A.I. as opposed to what?

One popular use of A.I. - specifically chatbots using LLMS - that I did not foresee is as a source of life advice. Sometimes, people refer to this in the context of therapy, as if the user is using ChatGPT or another A.I. as a substitute therapist. That implies a certain level of intimacy and privacy that probably applies to a minority of the many advice-seeking queries users offer every day. 

When thinking about the effects of anything, we often search for comparisons, and the comparisons we make are often shaped by metaphors we use - I think that's what is happening with how we think about the effects of using A.I. for advice-seeking. Instead of choosing a comparison that comes to mind the quickest or perhaps one that suits our existing biases for or against the phenomenon in question (e.g., how do the answers given by ChatGPT compare to those given by a professional therapist), we might choose our comparisons in a more deliberate way. Instead of starting with the connections our mind makes when learning of a few vivid exemplars, we might first define the field of inquiry - what is the behavior we're interested in, how many folks are engaging in it, and how can I observe a representative sample of it? 

The next step is to consider the behavior in the context of people's lives. Here, the choice of comparison is not what comes to mind for us, but our reasonable guess as to what people engaging in the behavior would have done otherwise. If they didn't have access to ChatGPT, who or what would they have gone to for advice (or would they have gone to anyone or anything for advice at all)? 

Therapists strike me as sources of very good advice on many topics. They're also better than self-help books because they can tailor their advice to you as an individual and they engage in a back-and-forth exchange. There's also some intangible humanity to your connection with a therapist that clearly helps. On the down side, it is hard to access therapy. There are only so many professionally trained therapists to go around. Efforts to make them more accessible by moving therapy online sacrifices some benefits of the therapeutic experience, namely the intangible human connection, in addition to leading to burnout from overbooked therapists. Even a society that is fully committed to serving the mental and emotional needs of its citizens runs up against the limits of therapeutic supply. 

Of course, people have turned to many other sources for life advice, including friends, family, clergy, authors, and artists. You may not approach a movie, TV show, or a novel with an advice-seeking intension, and yet its lessons may be your guide through any number of emotional or existential straits.

Then there are sources of advice that we encounter online: in spaces explicitly marked as such (and which derive their format and logic from newspaper advice columns) but also on YouTube, TikTok, and podcasts. Again, these life lessons may not be something we sought out, but they may still inform how we navigate challenging times in our lives. 

As I consider whether its a good idea for people to turn to ChatGPT for advice, I find that the most apt comparison - that is, the most plausible source of advice for most of the people asking ChatGPT for advice - is either googling it, searching YouTube or TikTok, or running across it on YouTube or TikTok via an algorithm. The quality of advice coming from these sources is, well, mixed. In many cases, the answers aren't as high quality as one would get from a professional, but its much more accessible, which is why its used more often. In some cases - googling something that is commonly googled and finding results from trusted sources - the quality is similar to that which you'd get from a professional. 

Are the types of life advice questions users ask ChatGPT more like the impersonal kind that people have, for the past 20 years, tended to google? Or are they more like the personal questions that people turned to friends, family, and - if they have access - therapists for? My sense is that a fair amount of young people have been getting that kind of advice from YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms for the past decade. In that sense, it is an appropriate point of comparison for that type of advice.

I'd imagine advice of this sort given by ChatGPT would be pretty homogeneous when compared to what you would find on social media platforms. The latter would vary greatly in values it reflected, the perspectives and experiences from which it drew. It leaves the existing variety of humanity intact, while ChatGPT probably flattens it. 

I guess I imagine cases in which people get bad life advice - "bad" in the sense that they result in some harm to themselves and/or others - being more numerous on social media platforms than on ChatGPT. I also imagine that the flat homogeneity of its answers won't necessarily spread to other aspects of culture more broadly, as some suspect it will. ChatGPT tends to qualify its advice and allow for some degree of variety and nuance in its answers. By merely asserting that there is some variety and nuance to certain life advice questions, ChatGPT would be contradicting the values of some of its users. This is less likely to happen on social media where answers are sorted by algorithm to confirm the existing biases of users. 

And so that would seem to be the trade-off: leave the echo chambers of social media advice intact - some of which generate harmful outcomes - or replace them with answers that guide most users away from harmful outcomes but homogenize...something. But is it really Culture that's being homogenized if people are encouraged to cope with crisis in particular ways? This is where my speculation reaches its limit and I feel the need for a more systematic examination of the life advice questions people ask ChatGPT and the answers they receive. 

What did Americans watch on TikTok?

It's a seemingly simple question with a seemingly obvious answer. If you've read anything about TikTok, you probably assume that most Americans are watching influencers who talk about politics, fashion, weight loss, and a broad, amorphous category of behaviors called "trends." Those who write about TikTok - not just journalists but academic researchers - tend to write about what they're interested in, what has the biggest impact on society or the economy, or what is trending. What is trending on any large platform like YouTube or TikTok represents less than 5% of what users are watching, so it's not a good starting point for answering this question. 

Instead, it's better to start with a representative sample of Americans and ask them to report URLS of the last ten TikTok videos they watched, which is what we did in April of 2024. Why ten? People tend to get tired of copying and pasting URLs after that, and we believe this allows us a view of most Americans' TikTok viewing habits that other approaches do not offer. 

After collecting roughly 3,000 URLs from roughly 300 Americans, we watched each video and categorized it based on its topic. Topics ranged from music and dance to true crime to news, politics, and social issues. Recognizing that many videos were "about" multiple things (a comedy skit that was about animals and relationships), we assigned as many topic labels to these videos as was warranted. We then calculated the share of videos in our sample that belonged to each topic category. Here is what we found.

It is hard to characterize Americans' TikTok viewing in terms of topic. It may be tempting to look at the highest bars in the chart and talk about how TikTok is mostly a light-hearted platform where Americans watched comedy and dance videos, but those two categories, cumulatively, account for less than half of the videos in our sample. Another way to describe the viewing is "fragmented," which is misleading and oversimplifying in its own way. To get a better understanding of what types of content Americans watched on TikTok, it helps to have a point of comparison. 

We also asked our representative sample of Americans to provide the URLs of the last ten YouTube videos they watched. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two platforms. 

Relative to YouTube, TikTok was used by Americans to view more comedy content and content about relationships while YouTube was used more for educational videos (e.g., tutorials) and clips from movies and TV shows. But the diversity of topics is broad on both platforms: not only can you find content on a wide variety of topics on both platforms; Americans tended to watch a variety of content. Based on this admittedly rudimentary analysis, it's best to think of cross-platform differences in Americans' short video diets (and perhaps, by extension, the identities and purposes of the platforms) as tendencies rather than in absolute terms. 

All the Media Content We Cannot See

Like the majority of the electromagnetic spectrum, most of any given high-choice media landscape - be it YouTube, TikTok, or even Netflix - is difficult to see without some kind of aid, and thus easy to forget about. One might argue that the most important stuff - the content that has the most influence on individuals and society, i.e., the popular stuff - is easily visible through Top Ten or "trending" lists on the platform itself or through articles, podcasts, and conversations of cultural critics. But how much of the entire spectrum of content - or, if you take a human-centered approach to the question, viewing hours - are we observing when we talk about this tall head of the distribution tail?

The answer has implications for how we conceive of the culture we live in. Often, we assume we can get a pretty good sense of a culture by observing what media content it chooses to spend its time with. The topics, values, and aesthetics of popular content have long been thought to reflect and/or shape the preoccupations of the culture. This was all easy enough during the era of mass media when choice was limited, although even then it oversimplified the character of a culture. We look back on the late 1960's in America and think of psychedelia and unrest, but plenty of folks living in that place and time were likely oblivious to such trends. Still, it seems safe to say that you could get at least some idea of what most people living in a certain place and time were thinking and feeling by examining its popular media content. 

It's a commonplace that the number of choices for media content has exploded in the past decade or two. Truly understanding how content relates to culture - or trying to derive a sense of culture by examining content - has become trickier. In the era of broadcast TV, it wouldn't take much time for anyone to watch episodes of the 10 most popular TV shows. Out of the total number of viewing hours in a given culture, that might get you, say, 50% of them. The other 50% of the viewing hours would be distributed across less popular programming, so you could make a decent claim to "knowing" a culture by examining 10 popular TV shows. What would a similar approach get you now, if applied to Netflix?

According to recently released data from Netflix, viewers watched a total of roughly 90 billion hours in the first half of 2023. Of those hours, the top ten shows accounted for 4.9 billion - or roughly 5% of the total. Watching episodes of these ten shows, then, wouldn't be a very good way to get an idea of what Netflix viewers, generally, were watching (or, by extension, what they thought or how they felt about anything). It may be that the shows are in some way representative of the larger whole - in terms of their genre, topic, tone, aesthetic, values, etc. - but given the relatively small proportion of the whole it represents, there is reason to suspect that we are missing a lot about this group of people and their preoccupations if we only take into account the most popular content. 

But this is where many of us start, and by "us" I mean scholars and researchers as well as cultural critics, content creators seeking to create content that resonates with an audience, or marketers. What other option do we have? 

One alternative would be to take stratified samples from further down the distribution tail, an approach used in this article from The Hollywood Reporter. It's important to note that such an approach requires that the platforms make their data available in such ways as to make this feasible, and in this respect, Netflix has done us a huge favor. It is more difficult to get underneath the trending surface of TikTok or YouTube to try to get even a rough idea of what the rest of it looks like. 

And with YouTube and TikTok, the problem of unaccounted-for content is likely much worse. 

Let's do some back-of-the-envelope* calculations to try see how little of the content universe we're seeing when we examine, say, the top ten TikTok videos from last year. There are roughly 1.1 billion active monthly TikTok users. The average user spends 95 minutes on the app per day. So, that's a total roughly 104.5 billion minutes per day, or 381.5 trillion minutes per year. The most viewed TikTok video of 2023 had 504 million views and it is roughly 30 seconds long. Obviously, the next nine had fewer views than this, but I'm finding it difficult to obtain raw view numbers for each video (it's easy to find the number of followers, but plenty of people watch TikTok videos created by users they don't follow). So, let's err on the side of overestimating and say that each video is 1 minute long and is watched 500 million times. By watching the top ten TikTok videos, we are accounting for 5 billion minutes of viewing. What proportion of the total are we seeing?

Before we do the math, it's worth remembering our tendency to fail to see meaningful differences among very small proportions. We can pretty easily tell the difference between 20% of something and 5% of it but fail to differentiate between .1% and .01%, even though the difference in magnitude of the latter is more than twice the difference in magnitude of the former. Often, we just think of anything below 1% of something as "very small," whether it's .5% or .05%. But if we're really trying to know something - a culture, a media diet, etc. - it's important to correct for that bias and recognize just how small the proportion really is. 

Watching the top 10 TikTok videos of 2023 would account for less than .001% (one thousandth of one percent) of all TikTok viewing. Given that the top 100 videos would have fewer views than the top video, and given that most of those videos are under 1 minute in duration, watching the top 100 videos (a feasible, if time-consuming, task) would account for less than .01% of content viewed on TikTok. 

Even if we are studying a particular topic or domain within these high-choice environments - say, political messages or health-related messages - sampling only the most popular videos doesn't get us anywhere near the complete or representative sample that it once did in the low-choice days of mass media. Most viewing is happening outside of the sample, further down the distribution tail. Until we reckon with the vast size these media environments and the diversity of users' media diets, it's hard to know what we're missing.

*If anyone has more accurate usage data, I would love to see it! I don't have supreme faith in these data, but it's the best I could find right now. 

So you want to be an influencer

There's something about the name of the major in the department in which I teach - "Creative Media" - that, for many first-year students, brings to mind the career of an influencer. So as to disabuse them of the notion that our major will teach them how to be an influencer, I outline the differences between the career of a media professional - a broad category encompassing screenwriters, directors, producers, editors, camera-people, newscasters, sound engineers, etc. - and the career of an influencer. In searching for a metaphor or parallel to describe the career of an influencer, I typically refer to pop star musicians (though the following is likely applicable to any genre of popular music - rap, country, etc.). 

On the up side, the barrier to entry is low - anyone can start playing music, post that music online, promote it on social media, develop a following, become famous and earn plenty of money. This is in contrast to many media professional positions that require access to expensive equipment, social and/or geographic proximity to connections in the business, competitive apprenticeships, and a track record of proven success. On the down side, there is a lot more competition when the barrier is low. There's always someone younger, hotter, funnier, edgier, and more novel than you, and they're so eager and hungry for attention that they'll be happy to take that sponsorship deal you turn up your nose at. There's no incentive for platforms like YouTube, TikTok or Spotify to share much revenue with creators because there's a never-ending talent pipeline, and so they tend to pay creators very little.

Generally, pop star careers are shorter than those of many media professionals, again because of the low barrier to entry, their replaceability, and the audience's desire for novelty. Of the small percent of influencers who achieve success, it's hard to find ones who maintain it for more than a few years. This is in contrast to all of the aforementioned media professional careers that typically last decades, with salaries and job security typically increasing over time. 

There's also the challenge of maintaining a pace of output that being an influencer demands. Whereas audiences are trained to expect a new song from a musician maybe once a year, 13 new episodes of a TV show every year, and a new film from a well-known director every several years, influencers are expected to generate new content at least once a month. Maintaining that pace for years can be taxing. Looking at the Wikipedia entries of several popular influencers from the 2010's, the word "hiatus" frequently appears - an understandable response to the non-stop production schedule. This is to say nothing of the effects of public scrutiny on one's mental health, the blurring of personal and professional identities, the loss of privacy - none of which are issues for the average editor, screenwriter, or audio engineer. 

Other influencers try to make the jump to the mainstream, collaborating with established media professionals, making movies or TV shows, parlaying their success on the web into something more lasting. Some succeed while most do not. Gradually, I think influencers and the entertainment industry will get better at intuiting which personalities will transfer to the big screen and which are better suited to TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, etc. 

Another antecedent to the influencer is the career of reality TV star, though they seem to rely more heavily on personal appearance or sponsorship gigs than influencers, who seem to more effectively monetize their content and exert more control over their image from the start. Maybe the similarity is less related to their career trajectory and more to their relationship to audiences - more intimate and ordinary than the average actor or director.

This all sounds like I'm trying to dissuade students from pursuing the life of an influencer, which I'm not. The fact is that tens (or maybe hundreds?) of thousands of influencers (broadly defined) make enough money to live on. I'd guess that this is more than the number of people who make a living at being a pop star, but maybe less than those who make a living as a musician. 

Being an influencer, like being a pop star, seems to require "natural talent." There's only so much you can be taught about how to succeed in those realms, and a college classroom certainly isn't the place to learn it. Better to just watch some tutorial videos, go out there, and do it. And if you got it, you got it, and if you don't, you don't. I can't think of a reason not to pursue both paths - the path of the influencer and the path of the media professional - simultaneously, though the time demands of either path will eventually force you to decide. 

As the influencer phenomenon continues to age, we'll get better at answer these questions about that career: Do influencers get enough revenue coming in from their videos that were popular years before to make a living? Do sponsorship deals persist or do they dry up? What does the second (or third) act of the career of an influencer look like?

Types of audience fragmentation

 I'm embarking on a new large-scale project relating to audience fragmentation. Or rather, I have been embarking on it for the past year - such is the leisurely pace of the post-tenure research agenda. It started as a refutation of the echo chamber as an intuitive but overly simplistic characterization of audiences' media diets in the age of information abundance. Then I realized that someone already wrote that book. 

In researching the idea, I was surprised to find how few studies about fragmenting audiences and echo chambers even tried to capture what I felt was the right kind of data: data capturing the whole of people's media diets - not aggregate audience data, not what individual users post on a particular platform, not even the amount of time or what individuals see on a particular platform, but ALL of what they see across all platforms and media. Unless you capture that, you really have no way of knowing whether individuals have any overlap with one another in what content they consume and/or how many of them are sequestering themselves in ideologically polarized echo chambers. 

In defense of researchers, this is a hard kind of data to get. What media content people consume is often a private matter. It's just hard - for an academic researcher, a company, a government - to get people to trust them enough to get that data. Observing people might cause them to change their behavior. Still, some researchers have made in-roads - working with representative samples, trying to get precise, granular data on precisely what content people are seeing - and I think that if we start to piece together what they have gathered and supplement it with new data, we'll be able to get a better sense of what audience fragmentation actually looks like. 

I've started the process of collecting that data. In a survey, I've asked a sample of college students to post URLs of the last 10 TikTok videos they watched, the last 10 YouTube videos they watched, and the last 10 streaming or TV shows they watched. I'm anticipating that there will be more overlap in the TV data than in the YouTube of TikTok data. But I wonder what counts as meaningful when it comes to overlap or fragmentation. I return to the age-old question: so what?

Let's say you have a group of 100 people. In one scenario, 50 of them watch NFL highlight videos, 25 watch far-right propaganda videos, and 25 watch far-left propaganda videos. In another scenario, all 100 of them watch 100 different videos about knitting. The latter audience, as a whole, is more fragmented than the former audience. The former is more polarized in terms of the content it consumes - half of the sample can be said to occupy echo chambers, either on the right or left. 

It's clear to me while the polarization of media diets matters - it likely drives political violence, instability, etc. But why does fragmentation, in and of itself, matter? 

I guess one fear is that we will no longer have any common experiences, and that will make it harder to feel like we all live in the same society - not as bad as being ideologically polarized, but it's plausible to think that it might lead to a lack of empathy or understanding. But what counts as a common experience? Do we have to have consumed the same media text? Stuart Hall would tell you, in case you didn't already know, that different people watching the same TV episode can process it in different ways, leading to different outcomes. But at least there would be some common ground or experience. 

But what if we watched the same genre of television show, or watched the same type of video (e.g., videos about knitting)? If we contrast the 100 people who all watched different knitting videos to 100 people who all watched videos about 100 very different topics (e.g., knitting, fistfights, European history, coding, basketball highlights, lifestyle porn, etc.), I would think that the former group would have more to talk about - more common ground and experience - than the latter, despite the fact that there is an equal amount of overlap (which is to say, no overlap) in terms of each discrete video they watched. 

Instead of just looking at fragmentation across discrete texts, it would also be useful to look at it across genres or types. It could get tricky determining what qualifies as a meaningful genre or TikTok video. Some TikTok videos share a set of aesthetic conventions but may not convey the same set of values, or vice versa. There will be some similarities across the texts in people's media diets, even if there is no overlap in the discrete texts. The challenge now is to decide what similarities are meaningful. 

Going viral (by accident)

Another fall semester here at the University of Alabama brings another media-related kerfuffle involving our students. Last fall, a student made a threatening comment on a UA sorority's YouTube video, which set in motion a campus-wide panic that circulated through social media (YikYak in particular) and lasted several days. This week's incident involves yet another UA sorority's YouTube video, but this time it centers on the video itself rather than a comment on a video. And, like the last incident, it makes for a teachable moment that is highly relevant to all undergraduate students (particularly those who were actually in the video, some of whom may be in my classes).

The video, which may or may not be available by the time you read this, was a recruitment video depicting the members of a sorority smiling and waving at the camera, dancing around, and doing what I would describe as frolicking. This is the first lesson: part of the difficulty of discussing any kind of media content is describing it. Each person will likely highlight some aspect of the content and leave out other aspects. One could note that all of the sorority sisters were white, or good-looking, or thin, or that the cinematography and editing was very professional looking for a student production, or that the young women don't seem to actually do much in the video. Coverage of the video in mainstream news and in blogs provide an excellent example of media framing: the aspects of the video that are mentioned are not chosen at random, but rather chosen so as to promote (or at least discuss) one of many possible interpretations.

The spread of the video also provides a good case study of audiences in the age of viral content. Many lessons on media creation start with the question: who is your audience? The answer to this question informs everything from aesthetic choices to the medium or venue through which you disseminate your message. In most cases, the Internet allows for a precise calibration of the relationship between content and audience, much more precise than the big-tent, shotgun approach more commonly used in old-school broadcast media. But in some cases, like this sorority video, content specifically tailored for a very small audience escapes into the wild. By now, there is a long list of media content, in particular YouTube videos, intended for a small, specific audience that, through no intention of its creators, found a much larger audience.

The prototypical example of this is Rebecca Black's Friday. Part of the pleasure of this kind of viral content, part of what makes it unique, is a result of the disjuncture between intended audience and actual audience. We're so used to seeing content that is either tailored to us or intended for a homogeneous audience that it is novel to see content that was so obviously not designed for us. Seeing this kind of content raises the question: "what were they (the creators, the target audience) thinking?" Like some kinds of reality TV, this type of content gives us a window into a culture and mindset that is foreign to us.

Also, like the Rebecca Black video, what makes the UA sorority recruitment video worth watching for so many people is that there are different ways to hate it or enjoy it. Some viewers seem to have taken unironic pleasure in the attractiveness of the video's stars, others laugh at its apparent earnestness, and others use it as evidence of an argument about the homogeneity of Greek organizations, and UA sororities in particular, or of how oblivious said sororities are of this fact, or of some aspect of a hegemonic culture that has inculcated the video's creators with this inability to see the underlying message that the video is sending, or that there is nothing wrong nor remarkable about the video and that the reaction to the video is indicative of political correctness run amok. The popularity of the video, the number of clicks and shares it gets, doesn't take into account which of these interpretations or reactions the user has. And, of course, the networked nature of social media and the way in which YouTube and similar sites highlight the number of clicks and shares facilitate the process: we watch it and talk about it because it is what everyone is watching and talking about.

I'm excited to find out what happens next, and to be a part of helping something positive come out of all this. It feels as though it could go either way. It could be yet another cultural object used to bludgeon people on the other side of the cultural divide, a prop in an escalating online shouting match. I imagine that such an experience would be thoroughly demoralizing to the content creators, prompting them to become deeply cynical about public discourse, causing them to "play it safe" by not sharing anything online or creating the most bland, benign content they can think of.

But I hope it doesn't turn out that way. I hope it leads to deeper reflection on what the video depicts, how it depicts its subjects, and how it is received by an audience with diverse, often diametrically opposed, viewpoints. If our students can get past the initial sting of intense scrutiny, I think they can learn a lot about the power of media. It certainly won't be hard to convince these students of the relevance of these lessons to their lives.

How much of the media we consume is really user generated?

Like most media users today, I enjoy two kinds of leisure media: user-generated content (UGC) and professionally generated content. The former costs WAY less to produce than the latter. On one of my favorite user-generated content websites, Reddit, there was a pretty good description of why cable costs so much, and a good part of it has to do with the cost of professional production of content. But if we're using our internet connection to access UGC, well then, we shouldn't have to be paying so much for the professionally generated content that we're not using. This got me to thinking: how much of the content I use is user-generated?

I don't think I'll ever abandon professionally generated content: I still love sports and a handful of television shows like Mad Men and Charlie Rose. I also loved relaxing at the end of a hard day by flipping on the TV and channel surfing. But I don't really do that anymore. I think that what has replaced that for me are two things: Facebook and Reddit, both of which are primarily UGC. Facebook occasionally contains references to content that was professionally created: a link to an article on NYTimes.com, a link to a video clip from a TV show posted on YouTube. But MOST of the information I encounter on there is generated by my friends: status updates, photos.

The same is true of Reddit. Let's take the most up-voted stories on reddit today as a sample. Of the 25 items on this front page, 16 of them are pictures or statements or links to content ostensibly generated by a non-professional (someone who did not create the content with the understanding that it would generate revenue for them personally). So again, its not clear cut. Facebook and Reddit and YouTube derive SOME of their value from professionally generated content, but it seems disingenuous to say that they're similar, in terms of what it costs to maintain the quality of the experience, to the former great American past-time: channel surfing.

I accept the fact that Facebook, Reddit, and sites like them provide a useful service by providing a venue for all this interaction between users. I accept that this takes a lot of hours of coding, and I accept that I must pay for that service in some way: with my attention to ads or having those companies mine my data or sell it to advertisers. But clearly, the overhead of running such sites is much less than running a television network: you don't have to pay writers, actors, set designers, animators, etc. So yes, I should pay for my time on Facebook and Reddit, but not as much as I should for my time watching a television network.

It wouldn't be that hard or time-consuming to code a random sample of Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit content as UGC or professionally generated content, and then to do a rough calculation of the true cost of producing and distributing this content. Another project for the back burner!

Ironic Liking vs. In-Spite-of Liking

In thinking more about Rebecca Black's popularity, I start to think more about how anyone gauges whether something is popular and/or well liked, and what that means.

At the most basic level, we have the number of plays or views. The fact that Rebecca Black's video has been played over 20 million times tells us that it is, in some way, popular. Of these, some could be curiosity seekers, some could be people who like the song listening to it repeatedly, some could be people who enjoy laughing at the song listening to it repeatedly. The story surrounding Black's song indicates that most viewers do not like the song in the way that most people earnestly "like" what they like.

It takes very little effort and no money to click on a link and watch a YouTube video. The same cannot be said for downloading a song on ITunes. So, which is more likely: that tens of thousands of people earnestly like a song that many people find horrible OR that tens of thousands of people are willing to pay money to listen to something that you do not earnestly like?

What do I mean by "earnest"? People talk a lot about liking something "ironically." But I feel like this is the wrong term. "Ironic" implies that they like something for the opposite reason than one would expect them to like it. But are those who grow "ironic" mustaches really growing it for the opposite reasons than those growing it for earnest reasons? What would that mean? The term "ironic" just doesn't seem to convey anything meaningful. It doesn't help us understand why people buy or do or wear things that are inconsistent with their apparent tastes and likings. The term "parody" might be used to describe such actions, but I feel like that's inadequate, too. "Parody" implies that they are trying to get a person to laugh at that which is being parodied. Its commonly understood as a way to ridicule something. In some cases, I can understand how this might be true of a hipster growing a mustache or of someone who finds Rebecca Black's voice to be grating and her lyrics to be awful: they're growing/listening to these things to make fun of and feel superior to those that earnestly do/like them. For them to do this, there must be a receptive audience, someone to share in the joke. If they were in the exclusive company of earnest fans or mustache-growers, I can't imagine that they would keep up the parody for very long. But if they're surrounded by others who feel similarly toward people who grow earnest mustaches and earnestly like Rebecca Black's music (or that type of pop music), then parodic liking is a way of bonding, of signaling that you're part of a group.

I'd like to suggest that something else is going on: In-spite-of liking. This means that someone hates a certain aspect of a show, movie, song, clothing, famous person but likes another aspect of it. All of these things are comprised of many elements, but most of the ones that are liked in this fashion are somehow un-self-conscious, nakedly attention-getting, unapologetic and unsubtle. Perhaps people long for these characteristics and if they happen to be packaged with something that the user does not like - misogynist lyrics, nasally voice, rampant consumerism, a lifestyle that one cannot identify with - they're willing to overlook these things in favor of the characteristics they like. Maybe they also identify with the fact that these people are proud and hated by many. Unlike parody, this could take place in a vacuum. If I liked the beat of Rebecca Black's song and found it catchy, despite the fact that I thought the lyrics were inane, that it was irresponsible to mock a 13-year-old, and that her voice was grating and nasally, I might still listen to (or even download) the song without having to do this in front of anyone.

I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to articulate these feelings, but that doesn't make them any less true. People might just say "I like it, the end." So if we want to understand what predicts liking, we might have to move away from self-report and find out patterns of liking that diverge from traditional models, instances we have usually called "ironic liking." If we isolate each characteristic and ask whether one is liking something as a kind of performance for the benefit of others, we can better understand this phenomenon.

Post-script: Amazingly, 10 year olds seem to grasp the concept of ironic liking. This focus group also indicates that the song skews young: people under 10 seem to like it more than teens.

The Fate of Rebecca Black

In just over a week(!), unknown teenager Rebecca Black's quasi-home-made music video Friday went from 3000 views to 22 million views. Like many viral sensations, there was a catalyst in the form of online opinion leaders (i.e. bloggers with connections to mainstream media): popular blogger Tosh.O got the ball rolling with a re-post of the video from The Daily What. Its hard for anything to "go viral" without these influential bloggers drawing the material to the attention of their audiences, which draws the attention of mainstream media, which draws the attention of your mother. But are there any characteristics of this text that set it apart from things that don't go viral that it has in common with other things that have gotten popular?

One possible precedent is the meteoric rise of YouTube pop sensation Justin Bieber. Commonalities: they happened at roughly the same time, meaning that the relationship amongst smalltime teen artists, YouTube, bloggers, the mainstream media, and the general audience was roughly the same during both phenomena. They're both producing pop music in the style that is popular at this time. Here, one might engage in subjective judgment of the merit of their music, but there is where the conversation about what goes viral ceases to interest me. Maybe Bieber's talented, maybe he isn't. If we're interested in figuring out why both Bieber and Rebecca Black got popular quickly on YouTube, we have to look at characteristics of the video texts in relation to their reception which - conveniently enough for anyone interest in understanding media, meaning, and effect - is captured on the YouTube video itself, on Twitter, and in the blogosphere.

Both Bieber and Black inspire diametrically opposed reactions: you either love them or you hate them. Though its hard to be certain of the identity of anyone online, judging by the preferences of those who leave comments (which, in another boon to media researchers, is easily available, searchable, and analyzable), loving/hating of both seems to be determined by gender, age, and some personality trait (anti-authority or anti-social, perhaps). The loving/hating of these artists seems more personal than the loving/hating of artists who rise through the traditional star-making machinery of Hollywood. Stars are either conditioned to speak and behave in a certain way or are selected based on their match to very specific popular archetypes. They feel remote and unrelatable in a way that overnight sensations do not.

But Black might actually have more in common with a certain brand of reality TV, of which Jersey Shore is the most salient example. These texts have at least two kinds of viewers: those that identify aspirationally with some element of the characters' behavior (usually their bravado in the face of haters, or their unchecked hedonism during a buzzkill economy) and those that love to hate them and/or laugh at them, feeling superior to them. Additionally, there are people who, paradoxically, occupy both ends of that spectrum, liking the characters "ironically." There's a genius to this kind of entertainment: by incorporating both lovers and haters of these people, they double their audience AND they get people talking online, which is necessary in the age of social media for marketing purposes. As one of my professors says, TV exists to give people something to talk about, so these texts are popular because they're ways for us to talk about taste, class, appearance, values, and pretty much any other element of human behavior.

There's also the question of authenticity. Black seems to be authentic in her performance (as opposed to being purposefully bad in a parody style) given her age and her earnest appearances on mainstream media outlets. But the authenticity of those millions of people who watch the video is in doubt. Judging by a lot of the comments on YouTube and the mainstream media story, most people are laughing at Black, but its conceivable that there could be some other earnest 13-year-old girls who honestly like the song and, out of empathy, are un-ironic fans of hers. If you hate her, you're saddened and alarmed that so many people can have such horrible taste in music. If you love her, you're saddened and alarmed that people can be so cruel as to laugh at a 13 year old. In any case, she seems to be making some money off it, money that, properly invested, will still be hers when we find someone else to laugh at. And she's making showbizz connections. The narrative will probably go something like this: mean internet beats up 13-year-old girl, Bieber or Usher or some famous dude jumps to her defense, voice coach tells her how to sing slightly better, young teen girls see her as empowering figure, ??? = profit!

This still leaves me with one question, one that I hope many people are asking as more cewebrities pop up: does it matter how you get famous? I can't help but think of Star Wars Kid, who ended up in therapy after so many people made fun of him on the internet. Sometimes, the social mediasphere can be an extension of junior high. There's an endless supply of 12-15 year-olds doing something embarrassingly earnest and, mistakenly, recording it. These are the next Rebbeca Blacks. And the conversation about the effects of Rebecca Black's rise and reception doesn't end with whether or not she lands on her feet. Maybe some girl, too young to understand exactly how people get famous online, will see that Rebecca Black is famous and met Justin Bieber, so she'll make a similar video, but it won't go viral. It'll just get passed around her middle school, she'll be made fun of, and develop an eating disorder. Maybe this will be the 21st century equivalent of the emotional wreckage of the would-be starlet turning tricks on Sunset Strip.

As audiences, we seem to always be hungry for someone to serve as a topic of debate. By tearing them down and building them up, we're helping create the rise-and-fall/fall-and-rise stories that have always kept audiences rapt. As performers, we seem to be stuck between killing ourselves when someone speaks ill of us or being way too proud of our shitty music or personality, impervious to criticism (haters gonna hate!). Those wondering how our culture will get past this period would do well to follow Rebecca's story as it unfolds.

Is vlogging a female medium?

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

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

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

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

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.

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"

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.

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.

YouTube: Public or Private?

One of the most interesting things about the case of Viacom ordering YouTube to hand over its information on users is that the act of watching videos is being referred to as a private act. Is it as private as our social security and credit card numbers? Half as private? Twice as private? Where did the idea of what you watch being private come from? Here's one answer to that last question:

"'(the right to watch videos in private) is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, 'Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee."

One might have guessed that Bork's rental history was similar to that of Clarence Thomas. Actually, Bork, who's nomination was rejected, had fairly tame tastes while Thomas, who serves on the court today, claimed to have watched some less mainstream fare.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the act of watching a video on YouTube is similar enough to the act of watching a video cassette to qualify that act for protection under the video privacy protection act. I would argue that YouTube is not very similar to watching videos in the privacy of your own home. There are so many things about the site that make it feel public - the comments, the favorite lists open to the public, the usernames. It is precisely those attributes that set YouTube apart form existing online video sites and led to its massive success. YouTube became what it is today b/c it is not as private as watching TV. It is communal and public.

Watching a video on YouTube is NOT (and never was) a simple private act. Opsahl makes the classic mistake of thinking that just because YouTube has video, like VCR tapes, it is used in the same way and has the same relationship to publicness/privateness as its visual predecessors. He is not alone in the error of attribution. Viewers, lawyers, privacy advocates, and even users may mistake watching YouTube for a private act, but be assured, it is not.

Corporate Image and Social Networks

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the cycle goes like this:

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

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

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