Over the past few weeks I have been conducting an e-mail debate with my old friend and colleague Chris Palmer of American University.

Chris was very upset about some shocking revelations concerning the Disney Nature Film "Chimpanzee" that were published in the April 29th edition of the German magazine der Spiegel.

After  a few weeks of increasingly longer and complex exchanges, we decided to edit the whole colloquy and release it to a few magazines and websites related to our field. 

"Chimpanzee" is not a documentary film but still provides fascinating facts about our closest relatives. 

Next week the Disneynature film "Chimpanzee" opens in German cinemas. An article that appeared in this week’s issue of DER SPIEGEL is making waves and, for this reason, we would like to take this opportunity to make the following clear: while this film is not a documentary, its contents are not made up. The story is based on the results of more than 30 years of pain-staking research on these and other extremely exciting aspects of the lives of our closest living relatives. For practical reasons the filmmakers were not always able to capture the story in exact sequence but this is common with wildlife films.

In order to tell a story that is coherent enough to be carried by a feature film, the story had to be collated from the wealth of authentic footage that Disneynature had accumulated. To researchers studying chimpanzees, for instance, it is obvious that “it is impossible to film a hunt with 30 apes in the trees and four to six hunters on the ground all moving in different directions with just one camera in one day,” as Christophe Boesch, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, puts it. Of course the wildlife filmmakers had to edit different hunts together in order to have a complete hunt sequence for the film. The same applies to the territorial fights between neighbouring groups of chimpanzees. While these regularly take place in the Taï rainforest, there were practical reasons for choosing a group of chimpanzees in Uganda for the "rivals" shown in the film: the forest is more open there and it is possible to see and film the interactions that the filmmakers were genuinely witnessing in Taï.

The film shows the first 6 years of “Oscar’s” life – Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, however, only had 2.5 years to film in the Taï rainforest. It should therefore be clear that Oscar’s story could only be told by including episodes from the lives of other young chimpanzees to fill in the gaps. The time spent in the rainforest was an immense technical and physical challenge for the film team and the reproaches made by DER SPIEGEL should not diminish their performance.

As chief scientific adviser, Christophe Boesch made sure that the scientific facts in the film were presented correctly. However, the researchers did not have any influence on the dramaturgical design of the film. Since it is a family film, "Chimpanzee" of course has a happy ending. Unfortunately though, this is not always the case in the wild. Indeed, very few orphaned chimpanzees survive, even despite adoptions like this.

Anyone who wishes to explore the science behind the film in more depth should visit www.schimpansen.mpg.de, a website specially prepared by the Max Planck Society.

Contact:

Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
Department of Primatology
Prof. Dr. Christophe Boesch
Tel.: +49 (0)341 3550-200
Email: boesch@eva.mpg.de

Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
Press and Public Relations
Sandra Jacob
Tel.: +49 (0)341 3550-122
Email: jacob@eva.mpg.de

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The wildlife filmmaking world is a very small community, and we always endeavor to treat one another with great respect.  I think you can tell that Chris and I admire the great work Alistair and Mark have done at the BBC over the years. 

Here's a picture from the 1997 Jackson Hole Film Festival where Alastair and I appeared on a panel chaired by Chris discussing the relationships between filmmakers and scientists - evidently something still topical sixteen years later...

There’s a sign in the “exit garden” of JungleWorld at the Bronx Zoo with a quote from a speech by Baba Dioum that is often repeated around conservation organizations:

Within months the Judy Collins song, (and the original full length Humpback Whale album)  seemed to be everywhere.

Today we would say that the whales had “gone viral.” 

Dr. Payne was tireless in his evangelical efforts on behalf of his whales, seeking out every opportunity to expose the American public to their haunting sounds.  He appeared on TV everywhere from the Today Show with Hugh Downs to the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  A single, released as an EvaTone Sound Sheet (in the January 1979 issue of National Geographic) became not only the largest animal sounds record of all time, but was the largest single production run OF ANY RECORD IN THE HISTORY OF THE RECORD BUSINESS to that date!

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It’s hard to say exactly why this record took off.  Clearly, it was a product of the right effort at the right moment in popular culture.  Here are a few speculations on what may have contributed to the success:

• In 1970 “folksingers” like Collins were still able to chart with “singles” on the radio.

• High-fidelity FM stations had recently begun to eclipse AM stations in popularity (can you ever imagine listening to a whale song on a squawky little AM transistor radio?)

• Increased use of marijuana by the general public.  (This last point was suggested to me years ago by John McKew, who was the business manager for the NYZS who negotiated the original record contracts in 1970, and was still working there when I started there in the 1980's.  He was convinced that an article in Psychology Today on the health benefits of meditating to the sound of whale songs had sparked an entire generation to “get high and groove on the whales” ...   Frankly, who am I to say he’s wrong?)

In the final analysis, I believe the whale songs had such a remarkable impact on the public because they were presented as “pure music” – no narration, no accompanying video.  The instructions on the liner notes even encouraged listening with headphones for a more complete immersion in the “otherworldly-ness” of the soundscape.  

As musicians, Roger and Katy had the courage to let the whales music stand on its own as a powerful and enigmatic esthetic experience – not an information filled educational one.  True, the original issue of the album was accompanied by a handsomely illustrated 36 page booklet (printed in both English and Japanese) on the Payne’s research and global whale conservation issues, but the core experience – the whale songs themselves – are presented “a capella” as it were.

Freed from the burden of any over-arching narrative, the audience was open to participate in their own interpretation of these abstract songs – to bring more of themselves into the experience.   In a sense, whale songs are what Marshall McLuhan would call a “cool” medium, requiring more participation on the part of the audience, like Television or Jazz.

TV... Cool ... Jazz ? ... Maybe the association with marijuana is not as far-fetched as I thought.

Last June Sherry Turkle  spoke at the Media Ecology Association symposium at Manhattan College about her book "Alone Together; Why We Expect More From Technology And Less From Each Other".  

Since the late 70’s, Turkle’s work has examined the way we interact with digital technologies, and how it has changed our behavior and re-defined who we think we are.  A major theme of “Alone Together” looks at the impact of wireless devices, and what it means to be always on a network, and to have the network “always on” us.

At one point she illustrated her talk with a transcript of a SMS text message “conversation” between teenagers.  It was a seemingly dis-jointed stream of single words, fragments of phrases and acronyms;  “Whassup?” “Whr RU?” “K” and so forth.  Her point was that this was communication without significant substance - connection purely for the sake of connection. 


“In this group there is near consensus that one of the pleasures of digital communication is that it does not need a message.  It can be there to trigger a feeling rather than transmit a thought” (pg 198). 


Turkle sees these teenagers as discovering or inventing a new social protocol, entering the undiscovered country of a new medium for which “the rules” have not yet been written.


I recognized it immediately as something else – the revival of an extremely ancient mode of communication – the contact call. 




Having worked with a number of animal behaviorists and primatologists over the years, I have encountered this concept many times.  Among most “social” animals (those that live in troops, herds or flocks) contact calls serve an important function – coordinating the behavior of the group, assessing the general mood and sense of security of the individuals, and alerting the group to internal tensions or external threats. 

If they could be transcribed into English, most contact calls might look a lot like Dr. Turkle’s transcription of teenagers;


“Hey, how R U? ... I’m OK over here ... You OK over there?  .... Good leaf munching over here – Wait, what was that?  A predator?  ... Never Mind, ... OK ... Hey, how R U?


Here’s an example of some contact calls, in an excerpt from a training video I did years ago on studying baboon behavior.  You can hear contact calls, accompanied by lip smacking, and visual cues like the curious eyelid flipping that is a signaling behavior typical of this species.



As teenagers, we experience the strong urge to feel “connected” with our peer group as we do in no other phase in our lives.  From my perspective, SMS texts and IM and social platforms like Twitter and Foursquare have been so seductive for teenagers because they stroke an ancient need - a primate “itch” we have to feel connected to our “troop” with simple signal-based “gestures”. 

Texting is addictive because, like a digital form of a back scratcher, it is a technology that finally allows us to scratch an itch that’s been bothering us ever since we climbed down from the trees, stood up right and started walking and talking.

Back at NYU, every time I tried to use a concept from biology to explain a social phenomena, Jay Rosen, (the only surviving member of my long defunct doctoral committee), used to call it “cheating” or a bit of a cop out. 

In response, maybe I can offer this McLuhan-like “tetrad” on texting as contact calls.  (Marshal McLuhan’s Tetrad was a set of four questions which McLuhan drafted which can be used to approach an examination of any new medium, tool or technology.)

They are:
1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

I would answer them this way:

1. SMS text enhances signal and “gesture” over discursive content.

2. SMS text makes the awkward teenage boy-girl phone call obsolete.

3. SMS text retrieves “primate contact calls” enabling more “primate troop-like” behavior to teenage social life.

4. When pushed to extremes Text, (& Twitter and the like) can flip into Smart Mobs, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, ... push it as far as you like.

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You know, since contact calls are also common among most colonial-nesting bird species, I always thought it was ironic that it was called “Twitter” – it never occurred to me that they were being that literal.  When Twitter was originally launched at South By South West in 2007, its power as a "contact call"  was immediately apparent when big clusters of these first time Twitter users were "flocking" at one bar or party or another driven entirely by the tweets they got from each other.  Are we all one big flock now?

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For more on Turkle's observations of life lived "always on", here's an excerpt from a talk she gave at the London School of Economics in 2011.

While George Schaller was doing his pioneering study on mountain gorillas in the Belgian Congo in 1959, he and his wife Kay were living in a small cabin in the Virunga Volcanoes, largely isolated from the outside world. 

Supplies and mail arrived perhaps once a week – when someone was willing to spend all day hiking up the muddy trail from the nearest road.

Fifty years later, when we were filming Dr. Schaller in the same mountains, he had a constant reminder of how less isolated he was;

"I'm surprised the trackers here can concentrate on anything with their phones ringing all the time..."

The afternoon the film crew phoned in a “lunch to go order” back to our hotel from within earshot of a troop of gorillas, Dr. Schaller finally knew that the isolated, wild gorilla home he knew as a young naturalist had changed forever...

Like much of Africa, the cell phone network in Rwanda is newer and more reliable than landline phones, and cheap phones and calling cards can be readily purchased from street vendors just about anywhere.  Virunga Volcano National Park (home to the largest surviving population of mountain gorillas) has surprisingly good cellphone signal coverage.  Not only can park guides and anti-poaching guards keep in touch with their headquarters, they also can keep up a constant stream of text messages with their wives and girlfriends from deep in the rainforest.

This article by the American artist An Xiao Mina suggests that the use of humorous hashtag memes in Kenya and Uganda is becoming a new form of public assembly.  Rather than “take to the streets in protest”, internet using Kenyans can “rally ‘round their phones” and re-tweet trending hashtags to make the voice of the people heard(especially if that voice can be expressed in a snarky tone using 140 characters or less).  Trending hashtags (like the ones Mina cites around the recent Kenyan elections) can be spotted by digital savvy observers and identified as an "aggerate voice of the people".  This does give foreign journalists a window into an alternative narrative of political events, which is certainly useful.  But, since only 13% of Ugandans and 28% of Kenyans presently have internet access, this use of sarcastic tweets as a form of public protest may not be THE voice of the people, but it is certainly A voice of a rapidly growing and influential minority. 

I can’t help getting the impression that somehow a few taps on a smart phone to re-tweet a clever phrase somehow lacks the “spiritual density” of standing en-masse in a public square linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome”.  Sure, there have been a lot of recent examples of the power of "mobile social media" taking center stage in political events in places like Egypt where we saw evidence of what Howard Rheingold called "Smart Mobs" (in his 2002 book of the same name).

A Twitter hashtag can give one the false impression of taking action with out ever leaving the couch.  And, if physical direct action were ever to be actually replaced by virtual group speech, what implications might this have for conservation?  Must we resort to laying down our cell phones in the streets to stop the bulldozers?

As a young doctoral candidate and journeyman natural history filmmaker, I wanted to give a talk at the 1989 Wildlife Filmmaker’s Symposium at the University of Bath, UK.  

Back at NYU, Neil Postman had advised us that the best way to get invited to speak at a conference was to find out the topic of the keynote speaker’s talk, and then write a paper arguing the exact opposite.  The Keynoter at this symposium was Jonathon Porritt,  (then president of Friends of the Earth, UK) who was speaking on the symposium theme, “The Greening of Television”.  

So naturally, I titled my paper The “Browning” of Television – How TV can be the Environment’s Worst Enemy”.  The paper was well received, was subsequently published in BBC Wildlife Magazine, and has been cited in a variety of books and articles over the years.  You can download a PDF of the full text here.  
 
The core of the argument was that regular use of any technology encourages certain patterns of behavior and alters beliefs and attitudes about the world.  I cited an example of how the introduction of a chainsaw into certain communities can transform ones view of a forest from a habitat into a cash crop.  

Conservationists understand this influence, and try to encourage certain attitudes and behaviors to counter that effect and support a conservation ethic. The three behaviors/attitudes outlined in this article that were crucial to environmental conservation were;

1) Encourage a need to delay gratification
2) Promote a coherent and interconnected view of the world
3) Adopt a farsighted view of consequences of our actions
 
The article points out that the ethic of a television society is in direct contrast to these attitudes.  Television avoids any delay of gratification, destroys coherence in one’s world view, and wants one to think no further than the next commercial.

I have always wanted to update this argument to include new technologies that have commanded our attention in the last quarter century, (social media, mobile devices, etc.)  but haven’t had the time – and frankly, haven’t had enough first-hand experience with these technologies – to do this project justice.

Here is where you can help -

I would like to use the 21st century concept of “crowd-sourcing” to try to better understand this question;

What are the patterns of behavior that are encouraged by new media that might have an impact on conservation?  Are we more coherent in our outlook because of our Twitter connections – or more incoherent because we are “balkanized” into faux “communities” of virtual “friends” who share common attitudes and never question their shared assumptions?

Please feel free to pass a link to this blog on to your colleagues, your students, or anyone else who might have an interesting take on what kind of impact newer media like Twitter, Facebook and the like might have on these crucial conservation behaviors.

All the best,
Tom V.