The Problem with False Consciousness (and false desire and false choice)

There is a strain, one might say a dominant strain, of cultural theory (derived from Marxist theory) that claims that individuals immersed in a culture, exposed to certain information via media while other information is kept from them, are unable to know the truth about how the world works and thus make decisions that are not in their collective or individual best interests but rather in the best interests of those in control of the information flow. On the face of it, the theory of false consciousness seems possible, even likely. But here's the rub: the theory itself is just another way of looking at the world supplied and supported by individuals with interests of their own, some of which run counter to those of people reading about the theory. It is possible that those who are exposing others as having pulled the wool over our collective eyes are, in fact, pulling a different kind of wool over our eyes. The new illusion of "seeing the world as it really is" is all the more convincing given that the revelatory nature of the theory. How do we know it is not another illusion, one more pernicious than the last? We don't, and most cultural theory provides little evidence to suggest one way or the other whether it is just another bias looked at human nature. Are we naturally competitive or naturally cooperative? Are corporations and advertisers in charge of telling us what to desire, or are charismatic leaders/writer/artists the ones pulling the strings?

I like to use two movies from 1999 as convenient illustrations of false consciousness and (if you'll pardon the unwieldy double negative) false false consciousness. The Matrix is a classic good v. evil story of false consciousness. A handful of good guys need to clue everyone else into the fact that they are not acting in their own best interests, but are rather part of an elaborate illusion that serves the interests of a controlling "other." Fight Club issues a similar indictment of mainstream culture, albeit in a less metaphorical more literal manner. However, the bunch of rag-tag rebels that fight The Man inevitably coalesce around a charismatic leader who, as it turns out, is insane. Group-think develops, critical thinking goes out the window, and the group of rebels is even more lost than when it began. I am heartened by the fact that popular cinema can still address (and prompt audience members to debate and think through) important socio-politico-philosophical issues of the day. Just in terms of acting as teaching tools, these movies can liven up a dreary classroom discussion about free will and hegemony.

As valuable as fiction is in helping us understand our socio-political reality, it can only take us so far. In order to really understand things, we need evidence. Most of the crit/cult theory I've read cites cherry-picked instances of people deprived of infinite choice and freedom and/or maintaining a subsistence level of wealth while those in power stay in power via hegemonic, patriarchal culture. The tacit assumptions are that: information desemination - in the form of popular culture, education, and other cultural institutions such as church, the government, or news agencies - is part of the root cause of power imbalances and that the world could be otherwise (i.e. equality is possible given human nature).

In order to further interrogate the line of reasoning behind false consciousness, let's take an ordinary claim. Let's say you think someone who just spent $5,000 on a new paint job for his car but lacks the money to pay for his child's health care, college education, or nutritious diet has somehow been conditioned by culture to value some material goods (e.g. car paint jobs) over others (school, food, health). How can we, as theorists, step in and say that this person is no longer capable of making decisions for themselves? I suppose the crit/cult theorists also assumes that in the long term, the indiviual and the group that he or she is a part of will suffer. His child will be more likley to fall ill or earn less money w/o health care, a healthy diet, or better schooling. As a group, they will have less opportunities. They will live shorter, harder lives - something (and this is crucial) we can all agree is undesirable. If they only saw the connection between their consumption of culture and the long-term undesirable consequences, then they would alter their behavior, rise up against their oppressors, and alter culture.

In order for this to happen, you need to establish that some conditions are objectively undesirable. Is living a shorter life objectively undesirable? Not necessarily. Is being able to retire at an early age if one so chooses objectively desirable? Sure. Even if we reject the notion that a person's worth should be judged solely on their monetary worth, we can accept the fact that the systematic impoverishment of a people is undesirable. So then how do we draw a connection between certain behavior that may give pleasure in the short term (getting that $5,000 paint job) and long term displeasure (impoverishment) in a way that a) everyone can understand and b) does not elevate the theorist to the position of truth-teller?

You need to look for instances when people who hold one opinion about how the world (or some small part of it) works revise this opinion based on information presented to them. We have the dual opposing influences of authority (e.g. the news media, the scientific community, both of which were grossly mistaken about human nature in 1930's Germany) and upstart revolutionaries (which are at least equally likely to become corrupt by power and get things wrong - see The Great Leap Forward, an extension of what was, at the time, revolutionary thought). Charisma and authority go a long way to swaying people about big issues like human behavior and economy, but what about small, manageable issues like, say, the length of two lines?
Maybe this is a shitty example because we're all very familiar with the illusion. My point here is that we initially see that the lower line is longer than the top line. If, however, an authority were to come along and, before our very eyes, remove the diagonal lines at the end of each line, we would see, with our own eyes, that the lines are of equal length. Now, is this proof that the lines are of equal length? Absolutely not. You could get out your micrometer and say, "actually, the top line is shorter than the bottom one." But actual, physical reality isn't what concerns me (actually, I think it is indeterminate, but that's another blog entry). What I'm interested in are the patterns of people's behavior, specifically what precipitates a revision of worldview. In most cases, people will believe that the top line is shorter than the bottom one until you remove the diagonal lines, at which point they will think that they are of equal length.

This example reveals a different kind of false consciousness, a short-term false consciousness. It all happened in front of our eyes. We can acknowledge that we were mistaken. We thought our information about the situation was complete and accurate, but in retrospect, thanks to the revelation from the authority figure, we know that it was not.

Those of us studying culture, information, media and how it relates to freedom, happiness, well-being, and choice need to make the claims about false consciousness more like this. We need to make the connections between short-term pleasure and long-term displeasure more obvious, more indubitable. Impossible, you say? Bullocks! We've got exponentially more data about people's shifting desires than we have had in the past (and by "we" I mean the public, though if we're not careful, it might all end up in the hands of a fortunate few. That really would be hegemony).

Its a hard thing to acknowledge that we're not very good at predicting what will bring us long term pleasure, as individuals and as groups. When we're wrong, we look for scapegoats (The Man, the government, the media, etc), and sometimes we're right, but other times, we made bad decisions based on imperfect information about the connections between those decisions and long-term loss. How do you convince a person that his desire to get a $5,000 paint job was the result of a culture intent on keeping him down? You lay bare the mechanisms of culture, not in some vague way, but in a concrete, indubitable way that shows how all people (not just a gullible few) are capable of being misled when presented with certain kinds of information.

To that end, I'm proposing a new research project (featuring testable hypotheses): Is the abundance and restriction of media choice associated with a greater discrepancy between gratification sought and gratification perceived? You can argue with someone else's definition of gratification (for you, it might be having a big house; for someone else, it might be having a car with a sweet paint job), but you'd be hard pressed to find a person who would argue w/ their own definition of gratification.

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!

Uncertain entertainment

OK. I think I've got a dissertation topic: why we choose media.

I keep thinking that it has something to do with pleasure, but that we're not just hedonically motivated. Or that "pleasure," the end goal of hedonism, mutates and evolves in each of our lives so that to say that we are hedonically motivated tells us very little about why we choose certain experiences over others.

Let's take a concrete example. Today, I listened to a story from Stephen King's short story collection Just After Sunset. Why this story? Because I'd read/listen to other stories by that author and I'd enjoyed them immensely. Not only had I enjoyed them while I was listening to/reading them. I also would periodically recall emotions or ideas from the texts at various times, and that gave me pleasure and helped me cope w/ some rough patches. If we're to map out the decision making process that goes into choosing media, I think we need to take into account pleasure that comes well after actually experiencing the text. Hard to measure, but let's save the question of measurement for another time.

Anyway, based on past experience w/ other King stories, the low cost and availability of the story (free from my local library), my mood (more or less neutral, I just wanted to be transported while doing yard work, and if I got some insight into the human condition, so much the better), and the time available (I have lots, thanks to summer vacation). It was the wrong decision. At least for that one short story, I experienced pretty extreme displeasure. I experienced something that I'm sure many others have experienced: hating a media text but needing, masochistically, to finish the text, needing closure. Why was the text to unpleasurable? Because it conjured up unpleasant connections with my personal history. How could Stephen King know about that? He couldn't. But could I have known? That's an interesting question.

What do we know about a media experience before we spend time and money on it? When we re-watch movies, we know plenty, and sometimes, we experience great pleasure. Most times, we only have a rough idea of what to expect, based on author, genre, preview, or recommendation. We don't want to waste our time, but we want to be surprised. This requires a relinquishment or control, a trust in an author or authors that is paid for with our future attention. In this way, choosing to experience a media text is unlike so many other consumer decisions. I wouldn't want my car to surprise me. I wanted to know exactly what I was in for when I bought it. The same is true for every other consumer decision i can think of. The same isn't true for my experience with people. I wouldn't want to know utterly predictable people. Though they may bow to my every command, they would seem lifeless. So it is with media. We desire some unpredictability, some chance that what we experience may be undesirable.

I guess there's always the chance that one may be introduced to a new kind of pleasure, one that a consumer/user didn't even know they desired until they experienced it. The unknown experiences are fodder for our future desires and dislikes.

After choosing to listen to the King short story and hating it, I listened to a Radiolab podcast, and within the first 5 minutes, I experienced exactly what I wanted to experience. I was transported. I left my body. I also felt better about life and myself, if for a brief time (there, again, is the time issue. Is it better to experience a temporary boost in self-esteem than it is to get something embedded in your brain that will keep cropping up and putting things in perspective at later points in life? In a word, no. That's what makes great works of narrative so great. They stay in your head and pop up when you have various experiences. Hard to assess, but definitely a part of the worth of a mediated experience). I made a bad decision w/ the King, and a good decision w/ the Radiolab. What happened?

Part of it was a lack of information. If the King story came w/ a disclaimer that said, "Elliot Panek, this story will remind you of very specific instances in your life where you have failed, resulting in negative affect," well then I wouldn't have listened. That's a tall order for the media producer, but maybe, just maybe, some sort of information aggregator could keep track of certain things that were bound to trigger negative (or positive) affect for the user, screen the text for those things, and then give the user an idea of what he/she is in for. This would just be an extension, an elaboration of genre and its conventions. Totally doable given the pace of progress in IT.

Neither the media producer not the user wants too much of a chance of displeasure. They wouldn't want you to go elsewhere for media and you don't want to waste your time with displeasure. And yet some risk seems necessary. We seem to need to cede control, to some degree, at some times.

How curious it is that we spend time and money on something that might give us displeasure. Is this an acknowledgement of the quicksilver nature of human desire, or is this a failure of the media market to accurately inform the consumer whether or not the product is suited for a particular context? Obviously, its a large question, one hopefully fitting for a dissertation. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Celts play the Magic in game 1 of a playoff series. Sports is kind of the apotheosis of the uncertainly entertaining media experience. The Celts could win a quadruple overtime game, yielding a transcendent pleasure for me, or it could be a close loss for the Celts, yielding another evening of ennui. The choice is most certainly not mine.

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.

Wordling Through Public Opinion

I've been examining audience interpretations of movies, TV shows, and web video for a few years now. Recently, a friend turned me on to this Wordle application which makes word clouds of any block of text you give it. Word clouds got a lot of press recently when CNN used it to analyze one of Obama's speeches (sadly, people didn't "get" what word clouds can tell them). Anyway, like any good data visualization tool, it allows you to see, at a glance, some of the trends in your data. There are, of course, limitations (as will become apparent in the examples i give below), but it could be an exciting new way to look at public opinion quickly. Take blog posts or comments from thousands of different people, feed it into Wordle, and you'll get a general idea of what that portion of the public is thinking about (or what they think about a certain issue).

Here are the results of my wordle of people's evaluation of several movies on IMDB. I drew the comments from the headings of the first 300 posts for each movie. Check 'em out.
Shawshank Redemption (the highest rated film on IMDB). No big surprises. People think its the best. Its interesting to note that they think its the best ever. If you look closer, you can see adjectives like "brilliant" and "moving." These may not seem surprising, but when you start comparing the different word clouds to each other, even the films that everyone loved, you start to see that fans put emphases on certain elements of certain films.
Amelie (44 on the list of top 250 IMDB). Interesting to see the word "overrated" in there. People define this movie by the fact that its French, and they find it charming.
Love Guru (I had to pick a bad one for contrast). This represents the limits of assuming that word choice (taken out of context) will tell you what people think. The word "funny" might have been part of the phrase "not funny," but Wordle can't tell you that. Its interesting to see that "bad" is used far more than "worst," and that people think of this as a Mike Myers film more than anything (again, obvious, but worth noting). Also, the word "critics" indicates that the critics lambasting of this film carried some weight with people (you don't see "critics" in many other worldes for other films).Casablanca (11 on Top 250 list). Again, "best" and "greatest" are there. "Classic" is there. It would be interesting to see at what year the word "classic" becomes commonly used by people. You would expect it to grow in highly-rated movie word clouds the older the movie is, but maybe there are certain characteristics that make people call a movie "classic" (the centrality of a romance? PG content?). In any case, its far more interesting to me to look at the ways in which hundreds or thousands of viewers use words like "classic" than the ways in which a handful of critics use them. Definately something worth exploring further.

Against The Daily Show

After reading a slew of paeans to The Daily Show in Flow and after seeing plenty of conference talks about how wonderful The Daily Show is, I have reached the conclusion that media/comm studies folks have an alarmingly univocal (and ultimately uncritical) love for this show.

The arguments usually go something like this: "legitimate" news organizations aren't doing their jobs as well as they could or should. Evidence: their failure to cry foul before the start of the Iraq War, their failure to cover Hurricane Katrina in a fair, accurate manner, the failure of taking x conservative politician/member-of-the-press/business leader to task before he ruined a bunch of people's lives. The Daily Show picks up the slack. It speaks the truth when no legitimate news source can. It is effective satire in the tradition of Mark Twain. You may think that young people are watching TDS instead of watching or reading other news sources and that its making them more cynical, but studies have revealed the opposite: they're less cynical than the average person and they read and watch more news than non-viewers. Thus, evidence suggests TDS makes viewers more engaged, more skeptical (as opposed to cynical), and more aware of the world around them.

Allow me to present the counter-argument. First, some ground rules. Let's acknowledge the third person effect: the idea that we all tend to think that the media exerts a strong influence on other people but not on ourselves. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals who have free will, who make intelligent decisions as to what information to consume and how we think about issues, while others are susceptible to the influence of demagogues. My political beliefs lead me to seek out TDS and NPR but my exposure to those information outlets does not change those beliefs, whereas Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have the power to influence viewers' and listeners' beliefs. If they did not, then we wouldn't have any reason to criticize them. If they're just entertainers, then what's the problem?

I'm familiar with the argument that b/c Stewart frames his show as comedy on a comedy network and various conservatives like O'Reilly and Limbaugh frame their programs as news, that one is less likely to influence the views of listeners or viewers than the other. This logic has an appealing obviousness to it, but the intentions of Stewart and the framing of his show are beside the point. It is possible that satiric content, which viewers acknowledge to be "just comedy," is just as likely to influence views as non-satiric content. Both pointed satire and that which poses as "hard news" are capable of altering (even more capable of bolstering) our views of the world. This isn't to say that the intentions of the creator or genre classifications don't play some role in the ways that viewers/listeners/readers process the information, but Stewart is mistaken in thinking that his role as comedian determines the degree of his influence. Its his prerogative to not see himself as responsible for the alteration or bolstering of viewers' beliefs, but his take on his own personal responsibility as a satirist has nothing to do with the question of effect.

There is ample empirical evidence that suggests we are all mistaken in our assumptions about the effectiveness of media to alter worldveiws, that neither conservative nor liberal, well-informed nor uninformed, over-educated nor under-educated, fans of satire and fans of supposedly hard news are any less susceptible to having our views of the world altered (against our will, so to speak) by what we watch, listen to, and read than anyone else.

So, premise #1: TDS could lead to people thinking a certain way about the world around them without those people being aware that their views of the world are being altered by that program.

How do we know if that's happening, and how do we know the ways in which it is happening?

The idea that TDS and other sources of "soft news" substitute for "hard news" sources in viewers' media diets has been debunked. Also, viewers seem more likely to vote, more likely to join civic organizations and volunteer, more able to cite objective facts about what's going on in the world.

That leaves the following likely negative effects that i don't think have been addressed by scholars:

• the tendency for viewers to be more partisan - viewers make decisions as to whether or not an idea is good based on whether it is associated with conservative or liberals and not based on evidence that suggests that the idea would work in certain circumstances and not in others. Decisions are made based on principles (which are cultivated by the show) or based on whether the sources of information have contradicted themselves at any point in time (if they have, then everything they ever say is called into question).
  
• the tendency for viewers to focus on blame rather than solutions, the exacerbation of the its-not-me-its-you tendency that we all have (that is, viewers of the show and other shows that focus on the blaming-others narrative of news will be more likely to focus their energy on ferreting out other people's evil doings and less likely to spend time thinking of possible solutions to those problems and trying them out than non-viewers)

If I had to speculate on the kinds of thinkers that TDS turns its viewers into, I would say that its people who believe that when a person in power (govt, media, finance) says one thing and later says something different, then that person loses all credibility and should be ousted in favor of someone who has yet to be proven as hypocritical. If everyone thought this way, then we would end up with political, media, and financial leaders who were ideologues. Say what you will about ideologues, at least they're consistent. You can't play a tape of them saying something they will later contradict because they never change their opinions about anything regardless of how circumstances change. Is that a good thing?

And yes, veiwers of TDS seek out other source of news, but what orientation do they approach that news with? I would argue that when they watch those other news sources, they take the bits of it that are consistent with TDS's view of the world and ascribe the rest to traditional news media's inability to tell it like it is, the failure of traditional journalism in the face of powerful governments and corporations. They're not making critical decisions about the information from other news sources based on anything but a need to see the world in a way that conforms to their existing view of it. Again, people have this tendency in the first place, but I would argue that TDS exacerbates it.

I also believe that the "people were always this way" argument is inadequate. I can imagine a world in which a lot of people think about an issue and make a decision on what to do or who to vote for based on evidence that suggests that the policy or action proposed will bring about good things for many people. How many conservatives actually examine the intricacies of the circumstances in which taxing the rich or running of deficits leads to long-term gain instead of just saying that taxes in a recession are bad? How many liberals consider the implications of the constant risk of nuclear war given the existence of over 10,000 active nuclear warheads?

Many people don't want to think about the other side of an issue. They want to get angry, and they want to laugh. TDS helps them do that. In fact, maybe it leads to more and more people getting angry and laughing instead of looking for solutions. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does something totally different. We have a responsibility to find out the answers to such questions.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?

Mashups: Turning individual mediocrities into collective gold

I've just stumbled upon (via Heffernan's blog) yet another mashup that has swept me off my feet: ThruYou. I felt the same giddy charge that I felt when watching that ol' Brokeback to the Future mashup video, when first hearing DJ Shadow's Entroducing, when that rash of "Artist1 Vs. Artist2" mashup songs circulated a few years back, when I was sitting in the Library of Congress this summer doing research and listened to Girl Talk for the first time (I had this dopey grin plastered on my face; must've looked like an idiot). What the hell is it about mashups that I find alluring, especially now that the novelty of the form has worn off?

In the case of Girl Talk, he lingers just long enough on one combination of samples to establish a danceable groove and to make you chuckle at the juxtaposition of the original meanings of the sampled songs. There's a kind of thrill at being able to move so easily and quickly across genres and eras. The decontextualization of the braggadocio of contemporary rap and the seriousness of the arena rock renders the samples explicitly comic (the fact that I grew up in a world totally different than the ones inhabited by the songwriters already gave me this kind of distance from the lyrics). Many of the songs he samples are about the assertion of individuality and dominance. What could be better than to take parts of those boasts and create something collective, free, and funny out of them? And the fact that there are rhythmic and melodic bonds between songs as culturally disparate as late-80's Metallica and Lil' Mama is somehow comforting.

ThruYou is the same thing but with user-generated content for beat fodder. By and large, the song remains the same (sounds a lot like DJ Shadow to my ears), but the fact that he's using clips of people playing riffs in their bedrooms all over the world makes the songs feel different to me. With DJ Shadow, I feel as though the artist is paying homage to the sampled artists, reviving long forgotten songs in the hopes that new fans will find the originals. With Girl Talk, I feel like he's playing a prank on the original artists, neutering them. With ThruYou, it feels like he's bringing out the latent collective artistic talent that lies in every mediocre individual. ThruYou is to YouTube musicians as Google is to webpages. To say that he creates something that is greater than the sum of its parts is an understatement.

Even though they have access to billions of recorded sounds, DJs produce music that sounds, well, pretty familiar. If you're not into this particular kind of music, then it doesn't matter how it was created. This needn't be the case. But perhaps in order to be pleasing to the ear, like original music, it has to build on familiar melodies and rhythmes. Still, its not only the sound of mashups that makes them pleasurable (at least for those of us who dig these familiar rhythms and melodies). Its the baggage that the samples come with.

What gets written about in Media Studies?

I just went to a talk about the portrayal of women in shows and movies about the spiritual/supernatural in the late 1990's. Of course, the key text that the scholar was examining was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. the speaker described people's reactions when she told them she was writing about Buffy. Generally, people reacted negatively because so many media scholars (particularly those working in the feminist or cultural studies traditions) write about this one show. This was followed by a justification by the scholar as to why she was writing about this one very-written-about show. It was part of a larger trend that she was examining, it ran for a relatively long time (6 years), and it was fairly popular.

The idea of one show or movie being "better" than another is one that most media scholars, I would expect, would reject. And yet it seems impossible to get away from, because we must write about certain texts and not others. What do we base our selections on?

What we love: My problem with this is it will lead to a few shows/movies being written about a lot while most other shows/movies don't get written about at all. This seems to be happening in film studies. There are a million papers about The Searchers, which isn't a bad thing per se, but shouldn't the number of films that scholars examine and write about be larger? Shouldn't we aspire to examine a diverse set of texts, however one might define diversity? Also, there are plenty of hyper-articulate, passionate, super-smart people who write about texts they love on the internet. They're called fans. Part of the discipline of media scholarship, part of what sets us apart, is our willingness to consider texts that we don't like. Examples: Buffy, The Searchers.

What is popular: I like this strategy, but only if it pertains to films/shows that are popular over a long period of time in multiple cultures, and ideally, independent of the degree to which they were promoted (extra promotion gives some shows/movies an unfair advantage over other shows/movies that would've been just as popular had they had the marketing muscle behind them). If it is desirable to have the deepest knowledge about the greatest number of media experiences, starting with the most popular experiences seems like a good idea. Example: The CSIs and Law & Orders.

What isn't popular: Scholars often take it upon themselves to act as a corrective influence on readers' tastes, trying to counteract the effects of extensive mainstream marketing by "rescuing" lesser known works that are usually aimed at marginalized audiences. This isn't so much about enlarging our collective understanding about how media and culture work as it is about acting is opposition to the private corporate influence on culture. Examples: Stan Brakhage, Queer as Folk, soap operas (yes, I know soaps are "popular" in that they endure much longer than any other text, but it depends on how you look at it. Individual episodes are disposable in the way that news reports are disposable. They don't have a long shelf life).

What did/could/should have an impact on culture: Even if a show wasn't particularly popular, it may have exerted a significant influence on culture or cultural form thereafter. A show like My So-Called Life wasn't very popular when it aired. I doubt that its very popular now (DVD sales and all). And yet its hard to argue with the fact that every teen drama that came after it resembles it in many ways, and that no show that came before it was quite like it. Ditto to Arrested Development, which has spawned a ton of voice-over single camera comedies that might usher out the era of sitcoms (fingers crossed). Its exceptionally difficult to anticipate what shows/movies will have the greatest influence in the future, but if we look back, we can see some unpopular-yet-influential texts. Unfortunately, a lot of scholars try to promote texts they happen to like as highly influential (or possibly influential in the future), but this is just textual boosterism, plain and simple.

Selecting Purely at Random: No one I know of does this, but it strikes me as a good way to go about studying media. If you did it enough, you'd get a pretty good (that is to say, unbiased) sample of all media. Thus, the conclusions you drew about the texts you happened to look at would be generalizable to a much larger portion of all media than any other selection technique. I was going through old TV Guides for some research and kept seeing shows that I knew no scholar or fan was ever going to write about, and this seemed like a shame to me. Again, if we want to form larger theories about how media works, we should broaden our horizons to include texts that don't fit into any of the above categories: the truly mundane texts.

Some texts can fit into more than one of these categories. My next project: taking a survey of texts written about in scholarly journals and those written about on blogs, to see what categories and texts we've got covered and which ones need covering.

What else would you have done?

In reading a shit-ton of media effects articles for several classes, I've come back to some of the same questions about their worth. I should say that I generally subscribe to the idea that most of these studies really do reveal something about what media cause us to think or how they cause us to behave or feel. Just so we're clear, I'm talking about the articles about the effects of violent video games on aggression, or of advertisements with skinny models on reader/viewer's body image. I accept the findings that say that, even when you control for things like pre-existing trait aggression and low self-esteem and latent racism and various attachment styles and SES, the media can have a negative influence on you, even though you might not be aware of it.

The findings imply that if you don't want to be problematically aggressive, bigoted, self-hating, or anorexic, you should avoid exposing yourself to certain media. OK, fine. But what do you then do to satisfy that craving that you would've satisfied with that media, and are we sure that the media in question wasn't providing you with some positive influence that might outweight the negative influence?

This occurred to me while watching a talk on UMich's Channel 22 about the causes of cancer. There were some things, like wine for instance, that caused women's risk of breast cancer to go up a tiny but measurable amount. However, it caused their risk of cardiovascular disease to go down a bit. And wine tastes good and makes you feel good. So, even if we accept that initial bit of information - that wine makes you slightly more likely to get breast cancer - we still may choose to drink wine for other reasons. Similarly, even if you know the risk of getting lung cancer from smoking, you may choose to smoke. You may also watch violent porn even though you know it will make you more likely to be callous towards rape victims.

I think we need to ask what people would have done if they didn't do something that they know is bad for them. It is possible that if a person chose not to smoke those cigarettes, that they might use booze to fill that void, becoming an alcoholic. It is possible that even if they resist all temptation in the form of substance, they may just become more ornery and hard to be around, driving people away which, in turn, makes them more depressed and hostile towards others. It is also possible that, after a rough patch of having to do without those vices, that the person breaks their bad habit and finds things that make them a happier, healthier person.

In order to make a judgment as to whether or not an individual or a group of people should stop doing x (be it smoking cigs, watching violent porn or slasher films, drinking wine, eating bacon, whatever), you have to consider the choice to engage in that vice in the context of that person or those people's lives. That's damn difficult, and when it comes to addicts, we know that they can't be trusted to make that judgment. But to simply say that just because a vice has an established negative effect and expect people to use that information to stop doing whatever it is that they're doing doesn't make sense to me.

I guess what I'm advocating for is a holistic study of why people engage with media that is known to have harmful, anti-social effects. That doesn't mean that you're advocating its use, necessarily. Too often, conversations I've had on tabloids, Jerry Springer, soap operas or other "trash media" turn into arguments between people who think it really fucks w/ people's heads and other people who think that it helps them cope with the troubles of everyday life and its just being attacked b/c it doesn't appeal to the wealthy, white male heterosexual establishment. We get it. Both of those things could be true. Study of the effects of media, and indeed the worth of media, needs to move beyond that petty argument. We need to ask, with open minds, what are the good things and what are the bad things about each bit of media for each different type of person.

How do we Study Audiences on YouTube?

To make a broad generalization, comments on YouTube videos aren't terribly different from the back-and-forth you'd find on any message board or chat room. They're meaner, more succinct, more candid, and less articulate than face-to-face interactions. What intrigues me about the comments is the fact that you can click on the usernames of commenters and get a little bit of an idea of who these people are (or at least what they like to watch, which could be as good an indicator as any as to who they really are).

There's a lot of data: networks of desires, groups and sub-groups. I know its unprecedented and very valuable, but its a bit overwhelming. What is the object of such inquiry? Is it to learn something about the interactions that are going on in the YouTube forum, the cultural exchanges, the conflicts, the bridges built? Or can we use it as a way to learn more about audiences, what they prefer, why they prefer it? Maybe you can't extricate the two from one another: the social use of this forum and the desire fulfillment of watching videos.

Let's take an example.



There's a special irony in the fact that this clip has been taken out of context and put on YouTube. As I understand it, the scene (in the larger context of the show) is about the moral conflict regarding a down syndrome kid getting a lot of attention for a performance but, arguably, for all the wrong reasons (i.e. his audience is less impressed by his dance moves and more amused by his disability). The plot of the show offers complex commentary on this sad state of affairs while the exhibition of the clip on YouTube seems to replicate the depicted scene: an audience laughing it up at someone with a disability. The comments feature the predictable Down-Syndrome-bashing that one would expect in such a forum, a classic example of Lulz (defined loosely as humor derived at someone else's expense). One comment - "I will kill that fucking retarded sack of shit." - seemed a little more cruel than the others.

So I clicked on the Username and pulled up Adam1357923's account. The actual profile information is rarely a good indicator of who anyone is on YouTube (he lists his age as 104). We've got 21 favorited videos to check out: 4 Rocky clips, a few action fight scenes, some clips from There Will Be Blood, a speech by Daniel Day Lewis at the SAG awards, and a clip from Willie Wonka in which Gene Wilder berates someone. We might characterize these clips as hyper-masculine, angry, violent, generally made in the 80's or early 90's.

Let's say we find adam1357923's anti-social remark undesirable. We want to find out how anti-social behavior takes root so that we might keep it from occurring or becoming more prevalent. Let's say that our hypothesis is that the tendency to express these anti-social remarks is cultivated by peer behavior and mass media. If we see anti-social behavior (or pro-social violence) in media clips, we're more apt to think that such behavior is acceptable or normal. If we see a war happening half a world away or other people laughing at someone for being different, we think "That's what people do. They kill each other and they make fun of each other. There's no way to stop it. It is human nature." If we see that others accept or endorse these images in some vague manner, if we see that these images are popular (as indicated by how many other people have watched or favorited the clips), then that sense of normalcy, of social acceptability, is reinforced to a greater degree. Finally, if we read an endorsement written by another user, we get the sense that other people, possibly like us, have gone to the trouble of commenting on some depiction of behavior. Arguably, this reinforces the norm to a still greater degree.

It is unlikely that the videos, comments, and user favorite lists create anti-social behavior. Such behavior is much more likely to be a function of home life, economic status, or educational background. Nevertheless, there's reason to believe that use of such media, like exposure to traditional violent media, propagates anti-social behavior or expressions/endorsements of such behavior. If the goal is to curtail anti-social behavior, then I think that careful study of YouTube participation can give us an idea of what limits need to be set on use by parents and by ourselves in order to prevent its spread.

I don't think those limits should be imposed by a government telling people what they can or cannot watch, mostly b/c I don't think they can be imposed in a user-generated-content (UGC) mediasphere. This brings me to my UGC strong effects theory: There is reason to believe UGC is more likely to influence behavior, for better or worse, b/c its perceived as being more "real" or more reflective of actual social norms than professionally-created media and b/c, logistically, it would be impossible to ferret out anti-social behavior (however one might define that) on the internet. Professionally created media had to adhere to a set of norms that were set by the FCC. You may argue that these norms reflected a conservative view of sex, a lack of concern for violence, and a disregard for bigotry, but whatever you make of these loose set of rules, they tended to yield media that were reasonbly uniform in the behavior it depicted. This is not the case with UGC, which tends to reflect "marginalized" behavior that is forbidden by traditional media (extreme violence, extreme bigotry, sexual coercion, etc). To make an analogy: professional media is like a parent. They tell you a certain version of reality that you gradually come to realize is "whitewashed" or sanitized. UGC is like a peer from school (the one whose parents don't seem to give a shit about) who knows about and is more than willing to share information about the darker side of human behavior. He exaggerates from time to time, but to an audience that is realizing just how phony the world depicted by the rule-constricted mainstream media, his version of social reality can seem beguilingly...real.

As viewers and as researchers, we can't fall into this trap. We do not get a complete picture of who adam1357923 is. We only see a partial picture of what he uses YouTube for, so we must be cautious about any conclusions we draw from such a limited picture. Still, YouTube presents us with information that it would take millions of dollars worth of research grants to have found in the dark ages. Let the random profile-clicking commence!

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"

3 Questions of Pleasure

Here's a thought:

All communications literature (and perhaps all thinking in the social sciences, cultural studies, and humanities) take one of three approaches to pleasure:

Figuring out How to Produce Pleasure: This is a basic question that lots of formalist or neo-formalist film theory tries to answer. We accept the fact that some movies or experiences bring us great pleasure while others do not, and that one person may take great pleasure in one thing while another person takes pleasure in another. The big questions here are: what characteristics, of the text, the experience, or the individual, bring about pleasure? I think of David Bordwell's analyses of how narratives work to be typical of this kind of research. This type of work is most relevant to people trying to make movies, trying to produce experiences or texts that bring others pleasure, or those seeking short-term or long-term pleasure (figuring out what kinds of movies I like so that I might be better in the future at seeking them out). This kind of work can and should be all-inclusive. Usually, it has certain cultural biases, favoring one genre or time period as "classics," but this needn't be the case. It could just as easily be applied to debased cultural forms or experiences or marginalized people. The role of the theorist is that of master practitioner. The goal is to create the most pleasurable temporary experience.

Figuring out Whether Something that Brings us Short-term Pleasure could Bring us Long-Term Displeasure: This is more the domain of media effects research. There's an assumption of the hedonic principle of seeking out movies, TV shows, or experiences that bring us pleasure, at least in the short term. After the experience fades, people might feel displeasure for an unknown, apparently unrelated reason. For instance, you may have sat down to watch Sex and the City or play Mass Effect because, well, you enjoy watching or playing them. Later, you might feel bad about the fact that you've been single for awhile or you may feel increasingly hostile towards your co-workers (which ends up getting you fired). The purpose of this type of research is to draw previously unseen connections between actions engaged in for short-term benefit which lead to long-term problems for the individual. I think there's a lot of room for this branch of theory to grow, considering two things: there has been a rise in the complexity of our information environments, making it more difficult to intuit the long-term effects of what media we consume on our moods, self-esteem, and general disposition, and there has been a rise in emotional disorders. There might be a correlation between the two, and I think it is worth exploring. The role of theorist here is more like a medical doctor. As a result, these theorists demand a degree of deference, one which psychotherapists seem to be afforded but that media scholars are not. I would argue that this reluctance to afford them the authority is partly b/c they become associated with the last type of theorist, which I'll get to in a moment. The goal is to bring about the most pleasurable life, and to make sure that we know the long-term ramifications of our short-term, hedonic pursuits.

Figuring out Which Pleasure is Superior to Others: This is the domain of many cultural theorists and many who are grounded in Marxist theory. Pleasure, as it is commonly defined (positive affect, either short term or long term), is suspect. True pleasure can only be brought about by reconfiguring the society and the economy, not through simply deciding to watch or experience something else. In fact, the decision to watch something else is not, according to this line of theory, bringing about anything but the extension of undesirable circumstances. True pleasure is forever deferred, at least until after the revolution.

The first group fails to take into account any long term effects for the individual or any social effects. However, it possesses a level of analytical detail that the other groups fail to achieve. The second group gives up some of that level of detailed analysis. Also, if it is strictly about measuring pleasure, it offers no commentary on social problems and how media might be related to such problems. The third group is tricky: it does offer analysis of the broad social implications of media that produces pleasure in the short or long term for an individual or groups, but as that group grows, the complexity of the problem grows. The number of assumptions that must be made about group behavior over long periods of time grows. Quickly, it becomes tempting to make generalizations based on conjecture about behavioral economics (i.e. most cultural theory in the Marxist tradition).

None of these ways is the correct way to look at pleasure, but I think its worth keeping the distinction amongst them in mind when judging the merits of one particular theory. Its also worth thinking about all three of them when asking ourselves whether any media experience is "good" or "bad."