[The New York Times / Inside the Action: Luge, still]

While I don't plan on offering much in the way of Olympics coverage (how about that tasteful opening ceremony?), I do feel compelled to make a few comments about the media coverage of the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili. As a luger, Kumaritashvili was no stranger to velocity or navigating curvilinear surfaces. However, at only 21 years of age he was relatively inexperienced compared to many of his peers and this fact coupled with the treacherous nature of the track he was riding on led to a hard turn and an ensuing freak accident. John Branch and Jonathan Abrams of The New York Times described Kumaritashvili as travelling "about as fast as any luger had ever gone" down the Whistler Sliding Centre track that is being used for the 2010 games.

I just happened to be at the gym when the Kumaritashvili death occurred so I was subjected to the (muted but with closed captioning) coverage of an array of televisions tuned into various cable news networks. At that moment this was "breaking" news so there was more speculation than available facts and reporters and anchors rattled off statistics, talked about how Kumaritashvili was being airlifted for treatment and repeatedly discussed a few available photographs. This is the standard cable news loop that we all know but it was fascinating to watch it play out on several networks at once. The only upbeat moment of this coverage was a trainwreck of a segue when a reporter attempted to transition from the Kumaritashvili coverage to an (obviously pre-scheduled) interview with Walter Gretzky – "Sports certainly CAN be dangerous and here is a man who knows all about the anxiety of watching his son compete..." The show must go on right?

This morning The New York Times published an interactive graphic that thoroughly documents Kumaritashvili's ill-fated final ride. In the span of eight frames the viewer is provided a labeled map of the track, a 3D model of the terrain that rotates to zoom in on "turn 16", and then a sequence of images that track the trajectory of his body as it is thrown from the sled. Despite the fact that the final moments of Kumaritashvili's life are rendered as if they were an annotated ragdoll physics demo, the event is communicated with the dispassionate clarity we'd expect from The Times. The final frame is an unadorned photograph taken at approximately the moment Kumaritashvili is fatally injured.

Earlier this week videogame researcher Ian Bogost wrote a blog post outlining a book chapter from his new text Newsgames: Journalism at Play (co-authored with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer). The post employs the "information is beautiful" catchphrase of designer/journalist David McCandless to consider the utility of information visualization. Bogost on "beautiful but useless" information design:

The problem is this: infographics like this [McCandless' Reduce Your Odds of Dying in a Plane Crash] may be beautiful, but it is not necessarily informative. Specifically, pretty charts often fail to synthesize the meaning, relevance, and impact of information as it pertains to decision making.

While Bogost is framing information design in relation to gaming and journalism his critique could perhaps be extended to problematize many other types of visualization projects. In the context of "reporting" news, we're obviously interested in documenting events and capturing moments – and this graphic definitely offers an expansive understanding of a singular tragedy. I think what is interesting about this example in relation to the comments by Bogost is not so much that "Luge Crash at the Olympics" (the title of the piece) can be dismissed as uninformative but that the sequence of images is actually hyper-informative – the precision with which this graphic schematizes the death of a man is unsettling. As an active consumer of media, I've seen countless gruesome photographs, watched footage documenting similar events and read verbal descriptions of all manner of calamities. All of that said, this interactive graphic still managed to catch me off-guard and I almost expected a pop-up media player to appear on the final frame and offer me the option to stream a recording of Kumaritashvili's death rattle.

I'm not trying to moralize the editorial decision to show an image of a man as he died – that is nothing new and the discussion of Kumaritashvili's death ends now.

I do believe the fact that it is now journalistic protocol to diagram death through rich media might mutate into some strange practices in the near future. In their present incarnation, crime aggregators like Oakland Crimespotting offer limited information about specific events (e.g. "Robbery" geolocated down to an address or intersection), but what if they allowed us to watch available surveillance footage documenting various crimes? We'd have augmented a map-based community monitoring system with "assault and battery" theatre. Is this kind of voyeuristic functionality on the horizon? Perhaps it will only be available to "premium" users. Regardless, this would definitely put a new spin on panopticism – navigable, annotated metamedia tracking the city and served 24/7 on the web.

[Harun Farocki / Deep Play at LACMA / photo: c-monster]

I'm getting dangerously close to discussing "the future of journalism" here, so to reconcile the consideration of this interactive graphic with the "thinking about visual culture" focus of this blog, I'd like to point to the work of Harun Farocki. Farocki's Deep Play (2007) takes the July 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy and expands this football match into a motion-graphics/surveillance multiscreen installation extravaganza. The piece isn't any more absurd than the broadcast design of NFL Football or the military informatics connected to UAV drones, but when deployed in a gallery these representational techniques operate differently – they seem formalist and inhuman. In 2008 I interviewed the media scholar Alex Munt and he had the following to say about Deep Play (in relation to feature film):

... [it] resonates with that idea in new digital cinema that there is a spatial reconfiguration underway – an idea from film theorists Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib. This transition represents a shift from a traditional 2D mode of 'coverage' of cinematic space to the mapping of 3D cinematic 'zones' ... It is interesting to speculate whether the 'zone' approach and the mapping of 3D cinematic space will simply be a trend for the cinema or perhaps become the dominant mode of production/aesthetic - and relegate the traditional 2D filmic zones of classical cinema as a twentieth century concern.

Given the dissonance between the "revolutionary exploration of 3D cinematography" and the conventional, linear narrative of the film Avatar, perhaps we should be looking to the graphics department at The New York Times for hints as to what constitutes the most appropriate manner to tell stories in the 21st century.

I'd like to extend a Hat tip to Mathew Ingram for tipping me off about the "Luge Crash at the Olympics" interactive graphic via twitter.

FlowTV is a great resource for scholarly-but-accessible thinking about all manner of media. I've professed my love for the site in the past and it has delivered once again by publishing a concise and lucid text by David Parry that debunks the "newness" of new media.

[ARPANET Interface Message Processor / photo: carrierdetect]

Parry's post bounces between our relationship with a range of media artifacts that include the card catalog, the Google search box and social networks to parse how "novelty" relates to technology. The text includes a nice swipe at the digital native model that postulates that youth intuit prowess with recent technology through immersion and instead suggests it is a lack of critical engagement that inspires proficiency with (and complacency towards) firmly established protocols/networks. Parry on his classroom strategy:

I have been teaching “digital stuff” for about eight years now and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — “What is this strange object before us?” Now they simply take it in stride. There is nothing particularly strange/odd or even noteworthy to many of them about the practice of having a Facebook page. (Indeed this is the second semester in a row where nearly all of my students have a Facebook page.) I used to approach teaching these matters as the question of looking at the strange and contextualizing it in terms of the familiar. I now find that my job is to take the familiar and make it strange, or as Siva Vaidhyanathan observed during an online discussion about this issue, “I use the ‘I’m teaching fish about the ocean’ perspective. I try to make it weird again.”

Making strange, defamiliarization – these sound like good tactics for any educator to employ. Parry's short essay concludes by comparing the spread of the printing press and network culture while carefully considering the utility of "novelty" for framing media. For those looking to dig deeper into this topic, I highly recommend the excellent New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (2006), edited by Wendy Chun & Thomas Keenan.