Media Mindfulness

I guess the Marine training that equates a hard-on with a deadly weapon translates well to the optical unconsciousness. At FreeVideoBlog soldiers are posting their combat footage (and in other cases doing things as mundane as doing BMX bike tricks in the middle of a vacant desert). Some of the clips are straightforward sad, with titles as simple as the great American lament, “Iraq Sucks.” Others though, are adrenalin-fueled, quickly cut montages of door knockdowns, home invasions, and assaults on Faluja. Overdubbed voices celebrate the “once in a lifetime opportunity” to attack a city full of insurgents. One video is just a guy “getting some” as he fires his machinegun from a helicopter; hell knows where those bullets are landing.

When Warhol claimed everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame, I wonder if he envisioned bored US soldiers uploading from their imperial posts combat footage set to heavy metal, cut like sophisticated MTV videos. It’s a weird kind of techno-violent-mini-spectacle that fuses war films, music videos and pornography, something akin to “warnography.” It’s pornographic in the sense that there is an erotic obsession with the virility of violence, destruction, weapons and domination.

FreeVideoBlog is also home to an assortment of more mundane categories: Anime, Kids, Basketball, Music Video, Cats, Myspace, Dancing, Paintball, Dogs, School, Drunk People, Skate, Extreme Sports, Slideshows, Fights, Soccer, Funny, Star Wars, Iraq War, and Video Games. This site challenges the belief that just because someone can make media that they should. I recall several years ago that Francis Ford Coppola remarked that consumer video cameras would usher in a filmmaking revolution, one in which even some trailer park kid in Ohio could become a brilliant auteur. With the Internet and its phenomena of viral video (YouTube, VideoBomb, GoogleVideo, etc.) we have hit upon something slightly different. From watching trailers in movie theaters I suspect that the wave of the future is not feature movies, but one-to-five minute blasts that can be emailed, uploaded, traded and viewed on portable media players. With the increasing speed of edits (trailers have almost two cuts a second), we are processing images much faster these days. Even my stodgy old self can barely sit through a full-length movie anymore without getting totally antsy.

I won’t call this a “revolution,” just because the word is so trite and commodified even Chevy can call their latest line of petrol-guzzling vehicles “revolutionary.” Besides, the word is widely abused. To revolve is to return to something. But as I write this, it occurs to me that the current wave of Internet video is in some ways a throwback to early cinema. Just as the first films were about ordinary experiences and were mostly interesting because of their novelty, now college kids are throwing up video of running drunk down their dorm hallways, or teens dropping Mentos into Coke bottles to turn them into fizzy geysers. What is evolutionary about the process is how we are collectively engaged in a networked kind of Darwinian process of natural selection. Through our collective participation in the primal sea of amateur video, our individual views, reviews and crosspollination are creating a self-selecting reality in which our group intelligence builds an alternative, noncommercial media network. What remains to be seen is if the masses will simply fall back on fart jokes, Web cam wannabes, exhibitionist stripper segments, pot smoking laugh-a-thons, or if we’ll see brilliant and subversive interventions like Stephen Colbert’s Bush roast, or the kind of actualities we saw with grassroots activists documenting recent immigration protests. My sense it that it will be a mix of all this, just as the MySpace ecosystem is flexible enough to incorporate the quirky tastes of our authentically freaky society. So despite the sad and depressing manifestation of this phenomenon as represented by war videos, I’m also hopeful that our collective editing habits can improve as our group mind filters out the more regressive tendencies of our culture. Now, can we at least begin to shorten the credits?