Disneyfication in the New Media Chunnel

When Image Myth Takes Over

Avon Edward Foote, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, electronic media

University of North Alabama

Huntsville – Decatur – Florence (DMA)

April 2002 revision with Comcast update added February 2004

Originally prepared for the Inaugural International Media Conference,

University of London, Institute of Education

July 24 to 27, 2001

Co-sponsored by British Film Institute, Broadcasting Standards Commission, and

Independent Television Commission

Home 256-767-5159 or cell 256-320-5857

http://chotank.com/disneyrom.html

chotank@aol.com and

aefoote@una.edu

Abstract

The trends of media consolidation and broadband access are rapidly changing new media information users into entertainment customers. Major media transnationals with extensive entertainment program libraries and high levels of penetration within world media are rapidly becoming the dominate sources of New Media globalisation. Most of these media transnationals are American and share certain characteristics with the Walt Disney Company, on which this paper focuses.

Media globalisation is being subjected to much the same negative process by world developers that Disney used when imagineers failed to win federal and public approval with a design for a new history theme park 40 miles west of Washington D. C. Although CEO Michael Eisner promised diversity and real history, the result was in fact an image myth. The imagineers didn’t grasp, or ignored, educational guidance, important social values and cultural considerations.

The New Media Chunnel is both a “funnel” which allows filtering, idea compression, and producer control and an interactive “channel” to reach the masses. Hence the name “chunnel.” To avoid the negatives of current trends in New Media globalisation, companies will need to put more emphasis on content diversity and avoiding the excessive fictualisation of real people and real events. The Disney Company from Walt’s beginning has had too close an association with Hollywood architects who are now morphing into New Media pleasure techs, spending their professional days, digitising, programming and encoding movie effects for the image myth. The paper's author labels the producer/creators who are not educated as communicators the eisnermites but says they can still become the eisnermight of broadband world diversity in 2000+.

Introduction

New Media transnational power enhancement is happening at a time when managers and producers are overwhelming committed to goals for corporate and private economic rewards. Ironically, just when the diversity of locales and localised audiences is increasing because of New Media development, content diversity is thought to be contracting. The threat looms over all the world of globalised audiences being manipulated by entertainment content producers as corporations seek greater transnational profits through economies of scale in content and distribution. Informational programming requires much more localisation and viewpoint diversity than entertainment programming, and therefore, information is considered a poor choice for the 2000+ broadband revolution profits of the corporations when the overriding goal is enterprise focused.

Predictions of growing persuasive power of the transnational’s entertainment programs is temporally linked to improvements in ability to create convincing fictitious images for plots and formats which are nearly impossible for the uninformed to detect or decode as imaginary, especially when void of producer guidance on interpretation. In fact, it is even challenging for the best educated and determined media skeptic to identify what is real and what is not real.

Putting visual imagineers and special effects, computer technicians with professional loyalties outside of public service and media into influential production positions, as Disney did when it hired architects in Walt Disney productions first in the 1930s, creates a distorted imagery-oriented, production environment. This Disneyfication of the production management environment has historically rendered textual, script content secondary in message significance to visual imagery.

This chapter will look at the trends in New Media consolidation, consider technological trends that aid and abet entertainment content emphasis over information, and consider the heritage and corporate values of the Disney corporation that often affect competitive responses from other transnational New Media companies as the broadband revolution takes hold.

Broadband’s Gain

. . . when companies like AOL-Time Warner, Disney and Vivendi Universal own the channels of communication as well as much of the “content” that flows through them, will the rich cultural diversity that has traditionally been created and nurtured in civil society dry up? Will we be left with only a few global media companies as the ultimate arbiters of human culture? (Rifkin)

According to online research leader Jupiter Media Metrix, a 2000+ consolidation trend is occurring in online media of such catastrophic magnitude to wipe out the illusion that “severe market dominance is impossible with the Internet (p. 1).” The number of media companies controlling the majority of U.S. minutes spent online dropped 87 percent in just two years. Declining from 110 to 40 in 2000 -- the second year of measurement reporting -- the plunge in the number of controlling content-provider companies was at an even faster rate this year. In March 2001, just 14 of the 110 companies that had held a share two years earlier controlled 60 per cent of all online minutes. E Commerce Times explained how new Hollyweb[1] company strategies have changed the Internet, “Major media companies have significantly increased their ability to differentiate online offerings through quality of presentation, intensity of marketing and integration with off-line programming (Regan, p. 1).”

Among the 2000+ dominant 14 online companies is the Walt Disney Internet Group, controlling 0.8 per cent of the U.S. usage minutes. Disney’s January 2001 decision to close its go.com portal and lay off 400 go.com employees may have increased, not diminished, Disney’s on-line profits, and Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner has promised that Disney will maintain its position in Internet leadership (Parkes, p. 1).

Comparing Disney’s share of U.S. usage-minutes of less than 1 per cent to AOL -- Time Warner Network’s usage-minutes of 32.0 per cent misrepresents statistically the true nature and importance of the Disney role; Disney is one of the top two, traditional U.S. media companies with rapidly expanding international, new media marketing goals. With movie, television, radio, cable networks and other cable interests, publications, music and significant web innovations, AOL -- Time Warner and Disney are similar in that they both have gargantuan global e-commerce ambitions and communications content commitments (Turnstall and Machin, pp. 53-54). Communications services such as e-mail, instant messaging, and greetings make up two-thirds of the AOL -- Time Warner total user-minutes, narrowing the e-commerce and new media content pie slices for the two transnational media giants.

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the U. S. National Research Council has acknowledged concern about the “emerging broadband market.” The Board’s Internet Subcommittee sees a link between the “recent flap on open access” and behavior of facilities’ owners, distribution providers and content producers/owners at a time when industry analysts are predicting increased consolidation and when business arrangements are mostly kept from the public’s and the regulators’ review (Computer Science and Telecommunication Board, p. 112).

Disney’s global commitment to world-wide new media is real. Within the last year, the Walt Disney Company expressed to the Commission of the European Communities “grave reservations about the anti-competitive impact of the proposed AOL -- Time Warner merger on the emerging broadband market (Center for Media Education, p. 1).” Because of expanded AOL -- Time Warner vertical integration after merger, Disney foresees a walled garden where Internet content producer/distributors, including its own corporate self, face monopolist bottlenecks.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, has commented on the irony of Disney’s opposition to the AOL -- Time Warner merger. Chester, selected as one of the Internet’s Top 50 influentials by Newsweek in 2000, declared:

It’s ironic that a company the size of Disney, the second largest media conglomerate in the country [US], is raising these concerns about AOL-Time Warner’s potential stranglehold on the broadband market. At the end of the day, they and other vast conglomerates will no doubt have controlling access to the digital broadband platform (Center for Media Education, p. 1).

The Walt Disney Company has not been an outstanding leader in insuring an open broadband platform in the U.S. Instead, the Company has often remained silent on the open standards recommended by the Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure, while promoting the corporate benefits of deregulation. America's electronic media historian and author Chris Sterling has summarized trends that he attributes to Disney and other supporters of deregulation.

. . . concerns center on the decline in diversity of viewpoint as well as economic concentration . . . . A widely noted parallel was the ‘malling of America,’ with huge indoor shopping malls featuring the same chain stores everywhere – and leading to the decline and disappearance of smaller shops and traditional downtown shopping areas. The bottom line in both cases – less choice and the threat at least of higher prices…(Tumber, p. 67).

Disney might respond that the main reason we have not heard much from them on U.S. infrastructure issues is because Disney and the other key content providers have been left out of membership and access to the most important Committee gathering the data and making the recommendations. A new Hollyweb content provider with membership access and influence is AOL – Time Warner. James Chiddix of Time Warner Cable represents the company on the immediate parent body of the main policy Committee, which is the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. The Board functions under the Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications which is itself a part of the National Research Council.

The Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure warns in its 2001 report that several different Internets might emerge if proprietary protocols among the large companies such as Disney and AOL -- Time Warner are allowed to develop. If a scenario of separate competing, proprietary Internets becomes the pattern and the proprietary Internets are controlled by Disney, AOL-- Time Warner, and other Hollyweb companies, the Committee report reminds readers that other content and application developers might choose to target these larger company networks with their improvements and new technology, rather than the abstract, less-profitable original Internet of pre-2000+ (Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, pp. 146-147).

Disneyfication according to Baudrillard

Not until 1996, did the post-modernist Jean Baudrillard, respond to questions on the potential of new technologies, but he had started writing about related ideas years earlier. Interviewer Claude Thibaut asked Baudrillard if image (his variation on virtual reality) was likely to challenge humankinds’ vision of self and world. Applying Baudrillard five years later to the new media setting of 2000+ requires comprehending the complex meaning of “Image” as he intended. To him, “Image” meant more than distorted representation of reality; instead it is replacing reality with a simulation that has no reality referent. If Baudrillard’s abstract idea of image is replaced by the practical concept of image myth, the philosopher’s thoughts of the 80’s and 90’s point us to tenets for the Internet’s future at a time of decision-making on international policy concerns.

Hollywood’s perfection of computer-generated (cg) animation, such as used in the Oscar-winning, cartoon-hit Shrek, or in the cg-assisted hits praised by critics and audiences, depends primarily upon the visual part of virtual reality to communicate myths. These mythical stories raise concern about limited diversity of points of view, while better than real computer design and animation techniques are available to confuse audiences about what is in the real world and what isn’t. And, some social observers believe that an individual’s environmental stability is threatened by the substitution of 2000+ Internet interactive media for ties with family and friends that are enhanced by face to face interaction.

Certainly, audiences from less literate countries, regions or communities are at greater risk. But, those population groups with high media literacy levels are also threatened because education and skepticism are insufficient to self-reveal the skillful manipulation. A “higher-calling”, public service commitment, that puts truth and ethics ahead of profit and expansion, is required before electronic communities replace history anchored, place communities and disrupt the pattern of truth checks and balances, that humankind has depended upon for orientation, understanding and truth confirmation.

Will new media challenge mankind’s vision of self and world in 2000+? Without having our advantages of another five years of evidence, Baudrillard told us:

Certainly, because it is the system of representation that is at issue. The image [myth] that he [user] has of himself is virtualized. One is no longer in front of a mirror; one is in the screen, which is entirely different. One finds himself in a problematic universe, one hides in the network, that is, one is no longer anywhere (Thibaut, 1996).

In interpreting Baudrillard theories, Numes has observed “the hyper-real abandons the real by presenting an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensive and comprehendible world (Numes, p. 314).” If world informational diversity is replaced with entertainment, economies of scale simplification, then freedom to choose is hampered because real choices are not presented comprehensively. Simulations do not extent the freedom to choose because simulations are not real; they do not really exist because they are image myths. As a member of a New Media audience, you cannot select an unreal option because it does not exist. It is an imaginary substitute.

While new media audience- searchers maintain a quest of the ever-increasing, ultimate intensity of experience and meaning in new media, broadband producers at the same time are under pressure to magnify reach, impact and profit. This tremendous pressure on producers to succeed brings the new media to the same techniques of image myth that Hollywood has used from D. W. Griffith forward, often severing representations from real world actuality. But in a communications world of pervasive and instantaneous global impact and with the increased user sensory stimulation from “hiding in the network”, users are found in a heightened state of persuasive receptivity. Baudrillard warned that simulation may envelop the edifice of representation itself, giving successive phases of the “image myth”:

It is the reflection of a basic reality.

It masks and perverts a basic reality.

It masks the absence of a basic reality.

It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own simulacrum. (Docherty, p. 194)

Later, Baudrillard would level his charge that Disney is “the grand initator of imaginary as virtual reality.” Disney, he says, created a magnificent show where the real, transfused or cloned spectacle of Disney imagineers, becomes what is now of growing concern worldwide -- the Disney theme park and its cloned simulacrum in the new media. Baudrillard proposes that Disney and America are one and the same; there is no separate real America outside of Disney World. Walls are put up by Disney around theme parks so that park attendees will believe that the fantasy in the walls is different from the surrounding reality outside the walls. . . But, he tells us it isn’t. The Disney fantasy has spilled into the adjoining world and the two are homogenized so they no longer can be separated into their original forms or independent states of being (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 1-3). Has America become a giant Disney image myth?

Disney-like park walls also exclude. Walled gardens shut out what remains of the real, which as a result continues to shrink because it is not recognized, not endorsed and not nurtured in the fantasy, Disney-hyped computer/internet compressed world. Walled-garden, exclusion limits help compress reality into fewer and fewer bit-mapped definitions. It is much like taking computer capacity in reverse from 64 bit, to 32 bit, to 16 bit, to 4 bit. When the objectives are economies of scale, the world goes backward from an infinite number of choices, to 64 million choices, to 40,000 choices, to 256 choices, to 16 choices. Diversity recedes as far as the entertainment transnational moguls choose to let it in search for enhanced profits.

Reminding readers that General Norman Schwarzkopf celebrated victory by holding a huge party as Disney World, Baudrillard claimed that the Gulf War did not take place, referring to it as a “prototypical event.” He states, “These festivities in the palace of the imaginary were a worthy conclusion to such a virtual war.” Revisiting the war is possible because “everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality (Baudrillard 1996, pp. 1-3.”[2] When everything is possible and recyclable, someone must make the decisions about what is to be made possible and what is to be recycled and what is not to be made possible and what is not to be recycled. Should Disney and the other mostly American transnationals be given most responsibility for these worldwide decisions in 2000+?

Disney’s America

The roots of Disneyfication parallels the modern moving image/information age, a phase that considerably predates Walt Disney’s 1920 entry into his pre-movie-making profession as a Kansas City advertising cartoonist. Long before Disney arrived in Hollywood, the earliest US films were slice-of-life, 30 second loops, or comparable card-like decks of still photographs to be rapidly flipped mechanically in front of a magnifying viewer. The photographs satisfied the escapist appetites of predominantly immigrant, male audiences, who patronized Biograph and Edison viewing and/or Edison listening parlors in large cities.

But it is the praise heaped upon a D. W. Griffith World War I picture, Hearts of the World, that gives the greatest understanding of how and why the early movie audiences failed to recognize the image myth elements in his third war film in a row. The cover page of a studio promotional brochure for the film bears two images of David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister. The caption on the dominant top-most engraving showing George Shaking hands with Griffith reads: “David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England, bidding God-Speed to David Wark Griffith on the eve of his departure for France.” At the bottom of the cover page, the other engraving of the Prime Minister appears to show George working at his desk at Number 10, Downing Street. At the bottom is this phrase, “Under the auspices of the British and French War Offices (c1918, Cover)”. [3] By far, the most remarkable page in the brochure is the reprint of a letter from Francis Trevelyan Miller, Litt.D, LL.D., member of the New York Board of Historians, where he greets Griffith as “the greatest war historian”.

The Los Angeles Times critic endorsed the wartime, “Disneyfied” image myth film of Griffith’s cinematic genius, writing that it “was filmed under extraordinary circumstances.” The critic continued, “By the favor of the British Foreign Office, Mr. Griffith was permitted to take many of the scenes of the drama in the front line trenches . . . (p. 21).” Charlie Chaplin would later say of Griffith, “He was the teacher of us all.”

In November 1993, the Walt Disney Company announced plans to open a history theme park in Prince William County, Virginia, near the famous Civil War battlefield at Manassas, just 35 miles west the U.S. Capitol. One of the first brochures designed to sell the project to the area and the nation opened with a promise "to create a unique and historically detailed environment in Prince William County, Virginia, which celebrates our nation’s richness of diversity, spirit and innovation – Disney’s America." [3]

On May 11, 1994, several months after local opposition has been effectively organized by the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Washington Post announced that a group of prominent American historians and writers was forming Protect Historic America to fight commercialization and vulgarization of the nation's past which they believed Disney's America would bring to Virginia. There was no magical ending for Disney's CEO Michael Eisner for during the next few months he announced a cancellation of theme park construction (Foote)

This author had a front row seat to what transpired leading up to Eisner’s cancellation. Because of a coincidence of history, the land selected for Disney’s America in Prince William County, Virginia had once belonged to his family. He had been a part of much of the debate and negotiation with Disney. And in spite of all the local and national coverage and debate, Disney never agreed to diversify it's Disneyfied history by adding real people’s lives, facts and /or narratives associated with the land; stories of local, native tribes; or the generational families who followed when the Indians were forced to move West beyond the mountains. In this author’s opinion, Disney would have kept both rich and poor, but often diversified, Northern Virginia people out of sight in Disney’s America, lurking just beneath the subsoil as does the limestone rock of the region, which the Haymarket Indians used for flint beds for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans.

While Mary Anne Reynolds, working with Jody Powell on Disney PR for the park, assured the author in a phone call from Gainesville, Virginia that Disney was not stonewalling, he continues to hold until this day the opinion that Disney used tactics of ossification and bullying, hoping to deflect national and local criticism of a Disney-style image myth interpretation of Virginia and US history that they could create as they saw fit. [5]

If a university professor, such as the author, with influential political and historical connections in the immediate area of the Disney development and with broader national influence support voiced by his famous relative, Shelby Foote, did not get Disney to rethink its story and presentation, how can an international, New Media user thousands of miles away from the producers expect be heard? (Especially, the New Media user who depends on easily-ignored e-mail or interactive chat, both often recommended for New Media feedback?) Disney under CEO Michael Eisner did not and still does not accept user challenges to its self-perceived supremacy as king of world fantasy. Just as it did with Disney’s America, Disney feels free to portray image myth as fact and reality, disregarding the wisdom and advice of educational, governmental, historical and cultural authorities.

The New Media Chunnel Model for the Broadband Revolution

The Claude Shannon Mathematical Theory of Communication has had intense study for a longer period and resulted in more fame for its creator/scientist than any other communication process model. With the 1948 publication of his landmark, the father of information theory established a framework and industry terminologies that are still standards in 2002 (Lucent Technologies, p. 1).

While not taking any ideas directly from Shannon’s theories, the New Media Chunnel Model for the Broadband Revolution draws on inspiration from his work; this creator’s clear and certain understanding is that the broadband revolution of 2000+ could not have happened without Shannon’s solutions of the fundamental engineering problems during and after World War II. Without the foundations of information theory that he laid down at Bell Labs, the New Media Chunnel Model for the Broadband Revolution could only be a speculative academic exercise -- because no broadband or internet infrastructure would otherwise exist.

“Chunnel” is a broadband term -- a combination of “funnel” and “channel”; the latter is the term Shannon used for the medium of the message. Funnel applies to needs for encoding, editing, idea compression and filtering of broadband content to comply in some cases with social norms and to operate with the technological limits of the system. The use of “Chunnel” invokes high tech visions that the planners of the other Chunnel, the train tunnel under the English Channel, had for a multi-track, high speed, state of the art link between the English coast and France. It also reminds us of bridging the great waters of the world, especially of influence of Anglo-American media structures and content on world audiences.

In the preliminary chunnel model used in classes at the University of North Alabama until 1999, the head end, server/distribution encoding filters were labeled transparent. Before 2000+ broadband revolution, the limitations of html compared to Java, JavaScript, JSP and ASP content were substantial, but the economics of major technologies and the mastery level of the technologies and their deployment were well within the personnel competency and affordability of most small business/organizations. [Even the web-literate, Internet user, may need a few terms in this section defined. See footnote [6] for selective definitions.] The electronic newspaper and electronic brochure Internet formats were the web styles most often deployed during this era. Up to seven million sites used those design models with an equal and a democratically determined chance of reaching an individual surfer in a transparent and open network of the era. Fortunately, relative little filtering occurred, but, when it did, it was near the user’s end of the channel, involving traffic prioritization policies imposed by the last-mile ISPs. It was of mutual benefit to both the content provider and the customer to attempt to overcome a combination of backbone compression, limited ISP thru-put capacity and user decoding limits. User decoding problems were primarily the result of an interaction of the destination computer hardware and browser software, both selected by the user.

Before 2000+ broadband revolution almost every Internet content provider/website could be effectively located through at least one of a limited number of high-profile search portals, mainly Yahoo, Lycos and Infoseek. The feedback loop worked well because e-mail in its DOS-like, text-only form was still new; and, in the era of innovation and novelty, the provider always read the feedback message and almost always replied to the user if there was need to do so. After secure servers, techniques of encryption, and other enhancements proliferated, the feedback loop kept pace with this improvement by adding extended applications for e-commerce, various forms of interactive chat and downloading needs. Because the technology was simple and technology demands continued “quaint” for feedback, the upstream portion of the interactive loop avoided most problems of downstream browser/hardware decoding limits and last mile ISP filters. Because home-region ISP and browser/processor response speeds were insignificant in degrading maximized feedback results before the broadband revolution, the feedback loop in the old model was shown connecting at the user end just above a bottom-most, filtering/decoding layer.

The 2000+ broadband revolution officially arrived in the US when Arbitron and Coleman revealed to the 2000 National Association of Broadcasters’ Radio Convention in New Orleans that broadband users represented 33% of those connected to the Internet. The data showed this group spent 22% more time with electronic media than other Internet users, and those connected with broadband capacity were “far more likely to use downloaded and streamed audio and video content.” The data indicated that broadband users’ satisfaction with residential broadband service through DSL and cable is so high that the researchers predict optimistic growth for broadband -- therefore a revolution (Rose and Kurtzman, p.2).

In a June 2001, follow-up study, the researchers expanded the focus to include work and school [or college] broadband access. This study revealed nearly a third of American internet users had broadband access at college, work or home; that the broadbanders, the so-called speedies, spent as much time with the internet as with either radio or television; that heavier media consumers with broadband access were more likely to do multitasking; and that those accessing broadband at school think of the internet as being a bit less a information-based medium than the other groups (Rose and Kurtzman, p. 4). Here was the beginning of an entertainment trend in New Media among younger users. But, taken in total across all age groups, the combined demographic viewed the Internet as primarily information-based, rather than entertainment-based by a 75% to 14% majority (Rose and Kurtzman, p. 15).

Revisions for the New Media Chunnel Model for the Broadband Revolution take into account several recent other trends or predictions: (1) That established, brick and mortar media transnational corporations are increasing their reach because of an overall audience loyalty and a growing broadband, entertainment preferences of the young, and that cross-media promotion is likely to reap the greatest e-commerce profits; (2) That the Internet is now considered primarily a marketing and e-commerce medium by dominant providers rather than an information medium; (3) Whereas in the Internet world before the broadband revolution, reception points were first viewed as users, in the 2000+ era they become first and foremost customers; (4) That most of the limitations in diversity and variety are no longer choices made by the user/customer but in fact are imposed by transnational corporations upon their customers for economic and political reasons; (5) That governmental monitoring and censoring of the Internet has become a serious policy issue in many parts of the world and is the greatest threat to the Internet’s robustiness and reliability of content – even greater than content Disneyfication discussed in this paper [7]. (6) That if new media chunnel dominance continues, media transnationals will become more and more interested in “walled” strategies as the way to trigger their own sales and economic growth.

As if they know that walled strategies are being put in place, the Committee on the Internet in the Evolving Information Infrastructure states that some ISPs may already be perceived as favoring their own content. The Committee and it parent organization, the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the U. S. National Research Council recommends that “ISP’s should make public their policies for filtering or prioritizing customer IP traffic. (p. 25)”

Chester has warned of the trend toward consolidation of control in the giant transnationals:

The problem is that the nation’s leading “old” media companies are chaining the Internet to their business models. They want to make sure they control the content flow. . . they’re absolutely a threat to the Internet, because these companies are using their political muscle to stop the FCC from having a safeguard to keep the Internet open and nondiscriminatory. They’re opposed to it because the business model of these media giants is about controlling the user experience. It’s not about real competition or diversity of expression. (pp. 2 - 3)

New Media Chunnel for the Broadband Revolution

(REVISED MODEL, Copyright (c) 2004, Avon Edward Foote, All Rights Reserved)

The model portrays Disneyfication as more than marketing/e-commerce strategies of one single company. At worst, it is a worldwide, societal, virtual disinformation, which may have to be accepted across societies during periods of war and/or radical terrorism. For example, in the first few months of 2002, the Pentagon announced that is was going ahead with establishing an official worldwide, disinformation bureau, but editorial opposition from the American and European press caused a reevaluation and tabling of the plan. Nevertheless, it is general knowledge among the US and European populations that e-mail and website monitoring has been organized by American and British governments to deal with the threat of more terrorism since September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and to apprehend the terrorists. In peacetime, checks and balances are relaxed and Disneyfication may become total simcracrum in Baudrillard’s terms masquerading as documentary truth, objective journalism, and/or the actuality entertainment for corporate economic and political reasons.

While reflecting producer over-dependence on image myth for impact and reach, Disneyfication bears no marks of pure fiction or of a factual-content, distortion disclaimer. Also, Disneyfication is missing always stylistic and promotional imprints of non-representation, or in Baudrillard’s terminology, the simcracrum is not acknowledged by producers. The audience gains no comprehension that the Disneyfied New Media content is to be enjoyed as entertainment only – and not to be confused with fact, history, knowledge, learning and/or cultural reality.

Architecture as the Metaphor

Gareth Morgan (1997) in his Images of Organization shows how metaphors may be used when studying management and organizations to gain creative interpretations of situational, leader motivations and actions. A scientific framework for the application of the metaphor to organization study is endorsed by communities of scholars, who specialize in organizational communication, leadership concerns and urban geography.

Morgan describes the invitation and challenge for this type of scholarship:

To recognize and cope with the idea that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors which persuade us to see, understand, and imagine situations in partial ways.

. . . metaphors create insight.

But they also distort.

They have strengths.

But they also have limitations.

In creating ways of seeing they tend to create ways of not seeing.

Hence there can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view. There can be no “correct theory” for structuring everything we do.

The challenge facing modern managers is to become accomplished in the art of using metaphor: To find appropriate ways of seeing, understanding, and shaping the situations with which they have to deal (Morgan, p. 348).

Hugh Bartling, an urban geographer, has gone beyond use of the pure metaphor by observing that “the corporate planned community provides an opportunity to investigate physical and cultural assumptions inherent in the town’s environment and understand the fundamental ideological frameworks governing corporate practices. . . [and to ] shed light on how corporations see their role in the larger social sphere.”

I made my second visit to Seaside, Florida in May 2001, becoming a part of the hoopla of the 20^th anniversary year celebration for the Disney-like community on the Gulf Coast. Founders Robert Davis and his wife built a new town, that has become famous and -- to some -- infamous, on land they owned in the Florida panhandle, that finger of the state that stretches along the white beach/blue water demarcation of the Gulf from the Bush brother’s Florida state capitol home nearly to Mobile, Alabama. America’s architects know Seaside as the quintessential example of the architects’ New Urbanism.

Most Americans and Europeans know Seaside as the locale for Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, released in 1998 by Paramount -- ironically, not by Disney. The movie is the defining nexus for the influences and factors of the image myth described in this paper. The Truman Show provides: (1) A perfect context for the ideas of Hollyweb; (2) Demonstrates the virtual environment of the new media; (3) Exposes audiences to Walt Disney’s graphic visions; (4) Has plenty of examples of Disney-inspired, architectural solutions for America combining fantasy with social goals and control; (5) Reminds us of the highly successful, customer control, profit objectives of Disney Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner; and (6) Gives us a metaphor for American architects’ influence on new media – a “who domed it.”

Drawing parallels between the Canary Wharf development in London with the World Financial Center development in New York, Darrel Crilley declares that urban architecture turned two decades ago from democratic political debate to urban theatre – what he calls the “grandeur of a carefully orchestrated corporate spectacle.” He says the “public is there for entertainment and there to gaze (p. 153)”. In an abstract of his 1999 University of Kentucky dissertation, Bartling wrote:

By creating a new urban environment . . . a corporation can mitigate the influence of . . . meddlesome exogenous forces. The existence of intervening interests is controlled and the corporation, in theory, can embark on a physical and social engineering project in close accordance with its perceived requirements (Bartling).

The chairperson of the English Department of a small Evangelical Christian, Pennsylvania college explains the frightening implications of producer-defined social goals and environments that seem to follow recent architectural traditions of the New Urbanism. Dr. Carolyn Cherry of Eastern College teaches British literature, film, and the literature of women and is also associate editor of Quaker History, a scholarly journal. She writes about The Truman Show :

The film stimulates thoughts about the extent to which . . .we live in a virtual reality defined for us by remote manipulators. It prompts you to think about Disneyfication of American (or perhaps the Disneyfication of our imaginations). It makes you ponder what constitutes reality…. (Cherry, p. 1).

Another teacher of literature and creative writing for Florida International University describes “Disneyfication” as falsifying and cutseyfing the natural landscape with a behavioral goal of creating communities “where people are suddenly relieved of their modern stresses and begin to act in the polite and civil way of those model citizens we know and love so well: Mickey and Minnie (Hall, p.1).”

According to author/professor James W. Hall, Victorian and Southern Cracker -- what I would prefer to call Rebel Celtic -- architectural heritages are being used in a hybrid designs to create fantasy architecture at Seaside. He described the fantasy in Sunshine Magazine:

Cracker holdovers as tin roofs, wraparound porches, widow’s walks, double-hung window, French doors, and gazebos. . . . Pastel paints prevail, peaches and butterfly yellows and pale purples, all of which give the town a rainbowy, Crayola feel. When you approach Seaside from the north along the beach road, making a big sweeping turn, the town springs into view all at once, rising from the barren landscape like some frothy meringue, a colorful clutter of Victorian dollhouses (Hall, p. 1).

After having stayed at Seaside six times, Hall concludes that it is all done too

well. The contrived, the mannered, the manufactured beauty, he says, cause residents to lose their way; he calls it the “Disney Virus.” After two visits to Seaside, I will personally confirm Hall’s feelings. Seaside [8], where a pleasure-filled, cartoon-like fantasy is accepted as reality 24/7, is also where the world’s diversity is invisible 24/7.

What diversity is in Seaside's architectural message? At Seaside the architectural message is one that ignores serious political or socially-responsible diversity. Seaside’s diversity comes more as urban theatre to enjoy and relax. Surely, the developers would be able to show that diversity does exist among those who select to live or vacation in the corporate myth of an uncomplicated and perfected New Urbanism lifestyle. But this is exactly the challenge. As with Disney-like architecture, Disney-like entertainment is popular among locally diverse audiences the world over – and, even when the diversity of the buyers or audiences is apparent, idea diversity is invisible in associated entertainment productions.

Gaining diverse audiences or finding diverse buyers in Seaside is not the problem. By avoiding realism the producer gives the production mass appeal, while audiences accept and cherish the image myth productions. But it still does not meet the public service obligation to reflect the social and cultural diversity of the real world; to share the diversity of the reality by inviting participation of the citizens in a political marketplace of ideas.

Economics of scale are in the foreground of transnational decision-making. Single world-wide audience production that identifies with no particular ethnic and social group but is fictionalized outside this world is the safe norm. With highly –paid, skilled craftsman in charge, the quality lacks diversity. When alternative, public service New Media companies with commitments to diversity try to fill the void, their productions likely come off feeling inferior, perceived as lacking overall merit. These alternative, New Media companies eventually fail. The failures of the smaller firms with diversity goals, seemingly, but in error, confirms that the transnationals’ original economy of scale decisions were indeed the right ones. As the Chunnel Model shows, eventually the massive diversity of the pre-2000+ Internet gives way to an evolution of broadband entertainment sameness, a process of image myth “Disneyfication”.

Mixing Architecture and Moving-Making Professionals at Disney

Walt Disney considered engaging several different architects as lead designers on the first Disneyland park during 1950's planning. Although Frank Lloyd Wright had guest lectured at the studio in the late 1930s, he was ageing in the 1950s. But Walt’s greatest problem with Wright had been his bitter criticism of Fantasia. The Disney Studio founder finally settled on a team of Hollywood film art directors to handle the architectural design and imagineering of Disneyland.

Much less well understood is the influence of architects on Disney films of the 30s, 40s and 50s. Marling writes that whole generation of movie-inspired architects have received very little historical attention. In her 1997 book, she revealed how often film art directors bounced back and forth between the studios and Los Angeles architects’ offices, depending on whichever of the two industries had the least slack at the time:

. . . many of the art directors, animators, and layout men Disney hired when his studio geared up for feature-length animation in the 1930’s were trained architects, without much hope of finding work at their trade during the Great Depression. (Marling, p. 58)

But, the architects’ influence-sharing generally flowed both directions -- from movie to architectural firm and back to movie lot again. She describes William L. Pereira’s professional life in film, which combined architecture and movie production at the same time. Pereira “ . . . practiced architecture while making movies as a Paramount art director, a production designer, and a special-effects expert (who won an Oscar in the latter category) (Marling, p. 58).”

In June 2001 exhibition program at the National Building Museum in Washington, one of the defenders of the Seaside development style of architecture, architect Geoffrey Ferrell, joined planner Summer Rutherford and Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council, to discuss the aftermath of the Disney’s America defeat. Miller’s organization was the out-front, local organization of local landed gentry opposing Disney history-park plans in 1994 and 1995. The Disney’s America panel was part of the Museum’s exhibition program, “The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks”.

According a Museum press release, an imaginary cinematic land in the exhibit examined “Disney’s interpretations of the inhabited natural world.”

Disney’s changing view of the meaning and character of the American frontier is observed through its architecture, culminating in models and designs for the “farm land” planned for the unbuilt Disney historical project in Virginia (National Building Museum, p.1).

In its online literature on the exhibit, the National Building Musuem calls visitors’ attention to the “increasingly subtle boundaries between reality and illusion that mark Disney theme park architecture (National Building Museum, p.1).”

Marling acknowledged that Walt had a hidden social agenda, when she wrote that Walt saw Disneyland as a “tacit critique of the chaotic American city.” The Museum publicist boasts that the “principles embedded in Disneyland have spread outside the parks and into the hotel complexes surrounding them, into stores and malls, and into our daily lives (National Building Museum, p. 2).”

To know the history of what is the Disney new media, corporate culture at time of the 2000+ broadband revolution, you must understand that today’s traditions and principles were established by Walt himself, making them ingrained, enterprise elements of Disney organizational culture -- more than biblical in significance for the New Media Age eisnermice.

Based on architects’ professional education and learned social norms for customers’ needs, architects plan by creating designs to manipulate how those in residence and work are to live their daily lives, using image myth spaces. Boyer writes:

This new language of urban design follows formulas established by advertisng and provides invented models of reality, seldom disguising their artifice. The city these spaces represent is filled with a magical and exciting allure, landscapes of pleasure intentionally separated from the city’s more prosaic or threatening mean streets. Controlled by the rules and values of the market system, these places offer a diet of synthetic charm . . . architectural imagery, fictional information, entertainment and spectacle . . . .

(Boyer, p. 119)

In the 1930s, when Walt was creating his great studio, the Disney Company established a pattern of hiring Los Angeles architects who then contributed significantly to the studio’s movie production skill cadres. The post-modern problem is that architects have a professional ethic that according to Boyer suppresses “the sequential order of reality” and substitutes an “imaginary order of things (p. 126).”

For example, putting messages of reassurance into architecture is endorsed in the current National Building Museum’s 2001 exhibit in Washington, where Michael Eisner received a recent architectural award.[9] The exhibit which opened first at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal in 1997 confirmed that visitor reactions were being managed.

The apparent height of the buildings is an illusion engineered through the set-designer’s forced perspective: while main floors are almost life size, second and third stories are smaller creating the impression of tallness in buildings of modest, domestic height. This toytown scale – impossible in the real world – gives adults the same feeling of mastery and control that children feel . . . (National Building Museum, p. 2).

The building height illusion is akin to the Langs’ description how the Internet changes our understanding of physical space. Lang and Lang attribute Americans’ image myths to the impact of streaming messages, an inherent part of the Internet’s broadband revolution.

Still more graphic, and certainly more vivid, than two-dimensional maps are the various video images. They have the power to overwhelm and even erase the traditional, often exotic, ideas of other countries derived from lore, literature, and remembered history. Implicitly or explicitly, they define proximity or distance along dimensions other than that of physical space (Tumber, p. 296).

Perceptions of image myth space mean people are prone not to view countries as near or far but as “important or unimportant, friendly or hostile, co-operative or obstructive, democratic or authoritarian, advanced or undeveloped, and so forth (p. 296).”

While my description of how image myth are used to modify space concepts implies that the New Media audience is being misled as to what is reality, others seem to see this linkage of space and place locales progressive -- the term used by the Open University’s Doreen Massey, a respected geography scholar. She considers progressive the compression and disruption of time - space perceptions. Massey asks, “Who is it who is yearning after the seamless whole and the settled place? (Massey, p. 330)” This author would counter with an argument that it is a responsibility for the accuracy of the portrayal of space and place to humankind that should be of concern instead of settling on some specifics of a definition which seems to have Massey’s attention. Much of the world is caught up in a New Media revolution, but the rest will be stuck in the 19th century in a settled place with limited Internet availability for at least a hundred more years.

Marling reconstructed Walt Disney’s attitude about his studio’s responsibilities to the world humankind from a perspective of place:

[Disney] did not believe for a moment that art – his art, the picture-postcard kind – was obliged to be disturbing, challenging, unsettling. He believed instead that it ought to provide comfort and refuge from that world of woes he knew at first hand. His park was built behind a berm to protect it from the evils that daily beset humankind on all sides. The architecture of reassurance (Marling, p. 83).

To understand Walt’s determination to avoid the disturbing, the challenging, the unsettling we need to see his personality better--a persona that has been passed on in the house that Walt built—to CEO Michael Eisner up there on the Disney roof. Marling writes: “Order implies control and there is no question about Walt’s abiding interest in being in control – of his business, of the content of his films, of the smallest detail of his park (Marling, p. 85).” She puts him straight into her spotlights glare when she discusses his “rage for order (Marling, p. 85).”

Has the architect’s influence gone from Hollywood?

Broadband, digital production requires that engineer and artist be rolled into an information technology guru—producing and designing and digitising, more of an Edwin S. Porter than a Melies. The pleasure techs of interactive new media are becoming the new imagineers, comparable in 2000+ to the building architects so important to Walt in the 30s, 40s and 50s.

The management risk for all Hollywebs in 2000+, but symbolized by Disney, lies in whether or not to give New Media's top producing assignments to eisnermites -- who may be selected to replace the architects’ eisnermice descendants. Or will the industry give the choice producing jobs to the eisnermight of world diversity? If the eisnermites are enthroned in the Castle of New Media production and control, the producing cadres of the Hollywebs will be mostly computer programmers focusing the information bits on the digitised, broadband versions of the image myth. It is a step-down from what Walt’s architects did for him and other studio moguls in the analogue world of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and what their second generational descendants are still trying to do for the Michael Eisner today.

The 2000+ broadband revolution is highly dependent on cg animation to control and create both virtual and live-talent production in the new media chunnel while keeping talent and production personnel costs as low as possible in the Hollywood economy. Hugh economies of scale dominate decision-making for world distribution in the New Media Chunnel, making entertainment emphases the only enterprise-endorsed way to avoid the localized tastes demanded by information content. But what falls outside the reality limits of informational interactive programs, allows all types of self-endorsed, corporate PR themes to creep into the image myth programming. The architectural system metaphor for Walt’s world will need morphing into 2001+ pleasure tech, computer programming metaphor if the leadership ignores the challenge.

Poor Disney scriptwriters have already lost their way with the image myth producers of the new Hollyweb. If you doubt it, just listen for the leaden clanks Randall Wallace’s screenplay gives off when you try to enjoy his high tech reenactment of Pearl Harbor (Davis).

As increasing less cosmopolitan segments of world-wide audiences grow in numbers, they will sacrifice their psychological bearing about what is real and what is fiction to “Corporate image and definition control” by the New Media transnationals (Boyer, p. 119). If trends continue, fiction will be passed off as history and image effects presented as visual, documentary fact, just as Disney’s America theme park in Virginia would be doing right now if it had not been stopped in 1994.

New Media images are becoming better than reality, losing traditional imprints and visual cues that helped pre-2000+, Hollyweb audiences judge the truth or falseness of the entertainment they were presented. This happens at the same audiences are being distanced from correcting, localized human interaction by New Media Chunnel electronic communities that are often culturally segregated and more easily leader manipulated than face to face communication in a resident place could be.

“Disneyfication” in the New Media Chunnel is a threat to the future and stability of the world as Internet technology moves to broadband, foreshadowing content changes with significant global implications. With media scholars expecting enhanced effectiveness for interactive electronic Chunnel media over traditional one-way electronic media, dominant content shifts from the reality of diverse informational content to heightened perceived-reality in image myth content gives New Media communications companies alarming decision-making power over New Media’s undereducated, often illiterate, and diverse world audiences.

News comment on 2004 Comcast take-over proposal from the Miami Herald

Mother of Media Monopolies quote of Edward Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics,
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia (permission to quote granted by Dr. Wasserman)

Top that off with a commanding position astride the emergence of interactive TV, video on demand and all sorts of Internet applications -- which is why the Mother of Media Monopolies, Microsoft, spent $1 billion to buy a substantial 7.4 percent stake in Comcast in 1997.

Why does this matter? Because a single entity will be able to orchestrate the full range of media activity: originating content, buying content on advantageous terms, deciding its distribution, choosing the technology to exhibit it, setting prices and ad rates for it -- with no effective competitive constraint. (You could ditch Comcast/Disney/Microsoft in favor of Murdoch/Fox/DirecTV. Welcome to 21st century consumer choice.)

Vertical integration on this scale -- when one colossus controls the whole process, soup to nuts, by which something is made, distributed and sold -- is breathtaking. It also eludes most antitrust scrutiny, which looks at unhealthy dominance over a single market, not unhealthy dominance based on cumulative influence over a sequence of markets.

Deal is no sure thing. And the marketplace of ideas? The engineers of this deal will say they want your money, not your mind. That's a comfort, I suppose. And it's reassuring that the deal is no sure thing (the parties may never come to terms), and it may never work as hoped, although botched mergers still cost millions of dollars and thousands of wrecked careers.

But the thing that makes this alluring economically -- the dark appeal of centralization -- makes it a bad deal for the life of culture and ideas. Perhaps ownership diversity must be protected because it is the closest thing that a privately held media industry can offer to the checks and balances built into our political structures.

But we won't see this question debated during this, or any, electoral season.

Notes

[1] My thanks to Jeremy Turnstall for using in his writings the term: Hollyweb.

[2] The Avon Edward Foote and Dorothy Gargis Foote, Persian Gulf War Video Collection will open in 2002 at the Broadcast Pioneers Library of American Broadcasting housed with the National Public Broadcasting Archives in Hornbake Library, University of Maryland, College Park.

[3] Avon Edward Foote donated the original brochure to the British Film Institute archive collection in 1991. A machine copy made before donation was used as reference for this chapter.

[4] This quote is from a machine copy of part of one of the first Disney’s America brochures issued by the Walt Disney Company. The author made several attempts to influence the Disney Company. Most were unsuccessful.

[5] Jody Powell is former press secretary to President Jimmy Carter. His partner in the firm of Powell-Tate is Sheila Tate, former press secretary to Nancy Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush, Sr., while he was President-elect.

[6] Java is a programming language that may be used to control and add interactive features to a wide range of broadband destination devices. Many of Java’s advantages will be popularized by the MPEG-4 standard, which defines the newest compression, encoding-technology standards of the broadband revolution. JavaScript is often used by non-programmers to enhance content formatting in pre-broadband and introductory broadband periods mimicking at a basic level, the way Java is used for more sophisticated programming solutions. JSP stands for Java-Server-Pages and involves shifting Java programming control and formatting from the browser to the web server to gain efficiency and expanded database access. ASP, Active-Server-Pages, is Microsoft’s proprietary and older version of the JSP, but using a different language. ISP stands for Internet Service Provider who provides regional and local access to the national or international technology backbone. Last-mile ISP is the provider who delivers the very last phone line, cable, or satellite distribution bridge into the home or office. DSL is Digital Synchronous Line that allows the phone company after some equipment upgrading to deliver broadband using existing phone wire technology. DSL competitors use television cable and satellite for distribution. IP is Internet Protocol and defines the standards of Internet distribution, including broadband New Media, on the national and international technology backbone.

[7] Singapore represents the application of censorship across a wide variety of content that the literature documents with exploration and history of its Codes of Practice and how its regulation is organized. Clause 3 of the Singapore Code states that in relation to programmes on the World Wide Web, an Internet Service Provider discharges its obligations when it denies access to sites notified to it by Singapore Broadcasting Authority as containing prohibited material. See: Anil, S. Re-Visiting the Singapore Internet Code of Practice, 2001 (2) The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT). http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/01-2/anil.html accessed March 26, 2002.

[8] In recent years Seaside has promoted itself as the ideal setting for sales meetings, team-building, and executive retreats. Recent corporate clients thru June 2001 include Pfizer, Merrill Lynch, Dupont, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals, and Welch’s. According to Kerri Billman, Advertising and Editorial, Seaside Marketing, many of the residents have second and third homes at Seaside. Phone conversation with Billman, July 11, 2001, and my discussion with unidentified Seaside Marketing employee, Clutch Concert, Rock 'N Rock Clutch Café, The Boardwalk, Panama City, Florida, May 24, 2001.

[9] The National Building Museum presented the 2001 Honor Award to Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO, and The Walt Disney Company, “in recognition of their legacy of outstanding contributions to architecture, design and planning.” The justification continues, “Under Mr. Eisner’s leadership, Disney has reinforced and expanded its role as a patron of innovative design, commissioning more than 80 buildings by some of the world’s leading architects over the past sixteen years. The 2001 Honor Award will celebrate the company’s role in creating some of America’s most beloved and highly symbolic structures – from the castle at Disneyland to the dome at Epcot Center, as well as Disney’s leadership in exploring new ideas in community planning through the development of the town of Celebration, Florida.” In conjunction with receiving the award, the Disney Company became a benefactor of the Museum, contributing $50,000 to help pay for the costs of the Award functions, which allowed 10 employee/friends of Eisner and Disney to attend. Accessed: June 26, 2001 at http://www.nbm.org .

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5 February 2004 with Wasserman comment added 25-26 February 2004.

Reviewed/Revised 30 March 2004