Assessing the big, infrequently occuring effects of films and novels

Sometimes, I'll be asked by someone who knew what I was interested in years ago whether I'm still writing about film. I stopped and thought about why I'm not as interested in film anymore. I think its because I wanted to understand some principles of communication that have the most explanatory power, or that explain the highest percentage of the total human experience. Films, like novels and theater before them, used to occupy a great deal of our time and, probably, our consciousness, influencing what we thought about the world. Then came TV and the internet. My sense is that TV and the internet are like the air we breathe. They make up hours of many people's days.

Its not that films aren't still "important" in some sense of the word. They provide a lot of the content that people watch on TV. Large numbers of people still watch, discuss, and are influenced by films via Netflix. Films can still start a conversation about something in a way that TV and the internet seem unable to. But still, if I had to rank the most influential media, I would put the internet at the top, TV in the middle, and film after that.

However, I've always had this suspicion that film, like novels, though they are both experienced very infrequently, can dramatically change the worldview and trajectory of someone's life. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine the effects of these various media this way:

• TV and the internet erode our brains (but not in a bad way). The change happens very gradually through frequent exposure. Over the years, profound changes to our individual and collective mental landscapes can take place. These might be easier to observe and predict. People's encounters with religious texts seem to operate this way. Sure, maybe it was a revelation when they first discovered the power of the bible, but it really only has profound effects if you keep reading it over and over. Personally, I feel like the online version of The New York Times has gradually shaped the contours of how I think. I've been perusing it for the past decade.
  
• Film and novels act like earthquakes (again, not in a bad way). They can completely reconfigure the landscape in a short period of time. All you need is one story to hit you at the right time in your life and you might decide to change the entire trajectory of your life. These are probably less easy to observe and much harder to predict, but no less significant for the individual or society. Take the books of Ayn Rand. I'm guessing that not many people have read them. but if particularly influential people have read them and have been influenced by them, then they are capable of having profound effects on society. Personally, reading White Noise might've been part of why I decided to try becoming an academic. The main character of the book was a professor. That character (and by extension, the author) thought the way I thought. Its not that he had a glamorous, desirable life, but just that I identified with him and the way he thought. And so I thought "maybe I should look into becoming a professor." There were many other factors that contributed to that life-altering decision (an uncle, parents, former professors of mine), but this one brief encounter with this novel had something to do with it.
  

This isn't to say that some TV shows or some websites or online communities can't be revelations in the way that novels and films can be. In any case, I think its important to think about how you could test these significant effects of these media, these earthquakes. I guess you could start with interviews, or maybe surveying people and simply asking them: what was the most influential TV show, book, movie, etc, you ever experienced? How often do they reference them, talk about them with others, write about them, or think about them? One possible way to assess this would be by looking at people's online profiles. Are there any quotes from movies or books? Any tattoos of characters (I'm thinking of you, Twilight fans).

Also, I think it would be useful to assess the state in which the user found themselves at the time of their encounter. I'm guessing that in most cases, the user was young and in a period of transition (to extend the seismological analogy a bit further: this is like looking at buildings constructed on fault lines). One can imagine a well-made movie that is tailored to young men or women that has a certain pro-social or anti-social message having a profound effect, not on little everyday actions, but on choices like what job to pursue, or whether or not people are generally good or bad. It would be unsurprising to find that movies that glorify war or wall street boost enlistment and b-school applications. I also like to consider a particularly vulnerable population: the mentally ill. The trouble is that when you start this conversation about whether exposure to video games or vitriolic political rhetoric contributed to violent actions, people take sides based on their own behaviors or their political beliefs. But if we could set those aside, it seems clear that unstable folks are just another population that may react differently to certain media texts and that this is worth knowing. Maybe nutjobs like Jared Lee Loughner or John Hinkley, Jr. would've eventually latched on to some media text and used it as inspiration for an assassination. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something special about the interaction between one particular media text and an unstable mind that results in acts that are profoundly disruptive to society.

We can't just take anecdotal evidence (e.g. most murderers read A Catcher in the Rye when they were teenagers or something like that). We need to subject this evidence to rigorous statistical analysis, comparing those who were exposed to the text and didn't change their lives to those that did. What makes them different? How many of them are there? How drastic and costly to the individual and society is the behavior change? What would be the cost to society of somehow limiting access to the text? There is not reason why we can't do this, but we have to start looking in the right places.

Decoding a Media Spectacle: 'June 17th, 1994'

I just got sucked into a terrific documentary on ESPN. "June 17th, 1994" chronicles a very strange day in sports. The New York Rangers celebrated winning the Stanley Cup in Manhattan, Arnold Palmer played his last round of golf, the World Cup kicked off, there was game 5 of the NBA Finals, and OJ Simpson led LA police on a chase. The lack of voice-over commentary lets us judge the events for ourselves, though the editing and the music offer some commentary.

What do I find so compelling about this documentary?

The moment that most intrigues me is when the news (Tom Brokaw, specifically) reports on the crowd that develops to cheer on OJ as he flees police. The crowd was created by the news media (crowd members learned of the car chase via television) and then the news media was bearing witness to the amoral attention seekers it created.

Everything happened in real time. As we watch the news broadcast of OJ driving down the freeway, we hear a psychologist describe what he is going through. That psychoanalysis was not added after the fact; it was done while OJ was fleeing. Crowds convene on overpasses, cheering for him. At this point, its not clear whether those people offered their support, if you can call it that, because they thought he was innocent, because they thought he was guilty but didn't want to see him kill himself (which he was threatening to do), or because they wanted to be part of some pop culture event as it unfolded, regardless of whether or not it had to do with murder or sports.

What is so striking about this moment is that it revealed this scary power of live television that lies dormant most of the time, a power that may have been inherited by twitter. Television binds millions of people together. Live television gives people the impression that they can quickly and radically change something. It is true that large numbers of people are capable of such feats, but like any organism, a crowd would not be very effective in altering its environment if it didn't have any sort of sensory feedback about the consequences of its actions. Live television (and now twitter) can act as that sensory feedback mechanism. Telethons work on this principle, but there's something inert about their orderliness. The OJ incident felt alive. Even though I was watching it 16 years after it happened, I got the feeling that the whole culture was in a state of flux.

This documentary reveals something about how people interact with one another and how media plays some role in enabling the tendencies of people to congregate, to gawk, to seek attention and to see a bit of themselves in the groups (sports teams) or individuals (OJ) they support.

Crowds gather for all sorts of reasons. While the distinction between supporting a murderer and supporting a sports team may seem obvious in retrospect, its possible that this distinction doesn't feel as important when you're part of a big group. There are well-known conformist tendencies that overrule our individual senses of morality. In addition to that, I think members of crowds engaged in unsavory behavior can distribute the guilt so that even if they are guilty of some sin (supporting a murderer, standing up for a tyrannical government), you're somehow less guilty than if they were committing the act as individuals. Television extends the crowd. Live television allows the crowd to see itself, to be impressed or repulsed by its spontaneous, amoral power.

The style of the documentary - free from talking heads telling us what to think about everything we're seeing - provoked me to ask this question: are sports trivial? Many non-sports fans I know believe they are, and in a way, I agree with them. That is what's pure about sports: the outcome of the game does not directly link to the election of an official or the fate of an economy. Of course, sports can indirectly affect politics, economies, and pretty much everything else, but that's only because of the value we assign the games.

As we see the juxtaposition of deadly serious police press conferences with tickertape parades and a round of golf, we might ask: How can the New York Rangers fans talk about winning the Stanley Cup in terms of life and death? How can announcers wax poetic over the retirement of an over-privileged geezer in bad pants hitting a ball with the stick? How can people talk about these things like they are that important? Surely, this is the sign of a warped culture. At the same time, the serious countpoint - the OJ murders - isn't especially remarkable without its connection to sports. People are murdered everyday. These murders mattered because they involved a well regarded professional athlete. To ignore a huge news story in favor of watching an especially competitive game 5 of the NBA Finals seems callous or crazy, but the story was only huge because of other (ostensibly trivial) games played years ago, games in which OJ Simpson ran faster than the men who were chasing him. None of it really mattered in the macro-economic sense. Or rather, it mattered, but only in an indirect way (again, billions of dollars were made: this was one of the highest rated television spectacles of all time). Like all sports, it only matters because of the meaning we assigned to it.