As I reflect on how this documentary started and where it has ended up, I notice how much it has evolved. I have been writing up synopses and talking to a number of people about the project, and I realize that there is some confusion about the motivations and intentions of The Echo Chamber.
Is the film is going to criticize the politics of the selling the war to the American people and serve as a thinly-veiled attack on President Bush? Or is this a serious academic investigation of the downfalls of objective mainstream journalism?
ORIGINAL MOTIVATIONS
A SHIFT IN EVOLUTION
SEARCHING FOR A POLITICAL PARTY
PROSELYTIZING VERSUS MEANING CO-CREATION
A FILM ABOUT POLITICS OR JOURNALISTIC PROCESS?
LOOSING UP THE PARADIGMS
EVOLUTION
RECREATING THE EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY
ORIGINAL MOTIVATIONS
The original intention of The Echo Chamber was to criticize the war in Iraq, but it was also to investigate the role of the mainstream broadcast media in shaping public consciousness.
I originally envisioned this film as a well-constructed argument against the war in Iraq, where I would proselytize my paradigm as being the absolute best and most correct.
But throughout the process of interviewing 45 experts, I left my attitudes and beliefs open to being persuaded and altered -- as a result, I went through an interesting evolution. I realized that every perspective contained a grain of truth, but there also seemed to be at least one point of departure from my own perspective of what happened and why.
A SHIFT IN EVOLUTION
A turning point happened when I had a two-hour post-interview dialogue with retired Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski about the differences between libertarianism and Republican conservatism.
I began to find a lot of common ground and identified the points of departure between our respective ideologies. I began to really understand the conservative philosophy, and I gained more compassion and empathy for the conservative perspectives on how to best structure an economy.
I even adopted a more classic conservative approach to media reform by focusing on evolving the culture by producing intelligent and thought-provoking entertainment. If this documentary project is successful, then it might begin to open a new market that demands news that transcends the current infotainment standards.
Government regulation of the media by the FCC may be able to further prevent media consolidation. This would help maintain some media diversity, but it shouldn't be the government's role or responsibility to force media companies to produce quality public affairs programming. Even if this type of programming was mandated to be created, the government still couldn't force the public to watch it.
There also has to be a consumer-based solution -- My dialogue with Kwiatkowski's Libertarian perspectives has helped me explore the nuances of my previous media reform ideological position.
I still however disagree with the Bush Administration's justifications for the war in Iraq after I've extensively explored the legal and moral arguments from a number of different perspectives and weighed the associated costs and benefits from the intervention.
The challenge for me is to be as objective as I can in structuring these perspectives in my film -- I'll explore how I'm planning on going about this in my next blog posting about Integral Journalism.
SEARCHING FOR A POLITICAL PARTY
But by the end of film production, I realized that there wasn't one single political ideology that fits all of my new set of beliefs. The available options for political party affiliations have fractured philosophies that each contains a portion of the truth.
But with the dominant two-party system, the available philosophies become even more fractured. Voting ultimately comes down to choosing between the lesser of two evils.
There is certainly a need for electoral reform -- Instant Run-Off voting could bring in some competition to the political monopoly held by the Republicans and Democrats.
Instant Run-Off voting could create more diversity in the political institutions of Congress and the local legislatures. This could provide the media with additional dissident voices that could be included in debates over issues where the Democrats and Republicans agree.
I have a number of other ideas as to how to improve our Democracy, and I'm sure that other people have ways to improve our country as well.
PROSTELYZING VERSUS MEANING CO-CREATION
It is not my role as a filmmaker or as a citizen to figure out the best solution and preach it to the world. But what I can do is present a range of views and stimulate dialogue between people so that they can create their own meaning and come up with their own ideas.
This concept is building off of sociologist Nina Eliasoph's rebuttal to Rodney Benson's scholarly article that combines Sociological Field Theory with political communications.
From an earlier blog post:
The dominant political and sociological framing views the public as a passive entity that is being manipulated by powerful institutions. Sociologist Nina Eliasoph stresses how important it is to teach people how to interact with each other as opposed to just feeding people the "truth" of institutional domination. She warns that preaching a litany of facts to people is the same as viewing humans as passive and not active creatures who are capable of creating a collective meaning.
A FILM ABOUT POLITICS OR JOURNALISTIC PROCESS?
So is this a political film or an academic film about journalistic process? It is more about the journalistic process, but it may be impossible to divorce the two at the end of the day.
By making all of the interview transcripts online and watching the film -- it should be up to the viewers to create whatever meaning that they want to get out of the experience of watching this film or visiting this website.
More about the projected four stages of meaning creation along with how to leverage the blogging medium with documentary filmmaking in future postings.
LOOSING UP THE PARADIGMS
I think that the most important lesson for me has been to treat my attitudes, beliefs and moral belief system as if it were a set of temporary placeholder theories. The judgements and perceptions that form my paradigm is only a model of reality that should be treated as an approximation to the truth.
I'm currently treating my paradigm as a phenomenon that is trying to describe a more unknowable "Noumenon."
I acknowledge that I'm a flawed human just like anyone else. I'm also not enlightened or blessed with the so-called truth. Instead, I have something to learn from every individual perspective.
Life is a process of evolution, and I'm in the process of understanding and being compassionate towards a number of different intersubjective realities within our culture.
I'm beginning to really understand the causal nature between an individual's belief system and perception. We only have a limited amount of attention available, and our overriding philosophy on life and moral belief system serves as the first filter for how information is perceived and stored in our brains.
A culture that has a polarized set of belief systems is going to interpret the same set of facts with a completely different set of lenses.
The less that we understand these philosophical differences and how they affect our perception of reality, the more misunderstanding and fear is going to be created between the two major political parties.
As this fear escalates to the point of dehumanization, then a "US" versus "THEM" mentality sets in and this paves the road for ideological hate speech and potentially even physical violence.
With high passion comes low logic, and the goal of the Echo Chamber Project is to reintroduce rational logic in order to counterweight the high passions of both sides getting too engrained into their political and/or religious ideologies.
EVOLUTION
Understanding the differences of these different "software operating systems" the are running on the universal "human body hardware" is a key component to conflict resolution and evolution.
If this film can point out that both sides are right and wrong to varying degrees, then hopefully this can stimulate more compassion and understanding while reducing the level of conflict and fear.
The goal isn't to have one side or the other completely abandon their entire belief system. This is pretty unreasonable. But it is reasonable to have people begin to analyze their own set of beliefs (i.e. MetaThinking) and begin to open up their belief systems to change.
If we see the shades of gray in our own beliefs and within the available set of fractured philosophies, then we may be able to integrate the best of both worlds and expand our identities beyond the Black and White nature of Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal or Left/Right.
A new set of Intgral Poltical Parties might be in order to blend new combinations of fiscal conservatism with liberal socialized support networks and economic principles of global sustainability.
Eventually we may be able to evolve our identities less towards political partisans and more towards American Citizens. And we might eventually begin to incorporate the mutual interests of all of the economically globalized countries and begin identifying ourselves as Global Citizens.
Ken Wilber's Integral Philosophy provides the theoretical basis for this type of integration and evolutionary identity expansion.
RECREATING THE EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY
The current intention of this documentary project is to attempt to recreate the evolutionary insights that I've gained from this journey of discovery.
I've learned a lot about the media, and about how people use their overriding belief system filter through various theories that explain current events and the nature of reality.
I want to challenge the engrained and ideological paradigms of our culture by presenting a wide variety of perspectives on the media and the build-up to the Iraq war.
No one perspective has all of the solutions, and I believe that it is going to take a cooperative effort from both sides of the aisle to come up with solutions to the biggest problems that we face as American and global citizens.
I've been searching for a way to integrate the best of both worlds, and it seems that Ken Wilber's Integral Philosophy is the most inclusive and comprehensive mechanism for accomplishing this that I've so far discovered.
More about this concept of "Integral Journalism" in a future blog post.