Wordling Through Public Opinion

I've been examining audience interpretations of movies, TV shows, and web video for a few years now. Recently, a friend turned me on to this Wordle application which makes word clouds of any block of text you give it. Word clouds got a lot of press recently when CNN used it to analyze one of Obama's speeches (sadly, people didn't "get" what word clouds can tell them). Anyway, like any good data visualization tool, it allows you to see, at a glance, some of the trends in your data. There are, of course, limitations (as will become apparent in the examples i give below), but it could be an exciting new way to look at public opinion quickly. Take blog posts or comments from thousands of different people, feed it into Wordle, and you'll get a general idea of what that portion of the public is thinking about (or what they think about a certain issue).

Here are the results of my wordle of people's evaluation of several movies on IMDB. I drew the comments from the headings of the first 300 posts for each movie. Check 'em out.
Shawshank Redemption (the highest rated film on IMDB). No big surprises. People think its the best. Its interesting to note that they think its the best ever. If you look closer, you can see adjectives like "brilliant" and "moving." These may not seem surprising, but when you start comparing the different word clouds to each other, even the films that everyone loved, you start to see that fans put emphases on certain elements of certain films.
Amelie (44 on the list of top 250 IMDB). Interesting to see the word "overrated" in there. People define this movie by the fact that its French, and they find it charming.
Love Guru (I had to pick a bad one for contrast). This represents the limits of assuming that word choice (taken out of context) will tell you what people think. The word "funny" might have been part of the phrase "not funny," but Wordle can't tell you that. Its interesting to see that "bad" is used far more than "worst," and that people think of this as a Mike Myers film more than anything (again, obvious, but worth noting). Also, the word "critics" indicates that the critics lambasting of this film carried some weight with people (you don't see "critics" in many other worldes for other films).Casablanca (11 on Top 250 list). Again, "best" and "greatest" are there. "Classic" is there. It would be interesting to see at what year the word "classic" becomes commonly used by people. You would expect it to grow in highly-rated movie word clouds the older the movie is, but maybe there are certain characteristics that make people call a movie "classic" (the centrality of a romance? PG content?). In any case, its far more interesting to me to look at the ways in which hundreds or thousands of viewers use words like "classic" than the ways in which a handful of critics use them. Definately something worth exploring further.

Against The Daily Show

After reading a slew of paeans to The Daily Show in Flow and after seeing plenty of conference talks about how wonderful The Daily Show is, I have reached the conclusion that media/comm studies folks have an alarmingly univocal (and ultimately uncritical) love for this show.

The arguments usually go something like this: "legitimate" news organizations aren't doing their jobs as well as they could or should. Evidence: their failure to cry foul before the start of the Iraq War, their failure to cover Hurricane Katrina in a fair, accurate manner, the failure of taking x conservative politician/member-of-the-press/business leader to task before he ruined a bunch of people's lives. The Daily Show picks up the slack. It speaks the truth when no legitimate news source can. It is effective satire in the tradition of Mark Twain. You may think that young people are watching TDS instead of watching or reading other news sources and that its making them more cynical, but studies have revealed the opposite: they're less cynical than the average person and they read and watch more news than non-viewers. Thus, evidence suggests TDS makes viewers more engaged, more skeptical (as opposed to cynical), and more aware of the world around them.

Allow me to present the counter-argument. First, some ground rules. Let's acknowledge the third person effect: the idea that we all tend to think that the media exerts a strong influence on other people but not on ourselves. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals who have free will, who make intelligent decisions as to what information to consume and how we think about issues, while others are susceptible to the influence of demagogues. My political beliefs lead me to seek out TDS and NPR but my exposure to those information outlets does not change those beliefs, whereas Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have the power to influence viewers' and listeners' beliefs. If they did not, then we wouldn't have any reason to criticize them. If they're just entertainers, then what's the problem?

I'm familiar with the argument that b/c Stewart frames his show as comedy on a comedy network and various conservatives like O'Reilly and Limbaugh frame their programs as news, that one is less likely to influence the views of listeners or viewers than the other. This logic has an appealing obviousness to it, but the intentions of Stewart and the framing of his show are beside the point. It is possible that satiric content, which viewers acknowledge to be "just comedy," is just as likely to influence views as non-satiric content. Both pointed satire and that which poses as "hard news" are capable of altering (even more capable of bolstering) our views of the world. This isn't to say that the intentions of the creator or genre classifications don't play some role in the ways that viewers/listeners/readers process the information, but Stewart is mistaken in thinking that his role as comedian determines the degree of his influence. Its his prerogative to not see himself as responsible for the alteration or bolstering of viewers' beliefs, but his take on his own personal responsibility as a satirist has nothing to do with the question of effect.

There is ample empirical evidence that suggests we are all mistaken in our assumptions about the effectiveness of media to alter worldveiws, that neither conservative nor liberal, well-informed nor uninformed, over-educated nor under-educated, fans of satire and fans of supposedly hard news are any less susceptible to having our views of the world altered (against our will, so to speak) by what we watch, listen to, and read than anyone else.

So, premise #1: TDS could lead to people thinking a certain way about the world around them without those people being aware that their views of the world are being altered by that program.

How do we know if that's happening, and how do we know the ways in which it is happening?

The idea that TDS and other sources of "soft news" substitute for "hard news" sources in viewers' media diets has been debunked. Also, viewers seem more likely to vote, more likely to join civic organizations and volunteer, more able to cite objective facts about what's going on in the world.

That leaves the following likely negative effects that i don't think have been addressed by scholars:

• the tendency for viewers to be more partisan - viewers make decisions as to whether or not an idea is good based on whether it is associated with conservative or liberals and not based on evidence that suggests that the idea would work in certain circumstances and not in others. Decisions are made based on principles (which are cultivated by the show) or based on whether the sources of information have contradicted themselves at any point in time (if they have, then everything they ever say is called into question).
  
• the tendency for viewers to focus on blame rather than solutions, the exacerbation of the its-not-me-its-you tendency that we all have (that is, viewers of the show and other shows that focus on the blaming-others narrative of news will be more likely to focus their energy on ferreting out other people's evil doings and less likely to spend time thinking of possible solutions to those problems and trying them out than non-viewers)

If I had to speculate on the kinds of thinkers that TDS turns its viewers into, I would say that its people who believe that when a person in power (govt, media, finance) says one thing and later says something different, then that person loses all credibility and should be ousted in favor of someone who has yet to be proven as hypocritical. If everyone thought this way, then we would end up with political, media, and financial leaders who were ideologues. Say what you will about ideologues, at least they're consistent. You can't play a tape of them saying something they will later contradict because they never change their opinions about anything regardless of how circumstances change. Is that a good thing?

And yes, veiwers of TDS seek out other source of news, but what orientation do they approach that news with? I would argue that when they watch those other news sources, they take the bits of it that are consistent with TDS's view of the world and ascribe the rest to traditional news media's inability to tell it like it is, the failure of traditional journalism in the face of powerful governments and corporations. They're not making critical decisions about the information from other news sources based on anything but a need to see the world in a way that conforms to their existing view of it. Again, people have this tendency in the first place, but I would argue that TDS exacerbates it.

I also believe that the "people were always this way" argument is inadequate. I can imagine a world in which a lot of people think about an issue and make a decision on what to do or who to vote for based on evidence that suggests that the policy or action proposed will bring about good things for many people. How many conservatives actually examine the intricacies of the circumstances in which taxing the rich or running of deficits leads to long-term gain instead of just saying that taxes in a recession are bad? How many liberals consider the implications of the constant risk of nuclear war given the existence of over 10,000 active nuclear warheads?

Many people don't want to think about the other side of an issue. They want to get angry, and they want to laugh. TDS helps them do that. In fact, maybe it leads to more and more people getting angry and laughing instead of looking for solutions. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does something totally different. We have a responsibility to find out the answers to such questions.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?

Mashups: Turning individual mediocrities into collective gold

I've just stumbled upon (via Heffernan's blog) yet another mashup that has swept me off my feet: ThruYou. I felt the same giddy charge that I felt when watching that ol' Brokeback to the Future mashup video, when first hearing DJ Shadow's Entroducing, when that rash of "Artist1 Vs. Artist2" mashup songs circulated a few years back, when I was sitting in the Library of Congress this summer doing research and listened to Girl Talk for the first time (I had this dopey grin plastered on my face; must've looked like an idiot). What the hell is it about mashups that I find alluring, especially now that the novelty of the form has worn off?

In the case of Girl Talk, he lingers just long enough on one combination of samples to establish a danceable groove and to make you chuckle at the juxtaposition of the original meanings of the sampled songs. There's a kind of thrill at being able to move so easily and quickly across genres and eras. The decontextualization of the braggadocio of contemporary rap and the seriousness of the arena rock renders the samples explicitly comic (the fact that I grew up in a world totally different than the ones inhabited by the songwriters already gave me this kind of distance from the lyrics). Many of the songs he samples are about the assertion of individuality and dominance. What could be better than to take parts of those boasts and create something collective, free, and funny out of them? And the fact that there are rhythmic and melodic bonds between songs as culturally disparate as late-80's Metallica and Lil' Mama is somehow comforting.

ThruYou is the same thing but with user-generated content for beat fodder. By and large, the song remains the same (sounds a lot like DJ Shadow to my ears), but the fact that he's using clips of people playing riffs in their bedrooms all over the world makes the songs feel different to me. With DJ Shadow, I feel as though the artist is paying homage to the sampled artists, reviving long forgotten songs in the hopes that new fans will find the originals. With Girl Talk, I feel like he's playing a prank on the original artists, neutering them. With ThruYou, it feels like he's bringing out the latent collective artistic talent that lies in every mediocre individual. ThruYou is to YouTube musicians as Google is to webpages. To say that he creates something that is greater than the sum of its parts is an understatement.

Even though they have access to billions of recorded sounds, DJs produce music that sounds, well, pretty familiar. If you're not into this particular kind of music, then it doesn't matter how it was created. This needn't be the case. But perhaps in order to be pleasing to the ear, like original music, it has to build on familiar melodies and rhythmes. Still, its not only the sound of mashups that makes them pleasurable (at least for those of us who dig these familiar rhythms and melodies). Its the baggage that the samples come with.