David Lynch does a naturalist interview tour of America. It’s a 20 000 mile road trip, of 70 days, talking to people found on the road. The people telling their story. People. People. Tells David Lynch, discovering the wonder of oral history, that out there without a script the anonymous has a story, and knows how to tell it. The interviewers, Lynch’s wage laborers, ask a closed set of questions such as “What am I most proud of?” or “How would I like to be remembered?” The questions give the project some consistency, together with the editing of the clips, while the location on the map gives just enough context.
What comes out of these interviews however, besides a bit of life story, is the impossibility of questioning. The design that people’s lives can fit between the expectations of an early life that gets or doesn’t get realized, and the retrospective look (flashback, judgment day); fails. People have no emotions for these epic questions. They live life merely by living, never professing it.
It promises to “discover your position in the political landscape for the 2009 European Parliament Elections.” It is Eu Profiler. My result puts me far to the left, and sitting on the fence about all things European (picture is me in the Portuguese “landscape”). The party in Europe I am closest to is the Piratpartiet of Sweden. And by reading their program online it seems a pretty nice match.
There is something unseemly about this survey. I makes political choices into an algorithm, of separable questions with individual weights. It makes party positions into discrete data points on a Cartesian axis. History personal and national is forgotten for the sake of the program. Charisma, trust, and imagination are not the axis. All that is exciting and humane about politics is expelled.
I won’t follow the advice and emigrate to Sweden to cast my vote. I doubt anyone will. Disciplinary projects like this, that want to shape reason and emotion are common. But their coming to existence doesn’t mean they are effective.
I hear Eric Alterman, blogger, professor, book author, in a podcast from the Woodrow Wilson School on the “The Future of News”. The session was roughly devoted to the economics of print, although very little of that go mentioned. There was on interesting passing remark by Alterman, that today’s media is mostly opinion, in loose paraphrase, to “provide context to the news.” News is everywhere, diffuse, instantaneous, and repeated in the print media, so the new journalist ventures mainly online focus on “context.”
Context is thrown back and forth in academic and semi-academic settings as a good thing. But the more it gets invoked the less I understand what it refers to.
