Paper Presentation

Spectatorship

Conclusion

Stage 3: Converging Apparatus

The interplay between authorship and spectatorship when multiple apparatuses are enacted

Cinema and Social Networking Sites

Thesis: Social networking platforms are immersive sites that shape and redefine the role of spectatorship and authorship within apparatus theory

"When the apparatuses converge, a new, uncharted complex arises. Authorship and spectatorship become either conditional to a given apparatus or permeable across multiple apparatuses depending on the perspective of critical analysis" (Lachowitzer 14)

Case Study: Catfish

Cinema: spectators are passive subjects of the apparatus

In New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Beyond, Robert Stam conceptualizes the spectator as a construct of the apparatus. In this way, the apparatus creates a situation in which the viewer is vulnerable and susceptible to the fantasy of reality (Stam 147)

Social Networking Sites: spectators are agents

Immersion increases because of viewer agency

Spectators' re-creation increases ideological effect

A real life documentary about online relationships and a cautionary tale about social networking duplicity

Yaniv "Nev" Schulman & Angela Wesselman

Immersion and fabrication: What is real?

Directors: Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost

Distributor: Universal Studios Inc. (2010)

Setting up the Argument

Apparatus theory is transferable across media/technology

• true subject/spectator opposition is limited and impractical
• traditional authorship resides in the dominant ideology of the culture industry

Authorship and spectatorship are dependent on a given apparatus

• mobility
• subject immersion
• agency
• representation

Apparatus Theory

Apparatus Theorists

Metz "The Imaginary Signifier"

The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry (which also works to fill cinemas, not to empty them). It is also the mental machinery -- another industry -- which spectators "accustomed to the cinema" have internalized historically, and which has adapted them to the consumption of films. (The institution is outside us and inside us, indistinctly collective and intimate).

In "Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader," Philip Rosen summarizes the apparatus as a "conjuncture of determinants and effectivities, one nodal point of a social construction of knowledge, desire, pleasure, signifying adequacies, etc." based on the "junctures of film and culture" (282).

("The Imaginary Signifier," Christian Metz, p. 18-19)

More than just the machine, it's the apparatus' ideological effect

Jean-Louis Baudry: "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" & "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema"

From the cave to the cinema & from the cinema to social networking sites

Oppositional voice: Noel Carroll in "Jean-Louis Baudry and 'The Apparatus'"

• Dialectic between the internal and external
• Positioning of the spectator as subject
• The role and function of authorship

Authorship

Authorship Cont.

Social Networking Sites:

Authorship is dependent on spectator agency

• transition away from passivity in the cinema apparatus

Nev and Angela are agents in the mobile and highly immersive platform of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace

However, dominant ideology pervades agency through the representation of images

• profile pictures
• socially acceptable/desirable

Cinema:

In "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Baudry notes that the ideological effect of the apparatus is "necessary to the dominant ideology" (Rosen 295)

Horkheimer and Adorno's "culture industry" as producer and perpetrator of dominant ideology

Stuart Hall's conception of dominant coding (encoding and decoding) introduces oppositional spectatorship as seen in Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

3 Stages:

Cinema, Social Networking Sites, and Cinema/Social Networking

Introduction

Title: "Converging Apparatus": Authorship and Spectatorship in Catfish

Thesis: Social networking platforms are immersive sites that shape and redefine the role of spectatorship and authorship within apparatus theory

Translation of cinematic apparatus theory to social networking sites

Paper Presentation

SPCM 646: Media Theory

By: Chance Lachowitzer