A paean to cassettes

While leafing through the book "mix tape: the art of cassette culture", which was recently given to me as a gift from a good friend, I got to thinking about how I came of age at a time when cassette tapes were the dominant mode of conveying music, and a time when VHS cassettes were the dominant medium through which video was disseminated. But the big innovation that came with cassettes - both audio and video - was that you could record on them. They were, to my knowledge, the first widespread medium for recording audio and video.

The other widespread recording medium that was already established was photography. But you typically took pictures of other things or other people, not pictures of existing artistic products (though, I suppose, plenty of people took pictures of paintings, causing some crisis regarding the value we place in an image). Of course, the influence of technologies that allow people to reproduce or copy art on the value of art has been thoroughly explored (probably beat into the ground at this point). I suppose I'm less interested in the ways cassettes allowed people to copy music and video and more interested in the ways in which it facilitated the re-purposing of existing work.

It wasn't radical re-purposing in most cases. It wasn't like we were using Photoshop to create some sophisticated blending of images, or using some audio editing software to create a unique mash-up. We were just putting songs next to other songs on a mix tape, or an episode of Late Night with David Letterman next to an episode of Square One. The juxtaposition still creates something unique, but the way in which it changes the meaning or mood of the listening/viewing experience is more subtle than the total reconfiguration that digital tools facilitate.

The other defining characteristic of that era, to me, only becomes apparent in retrospect: we couldn't disseminate the thing we created very widely. That is the difference between the mix tape and the Playlist on ITunes, Spotify, or YouTube. The mix tape was like a private joke, only intended to be relevant to certain people at a certain time and place, which makes it seem more intimate as I remember it. It makes me wonder about various kinds of hyper-local, hyper-personal social media like Yik Yak and Snapchat that have arisen in the wake of broadcasting social media like Twitter. Will the teens of today look back wistfully on the Snaps or Yaks they sent one another in the same way that I look back on mix tapes I made and received, and those cobbled-together VHS cassettes containing whatever I found funny in 1995?

Of course, the difference is that Snaps and Yaks are also intentionally ephemeral while cassettes were intended to preserve. Also, cassettes were intimate in that they were meant to be shared with one other person, or a small group, but they were comprised of elements from popular culture, which kept them from being too intimate or personal (though when I think back to some of the mix tapes I made for others, they do seem as embarrassingly soul-baring as an ill-conceived Yak). There wasn't even the possibility that the cassette mix would ever leak out into the wider public and impress anyone other than its intended audience of one or a few intimates.

With cassettes, we had a kind of circumscribed freedom to play around with the music and video that informed who we were and who we were becoming. Obviously, home recordings are worth preserving - the home videos and, though there aren't very many, the home audio recordings we made when we were young. But the mix tapes and the VHS tapes of TV shows seem to me to be more indicative of that time, more unique because of their limitations.

Hoaxed

A couple of viral stories, or memes, circulating through the information ecosystem over the past month got me thinking about hoaxes and viral media. They're both stories about interactions between strangers. They have the elements of any good story: conflict, a moral element, a character with whom you can identify. They both incorporate pictures of written documents which have the effect of serving as proof of the events (they make the stories slightly more believable than if there were no pictures at all). One took place on an airplane. The other took place in a restaurant. They both turned out to be hoaxes. Many people, including major news outlets, believed them at first.

My initial thoughts on hoaxes and new media revolved around the premise that hoaxes happen when any information dissemination technology is new. They expose the fact that we have placed too much trust in the new source of information. Think of War of the Worlds Halloween broadcast (radio), the quiz show scandals of the 50's (TV), Lonelygirl15 (online video), Manti T'eo (online dating). Whether intended or not, hoaxes help audiences or users develop a proper skepticism toward information from the new technology.

But this latest rash of hoaxes seem like something else. This just seems to be par for the course in the era of decentralized, virally spreading information. It's easy to create and spread a hoax online and an audience can only be so skeptical. This kind of hoaxing and unmasking happens a lot on Reddit. People pretend to have cancer, or make up a story around a photo, e.g., "my 5-year-old daughter made this" in order to garner greater attention or sympathy. As good as digital media is at spreading lies, it seems equally equipped to unmask them. Crowd-sourced Sherlocks put pieces of evidence together to determine the truth of any of these stories.

The situation raises a couple of questions:

Can an online information consumer really spend the energy being that skeptical about all the information he/she encounters online, all of the stories like this one? The signal-to-noise ratio isn't quite so low that people will stop believing certain sources, but that could happen. But with a site like Gawker, I'm not convinced the average reader, after having read a fake story on the site, would be any less likely to believe or go to the site for information. But perhaps that is because Gawker readers seek a certain kind of information, which leads me to my next question.

Does it really matter if stories like these turn out to be untrue? Does that erase all of the meaning? It matters if a story about an attack on the White House turns out to be fake. But these morality play stories go viral in part because they spark a conversation about morals and behavior. The conversation and the thoughts shared about the topic still seem valid to me. Perhaps there is news and there is gossip. Both serve a function, and with the latter, we're more tolerant of the occasional falsehood.

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After listening to an excellent podcast in which Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, and Chris Connelly discussed what we know about the Kennedy assassination 50 years after it occurred, I had another question related to truth and lies in the digital age: are we, in general, developing a more complete understanding of the world around us, or are we somehow moving further away from that? We have better tools for recording, seeing, hearing, and analyzing. We should be better at answering questions about what happened. But those tools developed at the same time as the hoax-spreading machine known as the internet.

There is some theoretically knowable answer to the question of who killed Kennedy and why. But information and knowledge do not move in tandem. William Gibson once said that the future is here, but that it was just unevenly distributed. Maybe knowledge of the world around us is like this. Those with a certain orientation to the technology are moving closer to this knowledge while others move further away.

Post script: There was an interesting article on the Reuters blog about this topic. It features quotes from Jonah Perretti (BuzzFeed) and Nick Denton (Gawker) and is definitely worth reading. Here's a terrific quote from it: "the reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true." The article acknowledges the two types of information circulating - news and info that let's people feeling "fleeting instances of comfort or joy" that are more difficult to verify. But even if you're dealing in the latter, if you repeatedly pass on stories that draw some of their appeal from being real (and let's face it: these little gossipy stories make for sub-par fiction) that turn out to be untrue, you become like the friend who's always telling tall tales and loses all credibility. Not as bad as the news organization that loses credibility, but still, I think people will seek out reliably true "gossip"-type news, shunning sources that get repeatedly duped.

Choose your metaphors wisely

The term "digital detox" is now in the Oxford English Dictionary. This suggests a certain cultural awareness of the concept of media overuse which, to someone studying self-control and media use, is heartening. But I wonder about the choice of words.

"Detox"'s meaning, recently, related to food consumption, or the lack thereof. When you traded in the fast food for celery and refrained from consuming anything but tea, you were "detoxing", or "cleansing". But, of course, the term detox originally achieved notoriety when it was used in reference to addictive drugs like heroin. When I think of the term, I still think of it in terms of drugs.

Even beyond that single term, we are apt to think of new experiences in terms of older, more familiar ones. More and more, I hear people talk of Facebook or Candy Crush "addiction" which, again, conjures thoughts of hopeless alcoholics or strung-out meth-heads. Perhaps, in our effort to blame anyone but ourselves for the fact that we're unable to eschew immediately gratifying options for activities that will help us achieve our long-term goals, we want to trump up the power of our indulgences, and we do this by likening our habits to the almost-literally-irresistible urge of the crack addict to smoke more crack.

If we have to understand our new experiences with habitual digital media use in terms of older experiences (and, as much as people love to bad-mouth metaphors as some sort of crutch that keeps us from seeing new things as they truly are, I think this is the only way anything new can be understood at all, at least at first), then food and dieting would probably be a better metaphor than drugs.

Information (that is, the content of all media, digital or otherwise) is like food (and unlike, say, cocaine): we need it to survive. You can't really say no to media any more than you can say no to food. Getting too much of it is bad, but not nearly as bad as injecting large doses of certain drugs. Many more people struggle with tempting foods than with tempting drugs, and I think media over-use and habitual media use should be understood as things that are as common and as benign as bad eating habits, not as rare and harmful as drug addiction.

As time goes on, we'll understand our relationship with digital media on its own terms. But until then, its important to at least consider how our comparisons to other experiences (both in thought and language) affect our perception of threats and responsibilities.

Do you have a Candy Crush Habit or a Candy Crush Addiction?

Most of my recent research concerns media habits and/or what you might call "unconscious" media use. These are the times when we open up a tab on our web browsers and go to a website without thinking too deeply about why we're doing this or considering the long-term value of such an act. Over time, such behavior become habits, and habits can be hard to break. It seems that if habits are sufficiently difficult to break, we call them addictions.

But I, like many others in the field of psychology, am not too keen on applying the term "addiction" to habitual media use. Why not? If you're playing Candy Crush Saga five hours a day and you feel unable to stop playing, what is the difference if we call this a bad habit or an addiction?

Well, I suppose it has to do with how our culture currently understands addiction. We treat it as a disease that requires professional intervention. We assume, as is the case with most diseases, that the afflicted is not responsible for their affliction and that it is unlikely that they can get better on their own. They need help. This diagnosis is well-meaning in the sense that when people are going through something bad (and the feeling of being unable to stop doing something is usually bad) it would be worse to heap the extra guilt that comes with responsibility for their current condition (and for altering the condition) on top of their existing troubles. In addition, professionals have years of experience dealing with addictions and decades of research to help develop systems for fighting addiction.

But there's something that's lost: the individual's sense of self-efficacy, the sense that they can do something about the behavior. In some cases, it's possible that self-efficacy can be an important part of altering habitual/addictive behavior, that the individual finding a way to change their behavior is more effective and efficient than sending all of those individuals to professionals and/or through a series of institutions.

As more people find themselves with habits/addictions to games like Candy Crush, it's important to address the following questions: What role does self-efficacy play in breaking habits? If we call the habit an addiction, does this diagnosis reduce the person's sense of self-efficacy thereby making it harder (or perhaps more expensive) to quit?

This isn't to say that simply labeling this kind of behavior as "habits" isn't without drawbacks. People may not take the threat that their behavior poses as seriously if they call it a habit (most of us have bad habits, after all). Even when we do call the behavior addiction, we're increasingly liberal in our use of that term which waters it down (much like the term "stalking", which is used in a casual, everyday sense).

So, whether we call this kind of behavior "addiction", I think, is not just a matter of semantics. It is possible that diagnosis affects self-efficacy, which affects likelihood of behavior change. Whether you call it addiction or habit, the end game should be the same: understanding how people stop doing things that they, at first, feel they are unable to stop doing. But it's important to recognize the role of words and diagnoses in that process.

Contemplating Life Without Television

The transition from analog to digital television has me thinking about turning off my TV for good. That's not to say that I'm one of these anti-TV people who thinks that it rots brains and has nothing but stupid content. I just think that we're closer than ever before to having a service that could be substituted for television, namely the internet.

In order to be substitutable, using the Internet has to feel like watching television. It has to be able to create the same affect, that same sense of relaxation, of passivity. That was never the Internet's forte, but as online video sites proliferate, acquire more quality content, and become easier to use, it becomes increasingly clear that, with a few more tweaks, it could become just like television.

The closest things so far that I've seen are Joost and Hulu, mostly b/c they make available the same content that is available on television and their interfaces are very easy to use. Still, the interface needs to be even easier. To me, bookmarked webpages are the equivalent of channels on television. With one click, I can get to a new site with (hopefully) new content. The fact that its one click, that there only has to be one choice made, is crucial to the "channel surfing" experience of watching television. I suppose the creators of the site and sites like it want the entire site to function as the frame of a reduced-choice experience similar to channel-surfing while watching television, but the choice isn't reduced enough. When I go to Hulu, I am overwhelmed with choice. Different programs, movies, genres, producers, the ability to search for actors. Type "Tom Cruise" into their search engine and you get 229 professionally (or semi-professionally) produced clips. Some of them are clips of interviews, others are parodies, others are comic commentary about Cruise, others are web series that riff on Cruise. This is all great, and we can crow about the limitless choice online video gives us relative to that of television, but this isn't necessarily desirable. I think online video takes advantage of the limitless bandwidth/shelfspace of the internet to create a new entertainment experience for viewers, but if it really wants to take a bite out of TV revenue, it needs to offer less choice.

Here's the thing: when I turn on the TV, I have only the vaguest hint of a knowledge of what I want. This is a hard thing to admit. We often define our selves by what we desire, at a given moment or over the courses of our lives. But I certainly get the feeling that sometimes, we just want to provide a general frame for a trusted entertainer or medium to try to entertain us. It is the vagueness of this frame that defines the reduced-choice, passive experience of watching television. I go to ESPN to see if there are any games on, but if I flip by Turner Classics and they're playing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I'll stop there for a bit. I'll check the news to see if they're doing anything Obama related and to make sure the world hasn't ended, and on my way maybe I'll see a particular part of a Seinfeld episode that I feel like re-watching. I don't doubt that all of these texts will be available a la carte online. But my aforementioned television watching experience is greater (or at least different) than the sum of its parts. I didn't know what genre I wanted. You could accurately tag very show with an emotion and I still wouldn't be able to fulfill the desire that channel-surfing fulfills. Sometimes, we don't know exactly what we want (however, we do know that we don't want most commercials. Most channel surfing is caused by commercial breaks. That shit just gets in the way, and it makes television-watching less competitive in the entertainment experience marketplace, but that's another rant for another time).

Maybe that desire is dangerous and irresponsible. Maybe that desire for less choice makes us more easily controlled. But its a real desire, the desire to be passively entertained for a period of time, and television did not invent it. It is more likely that television, with its limited number of options for content, cultivated a kind of passive close-mindedness, a pathological desire to cede control more and more often to anyone or anything. It is possible that a person who watches 6 hours of television a day and doesn't use the internet has been trained to be more passive than someone who uses the internet for 6 hours a day. Still, I think the choice between television and the internet for entertainment and information (and the choice between real life interaction and online interaction for social fulfillment) prompt us to reconsider our notions of desire, choice, passivity/interactivity, and identity.

Any given site could easily recreate the experience of watching TV. The best I've encounter so far are sites or parts of sites that generate rapidly rotating lists of popular articles or links to other sites. There's always new content and its managed to pass muster with a fair amount of like-minded people at a given moment in time. Maybe the choices aren't as mood or genre-diverse as those on television, but they could be (and, with the careful eye of a good editor, they would be). Either that, or the site itself just gives me something, straight up, no choice. When I go to icanhascheezburger.com, I know what I'm getting. I go to I Can Has Cheeseburger, have a laugh at some cats for 5 minutes, and then I'm on to the next site, done w/ it for the day. However, there is no site can provide as much new quality content as a TV station, unless its some high-profile producer that's probably already on TV.

The point is, more sites need to be more forceful in telling the audience what it wants. They need to reduce choice. A site or suite of sites or some content aggregators could kill TV. All you'd need would be a laptop-to-TV cable so you could watch on your couch.

BTW, great article on Slate on this topic. "Passivity is television's main feature; we love it precisely because it asks so little of us"