Why MTV doesn't suck as much as one might think, or why...

is the new

Another terrific Bill Simmons podcast (this one featuring an interview w/ Chris Connelly in which they debated why MTV stopped playing music and went all reality all the time) made me reconsider MTV's move away from music. On (in?) the podcast, Connelly essentially argues that what musicians were for an older generation, reality stars like LC, Hiedi, and Spencer are for this generation. More specifically, he argues that because people who are now 35 and older formed their identities in their teen years by listening to popular musicians, they want to keep listening to popular music. Hence, popular music is no longer the "adult-free" zone it used to be. If it isn't adult-free, then it can't be used by teens to forge identities.

Rather than find a media space that parents can't get access to, teens find a media space that parents just don't (or can't) understand. It used to be rock and roll, then it was hiphop, and now its reality TV (which, interestingly, doesn't have the interracial threat of RocknRoll & hiphop, and so is perhaps seen by white parents as just as confusing but less threatening than pop music).

Maybe teens' obsession with popular music (during the rock and roll craze of the 50's, the rise of MTV in the 80's) was never really about the music in the first place. Maybe it was about the lyrics and the celebrity singing the lyrics. In those lyrics and in the celebrity, teens found someone to commiserate with and aspire to be, something to talk about with friends, a way of judging another person in shorthand ("oh, you're the type of person who likes Dave Matthews Band, or the type of person who likes Kid n Play"). What if you stripped away the music but kept the person to commiserate with/aspire to be? You'd have reality TV. It performs the same functions, and so MTV remains popular. And, according to Connelly's interesting theory, they had no choice if they wanted to keep the teen audience. Popular music was tainted by the interest of adults.

Now, I know teens still listen to music, and I know that most adults are as confused by/contemptuous of Asher Roth as 1950's adults were by/of Buddy Holly. But I think we're back to listening to music for older reasons - to enhance or bring about a certain mood, as a kind of drug to escape the world. The "social comparison" identity-forging uses (see above paragraph) were a contemporary phenomenon relegated to youth culture. I think youth culture now has LC and Heidi (and Kevin??? BTW, College Life seems really promising to me - like Laguna Beach/Hills/City w/o the unachievable glitz and glamour). They don't need Eminem or Kanye.

Important to note that there's a strong gender element at play. Most of the guy students I talk to are less about TV and more about movies and sports for forming identity (TV = domestic = female, even in the online TV era?).

NB: As far as MTV playing music videos, it certainly didn't help when the teen music business model collapsed. MTV played videos to promote the purchase of music, but it remains an open question as to whether teens will see music as something you purchase.

Thinking Through the Inevitability (or obsolescence) of Advertising...Again

Thinking about whether ad creep is inevitable is a bit of an obsession with me. I try not to bug people I know by constantly ranting about it. Instead, I reserve such rants for this space (that's my basic argument here: being a tolerable company or a tolerable human being is all about knowing where to put certain messages). I like to think that I'm refining or extending my arguments, but maybe I'm just repeating myself. Here goes.

2 likely possibilities for which we might gather evidence:

1: ads have crept up a little in terms of where they are and how much of our conscious and unconscious attention they take up, but not all that much. There's always been push-back from consumers, and so they've reached a permanent stalemate w/ advertisers and sellers. Ads don't work perfectly, but they work well enough to be worth the trouble for the sellers.

2: prevalent promotion of any kind, much like record labels, is a holdover from a pre-networked information economy. During the broadcast era, the infrastructures and content needed for the pre-eminent modes of mass communication - TV and newspapers - were expensive to set up and maintain, so expensive that subscription fees wouldn't have covered the cost. During the networked communication era, the infrastructure had a high up-front cost but the cost of maintenance, while hardly nil, is far less expensive than that of traditional broadcast media. In addition, the cost of providing content of acceptable quality (user generated content, once it gets going) is virtually nil. The supplementary revenue generated for the service providers by advertising is not as essential as it was during the broadcast era. In addition, there are less expensive ways for the producers of goods and services to reach target markets (say, those in the market for a re-financed mortgage) than splashing ads everywhere. As a seller, you could spend money trying to cultivate demand where there was none (which advertisements do all the time, but is an expensive, unreliable, and difficult task given the ever-increasing, ever-evolving savviness of consumers) or you could spend less money targeting those who are "in the market" for something you sell to begin with. Since low overhead and greater sales trump all in a capitalist marketplace, promotion outside of a designated "marketplace" becomes obsolete. The practice will persist for awhile, especially in places where networked communication is less ubiquitous, but only due to institutional inertia which decays over time.

Argument for 1: promotion of goods is inevitable. I would grant this. If we want to use history as proof, we would see that promotion of one kind of another exists in every known culture in every place in every era (not that history should be used as an argument for what humans are capable of, but for the moment, we'll accepts this argument's utility despite its shortcomings). You can regulate it and restrict it, but if you do this too much, it would handicap your nation's companies in a global marketplace in which it must compete with less-regulated markets.

Argument for 2: In most cultures, promotion was/is relegated to a certain space - the marketplace. If you went to the marketplace, you were prepared for people selling their wares. If you were in a domestic setting, if you were listening to a story, if you were at work, you heard far less explicit or implicit promotion of goods or services.

What happens when ads move outside of the marketplace? You get greater sales, for the time being, but you also eat into the collective brain power of everyone in your culture. More time spent paying attention to ads, attempting to resist ads, and engineering more sophisticated ads is less time working, socializing, fucking, etc.

I'm particularly interested in studying the side effects of promotion that are not noticed by the conscious mind, b/c this seems to be the way advertising is going. Most product placement works this way. Maybe some online banner ads work this way on you. Its pretty well established that this kind of advertising works to some degree, in that it can convince us to buy things we wouldn't have bought had we not been exposed to the ads, though consumers cannot notice when it works. This is good in the sense that, unlike explicit advertising, this doesn't interfere with conscious processes (e.g. our abilities to concentrate on a complex narrative, to do work, to socialize w/ others). But it may interfere with unconscious processes. I would bet that our brains are working through things without our being conscious of it. The result of this "working through" is a stable sense of self, an ability to generate new ideas, and an ability to find some sort of equilibrium in social relations. It is possible that if you introduced a signal that interfered with that unconscious processing, it might prevent us from doing those things as effectively.

You can't determine whether or not this is the case by simply asking people. If I could conduct an ideal experiment, I would take some similar people, immerse some of them in ad saturated culture, immerse the others in the same culture where the ads were relegated to certain websites and physical areas (stores, neighborhoods, malls), and see if their abilities to do other things changed over time.

In closing, I might ask why telephones or electricity were never served up w/ ads. Why were we charged a subscription fee for those without having to pay for either service through our attention to advertising? Why weren't our telephone calls interrupted every five minutes w/ very brief ads for something? Was it just some artifact of the early monopoly on both which trained us to be intolerant of interruptions, or is there something about the proximity of extremely personal information (on the phone) and unrequested content (ads) that we can't tolerate (in which case we would be less tolerant of ads alongside emails than embedded in hulu videos). Surely, we would've complained about ads in our phonecalls but then, given the lack of other viable options, we would've tolerated them, and this would've generated more $ for advertisers, sellers, and the phone/electric companies. If ads work, as a way of selling goods and as a business model for media providers, then why aren't they literally everywhere?

You Tube Phenoms: Susan Boyle

Ordinary-person-turned-celeb Susan Boyle presents us with yet another interesting case study in web-enhanced fame. She occupies a space at the intersection of a lot of different kinds of appeals. Its key to remember that her fame is only enhanced by the web. The real media venue that is equally (or more, or less?) responsible for her fame is Britain's Got Talent, the British version of American Idol (or is AI the American version of BGT?). Boyle's rise to fame is in keeping w/ talent shows' examination of what how cultures define talent. I used to be very dismissive of these shows, but really, when you consider what they say about how we judge people and how popular they are, they're quite interesting.

Do we defer to experts? Yes, partially, but we also love to hate them. Is talent acquired through hard work or are you born with it? Not sure, really, but we like to think that there's at least some persistence against the odds invovled in acheiving success. Do we base our judgment of people on their similarities to us? Sometimes. Do we base it on looks? Usually, but not this time, and apparently there's nothing we love more than praising someone who doesn't fit the mold of the attractive pop star. In doing so, we are praising ourselves for not being superficial (nevermind the fact that we're still judging someone based on an arbitrarily chosen valued ability. God forbid if the woman had been ugly and hadn't been able to sing).

I would argue that Boyle is also in sync with another trend, this one related to popularity on the web: freak appeal. I've heard a few comparisons of Boyle to William Hung, although all the people making those comparisons note the important difference: Hung was talentless, Boyle is incredibly talented. They're both outcasts in some sense. I think Boyle is what some of us wish the William Hungs of the world could be - someone who seems like an ugly duckling at first, but then turns out to be a swan. I also think that we feel that this makes it okay to laugh at freaks like Hung b/c we can hold out hope that Hung will eventually turn into a swan or that we'll eventually uncover the hidden talents that Hung always had (maybe he's brilliant at math, to use a stereotype about asians). There's a kind of ugly-person tokenism going on with Boyle.

When we say that "anyone can make it in America/Britain/anywhere-else," we're identifying the characteristics to which our cultures assign value. Despite being ugly or poor or black or old or blind or a recovering drug addict or gay or transgender or whatever, this person has succeeded. Whether its seeing Susan Boyle become famous in a week or seeing a black man get elected president, seeing a person succeed against the odds simultaneously convinces us that there's less true inequity in the world (if there was more, then this person wouldn't have made it), convinces us that we're not part of reinforcing that inequity, and convinces us that despite our shortcomings, we can make it, too. This can lead us to believe that inequities are a thing of the past, and this may instill false hope among many less-talented people (there's a novelty effect built into the success of the first disadvantaged person to achieve, one that wears off quickly and doesn't apply to the next few people out of the pipline). As long as cultures have hierarchies that are based on identifiable characteristics, these stories will remain resonant with audiences.

That's not to say that the success-against-the-odds stories don't have positive effects on audiences; only that there may be some negative ones as well. How could we determine whether the good outweighed the bad? Sound like another research project!

Data Mining as Psychotherapy: How the petabyte age could help us to know our selves and why that's nothing to be scared of

Let's start with a problem. Make it a personal problem. I mean "personal" in two senses: "personal" as in something that you wouldn't want to talk about with anyone besides a very close friend or a therapist, and "personal" as in specific to you and only you. Say you're depressed, or that you're engaging in what you know to be a self-destructive pattern of behavior. How can you solve this problem, or avoid repeating it in the future?

Now, let's pretend you had a magical machine that could track every bit of thought and experience you had from your birth to this moment. The data produced by the machine tells you everything that led up to that negative outcome moment. Well, not everything. Only the things that you were a part of. If a butterfly flapped its wings in China the day after you were born, the machine would not record that. It is possible that things that you were not directly a part of could have a profound effect on you, leading you to become depressed or engage in shitty behavior (see sensitive dependence on initial conditions). Nevertheless, if you have to limit your recording of information somehow due to technical limits, of which there will always be some, and your goal was to find out the cause of a problem that relates to you specifically, then it would be good to start with all experience and thought related directly to you.

Now that you've got all that information, you could look for patterns in that data, or maybe the machine could look for them for you. You notice a recurring pattern of actions or thoughts that you keep choosing that lead up to that negative outcome you want to avoid. We have an intuitive grasp of the kinds of behavior or thought that lead up to such outcomes (e.g. I'm depressed because I looked at a picture of a dead relative, which reminded me of how much i missed them and of my own mortality. Maybe I shouldn't look that picture so often). But sometimes, we can't see those patterns, either b/c we don't want to acknowledge that somethings that produce pleasure in the short-term might bring us displeasure in the long term, or b/c we just can't remember everything that we thought, felt, or did over the course of our entire lives.

The first problem is an objectivity/subjectivity problem, solved by asking a trusted friend or a therapist for advice. The second problem is a surveillance problem - no other person is there for our every waking moment, and even if they are, they can't see inside our heads (the closest you could come to that would be a parent or a lover). This creates a trade-off: you're the only person with access to your entire history and your thoughts and feelings, but you're not especially objective about them. The third problem is a cognitive load problem: no one person can hold that much information about one person's life in his/her head.

Enter the machine. The machine is capable of holding a much larger amount of information. The machine also makes the data available to you or to trained professionals (though, once you were able to see the patterns that linked the short-term pleasurable actions with long-term displeasurable consequences, you wouldn't need anyone else to tell you to cut it out). The machine could be with you every waking minute. Heck, it could even record what's going on in your head while you're asleep.

I'm not saying that the machine would allow you to see with complete certainty what led to that negative outcome, but it would be on a par with what we think to be causes and effects in the hard sciences. In other words, they would be able to reduce the probability of there being some other explanation for your misery to virtually nil. So, you take the data, you make note of the patterns of thought and behavior that led up to the negative outcomes, and you choose not to think or do the things that led up to those outcomes. Even better, you look at the patterns that lead up to your happiest moments, and you repeat those.

The machine does not exist. yet. But I think we've got a prototype: google. Google tracks our searches, which might tell us a little more about our patterns of behavior than we might know ourselves. A prototype also exists in the form of spyware that tracks our every click on the internet. As more and more of our desires and thoughts and feelings and actions are conveying on computers, the closer we come to having something like "the machine." (if you included mobile tech and its ability to track us throughout the day, you'd have an even better approximation of the machine).

Is the machine to be feared? I'd guess that most people would say yes, but I wouldn't agree. To me, that's like saying that you're afraid of knowing yourself, or afraid of knowledge in general. What we're afraid of is the misuse or misinterpretation of information. But should that keep us from garnering what we know to be more accurate information about our selves? There is such a thing as responsible data interpretation. In order to engage in responsible interpretation, it is essential to start with this assumption: the information we're dealing with is imperfect and incomplete, and yet it may offer us insight into our thoughts and actions that is superior to (or supplements) what we're currently working with. We need to engage in systematic testing of the circumstances in which this information does provide us with insight, and we need to identify misuse and misinterpretation and discourage it.

The other choice is one that I think too many people choose, mostly out of fear and laziness (its easier to dismiss the entire enterprise of data mining than learn how to do it responsibly and teach people how to interpret data properly and how to tell if someone else is interpreting data properly). I think that, on some fundamental level, we fear data, not the corporations or the governments or the scientists who are gathering it and using it, but the data itself. Given the rate at which behavioral data is piling up, this stance is becoming increasingly irresponsible each day. We can either let someone else aggregate all this data and learn why we do things and how to manipulate us, or we can take control of our own destinies and learn how our minds work so as to beat the others to the punch, to alter our behaviors so as to become less predictable. There's no going back to the pre-data age.

And really, the machine is just an extension of established sciences that spring from our desire to know ourselves more fully. Psychology, sociology, and really all of the social sciences are imperfect versions of the machine. They look for patterns leading up to outcomes we judge to be good or bad, but they have huge blind spots. But the blind spots are shrinking. Sociology and psychology have always played the red-headed stepchild to "hard sciences" like physics and chemistry. A great deal of this ill-will comes from the fact that social science can not deliver the levels of certainty that are the norm in hard sciences (hence the tolerance of smaller effect sizes in social science). That, too, may change in the petabyte age.