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."

Obama: Pro Online Video, Anti-Television

I was pleased as punch to learn that Obama plans to make his weekly addresses on YouTube (or is he just going to post online videos that happen to be on YouTube? Its weird how synonymous YouTube has become w/ online video). This further legitimates the medium of online video and, if you look at the other videos on change.gov's YouTube page, adds (at least the appearance of) an amazing degree of transparency and interaction. I doubt that they're really going to put out any information that any preivous administration wouldn't release (w/ the possible exception of the weirdly clandestine Bush admin), but the fact that they're releasing it in video form, as opposed to print or radio, makes it...sexier, more appealing.

I'd never go to a website and slog through text, but would I watch a quick video on a break from doing work? You betcha! Medium specificity research (cited by MacLuhan in Understanding Media) indicates that film/video is no better at getting people to recall information. However, people are more apt to experience emotional affect when they watch video, and they're definitely more apt to look upon it as a break from work rather than labor in and of itself (the way many people look at reading). I'd also wager that people are more apt to believe information if its conveyed by a talking head (like this vid from Melody Barnes) than if it were conveyed through text, under the assumption that seeing someone's eyes and/or face makes you believe what they're saying, that they couldn't "look you in the eyes and lie to you." Nevermind whether or not people can and do lie to people's faces. I just think that having that face there makes people trust authority figures a bit more.

But the most significant thing about Obama's vids on YouTube, something that I noticed during the campaign and appears to be continuing into his presidency, is that he doesn't allow ratings or comments of his videos. Why does he do this? What is he afraid of? How does the conspicuous absence of comments change our perception of the video? It certainly makes me think that he (or his people) doesn't want negative dialog to surround his messages. I've heard the argument that Obama is curbing free speech by not allowing folks to comment on his videos, and I've heard the counterargument that he doesn't stop anyone from embedding his vids on their blog and commenting all they want. Of course, the "free-ness" of the speech isn't the issue; its the public-ness or the popularity of the forum.

Obama has the clout and the goodwill to get people to watch his vids without needing to turn the videos into conversation catalysts. If that goodwill changes, watch out for peopel editing his vids and commenting all they want, something he can't stop.

In regards to the title of this post, I've heard Obama trot out the old "TV as bad object" rhetoric several times during the campaign (as in 1 minute thru this vid). TV is something undisciplined people watch. Online video is a tool, to be used for good or ill, but at least its active. It'll be interesting to follow his administration's use of new technology once they take office.

Presidential Web Videos

There are many things to think about and talk about after the election on Tuesday, but in terms of this blog, I thought it useful to write about one, small aspect of our "new world" (which is what it feels like), one that has to do with my area of study: Obama and web video.

I'm sure there has been (or will be ) plenty written about the effects of all those YouTube videos - the professional parodies, the homemade smears, the "gotcha" journalism - on the outcome of the election, public opinion, and the future of politics. This is important, and indeed I'm still working on some research concerning the effects of YouTube comments (whether they are constructive debates or vitriolic hate-speech) on reader/viewer's attitudes towards candidates. I wasn't able to run as many subjects as I would've liked, so the results may have to wait until the next election cycle. But rather than write about this well-trodden material, I thought I'd draw your attention to the Obama press conference on Hulu:


A few things that struck me: Having it on Hulu, rather than the mad fray that is YouTube, frames it as somehow more legitimate. In general, I'm interested in how Hulu, with its lack of highly visible user comments, lack of user generated content, abundance of high quality content, and advertisements, is the perfect middle ground between YouTube and TV. It is neither of those things, and I think viewers come away with a different impression of the same content when it is presented on this platform. Is it more trivial because its online on a website that's typically associated with entertainment, as opposed to a cable network (or website) that is associated with hard-hitting news?

Then there's the very fact that I was watching this speech though I'd had little conscious intention to do so when I went to Hulu. I wouldn't have watched this address had I not seen the promo screenshot on the rotating front page of Hulu. There's Barack, wedged between Liz Lemon and the new anime channel. I can't imagine this would've happened if it were McCain giving his first press conference (or that it would've garnered as many views as Obama is likely to get). Among many other things, Obama is video-genic: easy on the eyes, witty, etc. I'm not sure if that makes him a celebrity (whatever that means these days), but it does turn presidential speeches, a subject that typically appeals to the CSPAN set, into something with a broader appeal (Bush's speeches seemed to be a collosal letdown in the entertainment department. I kept watching for him to say something hilariously stupid, but it rarely happened. In practice, he was just as boring and uninspiring as most other politicians).

Then there's the pre-roll ad before the speech. This seems a little inappropriate, and sets a bad precedent. Here's Barack, leading off with some dour news about the economy, and its preceded (at least in the times that I viewed it) by a whimsical, context-inappropriate ad for Blackberry. What if, say, the next press conference is about Iraq or Afghanistan? At what point do people become a little disgusted at the encroachment of ads into the domain of politics during serious times?

Maybe nestling these addresses amongst more frivolous fare will boost civic awareness. People who normally wouldn't seek out that content will be forwarded links, or come across it in blogs, or see it in the "top vids" section of Hulu.

On another note, I just noticed that Hulu has "liked/dislikes" buttons for the pre-roll ads it runs, which is terrific.

The Other, The Cultural Divide, and Me

I haven't really thought through the implications of this, and there might be a few horrible wrong turns in this entry, but this blog is a place where I can muse about media, so here goes.

I had a few thoughts about media and Other-ing after canvassing in Sandusky, Ohio on Sunday. The poorer neighborhoods I walked around were the kind of parts of the United States that I have never been to, that I have only experienced through the media. I read about them in the paper or see on TV when the news or fictional stories talk about economic downturn or how these parts are a problem that needs fixing (or how people living here should be pitied). As I walked around, I thought "in many ways, I do not live in the same world that these people live in." Did this mean that I was somehow fundamentally different than they were? Not that I was superior or inferior, but that I was different in some irreconcilable, permanent way.

That's a crucial distinction, between difference and deficience. If there truly is difference, we may look at it as something positive like diversity, or we may look at it as something that prevents communication, trust-building, or close relationships. But what is that difference? Am I mistaken in imagining its type and degree?

First off, as became obvious after talking with a few folks, there were some people who I got along with and agreed with on many topics, and others whom I did not, as would be true with people from the town in which I grew up. But the people I disagree with that are from my socio-economic and cultural sphere and I have some things in common that I feel I don't have in common with folks I disagree with in Sandusky. We have different views of the world, different values of certain ways of thinking, different views of other people and of human nature and their houses, the surroundings, are all so different than where I grew up and where I’ve always lived.

Are these people more different from me than people living in other countries, or people at other times (say, China 1000 years ago)? Are the differences superficial ones? I had to face the fact that I had very little direct experience with people in places like Sandusky. In the absence of direct experience, mediated experience and second-hand information fills in. When people talk of media forming images of people as Other, as fundamentally different, I think they're usually talking about the depictions of those people. And certainly that's one thing that contributed to my conception of such difference. But the big contributor from media, it occurred to me, is the audience that I imagine to be consuming media that I do not like or do not understand.

I see some stuff on TV (primarily Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, whom I've been watching a lot of lately) and I think, “millions of people watch this. This reflects someone’s desires and values. And they are so different than my desires and values, therefore those millions of people are fundamentally different than I am.” And that’s where this idea of some people being so different than me, irreconcilably different, comes from. Its not so much the depictions of the Other as these bits of media that reflect the desires and values of an Other. In the language used by my friends and colleagues, I hear this. We talk about Bill O'Rielly and Fox News, and in the language that we use, we treat their viewers as inferior or, at the very least, fundamentally different than us. Media scholars have long since refrained from demeaning analyses of debased cultural forms like the soap opera and the romance novel, but we talk about Fox News and their viewers as if they were lower forms of life, like they need to rescued. What if we were able to determine that Fox News viewers have certain demographic qualities in common; say, that they're mostly white, mostly religious, mostly either earn between 0 and 25K or 250K and 1M, mostly have American flags in their front yard, mostly wear Nascar-related memorobilia. Might this lead us to look upon these people, as I found myself looking upon the McCain supporters I saw in Sundusky, as fundamentally different? Might this be a problem?

But I'm not sure that we're really all that different. My cognitive development psych class has me thinking about human similarities. So, die-hard Repubs, people in Africa a thousand years ago, and me, we all have some things in common. In a sense, we all have most thing in common - language acquisition, intuitive grasp fo physics, the basics of psychology, biology. We all desire affection, attention, shelter, food, sleep. Sometimes we compete with one another or threaten one another, and other times we cooperate to achieve common goals. So what do we differ on? Theories about human nature: in what contexts are we competitive or cooperative, nature or nurture, the role of organizations and the individual, how to behave sexually, how best to bring about long term gain for the greatest number of people. Arguably, these differences touch on many aspects of our everyday lives. But still, I feel like we have some things in common. And this is what psychology can speak to.

They are incomplete thoughts.

Mad Men: Another Suprise Pregnancy? Really?

Did I love the conclusion of the second season of Mad Men? Sure. Don's reappearance seemed rather sudden, so sudden that I thought it was a figment of Betty's imagination (something Weiner was prone to doing as a writer for The Sopranos). The Cuban Missle Crisis, Betty's infidelity, and Peggy's revelation to Pete were so big that they blotted out the slow burn of Don's trajectory. He just seems completely erratic to me, and not in a way that's compelling. Still, I liked the power play between Don and Duck Phillips. And the HBO touches are still there: the concern with organizational hierarchies, the slight ironic distance between the characters and the audience, the possibility that a flawed main character living a life of ill repute could reform thanks to psychology, religion, or larger cultural trends or institutions. For those, I'll gladly watch another 3 seasons.

But here are my main problems with the last episode and, by extension, the show as a whole: the centrality of romantic relationships and the inevitable emphasis on two revelations: pregnancy and infidelity. I was reminded of two things I watched last night: an interview with Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Rose in which he notes that the depiction of romantic relationships in most Hollywood films is inaccurate (5:22 into the clip). I'd agree, and I wouldn't even say that the main problem is that there are too many happy endings (or any kind of endings for that matter, b/c real life relationships never truly end until one person dies). The problem, as I see it, is the overrepresentation of surprise pregnancies and infidelity. The second thing that I was reminded of is essentially a rebuttal of the first (written by the same man, Charlie Kaufman): its this scene (1:30 into the clip) in Adaptation in which Brian Cox (as Robert McKee) berates Charlie for claiming that these types of things (the melodrama of everyday life) do not happen in real life. Everyday, someone gets murdered, someone falls in love, etc. McKee/Cox is right. All of that stuff does happen everyday. People have probably been fucking around behind the backs of their wives/husbands since the beginning of time, and they'll probably continue to do that forever. It is a universal theme. And yet, in practice, it happens to individuals only once or twice in a lifetime on average.

Its the overrepresentativeness of surprise pregnancy and infidelity that bug me, not their mere presence. Maybe its the fundamental discontinuity between character's lives and viewer's lives that does it: the character, presumably, only has one or two revelations like this in their fictitious lives, like us. However, we keep flitting around, watching the same excerpts of fictitious lives, cutting from one moment of relationship drama to another. If we compared our lives to the lives of individual characters, no problem. But, according to cultivation theory, the individual viewer compares his or her individual life to some aggregate life cobbled together from the bits and pieces, the brief windows into millions of people's lives (real and fiction) that we experience through stories. These aggregate lives are typically distorted, to heighten drama, to shorten plotlines, to sell products. They have no single author and they're not expected to be perfectly realistic. As long as they are realistic enough, we'll go along with them, and in doing so, we'll begin to modify our conceptions of human nature and social mores, whether we're conscious of that or not.

A student in the Media Effects class I'm GSI-ing for has proposed a study that hypothesizes a cultivation-like effect of overrepresentation of troubled relationships on heavy viewer's real life relationships, and I'm pretty damn sure she's on to something. Writers need drama, so they put infidelity in their storylines. In and of itself, no individual instance of this is unrealistic. But as they pile up, they give the impression that infidelity is extremely common (read: acceptable?). Though people would never admit to it, I wonder if, in the backs of their minds, they think that many other people are cheating and so they go ahead and do it, thinking "I know its 'bad,' but people do it pretty frequently." In fact, its especially likely to happen and especially hard to ferret out because our culture, every culture, likes to believe that it doesn't happen. I suppose we're that way with a lot of elements of sexual relationships: publicly denying certain aspects, speaking to one another in the code of fiction about how things "really are," but in the process, we overrepresent the dark side and make our lives darker through the cultivation of values that come with heavy viewing.

Its not even the prevlance of infidelity per se that I object to. Its the tired, cliched depiction of how it unfolds: the boredom with fidelity, the temptation, the lapse, the secrecy, the guilt, the revelation, the begrudging forgiveness. Yes, I'm sure it happens a lot like that in real life on its own, but whose to say that we don't go through this charade thinking it is in our nature when we're merely repeating the scripts that were embedded in stories for purposes of selling more soap (or more stories. There's no need to pin the blame solely on commercially-sponsored storytelling. 19th century novels and serialized stories were just as likley to include such heightened drama in order to keep the buying public coming back for more)?

Stories do not implant or invent desires. In real life, there is infidelity and there are secrecy and revelations. And yet, due cheifly to constraints of economy and technology, stories are required to reflect only certain aspects of our desires. Its not the values reflected in the stories that shape our beliefs on human nature and social mores. It is their collective and individual structures. Compare one society in which individuals read one grand narrative (e.g. the Bible, which is a collection of smaller stories, yes, but they have a unifying thread and they're typically treated as a single text) and see their lives as one grand narrative to a society in which individuals watch hundreds of different, unrelated narratives a year. We have little fragments of lives. It might have a baring on our desires or expectations for long-term relationships, as part of a marriage, a business, a country, an institution, etc.

Surprise pregnancies (especially the kind that happens when two people fuck each other once and only once) are another matter. It just seems biologically unrealistic. If you took the number of times one night stands resulted in pregnancy on TV and compared it with the number of times they resulted in pregnancy in real life (again, good luck trying to prove this, but its still my hunch), you'd see a discrepancy.

But the effects issue is beside the point. I'm just sick of it is all. Yes, infidelity, pregnancy, and will-they-or-won't-they romances happen in real life to most people and, as they are universal, are compelling for that reason. But they're overused. In this world overcrowded by stories, it is not enough to be realistic. You must be original, even if it means being unrealistic, in order to be compelling.

So, I wasn't wild about the fact that this season-ender included the old stand-bys of pregancy and infidelity. But at least it treated the former in a somewhat unique manner, lingering on the scene of the revelation in which both characters were neither horrified nor overjoyed, but conveyed something in between (perhaps horror masked by a facade of acceptance and decorum, something that pervades the show). The music, the fade to black: it all had a nice feeling to it, set it apart from the slaps-in-the-faces and the rivers of tears that characterize most pregancy revelations. Or, to be more accurate, it didn't quite set it apart by itself. It characterized the show as an HBO show. It was the kind of scene, the kind of conclusion, that you would expect of The Wire or The Sopranos, that disquiet of ambiguity, the frustration of the need for closure that we all feel when we engage with stories, that frustration mirroring that of the characters.

Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.

Flow Conference 2008: Thoughts on Media Metrics

After a day at the Flow conference, I’m reminded of how good this conversational round-table format can be. The Narrative Franchises panel was amazing: 40 or 50 people in the room, some of which were experts in the field who probably knew more and thought more deeply about the this phenomenon than anyone else on the planet, and instead of just throwing out self-indulgent tangents about their ultra-specific area of interest (as often happens at academic gatherings), they were contributing information or viewpoints that were totally relevant to the discussion, fleshing out the picture we had a franchises with examples, considering exceptions to rules and considering whether they constituted the re-write of those rules. I got the feeling we were building a larger understanding of the phenomenon than any of us came in with. It reminded me of the kind of collaboration that I thought could only happen online.

Media metrics (the most famous of which is Nielsen TV ratings) are to be thought of as currency, like money, or degrees on a thermometer. They provide a universal, transferable, singular standard by which we measure the value of something.

What creators really want to know is: what combination of textual characteristics and audience characteristics lead to more people buying an advertised product within that text and/or paying for the text itself? Whether or not certain people choose to watch a show or see a movie at a given time is an imperfect measure of that. The perfect measure would: not just measure whether or not someone was tuned in, but what was going on in their heads (look to transportation measures for this). It would also measure whether they viewed something at any given time (look to Tivo data for this). It would also measure the degree to which they talked about the content with their friends (look to optimedia’s measurements of buzz, or searches like Technorati that could tell you what people are blogging about, but also take valence into account). It would take into account previous viewing and purchasing experience. It would take into account characteristics of the text itself. Its not an infinite number of things you need to quantify and combine into some sort of quotient or scale, but its more multifarious than we thought it was before, or had the ability to measure before.

One of the dilemmas confronting researchers, ad people, and producers/networks will be whether or not they go with a census (in which case they're bound to lose a lot of the aforementioned nuance) or a sample (in which case you might not get the generalizability you desire). Maybe a flexible system like YouTube, where the stakes are lower, ad money-wise, will evolve new metrics quicker. They’ll weed out the ones that don’t tell you anything new about viewers and their desires and habits, but new tools for gauging that will evolve. Insight is just the beginning of that.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.

Another Ad Rant (w/ Some Love for Nike)

Reading Josh Levin's terrifically funny and insightful ad crit on Slate prompted me to examine one of my abiding passions = Nike ads. Ever since I was a scrawny teen trying to cobble together an identity from the images and words around me, I had some sort of deep emotional connection to Nike ads. To this day, some Nike ads are capable of stirring up my emotions in less time than any video, TV show, or film. Sure, the power of these ads chiefly derives from other people's accomplishments: kick ass music and superhuman athletic performances. In this way, Nike ads are just really well executed mashups, ideally suited to the era of remixes and contextless clips, AND they've got the $ to do it legally by paying the exorbitant use rights for the clips. The critical acclaim these ads garnered only serve to legitimize my connection to material in the most debased of all cultural forms: commercials.

This strong emotional attachment is the effect that all advertising creators hope to forge. And yet, how many pairs of Nike shoes have I bought? Quite a few when I was in high school, but none since then. Price, comfort, and fashion trumped that emotional bond. Is an emotional connection with an ad the same thing as an emotional connection with the product? Is the associative link between an emotionally affecting 1 minute spot and a shoe strong enough to overwhelm my preference for a more comfortable, cheaper, more fashionable shoe?

The larger question is: What is the value of advertising today? Studies have shown that ads (be they 30 second spots or banner ads) work on a sub-liminal level, that most of the time we are not aware of how they prompt us to notice brands in stores or online. Its also thought that by getting people talking about that last Nike ad, Nike remains in the popular consciousness and is thus more likely to be purchased and preferred over other brands. Advertisers and product peddling companies stretch this logic of these links between appealing, memorable, or controversial advertising and product purchase way too far. No one has taken them to task thus far, and no one will have to. There is some link, though its hard to prove exactly how much advertising affects purchase decisions b/c the ads are part of an ocean of symbols and mixed messages about products.

Ads became popular because mass communication (magazines, radio programs, TV programs) were very expensive to distribute. They needed to be subsidized someway. Given the choice between paying high subscription prices for content and tolerating content that was not their choosing (i.e. commercials), viewers would probably have chosen the unwanted content of advertising. In effect, the question posed to the viewer/consumer was "would I pay 1/10th of my monthly salary for content I chose or not pay anything and tolerate some content not of my choosing?" But that equation has changed. It is considerably less expensive to create and distribute content. As more and more of the country and the world gets wired to broadband Internet, these costs will continue to fall. Soon, the consumer may ask him/herself "would I pay 1/1000th of my monthly salary for content I chose or pay nothing and tolerate ads?"

The prevalence of advertising is an artifact of the era of expensive distribution. There are already ad-less websites with business models that understand this: wikipedia and craigslist for starters. Craigslist works by soliciting micropayments from users and wikipedia asks for donations of time, expertise, and money. It would be an interesting economic experiment to see if consumers would be willing to pay small amounts of money to keep a site ad free. Such efforts failed to catch on in the past, but I'd argue that was b/c the amounts weren't small enough ($5-$10 per year seems appropriate to me) and that people don't recognize the true "cost" of advertising.

Most people say that they're not bothered by small banner ads, but I would counter by saying that they didn't choose that content nor is it consistent with the content they chose in terms of its emotional tone, the values it promotes, and its aesthetics. Therefore, it is a kind of cognitive tyranny imposed on the consumers who, though she or he is not aware, have their emotional experiences dampened by the interference of ads. I must stress the point about self-awareness not mattering. Just because you report not minding ads doesn't mean they don't affect your viewing/listening/reading experience in a detrimental way. This would be easy enough to test: show a group of people a show w/ ads and another group the same show w/o ads. If the group who sees the show w/o ads rates the experience higher in terms of enjoyment and information retention than the group who views the show w/ ads, then ads are costly to the consumer even if they are not aware of such a cost or claim to not mind ads.

Ads have costs for the producer (market research, ad creation, ad distribution) and for the consumer (worsened media experience, lost time). Ads have benefits for the producer (more products sold) and the consumer (directed to goods that they benefit from, an occasional laugh). Their costs and benefits change as the cost of producing/distributing content falls and consumers' access to information on various products increases via search technology.

This isn't to say that ads can't be brilliant, like those Nike ads or whatever ads you happen to find funny, moving, or thought provoking. But the creative folk who put together the ads are hampered by having to shoe-horn in a product, and if brilliance happens its more of a happy accident than anything else.

BTW, Levin's cataloging of random images from that one Nike spot is terrific but not exhaustive. Around :49, there's Pete Sampras vomiting and a drawing of two lute-playing jesters. wtf.

Washington Week in Review 2: How Bills Become Laws

We don't have to shrug our shoulders and cynically declare that the inner workings of Washington are too byzantine to understand, though when you get into the nitty-gritty of telecom policy, it can be tempting to reach such a conclusion. That shit seems to be written by lawyers, for lawyers.

How do we combat this cynicism? To quote one of my favorite professors, “start with the obvious.” This is an advantage of being an outsider: you may not have the expertise to really know the specifics and complexities of how things work, but you can see things in a light that insiders have long since lost the ability to see. This approach might oversimplify things, but it gets all the assumptions on the table, gets to the root of what people believe in and where the disagreements are.

I’m making claims about things that are inherently, intentionally obscure. It’s in people’s best interest to not talk about how things really work in Washington. You might never see a documentary about it, but maybe reporters or people who are involved in it write fictionalized versions (or tell-alls) afterward. I have but one keyhole to look through, one story to present.

The government is just another large group of people, albeit with some rules that don’t apply to other groups like families or businesses. People in groups behave in fairly predictable ways.

There’s a lot of speculation about people’s behaviors and motivations on the parts of both activists and legislators. There certainly isn’t the assumption that some people are inherently evil or wrong, which seems to be outsiders’ perspective on politicians, lawyers, and big businessmen. Here, there’s a tacit assumption that politicians, like everyone else, care about their careers above all else. But this isn’t the same as just caring about money. Careers have to do with respect, status, and future earnings. The justification: As long as you have a family to support and you can imagine a rainy day in the future (which isn't that hard to imagine these days), the maintenance of a career is not greed. Its survival.

We need to remember that in most cases, politicians are only going to be in office for a few years, so they ally themselves with certain people (often in an industry). They make sure not to piss off industry people for two reasons

#1 Those industry people can help politicians get re-elected by donating large sums of $ to their campaign. The connection between campaign operating budget and success is well established, but I think it is flawed for the simple reason that it assumes that money = visibility = votes. Yes, there is some connection there, but its grossly overstated by the self-justifying media, in the same way that the effects of advertising are grossly overstated (and what is a politician but another product to be marketed?). It assumes the use and effects of old-school, one-way, extremely costly media and does not take into account word-of-mouth, viral, low-cost media.

Don't get me wrong: one-way media still has more of an impact than the internet, but I wouldn't be surprised if its impact is lessened and its value diminished in future elections. If that gets to be the case, then a certain amount of money will be required to gain some initial name recognition, but from there, more money will not necessarily equal more popularity. Look at the world of music. Yes, most of the people at the top of the charts were products of big label ad campaigns from the beginning. But others are not. Others are just skilled at marketing themselves. Or just plain skilled. This is a function of the falling cost of distribution of information about people's reputations, their talents, and what they believe in. There's no reason why it won't effect politics in the similar ways. Its just more information, just more personalities to package.

#2 Politicians need jobs after they leave office. The stakes are very high. If they decide to legislate in a way that is sympathetic to the industry, they get a very high paying cushy job. If not, they might get blacklisted and not be able to work in the industry at all.

Politicians care about getting re-elected, so they care about votes and what the people think. The will of the people tends to be a very vague concept based on calls, emails, letters to them, polls, etc. None of those have inherent value. They only have value in so far as they reflect that person’s future voting behavior and their ability to convince others to vote a certain way. If you frame yourself as an influential member of your community, then you’re liable to get farther than if you’re just one person. The politicians are concerned with the behavior of the voters, to some degree.

Activists want certain bills to get passed. They’re concerned with the behavior of the politicians. They frame issues by highlighting how many voters in their district want that bill to pass, so that if the politicians want to get re-elected, they should co-sponsor the bill. Also, activists frame the passage of a bill in terms of the bearing it will have on the internal allegiances and hierarchies within the organization of congress. The chances that any bill has to pass depends on who gets elected. That's what makes Washington so interesting and unlike companies or academia (at least in theory, if incumbents didnt' win 4 out of 5 elections): the frequent turnover keeps you from just figuring out how to please one person and instead everything is qualified by who might get elected or appointed in a year or two. There are contingencies for various scenarios, different angles to work. No one really knows what kind of legislation is going to go through 6 months from now b/c no one knows who is going to be the next president or congressperson.

For the activists, it becomes a question of how to frame the issue to highlight the advantages for other people (politicians, voters, people in the industry), to get them to realize that, hey, there’s something in it for them. I keep using the word "frame" b/c, from my POV, that's what its all about, more than truth, more than what's right, even more than money: rhetoric. It is therefore no surprise that there are plenty of lawyers in Washington, being as they are schooled in the art of rhetoric. But why aren’t there more behavioral psychologists? Maybe b/c people would balk at voting for someone with that kind of degree b/c it means they’re skilled at manipulating people, whereas lawyers sometimes do good things for people? Personally, I'd rather have a skilled psychologist fighting for me on the Hill than a lawyer.

The Politics of the Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is, in many ways, the ideal movie to blog about. Its complex, so complex that I'm sure I missed a few things. After seeing it a second time, I still wasn't sure whether The Joker, when he was informing Batman of the Harvey Dent/Rachael Dawes hostage situation, told Batman who was at which address. My friend and I had conflicting memories about this, and I heard a reporter from Slate say that Batman had intended to save Harvey when I'm 90% sure he said he was going to save Rachael (though who can tell w/ that ridiculously gruff voice!). You can pause and review a DVD, but not theater flick, so we're left with the collective memory of the blogosphere to get everything straight.

But more than facts, its the meaning of The Dark Knight that needs unpacking and debating, specifically the political meaning. I'm reminded of why outlandish fiction (particularly sci-fi and comic books movies which, in some ways, have taken over sci-fi's domain in the past 5 years) can work so much better as a way of talking through issues of the day than more literal historical fiction like that rash of Iraq war movies from the last year. Even a movie I adore, The Lives of Others, is ill-suited to really dig into the philosophical and moral issues around surveillance in an impartial way. We know who to side with - those fighting the Stasi. Similarly, we know to side against the US administration and with the hapless, brave soldiers in most movies about 'nam or Iraq.

It would be very easy to read The Dark Knight as an allegory for post 9/11 America, though we don't have to read it that way. In fact, I think its a great way to think about a hypothetical world with hypothetical heroes and villains that our world might come to resemble in the future, in which case we should think about how we would act in those situations.

Being a Role Model: Batman wanted to be a symbol of good actions, so that if he died, there would be others who would take his place to step up and do the right thing. Trouble is a lot of those people bastardize that good symbol and put their own spin on it. To them, its OK for Batman to carry a gun, and b/c they're not mega-millionaires with military R&D people working for them, they don't have much choice but to carry guns and wear hockey pads. Then there's the matter of inspiring madmen like the Joker/terrorists, but its tough to say that Batman's hubris and his clones created The Joker, just as it would be tough to say that any given culture or Cowboy president created terrorists, though its to their advantage to make you think that.

Surveillance: In real world "prisoner's dilemma" situations, the best course of action is to try as hard as you can to find a third option. Its Batman's use of illicit surveillance that resolves the prisoner's dilemma on the two ferries. Thanks to the cell phones as cameras, he's able to track down the Joker before he throws the switch and kills the people on the two ferries who, in a strictly Utilitarian sense, made the wrong decision not to kill each other. There are two significant things about that cell-phone scene in the Bat lab: Lucius Fox objects to the surveillance on moral grounds, and even though he capitulates, the fact that he objected makes it more thought provoking than if the scene were just passed off as cool gadgetry (Bond, anyone?). And before we jump to making the obligatory Orwellian metaphor, its worth noting that the civilians do not know they're being spied upon. When people know they're being spied on by their leaders, it can have a chilling effect on their behavior. But if they don't know, well then, is there any harm? This leads us to the next moral dilemma.

Lying to the Public: Bruce has trouble with this one at first, wanting to come out and tell the world he's been living a lie, coming clean and telling them that he's Batman. He wants crime to be fought by a public figure - Harvey Dent (Obama to Bruce's Bush? Just a thought). Alfred insists that there needs to be someone who does the dirty work, who makes decisions that he knows are unpopular and probably illegal. The solution? Do those deeds but invent a persona that is distanced from you that can take the public's disapproval. At first, its just Bruce's reputation that needs to be kept clean. In the end, of course, its Harvey's. But all of this assumes that the public simply can't handle the fact that a good person - Harvey Dent - did some really bad things. Knowing this would make them lose all faith in themselves. Is this true? What if we found evidence that MLK shot a bunch of people in an insane revenge seeking fit? Interesting question, but I really find it shocking that any movie would say that the answer is that the public can't handle the truth. What are we, children?

Killing people: I would argue that b/c Batman cannot kill anyone, even his arch nemesis, he has to commit other sins against the freedom of the people he protects. Sometimes, martyrs for non-violence don't get assassinated. Sometimes they live long enough to have to make some unpopular decisions, to see themselves become villains.

So what does the movie really say about any of these? I think it leaves a lot of questions open to debate. If the movie has a moral voice, it is not that of Bruce Wayne but that of Alfred. Bruce eventually comes around to Alfred's "things have to get worse before they get better" philosophy, which is oddly similar to Ra's Al Ghul's, the villain from Batman Begins. Something about the way in which Alfred and his message is presented makes it seem authoritative in a way that Bruce isn't. Bruce, like the audience, is trying to work through difficult real-world moral dilemmas, whereas Alfred seems to have it all figured out from his years of experience.

Still, I'm not convinced that if we are to call Alfred's version of reality a bit...right wing that we must dislike or dismiss the movie if we do not share those values. It reminds me of one of the most praised films of all time - The Searchers. From what I understand, critics love that movie b/c the morality it apparently presents in the end (lunatic racist hyper-macho psychopath hero decides to reform for no reason at the last minute) shows how ridiculous traditional Hollywood Western morality (and, by association, the morality of 1950's America) really is. You could read the end of The Dark Knight the same way. Its holding up a mirror to our political culture. We're scared of people we think just want to watch the world burn (maybe you think its terrorists, maybe you think its Cheney/Bush/corporations). We want a knight in shining armor, but sooner or later, that knight has to do some things that aren't going to look so good to others. In order to maintain power in this democratic culture that values popularity above all else, the knight has to hide his or her dirty work and maintain a nice face for children and the ignorant masses. At least that's my reading. What's yours?

Superhero Movies - More Diverse Than You Think

At the risk of using a classic snowclone, Superhero (or comic book) movies are the new Westerns. What I mean is that the genre is both popular and diverse enough to be regarded as a venue for working through our collective philosophical and psychological issues.

Other genres (horror, melodrama, comedy) also hold up a mirror to our collective psyches, but not in the way that the Big movies do. The lesser genres show us what we want - morally, aesthetically, emotionally - but only part of what some of us want. The dominant genre of the time, be it Westerns, gangster movies, or superhero flicks, reflects most of what most of us want. I would consider comparing gangster movies and TV shows to Westerns, if you were to say that Westerns were more of a way of defining masculinity. But I think Westerns, in their time, were bigger than gangster films/shows like The Sopranos, Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface are today.

No one would doubt that superhero tales are quite popular, more popular in the last 5 years than ever before and more popular than any other type of film with the possible exception of talking-animal-CGI films. If you were keen on making an older comparison, you could liken them to myths or fairy tails, other dominant genres of their times. But what about my claim that the genre is diverse?

Enter The Dark Knight, in some sense a synthesis of the superhero movie and the gangster flick. And yes, I know Batman isn't technically a superhero because he doesn't have superpowers. But genres and classification aren't defined that way. They're defined by the language we use to refer to the texts, by marketers, vendors, critics, and fans. And I'm willing to assume that most of them would classify this as a superhero blockbuster film. While watching it, I couldn't help but compare it to another superhero blockbuster - Iron Man. These films came out in the same year, they're of the same genre, I'm willing to wager they make roughly the same money (they're as popular as one another), and, significantly, they have almost the same amount of critical acclaim (79 for Iron Man on metacritic, to Dark Knight's 82).

If we were going to plop down $15 to see the Dark Knight on the Imax, maybe we'd like to have a good idea of what we're in for. Ads are of no service here, as they remain startlingly homogeneous. They have to. Ads have to appeal to the largest group possible, even if they have to misrepresent their product, which they frequently do. Ads for Iron Man, Hancock, and Dark Knight look pretty similar to one another - lots of action, some ironic wit, good-looking wounded-yet-rough men, sexy women. To take Dark Knight as an example, its interesting to note that almost all of the clips in the many previews come from the first 2/3 of the movie (which, in my opinion, are the least interesting part of the movie, certainly not as morally complex as the last third). So ads are not a good indicator of content.

What about critics? Shouldn't critics be the corrective to misleading advertising? Well, it depends on how much you bother to read. If you're just looking for general thumbs-up-thumbs-down assessment, as most people are, then the critics are of no use. Yes, all of the critics like both movies, but I have a tough time believing that the public will like both movies equally. One is pretty frothy and fun, the other is pitch black and quite complex. If you dig a little deeper and read the reviews, you can see that most critics recognize these differences. Its important to say that I do not think critics should've praised Iron Man, damned Dark Knight, or vice-versa. But to fail to acknowledge the stark differences between these movies, as thumbs-up-thumbs-down reviewing does, seems to indicate that there's something wrong with that kind of popular film criticism.

Let's go over some of the differences:

Humor: the humor in Iron Man relies primarily on understatement - the hero reacts to a huge explosion with raised eyebrows. There are plenty of catchphrases and instances of Tony Stark reacting in more laid-back fashion than the situation dictates. In the Dark Knight, the humor is more dry and British, quicker and, depending on your taste for these things, either clever or too clever. There's more gallows humor as one would expect with the Joker (here's hoping that Heath Ledger's death doesn't totally overwhelm critical appraisal of this film).

Romance subplot: While both protagonists are playboys, Tony Stark gets the girl in the end while Bruce Wayne is left to brood over a dead lover. Not exactly a minor difference in terms of tone.

Morality: Iron Man dabbles with moral complexity, casting a reformed arms dealer as hero (who ultimately ends up using weapons he designed to kill bad guys, much like the military does). The Dark Knight, on the other hand, had scene after scene in which characters were made to ask themselves (and the audience) tough moral questions: is it ever moral to kill large numbers of people? Is it okay to lie to the public in order to maintain order? Is it okay to survey the public without their knowing? Does using force against the enemy breed more insidious, amoral enemies? Can we delegate the killing that our situation demands to superheroes (read: soldiers) because we can't do what needs to be done? The film was practically an ethics class.

There's one scene that really brings home the dissimilarity. At the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark holds a press conference and announces that he is Iron Man. The scene is subversive, in that it goes against what we know about superheroes: they like to keep their true identity a secret. In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent calls a press conference and announces that he is Batman (when we know that he's not). Iron Man is content with a few double crosses here and there but doesn't want to confuse the audience with too many. The Dark Knight assumes the audience can maintain an understanding of character motivation even when there are many, many more double crosses.

If there's anything to learn from this, it is that looking at who wrote and directed the movie might be a better indicator than any as to what the film will be like, lending credence to the beleaguered auteur theory. I think that auteur theory is imperfect in that it fails to recognize the fact that creators could create something especially similar to other creators' works and dissimilar to their own previous work. This happens plenty, and the good critic can recognize it.

So, what are the recurring authorial themes? Right away, there's identity. In the first two scenes, the Nolans play with our expectations of who's who, just as they did with the twins in The Prestige, the hero/villain of Memento, and superhero-as-symbol-transcending -individual concept in Batman Begins. They take the idea of superhero's symbolic power being more important than their individual identity to a new level by making a mockery of the personal-history-as-destiny concept. The Joker tells a couple of different versions of how he got to be as fucked up as he is, and none of them is the truth. Each version suits his situation. This film deals far more with moral, political, social, and philosophical issues than psychological or personal ones. Another point of difference from some comic book heroes (Hulk) but not terribly different than others (Spiderman).

And for those of you who think web criticism doesn't matter, check out this article from Slate. Be advised that the article never claims that critics cause a movie to be popular. Only that they are able to anticipate the popularity of a movie better than non-experts and better than chance. Surely, some critics exert some effect on the popularity of a movie (probably the ones who have been especially good at predicting how much the public will like it). Anyway, if critics learn to write from the point of view of the experienced expert and not from the point of view of the cultural elitist, then they will be valued widely. As long as they assume that their job is to say what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is trash, instead of being able to distill the differences of films and be able to present those differences in a way that consumers can make decisions based on them, they'll be writing for just another niche.