Compared to Whom?

After finishing up another semester of GSI-ing a media effects class, I returned to considering what the effects of social media might be on its users. Of all the theories covered in the class, the one that seemed the most applicable to social media is social comparison theory. If comparing ourselves to others is something we do naturally in order to establish an identity and an idea of what constitutes normal behavior (especially when we're young adults and teens, which happens to be SNS's key demographic), what better tool could you create for comparing your self to others than Facebook? The questions, from a public/psychological/emotional health standpoint are: in what ways does FB present a distorted image of others, and could the ease with which one can compare one's self to others lead to increased time spent dwelling on how well or how poorly one measured up to one's peers?

I think one key variable to look at is how one uses the site. Do they spend more time looking at other people's pictures, comments, and friends, or do they participate by posting their own? What moods are they in when they go to FB? Some research indicates that people in high affect states tend to be social, talking with others, going to parties, while those who are in low affect states (though its not exactly equivalent to "bad mood," we might think of it as such for now) watch more TV. I could imagine going to FB in either state: when bored and in a bad mood, just to passively look at what others are doing, or when I'm excited to express something about my life.

Then there's whether or not you see FB as a place to "put your best face forward." Obviously, everyone does a bit of image tailoring when they post pictures of update their statuses, but some people seem more keen on impressing others (or inspiring jealousy?) with their images, while others display a more warts-and-all aesthetic. I would think there would be a tendency to assume that others use the site in roughly the same way you do: if you're a warts-and-all poster, you assume others are, too, and if their profiles are pretty much squeaky-clean, you assume their real lives are.

The reason why I think FB is so appealing for the social comparer in all of us is the ease with which we can see what other people very similar to us are doing with their lives, and we can see it evolve in real time in some sort of context. Of course, you can do this by observing your peers at work or at school. You can do it by tuning in to local gossip. You can do it by hearing/watching/reading stories (even if they're fiction, the fact that they ring true with a large audience tells you that they're depicting behavior, identities, and values that are, in some sense, normal; even more so w/ reality TV, probly). But the nice part of using FB to compare yourself to others is that you can't be seen while you're doing it. Also, these people are usually more similar to you than your work peers (though some of them might be your work peers). The lives of people you grew up with seems like a more natural thing to compare one's self to. These people, unlike people you meet later in life, had the same starting point as you.

In a way, this reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows: the Up Series. I always saw that show, which explicitly compared documentary footage of a few people who grew up together as they aged from 7 to 49 (so far), as one of the most useful tools for learning about what you can do with your life, why some people's lives turn out different than others, and why most people try to make themselves happy whether or not they live lives that are seen as "successful." It did what a lot of reality shows don't do: examine the criteria we use to compare ourselves to one another and show how it varies from person to person.

In some ways, Facebook is like a reality TV competition shows and the Up Series in that it presents an opportunity for social comparison. However, there is no narrative built into it to guide you to think about the nature of comparison, success, or happiness or guide you to decide who the winners and losers are and which one you happen to be at the moment (and how you might go about becoming more of a winner). My hunch is that it can accentuate any tendency you bring to it, the tendency to compare or the tendency to think about why and how we compare ourselves to one another.

Losing The Passive Companionship of TV

For the past month, I have felt as though I've been part of one of the experiments I would like to conduct on media choice and decision making. Ever since I moved into my house, I've received free cable, as often happens with Comcast who isn't very vigilant when it comes to who gets their signal and who doesn't. After the digital transition, they've begun gradually whittling away at my channels. I lost about 3 or 4 channels out of 40 a few weeks ago, and this past Friday I lost about 20, pretty much everything besides the networks, public television, and the Michigan research channel. When I lost AMC, I had to consider what watching my favorite show, Mad Men, meant to me, and whether I could replace the experience with something as pleasurable until it came out on DVD. I decided that I could live without it, that it certainly wasn't worth paying the extra $40(!) a month for cable television, that I'll either wait for the DVDs or buy the remaining eps on ITunes. Then they took ESPN, my bread and butter, and that has caused a great deal of reflection on my part as to what the value of TV is for me.

At first, I missed the up-to-date-ness of TV. I can go online and get all the information that is dispensed though ESPN (and then some), but it doesn't feel the same. I think my attachment to TV has something to do with the fact that I live by myself. When I turn on ESPN, there's something about the direct address format and the jocular tone of SportsCenter, not to mention the always-on nature of the news coverage (similar things could be said about cable news). It feels like companionship in a way that cold, lifeless DVDs and the internet does not. If I was looking for replacement experiences, I could just spend more time actually talking to people, but part of the pleasure of the companionship offered by ESPN and TV in general is that its passive. Also, my use of ESPN is dictated by my moods and schedule, not someone else's. I don't give a fuck whether or not Chris Berman or Scott Van Pelt are in the mood to be funny; that's their job. Not so with people I know.

Are there any possible substitutes for this feeling? Like ESPN, NPR is always on and roughly appeals to my interests, but to be honest, i just don't like the content as much. Its possible that some applications on the internet - social media like Facebook and maybe Twitter - could fill this need for passive companionship. Using FB does feel a little bit like that kind of passive companionship that I crave, though sometimes its almost too personal. I like the level of detachment that I get from watching sports or news. Perhaps this will motivate me to give Twitter a try.

This experience makes me believe that television, just like radio before it, needs to move away from pre-recorded drama and towards shows that address the viewer as part of a crowd, either through a host or telecaster or anchor, or merely by presenting a show that is performed in front of a crowd (like American Idol). Its possible that reality TV offers something in the way of passive companionship, although maybe its pleasures are more about social surviellance. Similarly, comedy might provide some additional pleasure if watched in groups, so maybe it does need to be watch simultaneously by many viewers. In any case, DVD and the internet seem to take care of drama exhibition and information about the world.

The Day the Texting Died

T-Mobile's services have been failing tonight. I discovered this when someone called me and told me that they were having trouble texting me. I then tried to send a text and it bounced back. Then, I tried to call T-Mobile customer support to find out if the problem was with my network. When I didn't get an answer (all agents busy, don't even bother hanging on, call back later), I knew it wasn't just me. I then googled T-Mobile news and got a story, posted within the previous 30 minutes, that T-Mobile was having massive outages. Kinda neat how I was able to find out how big the problem was so quickly.

Then, I went over to twitter (the news article in pcmag mentioned outraged phone users taking to twitter to register their disgust w/ tmobile). Indeed, it was clogged with complaints about T-Mobile. My first reaction was laughter. There was something that just struck me as funny about how upset people were about losing texting service. It was the kind of exaggerated outrage that pervades online fora (LOTS OF CAPS, EXPLETIVES, AND EXXXCLAMATION POINTS, DAMMITT!!!!!!). Maybe I felt entitled to laugh at this outrage (or self-parodying fake outrage (fauxtrage?)) b/c I was in the same boat as them. For me, it was a comically minor inconvenience, one that, frankly, prevented me from being distracted by getting into a text conversation (though here I am, avoiding my work by blogging, so maybe the outage didn't help my productivity after all).

Then I checked myself. It would be bad to laugh about a total failure of telephone lines. Phone lines are used by emergency units to save people's lives. While I know that it wasn't everyone who lost texting capabilities (I guess some lost voice, some lost both), it got me to thinking about what it would mean for lots of people to lose the ability to text for a night. Would there be anything seriously bad about that?

It got me to thinking about the overall character of texting. Is there really anything serious about it? There's the hyper-coordination, so an outage might mean a bunch of people would get slightly lost or be slightly late, and get ticked off at one another. I suppose it is possible that if someone didn't know about the outage and was waiting for a call or a text, they might think that the other person was ignoring them, causing stress in the relationship (maybe even the end of a (probably already tenuous) relationship?). Imagine that happening to thousands of people at once.

But really, I feel like the overall character (aside from coordination) of texting is joking, flirting, and gossiping. What would it mean to lose that for a night? One could study this in the way that Berelson (1962) studied what it meant to live without the newspaper for awhile back in the day. Maybe it'll be a nice moment of self-reflection for people. That's what its been for me.

What it Means to Like/Hate a TV Show

The question seems simple enough: what TV shows do you like?

This phrasing aims to compare two variables: individuals (you, and other people answering the question) and TV shows. It doesn't take into account certain episodes or aspects of TV shows and certain moods or states or stages in life of an individual, or the intensity of liking or the duration of liking. There's not really a problem with this, as temporary changes in mood can be averaged out, as can the better or worse episodes of a TV show. Indeed, whenever anyone is asked a question such as this, they engage in that kind of averaging.

But there's one particular facet of TV that doesn't get averaged out by a viewer, but rather is ignored, or treated as a separate question: what kind of TV shows do you like when you're around other people. My intuition is that people would answer the first question with shows they like to watch by themselves, more apt to ignore the shows they watch with others (after all, they probably like them less). But the shows people watch with others have just as much of an effect on them. They still spend their time watching them and still pay attention to the ads embedded in the programs. In short, we tend not to think of shows we watch with others but they still have an impact on us. Arguably, this question matters because given the rise of mobile viewing devices, online viewing, more time-shifting, and changing patterns of co-habitation, we're watching more and more TV content by ourselves. As Morley and others have noted, watching TV was a social act, as fraught with domestic power dynamics as cooking or sex. Not any more, perhaps.

Even the definition of "liking" a TV show changes for me depending on whether I'm watching with someone, or even discussing a TV show with someone. I could see myself “liking” Sex & the City, or So You Think You Can Dance, or country music, or Christian music, or 80’s music, if I was watching it/listening to it/discussing with someone who liked those things. More precisely, I could find something to like in each of those things. I don't think I would be lying by saying that I found something to like about those things. They would genuinely lead to some sort of positive affect. If I'm by myself, my standards are much higher (or different). These days, I can barely find any music or TV that I can tolerate for more than a minute that (in the case of music) doesn’t exactly fit my mood or (in the case of TV) isn’t Mad Men or sports without changing the channel or shuffling through my ITunes.

Also, its funny how liking of media, amongst any group, tends not be uniformly hierarchical. That is, many "favorited" shows are also near the top of other people's most hated shows lists. But perhaps this is true with all matters of taste. Let’s say we were ranking any other thing not related to taste (greatest football teams, tallest buildings). It seems odd that someone could hate Citizen Kane or Seinfeld when others have written endless paeans to their objective greatness. People who hated these shows or movies wouldn’t think that those films/shows were just "less great" than whatever they happened to love. They would think they were among the worst.

More Technology in Our Lives = What, exactly?

This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.

I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.

Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.

1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.

This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.

2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.

It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."

This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.

3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"

So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.

Why we hate TV now more than ever

If, indeed, more people feel more hate towards television than ever before (example of said hatred, which is usually directed at reality-based programs), here is a possible explanation that relies on technological and economic factors rather than some general decline of morals, behavior, or taste:

1. Since the rise of reality-based programming (due, in part, to the writers' strike of the late 90's), there is a pipe-line for cheap programming and lots of channels and timeslots to fill.
2. More tastes, desires, and values can be catered to cheaply on TV than ever before. Those varied tastes, desires, and values always existed, but before the rise of cheap-2-produce TV, only certain "elite" tastes could be catered to.
3. There is a new kind of diversity in terms of the desires that are being catered to through TV programming. Because of how deeply synergistic TV is (w/ cross-channel promos, program lead-ins), you can't just get your little bit of tailored content. You have to be exposed to other content not intended for you, unlike the internet where you can go to your favorite sites and generally avoid the variety of sites that cater to other preferences and lifestyles and whatnot. Its not the diversity of values expressed on TV that drives people to hate it: its the fact that you're almost forced to be exposed to those other values.
   

It is, of course, also possible that TV encourages or legitimizes disparate value systems and, thus, ratchets up people's pre-existing knee-jerk distaste for behavior that they can't understand. Reality TV gives people an excuse to hate people who behave differently than they do. What could the other explanation of people's strong hatred of certain programs be? I doubt that its b/c these programs are poorly crafted. I think that when people see something they don't like on TV, they don't just think about the fuckhead that created it, but also think about the audience for the program. They believe in the premise that TV can promote, cultivate, or instill values in an audience, and they fear the erosion of their own values in the face of those of The Hills or Jerry Springer or whatever. But those are real people on those shows. Its not like you're just hating fictional characters if you hate those shows. You're hating (at least semi-)real people. Do people who hate reality based TV shows hate them b/c of the characters' behavior (which is quite different than behavior exhibited in previous fictional TV programs) or is there an added layer to that hatred based on the fact that those are real people that they're hating?

This whole theory of mine may be wrong in that its based on a few people I happen to know and a few blogs I read. Maybe only certain people hate TV more now or feel that hate more strongly (the people who were being catered to during the network era).

Its also possible that some of the people who watch the shows other people hate like the show but hate the people in the show. For instance, you could like The Hills and hate Spencer. In fact, many reality-based shows understand the ways viewers love to hate people by positioning the subjects in each show as simultaneously sympathetic and laughable subjects of derision. In effect, the viewers identify with an invisible narrator who is relaying other people's stupid behavior for their amusement. Is She Really Going Out With Him on MTV is a good example. The men are laughable, but are the women? To some, yes. And the men are, in some sense, successful, in that they're rich, good-looking, and they're getting laid, so a viewer could look up to the them, feel attracted to them, or identify with them. But you can also hate them while liking to watch the show.

When someone says, "I cannot believe people watch Flavor of Love, I hate that show," they may imagine that the show is on the air because other people like or identify with the characters and behavior on the show. That is, after all, why they as viewers watch TV. But maybe other people, particularly younger people, watch shows in order to hate others, and are able to make the distinction between show (which they love) and characters (which they hate). Or maybe its some kind of mixture of love and hate that they get from watching it.

After googling "Most Hated TV," I did get the sense that people hate reality-based TV, as a whole genre or individual shows. They also hate comedies that they don't find funny, and popular shows that they don't understand the appeal of, maybe b/c they're hard to avoid (American Idol).

Mad Moods

When I've been reading a novel a lot or watching a novel-like show a lot, it alters my default thoughts, moods, and my inner dialog. I'll be walking across campus, between appointments, distracted from work for a moment, and my thoughts will drift back to a song from the TV show or a certain moment from the narrative. In some sense, I'm always occupying that world, whether or not I'm reading or watching the story at any given moment.

So it goes w/ Mad Men right now. I'd just re-discovered the first season, watching all of season 1 in a week. Now, I'm making my way through season 2 for the second time in preparation for the beginning of the third season next weekend. The mood of Mad Men is something like the mood of The Sopranos - pretty dark w/ touches of detached, sarcastic levity. Hardly the mood you would choose to be in all the time. Did I choose to watch Mad Men because it had qualities that helped me put my life in perspective in some way, as Mary Beth Oliver hypothesizes in her writings about sad and meaningful media? Maybe. But thinking about it strictly in terms of mood, the show puts me in a somewhat reflective mood but seems to have inoculated me against slipping into very bad moods. If I had watched some comedy like Arrested Development, or some other distraction, I might have experienced a temporary boost in mood that might have even carried over a bit into the rest of my life. But then I would be reminded of some dark thought that would bring my mood way down and nothing about my media experience could help with that. If anything, it might even hurt more given the contrast between the two moods and the two worlds. But w/ Mad Men and similar "bad mood" shows, those unhappy thoughts and the events that trigger them can happen to me (and they will always happen to me - that's life) and I won't be brought as low by them.

We could call shows like Mad Men "reflective media," something that had this carry-over effect on mood after you've stopped watching (but only if you're really into the show), enhancing your ability to deal w/ situations and other bad thoughts and bad moods.

Still, it might be causing me to dwell on unhappier aspects of my life. Or it might just give color and shape to the moods and thoughts that are results of my real life situations and material experience. Maybe I'm pulling the darker moments out of a show full of dark & light moments b/c that's what I need at this time. That's what makes this so fascinating to study: I don't have an intuitive grasp on whether my mood is affecting my interpretation of the show, the show is affecting my mood, or both or neither is affecting each other. Its too glib to say that they both affect each other, though that may be true. I need to know the degree to which they affect each other and the circumstances in which those effects hold up. Not to say that mood is all that matters. I wouldn't want media or anything else to make me a happy idiot, and I wouldn't want people to stop reading Hamlet b/c its too depressing. Still, I'd like to know a bit more about what causes what, especially when it comes to these indirect, lingering effects on my default moods.

Pros and Cons of Road Tripping w/ IPhones

Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.

First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"

I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.

Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.

But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.

In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.

If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.

The Pitfalls of Hypothesizing about Film Success

Say we take a film like Transformers 2. The film, like most other films, has a lot going on, in its content and the circumstances under which it was released: grand spectacle, a link to something that is established in a target audience's cultural memory, an extensive marketing campaign, the fact that its a sequel, Shia LeBeouf, its director, its screenwriter, its late-June release not opposite of other big action blockbusters, etc. Which of these elements is most responsible for the film's success? Let's throw in another element of the film: Skids and Mudflap, two robots who (quoting the NYTimes piece) "talk in jive and are portrayed as illiterate; one has a gold tooth." The depictions have been called racist by many. Are these depictions reasons why the film is more successful, or is the film successful in spite of those depictions?

The questions are essentially unanswerable, but its not because film is Art and one cannot theorize about why some people like art and others don't, or why some art is profitabe and other art is not. It is so hard to predict why films, as opposed to other art forms, are successful or not b/c there are so few comparable films made and the circumstances of release (marketing, timing) play such a significant role in their success/failure. In order to determine what aspects of a product are responsible for its success, we need to make comparisons, but there are so few comparisons to be able to make that its harder to predict what will succeed. If you wanted to find out what elements of motion picture content made a certain text successful (e.g. certain choices in pacing, plotting, certain bigoted depictions, certain actors, lighting, etc), then you would look away from film and towards online video. There are simply more comparable texts, and the circumstances under which each video is watched are so varied that the uniqueness of each viewing can be considered to be random error and cancels out. What you're left with is a more pure comparison and better insight as to how motion pictures work on audiences than one you would try to do looking at a successful box office film like Transformers 2 and making generalizations about what aspects of the film resonated with the public. And yet film and cultural theorists have been doing just this, and continue to do just this: identifying certain characteristics of a film that possesses many charateristics, noting that the film was successfull, and then making claims about a culture's preferences.

Its interesting to consider recent advances in two untraditional predictions markets, both linked to the work of Nate Silver: presidential politics and baseball. Frankly, I don't know much about Silver's prediction models, but I'd guess he just takes discrete characteristics of each event (a race for office, a baseball game), takes a data set comprised of past events, and sees which characteristics, when all other characteristics are controlled for, exert the most influence on the outcome. You take those influences, assess the observable characteristics of the upcoming game/election, and make predictions of the outcome. With presidential elections, you have very few comparable events to use, while in baseball, you have many. In the former, I would think that you would have to start incorporating patterns in opinion polls (which fluctuate systematically based on various characteristics of world events and their coverage).

The trouble with film is that there aren't the equivalent of polls. Yes, there's test screenings, but those samples are so small and they're just used for minor recuts, not learning about why certain people like certain characteristics of films under certain circumstances. There's too little comparable data to work with. Perhaps the prevalence of remakes, reboots, adaptations is an attempt by producers to use the "data" of those other properties being successful with their suite of characteristics, and making a bet based on that. Its not very systematic, but in a way, I trust it more than I trust anyone who guesses that a film resonated or failed to resonate with the public b/c it was/wasn't successful at the box office and possessed a certain characteristic. That's just guesswork on their parts.

The Politics and Psychology of Academic Language

The most lively panel I attended at this year's ICA conference was the "Keywords: Effects" panel. 4 panelists were, in their own ways, demanding that we move beyond "effects," or, to put it another way, were proclaiming the death of effects research. One problem with effects researchers: they proclaim to study actual real-world violence when they actually study people's tendencies to administer sound blasts to other people in a lab setting. Another problem is that effects studies only measure an effect at a set point in time when it is likely that true media effects take place gradually and constantly over time (so it would be better to call them "processes" than "effects"). Afterward, Ron Tamborini had a great comment, basically saying that the argument over effects research was a semantic one, and that proclaiming that "effects research is dead" is just a good way of scaring those new to the field that what they're doing is worthless. His comment garnered applause from some members of the audience, and I have to say that I agreed with what he was saying.

I've read and seen more disputes similar to this one. Basically, they take this form: one group of researchers does some research with obvious, acknowledged limitations. Despite the limitations, the research moves us beyond what we used to know about that phenomenon. They select a word for their work. Time passes and methods improve. Another group of researchers comes along and pokes holes in the work of the first group of researchers. At this point, two things can happen. The first group of researchers can take heed of the criticism and modify their methods while retaining the original term they used for the phenomenon or their study of that phenomenon OR the second group of researchers can come up with a new name, decry the old names for the old methods/constructs to be obsolete, and move the field forward.

Note that in both cases, the actual research, the actual methods and the actual bits of information that we know about a phenomenon are exactly the same. The debate is not over what we know, but over how much and in what ways language shapes our ideas of what we know. For decades, we've known that language matters, that word choice constricts and opens up ways of thinking. But this valuable observation has been used in only one way: to point out the ways in which existing power structures foreclose the possibility of new meanings. Unfortunately, it has not been applied to an equally common and equally problematic use of language: the invention of new words and terms to further one's career or to aid the progress of one's in-group. The side effects of this political use of language are that we get bogged down in semantic debates and the growth of our collective, public knowledge of actual phenomena is retarded (while smaller groups in the private sector accumulate vast amounts of knowledge about people). Though the intentions may be good and the observation that "language determines and is determined by power structures" is a valuable one, those making this observation have released a cacophany of go-nowhere neologisms that sell a few books and then are lost to academic linguistic history.

What I see too often is the construction of straw men by up-and-coming researchers who, instead of helping to build knowledge for all, make careers for themselves (nevermind whether they intend to do this; their motives don't determine the outcome). In order to do this, they deny the possibility (indeed in many cases, as with "effects research," the plain reality) that researchers working within the existing paradigm can modify their methods to accomodate things we've learned about the phenomenon or new tools we have for studying the phenomenon. Effects researchers have acknowledged the weak construct validity of earlier studies and have adapted accordingly. They've tested various outcome variables at various points in time, developing data on trends rather than static outcomes. They've changed their ways. Do they need to change their name? To what end?

Along with "effects," the words "rational" and "cognitive" were hotly contested words at ICA this year. The debate over whether people are "rational decision makers" fits this pattern. Just because people decide, at a certain moment, to weigh the importance of one thing (be it their marital bliss, their libidos, their faith in God or community or justice) and just because they had certain restrictions on the information available to them doesn't mean that their brains worked in a fundamentally different way than they would if they had more information or valued different things at that given moment. To say that people are "rational" or "irrational" decision makers (or "cognitive" or "emotional" decision makers), to me, implies that people's brains work in fundamentally different ways, which is not the case. The circumstances under which decisions are made change, but the mind still works the same way: take in information, consider how it changes our belief that an action will help bring about a state we desire at that moment, and act accordingly. This applies to every human action I can think of, no matter how supposedly "irrational" it is. Yes, I'll acknowledge that different parts of the brain are activated when making certain kinds of decisions (what we might refer to as "emotional" decisions), but I think that the brain is still taking in information and acting based on a desire. The word "irrational" implies that its either random or totally at the whim of some other guiding force. In reality, the thinking is just based on different temporary priorities and limited amounts of information. There is also confusion over whether "rationality" assumes that we are deliberate in our actions. Again, I don't think that it means that. We can be rational even if we make rational decisions on an unconscious level.

Ann Gray's preference for the words "research material" in lieu of "data" provides another example. She claims that " 'data' has strong associations with 'evidence', 'information' and 'proof' as well as being associated with the products of more conventional sociological research methods." Its hard to deny this, and yet won't using the term "research material" confuse a lot of people? Those words already are loaded with their own meanings for every reader. How do you weigh the consequences of your word choice: causing confusion vs. freeing us from the restrictive nature of old paradigms?

In the giddiness of having seen the connections between language choice and power, we've gotten bogged down in debates over words, overestimating the power of an academic to alter language and misunderstanding the ways in which languages actually evolve over time (I have the feeling that language interventions are destined to fail, though I'd welcome any evidence that suggests otherwise). These debates serve to turn off anyone outside of a small number of in-group academics (as Tamborini noted, they even turn off and confuse undergrads and grad students) and, again, allow other people in other fields to advance knowledge of the world while we quibble over what words to use.

There have been some failures of those actively seeking to change language for political/ideological reasons, as well as some successes. Why do some words fail to catch on? I would argue that even if a word is loaded with meaning that hinders the population who must use it, the change in language will only take if the substitute is clear and concise enough.

Who uses the word matters (Wanda Sykes PSA for not using the word "gay"). If a more and more diverse set of people use a word or stop using a word, the word will have more/less of a stigma, or will gradually stop being perceived as a grammar rule that P.C. academics are trying to force us to adopt.

In the end, the internet has taught us that language spreads like a virus (though its hard to say how long some of the neologisms will be with us). Language is important and it affects how we behave and think, but changing it is quite difficult. It seems that you cannot change it simply by presenting evidence that a word is somehow discriminatory. If you really want people to use your new word, or to stop saying "faggot" or "nigga," I think you can't just lecture people or point out that powerful people dictate language. There has to be a more nuanced understanding of the spread of words throughout a population. I don't study linguistics, so for all I know, there is such an understanding. I'd be interested to learn what it is.

Are Online Communities Sustainable? (or online relationships, for that matter)

Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.

Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.

Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.

Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.

But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.

Unoriginality at the multiplex: Franchises are the New "Genres"

Here are some broad trends. I've categorized the top 10 grossing films of several years.

1980: 6 of 10 original, 2 sequels, 2 based on books
1985: 6 original, 2 sequels, 2 based on books
1990: 7 originals, 1 sequel, 2 based on comic books
1995: 5 originals, 4 sequels, 1 based on comic book/cartoon
2000: 7 originals, 1 sequel, 2 based on comic book/cartoon

No interesting trends there. People liked to talk about how Hollywood was infected with "sequelitis," but the numbers don't indicate any significant movement in that direction during those 2 decades. Then something happens in the last decade:

2001: 3 originals, 3 sequels, 2 based on books, 2 remakes
2002: 3 originals, 5 sequels, 1 based on comic book, 1 based on popular musical
2003: 3 originals, 6 sequels, 1 remake
2004: 3 originals, 5 sequels, 2 based on books
2005: 2 originals, 2 sequels, 1 based on book, 4 remakes/reboots
2006: 3 originals, 3 sequels, 1 based on book, 3 remake/reboot
2007: 0 originals!, 6 sequels, 3 based on comic book/cartoon, 1 remake
2008: 3 original, 4 sequels, 2 based on comic book/cartoon, 1 based on book

In many cases, the sequels were sequels of movies that were based on existing properties.

Of course, this is a reflection of what people want to see and what they are presented with. Whether its one or the other is, for the point I'm making, beside the point. I'm claiming that this is not a temporary trend. This is cinema (creators and consumers) obeying a fundamental law of economy. There are other media in which producers can distribute motion pictures to consumers (namely cable TV and the internet). They can also share stories via books, as always. Now, if you were a bank and you were going to fund a major motion picture, which cost 10s of millions of create, distribute, and promote, you would want to be as sure as you could be that the movie would be a hit. An established star is one way to bolster your odds, as is a director or writer with a proven track record of hits. But what about the story or the premise. Ideally, you'd want to be able to test it out for a smaller sum of money. And that's what we're able to do now. When you make a film out of an existing property, be it a cartoon, a novel, or an older film, you attract an audience who believes the film will be similar to the existing property and you have evidence that the story or the premise will resonate w/ people.

Its a little odd that it didn't happen sooner. Why weren't all movies tried as novels first? Maybe b/c some stories would only work on the big screen as spectacle. But now, with the internet and lots more TV channels, you would have to be a bit daft to bankroll an unproven story as a film. Why not make it into a miniseries on TNT or a novel first, see how it does, and retain the motion picture rights?

I would suppose that many cinephiles lament the lack of originality in mainstream cinema (if they care anymore about anythign "mainstream" that is). But are these remakes, reboots and sequels really any less original? Do we judge originality by a title? Couldn't a non-sequel thriller be less original (that is, more similar to its predecessors) than a sequel? I think that this is possible and has been the case in some instances. Really, franchises are the new genres: boundaries within which various artists work.

What to do with CGI films? Are they a genre? There are two companies that dominate - Pixar and Dreamworks. They employ many of the same creative people, use a lot of the same dramatic tropes. More importantly, I feel like audiences treat them more like a series of films and less like a genre. In terms of number and "quality," they are more like movies in a series than films in a genre: there are few and they are of uniform quality.

This is just the top slice of cinema, too. There are plenty of "original" stories lower down the charts, though again, I would question the idea of original. There has evolved a horribly formulaic strain of indie film that, I would argue, are, as a group, no more original by any definition of that term than the bulk of franchise films.

We needn't lament the fact that more hit films aren't fantastically original, the way they were, say, the in 70's. There are still great, original stories being told using moving pictures, but they aren't being told on the big screen. This is what should happen, economically speaking. Cinema no longer holds the same place it did 30 or 40 years ago when it was, essentially, the only place to go for amazing, engaging stories. Once the internet ramps up as a distribution platform for video, cinema will be even less like the cinema of yore. Get over it.

What kind of music do you like (right now)?

In keeping with my habit of making broad generalizations based on my personal experience w/ media...

As I was assembling a playlist for an upcoming roadtrip, I was thinking about the kinds of music I would want to listen to but also, acknowledging the social nature of most media consumption, what kind of music the people I'll be traveling with would want to listen to. Naturally, I thought in terms of genre. I'm pretty sure these guys don't like metal much anymore (if they ever did), which is a shame, b/c I do. Then I thought about my answer to that classic get-to-know-you question "what kind of music do you like," and, of course, my answer would be that typical avoiding answer: "lots of kinds, pretty much everything."

If you looked at my music collection, you would find many different genres from different eras and different places around the world well represented. But that doesn't mean I'd want to listen to any of it at any given moment. Our media preferences are governed by long-lasting preferences (I've liked metal since about 9th grade) as well as short-term moods (I'm not in the mood for metal right now). Here's my theory: as music collections expand due to the falling monetary value of songs vis a vis Napster, Torrent, and all that shit, long-lasting preferences broaden and explain less and less of why anyone wants to listen to any kind of music at a given time. As choices expand, mood and immediate context play a greater role in determining what you will choose.

But its tougher to know what kind of music you're in the mood for than knowing that you like rap or hate country. I've tried relabeling my music according to mood (so, there are rap songs and metal songs that are both labeled "energetic" and classical and rock songs that are labeled "melancholy") and occassionally that helps me find music that suits my mood and feels right, but most times, I find myself cycling through my shuffle until something clicks.

The way we engage with music changes when options becomes plentiful. Choice increases due to falling production/distribution cost. It happened w/ music, but the trends you see will happen with all other media. When you have all of those options, you can't rely on your identity as much to determine what media will satisfy you. You can't just say to yourself "I like this kind of music, or that kind of TV show, or that kind of news, so that's what I'll choose." Something happens to our decision making process when we have abundant, diverse options. I'm not quite sure what it is (experiments to follow, I hope), but my hunch is that we want to cede control to something else. Shuffle is one thing. Search engines are another. We're wary of being controlled, but we experience so much uncertainty and regret after choosing something when there are too many other options that we want our choice to be restricted.

Sometimes, we do know what we're in the mood for, but those moods and those preferences become more diverse given more and more choices.

The Problem with False Consciousness (and false desire and false choice)

There is a strain, one might say a dominant strain, of cultural theory (derived from Marxist theory) that claims that individuals immersed in a culture, exposed to certain information via media while other information is kept from them, are unable to know the truth about how the world works and thus make decisions that are not in their collective or individual best interests but rather in the best interests of those in control of the information flow. On the face of it, the theory of false consciousness seems possible, even likely. But here's the rub: the theory itself is just another way of looking at the world supplied and supported by individuals with interests of their own, some of which run counter to those of people reading about the theory. It is possible that those who are exposing others as having pulled the wool over our collective eyes are, in fact, pulling a different kind of wool over our eyes. The new illusion of "seeing the world as it really is" is all the more convincing given that the revelatory nature of the theory. How do we know it is not another illusion, one more pernicious than the last? We don't, and most cultural theory provides little evidence to suggest one way or the other whether it is just another bias looked at human nature. Are we naturally competitive or naturally cooperative? Are corporations and advertisers in charge of telling us what to desire, or are charismatic leaders/writer/artists the ones pulling the strings?

I like to use two movies from 1999 as convenient illustrations of false consciousness and (if you'll pardon the unwieldy double negative) false false consciousness. The Matrix is a classic good v. evil story of false consciousness. A handful of good guys need to clue everyone else into the fact that they are not acting in their own best interests, but are rather part of an elaborate illusion that serves the interests of a controlling "other." Fight Club issues a similar indictment of mainstream culture, albeit in a less metaphorical more literal manner. However, the bunch of rag-tag rebels that fight The Man inevitably coalesce around a charismatic leader who, as it turns out, is insane. Group-think develops, critical thinking goes out the window, and the group of rebels is even more lost than when it began. I am heartened by the fact that popular cinema can still address (and prompt audience members to debate and think through) important socio-politico-philosophical issues of the day. Just in terms of acting as teaching tools, these movies can liven up a dreary classroom discussion about free will and hegemony.

As valuable as fiction is in helping us understand our socio-political reality, it can only take us so far. In order to really understand things, we need evidence. Most of the crit/cult theory I've read cites cherry-picked instances of people deprived of infinite choice and freedom and/or maintaining a subsistence level of wealth while those in power stay in power via hegemonic, patriarchal culture. The tacit assumptions are that: information desemination - in the form of popular culture, education, and other cultural institutions such as church, the government, or news agencies - is part of the root cause of power imbalances and that the world could be otherwise (i.e. equality is possible given human nature).

In order to further interrogate the line of reasoning behind false consciousness, let's take an ordinary claim. Let's say you think someone who just spent $5,000 on a new paint job for his car but lacks the money to pay for his child's health care, college education, or nutritious diet has somehow been conditioned by culture to value some material goods (e.g. car paint jobs) over others (school, food, health). How can we, as theorists, step in and say that this person is no longer capable of making decisions for themselves? I suppose the crit/cult theorists also assumes that in the long term, the indiviual and the group that he or she is a part of will suffer. His child will be more likley to fall ill or earn less money w/o health care, a healthy diet, or better schooling. As a group, they will have less opportunities. They will live shorter, harder lives - something (and this is crucial) we can all agree is undesirable. If they only saw the connection between their consumption of culture and the long-term undesirable consequences, then they would alter their behavior, rise up against their oppressors, and alter culture.

In order for this to happen, you need to establish that some conditions are objectively undesirable. Is living a shorter life objectively undesirable? Not necessarily. Is being able to retire at an early age if one so chooses objectively desirable? Sure. Even if we reject the notion that a person's worth should be judged solely on their monetary worth, we can accept the fact that the systematic impoverishment of a people is undesirable. So then how do we draw a connection between certain behavior that may give pleasure in the short term (getting that $5,000 paint job) and long term displeasure (impoverishment) in a way that a) everyone can understand and b) does not elevate the theorist to the position of truth-teller?

You need to look for instances when people who hold one opinion about how the world (or some small part of it) works revise this opinion based on information presented to them. We have the dual opposing influences of authority (e.g. the news media, the scientific community, both of which were grossly mistaken about human nature in 1930's Germany) and upstart revolutionaries (which are at least equally likely to become corrupt by power and get things wrong - see The Great Leap Forward, an extension of what was, at the time, revolutionary thought). Charisma and authority go a long way to swaying people about big issues like human behavior and economy, but what about small, manageable issues like, say, the length of two lines?
Maybe this is a shitty example because we're all very familiar with the illusion. My point here is that we initially see that the lower line is longer than the top line. If, however, an authority were to come along and, before our very eyes, remove the diagonal lines at the end of each line, we would see, with our own eyes, that the lines are of equal length. Now, is this proof that the lines are of equal length? Absolutely not. You could get out your micrometer and say, "actually, the top line is shorter than the bottom one." But actual, physical reality isn't what concerns me (actually, I think it is indeterminate, but that's another blog entry). What I'm interested in are the patterns of people's behavior, specifically what precipitates a revision of worldview. In most cases, people will believe that the top line is shorter than the bottom one until you remove the diagonal lines, at which point they will think that they are of equal length.

This example reveals a different kind of false consciousness, a short-term false consciousness. It all happened in front of our eyes. We can acknowledge that we were mistaken. We thought our information about the situation was complete and accurate, but in retrospect, thanks to the revelation from the authority figure, we know that it was not.

Those of us studying culture, information, media and how it relates to freedom, happiness, well-being, and choice need to make the claims about false consciousness more like this. We need to make the connections between short-term pleasure and long-term displeasure more obvious, more indubitable. Impossible, you say? Bullocks! We've got exponentially more data about people's shifting desires than we have had in the past (and by "we" I mean the public, though if we're not careful, it might all end up in the hands of a fortunate few. That really would be hegemony).

Its a hard thing to acknowledge that we're not very good at predicting what will bring us long term pleasure, as individuals and as groups. When we're wrong, we look for scapegoats (The Man, the government, the media, etc), and sometimes we're right, but other times, we made bad decisions based on imperfect information about the connections between those decisions and long-term loss. How do you convince a person that his desire to get a $5,000 paint job was the result of a culture intent on keeping him down? You lay bare the mechanisms of culture, not in some vague way, but in a concrete, indubitable way that shows how all people (not just a gullible few) are capable of being misled when presented with certain kinds of information.

To that end, I'm proposing a new research project (featuring testable hypotheses): Is the abundance and restriction of media choice associated with a greater discrepancy between gratification sought and gratification perceived? You can argue with someone else's definition of gratification (for you, it might be having a big house; for someone else, it might be having a car with a sweet paint job), but you'd be hard pressed to find a person who would argue w/ their own definition of gratification.

Lost and Time Travel, Resolved

I confess, I still love Lost, not b/c I find it particularly pleasurable to watch (the soapy dialogue is hackneyed, there are too many scenes where characters redundantly talk about how important events are but nothing really happens, the pacing is lousy, and the music is an emotional crutch), but b/c it tries to do a lot of different things. It takes chances in terms of its choice of stories, the way it tells the stories, and melding of genres, and the weaving of subplots. When you take chances like these, you mostly get shit, but it provides the viewer with the feeling that they might experience something genuinely new. I feel as though the show could produce an unfamiliar emotion or thought. Its like watching sports: I feel like anything could happen.

Of course, there have been experimental narratives before, but experimental films are limited in the ways they can muck around w/ viewers' brains b/c they can't be very long. Experimental literature is abundant, but I don't find it as immersing as TV. And yes, there has been plenty of experimental TV shows before (Twin Peaks, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, late-night public access weirdness, Ernie Kovacs, etc, etc), but I like Lost b/c its experimenting on a grand stage in front of millions of viewers. That's what I liked about Twin Peaks, especially the series finale. If that was a movie, a smaller subset of people would've gone to see it and they would've had different expectations. There's something about knowing that other people are having their heads fucked by a really weird TV show at the same time that its happening to you that makes it a richer experience.

At first, I didn't like the time travel idea, but its grown on me. Movies about time travel don't have the time to get into the implications and possibilities of it. Here, there's room to explore. I think they've raised the cheif problems with time travel (can one intervene in past events w/o creating paradoxes) and I have faith that they will offer something more than a simplistic deus ex machina in future episodes to resolve the problems. Or maybe they won't. But, see, this is the cool part of about a serial TV narrative that is written as it goes, why its different from novels or films. I believe that somewhere, the writers are wrestling with these problems, trying to figure them out. At the same time, I'm trying to figure them out. I've been motivated to do so by the interesting story and the characters (considering time travel in the abstract wouldn't be as fun for me). I cannot skip to the end. I can't google the answer, b/c the answer hasn't been written yet. But I can take the information that I have and evaluate the problems again and again, talking about them with others, writing about them.

It is interesting to see two different kinds of reception of this show: the critical reception by the NYTimes (which, in my opinion, is absolutely the wrong approach to the material), and the message board reception. I think the show is more of a game to be played with the audience, not a text on which we might pass judgment. If you don't want to play, don't watch or discuss. But if you don't like it, I feel as though its partly your fault for not playing along more. If you don't have fun playing a game, its not necessarily b/c the game sucks.

So, in the spirit of playing the game, here's my take on things. Is it possible that people could travel back in time, intervene in the past and continue to experience a subjectively continuous, linear reality? Sort of. When the characters in Lost appear to travel back in time, they don't really, literally go back in time. They travel to a facsimile of the past. They can do whatever they want in that past and it will affect the future of that world. They can use whatever knowledge they have about what the future of that world would have been to bring about desirable outcomes in their future but the world they are altering is not prior to the world in which they were before they traveled in time. Its more like a different place that happens to have people and objects that closely resemble the past. They have special knowledge in the new world, but they can't do things that will instantaneously change their physical or existential status. In this scenario, you could "go back in time" and kill Hitler before the Holocaust, thereby preventing the holocaust in that world that you traveled to. The holocaust would've still happened in the other time line that you were a part of before you traveled in time, but would that matter? What does it mean to say that something has happened? Why is it of any consequence? Regardless of whether or not we can travel in time, we have the same moral responsibilities and the same desires for happiness. If I had the knowledge and the ability to prevent a holocaust from happening, I must do that, whether or not it undoes a holocaust that already happened. It makes me think of Daniel Dennett's essay "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise—So What?" The gist, if I remember correctly, is that whether or not there is a god, whether or not we have free will, whether or not you're operating in a contiguous or parallel reality, does not matter as much as you think it might. You still want to be compassionate, you still want to love and be loved, and you still want to avoid displeasure, and you do so based on what you can observe with your senses. Other possible worlds (one in which Hitler wins WWII, one in which he gets accepted to art school and lives happily ever after) are infinite in number but cannot affect your physical/psychological experience of reality, therefore they are of no consequence to you. Even if, in those other worlds, there are real people who are really suffering, if you can't potentially interact with them or even observe them, then they're not worth thinking about. Regarding Schrodinger's cat, when the cat is in the box, it doesn't matter if it is alive, dead, or "both." If this all seems very abstract and philosophical, consider the moral dilemma of the amnesiac murderer.

This puts the time traveler in a bit of a bind. They're morally obligated to visiting every possible world and preventing bad things from happening (a la Quantum Leap). I think the characters from Lost are off the hook b/c the mechanisms used to travel through time are unpredictable, so even if they wanted to visit parallel worlds that are the functional equivalents of their pasts and prevent bad shit from happening, they would have a very tough time doing so.

What if a character went back in time and killed their parents. Would that negate his or her existence? No. It would negate the existence of person who resembles him or her, but he or she is still a person with a personal past. So, my theory is that the characters in Lost can't change their material or psychological experience of reality by changing the past. Their bodies and minds can only move linearly, forward through a single time line, even though they may jump between worlds that resemble past and future points on that single timeline. Problems solved!

Uncertain entertainment

OK. I think I've got a dissertation topic: why we choose media.

I keep thinking that it has something to do with pleasure, but that we're not just hedonically motivated. Or that "pleasure," the end goal of hedonism, mutates and evolves in each of our lives so that to say that we are hedonically motivated tells us very little about why we choose certain experiences over others.

Let's take a concrete example. Today, I listened to a story from Stephen King's short story collection Just After Sunset. Why this story? Because I'd read/listen to other stories by that author and I'd enjoyed them immensely. Not only had I enjoyed them while I was listening to/reading them. I also would periodically recall emotions or ideas from the texts at various times, and that gave me pleasure and helped me cope w/ some rough patches. If we're to map out the decision making process that goes into choosing media, I think we need to take into account pleasure that comes well after actually experiencing the text. Hard to measure, but let's save the question of measurement for another time.

Anyway, based on past experience w/ other King stories, the low cost and availability of the story (free from my local library), my mood (more or less neutral, I just wanted to be transported while doing yard work, and if I got some insight into the human condition, so much the better), and the time available (I have lots, thanks to summer vacation). It was the wrong decision. At least for that one short story, I experienced pretty extreme displeasure. I experienced something that I'm sure many others have experienced: hating a media text but needing, masochistically, to finish the text, needing closure. Why was the text to unpleasurable? Because it conjured up unpleasant connections with my personal history. How could Stephen King know about that? He couldn't. But could I have known? That's an interesting question.

What do we know about a media experience before we spend time and money on it? When we re-watch movies, we know plenty, and sometimes, we experience great pleasure. Most times, we only have a rough idea of what to expect, based on author, genre, preview, or recommendation. We don't want to waste our time, but we want to be surprised. This requires a relinquishment or control, a trust in an author or authors that is paid for with our future attention. In this way, choosing to experience a media text is unlike so many other consumer decisions. I wouldn't want my car to surprise me. I wanted to know exactly what I was in for when I bought it. The same is true for every other consumer decision i can think of. The same isn't true for my experience with people. I wouldn't want to know utterly predictable people. Though they may bow to my every command, they would seem lifeless. So it is with media. We desire some unpredictability, some chance that what we experience may be undesirable.

I guess there's always the chance that one may be introduced to a new kind of pleasure, one that a consumer/user didn't even know they desired until they experienced it. The unknown experiences are fodder for our future desires and dislikes.

After choosing to listen to the King short story and hating it, I listened to a Radiolab podcast, and within the first 5 minutes, I experienced exactly what I wanted to experience. I was transported. I left my body. I also felt better about life and myself, if for a brief time (there, again, is the time issue. Is it better to experience a temporary boost in self-esteem than it is to get something embedded in your brain that will keep cropping up and putting things in perspective at later points in life? In a word, no. That's what makes great works of narrative so great. They stay in your head and pop up when you have various experiences. Hard to assess, but definitely a part of the worth of a mediated experience). I made a bad decision w/ the King, and a good decision w/ the Radiolab. What happened?

Part of it was a lack of information. If the King story came w/ a disclaimer that said, "Elliot Panek, this story will remind you of very specific instances in your life where you have failed, resulting in negative affect," well then I wouldn't have listened. That's a tall order for the media producer, but maybe, just maybe, some sort of information aggregator could keep track of certain things that were bound to trigger negative (or positive) affect for the user, screen the text for those things, and then give the user an idea of what he/she is in for. This would just be an extension, an elaboration of genre and its conventions. Totally doable given the pace of progress in IT.

Neither the media producer not the user wants too much of a chance of displeasure. They wouldn't want you to go elsewhere for media and you don't want to waste your time with displeasure. And yet some risk seems necessary. We seem to need to cede control, to some degree, at some times.

How curious it is that we spend time and money on something that might give us displeasure. Is this an acknowledgement of the quicksilver nature of human desire, or is this a failure of the media market to accurately inform the consumer whether or not the product is suited for a particular context? Obviously, its a large question, one hopefully fitting for a dissertation. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Celts play the Magic in game 1 of a playoff series. Sports is kind of the apotheosis of the uncertainly entertaining media experience. The Celts could win a quadruple overtime game, yielding a transcendent pleasure for me, or it could be a close loss for the Celts, yielding another evening of ennui. The choice is most certainly not mine.