McPherson Speaks on Race and the Media
By Lindsay Norcott
Staff Writer

Tara McPherson found a postcard at a road stop in Louisiana that was a hologram of a Southern belle from one angle, and a "Mammy," reminiscent of Scarlet's slave from "Gone With the Wind," from another angle. These two images could not both be held by the eye at the same time. The technology of the card kept the images of the two women separate.

McPherson, assistant professor of gender studies and critical studies at USC, spoke at the first annual Brian Stonehill lecture on Tuesday. She addressed issues of race and representation in the context of new media. The ways that the form and structure of new media affects the content, particularly regarding race, is McPherson's current focus.

McPherson began on this particular trajectory because she found her interests pulling her in two different directions. She was interested in race and the ideological issues that underlie media representations. Also, she was fascinated by the way the structure of new media, specifically the Internet, relates to ways of knowing. These two interests seemed far removed from each other, but McPherson realized that such a separation was one that required careful consideration.

Race and ideology, proposes McPherson, are actually intertwined in the structures of media. Media often capitalizes on a particular way of knowing-knowing in fragments. People categorize images in their heads as separate fragments; the connections between elements are severed. On the postcard, for example, black and white are seen as separate fragments. The complexity of the black/white relationship in the antebellum South is not available within that technology.

It seems possible, then, that the very format of media influences the way that race discourses are constructed. The question arises: is this process of shaping knowledge through form, in addition to content, intentional? McPherson made her case that, yes, knowledge construction is very conscious by discussing the particular phenomenon of Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames' were a couple, Ray being the wife, that started out in architectural design, moved to furniture design, and eventually became focused on information design. McPherson described them as the "pre-history" of new media.

The Eames' were primarily interested in the "way-finding" aspect of information. The way that users of any interactive setting or object created a "mental map" was something that the Eames' sought to capture and use. They recognized that computers had potential to be "information machines" and a means of meaningful communication despite the capacity for information overload.

The Eames' used information overload to their advantage. By taking countless photographs (5% of the Library of Congress photo archives were catalogued by the Eames') and then grouping or linking them in ways that matched human methods of "way-finding," a huge amount of visual information could be transmitted to a viewer in a short amount of time. Exhibitions by the Eames' would feature rapidly changing slide shows of similar images, such as toy trains or highway interchanges. The theory was that such a presentation made the viewer the protagonist. Each viewer brought different associations to their viewing that allowed them to shape their own experience. The Eames' theory aimed to construct information in a way that conveyed an increased amount of information in a more open-ended format.

McPherson aimed to show how the Eames' innovative methods, though well intentioned, have made a fragmentary way of knowing primary in new media. Post World War II, this has facilitated forms of covert racial logic in media to replace the overt forms of racism apparent before World War II. Such a fragmentary "way-finding" makes it acceptable for races to be represented, but kept separate in a way that strips them of their meaning and capacity for social change.

McPherson concluded that the structure and form of new media subtly, but powerfully, influences racial content and representation. At the end, she emphasized how she realized that instead of keeping technological structure and content separate, as she once thought, the connection must be explored further in-depth.