Sarah and I finally hunkered down to watch a serious movie last night so we watched Control Room. It was a pretty strong movie about Al Jazeera and how they fit into the puzzle of the fighting in Iraq in the latest war. It has some great and rich characters like a producer who chain smokes and a clean cut US army press relations guy. I think the presentation was balanced although the premise of the movie was that no presentation from any side is ever really balanced because the balance is always tipped towards what the viewers in the audience want to see. The arab viewers watching their television station reporting on the Iraq war want to see some anti-American sentiment just as much as Americans want to see some jingoist hoorah's about our role in the war.

Probably the best scene in the movie is when they cover the presentation by Al Jazeera of dead and captured American prisoners of war. I recall the television coverage and at the time watching Fox I thought about Al Jazeera as some form of monstrous lying propaganda organization. But in Control Room the army news correspondent goes through his thought process when he was first horrified by seeing the footage of the images of Americans dead and injured after a few hours earlier seeing similar footage of Iraqi collateral casualties and not being affected emotionally at all. So he realized that the arab world must be deeply offended and horrified by our lack of emotion when arabs are shown dying as if these people don't matter but our people do.

Speaking of unilateral conversations I also was reading Infinite Jest yesterday on the train home and David Foster Wallace gave a compelling reason why video phones ultimately will always fail. The basics are that most people when on the telephone enjoy doing lots of other things and assume that the person on the other side of the line is actually paying full attention to what they say. Because of the illusion of unilateral commitment to the conversation both sides believe they are getting the better of the other and are satisfied by the experience. Once video comes into the picture people need to be on their best behavior and to look attractive, neither of which is particularly appealing and makes the experience worse than a purely aural interaction.