Television is not a toaster with pictures, and Facebook circa 2005 is not Facebook circa 2015

Most people have likely formed an opinion about media effects: the degree or type of effects certain types of media use has on us. They likely talk about this in terms of media technologies (TV, radio, internet) or types of media texts (violent video games, Fox News). I think that we're using an outdated way of talking and thinking about the question of media effects.

We know that we spend more time using media - at home, at work, on the move - than ever before. And we know that there is a greater quantity of media options (in terms of content options and affordances of the technologies or applications) than ever before. I think that these two facts, by themselves, should prompt everyone (even skeptics) to reconsider the degree and type of media effects, and the ways in which we go about assessing these effects.

First, things have changed on the level of media technology. The question of media effects arose at a time at which the types of media (identifiable by their affordances) were limited. Producing and distributing a widely used communication technology that was functionally different than another communication technology took a lot of capital. Once the vast broadband and mobile online networks were established, it became significantly easier to create and distribute applications that, functionally, differ from other communication technologies. Much the same way the establishment of the electrical network permitted growth in the variety of machines in our lives and the establishment of the highway and railway systems permitted the growth of transportation, this network growth has increased diversity. Before the establishment of the electrical grid, you could make plenty of generalizations about machines and their effects on humanity because the number of widely used machines was quite limited. Afterward, those generalizations didn't make as much sense given the variety of machines that people used. Was the effect of a television the same as a toaster? Using pre-electrical network logic, the answer was yes.

Lumping all the uses of the internet or all the uses of Facebook together creates a similar problem. We still want to use the frames that were established by scholars and researchers during the 20th century for understanding media now. We talk about (and study) the effects of Facebook, of the internet, of texting, in the same way we talked about the effects of television 30 years ago: as if these things were discrete entities. But this approach doesn't make sense in a world in which the media forms to which we give names quickly change in fundamental, functional ways. The internet of 2011 is likely no more similar to the internet of 2000, in terms of its uses and effects on users, as radio (or a toaster, for that matter) is to the internet of either era. Yes, some useful things can be said about the effects of all online experiences just as some useful things can be said about the effects of the use of all machines (studies of modernity), but most of these general ways of thinking are just reflections of a time when "machine" or "online experiences" were easier to generalize about, before the network made new technologies and texts easier to create and distribute.

There is a similar problem with the way we think about the effects of types of content. If we talk about the possible effects of a particular film or television show, we do so because we believe that the principles at work are generalizable beyond that one text and that one audience. A film scholar writes about their experience viewing a certain film, but implicit in their writing is the assumption that other people will experience the film in a certain way and/or that other people will experience other similar films in a certain way. When the number of texts explodes, as it has done for the past several years, the question of what one particular person (or type of person) does with one particular text reveals less about the overall experience of media consumption. This just wasn't a problem when the number of texts was lower, when readers could be expected to have seen "classic" texts.

This isn't to say that there won't likely be some media texts that will be experienced by large numbers of people over long periods of time. Our thirst for common experiences will ensure the persistence of canons, but these canons will consist of a smaller and smaller sliver of our overall media use. Figuring out the effect of the two hours I spend watching Citizen Kane is worthwhile, but what about the effects of the thousands of hours I spend online? How do we go about assessing that? Do we break the texts into genres, like we did before? Do we pretend that Facebook or social networking sites are media technologies in the way that radio or television are media technologies? What happens when Facebook's online movie-watching feature takes off? Is its effect on users the same as it was 5 years ago? This seems ludicrous, and yet studies that purport to be about the effects of "Facebook" do not take it into account.

How do we adapt? We identify characteristics of media experiences that cannot be made obsolete by developments in technology and we base our theories on the presence or absence of those characteristics. How many people does a media application connect a user to? How often is it used? Is its use planned or spontaneous? What emotions is its use typically associated with? What parts of the brain light up when we're using it? What are the gratifications sought by the users? If you look at technology this way, you can make sense of the effects of television and toasters without having to conflate the two, and without having to re-invent your theories when the next contraption is invented. These approaches to media effects seem suited to an era in which there will be too many different texts and media technologies for any human to keep track of.

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.

The Pecker at the Party: Immediate gratification, social media, and social situations

Imagine you are at a cocktail party. Most individuals are talking to one another while some are pecking at their smartphones. One of the guests at the party confronts a “phone-pecker”, explaining that she finds this behavior to be rude and cannot understand why the individual is engaging in what appears to be “anti-social” behavior at a party. The “phone pecker” retorts, claiming that he is actually being quite social, just with people who do not happen to be in the room at that moment. He is looking at photos of friends on Facebook, answering emails and sending text messages, reading tweets. How, he asks, is his socializing any different (or inferior) to the socializing that is happening at the cocktail party?

This situation - in which an apparently solitary individual stares at a screen and pecks at the screen or a keyboard or, in some cases, talks to the screen - is increasingly common. More social interaction is mediated - taking place via text messages, emails, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) - and more people are concerned about the implications of this for individuals and society. The cocktail party guest’s identification of this behavior as “rude” suggests a breach of etiquette, but the perception of these acts as rude may only be a symptom of some people’s failure to understand how the technology is being used. Such a failure might be a result of the rapid diffusion of the technology and the predictable failure of social mores to evolve at a similar rate. Older generations lamenting the corrupting influence of new technologies is likely as old as technology itself. Once the technology is sufficiently common, such complaints are seen as the mark of a curmudgeon rather than a legitimate qualm. So the fact that this is seen as rude fails to distinguish between a public act that is simply new and will eventually be harmless and no longer seen as rude and an act that is, in some way, harmful to the social fabric and will always be seen as rude or aberrant.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting that the phone-pecker may not be being social at all. He may be scanning his Facebook feed (the equivalent of looking at other guests at a party while not conversing with them) or checking sports scores. Given the size and orientation of networked mobile devices and the expectation of privacy that is associated with the use of such devices, it is difficult for observers to be able to tell the difference between social interaction on mobile devices and non-social behavior.

Let us assume the phone-pecker is interacting with others via the mobile device. Are there really no differences between the nature of heavily mediated person-to-person relationships (that is, those that take place chiefly via text message, email, Skype, and Facebook) and those that are not as heavily mediated?

Older individuals often marvel at the sheer number of texts that teenagers send in a day. Half of all American teens send over 50 texts per day, according to Pew, 2010. Some teens send hundreds per day. This number is not shocking if one considers the text messages to be similar in purpose and content to turn-taking conversations. Teens engaged in long turn-taking conversations on land-line telephones and, before that, in person. The length of statements in such conversations was and is likely to be short, no more than the 150 characters allowed by most SMS (i.e. texting) services. So the length of individual statements and the frequency of text messaging and social media use, while initially seeming alarmingly different, do not to differ significantly from other existing forms (mediated or not) of communication.

What about the people participating in the interaction? There has been fear surrounding social media and one-to-one technology (dating back to the introduction of the telephone) that remote communication devices would facilitate relationships between vulnerable populations (e.g. children) and those seeking to take advantage of these populations (e.g. sexual predators, advertisers, etc.). Though there have been instances of such behavior, the bulk of mediated social interaction (on Facebook and text messaging, if not on Twitter, which, in any case, operates more like a micro-broadcast medium like blogging and less like a rapid interaction application) is still between parties that are acquainted with one another from non-mediated social worlds like school, work, and get-togethers in real world locations like bars and parties. In other words, the people on the other end of the phone-pecker’s pecks are likely to be similar, in terms of their connections to the phone-pecker, to the other cocktail party goers. So it seems, again, that what initially appeared to be different may not be that different at all.

But there's another possible area of difference: the nature of the relationship. The maintenance of relationships, like any other endeavor, is comprised of acts that are immediately enjoyable but do not pay long-term or collective dividends (being able to complain about work to a friend, flirting with a married co-worker, playing a game of basketball with a friend) and other acts that are not immediately enjoyable but do pay off in the long run (changing a diaper, attending a boring work meeting, discussing a difficult topic with a spouse). This isn’t to say there aren’t many (if not most) social interactions that are both immediately gratifying AND help foster long-term gains for the self and others (great sex, great parties, enjoyable collaborative work), but that some relationship maintenance, like many other things in life, is not immediately gratifying but pays off in the long run. An overindulgence in immediately enjoyable social interactions and a failure to engage in any other kind of social interactions may lead to shorter-duration relationships as individuals more frequently (and accurately) accuse one another of being selfish. A failure to think about one’s long-term goals in relationships goes hand in hand with being self-centered or selfish.

Throughout most of human history, our relationships were constrained: by the surveillance and judgment of others, by geography, by class, by time. The proliferation of networked communication devices allows us to (at least partially) remove these constraints. For some, this is a good thing: relationships hindered by repressive regimes are allowed to flourish online. For others, I think it is not. These constraints often kept immediately gratifying interactions at a distance, forcing us to talk with co-workers about work when we would rather be flirting with our partners, to talk with our parents when we would rather be talking with our long-time friends, conversing with our long-time friends when we’d rather be talking to someone new and exciting, talking to our spouses when we’d rather be flirting with a co-worker. They were shaped by the randomness of geographic distribution, by the history of institutions developed by those in power, and in these cases, circumvention of such constraints is, ultimate, a good thing. But either by accident or by design, those constraints kept us from indulging our every social whim.

Again, this isn’t to say that individuals without networked communication technology did not indulge in selfish interactions not in their or anyone else’s best long-term interest. However, when you make immediately gratifying options more easily accessible, you make them more likely to be chosen, particularly by those low in self-control. Why would the choice of whom to interact with and what to converse about be any different than any other decision (in which the temporal and spatial proximity of temptations make them more likely to be chosen)?

To return to the phone-pecker, it is possible that he simply prefers talking to someone who is not at the party. The pecker was invited to the party because of an assumed mutual interest in interacting with those at the party, but given his inattention to other party goers, he cannot count on this assumption lasting very long. He uses technology to develop and nurture several intense, mutually beneficial relationships with co-workers (frequently answering work emails), romantic partners, and close friends (frequently texting at parties), but ignores those very same people at other times so that he can communicate remotely with others. When spending time with his romantic partner, he frequently converses with friends through text and answers email, neglecting his relationship with his partner. When spending time at work, he frequently blows off work to flirt with his partner. It isn’t that he ignores certain people, but that, given the choice between one conversation and another, he chooses the more immediately interesting conversation.

By doing this, he may be training himself to become intolerant of social situations that are not immediately gratifying, becoming accustomed to the immediately gratifying interactions provided by networked communication devices. At a party, this is relatively harmless, though he might find himself invited to fewer parties in the future. But if he bows out of important discussions/ arguments with his partner before they can be resolved, if he pays more attention to work emails and less attention to his children, if he talks to his partner more than his co-workers about work, or flirts more to his sexy co-worker than he talks to his partner about their finances, eventually, his relationships with all parties will suffer through lack of attention.

Is vlogging a female medium?

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

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

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

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

Will the Revolution be Tweeted?

I just went to a terrific, timely talk by visiting professor Michael Dobbs on social media's role in revolutions. It was a rare treat to be in a room with well-informed experts on media and politics and discuss something that was going on right at that moment. Dobbs gave many examples of the popular press claiming that social media, Twitter in particular, had precipitated the successful revolution in Tunisia and the still-in-progress revolution in Egypt. He brought up examples of techno-utopian views on the subject (e.g. Clay Shirky's TED talk on the revolutionary power of Twitter) as well as rebuttals such as Malcolm Gladwell's piece for the New Yorker.

One question that came to mind during his talk was: when assessing whether or not Twitter and social media are capable of facilitating revolutions, to what are comparing them? And by "we," I mean the users, the public, the press, the critics, anybody. Gladwell essentially compares Twitter and Facebook groups to real world activism. I think he does this because he believes (as do I) that a fair amount of social media activists think of their tweeting or Facebook-group-founding as more similar to participation in a protest than sitting at home passively in front of a television screen and watching it all unfold. They think they're being active, but Gladwell points out that they ultimately have little real power because, unlike civil rights protesters or other activists who actually changed our world, they are not making any real sacrifice; they are not risking much; they are not forming lasting bonds with people for whom they would make some real sacrifice (e.g. a large sum of money, risking one's life, etc). So that, Gladwell says is the key difference between real world protesters and virtual ones: shared sacrifice.

I basically think of online activism the way i think about online "friends": instead of just saying, "online _____ is no substitute for the real thing!", I think it presents us an opportunity to pull apart the real world phenomenon and ask what parts of it are duplicated by the online proxy, what parts of it aren't, and how those parts matter for outcomes of interest. So, what is the point of protesting?

First, its a way to devalue the ruling party's monopoly on physical force. If enough people get out there in the town square and don't back down after being physically threatened and assaulted, then the power to threaten and assault loses its meaning. There's also a "softer" power of protesting crowds: they can choose not to vote for someone, they can choose not to spend their money somewhere. Even if they don't live in a democracy, they can make it even more glaringly apparent to the outside world that they're living in a country that isn't even remotely democratic. Dobbs seemed skeptical that this could result in the overthrow of a repressive regime. It didn't work in Poland, it didn't work in Iran, and it probably wouldn't work here, not unless people make very real, significant sacrifices, ones that couldn't be done online.

Dobbs essentially said that Twitter is a way to share information. Like pamphlets distributed in other revolutions, they are a necessary but not sufficient criteria for revolution. Other things need to be in place: long-standing, easy-to-grasp grievances, for one. But I don't think social media is just a way to get information out. The difference has to do with social pressure. Television was and is quite good at presenting the spectacle of many people behaving a certain way. Combine this spectacle with many little nodes on a network behaving or expressing ideas in the same way and you've got the appearance of consensus, which is a powerful tool.

This gets me to the idea of a tipping point. There is a point at which the contagion of an idea rapidly speeds up, a point at which it seems like "everybody" is buying the same t-shirt or saying the same catch-phrase or using Facebook. These are all fairly benign trends, which makes sense. Buying a certain kind of t-shirt didn't involve much sacrifice: they're all pretty much the same to you, and if this one is popular, even if its a little more expensive, maybe you should buy it. Putting your life on the line or uprooting your family or risking your livelihood (all things that may be called for if you're participating in a revolution) involve significant risk. But those arguing against the revolutionary power of social media miss a key point: social pressure can convince you to make great sacrifices under the right circumstances.

Here's how I think it works. At the start, you need to have a group of people who are very similar to you, the Twitter user, and they have to be engaging in some activity that you were pretty close to doing. Then you might be convinced to do what they're doing. As the number of people doing that thing grows, it starts to matter less and less how similar those people are to you and how predisposed you were to act that way in the first place. When it comes to social pressure, there is an effect of sheer numbers. It doesn't replace or cancel out those other effects, but as the number grows, the effects of similarity and pre-disposition lessen. If you give people who want a revolution a sense that they can pull it off because there are so many other young, unemployed, pissed-off men who are ready to risk jail or a beating, then its more likely to happen than if you didn't give them that sense. This is something that pamphlets or television alone cannot do.

At the end of Dobbs talk, another professor pointed out how many billions of tourist dollars Egypt is losing each day. China's economy can withstand a repressive government, but it doesn't look like this one can. We'll just have to wait and see.

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.

Decoding a Media Spectacle: 'June 17th, 1994'

I just got sucked into a terrific documentary on ESPN. "June 17th, 1994" chronicles a very strange day in sports. The New York Rangers celebrated winning the Stanley Cup in Manhattan, Arnold Palmer played his last round of golf, the World Cup kicked off, there was game 5 of the NBA Finals, and OJ Simpson led LA police on a chase. The lack of voice-over commentary lets us judge the events for ourselves, though the editing and the music offer some commentary.

What do I find so compelling about this documentary?

The moment that most intrigues me is when the news (Tom Brokaw, specifically) reports on the crowd that develops to cheer on OJ as he flees police. The crowd was created by the news media (crowd members learned of the car chase via television) and then the news media was bearing witness to the amoral attention seekers it created.

Everything happened in real time. As we watch the news broadcast of OJ driving down the freeway, we hear a psychologist describe what he is going through. That psychoanalysis was not added after the fact; it was done while OJ was fleeing. Crowds convene on overpasses, cheering for him. At this point, its not clear whether those people offered their support, if you can call it that, because they thought he was innocent, because they thought he was guilty but didn't want to see him kill himself (which he was threatening to do), or because they wanted to be part of some pop culture event as it unfolded, regardless of whether or not it had to do with murder or sports.

What is so striking about this moment is that it revealed this scary power of live television that lies dormant most of the time, a power that may have been inherited by twitter. Television binds millions of people together. Live television gives people the impression that they can quickly and radically change something. It is true that large numbers of people are capable of such feats, but like any organism, a crowd would not be very effective in altering its environment if it didn't have any sort of sensory feedback about the consequences of its actions. Live television (and now twitter) can act as that sensory feedback mechanism. Telethons work on this principle, but there's something inert about their orderliness. The OJ incident felt alive. Even though I was watching it 16 years after it happened, I got the feeling that the whole culture was in a state of flux.

This documentary reveals something about how people interact with one another and how media plays some role in enabling the tendencies of people to congregate, to gawk, to seek attention and to see a bit of themselves in the groups (sports teams) or individuals (OJ) they support.

Crowds gather for all sorts of reasons. While the distinction between supporting a murderer and supporting a sports team may seem obvious in retrospect, its possible that this distinction doesn't feel as important when you're part of a big group. There are well-known conformist tendencies that overrule our individual senses of morality. In addition to that, I think members of crowds engaged in unsavory behavior can distribute the guilt so that even if they are guilty of some sin (supporting a murderer, standing up for a tyrannical government), you're somehow less guilty than if they were committing the act as individuals. Television extends the crowd. Live television allows the crowd to see itself, to be impressed or repulsed by its spontaneous, amoral power.

The style of the documentary - free from talking heads telling us what to think about everything we're seeing - provoked me to ask this question: are sports trivial? Many non-sports fans I know believe they are, and in a way, I agree with them. That is what's pure about sports: the outcome of the game does not directly link to the election of an official or the fate of an economy. Of course, sports can indirectly affect politics, economies, and pretty much everything else, but that's only because of the value we assign the games.

As we see the juxtaposition of deadly serious police press conferences with tickertape parades and a round of golf, we might ask: How can the New York Rangers fans talk about winning the Stanley Cup in terms of life and death? How can announcers wax poetic over the retirement of an over-privileged geezer in bad pants hitting a ball with the stick? How can people talk about these things like they are that important? Surely, this is the sign of a warped culture. At the same time, the serious countpoint - the OJ murders - isn't especially remarkable without its connection to sports. People are murdered everyday. These murders mattered because they involved a well regarded professional athlete. To ignore a huge news story in favor of watching an especially competitive game 5 of the NBA Finals seems callous or crazy, but the story was only huge because of other (ostensibly trivial) games played years ago, games in which OJ Simpson ran faster than the men who were chasing him. None of it really mattered in the macro-economic sense. Or rather, it mattered, but only in an indirect way (again, billions of dollars were made: this was one of the highest rated television spectacles of all time). Like all sports, it only matters because of the meaning we assigned to it.

Getting attention

I'm sitting here in a lecture. I should be listening, but instead, I'm writing. I'm doing this because I just thought of a flip side to the debate over attention span, distraction, and the use of networked media by young people. Even if we ban the laptops in lecture, their/our minds might have been altered in some way that makes lectures like this pointless.

Sure, maybe people who use networked media a lot are accustomed to instant gratification (the emphasis being on "gratification": experiences that offer pleasure). And yes, media experiences are briefer than ever before.

But maybe this just means they're engaged in the expression and consumption of important ideas in a more efficient manner. Rather than thinking of networked media users' listening, reading, and thinking skills as being hobbled by networked media, they may just have become more efficient at finding and using relevant information. Thus, when they are forced to sit through a linear lecture with a lot of information that is not relevant and cannot be searched or scanned, they tune out, not out of boredom or lack of discipline necessarily, but because they prefer a more efficient flow of information.

So we sit here, slackjawed, unable to concentrate on a lecture. Whose fault is this: the speaker or the listeners? My hunch is that its a little bit of both. Of course, those who use networked media a lot would tend to think the problem is with the old fogeys who still lecture in the same way, insist that we consume information in the same way we did hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Those who do not use networked media (the tendency to use such media more likely being an effect of age cohort and/or income than an effect of holding any ideological disposition; the ideological disposition is a justification for an existing behavior, not the other way around) would tend to think that young people cannot think with the same depth and rigor and are thus intellectually stunted by their near-constant use of networked media.

I think what we need to isolate are the types of media experience or content. If consumers of information choose indulgent experiences over virtue experiences, then they are at fault. But if there isn't a significant different in virtue/vice value that one seeks out when using networked media, then perhaps producers of information should be more efficient in the manner in which they convey information.

I keep returning to the questions: What does it mean to be efficient communicators? What is the goal of communicating information? There is a category of media use referred to by Uses and Gratifications researchers as "information seeking." Its time to start scrutinizing that category and splitting it up into smaller ones. So much of what we do now is information seeking, but clearly, some of it is in our collective long-term interest and some of it is not. Some of what might look like dawdling is really the kind of creative play that leads to new ideas. And some of it really is dawdling.

Two approaches might help us tell the difference between the two: experiments that restrict people's access to parts of the vast quantity of information and detailed tracking of people's work using networked media, tracing the paths of new ideas to certain types of free-association information seeking.

The Medium is the Message: Blog

Reading this recent article in the New Yorker on blog magnate Nick Denton prompted me to revisit McLuhan's adage that the medium is the message. I do not take this phrase to mean that content has no significant effect beyond the medium by which it is accessed, but rather that the medium can influence what content people end up choosing and thus alter the media experience. I also take "medium" not to mean all internet applications but to mean various websites or applications that allow users access to information in unique ways.

Denton's blog empire, which includes Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin, feature a subtle but important tweak to the standard blog format (eloquently encapsulated by Ben McGrath as "links with commentary, presented in reverse chronological order"): it presents statistics on how many people have read and commented on each article. Denton also pays his writers based on the amount of readers their articles garner. There is a kind of herd mentality in readers: they read what is popular, and the more they do this, the more popular those particular articles become. It is worth asking whether the content preferred in this system is different from a system where writers and editors take it upon themselves to design the format and layout of an online publication (as is the case with traditional blogs and online news sites like NYTimes). In the New Yorker article, there seems to be agreement among journalists on both sides of the traditionalist/new wave divide that such a format leads to more "sensational" news preference.

This way of presenting news seems somehow more democratic than traditional editor-selected alternatives. It sounds as though it provides more choice, and that would be better, wouldn't it? In a way, Gawker's innovation is similar to what Google or Reddit or Digg do: they take tons of raw information and they privilege the most popular links. That judgment as to what is worthwhile is made very quickly by users. They scan headlines and if the headline is interesting enough, they click on it. The assumption that this is somehow good rests on some other fundamental assumptions worth questioning:

• We are being held back by gatekeepers (editors) from what we really want. We are used to having the type of content or experiences we have access to being controlled by gatekeepers who may not have our best interests at heart. As long as we can choose for our "selves", we'll be fine. This is, in turn, based on another assumption
  
• As individuals, we are single, desiring, decision-making selves with stable, unique sets of desires.
  

Returning to the "medium is the message" mantra, we could consider the difference between the concerns over television and the concerns over the internet. The case against television was always a case against content. Watching television was bad because most of what was on television was so bad. By contrast, the case against the internet is a case against its users. There are wonderful, amazing, informative, pro-social, productive things one can do on the internet: create and run a business or a charity, disseminate useful, accurate information, take a course online. If people fail to do these things, its not because there is any lack of positive options from which to choose, so it must be their fault.

Denton gives people what they want, and its not the caliber of people that he's polling that leads to the move away from hard news toward gossip. Its the fact that he's accessing our inner hedonists, our immediate selves.

Discipline & Privacy

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to showcase some of my ideas on networked media, selection habits, and immediate gratification (which is shaping up to be my dissertation topic) in front of some esteemed colleagues from the psych department here at UMich. The great part about giving talks like this is that it can get you to look at a problem you've been staring at for way too long in a new way.

Something Ed O'Brien said prompted me to return to the issue of privacy. Research suggests that we keep our immediate desires (or inner hedonist, if you will) in check in various ways: by making a habit of things that we don't like doing but know will help us in the long term, by taking temptations out of our immediate grasp, by having reminders of what will happen to us if we fail to curb our immediate desires, or by exercising good ol' fashioned self control. There's also another thing that prevents our inner hedonists from taking over: public censure, or the judgment of others. We don't fill our faces with chocolate cake, fritter away our time on leisure pursuits instead of working, cheat on our husbands/wives, or buy boatloads of porn for various reasons, but one of them is likely that we will be looked down upon by others. We will be publicly embarrassed. But what if you could do all of those things in private, taking the punishment or barrier of public censure and embarrassment out of the equation?

I posit that new media allows us to do just that. We can do so many things that we would have been judged for without being judged because we can do them in private. In many cases, this is good. We can pursue our true passions without repressing who we really are for fear of some sort of cultural judgment. But in other cases, the selves that are being repressed by public scrutiny are just our inner hedonists. The inner hedonist is just one aspect of a self, an aspect that has been kept in check by public scrutiny for probably all of human history in one way or another. Give that aspect of the self space to do whatever it wants and you're going to get behavior that does not reflect what you consider to be "your self." You will get behavior that reflects one aspect of your self.

Here's the counter-intuitive part of this. Most people think our privacy is being eroded by networked media, that more and more of our lives are on display. There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, though that information is out there and it is attainable, we must look at who is attaining it, how its being used, the extent to which we know about those things, and the extent to which that feeds back to alter our behavior. I would submit that most of the information about our online habits either sits unused, is used in some sense that ultimately doesn't embarrass us or punish us directly or indirectly (used to show us various kinds of ads), and thus does not alter our patterns of behavior. Its all fine and well to quote Orwell and come up with possible future scenarios in which our data is used by others to alter our desirous behavior, but I haven't encountered any evidence that indicates that has happened or is happening.

Here's the second problem. We never had the opportunity to do so many things that we can do now with networked media. Doing any number of things that feel good in the moment but are frowned upon by society (be it cheating on your wife/husband, learning how to build a bomb, trading bigoted jokes, etc.) were just too logistically difficult to pursue. It would be too much of a pain in the ass to find the right people or goods to carry those things off, and you had to sneak around to do them. These are just much, much easier to do now with networked media. We didn't do those things partly b/c we would not have had privacy when we did them and thus we would have been punished for doing them. Now, we can use the privacy that we should expect (privacy regarding our bank statements, voting behavior, private conversations with family members) to cloak the privacy that we never had (privacy regarding things that we know we shouldn't do but do anyway, not because they don't line up with the current public's social mores, but because they conflict with our own long-term goals). Online privacy is expected to cover a wider range of activities, some of them fine and some of them not so fine, than old school offline privacy. Is privacy eroded by these technologies? The technology allows it to be eroded, but I don't see that happening.

So if the eyes of the public can't keep your inner hedonist in check, then who can? Your inner disciplinarian, of course! And various kinds of technologies (like the program Freedom, or the Me timer or time tracking software for firefox) can do something that has never been done before with such efficiency and to such an extent: it can put your self at one point in time (the self that sits there not in direct proximity to temptation, well aware of what it should do) and allow it to exert power over your self at another time (the self that is surrounded by temptation and requires the discipline of some outside force to prevent it form acting). Think of it as a more nuanced, self-imposed chastity belt.

The most important difference is that we need to realize that the inner hedonist was always being kept in check, but that he was being kept in check by forces (i.e. the public, the government, mom, dad, etc.) that didn't always have our best interests at heart and had their own incentives for altering our behavior. We've found ways around them, but are we really any better off with our inner hedonists running the show? Now we can discipline our inner hedonist while preserving our autonomy and privacy. That's a big deal, and that's what I'll most likely be studying for the next couple of years.

Portable Technology: Size, Time, & Weight

My new computer - a netbook - has me thinking about how the physical characteristics of a device can influence how I feel about it and then what I do with it. I'm not talking about technological affordance - what the software/hardware allow me to do - but rather how the size and weight of the object influence my feelings about it.

My first working hypothesis: the smaller the device, the more "handy" it is, the more it will be suited for short bursts of use. Its hard to bust out anything bigger than my hand when I'm on the go, on a bus or walking around campus. Also, the use of these smaller devices for longer periods of time seems somehow fatiguing. Trying to block out all this other sensory information while concentrating on a smaller screen for a prolonged period of time is more difficult than concentrating on a larger laptop screen. For these reasons, smaller devices = shorter duration of use sessions.

Then I thought about whether weight has anything to do with use. I don't bring my laptop everywhere I bring my netbook b/c of the weight of my laptop. Its not so much that its literally too heavy for me to carry, but that it feels burdensome. I'm constantly reminded that its in my backpack. If I had a super light MacBook Air, I might feel better about bringing it more places b/c I wouldn't feel burdened by its presence.

So far, I'm finding that the netbook is making me more productive b/c I can "sneak up on myself" and start working on a project. This is inspired by a project I'm embarking on regarding study habits and affirmation (with Emily Falk and Elliot Berkman) related to my dissertation work on self control and virtue/vice media habits. Basically, if I think about going to a place (usually my office in my house), sitting down and doing work, I don't feel good about it, and I tend to avoid that place. But if I can take the "place" of work out of the equation, if I can get to work as impulsively as I can engage in time-wasting leisure activity, if work becomes as accessible as play, then I think I can get to work before I have a chance to dread it. At least that's the way it worked today.

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.

Is this a Big Deal? Hysteria, Social Media, and the News

I am watching, listening, and reading (and now writing) about a news story as it unfolds: a gunman has shot himself in the undergrad library of UTexas. The story is especially salient to me because I'm going there for a conference tomorrow, I spent two years there as a Master's student, and I know a fair amount of people who live there, some of which attend the university.

This event (which may be in the past or may still be occurring, depending on whether reports of a second gunman who has yet to be apprehended are true) came to my attention through reddit. I woke up, fixed breakfast, watched a little Sportscenter on ESPN, and then opened my computer to go online. Although I have my browser homepage set to the NYTimes, I rarely start a day by opening a browser but instead click on a bookmarked page from my already-open browser, usually checking my email or going to reddit first out of habit and out of a desire for self-relevant information (email) and appealing, brief distractions (reddit). So if, say, some event of great consequence were to happen, it is likely that I would find out about it this way. But if it were truly of GREAT consequence (e.g. 9/11), I would've found out about it either on NPR (which I flipped on when I was barely awake, as is my habit) or ESPN.

So there was the headline on reddit: Shooter at University of Texas library RIGHT NOW. Rather than click on the link or the comments, I went to NYTimes to corroborate it. Oddly, the story didn't appear to be there. I thought that the shooter maybe didn't kill anyone, or that it was a hoax. But then, buried in smaller headlines on the page, I saw mention of it. I read that story and it said that the gunman fired shots and killed himself, but no mention of anyone else being hurt. I then turned on CNN and, oddly, they weren't talking about it. Neither was Fox News. Other news stations were playing commercials.

I didn't have all the details of this story, but the fact that it wasn't plastered all over the front page of the Times and that CNN wasn't covering it at that moment led me to this conclusion: it is not a big deal. Because of the lack of coverage, it is extremely unlikely that anyone I know was hurt in anyway as a result of this event. It would be safe for me to assume that everything was fine with them, everything was fine with me going there tomorrow, and that everything would, in general, be fine.

This is not the picture that I got when I went to Facebook and twitter. Many people in my online social network have connections to UT, and so many of them posted links to news stories about the shooting, just within the last hour, with very little supplementary information other than brief declarations of fear or concern. With twitter, I had to search for Austin, UT, but the result is the same: brief expressions of fear, rumors of a second shooter still on the loose. From this information, it seemed like a big deal, a huge deal. Reading my Facebook feed, I was...well, not necessarily gripped with fear or concern, but I got the impression that I needed to keep monitoring the situation out of concern for people I knew and to see if I would still be traveling to Austin tomorrow. If I watched mainstream media, I wouldn't get that feeling. I would get the feeling that I could relax and go back to work.

There's this narrative that mainstream media is too big, too ad-supported, to get at the truth. The truth percolates up from the blogosphere, from citizen journalists. If this story isn't covered by CNN or NYTimes right away, its because they're slow moving dinosaurs who just got scooped, and they don't know what's really important but instead promote the values of their sponsors. But here, in terms of "level of appropriate concern," I think that the mainstream media has it right. If I step back and look at the situation, at least what I know of the situation (seems like an isolated, botched shooting, not a coordinated, successful attack by several people), the appropriate reaction is: don't panic, its okay, no one is in more danger than they were a day ago. I just don't get this from the little social network newsfeed that's evolved over the past few years. There have been legitimate criticisms of coverage of disasters like 9/11 and Katrina saying that certain frames used in the coverage gave viewers the impression that there was more panicking and more reason for panicking than there really were. I've had this feeling before about bias in the news, but I think it applies here, too: you thought this was a problem when mainstream interests were handling reporting the news? Just wait until 'the people' start doing the reporting.

I think that in some cases, crowdsourcing news helps information get out faster and that the crowd can, counter to our intuition, promote the accurate, relevant information over the inaccurate information in an efficient manner, more efficiently than MSM. But the emotion that seeps into our facebook feeds, the undiluted fear that cannot help but contaminate our accounts of our experiences and is being mistaken for "news", doesn't move us any closer to gaining an accurate impression of what the true risk is to our selves and people we know and love when a bad thing happens. Its self-relevant and is provided by many different people, and thus appeals to us as "truth," but its laden with emotions that aren't present in detached MSM accounts of events. One may say that those emotions are part of the truth of an event. That sounds good, but I think that emotional reporting of an event as it is happening is likely to be associated with overestimates of how threatening the event is to our selves and others (I'll avoid using the loaded term "hysteria").

One thing that really stuck with me about the coverage of 9/11 was the strangely detached monotone of many of the anchors as we all watched the World Trade Centers collapse. Certainly not the way twitter would've handled it. I feel like this change has happened in the past couple of years and that it is significant: many people no longer turn on the TV when disaster strikes. They go online. Online promises more viewpoints, more immediate updates, deeper and broader accounts of everything. Which is better? Which is truer? Which leads to worry and which leads to action?

The hidden choice of establishing your media environment or repertoire

When we think about any choice we make – whether to eat that apple, move to Omaha, or avoid writing your dissertation and check the headlines instead – we typically think about it in two ways: in-the-moment decisions or general tendencies. But there’s an in-between step that’s missing from this picture, a decision or a series of decisions that preceded the one we’re examining: the decision to shape our media information environment. If characteristics of our environment affect the comparisons we make and the decisions we make (e.g. how many options are there, how easily accessible are they, what are their characteristics), then we must ask how we ended up in the choice environments in which we find ourselves. Increasingly, I think we’re partially responsible for them, though we tend to forget this quickly.

When we decide to text someone or check our email or go on Facebook or do some work, that decision is shaped by earlier decisions: the decision to have the internet in our house, the decision to keep our cell phone by our side. These decisions feel obvious because they bundle so many different kinds of options together. You cannot give up the distraction of Facebook because it comes bundled with access to the internet which you need in case a work-related email demands that you respond promptly or you will lose professional standing. Technologies that allow a user to block certain websites or applications from their own future access seem initially absurd, but really, they represent an act of un-bundling. Sometimes you want access to social media; other times, it is not in your best interest. Such prioritizing and self-restriction will become necessarily in a distraction-saturated media environment.

Today’s media environments are often characterized by the extent to which they are saturated by distractions: the vibrating cell phone, the regularly updated blogs waiting to be scanned, the pinging email inbox. We might consider the extent to which they are saturated by temptations, and how we might make a distinction between these two terms. All temptations surely are distracting, but are all distractions tempting? The term “distraction” is used to refer to messages that expect our particular, unique attention at a specific time (e.g. email correspondence, text message) and it is used to refer to messages or characteristics of the environment that are generally directed to us (as members of a larger group or as individuals) but are always there, not needing our attention that that moment. Facebook, ESPN, and that chocolate chocolate-chip muffin just sit there, waiting for my self-control to ebb, at which point I will succumb to temptations and indulge in a distraction.

When I give in to the temptations – Facebook, ESPN, muffin – I feel responsible for the choice, as is indicated by my feeling of guilt upon indulgence. But when I check my work email, read and respond to a work email, I feel no sense of responsibility. This is simply a condition of our collective environment! So, when we say we live in an era of distraction, we fold these two kinds of distractions together: the temptations (i.e. vices) and the expectations of immediate attention related to ostensibly virtuous activities like work. We do this in part because of the way media is sold: in bundles of virtue and vice.

And yet I don’t think we should let ourselves off the hook that easily when it comes to work-related email or other virtuous online distractions. We have some agency in designing our media choice environment. We could’ve decided to put our cell phone on silent or not checked our email for 8 hours. One might complain that to do this would be to give up social and professional standing, and I think that if you just one day decided to do it, without giving the people you are in contact with any warning, then you would certainly give up social and professional standing. But if you simply gave the people around you the expectation that you are unreachable sometimes (either explicitly by saying that you will be “at work” during certain hours or implicitly by purposely delaying your responses to them), you could reduce the number of “necessary distractions” in your life. We have the tools and the ability to unbundle our lives but we have to acknowledge the self that can alter the media choice environment, the repertoire from which our future selves select an activity. That self has more and more say over what we end up doing with our time.

Tattoos as Human Meta Tag

This is a bit more random than my usual posts, but I was just watching TV and an ad came on for the unfortunately named Lugz shoes (the male version of Uggs?). It caught my attention because of the way it combined sex appeal and violence: man wakes up in bed next to a sexy dame, thinks about an MMA fight he had, cut back and forth between the sexy woman, the dude sitting in bed remembering whilst pondering what shoes to wear today, and a brutal fight. I didn't have the sound loud enough to hear but the message seemed to be that men earn their women through fighting other men...and these men wear lugz. It was hard to tell if the guy in the ad was just some guy or if he was a particular MMA fighter. Without any mention of his name, it would be hard to google him to find out. However, he happened to have a huge, ostensibly unique tattoo across his chest: BROWN PRIDE. How many guys have that tattoo? I googled the tattoo and, sure enough, I came up with the guy from the ad who is, indeed, an MMA fighter: Cain Velasque.

I'm sure the same thing happened with Tupac, or would have if Google were more prominent when he was alive. It reminded me how text-based search (and the internet) still is. I keep waiting for facial recognition to get better, faster, and more accessible. Someday, I'll just be able to point my IPhone at the TV or at someone walking down the street and get their name and whatever else I want to know about them. Until then, I suggest we all get unique phrases tattooed in prominent places.

Discussing Inception

After seeing Inception for the 3rd time, I've become almost as interested in the way people discuss this film as I am in the film itself.

I first became interested in the discussion around psychological puzzle or "mindfuck" movies when I wrote a chapter of my thesis on the IMDB discussion of Mulholland Drive. I found that the arguments fell into two distinct categories:

Those who thought the film's creator was trying to create a coherent fictional universe in which cause-and-effect applied vs. those who thought the movie was like an abstract painting. The first group thought that the plot was like a puzzle and that if you understood which parts were "real" for the characters and which parts were dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations, and you understood how the "real" lives of the characters influenced those dreams/fantasies, then you could "understand" the film. The second group thought either that the artist is having a laugh at the audience by making them think that the art is somehow "important" b/c its so inscrutable or that it has real beauty which cannot be analyzed the way a cause-and-effect narrative is typically analyzed.

In a way, the same thing is happening with Inception (based on my observations of a very limited sample of audience reactions: my friends and people on reddit). But I think b/c Inception has all the markings of a traditional Hollywood film as opposed to the art-house pedigree of Mulholland Drive and b/c the film's characters spend so much time explaining how everything fits together, most people debate what the final reality (for the characters) of the film was and/or whether the creator of the film was successful in his attempt to create a coherent fictional reality. Those who loved the film seem to believe that it all fits together and those who didn't like it either felt that it didn't all fit together or that its construction - its attempt to weld together an action film, a psychological puzzle, and an emotional story of loss and acceptance - is clumsy and draws attention to itself as artifice. Here's what I'm interested in: why do people fall into those groups?

Here's my pet theory. People think that some characteristic of the plot's coherence is to blame/praise for why they liked/disliked the film. They argue as if that were the case. But really, its their abilities to emotionally connect with the characters and some pre-existing disposition towards the type of movie they see Inception as (a summer blockbuster, a Christopher Nolan film, a smart film, a trying-to-be-too-clever film) that determines how hard they look for those flaws. This categorization and emotional identification with the situations and characters in the film, in some sense, precede viewers' desire or attempts to piece together what exactly happened in the fictional reality of the film, even though we're not aware that they do. With Inception as with many sci-fi and/or mindfuck movies, there certainly are inconsistencies or blind-spots to find. Those who were pre-disposed to liking the film could acknowledge these, but they would probably say that they don't matter, that its all part of the willing suspension of disbelief, that all stories must leave out some information and that the rules of the genre demand that we overlook some un-reality of the film's world. Those who were pre-disposed to disliking the film would call these "plot holes" and treat them as a kind of empirical evidence that the film is poorly constructed.

So when people have debates over whether the film made sense or what happened in the reality of the film, they're really just reflecting whether or not they identified with the film and whether they typically like the type of film that, before they entered the theater, they had categorized the film as.

I have this hunch b/c I try to imagine if these relatively minor things in the movie that people talk about were altered (the spinning top falling over/not falling over, a bit more explanation here or there, things going a bit differently with the kicks, etc.) and what the people having these arguments might think of that altered movie. I am highly skeptical that their opinions would change. They talk as if these minor changes would alter their opinions of the movie, that their arguments for why this movie was good/bad rests on these features of the film, but this seems ludicrous to me.

Perhaps its easier and safer to talk about one's like or dislike of a movie in this way. To understand how or why one categorizes a film as a certain type is a really hard thing to be aware of. Also, when you talk about what characters or situations you identify with, you can be revealing something very personal about who you are. Any statement against the film could be construed as a statement against someone who identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments in the movie, which would cause a whole lotta friction.

It should be obvious which group I fall into by now. But the more I think about the multi-layered pleasure I get out of this film, the more I think, "why can't I experience this more often with more movies, TV shows, songs, etc.?" We talk about these things as if its the artists' responsibilities to bring us a pleasurable experience, but I think we as audience members have some control over this, more than we think. If I'm arguing this for Inception, I'm arguing this for all art. What if I had gone to see Eclipse instead? My knee-jerk reaction would have been to hate it and to argue why this was a bad film. But I wouldn't have to have done that. I could've acknowledged the fact that I categorized the film as "awful teen chick romance" and understood that, on the face of it, I probably wouldn't have identified with the characters, situations, or sentiments expressed in the movie. But that doesn't mean I couldn't have found something positive in the experience and that I shouldn't have to wait for an artist to cater to my desires or find a fan to convince me of the work's merit. Everyone could love everything, and if loving something is more fun than hating something (I know that hating films, TV shows, people can feel good, but as someone who really loves Inception, I can tell you that loving feels better than hating), why shouldn't we try? I think my arguments for the greatness of some works are arguments for enjoyment in general, arguments against not enjoying yourself at a movie.