Category: reviews

I finished watching Stranger Things during the week, it was very enjoyable; even if the ending felt just a little downbeat. Max is a great character – eminently relatable – so it sucked to see her end up in such a bad way [sorry – SPOILERS!]. I loved the fact that a new generation has been turned on to Kate Bush. For those who want a little more Kate Bush fire, check out Cloudbusting and the far less renowned ‘Hounds of Love’ – equally timeless and fantastic songs.

I also liked the way the long-format TV on Netflix is playing on episode length, with the last three episodes essentially being feature movie length installments. That sort of ability to play with the ‘beats’ of a story is a really interesting innovation in long form TV and must be a boon for storytelling.

But, at the same time, there are elements of the ‘Netflixification’ of storytelling that I think really let Stranger Things down, in some ways. There remains a clear desire to appeal to literally everyone that sometimes undermines the actual impact of the story.

The thing I enjoyed most about Season Four was the way in which it managed to play with the ‘DnD is corrupting our kids’ trope, which was a real thing in the 80s.

The series nostalgically confronted how social fears about kids using their imaginations (instead of just playing sport and watching TV) could lead to a moral panic on behalf of witless adults and cool kids made uncomfortable by difference. The showrunners did a decent job of highlighting that the geeks aren’t just ok – their ability to comprehend the danger of ‘Vecna’ and their ability to organise against that danger was clearly enabled by their ‘geeky’ behaviour. Moreover, the fear expressed towards the different created more problems than it solved. It’s a good message that is almost timeless.

But really, at a point where Elon Musk and Mike Cannon-Brookes are generally seen as superheroes by the zeitgeist, is it really that interesting to suggest ‘the geeks are alright? The whole series is nostalgic, and I get that, but it also tries to make that nostalgia relevant for a younger audience that didn’t experience the 80s. And it’s a lot less cutting edge to stand in 2022 celebrating geeks than it was back in the 80s.

But I get it, Netflix production is dominated by attracting large numbers of viewers and achieving cut through across broad segments of potential audience. Hallinan and Striphas talked about this in ‘The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture’. Netflix use their unbelievably large set of data points about what audiences do and don’t like to curate content (such as Stranger Things) that they know will draw in guaranteed audiences – and the very data driven business model means that a show that fails in this regard and loses viewers can be axed very quickly indeed. So, yeah, I get it – Stranger Things blends its horror with humour, its bellicosity with banality because it needs to hit those audience numbers. (I wrote about this phenomenon – the ‘norming’ created by algorithmic culture in my article ‘The big data public and its problems‘).

But pandering to audiences should never mean that you lose opportunities to tell your story. And in the case of Season 4 of Stranger Things, the showrunners lost me when they – repeatedly – featured ‘gun porn’, particularly in the last few episodes. By ‘gun porn’ I mean scenes and shots of protagonists ogling, praising and fondling guns.

like this scene:

and this one…

and this one…

Now the relationship between media depictions of violence and actual violence is long and complicated – ‘direct’ effects are unverifiable. However, I’m a huge believer that the norming of themes, formats and, well, norms is one area where we certainly do see effective media. One example of this is Laura Mulvey’s concept of the ‘Male Gaze’. The ‘Male Gaze’ is the privileging of the heterosexual masculine eye in the construction of media.

Mulvey argues that this construction has been so privileged and prominent in media production that it has become its own social meaning system – it ‘norms’ a way of looking (and displaying) that we all take for granted/agree upon/see as somewhat unproblematic. The dominance of the Male gaze means that it is now unproblematic for TikTokers and Insta Influencers to see displaying for the ‘male gaze’ as something intrinsically valuable, whereas earlier generations would have viewed this behaviour as somewhat problematic. In fact, the ‘male gaze’ has become so unproblematic that males that have also internalised this way of seeing and displaying themselves, although they often ‘hide’ the gaze behind some other display of ‘utility’ [the capitalist gaze being the real power behind the throne].

The important thing to recognise about this is that this way of viewing has become so broadly accepted that it effects people’s behaviour. While it’s difficult to prove a ‘media effects’ type of causality in cases like this, it’s also clear that media plays a prominent role in ‘norming’ particular social meanings, understandings and [therefore, necessarily] behaviours.

One thing that US media/film/TV production consistently does is ‘norm’ the veneration of guns as being just great. To return to Stranger Things – which we love because of its accessible take on alt/genre culture – in Season Four guns are used as plot devices to give people power, to solve otherwise intractable problems and to be a sort of ‘democratising force’ for good (allowing the physically disadvantaged to stand up to stronger foes). Just like the Male gaze, these messages about guns have become so unproblematically internalised by US audiences that they are used consistently by US storytellers in these ways. We all see it, understand it and – more or less – accept it. But in my case, not so much.

But with the way gun reform is going in the US, and with a nod of the head to the ‘moral panic/won’t anyone please think of the children’ vibe , I found the gun porn in Season Four of Stranger Things to be pretty gross. In my world, guns create problems – they are used by teenagers to shoot innocent protestors, commit armed robbery and shoot up schools. There are clearly a lot of ‘good’ uses for guns but I see a lot more evidence that they create more problems than they solve. Wouldn’t it be great if media started running storylines that reflected this – the presence of the gun makes everything more dangerous, more lethal, and allows a vigilante to overpower and control a situation where they would otherwise be powerless. And people without guns, working together, can overcome that villainy through using cooperation, courage and candour.

In the case of Stranger Things, Season Four, I think the showrunners missed a real opportunity to make the ‘lessons’ a little more relevant and less nostalgic by finding interesting ways to solve the problems the protagonists’ faced. To be fair, they clearly illustrated that it was only in the case of the Russian side story that a weapon proved to be effective (the flamethrower on the mindflayer). In every other instance – the shooting of Vecna, the use of the gun in the plane hijacking, the fight between Lucas and Jason – the guns were pretty much useless.

So, maybe the writers are trying to be subtle about that what really ‘helped’ was the teamwork, the creative thinking, the solidarity and the bravery of the protagonists. But they missed a chance to feature that in a more direct way. I mean, they were creative enough to suggest that the upside down was a symbiotic system of evil and that Eleven could piggyback through time and space on other people’s memories… so why not use this sort of storytelling license to come up with reasons and ways to defeat Vecna without going into gun porn? They managed to NOT use guns earlier in the series to fantastic effect.

I’m not one who argues that all media needs to be politically correct – it is completely understandable that these gun porn beats are placed in these contexts. It is also useful to acknowledge that this is how guns are thought about in US culture. But if you ask me, the show does betray the very essence of what is wrong with the way the US thinks about guns (that they are a solution, rather than a problem), and I also think the otherwise savvy show runners missed an opportunity to tell a far more interesting story about how evil actually creeps into our lives, and what it takes to defeat it.

And the reason that they make these decisions is because gun porn, and violence in general, play well in the US market, and so we have ‘gun gaze’.

Honestly, this was a book I’ve been looking forward to reading for about a year and it did not disappoint me.

It presents a basic argument that the odd structuring of various ancient monuments and artwork is actually attributable to the fact that these once operated as technologies to encode cultural memories.

Kelly’s book speaks about quite a few of my longheld interests in history, oral cultures and indigenous cultures. It also discusses a number of places I’ve visited, such as Stonehenge, Maeshowe, Skara Brae, The Ring of Brogar and Machu Pichu. So possibly I loved it because it related specifically to my interests… but I think it also makes a profound contribution to thinking through how communications technologies shape our humanity.

Let’s get into it.

Kelly starts with an engagement with indigenous Australian memory practices and identifies how in these cultures, the movement within certain spaces was fundamental to inscribing cultural memory (through songlines). She refers to a rhetorical practice of loci used by the ancient greeks to aid memory retention. I had never come across the term ‘loci’ but I do remember this memory practice from Silva Rhetoricae

Orators were encouraged to envision where they would be speaking as a preparation for memorizing their speech. Then, having completed the speech’s composition, they were to divide it into manageable portions, each of which they would assign, in turn, to a different part of the room where the speech was to occur. Thus, by casting their eyes about during their speech, they would be reminded of the next part of their speech to give.

And she also refers to the ‘memory palaces’ that contemporary memory champions and card sharks use to, well, remember things. In each one of these scenarios being in a particular place (or imagining a particular place) is the first step to being able to recall the information.

Kelly was fascinated by the notion that oral cultures used these practices to encode cultural information before writing – and the sheer volume of information is staggering. She points to the Matses people of the Amazon as having recently created a 500 page encylcopedia of medicine based upon cultural memory that was previously passed down through oral traditions. Indigenous cultures need to remember the location of food and water, which plants you can eat when and the various geneologies of everyone in the culture to ensure that inbreeding does not occur. This is far more than most of us could remember in contemporary society but of course, for people without writing, remembering this stuff was integral to survival.

So, in the first few chapters of the book she recounts how she  tested the ‘loci’ system by developing her own memory spaces in her house, on her dog-walking route around her neighbourhood and then using abstract pieces of art, an object or a deck of cards as a further memory aid.

I have divided each room and every garden segment into ten locations as is suggested in the anonymous ancient Greek textbook on the topic, the Rhetorica ad Herennium… every fifth location is marked in some way… that ensures that nothing is missed as there must always be four locations between a marked spot. p.66

By doing this she has been able to memorise the events of world history, the different species of birds in Australia, details about the world’s states and capitals and so on. One location can be used to inscribe any number of types of information

Information may be in either of the songlines. It doesn’t matter. The links started happening from my first ventures into creating the songlines. The term I had used so often when talking about indigenous cultures was emerging. I was creating an ‘integrated knowledge system’. p.67

So she found that these pieces of information would start to relate to each other and take on their own inherent meaning.

After a year or so, I was starting to see patterns in the information even though I was not actively searching for them. I found my stories starting to take on the form of indigenous stories I’d read from all over the world. I was seeing familiar knowledge in a different way – vivid, visual and emotional. I gained insight and pleasure from the process. (p.xvii)

I don’t understand why I am never confused by drawing information from a whole range of memory spaces, but I am not. After a few years of adding data and commentary, stories and mythological characters, I cannot explain it to friends when they ask. It is too like hypertext and too little like the linear flow of a book. p.69

for these reasons:

Trying to separate indigenous practical knowledge from mythology is a process doomed from the start. The two are intricately interwoven. Rituals in non-literate cultures need to be considered on their own terms without trying to find an equivalent in literate cultures. Such an equivalent does not exist. p.6

So after she establishes how important place is to memory, and how places must have been important for storing cultural memory in pre-writing cultures, Kelly then has a revelation while at Stonehenge with her partner. She realises that a possible explanation for the arrangement of the oldest henge – as a huge circle of distinctly different stones – was probably an attempt to recreate songlines once communities had started to settle in one place. Because cultures were no longer nomadic, she argues, they needed to come up with a way to represent the memory spaces they had once used. Monuments such as the oldest henge at stonehenge would have provided the spaces necessary to recreate the traditional performances of songlines, without having to return to the scattered locations throughout the countryside.

(this is actually an image of nearby woodhenge – but you get the idea) – the outer ring of stones are uniquely different and everyone of them would have served as a ‘memory space’ to recall particular pieces of cultural information. The ditches around the henge, Kelly Argues, are for performances of the information. The ditch serves the twin purposes of amplifying the sounds and effect of the performance, and obscuring the view of anyone who is not permitted to share the knowledge.

Restricting knowledge affords power to those who have been taught and deemed competent by the elders who control that information. But there is another critical purpose. It is all to do with what is inappropriately referred to as ‘the Chinese-whispers effect’. Lots of people repeating the informaton in an uncontrolled way will inevitably lead to corruption of the facts stored within the songs. Distortion cannot be tolerated in information [vital to collective survival]…. the knowledge is not varied, it is sacred. p.9

Having already White and Ong and a few others on orality I had previously held a view that one of the great virtues of oral cultures was their flexibility – that they had the capacity to alter their knowledges as needs and perspectives evolved. Kelly does restate this advantage, but she also made it more clear that storytelling and knowledge itself was the locus of cultural power.

Kelly goes through a number of archeological marvels such as Chaco Canyon, the Ring of Brogar, Newgrange, Maeshowe and even the lines of Nazca and explains how they operated as memory spaces. It made me think of our guide at Machu Pichu, who explained that the purpose of certain rocks and cavities around the city had never been truly understood. Well Kelly came up with a pretty compelling explanation for these things as memory spaces, used to store the cultural memories ofa people who had settled and no longer visited the natural spaces they once did, but still needed to remember the knowledge associated with those spaces. Hence the reason why each of these cultures invested millions of hours of work into building monuments and structures with no discernable productive purpose.

However, her argument is that these stand-in monuments only operated as such during a particular ‘transitory’ phase between nomadism and civilisation.

It was only as societies settled and population centres grew large that heirarchies became established, with those at the top becoming wealthy and their world protected using guards, soldiers and warriors. It is from this time that individual burials with grave goods appear in the archaeological record. The knowedge specialists became the servants of the chiefs. From then until today, the power of knowledge was subjegated by the power of wealth and violence. p.33

Or:

As specialists emerged in the increasingly large and complex communities, no single group could control the knowledge system. Powerful individuals gained wealth. Egalitarianism was a thing of the past as a high staus warrior class emerged. When knowledge had been the prevailing source of power, the memory spaces were the predominant sign of the culture. Once wealth and violence replaced knowledge as the determining factor for control, the massive labour required to build megalithic monuments could no longer be justified by the community… [136] Knowledge specialists were still needed, and probably still powerful, just no longer at the top of the heirarchy… When knowledge was power, the Neolithic peoples built a memory space still unparalleled today. When wealth and violence became power, Stonehenge was abandoned. It had simply lost its purpose. pp.135-136

Increasing city populations, the emergence of specialist experts and the introduction of writing would have eroded the ability of the elders to control information. The elder who could memorise a thousand songs and all the knowledge of the culture was now long gone. p.251

Following the growth and specialisation of knowledge, keeps and fortifications became the dominant public architecture, which I find simply fascinating.

I guess I find it all so fascinating because Kelly is presenting a vivid picture of how practices of encountering and storing cultural knowlege have a direct and profound effect on the culture. My current research is looking at the effect of smart phones and big data upon culture and it isn’t hard to have your mind blown by thinking through the differences between the sort of cultural knowledge of nomadic people, compared to the cultural knowledge and practices imbued by smart phones and Google.

Consider her description of the connection the indigenous cultures have to country and place, (which helps me reflect on our contemporary lack of connection).

Nungarrayi, to use her Warlpiri title, described the catalogue of sounds which are ecoded as far more extensive than just the calls of the birds and other animals. For example, she described the way her people were able to identify trees and bushes and grasses by the sound in a breeze. I found this hard to believe but was assured that if I gave it a try I would discover that it is possible. That afternoon I sat in the bush and listened. What I would have described as silence, on a day which had very little wind, was anything but. I became aware of the bird sounds fairly quickly, but before long I became aware of the sounds of the plants. The eucalypt to my left, the acacias at the fron, and the grasses to the right all made distinctly different sounds.  I could not accurately convey these sounds in writing. In subsequent sessions, I’ve been able to distinguish between different species of eucalypt… p.6

Non-Indigenous observers have mentioned their surprise at the depth of the emotional response in a singer when chanting a set of place names, a seemingly unemotional task…. When I list the locations, my head is full of all these associations, vivid images, funny stories and a precious store of knowledge. But even more than that, my songlines are now so familiar and so much a part of everyday life, I am extrordinarily fond of them. I have an emotional response as well as an intellectual one when I think of my songlines. I could not have understood this had I not done it myself. For the elders with their entire culture tied to the knowledge embeded in the landscape, the effect must be extraordinarily intense. p.15

One element of the change is the lack of connection with the natural, or even the viscerally real in contemporary culture; another is the lack of appreciation of wisdom (or knowledge that crosses disciplines) as opposed to knowledge within a specific discipline:

We store our books in neat categories: science on one side of the library, ethics on the other and mythology somewhere else. These silos of generic information are an artefact of literacy, where so much is written and research is so focused that much of the interconnectedness of the human experience is lost. The extraordinary depth within each genre has come at the cost of the intergrated format of oral tradition. p.29

And of course, there is also the issue of pleasure. It seems to me that gaining knowledge used to be intimately tied to experiencing pleasure (forgive the play on words).

…gatherings serve the need for tade and to find marriage partners, as well as being for pure pleasure. Gatherings are also the forums to teach and trade knowledge through ceremony. p.12

While movies about US universities make me think this link between learning and pleasure hasn’t been completely forgotten about, the trend toward digital delivery and ‘blended learning’ in my own university suggests that efficient information transmission is now seen as the sole purpose of communication. But what is the price of the cultural, natural and ritual knowledge we lose as a result of always being online? Kelly doesn’t enter into any of this but that’s just as well, it is my interest, not necessarily hers – but I intend to ask her what she thinks of how digital technology is reconfiguring these memory practices.

And throughout all of this, Kelly has made an indelible contribution to my thinking through communication as ritual, not just information transmission. The songlines and structures she describes are not just about the information but also about the process of coming together to make meaning. The relationality experienced by building these monuments, and then using them to store cultural memories must have made this aspect of people’s communicative existence incredibly meaningful, not to mention the performative and aesthetic aspects of singing, performing and displaying ones knowledge and relationships.

On the use of abstract motifs on art as memory aids:

It was the process that mattered, not the product. I gradually understood why so many indigenous ‘art’ words were simply erased or left to rot after ceremonies and rituals. They had already served their purpose by the very fact that they were made. p.47

So finally, and I know this has been a long one, but I feel that this really has been an important book (and is well worth the read), I’ll finish on Kelly’s reflection on her own experience with training with memory places, which reflects my engagement with her work.

It has been a revelation to learn to think differently. It has also been the most wonderful fun. p.63