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. 

Memes: Not really an in-joke anymore

One of my favorite parts about teaching Media Literacy is hearing/reading about what media my students use, what content they enjoy, and how that compares to the experiences of me and my peers. As someone who is roughly twice their age, I don't really expect that we will engage in many of the same types of media experiences. Just as my teachers would make stilted references to M.C. Hammer in order to garner a laugh, I made a reference to Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools (... ... drank!) and got a hearty chuckle from the kids. We're in different age cohorts, different life cycles, and we're living in an increasingly fragmented media environment. What could we possibly have in common?

This makes it all the more surprising when I discover that many of them are encountering the same memes as I am. In some cases, we're on the same website, but in others, we're on different sites (or highly personalized versions of the same site, like Twitter and Facebook) that are increasingly comprised of viral jokes that often re-purpose amateur or professional media content in order to comment  on current events or a relatable situation (i.e., memes). Do we watch the same TV shows? No. In fact, I'm willing to bet more students in my classes have the media experience of seeing a Sweet Brown meme in common than will watch the Super Bowl, the Grammys, or the Oscars. Supposedly, these water-cooler TV events would remain a common cultural touchstone, and they likely will be the one thing (along with some big movies) that cut across age groups. But there is something going on with memes that is interesting. They're often originating from relatively tiny communities or obscure sources well outside of the mainstream, but they become the references that my students and I both have in common. If I include a reference to Mad Men in my slides, I'll get blank stares, but a picture of Grumpy Cat gets them laughing every time.

The first thing that occurs to me about this is that at least for certain populations (young people?), media users may not need TV and celebrities as a subject of common experience and conversation, at least to the extent that previous generations did. I think the use of memes is partially substituting for the use of TV and celebrities as a way to joke about norms, blow off steam, bond, etc. Based on my casual observations, I'd say that music and musicians as personalities are just as central to these young people as they were to me and my parents when they were that age. But TV and celebrities? I'm not so sure.

This isn't to say that TV and celebs are going away, but that they may not be as essential to leisure media use as they once were. Perhaps TV has already started to adapt to this, although the meteoric rise of memes to this stage in which they are something that my students and I have in common seems to have happened so suddenly that I doubt anybody has had time to adjust. Like the TV content that serves/served as our common cultural reference point, these memes, ultimately, only serve as a vehicle for advertisers and websites to build audiences to sell stuff to. But the professional content producers have been cut out of the equation. Just how much time is spent creating, consuming, and distributing memes? And if more time is spent re-purposing and creating amateur content, regardless of how solipsistic and retrograde its humor may be, isn't this something worth celebrating?

Assessing the big, infrequently occuring effects of films and novels

Sometimes, I'll be asked by someone who knew what I was interested in years ago whether I'm still writing about film. I stopped and thought about why I'm not as interested in film anymore. I think its because I wanted to understand some principles of communication that have the most explanatory power, or that explain the highest percentage of the total human experience. Films, like novels and theater before them, used to occupy a great deal of our time and, probably, our consciousness, influencing what we thought about the world. Then came TV and the internet. My sense is that TV and the internet are like the air we breathe. They make up hours of many people's days.

Its not that films aren't still "important" in some sense of the word. They provide a lot of the content that people watch on TV. Large numbers of people still watch, discuss, and are influenced by films via Netflix. Films can still start a conversation about something in a way that TV and the internet seem unable to. But still, if I had to rank the most influential media, I would put the internet at the top, TV in the middle, and film after that.

However, I've always had this suspicion that film, like novels, though they are both experienced very infrequently, can dramatically change the worldview and trajectory of someone's life. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine the effects of these various media this way:

• TV and the internet erode our brains (but not in a bad way). The change happens very gradually through frequent exposure. Over the years, profound changes to our individual and collective mental landscapes can take place. These might be easier to observe and predict. People's encounters with religious texts seem to operate this way. Sure, maybe it was a revelation when they first discovered the power of the bible, but it really only has profound effects if you keep reading it over and over. Personally, I feel like the online version of The New York Times has gradually shaped the contours of how I think. I've been perusing it for the past decade.
  
• Film and novels act like earthquakes (again, not in a bad way). They can completely reconfigure the landscape in a short period of time. All you need is one story to hit you at the right time in your life and you might decide to change the entire trajectory of your life. These are probably less easy to observe and much harder to predict, but no less significant for the individual or society. Take the books of Ayn Rand. I'm guessing that not many people have read them. but if particularly influential people have read them and have been influenced by them, then they are capable of having profound effects on society. Personally, reading White Noise might've been part of why I decided to try becoming an academic. The main character of the book was a professor. That character (and by extension, the author) thought the way I thought. Its not that he had a glamorous, desirable life, but just that I identified with him and the way he thought. And so I thought "maybe I should look into becoming a professor." There were many other factors that contributed to that life-altering decision (an uncle, parents, former professors of mine), but this one brief encounter with this novel had something to do with it.
  

This isn't to say that some TV shows or some websites or online communities can't be revelations in the way that novels and films can be. In any case, I think its important to think about how you could test these significant effects of these media, these earthquakes. I guess you could start with interviews, or maybe surveying people and simply asking them: what was the most influential TV show, book, movie, etc, you ever experienced? How often do they reference them, talk about them with others, write about them, or think about them? One possible way to assess this would be by looking at people's online profiles. Are there any quotes from movies or books? Any tattoos of characters (I'm thinking of you, Twilight fans).

Also, I think it would be useful to assess the state in which the user found themselves at the time of their encounter. I'm guessing that in most cases, the user was young and in a period of transition (to extend the seismological analogy a bit further: this is like looking at buildings constructed on fault lines). One can imagine a well-made movie that is tailored to young men or women that has a certain pro-social or anti-social message having a profound effect, not on little everyday actions, but on choices like what job to pursue, or whether or not people are generally good or bad. It would be unsurprising to find that movies that glorify war or wall street boost enlistment and b-school applications. I also like to consider a particularly vulnerable population: the mentally ill. The trouble is that when you start this conversation about whether exposure to video games or vitriolic political rhetoric contributed to violent actions, people take sides based on their own behaviors or their political beliefs. But if we could set those aside, it seems clear that unstable folks are just another population that may react differently to certain media texts and that this is worth knowing. Maybe nutjobs like Jared Lee Loughner or John Hinkley, Jr. would've eventually latched on to some media text and used it as inspiration for an assassination. Or maybe not. Maybe there was something special about the interaction between one particular media text and an unstable mind that results in acts that are profoundly disruptive to society.

We can't just take anecdotal evidence (e.g. most murderers read A Catcher in the Rye when they were teenagers or something like that). We need to subject this evidence to rigorous statistical analysis, comparing those who were exposed to the text and didn't change their lives to those that did. What makes them different? How many of them are there? How drastic and costly to the individual and society is the behavior change? What would be the cost to society of somehow limiting access to the text? There is not reason why we can't do this, but we have to start looking in the right places.

Flow 2010 Conference - Serial TV Narrative Wrap-up

Attending this year's Flow 2010 Conference reminded me of a few things. It reminded me how far I've wandered down the social science path of communication studies. It reminded me of the value of attending round-table conferences where the focus isn't on simply presenting your findings in a concise format, but rather on thinking out loud with many other informed individuals. Social science is often a matter of incremental gains in general knowledge. Where do the significant changes in theory and thinking about a topic come from? I think they come from places like the Flow 2010 Conference (or the blogosphere?).

I presented a brief position paper at one of two panels dedicated to serial TV narrative. My basic point was that a narrative doled out in semi-regular intervals over the span of years feels like the interactions we have with other people in a way that narratives doled out by other means do not. Something about reading a novel or watching a new Harry Potter movie once every 3 years feels inert and lifeless; I think some of that has to do with the evolution of TV stories over time (like our relationships with people evolving over time) and some of it has to do with our lack of total control over the pace and content of the story/relationship.

The discussion in the first panel got me thinking more about these gaps in between story parts. That seems to be a defining characteristic of narratives on TV as they are broadcast. What happens in those gaps? Janet Staiger noted that the gaps allow for extended periods of speculation of hypothesizing as to what is going to happen net in the story. The internet makes this kind of speculation collective, thereby heightening fan community, and I think this collective hypothesizing helps manage some of the anxiety people experience waiting for the next installment. The gaps also create the possibility for the creators of the story to adjust some of the elements in the story to respond to real life events (e.g. the incorporation of anti-terrorism federal agents in The Sopranos and The Wire post 9/11) while retaining a pre-established overall story arc (see Lindlof and Cuse's account of how they wrote Lost).

Its also important to note the regularity or irregularity of the gaps and how that affects the audience's experience of the story. I don't think its the existence of the gaps that makes audiences anxious so much as the existence of irregularity of gaps. Once I come to expect intervals of absences of certain durations at certain times, be it in a story I'm enjoying or a relationship of some sort, then I shape my expectations to conform to this. But if the intervals are of indeterminate length (is the show coming back? when is it coming back), people get antsy, or at the very least, they are somewhat detached in their devotion to the show. I like the idea of looking at Facebook newsfeeds as narratives, ones that evolve with us and are relevant to us. We have choice over when we choose to view them (although the bundling of these feeds together and with other sub-applications like party-planning makes it difficult to say "I want to check out how this one particular person's narrative is progression") but we can't choose when they update and typically people update irregularly. So perhaps we cannot be as devoted to an evolving Facebook feed narrative as a fictional TV narrative.

The second panel (in particular Ryan Lizardi's comments) got me thinking about the ideological potential of serial narratives, what I think Ryan referred to as a "long drip of ideology." There's something about a TV show, something about that frequent reinforcement of an idea over time and the ability to get everyone talking about certain topic in a certain way that has the potential to change people's minds about things. I provided two examples at the panel (The Wire changed how I thought about inner-city blight; The Up Series changed how I thought about success and happiness), but upon further reflection, I watched both of those on DVDs, not as they were broadcast. I suppose I'm not saying that other forms of narrative (TV on DVD, novels, movies) can't alter the way people think, but that TV as it is broadcast has the potential to change the national conversation about a topic (again, the water cooler).

Serial TV narratives may have the power to shift people in a positive direction, to help them consider a topic from a new point of view. But what do we lose when more narratives become increasingly serialized? I think we potentially lose the diversity of sampling different kinds of content (this is the "commitment" issue brought up by Bordwell on his blog on why he doesn't write about TV). If I have to watch 10 hours of a show and then watch it every week to be part of the conversation (which is the case with serial TV narrative), then I can't use that time to try out other content. Hence, there is less overlap in what we watch. This leads to a loss of a type of discourse about TV and, by extension, culture. Readers or DVD viewers can plow through a serial in a few days. Watching a show as it is broadcast requires a kind of protracted, scheduled commitment, and the talk about the show in between episodes is part of that commitment. So, serialization of narratives may be part of the social fragmentation phenomenon that comes with expansion of media options that other social critics have feared.

There is, of course, much more to say about serial TV narrative, but these are just a couple of ideas that I picked up from the panels that I wouldn't mind expanding on.

Hate the sin (use of media) and love the sinner (the media/the user)

Urban dictionary, the open-source authority on popular phraseology, defines the phrase "Don't hate the playa, hate the game" as:
"Do not fault the successful participant in a flawed system; try instead to discern and rebuke that aspect of its organization which allows or encourages the behavior that has provoked your displeasure."

This phrase popped into my head several times over the past few days. I've been visiting home, and each time I speak with people outside of communication/media studies about the media, I usually end up on the receiving end of a diatribe against "the media." Although "the media" is blamed for pretty much every social or psychological ill one can conceive of, it might help to focus on one recent example: the over-coverage of LeBron James's free agency. The problem, as I understand it, seems to be misplaced priorities. Why are we giving so much airtime/webspace to something so frivolous when more pressing matters (e.g. global warming, BP oil spill, the economy, Israel/Palestine) are clearly of more importance? Similar arguments have been leveled at reality TV, human interest news, soft news about television shows, celebrity news, etc. Usually, the people to blame are "the media" and the people who care about such things are helpless, ignorant addicts and dupes.

The argument is countered by many cultural critics or those with some reason to defend such fare (e.g. those in the entertainment business, fans, etc.) on the grounds that it serves as the basis for discussion and debate of important cultural mores. LeBron's free agency decision is about loyalty, reputation, and avarice. The Jersey Shore is about our love/hate relationship with our own bodies and those of others, classism, and ethnic identity. Sandra Bullock's divorce is about the meaning of family, sex, and marriage in 21st century America. Pretty much all so-called frivolous media fare is, in some way, about romantic love: how we define it, how we find it, how we keep it. When people put down these debased forms of culture, so the argument goes, they are performing an act of cultural elitism, holding preferred forms of discussion and debate of mores in high esteem because they were created by rich, white, heterosexual American men and not because those forms are inherently superior. To use another colloquialism: haters gonna hate.

I'd like to offer a third viewpoint on LeBron coverage, Jersey Shore and its coverage on the news and in the blogosphere, and coverage of Sandra Bullock's divorce. Yes, despite their apparent frivolity, they all contain elements which could, and indeed do, lead to what anyone might recognize as productive dialog about important issues. But they also contain elements that lead to negative outcomes: narcissism, hostility towards out-group members, and poor self-image, for starters. If we can't get to a point where we recognize these possible negative and positive outcomes of the content, then we can go no further in discussing whether any type of media is good or bad. But if we acknowledge those ground rules, then we can move forward. What determines whether one who watches or reads this stuff gets something positive or something negative out of it?

I think the answer lies not in exposure to the content or the mere existence and availability of the content, but in use: quantity, level of engagement, and motivations for use. Plenty of media effects research bears this out. If you read a lot of tabloids, comment on blogs about celebrity gossip, and do so after a hard day's work (showing signs of an "escapist" motivation as opposed to an "information seeking" or "social" motivation) and you exhibit higher levels of narcissism and lower levels of self-esteem and civic knowledge than someone who reads the same content but less often and for other reasons, well then, you've got something.

My hunch is that the people who use media in ways that end up being associated with negative outcomes have poor impulse control and trouble delaying gratification, and that these attributes were established early on in life. If they weren't watching too much celebrity news, they'd drink too much or spend too much time on Facebook, or overeat. They can still train themselves to steer clear of things that trigger the undesired outcomes, but first they have to recognize the links between the behavior and the undesired outcomes.

Let's get back to LeBron. I suppose members of the media are culpable on some level, in that each time an editor leads with a story about LeBron or another person tweets about it (making all tweeters members of the hated "media"), they make it easier for everyone to pay attention to LeBron and ignore more serious matters. Regarding the "if you don't like it, change the channel/website" counter-argument, this assumes that people freely choose what to watch or what to read (the old "rational agent" fallacy) when, in fact, they watch or read what is easiest to access and if all of the easy-to-access sources concern matters that contain frivolous elements, it becomes more likely that many people (even very media-savvy people) will find themselves accessing more and more of this fare and exhibiting undesired outcomes for reasons unknown to them.

But if your objective were to curtail the negative outcomes of narcissism and the lack of civic awareness and engagement, trying to stamp out "frivolous" media seems like the wrong way to go about achieving it. Better to establish the links between certain kinds and amounts of use of certain kinds of media content and agreed-upon negative outcomes. Give these facts to people in language they can understand and in metrics that they care about: how does this affect your happiness, your lifespan, your ability to earn money? Let them make their own decisions. Consumer-driven change helped drive the recycling movement as well as the organic food movement. Why couldn't it change what we see in the news?

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.

Substitutes

In today's NYTimes, David Carr posits that one reason for the depressed ratings for The Tonight Show over the past couple of years is that the internet - specifically, sites like TMZ, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and even forwarded emails - serve the audience's desire for snarky commentary on current events, which is most of reason why people watched late-night TV. The internet does so more efficiently, tailoring content to individual interests and providing it anytime people want, even right after the events happen, not to mention the fact that it doesn't have Broadcast Standards and Practices looking over its shoulder.

Maybe this is why ratings are down, and maybe it isn't. All we have are the Nielsen numbers, which indicate that, yes, people are watching less late-night TV and going online more, but we don't know if that's because Jeff Zucker screwed up when he switched Leno to 10pm and put Conan at 11:30, because people are satisfying their desire for snark online, or some combination of the two. But the possibility raised by Carr provides an ideal example of why scholars and critics cannot make claims about how an audience/user responds to a medium, or even a media text (like The Tonight Show), that would be true even if there were other media options available to consumers. Certainly, there's a need for in-depth commentary that applies in-the-moment to an audience's relationship to a genre or a show or a medium at a given time, and certainly, it is impossible to anticipate what the mediascape will look like in 2 years let alone 10 or 20, but there is an alternative to simply making claims about texts or genres or a medium: making claims about media experiences.

In an era with fewer media options, you could describe the audience's (or your own) experience with a medium such as television and assume that when someone read your analysis, that person would know what "television" was and would've experienced "television" in ways that are similar to the ways in which the audience did at the time the analysis was written. You could describe an audience's experience with a show or a genre, and even if the show or genre weren't available to the reader, the reader could find an equivalent in his or her own time and place. If I read a piece about what The Tonight Show meant to viewers in the 1960's, I would imagine that viewers of 2005's Tonight Show or perhaps viewers of any late-night comedy show might feel similarly. What Carr suggests is that although the show is still called The Tonight Show and that it hasn't radically altered its content, its relationship to its audience is not the same. Therefore, anything we said about the appeal of The Tonight Show 20 years ago doesn't really apply anymore.

In his essay, Carr says, "The show hasn’t changed, we have." I don't think this is quite right. We stay more or less the same. We experience the same basic set of emotions, our minds are just as capable or incapable of deciding between various options, we relate to one another in ways we related to one another thousands of years ago, we are creatures of habit. To use the example of The Tonight Show, we're still in need of funny commentary on current, shared, cultural events on a regular basis. So really, in the ways that count, in the ways that determine what media we choose and the ways we act in life, we have not changed.

So, if the show hasn't changed and we haven't changed, what has? The ways in which we are connected to each other have changed and will continue to change at rapid pace. We're left with an environment that won't sit still long enough for us to make claims about the role of any one of its elements - be it a technology or a TV show - that will be relevant to the world 10 years from now. Also, there are simply too many texts for any scholar or critic to keep up with. If twitter or Facebook feeds are the functional equivalent of late-night comedy TV for some people, how do we get access to this information and how do we preserve it? We can't.

What we need is a way of identifying and categorizing media experiences that is not contingent upon the text or medium's relationship to other available options at a given time, or rather, one that takes into account that relationship in the claims that it allows scholars to make.

To stick with The Tonight Show example, here are two ways of making claims about people's use of that show (these claims are probably not true, but they're just an illustration of the kinds of claims that one could make):

1. People who watch The Tonight Show do so b/c they want to relax, they want to stay informed about current events, they want to be entertained, and they want something to talk about with other people. We know this b/c they tell us. We also know that its true especially of people who watch that one show b/c people who watch other shows do not rate these reasons for viewing as highly. We also know that watching the show is associated with higher levels of political knowledge and better relationships with others.
   
2. Given a set of options that is roughly equivalent in terms of its monetary and temporal costs, if people are in a certain mood and they been encouraged to engage in an experience habitually by the way in which the experience is made available (once every night, 5 nights a week, year round), and that experience allows them to relax, stay informed, be entertained, and maintain bonds with others, they will choose that media experience. That media experience, so long as it contains commentary related to current events, will result in higher levels of political knowledge and better relationships with others.
   

The first claims do not address the shifting media landscape. Yes, one can make sound claims that were true at the time, and maybe the person who reads the analysis 20 years after the fact can adjust the findings in his/her mind to suit the subsequent media landscape, but there are ways for the media scholar/critic to make claims which do not require such adjustments. The second set of claims are about a media experience, one that was chosen from a number of options that were harder or easier to access, and was chosen b/c the user was in a certain mood. The 20-years-later reader can substitute any media experience for the one mentioned in the study. That reader knows what qualities of the experience are important - current-ness, cost, regularity, ability to provide relaxing entertainment.


The categories that we're using now - genre, medium, text - either won't exist or won't mean the same thing that they mean right now. The state of rapid media change does not require that we be able to see into the future. No one in any other branch of science is any more capable of seeing into the future. It just requires us to concentrate on other variables, ones which have numbers of levels that remain relatively stable. An incomplete list:

• emotions
• motivations
• the number of options one can consider at a given time
• monetary and temporal costs
• whether or not some experience appeals to our ideology
• whether or not we identify with characters
• ease of use

Theoretically, we can locate any possible media experience somewhere along the spectrum of each of these variables, and we can determine what prior emotional states those experiences are associated with (thereby predicting usage patterns) and what the subsequent effects of such experiences are.

Losing The Passive Companionship of TV

For the past month, I have felt as though I've been part of one of the experiments I would like to conduct on media choice and decision making. Ever since I moved into my house, I've received free cable, as often happens with Comcast who isn't very vigilant when it comes to who gets their signal and who doesn't. After the digital transition, they've begun gradually whittling away at my channels. I lost about 3 or 4 channels out of 40 a few weeks ago, and this past Friday I lost about 20, pretty much everything besides the networks, public television, and the Michigan research channel. When I lost AMC, I had to consider what watching my favorite show, Mad Men, meant to me, and whether I could replace the experience with something as pleasurable until it came out on DVD. I decided that I could live without it, that it certainly wasn't worth paying the extra $40(!) a month for cable television, that I'll either wait for the DVDs or buy the remaining eps on ITunes. Then they took ESPN, my bread and butter, and that has caused a great deal of reflection on my part as to what the value of TV is for me.

At first, I missed the up-to-date-ness of TV. I can go online and get all the information that is dispensed though ESPN (and then some), but it doesn't feel the same. I think my attachment to TV has something to do with the fact that I live by myself. When I turn on ESPN, there's something about the direct address format and the jocular tone of SportsCenter, not to mention the always-on nature of the news coverage (similar things could be said about cable news). It feels like companionship in a way that cold, lifeless DVDs and the internet does not. If I was looking for replacement experiences, I could just spend more time actually talking to people, but part of the pleasure of the companionship offered by ESPN and TV in general is that its passive. Also, my use of ESPN is dictated by my moods and schedule, not someone else's. I don't give a fuck whether or not Chris Berman or Scott Van Pelt are in the mood to be funny; that's their job. Not so with people I know.

Are there any possible substitutes for this feeling? Like ESPN, NPR is always on and roughly appeals to my interests, but to be honest, i just don't like the content as much. Its possible that some applications on the internet - social media like Facebook and maybe Twitter - could fill this need for passive companionship. Using FB does feel a little bit like that kind of passive companionship that I crave, though sometimes its almost too personal. I like the level of detachment that I get from watching sports or news. Perhaps this will motivate me to give Twitter a try.

This experience makes me believe that television, just like radio before it, needs to move away from pre-recorded drama and towards shows that address the viewer as part of a crowd, either through a host or telecaster or anchor, or merely by presenting a show that is performed in front of a crowd (like American Idol). Its possible that reality TV offers something in the way of passive companionship, although maybe its pleasures are more about social surviellance. Similarly, comedy might provide some additional pleasure if watched in groups, so maybe it does need to be watch simultaneously by many viewers. In any case, DVD and the internet seem to take care of drama exhibition and information about the world.

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.

Why we hate TV now more than ever

If, indeed, more people feel more hate towards television than ever before (example of said hatred, which is usually directed at reality-based programs), here is a possible explanation that relies on technological and economic factors rather than some general decline of morals, behavior, or taste:

1. Since the rise of reality-based programming (due, in part, to the writers' strike of the late 90's), there is a pipe-line for cheap programming and lots of channels and timeslots to fill.
2. More tastes, desires, and values can be catered to cheaply on TV than ever before. Those varied tastes, desires, and values always existed, but before the rise of cheap-2-produce TV, only certain "elite" tastes could be catered to.
3. There is a new kind of diversity in terms of the desires that are being catered to through TV programming. Because of how deeply synergistic TV is (w/ cross-channel promos, program lead-ins), you can't just get your little bit of tailored content. You have to be exposed to other content not intended for you, unlike the internet where you can go to your favorite sites and generally avoid the variety of sites that cater to other preferences and lifestyles and whatnot. Its not the diversity of values expressed on TV that drives people to hate it: its the fact that you're almost forced to be exposed to those other values.
   

It is, of course, also possible that TV encourages or legitimizes disparate value systems and, thus, ratchets up people's pre-existing knee-jerk distaste for behavior that they can't understand. Reality TV gives people an excuse to hate people who behave differently than they do. What could the other explanation of people's strong hatred of certain programs be? I doubt that its b/c these programs are poorly crafted. I think that when people see something they don't like on TV, they don't just think about the fuckhead that created it, but also think about the audience for the program. They believe in the premise that TV can promote, cultivate, or instill values in an audience, and they fear the erosion of their own values in the face of those of The Hills or Jerry Springer or whatever. But those are real people on those shows. Its not like you're just hating fictional characters if you hate those shows. You're hating (at least semi-)real people. Do people who hate reality based TV shows hate them b/c of the characters' behavior (which is quite different than behavior exhibited in previous fictional TV programs) or is there an added layer to that hatred based on the fact that those are real people that they're hating?

This whole theory of mine may be wrong in that its based on a few people I happen to know and a few blogs I read. Maybe only certain people hate TV more now or feel that hate more strongly (the people who were being catered to during the network era).

Its also possible that some of the people who watch the shows other people hate like the show but hate the people in the show. For instance, you could like The Hills and hate Spencer. In fact, many reality-based shows understand the ways viewers love to hate people by positioning the subjects in each show as simultaneously sympathetic and laughable subjects of derision. In effect, the viewers identify with an invisible narrator who is relaying other people's stupid behavior for their amusement. Is She Really Going Out With Him on MTV is a good example. The men are laughable, but are the women? To some, yes. And the men are, in some sense, successful, in that they're rich, good-looking, and they're getting laid, so a viewer could look up to the them, feel attracted to them, or identify with them. But you can also hate them while liking to watch the show.

When someone says, "I cannot believe people watch Flavor of Love, I hate that show," they may imagine that the show is on the air because other people like or identify with the characters and behavior on the show. That is, after all, why they as viewers watch TV. But maybe other people, particularly younger people, watch shows in order to hate others, and are able to make the distinction between show (which they love) and characters (which they hate). Or maybe its some kind of mixture of love and hate that they get from watching it.

After googling "Most Hated TV," I did get the sense that people hate reality-based TV, as a whole genre or individual shows. They also hate comedies that they don't find funny, and popular shows that they don't understand the appeal of, maybe b/c they're hard to avoid (American Idol).

Mad Moods

When I've been reading a novel a lot or watching a novel-like show a lot, it alters my default thoughts, moods, and my inner dialog. I'll be walking across campus, between appointments, distracted from work for a moment, and my thoughts will drift back to a song from the TV show or a certain moment from the narrative. In some sense, I'm always occupying that world, whether or not I'm reading or watching the story at any given moment.

So it goes w/ Mad Men right now. I'd just re-discovered the first season, watching all of season 1 in a week. Now, I'm making my way through season 2 for the second time in preparation for the beginning of the third season next weekend. The mood of Mad Men is something like the mood of The Sopranos - pretty dark w/ touches of detached, sarcastic levity. Hardly the mood you would choose to be in all the time. Did I choose to watch Mad Men because it had qualities that helped me put my life in perspective in some way, as Mary Beth Oliver hypothesizes in her writings about sad and meaningful media? Maybe. But thinking about it strictly in terms of mood, the show puts me in a somewhat reflective mood but seems to have inoculated me against slipping into very bad moods. If I had watched some comedy like Arrested Development, or some other distraction, I might have experienced a temporary boost in mood that might have even carried over a bit into the rest of my life. But then I would be reminded of some dark thought that would bring my mood way down and nothing about my media experience could help with that. If anything, it might even hurt more given the contrast between the two moods and the two worlds. But w/ Mad Men and similar "bad mood" shows, those unhappy thoughts and the events that trigger them can happen to me (and they will always happen to me - that's life) and I won't be brought as low by them.

We could call shows like Mad Men "reflective media," something that had this carry-over effect on mood after you've stopped watching (but only if you're really into the show), enhancing your ability to deal w/ situations and other bad thoughts and bad moods.

Still, it might be causing me to dwell on unhappier aspects of my life. Or it might just give color and shape to the moods and thoughts that are results of my real life situations and material experience. Maybe I'm pulling the darker moments out of a show full of dark & light moments b/c that's what I need at this time. That's what makes this so fascinating to study: I don't have an intuitive grasp on whether my mood is affecting my interpretation of the show, the show is affecting my mood, or both or neither is affecting each other. Its too glib to say that they both affect each other, though that may be true. I need to know the degree to which they affect each other and the circumstances in which those effects hold up. Not to say that mood is all that matters. I wouldn't want media or anything else to make me a happy idiot, and I wouldn't want people to stop reading Hamlet b/c its too depressing. Still, I'd like to know a bit more about what causes what, especially when it comes to these indirect, lingering effects on my default moods.

Lost and Time Travel, Resolved

I confess, I still love Lost, not b/c I find it particularly pleasurable to watch (the soapy dialogue is hackneyed, there are too many scenes where characters redundantly talk about how important events are but nothing really happens, the pacing is lousy, and the music is an emotional crutch), but b/c it tries to do a lot of different things. It takes chances in terms of its choice of stories, the way it tells the stories, and melding of genres, and the weaving of subplots. When you take chances like these, you mostly get shit, but it provides the viewer with the feeling that they might experience something genuinely new. I feel as though the show could produce an unfamiliar emotion or thought. Its like watching sports: I feel like anything could happen.

Of course, there have been experimental narratives before, but experimental films are limited in the ways they can muck around w/ viewers' brains b/c they can't be very long. Experimental literature is abundant, but I don't find it as immersing as TV. And yes, there has been plenty of experimental TV shows before (Twin Peaks, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, late-night public access weirdness, Ernie Kovacs, etc, etc), but I like Lost b/c its experimenting on a grand stage in front of millions of viewers. That's what I liked about Twin Peaks, especially the series finale. If that was a movie, a smaller subset of people would've gone to see it and they would've had different expectations. There's something about knowing that other people are having their heads fucked by a really weird TV show at the same time that its happening to you that makes it a richer experience.

At first, I didn't like the time travel idea, but its grown on me. Movies about time travel don't have the time to get into the implications and possibilities of it. Here, there's room to explore. I think they've raised the cheif problems with time travel (can one intervene in past events w/o creating paradoxes) and I have faith that they will offer something more than a simplistic deus ex machina in future episodes to resolve the problems. Or maybe they won't. But, see, this is the cool part of about a serial TV narrative that is written as it goes, why its different from novels or films. I believe that somewhere, the writers are wrestling with these problems, trying to figure them out. At the same time, I'm trying to figure them out. I've been motivated to do so by the interesting story and the characters (considering time travel in the abstract wouldn't be as fun for me). I cannot skip to the end. I can't google the answer, b/c the answer hasn't been written yet. But I can take the information that I have and evaluate the problems again and again, talking about them with others, writing about them.

It is interesting to see two different kinds of reception of this show: the critical reception by the NYTimes (which, in my opinion, is absolutely the wrong approach to the material), and the message board reception. I think the show is more of a game to be played with the audience, not a text on which we might pass judgment. If you don't want to play, don't watch or discuss. But if you don't like it, I feel as though its partly your fault for not playing along more. If you don't have fun playing a game, its not necessarily b/c the game sucks.

So, in the spirit of playing the game, here's my take on things. Is it possible that people could travel back in time, intervene in the past and continue to experience a subjectively continuous, linear reality? Sort of. When the characters in Lost appear to travel back in time, they don't really, literally go back in time. They travel to a facsimile of the past. They can do whatever they want in that past and it will affect the future of that world. They can use whatever knowledge they have about what the future of that world would have been to bring about desirable outcomes in their future but the world they are altering is not prior to the world in which they were before they traveled in time. Its more like a different place that happens to have people and objects that closely resemble the past. They have special knowledge in the new world, but they can't do things that will instantaneously change their physical or existential status. In this scenario, you could "go back in time" and kill Hitler before the Holocaust, thereby preventing the holocaust in that world that you traveled to. The holocaust would've still happened in the other time line that you were a part of before you traveled in time, but would that matter? What does it mean to say that something has happened? Why is it of any consequence? Regardless of whether or not we can travel in time, we have the same moral responsibilities and the same desires for happiness. If I had the knowledge and the ability to prevent a holocaust from happening, I must do that, whether or not it undoes a holocaust that already happened. It makes me think of Daniel Dennett's essay "I Could Not Have Done Otherwise—So What?" The gist, if I remember correctly, is that whether or not there is a god, whether or not we have free will, whether or not you're operating in a contiguous or parallel reality, does not matter as much as you think it might. You still want to be compassionate, you still want to love and be loved, and you still want to avoid displeasure, and you do so based on what you can observe with your senses. Other possible worlds (one in which Hitler wins WWII, one in which he gets accepted to art school and lives happily ever after) are infinite in number but cannot affect your physical/psychological experience of reality, therefore they are of no consequence to you. Even if, in those other worlds, there are real people who are really suffering, if you can't potentially interact with them or even observe them, then they're not worth thinking about. Regarding Schrodinger's cat, when the cat is in the box, it doesn't matter if it is alive, dead, or "both." If this all seems very abstract and philosophical, consider the moral dilemma of the amnesiac murderer.

This puts the time traveler in a bit of a bind. They're morally obligated to visiting every possible world and preventing bad things from happening (a la Quantum Leap). I think the characters from Lost are off the hook b/c the mechanisms used to travel through time are unpredictable, so even if they wanted to visit parallel worlds that are the functional equivalents of their pasts and prevent bad shit from happening, they would have a very tough time doing so.

What if a character went back in time and killed their parents. Would that negate his or her existence? No. It would negate the existence of person who resembles him or her, but he or she is still a person with a personal past. So, my theory is that the characters in Lost can't change their material or psychological experience of reality by changing the past. Their bodies and minds can only move linearly, forward through a single time line, even though they may jump between worlds that resemble past and future points on that single timeline. Problems solved!

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.

Against The Daily Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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