Nostalgorithms

Nostalgia is a feeling, to start with. We have songs and photographs we happen upon that conjure nostalgia. We have articulations of nostalgia, in poetry, in the lyrics of songs, in films, TV shows, novels. And now, we have algorithms that serve up content (songs, photographs, news) that make us feel nostalgic.

The “Your memories on Facebook” function fascinates me, as a potential mechanism for conjuring nostalgia. It's hard to know precisely how the algorithm works - how and when it decides to bring a photo up from the past and ask you whether or not you'd like to share this photo again on your timeline - but it appears to bring up pictures from the same day of the year in previous years, most likely at least 2 years from the past. It also is likely that photos/memories are chosen based on the amount of "likes" or comments they received at the time. 

That’s certainly one of the simplest approaches, and it works well enough, but perhaps not as well as it could work. I’ve only really heard people talk about this aspect of the Facebook experience (as is the case with many aspects of any kind of technology) when it doesn’t work. People make note of the times when Facebook served up a picture on an ex or, worse, a deceased love one. It’s clear that it doesn’t work perfectly, and yet it works well enough to persist. 

Does that algorithm learn from the times it presents unpleasant memories to users? Probably. Perhaps it starts by serving up memories, allowing a certain period for the memories to “steep," and, after a period of trial and error, it would be possible to identify certain types of memories that people elected to share. These types would be defined by objective qualities the shared memories had in common, qualities that set them apart from the non-shared memories. The algorithm is “dumb” in the sense that it doesn’t know anything about the concept of nostalgia, or the individual users’ lives, or about human emotion in general. But if you give it enough data, enough pictures, enough memories, it will probably get better at serving up pictures that you want to share, pictures that tap into something that we would call nostalgia. It learns not to serve up those pictures of your ex.

Perhaps there's an unseen pattern or signature to nostalgia that could be revealed by the algorithm. It's not just a matter of how much time has passed that makes us nostalgic for something. It has to do with the specific contours of social relations and feelings, all of which leave an imperfect imprint in our social media archives (less and less imperfect as more and more of our social/emotion lives are channeled through social media). 

Here's an example pattern using data that a social media company like Facebook could collect: Optimal nostalgia resides in the pictures with that person you appeared with in other pictures and exchanged frequent IMs with for a period of three years after which there were fewer and fewer pictures of the two of you together and fewer IMs until the trail went cold, but you were still "liking" and occasionally commenting on their posts, though this wasn't reciprocated, suggesting a kind of unreciprocated longing for re-connection. Or maybe it takes into account the time of day at which it was posted (maybe people are more nostalgic about things that happened at night) or the place (maybe nostalgia clings to certain places more than others, or it requires a certain physical distance from our current locations, at least 1,000 miles). Maybe it's all there, residing in the metadata. 

I think about nostalgia in terms of music, too. Pop music (and movies/TV shows that use pop music) have worked with a crude version of the nostalgia principle for decades, if not centuries. Artists arrange a song in a familiar way, or include a certain familiar phrase or melody, so as to strike a particular emotional chord in the listener. Genres are revived in part out of nostalgia. But algorithms could give us something much more fine-grained, more personalized. Imagine that your entire music listening history was archived (as will be the case for people starting to listen to music in the age of streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube). The program would know that you really loved a particular song (you played it 100 times that one week in 2010) but then seem to have forgotten about it (you haven't played it since). One of life's great pleasures is hearing that song you loved but have not heard in years. Part of you knows the rhythm and the lyrics, but another part of you has forgotten them. Your ability to sing along with the first verse feels instinctual, but you can't remember exactly what the chorus was until it comes crashing in, and you think, "how could I have forgotten this?" 

Maybe the music program is integrated with your preferred social media app. The social media app has a rough indication of your mood and what's going on in your life. It can make a pretty good guess as to when you're ready for an upbeat song and when you're ready for something more introspective. Maybe it knows that you found a love song when you weren't in love and seemed to like it but couldn't listen to it too frequently because you weren't in love. And now that it knows you're in love, you're ready to hear it again. Maybe it knows that the lyrics to another song will be more poignant to you now that you're 40. 

There is a visceral revulsion at technology colonizing overly-personal or artistic realms of human experience. All fine and well if the algorithms make shopping more efficient, but nostalgia? Memories, and our experiences of them, are tied to identity. This may account for the way in which we need nostalgia triggers to feel serendipitous. The idea of an algorithm writing poetry is a bit unsettling, but what about an algorithm that can conjure the feeling that inspires poets in the first place?

Prince and the art of making yourself scarce

Among the surprisingly strong feelings I experienced after Prince's passing (especially while watching some of the relatively-high-quality concert videos people have been posting) was a kind of shame at having taken so long to recognize how good he was. Part of the reason the strength of the feelings have been so surprising is that I was never a big Prince fan. This wasn't the normal level of regret one feels when an artist dies that you may have taken for granted. This was a sense that I might have been a much bigger fan of Prince had I listened to more of his music. But the answer to the question of why I didn't listen to more of his music, I think, has much to do with the unique way Prince produced music and managed access to it.

On the one hand, he produced a huge amount of material. This may have diluted his "brand." I don't mean "brand" in the commercial/corporate context, so maybe that's not the right word. I just mean that when I thought of Prince, I thought of all the music I hadn't listened to. It's subjective whether the material was consistently good (and it is rare for any artist to produce a lot of consistently good material; far easier to produce a few ground-breaking albums, call it quits, and leave the audience wanting more), but the mere fact that there was so much of it raises this question: where do you begin? The choice to listen to Prince wasn't whether or not to spend $10 - $40 on a few albums (as the choice might be to buy all of Guns n' Roses' oeuvre). There were hundreds of songs, and while there is some consensus that his earlier albums were among his best, there were plenty of gems scattered throughout the rest of his career. It would seem random to buy one late-era Prince album and ignore the others, but buying them all would cost a lot.

This leads us to the unusual way in which he regulated access to the music. Ever since 1999, the year Napster went mainstream, musical artists have had to balance the added exposure that comes with free distribution with the fact that giving things away for free is no way to make a living. Streaming music like Spotify and Youtube's Vevo channel are kinds of compromises that allow artists to make some money (arguably too little) while music consumers are able to listen to whatever they want either for free with advertising or for a small subscription fee. The more artists transfer over to that model, the more appealing the service like Spotify becomes. From the perspective of the music consumer, you could keep paying your monthly fee to Spotify and get to listen to what most new artists produce, or you could pay 10 bucks to listen to one album by one artist. The shift in value was incremental and difficult to notice - it wasn't like a single label or artist deciding to provide their music in a certain way tipped the scale. But at some point, the scale tipped. Music is as valuable to individuals and society as it ever was, but the value of individual artists or songs shifted when we started consuming music in different ways.

Thinking about how I missed the boat on Prince until now makes me think about how we recognize artistic excellence in today's world. I get a sense that there is a kind of skepticism about it now, a desire to ask, "how good could he possibly be? Wouldn't more people have been listening to him and making a bigger fuss about his music over the past several decades?" The question of who gets celebrated as a musical genius isn't just a question of subjective judgment of talent (though it is that, too). It's a question of how output and access influence our estimates of excellence. If something is even moderately awesome, we all hear about it, see video of it, and post it on social media right away. Encountering some of the videos of Prince's performances is so jarring because we've become accustomed to a world without secrets (and that includes secret genius). It's one thing to unearth an under-appreciated artist or work. This practice has become commonplace online: a sophisticated content curator spends hours digging through the detritus of YouTube so that we don't have to, and presents us with an overlooked or forgotten work of genius.

Prince's work was different. It was sitting there in plain sight; it just happened to be behind a paywall. That wall came down (at least temporarily) in the wake of his death, and it really did feel like something brilliant that had always been in your immediate vicinity had been suddenly revealed, rather than feeling as though a curator dug up a hidden gem.

I also get the sense while watching videos of the unbelievable live performances that Prince wasn't made for the world of sampling and covering, of copying and pasting, of virality and memes, not only because of what he produced and how he managed access to it, but also because of his performance of self. A large part of the appeal with Prince is the performer, some un-copyable charisma that he had. Whereas a Beatles or Metallica melody might sound interesting if interpolated by another artist, a cover of a Prince song would just make whomever was covering it look positively un-charismatic by comparison. Access to Prince's live performances is (or at least was) limited to begin with (similarly, this is a reason why Hamilton can still be a phenomenon in the age of digitally reproducible art). It's true that when the artist dies, the recordings (including the recordings of live performances) will live on, but the recordings are once-removed from the actual ecstatic experience of being there, with the performer, with the crowd. So watching them also makes me sad. Once the performer dies, the party's over.

A paean to cassettes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyrics: Not as violent/profane/"offensive" as they used to be?

There's an assumption that the number and intensity of references to sex and violence and otherwise "offensive" content has a certain upward trajectory across the years: each generation of parents complains about how media content is somehow worse than it was when they were young: more anti-social, dumber, or more harmful in some way. If you look at ALL media experiences, this trend seems to be holding. Yesterday, parents worried about rock and roll music and comic books, today they worry about video games and Facebook. Mind you, I don't think that this cycle of worry has anything to do with the actual effects of these media experiences: most of the people on either side of these moral panics aren't very interested in empirically testing their claims. Nevertheless, content analyses of media experiences would, I think, show a kind of evolution over time, with some taboo activity (typically related to sex or violence) getting more numerous, intense, and realistic as time goes on.

But if you look WITHIN a certain medium, like popular music, I'm not sure the trend holds. Have the lyrics of songs gotten "worse" - more references to sex, drugs, violence, other taboo subjects - over the past 20 years? Two things make me think they have not obeyed this upward trajectory.

1: personal experience. I admit, I'm an old fogey. I'm 36, I mostly listen to music that was written last century (and occasionally before that), but I listen to pop radio on a semi-regular basis and absorb aspects of most cultural trends in the way that any user of meme-based entertainment websites does. I can still detect the shifts in popular genres of music (the ascendance of EDM for example). Of course, there are small sub-genres I'm completely unaware of, but that was always the case: there were always musical niches listened to by the minority of listeners, and often those were the places where future popular music would arise from. But I'm willing to bet that even if you sampled music from every genre you could find, even the small ones, the lyrics would not be any "worse" than they were in the 1990's. So I guess I'm making two claims: the "worst of the worst" in lyrics today is no worse than it was in the 90's, AND the average popular song is no "worse" in lyrics today than it was at that point. The extent to which lyrics of popular music were anti-social and taboo-violating peaked in the 90's (but maybe I'm just saying this because it was the time when I came of age, when I was rebelling, seeking out the "worst" lyrics I could find).

2. Crime rates in the United States. I recall that many people - pundits, scholars, and everybody else - looked at the trend in violent crimes in the US during the 20th century and assumed that the upward trend would just continue. But it didn't. Murder rates, burglary, you-name-it have all fallen since the 90's. There are many reasons for this, I'm sure, but it made me think about lyrics and certain assumptions about lyrics simply because it was another case of people being mistaken about a trend continuing unabated. I'm not saying these two trends (assuming the lyrical trend is real), which would be more-or-less simultaneous, are causally related (though if I had to speculate, I would say that the lyrics reflect social reality and not the other way around, or its a reciprocal relationship). It just got me thinking that trends are often part of cycles, not inexorable laws with one trajectory.

Of course this is just a hunch. I'm looking for a quick way to do a little content analysis to test this hunch. There are a lot of useful databases out there now, so I assume it could be done.

To return to my point about lyrics and their place in the media environment: I get the sense that teen rebellion (or just rebellion in general) is no longer the domain of popular music. Lyrics went about as far as they could go in terms of violating taboos. The internet clearly allows for more rebellion, more anti-social behavior (not only in word, but in deed), which, I suppose, underscores the importance of taking a holistic view of media use, whether you're a parent, a scholar, or both.

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.

What it Means to Like/Hate a TV Show

The question seems simple enough: what TV shows do you like?

This phrasing aims to compare two variables: individuals (you, and other people answering the question) and TV shows. It doesn't take into account certain episodes or aspects of TV shows and certain moods or states or stages in life of an individual, or the intensity of liking or the duration of liking. There's not really a problem with this, as temporary changes in mood can be averaged out, as can the better or worse episodes of a TV show. Indeed, whenever anyone is asked a question such as this, they engage in that kind of averaging.

But there's one particular facet of TV that doesn't get averaged out by a viewer, but rather is ignored, or treated as a separate question: what kind of TV shows do you like when you're around other people. My intuition is that people would answer the first question with shows they like to watch by themselves, more apt to ignore the shows they watch with others (after all, they probably like them less). But the shows people watch with others have just as much of an effect on them. They still spend their time watching them and still pay attention to the ads embedded in the programs. In short, we tend not to think of shows we watch with others but they still have an impact on us. Arguably, this question matters because given the rise of mobile viewing devices, online viewing, more time-shifting, and changing patterns of co-habitation, we're watching more and more TV content by ourselves. As Morley and others have noted, watching TV was a social act, as fraught with domestic power dynamics as cooking or sex. Not any more, perhaps.

Even the definition of "liking" a TV show changes for me depending on whether I'm watching with someone, or even discussing a TV show with someone. I could see myself “liking” Sex & the City, or So You Think You Can Dance, or country music, or Christian music, or 80’s music, if I was watching it/listening to it/discussing with someone who liked those things. More precisely, I could find something to like in each of those things. I don't think I would be lying by saying that I found something to like about those things. They would genuinely lead to some sort of positive affect. If I'm by myself, my standards are much higher (or different). These days, I can barely find any music or TV that I can tolerate for more than a minute that (in the case of music) doesn’t exactly fit my mood or (in the case of TV) isn’t Mad Men or sports without changing the channel or shuffling through my ITunes.

Also, its funny how liking of media, amongst any group, tends not be uniformly hierarchical. That is, many "favorited" shows are also near the top of other people's most hated shows lists. But perhaps this is true with all matters of taste. Let’s say we were ranking any other thing not related to taste (greatest football teams, tallest buildings). It seems odd that someone could hate Citizen Kane or Seinfeld when others have written endless paeans to their objective greatness. People who hated these shows or movies wouldn’t think that those films/shows were just "less great" than whatever they happened to love. They would think they were among the worst.

What kind of music do you like (right now)?

In keeping with my habit of making broad generalizations based on my personal experience w/ media...

As I was assembling a playlist for an upcoming roadtrip, I was thinking about the kinds of music I would want to listen to but also, acknowledging the social nature of most media consumption, what kind of music the people I'll be traveling with would want to listen to. Naturally, I thought in terms of genre. I'm pretty sure these guys don't like metal much anymore (if they ever did), which is a shame, b/c I do. Then I thought about my answer to that classic get-to-know-you question "what kind of music do you like," and, of course, my answer would be that typical avoiding answer: "lots of kinds, pretty much everything."

If you looked at my music collection, you would find many different genres from different eras and different places around the world well represented. But that doesn't mean I'd want to listen to any of it at any given moment. Our media preferences are governed by long-lasting preferences (I've liked metal since about 9th grade) as well as short-term moods (I'm not in the mood for metal right now). Here's my theory: as music collections expand due to the falling monetary value of songs vis a vis Napster, Torrent, and all that shit, long-lasting preferences broaden and explain less and less of why anyone wants to listen to any kind of music at a given time. As choices expand, mood and immediate context play a greater role in determining what you will choose.

But its tougher to know what kind of music you're in the mood for than knowing that you like rap or hate country. I've tried relabeling my music according to mood (so, there are rap songs and metal songs that are both labeled "energetic" and classical and rock songs that are labeled "melancholy") and occassionally that helps me find music that suits my mood and feels right, but most times, I find myself cycling through my shuffle until something clicks.

The way we engage with music changes when options becomes plentiful. Choice increases due to falling production/distribution cost. It happened w/ music, but the trends you see will happen with all other media. When you have all of those options, you can't rely on your identity as much to determine what media will satisfy you. You can't just say to yourself "I like this kind of music, or that kind of TV show, or that kind of news, so that's what I'll choose." Something happens to our decision making process when we have abundant, diverse options. I'm not quite sure what it is (experiments to follow, I hope), but my hunch is that we want to cede control to something else. Shuffle is one thing. Search engines are another. We're wary of being controlled, but we experience so much uncertainty and regret after choosing something when there are too many other options that we want our choice to be restricted.

Sometimes, we do know what we're in the mood for, but those moods and those preferences become more diverse given more and more choices.

Why MTV doesn't suck as much as one might think, or why...

is the new

Another terrific Bill Simmons podcast (this one featuring an interview w/ Chris Connelly in which they debated why MTV stopped playing music and went all reality all the time) made me reconsider MTV's move away from music. On (in?) the podcast, Connelly essentially argues that what musicians were for an older generation, reality stars like LC, Hiedi, and Spencer are for this generation. More specifically, he argues that because people who are now 35 and older formed their identities in their teen years by listening to popular musicians, they want to keep listening to popular music. Hence, popular music is no longer the "adult-free" zone it used to be. If it isn't adult-free, then it can't be used by teens to forge identities.

Rather than find a media space that parents can't get access to, teens find a media space that parents just don't (or can't) understand. It used to be rock and roll, then it was hiphop, and now its reality TV (which, interestingly, doesn't have the interracial threat of RocknRoll & hiphop, and so is perhaps seen by white parents as just as confusing but less threatening than pop music).

Maybe teens' obsession with popular music (during the rock and roll craze of the 50's, the rise of MTV in the 80's) was never really about the music in the first place. Maybe it was about the lyrics and the celebrity singing the lyrics. In those lyrics and in the celebrity, teens found someone to commiserate with and aspire to be, something to talk about with friends, a way of judging another person in shorthand ("oh, you're the type of person who likes Dave Matthews Band, or the type of person who likes Kid n Play"). What if you stripped away the music but kept the person to commiserate with/aspire to be? You'd have reality TV. It performs the same functions, and so MTV remains popular. And, according to Connelly's interesting theory, they had no choice if they wanted to keep the teen audience. Popular music was tainted by the interest of adults.

Now, I know teens still listen to music, and I know that most adults are as confused by/contemptuous of Asher Roth as 1950's adults were by/of Buddy Holly. But I think we're back to listening to music for older reasons - to enhance or bring about a certain mood, as a kind of drug to escape the world. The "social comparison" identity-forging uses (see above paragraph) were a contemporary phenomenon relegated to youth culture. I think youth culture now has LC and Heidi (and Kevin??? BTW, College Life seems really promising to me - like Laguna Beach/Hills/City w/o the unachievable glitz and glamour). They don't need Eminem or Kanye.

Important to note that there's a strong gender element at play. Most of the guy students I talk to are less about TV and more about movies and sports for forming identity (TV = domestic = female, even in the online TV era?).

NB: As far as MTV playing music videos, it certainly didn't help when the teen music business model collapsed. MTV played videos to promote the purchase of music, but it remains an open question as to whether teens will see music as something you purchase.

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.

New Media Mood Rings

I've become more interested in people's use of media related to their moods. You could understand any moment of human experience by looking at moods, how they change, what changes them, why they change, why we're able to control them sometimes and can't control them at other times (if we could, wouldn't we always choose to be happy?).

All media consumption is related to moods, but with some, there seems to be more variety and fluctuation in moods. TV is interesting in that, at least for me, it seems to generate very few moods: the ritualistic up-down-up of a good drama; the introspective, aggro-but-still interested-in-learning-about-human-behavior vibe I get from HBO dramas; the self-esteem that comes from watching "healthy" TV like Charlie Rose; the amusement brought on by comedy; the pleasant, trance-like numbing of the mind that sports and pretty much everything else induces; some combination of these. With film, its mostly the same. But with music, things are totally different.

I tried in vain to label all of my music according to mood: drunk, funny, energetic, emo, emotional, happy, in love, rock out w/ cock out, blissed out, sad, druggy, melancholy, etc. (it would be interesting to explore color coding as a means of categorizing music according to mood. Maybe this would work better than words). I was thinking that when I was in a certain mood, I'd dial up those songs on my Ipod, but it wasn't that simple. Sometimes, I knew what I wanted, what song, what artist, what genre. But most of the time, I'm not sure how I feel or what I want, but I'm not willing to give myself over to the randomness of the shuffle feature. That's the key difference between interactive and passive media, and I'm defining music, as we listen to it now in the post-album era (and perhaps TV in the era of remote controls and frequent commercial interruptions), as "interactive" in the sense that we expect to exert control, that we're not willing to give ourselves over to the mood-shifting narrative created by the artist.

Music media can be a mood enhancer, mood manager, mood changer, or, most interestingly of all, a mood indicator (like a mood ring). It seems odd not to know whether you're happy or sad, but most of the time, according to my use of music, that's how I am. Its not until I don't hit the "skip" button when that Beatles song comes up on shuffle that I realize I'm really happy.

I'm still sketching out these ideas on mood and the level of interaction or control in media. I think w/ online video, we're treating video in the same way we treat music, but it might be overly-simplistic to say that we use both to enhance moods rather than experience a new mood. I doubt that self-reporting will get us the answer to these questions. Most of the time, we don't know exactly what we want, but maybe we're too afraid to admit that b/c it means that we're being controlled, which goes against every freedom-loving, individuality-promoting instinct in our minds.

When you look at the big picture of our media use, our use reflects our demographic, our psychographic, our values and beliefs and preferences. But when you start looking closely, you can see the ups and downs of our moods, which are far less predictable than other patterns. You could predict I'd like a new band b/c I like that genre of music, but you can't predict what I'm going to listen to tonight b/c you can't know whether the hundreds of interactions I have w/ people today are going to put me in a good or bad mood...unless you carefully monitored my brain activity and physiological states? Or just spied on me all the time? Maybe the next generation of IPods will measure that sort of thing, and finally I'll get the media I want but didn't even knew I wanted.

Subscriptions, eh?

After reading this article in the New York Times magazine on Rick Rubin’s move to Columbia, I’m giving more consideration to the subscription-based model for the distribution of media. For the record, I can think of at least 3 ways how we might consume abundant media (I’m assuming that all media texts will be abundant in the coming era):

1. Ad-driven – this assumes that spot advertisements (or any kind of ads outside of search-based ads) actually work. After reading this book my Michael Schudson and speaking with my friend who works for a new media marketing firm in San Francisco, I feel increasingly confident in claiming that the kind of push advertising that consumers don’t seek out but is foisted upon them (as opposed to ads based on a google search for a consumer good) never worked very well. I have to admit that I’m thoroughly disappointed to see YouTube going down this road.
   
2. Micro-payments – This is how Itunes works. I had an idea about a new "nickelodeon" where you would pay 5 cents to see a short film that was made on a low budget. So as we’ve seen music adjust from album-oriented sales (which dictate what gets made), we’ll see a change from 2-hour movies and half-hour or hour episodes to shorter, more serialized online videos. If they are serials, then in a sense, it will be like a subscription, though it will be one with rather unfair terms that will ultimately hurt the show’s lasting value – viewers will be strung along as long as the network can string them along for. With an ideal subscription network, viewers are loyal to the aesthetic of the network, and therefore aren’t liable to jump ship when one particular narrative ends. In that case, the narrative doesn’t have to get dragged on and become watered down.
3. Subscription – I used to be against the idea of more media going this way, just for personal reasons. I hate bills, I hate being locked into something. There’s something about he subscription-based way of consuming media that makes it more habitual and less critical or reflective, and therefore you’re more liable to end up with shittier, shallower media. But after reading Rubin’s prediction, I thought a bit more about subscription media. Suddenly, I realized that the two brand name ways of disseminating and producing media that I praise the most are subscription-based: HBO and Netflix. I still think that the way people consume music and the way they consume narrative media is and always has been radically different, so I’m not sure that any restriction on when a person can listen to a certain piece of music would work.
   

Whether micro-payments or subscriptions are the way to go, for music or video, depends on how the media is consumed. If its a serial narrative (or a series of serial narratives) then a subscription would make sense because consumption is so habitual. But with something like music, you want to listen to it many times over, but you might put it away for a few years and then rediscover it. I feel like this happens more with music than it does with video.

Already, I think we're seeing a tiered system develop in music: there's music that people are OK paying for (maybe music that's in greater demand, had a higher budget to produce, or is, by critical accounts, damn good) and then there's music that people don't expect to pay for (poppy, temporary hits). There hasn't been much of a price hierarchy in music before: the pop album cost roughly the same amount as the rap, classical, indie rock albums. But it would be interesting to see that change in the future. Maybe there will be a bottom-feeder genre of music that is free but that contain product placement in their lyrics, or are ad jingles.