Sports, Controversy, and the Court of Public Opinion in the Digital Age

As a fan of the New England Patriots, I feel compelled to think about (if not to speak about) the current kerfuffle regarding improperly inflated footballs. From what I gather, it is the general consensus that the footballs that the Patriots were playing with were not properly inflated, and that this gives the team an unfair advantage (hence, the existence of official rules regarding the proper inflation of footballs). It is not known (or not agreed upon, anyway) who, if anyone, is responsible for the fact that the footballs were not properly inflated. If the coach or the quarterback were aware of this or caused it, then that would be a big problem for the team. If it was an equipment manager who was responsible for the misdeed, that would be a much smaller problem.

I am well aware of the way in which my fandom biases everything I might think or say on the matter. So it seems uninteresting to offer any opinion regarding the guilt of the parties involved. But the whole incident did cause me to reflect on the nature of controversies and how we, the public, judge whether or not someone is guilty based on information we received through the media. I'll offer three factors which play a role in this process. Note that none of these three factors has anything to do with determining what actually happened. That is, they should not matter, but they do.

1. Having something that is easy to make silly jokes about changes the tenor of the conversation about the controversy. In this case, we have the word "balls" and sentences describing how "balls are perfect". Even if this incident did involve a breach of rules which compromises the integrity of the game (which I would take to be a relatively serious thing), the fact that people keep saying "balls" keeps it from being very serious. Comedians have a field day with it, as does meme culture on the Internet, which tends to silly-fy everything. This got me thinking about news events in general and how the presence of any potentially silly element can change public perception of an issue. Let's say someone tried to assassinate a head of state and the assassin shot him/her in the leg. Now imagine that the assassin shot him/her in the ass. In the first case, the public's discussion would contain little if any humor. In the second case, it would probably contain a lot of humor, leading people to take the whole thing a bit less seriously. I have to wonder how the discussion around something as deadly serious as Eric Garner's homicide would have been different if his name was Ha Ha Clinton-Dix.

2. Breaking the rules matters more when it may have affected the outcome of something. Most people (Pats fan or not) seem to agree that the improper inflation of the footballs did not cause the Patriots to win the game in question (which the Pats won 45-7). I seem to recall reading somewhere that the improperly inflated footballs were swapped out for properly inflated ones at halftime. After halftime, the Pats continued to dominate the other team. The circumstances under which cheating takes place shouldn't matter when judging guilt, but in the court of public opinion, they clearly do. And it certainly matters when you discuss proper punishments. To punish the Patriots by banning them from the Super Bowl would seem a bit much, given the fact that no one argues that they would have achieved that goal regardless of the inflation status of the football. But imagine if the same controversy had occurred in the other conference final playoff game, which went into overtime and hinged on a handful of key plays. Any minor change to the catchability of a football could have easily swayed the outcome of that game. The tenor of the discussion, again, would be more serious if the circumstances were different.

3. We live in an era of amateur forensic detectives. This, to me, is the most interesting thing to reflect on, and to consider how it may apply not only to this incident, but to all kinds of controversies in the era of digital media. My hunch is the increase in the ease with which we can record things and spread them around the world instantly has given people the expectation that if something occurred, they should be able to see visual evidence of it. They should not have to rely on the word of others, or trust in larger organizations, to determine the truth. Consider other recent sports controversies: L.A. Clippers' racist owner Donald Sterling was caught on tape saying racist things; Ray Rice was caught on tape punching his fiance. The presence or absence of this kind of evidence does not determine whether or not someone did something wrong, nor does it necessarily determine whether the person will be punished either by their employer or by the law. It does, however, play a huge role in determining whether the public feels that you are guilty and, again, affects the tenor of the discussion. When visual evidence is absent, as is the case with the Patriots' purposely deflating footballs (at least as of 1/25/15), then people are less willing to assume guilt. This expectation of visual evidence has troubling consequences for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. By their very nature, these acts occur in private and are not recorded easily (while virtually everything that takes place in public is recorded, whether we like it or not). Our waning trust in authorities coincides with our need (and our ability) to "see for ourselves". We need to at least see the evidence, even if we can't agree on how to interpret it.

We do love a good controversy, and there is clearly an agenda setting effect present in this case, whereby ESPN analysts spend lots of time discussing this aspect of the sport and the Internet follows (though I wonder about the backlash against ESPN's tendency to beat a dead horse, as seemed to happen when Tim Tebow became popular). So it is unlikely that we will stop talking about improperly inflated footballs until after the Super Bowl. But I'm interested to see how the tenor of the discussion plays out.

Memes: Not really an in-joke anymore

One of my favorite parts about teaching Media Literacy is hearing/reading about what media my students use, what content they enjoy, and how that compares to the experiences of me and my peers. As someone who is roughly twice their age, I don't really expect that we will engage in many of the same types of media experiences. Just as my teachers would make stilted references to M.C. Hammer in order to garner a laugh, I made a reference to Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools (... ... drank!) and got a hearty chuckle from the kids. We're in different age cohorts, different life cycles, and we're living in an increasingly fragmented media environment. What could we possibly have in common?

This makes it all the more surprising when I discover that many of them are encountering the same memes as I am. In some cases, we're on the same website, but in others, we're on different sites (or highly personalized versions of the same site, like Twitter and Facebook) that are increasingly comprised of viral jokes that often re-purpose amateur or professional media content in order to comment  on current events or a relatable situation (i.e., memes). Do we watch the same TV shows? No. In fact, I'm willing to bet more students in my classes have the media experience of seeing a Sweet Brown meme in common than will watch the Super Bowl, the Grammys, or the Oscars. Supposedly, these water-cooler TV events would remain a common cultural touchstone, and they likely will be the one thing (along with some big movies) that cut across age groups. But there is something going on with memes that is interesting. They're often originating from relatively tiny communities or obscure sources well outside of the mainstream, but they become the references that my students and I both have in common. If I include a reference to Mad Men in my slides, I'll get blank stares, but a picture of Grumpy Cat gets them laughing every time.

The first thing that occurs to me about this is that at least for certain populations (young people?), media users may not need TV and celebrities as a subject of common experience and conversation, at least to the extent that previous generations did. I think the use of memes is partially substituting for the use of TV and celebrities as a way to joke about norms, blow off steam, bond, etc. Based on my casual observations, I'd say that music and musicians as personalities are just as central to these young people as they were to me and my parents when they were that age. But TV and celebrities? I'm not so sure.

This isn't to say that TV and celebs are going away, but that they may not be as essential to leisure media use as they once were. Perhaps TV has already started to adapt to this, although the meteoric rise of memes to this stage in which they are something that my students and I have in common seems to have happened so suddenly that I doubt anybody has had time to adjust. Like the TV content that serves/served as our common cultural reference point, these memes, ultimately, only serve as a vehicle for advertisers and websites to build audiences to sell stuff to. But the professional content producers have been cut out of the equation. Just how much time is spent creating, consuming, and distributing memes? And if more time is spent re-purposing and creating amateur content, regardless of how solipsistic and retrograde its humor may be, isn't this something worth celebrating?

Is vlogging a female medium?

Something in an interview with cewebrity Magibon on Know Your Meme got me thinking: are there more female vloggers than male ones, and if this is so, why might that be? Magibon says that in Japan, most males do not go on video and, if they do, they do not show their faces. In my casual perusal of home-made videos from Japan on YouTube, I've found this to be true, and it wouldn't surprise me if this were true in the US as well.

Why might a gender difference exist in online self-expression? First off, a disclaimer: any difference we might observe is as or more likely to be a product of cultural expectations of gender roles than it is to be a product of some inherent difference between the sexes. Having said that, its possible that young females believe they can gain status by gaining attention, and one way to gain attention is to use their looks. Perhaps many males, here and abroad, do not enter this entertainment arena because, traditionally, males do not derive their cultural worth from showcasing their looks to the extent that females do. Perhaps males fear some sort of permanent tarnishing of their professional image. Perhaps they fear that employers won't take them seriously when they find their rather silly video blog. Young females, not having as much to lose in the traditional professional world (or at least not anticipating that they will when they get older) jump right in and start vlogging.

The result is a medium dominated by female producers, but is this media created for a female audience? Probably not as much as, say, the female blogging community. Take the looks out of the picture and, I would imagine, you take away a good sized portion of the young male audience. Its worth re-thinking how we identify authorship for YouTube and vlogging. Are females really empowered when they have to cater to a male audience (a young, hetero male audience fixated on looks)? Then there are those wildly popular make-up tutorial videos created by women for women. Even when both the audience and the creators are women, it seems to be ultimately geared toward pleasing men (albeit indirectly). This just doesn't seem to be true of the female blogosphere, and I think most of it has to do with looks.

Magibon made it seem as though males "can't compete" with females in the user-generated video arena, that it would, in some sense, come to be dominated by women. But how dominant are these young women?

Giving Dominic The Business: coincidences or memes?

My family and I have a running debate over what constitutes a coincidence. Basically, they believe in them and I don't. I think that most (if not all) coincidences are neither random nor signs of some mystical grand design, but are indicative of logical patterns that scientists haven't yet perceived. Coincidences precede science. They're patterns without any meaning, but instead of just accepting that lack of meaning, that randomness, we can start to speculate as to what the meaning behind the pattern might be.

The most recent couple of "coincidences" involved concepts (e.g. a song and a phrase) that hadn't been heard of at all and then were suddenly heard twice or more in a matter of days. The first was "Dominic the Christmas Donkey," a song I hadn't heard of until last week when a couple of my friends played it on a YouTube video, insisting that the song had been around for awhile, acting shocked when I told them I'd never even heard of it. Then, days later, another one of my friends told me she had the same experience: never heard of Dominic, and then suddenly heard people talking about it as if it had been around forever. As Wikipedia indicates, the song has had a 47 year history in and out of the limelight, revived and forgotten in ways that will probably be more common thanks to YouTube and such.

The second coincidence involved these videos of football referees using the obscure (and hilarious) phrase "giving him the business." As the poster of the second video writes, the phrase is so uncommon that it seems likely that the second ref was making an homage of sorts to the first ref. I had sent a link to the video to my father and we'd talked about the origin of that phrase and whether or not it was ever popular, and one day later, his colleague used that phrase in a conversation.

Both Dominic & "giving him the business" didn't conform to our notions of how ideas, phrases, songs, whatever spread through a culture. We're used to ideas spreading gradually through opinion leaders who seem to be up on every new trend or through major media hubs. But it occurred to me that the internet has changed the ways we encounter ideas. First off, they tend to travel through major media hubs (e.g. NYTimes, CNN) at later points in their life cycle. Had I seen a news story on CNN about Dominic the Christmas Donkey and then several people I knew started humming it, I would've been less surprised. Secondly, the path that ideas take are an amalgam of like-minded members of the same offline social network and disparate people who happen upon the same news aggregation site or obscure blog. In the case of "the business," neither my father nor his colleague are likely to go to YouTube, but its conceivable that people they know (e.g. their technology addicted offspring) would go to such a site and draw their attention to a humorous phrase they noticed on it. Its that new combination of online and offline networks that memes move along that make the speed and direction in which they spread seem random.

We wouldn't say that its a coincidence that many blogs are writing about the same thing because we accept that kind of viral spread of information online. But when it starts popping up in the real world, we evaluate it in terms of the ways information spreads in the real world between real people, and that's where we're wrong. If five people you know suddenly start humming a song that you hadn't heard of before, you would assume they were all reading the same blog or watching the same TV show, when in actuality, they might've gotten the tune from 5 different (but tangentially linked) sources. Because people are nodes on a network, the ideas they have (about everything from Christmas songs to terrorism to sex) change at a faster rate and appear to be synced up with other people's ideas in a way that appears to violate the "physics of ideas" that we've become so used to.

The Coming Era of Visual Storytelling: Building to Last

I've been kicking around the idea of applying meme-tracking to the study of the proliferation of certain stylistic and narrative elements in movies, TV shows, and online video. Also, I'd like to track the popularity of individual texts.

The first step would be to log which movies, shows, videos had certain elements (non-linear plotting, infidelity, a female protagonist, dense information within scenes, intricately woven subplots) or were of a certain genre. The second step would be to track the popularity of a text or an element within texts over the course of many years. Step 3 would involve making some falsifiable hypotheses that would be supported or debunked by the data.

Let's go ahead and skip to step 3. Some films have stuck around. Others haven't. Now that we've started to make more and more films and TV shows available on DVD (and soon online), I think its worth asking why it is this way. Perhaps critics cause films and TV shows to stick around by drawing the public's attention to them, or perhaps some inherent quality of the texts caused them to stick around and the critics merely recognize these characteristics. Of course, the elements themselves might not matter as much as the frequency with which they change. We might be able to see more clearly the degree of variety and familiarity that is demanded by the public.

I don't think we can really say at this point whether either of these are true because until relatively recently, films and then TV shows were seen as a transient medium. Their economic and cultural value were temporary. They had expiration dates. Just within the past few years, with the expanding inexpensive and accessible libraries of motion picture texts on DVD (soon to be online), we're getting our first glimpse of what texts are still valued by the general public well after their release. To some degree, this happened with books, but even there, some amount of capital was required to take the book into a 2nd, 3rd, 4th printing.

And here we get to the "so what" of it: people (especially vendors and owners of texts) never really cared about what separated a classic text from a temporarily successful text because it didn't matter, economically speaking. If a film, TV show, or book were popular within the first year of its release, then it would get syndicated, or re-released, or go to a second printing. All texts (except maybe oral legends) cost money to keep going, and the best way to get that money was to make it popular right away. Any text's initial popularity is a reflection of its immediate relevancy as well the strength of the promotional campaign behind it, NOT qualities which might make it of value to people living in a different culture (either on another continent or in another era). Stories weren't built to last because it wasn't in the producer/distributor/ owner's best interest.

We trundled along, mixing advertising (time-sensitive messages that are intended to distract) with storytelling, for the better part of a century. Given the available technology and the high cost of storage and distribution, this made economic sense. But now things change. With the dramatic fall in storage and distribution cost, it is significantly cheaper to keep an old title selling than to produce a new one. For the first time in the history of commercial storytelling, the economic emphasis should be on creating a lasting product.

In terms of examining culture, its always been important to ask what makes classic stories so enduring and universal. Culture (particularly storytelling) has been yoked to commerce for so long that the only studies of storytelling that were read widely and mattered to those outside the academy were ones that pertained to stories that produced profit. Now, the study of the classic story can get that outside momentum behind it.

So, what makes a classic story? Joseph Campbell's pretty much got this covered, but to speak about it in more practical and exact terms, I'd love to examine the films and TV shows that have been produced so far.

A few testable hypotheses:

1. So-called "body genres" (porn, horror, and melodrama) are somewhat similar in narrative structure (simple, unvarying), and popularity arc (steep drop off after a brief period of time).
2. Films and TV shows that are unified and complex (in terms of the threads of the narrative) are likely to have a less steep drop off in their popularity arc than films and TV shows with simpler narratives. In terms of commerce, these stories have a longer "shelf life" than others assuming the appeal of all other things - the timeliness/timelessness of the themes and content, the acting style, and other elements that may go in and out of fashion - is equal.
   
3. Certain critics, over the years, have been more adept at picking movies that did poorly initially but sold well later and continue to sell well decades since its initial release than others. There's a problem of causality here - did the critic's praise result in higher ticket sales, or was the inherent superiority of the story responsible, and the critic's and public's reaction merely an inevitable result of those qualities?
   

My hope is that we can get past the rather defensive stance that all genres, subject matters, and styles are equal. When theorists use this term (or imply that it is the case by rescuing oft-overlook and maligned genres like the aforementioned body genres), its a value judgment - a soap is no worse or less important than a highly rated, critically acclaimed prime time show like Seinfeld; a forgotten B film from the 50's is no less important than a Hitchcock film. OK, fine. Though they can be considered equal, different types of films, shows, and videos are not the same in terms of their style and content (rather obviously, since that is what is typically used to tell them apart) as well as (less obviously) their "patterns of popularity": how quickly they fade from the public's consciousness, how often they return to it.

Then there are those movies, TV shows, and especially songs that weren't all that popular to begin with, then sank under the radar for years, maybe decades, only to resurface later. When you dig one of these long forgotten texts up, you feel this proprietary need to defend it. It feels rare. But maybe we can set this personal passion aside and look at things with some distance. Of course, the existing history of visual storytelling is tainted for the reasons I mentioned (lasting popularity relied on initial popularity in a way it doesn't have to anymore), but if we correct for things like differences in advertising budget and pay special attention to the texts and characteristics that weren't so popular initially but stuck around and grew in stature over the years, then we might begin to understand the qualities that make a visual story a classic.