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November 7th, 2008: The ground-breaking technology that beamed reporter Jessica Yellin into the CNN New York studio on Election Night 2008 served as the perfect comic antidote to a milestone in US politcal and cultural history... The short sequence that showed host Wold Blitzer talk `to`Ms Yellin (sic) was heralded by Blitzer as a unique event in television history, which in a sense it was. Yellin explained how she was actually still in Chicago, but standing in a tent surrounded by up to 30 cameras whose fragmented images were magically coded into the holographic image that, oddly, remained within the two-dimensional image that we are accustomed to. What tempered the viewer`s assumed wonderment was the fact that the CNN studio transmission had already appropriated all the codes and conventions of the Star Trek series that TV viewers have been familiar with since the late 1960s. Yellin, in other words, was coming home. Her shimmering appearnace ìn`the studio merely confirmed that studio`s own constructedness. As at NBC, ABC or CBS, TV news studios function as the command deck of a place where no-one has been before: news anchors, like Captain Kirk, luxuriate in comfortable surroundings and command a view of the world on our behalf through screens through which we as participant viewers share intimate knowledge of the World Beneath. Valiant reporters, like their counterparts in Star Trek, take adventurous trips into such foreign fields (they are called `field reporters`) and report back their findings to a waiting command deck circling above: ironically the precision images and clear sounds that are their professional sign detract from the actual content of their reports that insist upon the immediacy of their real-life condition where, for most of the surrounding population, clarity and cleanliness is a rare commodity. Sitting, as it were, side-by-side with the anchor we as viewers glide effortlessly around the world`s troubled hot spots, safe and secure in the tacit knowledge that however long we may linger, we too can be beamed out either to another war or via another version of the global marketplace community, the 2 minute commerical break where, along with the business elite, we too can experience another world - from Bahrian to Tokyo - this time populated by amiable smiling air stewardesses who pass by in polite and gentle slow motion. Back on Command Deck, Star Date Nov 4th 2008, Captain Blitzer spent most of his active time in the studio turning to his earnest Command Control advisers and consultants who, like Mr Spock, would be found sitting at their own desktop control monitors from which they too could gleam the vital gems of data that would support their worthy assessments as Obama took Ohio, Pennsylvania and then Virginia. The whole world of gleaming surfacaces was a paeon to technology, information and The Future. Interesting here that at such pivotal moments in a nation`s history, the main and only agenda seemed to emerge from data analysts who talked about history but who somehow seemed to exist outside it. No poets, writers, painters need apply. It is a final irony worth pondering: that this celebrated development in digital technology (devised by David Bohrman) should be premiered live by an international newscaster and that it should emerge on the occasion of Obama`s victory - that effectively made him America`s first Black president. So just at the point, in other words, where the corporeal reality of a person`s self - who happens now to be the President-Elect - is of some historical significance. |
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