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. 

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.

The problem of giving consumers what they want

After about a year and a half of intermittent reading, I've finished the terrific Thinking, Fast and Slow. At the same time, I've been co-teaching a class on the future of television. I'm in the process of preparing a final lecture for the class, and I plan on drawing from Kahneman to talk about supply and demand in the world of TV (or whatever TV will become, i.e., some system for the distribution and consumption of video online).

The rhetoric of giving viewers what they want, when they want it is a big part of how new TV technologies and content are being sold. As we move from an environment of restricted choice to one of expanded choice, it would seem that consumers of media are more likely to get what they want. How could it be otherwise?

First, let's think about "what they want": how to define that, how to measure it. There have always been feedback mechanisms built into commercial systems, ways in which producers determine demand so as to know what and how much to supply. In the days of early radio and TV, producers heard from audiences via letters. Then came Nielsen, with ever-improving sampling techniques that more closely reflect what people are choosing, though the Nielsen system and the TV choice environment it worked with had limitations: there were only so many options from which to choose; there were some people (e.g., college students) who were difficult to track and so they didn't show up in Nielsen's picture of audience demand. What if we could eliminate these limitations? Wouldn't we have a more pure picture of audience demand to which we could suit our supply?

Technology improved, costs fell, and these trends helped eliminate flaws and overcome limitations in the feedback system. I'd like to raise two issues related to this improving image of audience demand in the TV marketplace. The first is that there are certain attributes of the TV system that aren't overcome by simply monitoring audience behavior more closely and/or removing restrictions on the viewers, giving them more "control" (which is the general progression of improvements in TV technology). The second is that a market in which supply and demand were more perfectly matched may not be desirable.

No matter how good audience behavior monitoring gets and no matter how cheap it is to implement, it will run up against privacy concerns of the audience. As choice expands, we may get a clearer picture of how people behave in any situation without any limitations, and its bound to reveal some ugly truths about individuals and groups behavior. As much as the audience wants to have its desires understood, it wants to be selective about what it shares about those desires, especially in a world in which desires are so closely associated with identity and potential.

Also, even if we could know exactly how people behaved in a choice environment with few restrictions, are we then permanently locked in to what they will desire? There's a wonderful scene in Mad Men where Don Draper reacts to the in-house psychologist who tells him what her focus group observation revealed about audience preference. Don's objection may be to the difference between what people say they want and how they behave, but I think the more fundamental objection is that people's future desires can't be predicted by their past desires. Advertisers and content producers are in the business of telling people what they will want, and as much as that sentiment rubs people the wrong way, it explains something about audience behavior no amount of data or market research can. Of course these are the words of a defensive ad exec asserting his value in an age where empiricism is creeping into an artistic realm. But I think there's some truth to it.

Don is wrong about not being able to predict future behavior from past behavior if he's talking about certain kinds of individual behavior. But the next trend, the next popular TV show, may not reveal itself no matter how hard you stare at people's current or past behavior. Psychologists may know that people pass on certain ideas to other people in certain ways under various circumstances, but the actual ideas they pass on can be set in motion by anyone with the budget to get in front of enough opinion leaders. Advertisers and show runners are just such people. They survive by developing new tastes, new markets for new stuff, and they can still do it in an expanded TV marketplace. So you have this force that will keep dropping ideas that are beyond whatever audiences currently want so as to do this, no matter how accurate the audience demand measurements get. 

Then there's a point made by Jonathan Franzen at a discussion during last year's New Yorker Festival. He discussed how the number of tweets or mentions on Twitter was now being used as a metric of how worthwhile an up-and-coming writer was to a publisher. That is, a publisher would sign a writer who had 100,000 followers or mentions on Twitter and not one who had 100, just because social media mentions and followers are pretty good indicators of present audience demand. This is another instance of the tightening of the feedback loop between creators and audiences. This could force writers to cater to the audience in ways that they did not before. But this idea makes Franzen and other content creators uncomfortable. Writers spend more time on self-promotion and homogenization of their work and less on developing their voices as creators. Better work is produced, so the thinking goes, when creators are not so beholden to current audience preferences (at least the ones that audiences are capable of articulating). The work is "better" not just from some elitist, subjective judgement of its worth but from a market standpoint: if an author or a show runner takes their cues from the Twittersphere, the product will be less pleasing to that very audience in the long run than if the author or show runner listened to their inner muses.

Finally, Kahneman's book brings to mind that the definition of what an individual wants (and the way that the individual ultimately acts based on their desires) depends on various characteristics of the choice environment, namely the timing of the choice, the number of choices, and the arrangement of available options. For example, whether or not there are thumbnails for similar videos on the side of the screen, as there are now on YouTube, may influence what people click on. Recommended videos on one's Netflix screen is another example, or songs that come up on Pandora. Users could've searched for whatever their hearts desired in the search box, and yet what they viewed was influenced by the arrangement of options, not solely the product of a pre-existing, internal set of preferences.

Two questions that popped into my head toward the end of Thinking, Fast and Slow related to Kahneman's conceptualization of two different kinds of thought processes: System 1 which is intuitive, automatic, fast, instinctual, emotional, and System 2 which is deliberative, slow, rational. Often times, these "systems" or ways of thinking reflect conflicting desires: System 1 wants to eat a burger while System 2 wants a salad. System 1 wants to watch an action flick while System 2 wants a documentary. So how we define consumer desire depends on whether we appeal to System 1 or 2. Here are my questions: What would a world look like that was entirely geared toward System 1, without restrictions? Are we now living in that world?

The inconsistency between what we say we want and how we act under various choice conditions is not infinitely large. Depending on what you compare it with, it could be considered insignificant. It doesn't make much sense to throw out the entire system of valuation because it is flawed. Better to detect the flaws and correct for the flaws in a way brings about positive individual and collective outcomes. The first step is one many people haven't taken: seeing the inconsistencies between what we say we want and what we choose in different circumstances. Then, think about the world or the life that we want and think about how to design a choice environment to bring those about. 

The relationship between supply and demand work in a marketplace of culture objects (e.g., TV shows) has a level of complexity that is not accounted for in the rhetoric that surrounds improving TV technologies such as Netflix and YouTube, both how they are sold and how they are celebrated by the press and by consumers. The relationship isn't infinitely complex, and work like Thinking, Fast and Slow lays out some rules for how people behave in certain choice environments.

A New Kind of Bad Television

I've been re-reading parts of Amanda Lotz's fantastic book "The Television Will Be Revolutionized". Written just 7 years ago about the state of television, it manages to be neither especially prescient nor obsolete despite how rapidly the world of TV is changing. I suppose this is because it clearly describes the relationships among content creation, funding, distribution, promotion, and consumption at one point in time. It doesn't get lost in "blue skies" rhetoric, as Lotz puts it, nor does it dwell on how great content is (another Golden Age of TV) or how consumers are finally in charge. While reading, I thought a bit more about web series and how and why so many of them suck.

Perhaps part of my reaction to these series is simply that they don't resonate with me, but neither do many shows on TV and I can still sense that there is some crucial difference between those shows and web series. I stated earlier that while some web series bear superficial similarities to professionally produced TV content (in production values), they lack a certain something(s): proper pacing, really good acting, good dialog, funny jokes. They remind me of the films I used to make as a 20-year-old film student. Part of me feels entitled to slag off others because I, too, produced content that I'm quite sure was utter crap and bilked others out of $ to help fund its creation. I guess you could argue that I'm just bitter that I wasn't more talented, but before judging me, assume that my argument is at least in part based on an intimate familiarity with the quality of amateur film/TV.  My films and other student films were "awful" in many of the same ways as some web series, only they lacked the polish and distribution and promotion channels of today's amateur TV.

That professional TV has a certain snap that web series don't is not surprising when you consider the fact that creators of professional TV are likely freakishly talented, the top .0001% of people who create content that is intended to appeal to others, and/or they have been at it for 10+ years. Part of the differences, I think, are due to the lack of experience of web series creators.

But the Lotz book, in particular the chapter on distribution, have me thinking about how crowd-sourced funding like Kickstarter yield a different kind of content than the kind of content that has gone through more traditional channels: pitched to execs, tested before small audiences, acceptable to advertisers, in competition with thousands of other ideas for shows.

Let's imagine a show creator who shoots a couple of short episodes of a show and puts them on YouTube. They get over 100,000 views. To finance the rest of the web series, the creator starts a Kickstarter and asks the people who like his videos on YouTube, directly, to help fund the creation of more episodes. These aren't family or friends, so they have no reason to pay hard-earned money to the creator other than wanting to see more of the content they like.

Part of the challenge of making good TV is maintaining a certain level of quality and novelty. Regardless of whether you're telling a serial story, creating a series of standalone episodes, or a reality show, you need to maintain a level of quality and novelty that keeps audiences coming back. This, it occurs to me now, is incredibly hard. Its something that those in the TV business, collectively as an industry with secrets of the trade and individually as showrunners with 10+ years experience, have gotten quite good at over the years. Nothing about the aforementioned Kickstarter scenario yields the kinds of shows that get audience's attention and keep it. Viewers who contribute to the Kickstarter may think that they'll enjoy the next episode(s) of the web series, but its hard to know that for sure, or keep it going indefinitely.

Its not as if I think that professional TV is necessarily all that great. As I said before, I'm aware of how commercial interests can yield lowest-common-denominator dreck that doesn't appeal to large swaths of viewers. But I'd argue that it's mostly an issue of the values conveyed in the work or perhaps a certain type of humor not synching up with would-be viewers. They all still have some mastery of pacing and rhythm that is hard to achieve and really hard to maintain year after year. Web series are likely better at appealing to niche values and esoteric senses of humor, but they're often bad in other ways.

Hey, let's put on a show!

It's the start of a new semester (or quarter, here at Drexel) and I'm excited to be co-teaching a class on the future(s) of television. We're skyping in a variety of guest speakers, including the producer of two web series. This got me thinking about the nature of web series. Do they have more in common with home-made YouTube videos or professionally produced TV content? Why do people make them? Why do people watch them?

After watching a few episodes of several different web series, I get the sense that they're somewhere in between a series of YouTube videos made in someone's back yard and a television series. This is true of how their produced, distributed, and promoted, but it also feels true (at least to me) of the finished product. Certainly, the look of some of these series is virtually indistinguishable from video content made for television in the traditional mode of production. The move away from expensive sets and toward more hand-held camera work made the aesthetic of "professional TV" easier to imitate. A generation of young people seem to have absorbed (either from film school or just watching tons of TV and film) how to compose a shot. I've watched a few minute-long promos for web series and they look like hip new shows on HBO or Fox. 

But the actual episodes lack something, and most of the ones I've watched lack the same things. The pacing seems slow. It seems slow when you compare it to professional TV and seems glacial when you compare it to YouTube clips or GIFs. I recall thinking during the early days of online video (2005-2011) that no one would ever watch a video longer than 3 minutes online. But I've seen the way college students have incorporated Netflixed 20-minute episodes of their favorite shows into their media diets, so I think that it's not an attention span issue. It's a pacing issue. In web series, more time elapses between jokes. The shots seem longer in duration. 

Also, the jokes seem, well, worse. I know this sounds like arbitrary, groundless criticism, and there's something weirdly personal about bad-mouthing a web series. You're not critiquing a millionaire. You're critiquing someone who bet their life savings on a passion project. Some of these shows are promoted and sometimes funded through word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth often starts with friends, so in many cases, the audiences are pre-disposed to liking (or saying they like) the show. Early audiences for web series seem divided into two groups: anonymous, cynical "haters" who permeate every corner of online discourse and friends who don't want to see the creator of the show emotionally, professionally, and financially destroyed. 

Unlike professional TV, the content didn't have to pass before a group of experienced judges. People love pointing out how homogeneous TV content is due to the fact that it has to either please advertisers or garner big audiences to stay afloat. They like to point out the many times stuffy execs passed on shows that became hits. These are good points, but still, the system almost certainly weeded out scripts that were too slow-paced or unfunny to entertain people before the shows were actually produced. TV networks and advertisers were flawed proxies for audiences, but, I'd argue, not as flawed as a show's creators and their friends. The web series environment is not a good environment to produce the constructive feedback that is necessary to generate content that many people want to watch. 

Unless, of course, you look at it differently. Maybe making a web series is this generation's version of starting a band. You're making an artistic statement that resonates with your generation, not trying to create the next Two and a Half Men. A handful of successes give creators the impression that their shows can become hits. And getting a decent sized audience (let's say 100,000 viewers) is easier online than with TV because you're pulling from such a large pool of potential viewers (anyone with a broadband connection or a smartphone), much larger than any TV show creator had when they made their show. Get a few opinion leaders to post links to your show and you've got your audience. Keeping them is another matter. In the world of infinite content and distractions, I think it would benefit web series creators to make single-season shows that die before audiences have a chance to lose interest. 

But I think there's an allure to creating a show even if it doesn't become a hit, in the same way that there was an allure to being part of a band even if it never became really popular. People whom you don't know (potential boyfriends/girlfriends, really) get to see you do something interesting, funny, cool. And you get to express yourself and maybe hit it big. 

It's not a precise analogy. I doubt that web series creators will be seen as "cool" in the same way that people in a band are/were seen as cool. But if I were 16-27 and I wanted to do something that attracted the right kind of attention, I might get some people together and make a show. 

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.

Paying for Liveness

One big stumbling block for television surrogates like the various incarnations of webTV, Apple TV, netflix, and hulu was the failure to create the relatively passive, lean-back, couch potato experience of sitting on a sofa and watching something on a big screen. Viewing something on your laptop makes it difficult to give one's self over to a semi-passive viewing experience. The opportunities for distraction go beyond other content that one may channel-surf through. They are different experiences, extremely personal and almost endless in variety: posting a comment on Facebook, reading a blog, checking your email. It offers pleasure, but not the same pleasure as what we refer to as "television."

Finally, some of those TV surrogates are moving beyond that stumbling block on to our TVs. The evolution of netflix and now hulu towards easy-to-install view-on-your-TV versions reveal something about value and the definition of television. All three platforms offer much of the same content, yet all three are based on different pay structures (cable = lots of ads, higher fees; hulu = some ads, lower fees; netflix = no ads, lower fees). While it should be noted that the content libraries are not exactly the same (netflix and hulu offer deeper, broader catalogs but do not have sports or news), it may seem as though they offer the same product, more or less. Why would anyone pay more for more ads and a smaller catalog of titles?

Basically, the consumer pays for live-ness, either with ads or money. This applies especially to sports and news which lose value immediately after they're aired, and we might consider any kind of soft news (gossip) part of this. But even with shows that do not need to be viewed live in order to be enjoyed, there is some added value in being able to view them as they air. Wanting to watch a program as it is aired isn't just a matter of impatience. Being able to discuss the show with others matters, and its easier to do this if everyone is viewing the show simultaneously.

Conversations about shows taken from a vast catalog (either netflix or hulu now) have a different tenor than those about television. They're often simply attempts to convert people who haven't seen the program or attempts to describe what happens in the show to the uninitiated. The catalog is just too vast for a lot of overlap in people's viewing experience. TV's appeal lies in its limiting of the available choices as well as its temporality. Its also something that doesn't really require our careful consideration. Like a more personal version of a newspaper, it should just blurt out what's happening so that viewers can talk about it. More reality TV, more sports, more direct address.

The Pitfalls of Hypothesizing about Film Success

Say we take a film like Transformers 2. The film, like most other films, has a lot going on, in its content and the circumstances under which it was released: grand spectacle, a link to something that is established in a target audience's cultural memory, an extensive marketing campaign, the fact that its a sequel, Shia LeBeouf, its director, its screenwriter, its late-June release not opposite of other big action blockbusters, etc. Which of these elements is most responsible for the film's success? Let's throw in another element of the film: Skids and Mudflap, two robots who (quoting the NYTimes piece) "talk in jive and are portrayed as illiterate; one has a gold tooth." The depictions have been called racist by many. Are these depictions reasons why the film is more successful, or is the film successful in spite of those depictions?

The questions are essentially unanswerable, but its not because film is Art and one cannot theorize about why some people like art and others don't, or why some art is profitabe and other art is not. It is so hard to predict why films, as opposed to other art forms, are successful or not b/c there are so few comparable films made and the circumstances of release (marketing, timing) play such a significant role in their success/failure. In order to determine what aspects of a product are responsible for its success, we need to make comparisons, but there are so few comparisons to be able to make that its harder to predict what will succeed. If you wanted to find out what elements of motion picture content made a certain text successful (e.g. certain choices in pacing, plotting, certain bigoted depictions, certain actors, lighting, etc), then you would look away from film and towards online video. There are simply more comparable texts, and the circumstances under which each video is watched are so varied that the uniqueness of each viewing can be considered to be random error and cancels out. What you're left with is a more pure comparison and better insight as to how motion pictures work on audiences than one you would try to do looking at a successful box office film like Transformers 2 and making generalizations about what aspects of the film resonated with the public. And yet film and cultural theorists have been doing just this, and continue to do just this: identifying certain characteristics of a film that possesses many charateristics, noting that the film was successfull, and then making claims about a culture's preferences.

Its interesting to consider recent advances in two untraditional predictions markets, both linked to the work of Nate Silver: presidential politics and baseball. Frankly, I don't know much about Silver's prediction models, but I'd guess he just takes discrete characteristics of each event (a race for office, a baseball game), takes a data set comprised of past events, and sees which characteristics, when all other characteristics are controlled for, exert the most influence on the outcome. You take those influences, assess the observable characteristics of the upcoming game/election, and make predictions of the outcome. With presidential elections, you have very few comparable events to use, while in baseball, you have many. In the former, I would think that you would have to start incorporating patterns in opinion polls (which fluctuate systematically based on various characteristics of world events and their coverage).

The trouble with film is that there aren't the equivalent of polls. Yes, there's test screenings, but those samples are so small and they're just used for minor recuts, not learning about why certain people like certain characteristics of films under certain circumstances. There's too little comparable data to work with. Perhaps the prevalence of remakes, reboots, adaptations is an attempt by producers to use the "data" of those other properties being successful with their suite of characteristics, and making a bet based on that. Its not very systematic, but in a way, I trust it more than I trust anyone who guesses that a film resonated or failed to resonate with the public b/c it was/wasn't successful at the box office and possessed a certain characteristic. That's just guesswork on their parts.

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.

First Taste for Free

A couple of weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails "released" an album online for free, prompting me to consider the viability of such an economic model.

First off, we need to note that NIN is (are?) a well established artist. People know their music, like their music, and would spend time listening to their music. And that's the key - consumers would spend time listening to the album. Forget money. Money spent for any particular text does not matter so much in the new media economy. Attention and time matter. Once you build up interest, you can charge for a subsequent album, a t-shirt, a concert, etc.

In today's media economy, if an artist can establish a fan base, they don't have to charge them for every album or every concert. As long as they can maintain some profit margin, as opposed to the huge profit margin they enjoyed before, the artist can make a living. Before, labels and studios had to charge consumers way more than a CD or a movie cost to produce b/c they had to pay for the duds that they churned out (Pareto's principle). They couldn't know which one of their products would be duds and which would be smashes. They also had to cover the costs of developing new talent (equivalent to R&D costs). But I don't think that distributors need to pay for that anymore. Artists can record and film stuff on the cheap, put it out there for free, see if its popular, cultivate interest in the unique output of that artist, and then charge $ for the subsequent output of that artist. You could also whore yourself out to advertisers and make $ off of modestly popular work, but I think the purest model for art/entertainment sales should be: give them a taste for free, then charge them for more once they're hooked (the drug-dealer economic model). Ads just add clutter, and I'm not sure they even work well enough to justify their existence.

Really, the only thing that agents, studios, and labels are useful for is visibility. They can artificially boost the visibility of an artist's output through promotion. But bloggers (gatekeepers, tastemakers) and the transparency of popularity on the web counteracts such promotional efforts. Right now, a small percentage of consumers make their decisions as to what to spend their time listening to or watching based on bloggers or online popularity tracking (that may in fact be affected by promotion). That's right now. But what if the people who paid attention to bloggers and popularity trackers were jsut early adopters? What if, in the coming years, most people took their cues from these sources? Could it render advertising, promotion, labels, studios, and agents all obsolete? I think that it could.

Whenever I raise the possibility that promotion may be futile in the new media economy, I hear a voice saying that promotion is more insidious than I imagine it to be, that its influence is hard to track but still exists. This voice says that anyone questioning the viability of promotion and advertising is hopelessly naive. This strikes as possibly true, but doesn't seem like a strong argument; more like something said by those with a vested interest in defending the business model of advertising and promotion. Its going to get very hard to trace whether an artist or a work become popular due to promotion or organic word-of-mouth popularity based on the merit of the work. However, the internet makes these paths visible, so maybe we could begin to see how effective promotion is when compared to the aggregated tastes of millions of users. If you want to defend the role of promotion and advertisement in the art industry, fine, but back your argument up with some hard data. If you're really about making money, then do it efficiently. Spend your money figuring out what makes a work good or popular and then make it. Don't promote shit that you're uncertain about. To quote Martin Sheen in Wall Street: "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Giving some of your work away for free is, in a sense, the ultimate promotion. Usually, ads and previews for movies are distorted pieces of a larger whole that are designed to make the whole more appealing than it actually is. But if you give away a whole album, a whole season, a whole movie for free, then there's nothing distorted about that.

And yet, it would seem unfair if, say, the creators of Lost gave away most of the narrative for "free" on TV and then concluded it with a movie that we have to pay to see. I see this with online video: its very difficult to tell whether an individual video is functioning as a satisfying media product in and of itself, a piece of a larger work that you could either have to pay for or tolerate ads with (in which case it is just an "ad" for the larger work), or both.

Maybe promoters are necessary, or inevitable. But I certainly don't think that art couldn't be sold w/o them. Artists are engaging in large scale economic experiments, and the results suggest that we should start reconsidering the role of promoters in the art business.

Mood Matters

Looking at my Netflix queue can be pretty depressing. By that, I mean that many of the movies I've put in the queue aren't exactly uplifting fare. The movie I watched tonight, L'Enfant, is a perfect example: critically acclaimed, but sad as hell. I have a really tough time getting in the mood for such films so I tend to bump them down in my queue. Turns out I'm not alone in this kind of behavior, as this article from the Wall Street Journal indicates. Even better, someone did an empirical study on the phenomenon of thinking you'll be up for a high-brow film on a later date, and then once that date rolls around, you'd much rather see "low brow" fare (though I take issue with Read et al's categorization of Groundhog Day and The Breakfast Club as low-brow).

Though the study and the article pertained to the high-brow/low-brow distinction, there's an implicit assumption in both: critically acclaimed = downer. Here's the interesting thing that my Netflix queue, with its swelling number of TV shows, points to: this is NOT true of critically acclaimed TV. In particular, I'm thinking of several shows from HBO (The Wire, The Sopranos, Rome) but I think you could apply it to any of the most critically acclaimed TV shows ever. Its not that the aforementioned shows are lighthearted, exactly. In fact, all of them can be quite depressing at times. However, they've all got moments of humor (albeit dark humor) and its those lighter touches that keep me coming back, and make me unafraid of diving in to 13 hours of a show even though I'm in a pretty good mood these days and don't particularly want to be brought down. When I think about settling in for a season of any of those shows, I think it won't put me in a bad mood. I cannot say the same for many of the "better" films of the past 10 years.

Earlier, I wrote about the tone of The Sopranos and that tone seems to pervade HBO dramas in general. Somehow, those shows manage to be deep and insightful without being horribly depressing. Is it the length of films that prevent them from being insightful and wry instead of insightful and leaden? Is it merely a convention, a habit? Whatever it is, its keeping me away from more and more films and making me more enthusiastic about the future of serial motion picture narratives, on TV and online.