Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
However, the data in the database is not the resulting cultural artifact we
might call a digital movie. It is only a collection without a means of seeing it.
The purpose for collecting, ordering and retrieving documents is revealed in
the design of a query system. The series of seven films produced in the 1940s
by Frank Capra,
Why We Fight
, was developed to persuade the population of
United States population to support the war against Germany and Japan (Sklar
1993: 265-266). Hence, the films are query results from a collection of moving
images and sounds that followed a politically determined algorithm. Certainly
no machine-readable code was written to carry out this enterprise in propa-
ganda, but the functional behaviors of the process are parallel. A body of the
United States government created a policy and an agency to produce these films
with a specific didactic intention. The moving images and sounds were col-
lected, catalogued, ordered, selected and implemented for each film following
an algorithm that was the policy of the war time government of U.S. President
Franklin Roosevelt.
The example of the
Why We Fight
series provides a pre-digital model of
the database as a mechanism for the production of documentary. The essential
difference is that Capra had to cut his negative and commit his materials to one
query result for each query - the finished films. The computer-hosted database
provides the possibility of continuous re-constitution and multiple query re-
sults. It also allows the possibility of autonomous behaviors sometimes unin-
tended by the author. Without the propagandistic algorithm pre-defined by the
Roosevelt administration, other structures and hence other films constituted
by the same collection of documents might make for another understanding of
the experience of World War II.
Not unlike wartime journalism, documenting and understanding youth
culture is an increasingly difficulty task. The 1970s was a decade when youth
culture evolved fewer genre of expression. But the channels of cultural produc-
tion were directed at more specific demographics than at any other time in his-
tory. Hippies and punks were once at binary poles with very little in between.
Today the list of sub-cultural identities not only revisit past ones, but also the
genera continue to propagate new species and subspecies every year. Ready to
exploit, and even invent this dimension of cultural production are the major
commercial forces that produce media for all - young and old, mainstream and
“alternative.”
Youth culture has, since World War II, and at moments before, when af-
fluence and leisure time were abundant, been a leading force in the dynamic
characteristics of the host culture of most every industrial nation. One expla-
nation relates how the industrialized middle class family separates youth from
