Last Thoughts on Lost

I never really liked Lost all that much. Every now and then, I would become immersed in it the way anyone can become immersed in a good story, but mostly I enjoyed it as a popular experimental narrative. It is the type of show that makes one reflect on one's own journey, so I struggled to recall when I started watching the show, while I was in Austin, off of bootlegged DVDs my roommate scored in Hong Kong. Since then, I've changed. Maybe I've become less tolerant of sentiment, or at least I look for it in different places (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the music I love give me all the deeply emotional experiences of memory that this show only began to give me). I've become more cerebral, less ashamed to engage in long debates about the possibility of time travel and social science experiments, and there again, I've found other places to scratch that itch (the internet, more school).

If we left behind the goal of loyalty or fidelity to an initial spirit of a show, the flexibility of written-as-they-go narratives could be a strength: they can grow with or grow apart from the audience and the creators. Most shows seem to become victims of their own success, losing the original thread and exploiting the trust of the audience. What Lost added to this was the transparency of the audience reaction to the show as it went along. Everyone could see the reactions to each show. The debate about how good or bad the show was in some way affected by viewers' immediate knowledge of others' opinions. I would think this would hinder a show from growing or changing.

What seems more significant is the ways in which my TV watching and media use habits have changed since I started watching the show, along with everyone else's. When I started watching, the show, like pretty much every other show, wasn't easy to watch online. For the last season, I watched most of the shows online, delaying watching as long as possible, reading synopses when I didn't feel like watching. For the series finale, I watched as a friend skyped with her sister hundreds of miles away, the laptop open, half of our attention focused on the show. In other words, I half-watched the show, something that wasn't possible in the way that its now possible. I did this not because I can't give TV shows my full attention anymore (I gave my full attention to Mad Men and continue to do so next season). I only half-liked Lost, only cared about the philosophy and the scientific experiments and mentally or physically tuned out when things got sappy. The show seems as ripe as any for a re-edit.

Then there are all the strange things happening outside of the show on ABC, the things that reminded me that I was watching television and not sitting in a darkened theater. The emotional ending gave way to a teaser for the local Detroit news: real people, really dead. Then, Jack Shepard walks out on the stage of Jimmy Kimmel's show for some incongruously semi-serious analysis of the show. Kimmel seemed unclear on whether to play things straight or crack wise, as I was while the last show was airing (should I make a snarky comment? Should I cry?).

I suppose what I liked most about the ending was that it ended with a death. That's the only real ending, right? The end of an individual consciousness. And the more I think about it, it really reminded me of Donny Darko: airline related disaster that does/does not kill the protagonist, protagonist engages in what may or may not be a prolonged hallucination about time travel after which he finally comes to terms with his own death and, in a way that is uncharacteristic of most Western narratives about death, dies peacefully, fondly recalling the lives he touched. Both stories tap into some cultural preoccupations: post-9/11 anxiety about flying (DD was made before 9/11 and was oddly prescient; its popularity might have something to do with the cultural resonance of plane crashes after its release), considering the implications of recent developments in philosophy and physics, trying to make sense of death and memory (these are more universal, long-standing preoccupations).

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!

First Taste for Free

A couple of weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails "released" an album online for free, prompting me to consider the viability of such an economic model.

First off, we need to note that NIN is (are?) a well established artist. People know their music, like their music, and would spend time listening to their music. And that's the key - consumers would spend time listening to the album. Forget money. Money spent for any particular text does not matter so much in the new media economy. Attention and time matter. Once you build up interest, you can charge for a subsequent album, a t-shirt, a concert, etc.

In today's media economy, if an artist can establish a fan base, they don't have to charge them for every album or every concert. As long as they can maintain some profit margin, as opposed to the huge profit margin they enjoyed before, the artist can make a living. Before, labels and studios had to charge consumers way more than a CD or a movie cost to produce b/c they had to pay for the duds that they churned out (Pareto's principle). They couldn't know which one of their products would be duds and which would be smashes. They also had to cover the costs of developing new talent (equivalent to R&D costs). But I don't think that distributors need to pay for that anymore. Artists can record and film stuff on the cheap, put it out there for free, see if its popular, cultivate interest in the unique output of that artist, and then charge $ for the subsequent output of that artist. You could also whore yourself out to advertisers and make $ off of modestly popular work, but I think the purest model for art/entertainment sales should be: give them a taste for free, then charge them for more once they're hooked (the drug-dealer economic model). Ads just add clutter, and I'm not sure they even work well enough to justify their existence.

Really, the only thing that agents, studios, and labels are useful for is visibility. They can artificially boost the visibility of an artist's output through promotion. But bloggers (gatekeepers, tastemakers) and the transparency of popularity on the web counteracts such promotional efforts. Right now, a small percentage of consumers make their decisions as to what to spend their time listening to or watching based on bloggers or online popularity tracking (that may in fact be affected by promotion). That's right now. But what if the people who paid attention to bloggers and popularity trackers were jsut early adopters? What if, in the coming years, most people took their cues from these sources? Could it render advertising, promotion, labels, studios, and agents all obsolete? I think that it could.

Whenever I raise the possibility that promotion may be futile in the new media economy, I hear a voice saying that promotion is more insidious than I imagine it to be, that its influence is hard to track but still exists. This voice says that anyone questioning the viability of promotion and advertising is hopelessly naive. This strikes as possibly true, but doesn't seem like a strong argument; more like something said by those with a vested interest in defending the business model of advertising and promotion. Its going to get very hard to trace whether an artist or a work become popular due to promotion or organic word-of-mouth popularity based on the merit of the work. However, the internet makes these paths visible, so maybe we could begin to see how effective promotion is when compared to the aggregated tastes of millions of users. If you want to defend the role of promotion and advertisement in the art industry, fine, but back your argument up with some hard data. If you're really about making money, then do it efficiently. Spend your money figuring out what makes a work good or popular and then make it. Don't promote shit that you're uncertain about. To quote Martin Sheen in Wall Street: "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Giving some of your work away for free is, in a sense, the ultimate promotion. Usually, ads and previews for movies are distorted pieces of a larger whole that are designed to make the whole more appealing than it actually is. But if you give away a whole album, a whole season, a whole movie for free, then there's nothing distorted about that.

And yet, it would seem unfair if, say, the creators of Lost gave away most of the narrative for "free" on TV and then concluded it with a movie that we have to pay to see. I see this with online video: its very difficult to tell whether an individual video is functioning as a satisfying media product in and of itself, a piece of a larger work that you could either have to pay for or tolerate ads with (in which case it is just an "ad" for the larger work), or both.

Maybe promoters are necessary, or inevitable. But I certainly don't think that art couldn't be sold w/o them. Artists are engaging in large scale economic experiments, and the results suggest that we should start reconsidering the role of promoters in the art business.

Corporate Image and Social Networks

I'm starting work on a larger project about the economics of online video, but before I delve into that, I thought I'd kick around a few ideas about its possible antecedents. I see online video as a combination of online social networking (which has roots in social network theory in general) and film/TV (so film theory of all types might be useful). Some users treat it like TV: passively watching hour after hour of viral vids or, if you're more creative, generating episodes of the webshow that you hope will launch your career in showbiz. Others use it as a way to interact with people, either by making videos or frequently commenting on others' videos. I'd suspect that most users use it as some combination of both.

Let's start with the social network side of things. I'm interested in why some social networks get popular and others don't. The allure of social networks, as I see it, is the ability to make contact with other users. The network host, be it Facebook, MySpace, Virtual Laguna Beach, or what have you, is just a venue that has some special characteristic (an incentive) that draws in some people. If those people are cool and plentiful enough, other people will come to socialize with them. Maybe that incentive is brand association. Maybe its some new way of interacting with people (an easy way to check up on what you're friends are doing, or a way of sharing photos or playing games with friends). Maybe the network is a hub for people to exchange valuable information about stuff like Yahoo.answers.

Social networks can make money in several ways. They can promote an existing product. If, say, Jergens were to have a forum on which members could discuss the finer points of makeup, the venue itself (along with plenty of banner ads, I'm sure) would act to promote the real-world product, and members would tolerate that as long as they were getting useful info and the pleasure of interaction with other members. Maybe Bud.tv is an example for the online video world: its centered around a product, the videos act as entertainment to get people there, and the socializing with other members keeps them there. Its not truly "user-generated," as the shows are produced in-house, but still, there's a community centered around a product.

Social networks could also sell adspace to all sorts of different products. When I think of video sties, I think of collegehumor.com, or YouTube for that matter. But more broadly, we could think of the current incarnation of Facebook or perhaps MySpace (though MySpace tends to advertise only the properties that its parent company, NewsCorp, produces). People come for the socializing, they stay for the advertising.

But here's the key distinction between a Bud.tv and a Facebook. One started out as an obvious attempt by a large corporation to sell its wares while the other started out as a small-scale ad-free social network designed to connect people. What I'm getting at is that the trend setters that advertisers covet probably won't go to a site that they see as corporate in order to socialize with other trend setters. They'll only go to small start-ups like the Facebook of 2004 or the YouTube of 2005. Facebook and YouTube needed some sort of innovation or entertainment to lure people there in the first place, but they don't have to overcome the "lame factor" that corporate sites like Bud.tv have to overcome. Bud.tv, or the hypothetical Jergen's forum, have to have an incentive that is that much more appealing to the public (specifically the trend-setters in each demographic) in order to lure them there.

So if you're a big corporation, you can either create some sort of appealing innovation or content to lure the trend-setters (and once they're there, try not to be too pushy about your product, less you scare them off), you can advertise on someone else's social networking site, OR you can acquire a fledgling social network. If you do this too early on in the life of the fledgling site, trend-setters will probably jump ship and your site will be sunk. But if you wait long enough, there will be so many people on the site and so much momentum that they won't jump ship just because the site is now owned by Viacom. You'd really have to fuck with the site to get enough people to leave to make a difference.

So the cycle goes like this:

• Some undergrad invents some new application and starts a site.
  
• Trend-setters flock to the site and start networking.
• Undergrad sells site to larger company, resulting in some attrition.
• Larger company sells ad space, makes millions.

There are an endless number of applications that could act as draws for those trend-setters. But I think whether you're an undergrad or NewsCorp, you've got to offer people some new way of interacting. You can't just give them content and expect a community to form around that, unless its ridiculously convoluted content that millions of people love to talk about (see Lost).

I really think that what people think of the companies that own and advertise on these sites will determine their success. Corporate image acts as a discount, meaning that users will go to the site with the coolest people, the most innovative applications, and the best content, but if any of those are really that much better than another site that isn't owned by NewsCorp, then they'll go to the other site. For this reason, big corporations can acquire social networks late in the game (MySpace) but they can't start them up.