appreciate that they are keeping a record of hurricanes, and perhaps in the future people will be able to go back (individuals, journalists, policy makers, scientists) and remember, oh, that’s what that looked like. We know how many cubic feet per second of water came through the levee when it broke during Katrina, and how high the water rose on Bourbon Street, but seeing photos may help people to not forget the impact on people. Perhaps it will help prevent the forgetting and promote better decisions in the future.
Perhaps Post Secrets offers a similar lesson too: What mistakes did other people make that I can learn from? And, for that matter, La Buena Vida as well. What has been the effect on U.S. foreign policy in Central and Latin America, and what can we learn from it going forward? If anyone watches it. Which I doubt they will.
Natalie: It sounds like you’re struggling with the purpose of these projects, and whether or not they actually achieve anything. I think your last line was the most apt, ” If anyone watches it. Which I doubt they will.” I think that for each of these projects, they’re actually less about who watches it, and more about the archive itself.
I vetted my experience with each of these viewings from a starting point of asking what their purpose was. With regard to the democracy piece, I think there was confusion in his purpose: it sort of had the facade of being a piece “for the people,” but really, it’s about the artists perception, using all of the other voices to express it. For both the hurricane piece, and PostSecret, it’s really about those who were part of the process, and then it exists for us to peer in on. In that sense, I think all of the projects achieved their goals.
My initial question is up for debate, however: What is the primary purpose of these media projects? Is it to document or to be interacted with? Based on the purpose, have the artists curated well enough to be effective when viewed?
I completely agree with you about the Good Life project in that since they were asking the same questions to everyone, why not just break it all down into information you can read? For instance, I thought it would have been a lot more interesting if they would have figured out that a certain percentage of people who were interviewed feel that they should be governed like X or Y (it could have also been broken down into how different genders feel about these certain topics, and so on). Or they could have asked the same questions and put the answers up in text on the page and asked them different questions that would have centered around that particular person. And as Amanda kind of alluded to, were all of these same questions asked in order to back up the artist’s interpretation of what he thought was going in Latin America? Probably so. After all, the artist didn’t go into the project without an agenda.
I’ll make the argument that The Good Life and Post Secret have two distinct audiences because the content on the sites are so different, highlighted by the fact that people who contributed to The Good Life project were videotaped which erases their anonymity whereas people who contributed to Post Secret only participate in it because it’s anonymous. I think there’s also a timeliness factor here. The Post Secret content can be viewed for several years and still seem interesting and relevant. The hurricane site can be seen as almost a snapshot of what took place in a historical sense while the The Good Life site may not be seen as completely accurate (not only because the people who were being interviewed weren’t really experts on such a complex topic) because what they said may not coincide with how things are today.