Mad Men: Another Suprise Pregnancy? Really?

Did I love the conclusion of the second season of Mad Men? Sure. Don's reappearance seemed rather sudden, so sudden that I thought it was a figment of Betty's imagination (something Weiner was prone to doing as a writer for The Sopranos). The Cuban Missle Crisis, Betty's infidelity, and Peggy's revelation to Pete were so big that they blotted out the slow burn of Don's trajectory. He just seems completely erratic to me, and not in a way that's compelling. Still, I liked the power play between Don and Duck Phillips. And the HBO touches are still there: the concern with organizational hierarchies, the slight ironic distance between the characters and the audience, the possibility that a flawed main character living a life of ill repute could reform thanks to psychology, religion, or larger cultural trends or institutions. For those, I'll gladly watch another 3 seasons.

But here are my main problems with the last episode and, by extension, the show as a whole: the centrality of romantic relationships and the inevitable emphasis on two revelations: pregnancy and infidelity. I was reminded of two things I watched last night: an interview with Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Rose in which he notes that the depiction of romantic relationships in most Hollywood films is inaccurate (5:22 into the clip). I'd agree, and I wouldn't even say that the main problem is that there are too many happy endings (or any kind of endings for that matter, b/c real life relationships never truly end until one person dies). The problem, as I see it, is the overrepresentation of surprise pregnancies and infidelity. The second thing that I was reminded of is essentially a rebuttal of the first (written by the same man, Charlie Kaufman): its this scene (1:30 into the clip) in Adaptation in which Brian Cox (as Robert McKee) berates Charlie for claiming that these types of things (the melodrama of everyday life) do not happen in real life. Everyday, someone gets murdered, someone falls in love, etc. McKee/Cox is right. All of that stuff does happen everyday. People have probably been fucking around behind the backs of their wives/husbands since the beginning of time, and they'll probably continue to do that forever. It is a universal theme. And yet, in practice, it happens to individuals only once or twice in a lifetime on average.

Its the overrepresentativeness of surprise pregnancy and infidelity that bug me, not their mere presence. Maybe its the fundamental discontinuity between character's lives and viewer's lives that does it: the character, presumably, only has one or two revelations like this in their fictitious lives, like us. However, we keep flitting around, watching the same excerpts of fictitious lives, cutting from one moment of relationship drama to another. If we compared our lives to the lives of individual characters, no problem. But, according to cultivation theory, the individual viewer compares his or her individual life to some aggregate life cobbled together from the bits and pieces, the brief windows into millions of people's lives (real and fiction) that we experience through stories. These aggregate lives are typically distorted, to heighten drama, to shorten plotlines, to sell products. They have no single author and they're not expected to be perfectly realistic. As long as they are realistic enough, we'll go along with them, and in doing so, we'll begin to modify our conceptions of human nature and social mores, whether we're conscious of that or not.

A student in the Media Effects class I'm GSI-ing for has proposed a study that hypothesizes a cultivation-like effect of overrepresentation of troubled relationships on heavy viewer's real life relationships, and I'm pretty damn sure she's on to something. Writers need drama, so they put infidelity in their storylines. In and of itself, no individual instance of this is unrealistic. But as they pile up, they give the impression that infidelity is extremely common (read: acceptable?). Though people would never admit to it, I wonder if, in the backs of their minds, they think that many other people are cheating and so they go ahead and do it, thinking "I know its 'bad,' but people do it pretty frequently." In fact, its especially likely to happen and especially hard to ferret out because our culture, every culture, likes to believe that it doesn't happen. I suppose we're that way with a lot of elements of sexual relationships: publicly denying certain aspects, speaking to one another in the code of fiction about how things "really are," but in the process, we overrepresent the dark side and make our lives darker through the cultivation of values that come with heavy viewing.

Its not even the prevlance of infidelity per se that I object to. Its the tired, cliched depiction of how it unfolds: the boredom with fidelity, the temptation, the lapse, the secrecy, the guilt, the revelation, the begrudging forgiveness. Yes, I'm sure it happens a lot like that in real life on its own, but whose to say that we don't go through this charade thinking it is in our nature when we're merely repeating the scripts that were embedded in stories for purposes of selling more soap (or more stories. There's no need to pin the blame solely on commercially-sponsored storytelling. 19th century novels and serialized stories were just as likley to include such heightened drama in order to keep the buying public coming back for more)?

Stories do not implant or invent desires. In real life, there is infidelity and there are secrecy and revelations. And yet, due cheifly to constraints of economy and technology, stories are required to reflect only certain aspects of our desires. Its not the values reflected in the stories that shape our beliefs on human nature and social mores. It is their collective and individual structures. Compare one society in which individuals read one grand narrative (e.g. the Bible, which is a collection of smaller stories, yes, but they have a unifying thread and they're typically treated as a single text) and see their lives as one grand narrative to a society in which individuals watch hundreds of different, unrelated narratives a year. We have little fragments of lives. It might have a baring on our desires or expectations for long-term relationships, as part of a marriage, a business, a country, an institution, etc.

Surprise pregnancies (especially the kind that happens when two people fuck each other once and only once) are another matter. It just seems biologically unrealistic. If you took the number of times one night stands resulted in pregnancy on TV and compared it with the number of times they resulted in pregnancy in real life (again, good luck trying to prove this, but its still my hunch), you'd see a discrepancy.

But the effects issue is beside the point. I'm just sick of it is all. Yes, infidelity, pregnancy, and will-they-or-won't-they romances happen in real life to most people and, as they are universal, are compelling for that reason. But they're overused. In this world overcrowded by stories, it is not enough to be realistic. You must be original, even if it means being unrealistic, in order to be compelling.

So, I wasn't wild about the fact that this season-ender included the old stand-bys of pregancy and infidelity. But at least it treated the former in a somewhat unique manner, lingering on the scene of the revelation in which both characters were neither horrified nor overjoyed, but conveyed something in between (perhaps horror masked by a facade of acceptance and decorum, something that pervades the show). The music, the fade to black: it all had a nice feeling to it, set it apart from the slaps-in-the-faces and the rivers of tears that characterize most pregancy revelations. Or, to be more accurate, it didn't quite set it apart by itself. It characterized the show as an HBO show. It was the kind of scene, the kind of conclusion, that you would expect of The Wire or The Sopranos, that disquiet of ambiguity, the frustration of the need for closure that we all feel when we engage with stories, that frustration mirroring that of the characters.

Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.

Flow Conference 2008: Thoughts on Media Metrics

After a day at the Flow conference, I’m reminded of how good this conversational round-table format can be. The Narrative Franchises panel was amazing: 40 or 50 people in the room, some of which were experts in the field who probably knew more and thought more deeply about the this phenomenon than anyone else on the planet, and instead of just throwing out self-indulgent tangents about their ultra-specific area of interest (as often happens at academic gatherings), they were contributing information or viewpoints that were totally relevant to the discussion, fleshing out the picture we had a franchises with examples, considering exceptions to rules and considering whether they constituted the re-write of those rules. I got the feeling we were building a larger understanding of the phenomenon than any of us came in with. It reminded me of the kind of collaboration that I thought could only happen online.

Media metrics (the most famous of which is Nielsen TV ratings) are to be thought of as currency, like money, or degrees on a thermometer. They provide a universal, transferable, singular standard by which we measure the value of something.

What creators really want to know is: what combination of textual characteristics and audience characteristics lead to more people buying an advertised product within that text and/or paying for the text itself? Whether or not certain people choose to watch a show or see a movie at a given time is an imperfect measure of that. The perfect measure would: not just measure whether or not someone was tuned in, but what was going on in their heads (look to transportation measures for this). It would also measure whether they viewed something at any given time (look to Tivo data for this). It would also measure the degree to which they talked about the content with their friends (look to optimedia’s measurements of buzz, or searches like Technorati that could tell you what people are blogging about, but also take valence into account). It would take into account previous viewing and purchasing experience. It would take into account characteristics of the text itself. Its not an infinite number of things you need to quantify and combine into some sort of quotient or scale, but its more multifarious than we thought it was before, or had the ability to measure before.

One of the dilemmas confronting researchers, ad people, and producers/networks will be whether or not they go with a census (in which case they're bound to lose a lot of the aforementioned nuance) or a sample (in which case you might not get the generalizability you desire). Maybe a flexible system like YouTube, where the stakes are lower, ad money-wise, will evolve new metrics quicker. They’ll weed out the ones that don’t tell you anything new about viewers and their desires and habits, but new tools for gauging that will evolve. Insight is just the beginning of that.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.