Hillary’s Study

The first impression I had of this photo is how media oriented everything has become. The study has long been the refuge of the cerebral. A place to go where you can get away from the world and surround yourself with books, stuffy furniture, and maybe even a fireplace. A place of comfort—but here we have what looks to be more like a contrived set on a sitcom. The room is bursting with gear, so much so that the actual human which presumably has a relationship with this room, is partially obscured by the artifices of the media production machine. We can presume the gear is all very temporary, but it doesn’t seem that way from the shot. It feels as much a part of the room as the decorations on the wall. You can feel the great eye of the world prying in on every facet of her life, until there is no life left but the interface between a set piece, the delivery mechanisms, and the audience.

ref : “how media oriented everything has become”
nice post, A.V. So, we’ve gone from, say ~ William Whyte’s mid-century modern classic 1956 Fortune Magazine article (Organization Man) => summary: “The Organization Man believed in the essential rightness of large groups–and in the essential wrongness of the individual. He felt very strongly that people had a moral obligation to ‘fit in’. To Whyte, this represented an important shift in American values. Americans were not merely working differently now; they were voting, praying, dressing, buying, and loving differently, too. And all this flowed from changes in corporate culture.” …to a postmodern ethic, oh ~ let’s call her The Media Being, fwiw.
Fascinating to me is not just how leaders/celebrities project themselves in ‘one-to-many’ broadcasts ~ but how the peer-to-peer (you and me = MEDIA BEINGs) are now transforming our own workplace “cubicles” into virtual micro studio sets; e.g., backgrounds, lighting; the MySpace Office as stage set: as more and more we realize that we, ourselves work = perform, thus: ON THE AIR.