How Election Coverage Can Decide Elections

I've been thinking about the press coverage of Reverend Wright's recent speeches, in particular the coverage of the major cable news networks and the NYTimes, though I'd suspect what holds true for these outlets holds true for most media. All agree that there are two priorities that, at times, conflict with one another: getting a certain candidate elected (Obama) and that candidate or other high-profile people linked (however vaguely) to the candidate being able to speak their minds. How much must one sacrifice in order to get elected? How many games does a candidate have to play?

To answer the question, you have to look at the poll numbers. Its a common complaint that the public is too focused on poll numbers, not focused enough on the issues, and this is b/c the news media frames elections as "horse races." I think that heavy use of the "horse race" frame (which emphasizes poll #s over all else) leads to more frequent/larger shifts in those numbers. That is, the more self-aware a public becomes of its opinion, the more likely it is to shift. The reasons for the shift are essentially arbitrary. It might be Reverend Wright, it might be "bitter-gate." There will always be something that either the competing candidate, the news media, or bloggers who support the competing candidate will exploit, either to get their candidate elected, to raise their own stature as "opinion leader," and/or to boost their ratings and make a profit. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's Spiral of Silence sums up this brilliantly. Its a must-read for anyone who is genuinely trying to understand why the primary is going the way it is going.

Fluctuations in polls are not due to the larger public's reaction to an event (like Wright's "controversial" remarks on race), nor are they the inevitable result of increasingly visible poll numbers per se (hating the pollsters and the NYTimes for posting poll #s gets us nowhere). The larger public reacts to professional interpretation of minor fluctuations in public opinion. First, the media (main stream or bloggers, doesn't matter) select an event which they can interpret as "controversial" enough to plausibly effect voter opinion. Then they limit their polling to one small but purportedly influential segment of the general populace (undecideds, superdelegates, other bloggers, white working class females between 25-40 since last Tuesday). How long this time period is and what the event happens to be are of no consequence. Both main stream media and bloggers will dig until they find an event that can be spun as controversial and a small enough sliver of the public to show that there is some movement in the polls that is plausibly correlated to that event. In doing this, they justify their own existence. They are the source of information about public opinion, and our conception of public opinion is, for better or worse, what we base our voting decisions on (if you don't believe this, read Noelle-Neumann's book).

This creates a cycle: larger and larger segments of the population accept the premise that public opinion is being altered by the event, making the connection between the event and public opinion ever more plausible.

It becomes acceptable (perhaps laudable) to change one's position on a candidate. This is the "change" election in the sense that voters are expected to change their opinion on candidates several times over the course of the year.

Why does all this work against Obama? Maybe b/c he was ahead, and favorite-toppled-by-underdog makes for a more compelling story than underdog-can't-come-back, which is why both candidates were trying so desperately to frame themselves as underdogs. It doesn't help that most people who publicly rush to Obama's defense are perceived by many as elite (the digerati, the NYTimes).

I think that the new technology and the ways it allows information to spread changes how public opinion fluctuates and so it changes how our leaders are elected. The first step is to understand how it works, to give up, for a moment, our dreams of perfect democracy or a perfect candidate as well as our nightmares of a totalitarian mainstream media cabal. Just take a step back and try to see how it all works. Then you can make your value judgment and think about how you might change the system. Personally, I think that the way out of this bind is...another technological innovation. I've seen innovations on assessing user demand work on small scales, on YouTube or within online communities that introduced wiki-ratings or similar widgets. Different tools, all under the heading of "new media" or "internet," can change the flow of public opinion and could get us to recognize how we're all shaped by public opinion and yet all have the power to resist it and decide things based on judgments of the candidates and the issues.

Movies and Data Visualization

Check out this amazing chart (or is it a graph? Maybe I'll just call it an interactive graphic) @ the New York Times. Box office earnings of every movie since 1986 represented graphically. At first glance, it just shows what one would suspect: summers and holidays are when the hit movies come out. But if you look closer, you can follow the paths of each film as its earnings rise and drop. You can quickly see which movies had "long tails." Its interesting to think about what those movies might have in common with one another.

Just looking at this, I start to see the flawed, delayed feedback system that movie creation and distribution is based on, all due to something that is becoming increasingly irrelevant: "shelf space" (or in this case, theater space). Studios release big movies at certain times b/c more people go to the movies then (summer/holidays), but people have started going to movies more at those times b/c that's when the big movies are out, not necessarily b/c that's the only time they want to go see movies. But b/c they're making huge, bloated-budget movies that have to compete with one another, studios have to make us starve for any half-way decent movies during the off-months (this April is pretty bad), not b/c its what we actually want, but b/c of finite shelf-space and bloated budgets, both of which could be (and perhaps are being) eliminated. Here's hoping everyone stays home this summer and watches hulu and YouTube.

Promotional space is still finite, though, so its still the movies with the biggest promo budgets that have the big numbers (they tend to peak faster and drop off faster than indy word-of-mouth hits). I really want to see how well films could do on their own merit. It would be easy enough to make a graph that corrected for promotional budgets, if only you could that information, if only studios weren't so protective of that data. I'm starting some work with a professor here at Michigan on the amount of information that flows into our households each day. Perhaps it would be easier to just track the amount of ads one can see instead of trying to get those stats from the people who put them out there. Advertising and promotion, by definition, is visible. Its trying to be seen, has nowhere to hide. You could just do a web-search for a movie, see how many hits you got, code explicit promos separately from mentions on blogs, etc. If one movie is more visible in its explicit and unofficial promotion than another movie that makes the same amount of money over the course of a similar time period, then you might conclude that the first movie actually succeeded based on its own merits and not on extensive promotion.

Long-term sales of DVDs might also get around the promotion issue, getting us closer to what people actually like.

Specific stats (things like "smallest drop from 5th to 6th week") are available in numerical form on sites like Box Office Mojo. In some cases, you're looking at the graphic representation to find specific things, in which case you'd be better off with a list of numbers. But still, images give you a bunch of patterns to notice that you can't notice right away by looking at numbers.

Mapping Narratives

I thought I'd post an abridged version of the paper I presented at this year's Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference here.

Here's what i had in mind: at any given moment in a film, information is being imparted to the viewer. At the same time, the viewer is aware (to varying degrees) of whether or not various characters are privy to this information. If you see a monster sneaking up behind the heroine, you are aware of the mortal threat to the heroine and you are aware of the fact that she is not aware of the monster. Thus, you feel that the heroine is quite vulnerable, more vulnerable than she would have been had she known that the monster was right behind her.

I'm positing that many (if not all) emotions a viewer experiences are dependent on fluctuations in these relative ranges of knowledge of events over the course of a narrative. For this project, I made some rather crude charts to illustrate my proposed mode of analysis. These charts show the course of movie narratives, and points during that narrative at which a key bit of information (an obvious threat to the protagonist or an obvious aid in helping he or she achieve his or her goal). 1=high level of knowledge ; 0=low level of knowledge. Click on slides for detail.



Flaws: as someone was kind enough to point out at my presentation, I have left out so many subtle aspects of narration (information revelation) in this crude model. The slightest bit of music or glance from a character could be considered a bit of information that would affect our emotions and our perception of goals and threats. To this I would say: I'm working on it. As I said, this model is very basic and crude. While watching movies for this paper, I became aware of the almost infinite amount of information that narratives dole out. And yet, it is not truly infinite. Also, it can be categorized, into threats and goals, by character awareness, perhaps by level of ambiguity. With a more sophisticated data visualization tool, I think I could create a chart that incorporates every bit of information in a narrative that could possibly affect viewer emotion. You could zoom in on various sections of the narratives, or highlight certain types of information.

Then there's the question of motivation. This model works well enough when the goals and threats are well defined, and when viewer identification with the protagonist is relatively straight forward. But what about when its not? When you look at them closely, many movies are bound to have moments of ambiguity concerning motivation, or the status of some bit of information vis a vis a given character. To that, I would say: this is one of the reasons why viewers do not have identical experiences of the same movie. Their experience and values will shape their identification and also their interpretation of some information as possibly helping or hindering a character. And yet, I do not think it is infinitely varied.

In any case, there is a way to set about proving the worth of this mode of analysis. I propose hooking a few viewers up to machines that measure their physiological states and comparing the read out yielded from those sessions with some narrative maps. We may not be able to say that a moment on our viewer physiological reaction chart represents "guilt" or "suspense," but I think we would be able to see fluctuations in the viewer's mental and physiological states. If those fluctuations corresponded to fluctuations on the more sophisticated narrative charts I hope to make in the future, in terms of the fluctuation's spacing, their duration, their degree (which I believe they would) then I think we could start to see how the machinery of narrative actually works on our emotions.

I think we already know the basics of this, intuitively. We're all familiar with the tropes of suspense, with dramatic irony, with farce. This is extending (and exacting) that intuition.

3 Ways to Define Good Cinema: Box Office, AFI, and IMDB

As the subjective coronation that is the Academy Award for Best Picture approaches, its interesting to compare a few gauges of public and critical enjoyment: AFI's top 100 (critics), Box Office revenue adjusted for inflation (public), and IMDB's top 250 (a certain segment of the public). If nothing else, a comparison might give us some clue as to what kind of sample of the public IMDB users are. Also, it might give us some indication of differences between public and critical perception of films.

What the lists have in common
Amazingly, Star Wars is on all three lists (#2 B.O., 15 AFI, and 11 IMDB). My personal opinion on this film is that the acting and dialog are awful and the special effects haven't aged well. Still, the themes resonate across time and cultures, the story is well constructed, and its a good mix of humor, romance, action, and philosophy. The Godfather just misses being in the top 20 on all lists (21 B.O., 2 AFI, 1 IMDB). Just as I'm surprised that so many critics like Star Wars, I'm shocked that The Godfather, with its European art cinema tendencies, is as popular as it is. I wonder if this film is a lot more popular with men than with women. Might that also be true of Star Wars? If that's so, then the male bias in movies isn't just coming from the critics or IMDB users. Its coming from paying customers. And yet, there are plenty of women who consume media. Historically, were they (and are they still) not making the decision as to what films to go see? Might this change in the future? Are TV and books more women's media than film and video games?

What they don't have in common
Gone with the Wind is #1 in Box Office, #6 with the critics, but its nowhere to be found on the IMDB site. IMDB definately has a bias towards newer films while AFI skews much older. The average age of a film in the IMDB top 20 is 30 years, while the average age of AFI's top 20 is 50(!). The average age of the top 20 box office hits is 38.

Casablanca is 3 on the AFI, 9 on IMDB, and nowhere to be seen on box office. Could it be that the general public didn't or wouldn't really like this movie as much as the critics or the semi-elite users of IMDB? Possibly, or maybe Casablanca was never promoted properly in the theater or re-released widely. Perhaps its stature grew over time. Perhaps all of these things account for the discrepancy.

E.T. is the 4th highest grossing film of all time, and rates a reasonable 24 on the AFI list, but is nowhere to be found on IMDB's 250. The critic/public hybrid represented by IMDB seems to be more testosterone heavy than either the general public or the critics. IMDB's top 20 is packed with men and violence. E.T. is a bit schmaltzy and certainly isn't very high in testosterone. This male (presumably young male) skew is a big reason why IMDB should not be confused with public or critical praise, but more likely represents, on average, the desires of young male Americans.

The Empire Strikes Back is 12 on all-time BO, 8 on IMDB, and its left off of the AFI list. I've always felt that Empire is vastly superior to Star Wars in every way: acting, cinematography, character development, pacing. The Joseph Campbell mythic themes that made the first one great are still there, too. The only reason I can think that AFI found Star Wars so superior to Empire is the former's cultural and economic significance, which is weird b/c they have no problem putting films that didn't exactly change cinema or the public consciousness (The Searchers, for example).

Critical godhead Citizen Kane (the Stairway to Heaven of movies, as it were) sits atop the AFI list. Only 3 films stayed in the same spot from the 1998 top 100 AFI list to the 2007 list, and this was one of them. IMDB rates it a respectable 24, and of course, its not on the box office list. I wonder if this were re-released and promoted heavily, would the public show up? Would they like it? Would they get what the big deal was about this movie? I kinda doubt it. Again, maybe critics are rating this movie highly for being innovative, in terms of style (depth of field), story, and themes. Sure, its still a good story, and the look of the film, the acting, and the dialog still hold up reasonably well, but I think the critics are mostly rating it so highly for its influence on subsequent movies (and the IMDB folks are probably acting like critics on this one). Ditto to Wizard of Oz (10 on AFI, 110 on IMDB, nothing on BO).

The Searchers, considered by many to be the apotheosis of a critics movie, is number 12 on the AFI list, 241 on IMDB, and nowhere on box office. What's most interesting is that on the 1998 edition of AFI's top 100 list, this film was 96(!!!). What the hell happened in those 10 years? Other big jumpers include Vertigo (52 spots) and City Lights (65 spots to 11).

Many films (Psycho, Schindler's List, Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, Lawrence of Arabia to name a few) are higher on AFI's list than IMDB by 20-50 spots, but that's not really that much of a discrepancy. They both think the film is great. But none of these films grosses all that much $. Unsurprisingly, epics do better on the box office list, probably b/c they play well on big screens and are heavily promoted to recoup high costs of production (both of which critics and IMDB users don't seem to care about). Sequels and films based on existing properties do better on the box office list, too, for obvious reasons.

So, what lesson can we draw from this brief comparison? I think we should pay more attention to IMDB and AFI for a few reasons: big screens won't really account for that much huge revenue in the future. Only 3 out of the top 20 films of all time were released during the home video (VHS/DVD) era. Back when theatrical release was the only revenue stream for film, they made them so that they would play well on the big screen. AFI and IMDB lists are made by people watching films that were made during that era and the era of home video, so I don't think they'd have this big screen historical bias that the box office list has. Presumably, home video, with its smaller screens, isn't going away. It would help to have a list of top 100 grossing films in all formats (theatrical, VHS, DVD, online, TV, etc). The same is true for repeated viewings: critics and IMDB users have time to pour over films again and again, so that might be a better indication of what people would really like, instead of what they've been told to like by marketers.

On a similar note, I think that in the future, promotion won't influence film revenue the way it has in the past. The long tail economy of the internet will allow good films to rise to the top over time. For these reasons, the top box office list might look more and more antiquated as the years go by. I think that the critics list are just as prone to cultural elitism bias as ever, but there also needs to be a way to track audience desire that can factor out the effects of marketing. Maybe that's what truly "good" criticism can do.

Box Office adjusted for inflation:

1	Gone with the Wind
2	Star Wars
3	The Sound of Music
4	E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
5	The Ten Commandments
6	Titanic
7	Jaws
8	Doctor Zhivago
9	The Exorcist
10	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
11	101 Dalmatians
12	The Empire Strikes Back
13	Ben-Hur
14	Return of the Jedi
15	The Sting
16	Raiders of the Lost Ark
17	Jurassic Park
18	The Graduate
19	Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
20	Fantasia

AFI:

1	Citizen Kane	1941
2	Casablanca	1942
3	The Godfather	1972
4	Gone with the Wind	1939
5	Lawrence of Arabia	1962
6	The Wizard of Oz	1939
7	The Graduate	1967
8	On the Waterfront	1954
9	Schindler's List	1993
10	Singin' in the Rain	1952
11	It's a Wonderful Life	1946
12	Sunset Boulevard	1950
13	The Bridge on the River Kwai	1957
14	Some Like It Hot	1959
15	Star Wars	1977
16	All About Eve	1950
17	The African Queen	1951
18	Psycho	1960
19	Chinatown	1974
20	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest	1975

IMDB

1.	9.1	The Godfather (1972)	263,716
2.	9.1	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	311,972
3.	9.0	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	151,051
4.	8.9	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)	85,867
5.	8.8	Pulp Fiction (1994)	267,773
6.	8.8	Schindler's List (1993)	179,754
7.	8.8	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	134,305
8.	8.8	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	189,692
9.	8.8	Casablanca (1942)	117,857
10.	8.8	Shichinin no samurai (1954)	65,877
11.	8.8	Star Wars (1977)	229,423
12.	8.8	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)	239,837
13.	8.7	12 Angry Men (1957)	63,122
14.	8.7	Rear Window (1954)	77,927
15.	8.7	Goodfellas (1990)	145,925
16.	8.7	Cidade de Deus (2002)	90,867
17.	8.7	Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)	162,612
18.	8.7	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)	273,337
19.	8.7	C'era una volta il West (1968)	43,490
20.	8.7	The Usual Suspects (1995)	184,812

Are 'No Country for Old Men' and 'There Will Be Blood' good movies?

Right after seeing No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood (both of which I liked, kind of), I got the feeling that critics would love them and the public would wonder what the critics were smoking. The lackadaisical pacing, the meandering plots, the lack of distinct musical cues, emotionally remote protagonists, and the oddball endings all seemed like something that people wouldn't like nearly as much as critics. I was right about the critics, but I'm not so sure about the second part.

One hint that this is the case can be found on metacritic which aggregates critical reception of a film and compares it to the opinions of users. The 18 point difference between critical praise and user praise of Blood and 17 points for No Country are larger than those of any other film out now, maybe bigger than any film on the site ever (need to do more research there). Granted, the sample of users is so small (329 & 401) and is interested enough in critical reaction to come to a site dedicated to aggregating it, and therefore it probably isn't very representative of general public opinion. IMDB users (larger samples at 30,000 and 60,000) rated both films very highly, so highly that they're both in the top 40 films of all time according to users.



For a moment, let's assume that the public didn't (or wouldn't) like either of these films as much as the critics. As I've always been interested in the relationship between critical praise and popular success, having rejected the reductionist platitude that critics like one type of film and the public another, I thought I'd take another look at why the discrepancy might exist.

One explanation would have it that there are certain static characteristics, both thematic and stylistic, that critics are drawn to more than the general public. Grandiose themes like the criticism of American capitalist arrogance, might be a thematic thread that is common to so many critically acclaimed films, while long-duration shots and any of the attributes listed above seem to fare better with critics than audiences.

In some cases, I think critical praise, of a film or the themes and stylistic traits of a film, precede the popular embrace of those things. Does the praise cause the public to like those things; that is, does the public or has the public ever looked to critics to tell them what's good and what isn't? Are the critics merely good at predicting what the public will eventually like? Are they just as likely to guess which movies will be popular if they were to pull a film's name out of a hat (the times they anticipate popularity are roughly equal to the odds that they would do so by chance)?

It would be fascinating to do an analysis of films that were loved by critics and hated by the public. Within that category there would be to sub-categories: the films (or attributes of films) that the public came to love (or at least accept) and films/attributes that the public still dislikes. The former would show us instances critical anticipating of popularity (critics doing their job well) while the other would show us what the critics like that the public will never like (critics acting like cultural elites, trying in vain to force the public to like what they like).

Limited access might skew there numbers. Even if all critically praised films become available to everyone via online or in-person rental, some will be better promoted than others, and so their popularity would reflect their promotion budget more than any intrinsic characteristic of the film. But still, the internet allows people to see some prima facie indication of what films critics liked that the public wouldn't like if they were made to watch the film instead of selecting it b/c they sought it out or b/c it was heavily marketed. Critics are made to watch every film, so for it to be a sensible comparison, the public would have to be made to watch every film too.

Mood Matters

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

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

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

Corporate Image and Social Networks

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the cycle goes like this:

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

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

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

Fewer, Better

On the year-in-review podcast of NPR's "The Business," I heard Cynthia Littleton of Variety make some pronouncements about the state of the TV industry that sounded similar to a few predictions I made in a paper last spring, specifically that the internet would take on the speculative role of nurturing lots of new talent while TV would move towards the "fewer/better" model of production that film studios adopted in the 60's when TV came on the scene. Her long term prediction that "all the execs are talking about" involves a ratcheting down of the budgets committed that is, ultimately, a correction of an extremely wasteful practice. "I think what you're really going to see is people going more to a cable model of developing fewer pilots, putting more time and energy and sweat into casting them, honing them, perfecting them...In the long term, if it helps cut a lot of the fat out of the TV business, it could be a good thing."

There are two forces at work: the inertia of the well established entertainment industry and the opportunities for dramatically increased efficiency in terms of getting the desired entertainment to the appropriate audiences (whether or not that entertainment is deemed "high quality") that new production and distribution technology permits. Institutional inertia can keep obsolete impractical, inefficient systems in place for awhile. But there's something about the openness and immateriality of online video creation and distribution that makes me believe that its revolutionary momentum won't be slowed by stick-in-the-mud institutions.

Let's compare two ways of making money by buying visibility for your product on an entertainment program.

The Upfronts: representatives of products show up to a yearly convention and look at pilots produced by established production companies, auteurs, and studios. They make a speculative decision based on the track records of those involved and the perceived appeal of the show as wehther or not to buy time on that show.

Online: Joe Nobody and 5 of his friends create a compelling, hip, humorous web series, build an audience on YouTube, then take their show off of YouTube and show it exclusively on their own site with advertising. In this model, the advertisers buy space/time on the creators' site based on established (not speculative) audience figures. What would be even better is if the next online auteurs wouldn't stretch serial narratives way beyond their breaking point (lonelygirl15 is still going. Enough already), but rather they created finite, stand alone serial narratives more like the extended-film or novel-esque stories of each season of The Wire. Then, based on their successful reputation of garnering an audience for that first low-budget series, they get more ad $ upfront for their next project. So yes, that reintroduces speculation to the equation, but its based on a reputation that can be established at a far lower overhead than on TV. Millions of $s go into developing pilots that don't hit. Could this really last?

Its just a tightening of the feedback loop that's always been integral to all forms of communication.

Giving Dominic The Business: coincidences or memes?

My family and I have a running debate over what constitutes a coincidence. Basically, they believe in them and I don't. I think that most (if not all) coincidences are neither random nor signs of some mystical grand design, but are indicative of logical patterns that scientists haven't yet perceived. Coincidences precede science. They're patterns without any meaning, but instead of just accepting that lack of meaning, that randomness, we can start to speculate as to what the meaning behind the pattern might be.

The most recent couple of "coincidences" involved concepts (e.g. a song and a phrase) that hadn't been heard of at all and then were suddenly heard twice or more in a matter of days. The first was "Dominic the Christmas Donkey," a song I hadn't heard of until last week when a couple of my friends played it on a YouTube video, insisting that the song had been around for awhile, acting shocked when I told them I'd never even heard of it. Then, days later, another one of my friends told me she had the same experience: never heard of Dominic, and then suddenly heard people talking about it as if it had been around forever. As Wikipedia indicates, the song has had a 47 year history in and out of the limelight, revived and forgotten in ways that will probably be more common thanks to YouTube and such.

The second coincidence involved these videos of football referees using the obscure (and hilarious) phrase "giving him the business." As the poster of the second video writes, the phrase is so uncommon that it seems likely that the second ref was making an homage of sorts to the first ref. I had sent a link to the video to my father and we'd talked about the origin of that phrase and whether or not it was ever popular, and one day later, his colleague used that phrase in a conversation.

Both Dominic & "giving him the business" didn't conform to our notions of how ideas, phrases, songs, whatever spread through a culture. We're used to ideas spreading gradually through opinion leaders who seem to be up on every new trend or through major media hubs. But it occurred to me that the internet has changed the ways we encounter ideas. First off, they tend to travel through major media hubs (e.g. NYTimes, CNN) at later points in their life cycle. Had I seen a news story on CNN about Dominic the Christmas Donkey and then several people I knew started humming it, I would've been less surprised. Secondly, the path that ideas take are an amalgam of like-minded members of the same offline social network and disparate people who happen upon the same news aggregation site or obscure blog. In the case of "the business," neither my father nor his colleague are likely to go to YouTube, but its conceivable that people they know (e.g. their technology addicted offspring) would go to such a site and draw their attention to a humorous phrase they noticed on it. Its that new combination of online and offline networks that memes move along that make the speed and direction in which they spread seem random.

We wouldn't say that its a coincidence that many blogs are writing about the same thing because we accept that kind of viral spread of information online. But when it starts popping up in the real world, we evaluate it in terms of the ways information spreads in the real world between real people, and that's where we're wrong. If five people you know suddenly start humming a song that you hadn't heard of before, you would assume they were all reading the same blog or watching the same TV show, when in actuality, they might've gotten the tune from 5 different (but tangentially linked) sources. Because people are nodes on a network, the ideas they have (about everything from Christmas songs to terrorism to sex) change at a faster rate and appear to be synced up with other people's ideas in a way that appears to violate the "physics of ideas" that we've become so used to.

Christmas Letters: The First Blogs?

The Christmas letter, like all snail mail, seems increasingly antiquated. I was never old enough during the snail mail era to have sent or received many Christmas letters, but my parents got plenty, and so I became familiar with their format. Basically, you write old friends and casual acquaintances and tell them all the good things that have happened to you over the past year. This typically consists of babies being born, people getting married, vacations, and crazy weather. If there is bad news - say, a parent or grandparent passing away - its spun in relatively positive way (e.g. "they're in a better place"). Evidently, bragging is also a staple of the Christmas letter.

It got me to thinking about what people write in their diary blogs: does it serve the same function - keeping geographically remote people up to date on their yearly doings? What does it mean to stay in touch with people? Is it enough to passively follow their news feed on Facebook, or should I comment on their blog? Maybe there's more of an obligation to be positive in the Christmas letter than a rando blog entry, just as there's this obligation to be happy in general around the holidays. Diary blogs seem to be much more about self-loathing than bragging. Maybe the average blogger and the average Christmas card writer are leading very different lives (angsty teen vs. content grandma), or maybe the ways in which the modes of expression are made available to their readerships affects the content.

When I read diary blogs or watch diary vlogs, I desire a middle ground between too much bad news (which makes me uncomfortable b/c its just too candid, or just makes me think the writer is a pity junkie) and not enough bad news (which makes me think that the person is being fake b/c no one has that perfect of a life). As I visit with friends and family for the holiday and update them on my life, I also feel obliged to mix good news with bad (but mostly good) so as to give them the feeling that they're getting the "real" story of how my life is going. As sprawling and unrehearsed as our life stories are, I think we still try to maintain some balance of positivity and negativity in our recounting.

The Self Conscious Documentary

This weekend, I saw the thought-provoking documentary My Kid Could Paint That. The movie could've been a straight-forward presentation of the story of Marla Olmstead, a 4 yr old whose paintings sell for several thousand dollars. That subject alone is enough to get people talking for hours. Instead, the documentary turned into a story about the manipulative nature of non-fiction narratives. In fact, there were odd parallels between this movie and The Insider: both films centered on one story but gradually became about the coverage of the story, in particular the coverage provided by 60 Minutes. In The Insider, the producers of 60 Minutes are portrayed as objective heroes fighting big network honchos who are in the pockets of corporations while MKCPT portrays them as spin-meisters who are so intent on making a compelling story that they don't mind ruining the career of a young artist.

Things get really interesting towards the end of MKCPT when the documentarian includes himself as one more person profiting from presenting a certain, inevitably distorted version of the events surrounding Marla's rapid rise to prominence. In this respect, it reminded me of Some Kind of Monster, the oddly entertaining documentary about Metallica and their relationship with psychologist Phil Towle. In both cases, the audience gets to sit back, analyze, pass judgment, and laugh at the subjects of the documentary. Then, suddenly, shockingly, the subjects talk back, accusing the filmmakers of profiting from their real emotional turmoil. The audience feels implicated, too. I'm sure there are other instances of this mini-genre in which documentary makers acknowledge their own construction of reality.

In MKCPT, New York times art critic Michael Kimmelman articulates a point that I'd been trying to make for awhile: there's something manipulative and deceptive about all documentaries (in fact, Kimmelman quotes someone who says that even all photos are an assault on the subjects). Kimmelman says that there might be a real physical event that takes place, but in the retelling of that event, things must be left out, thereby skewing the depiction in a certain way. I suppose you could give a viewer a lot of raw footage and allow them to construct their version of an event, but no matter what, the viewer's version of reality is limited by an intermediary (the documentarian).

We may laugh at aboriginal people who refuse to have their picture taken b/c they believe that the photographer is stealing their soul, but I'm beginning to think that they might have it right. Once you begin to tell another person's story, you're using their existence and their actions for your own ends. As soon as the camera starts rolling, the subject lends some authenticity to the person behind the camera who may then make claims about who the subject is. Its a power balance that is all around us, given the number of camera phones and online photos and videos.

At the center of this particular documentary is the controversy over whether or not Marla's parents helped her paint. The evidence that is used to refute that claim is a DVD recording of Marla creating a painting, unassisted. The message of the film is clear: film is the ultimate evidence. The documentary is also looked upon by many as evidence. It casts itself as getting "the real scoop" behind the smear campaign that 60 Minutes launched against Marla, but ultimately, the documentary maker realizes that the mere fact that he is editing, that he is telling a story about someone else and is profiting from how compelling the drama is (and all good drama needs conflict, heroes, and villains), puts him on the same level as 60 Minutes.

In a wonderfully revealing moment near the end of the film, the mother, after beginning to cry about the fact that she had let so many people use her daughter for their stories, says exactly what I was thinking: "documentary gold." Tears are documentary gold, and its good that the documentary maker is able to recognize that and leave it in the movie. Does that let him off the hook? I was surprised to read that A.O. Scott thinks it does not let him off the hook.

Really, there are degrees of manipulation. The fact that a good chunk of the film emphasized the the turmoil in Marla's family, instead of the heady questions raised about the nature of art, is what made it something worth apologizing for.

Entertain Yourselves

It seems that the WGA is going on strike. So what?

Frankly, I possess a weak understanding of the economics of the entertainment industry, but from what I've been able to observe, financiers, producers, writers, and actors all assume that profits will keep growing at a steady rate as the economy in general grows. If the growth stops, there's something wrong. But isn't it possible that DVD sales could keep going up for a period as people built their libraries, and then plateau? If this is the case, then slowing growth isn't anything to get alarmed about. Besides, can't they just make cheaper pictures?

As far as TV goes, maybe people don't watch as much TV as they used to. Maybe people go online for entertainment. Anything could be used as a substitute for TV, from social networking sites to YouTube to craigslist to message boards. Reality TV substitutes for scripted TV. So, what exactly do we need unionized writers for? What do we need producers for? What do we need studios for? If anyone can pick up a camera, create, promote, and distribute a movie or a show, what do we need Hollywood for?

Of course, most people will point out that most online content sucks compared to Hollywood fare, and also point out that as major Hollywood studios produce content for the web, there's not much of a distinction between old media and new media. What I don't get is the collective bargaining approach to making entertainment. If you make something that Joe Blow would have a tough time making - say, an automobile - then you can go on strike and the corporation that employs you as well as the public will have a tough time replacing you. But if you make entertainment, then couldn't people very easily find a substitute for you?

We could make like most other industries and offshore it, get content from overseas. Would it really be so bad if we watched foreign films that were subtitled for a year, or a decade? Would the world or this culture or our economy really be that worse off? Basically, our culture can be divided into two camps - those who will watch material from overseas, and those who watch a lot of reality programming and/or repeats of old shows. New scripted American content needn't figure into the equation.

The logic of a strike implies that there's something exclusive or superior to what Hollywood creates. Hollywood created "superior" fare in part b/c of the tightly-knit social network of nepotism and reputation that keeps things running relatively smoothly. They also had a monopoly on equipment, sets, and funding. But now, everybody else can get in on the entertainment game. More importantly, everyone can form and maintain the social networks needed to produce the collaborative arts of film and TV.

Hollywood's promotional muscle is overrated. Big advertising budgets are capable of spiking the sales of a product at first, but the quality of the product determines its long-term profitability in the long-tail economy. Initial promotion matters with products that require constant streams of funding to be produced, like material objects or a high-budget TV series with unionized workers. It doesn't matter with a low-budget 30 ep web series that catches on via word of mouth or based on the existing reputation of the artists involved.

Producers, studios, and big-name stars had writers over a barrel for decades. Ultimately, this might teach them that its the whole system that isn't needed by the public. What people really want is a good story, drama, characters they can relate to. Individuals (be they producers, writers, directors, actors) who can create those stories will always be of value. To me, this all seems like what the music industry went through post-Napster. Their economic models predict growth, but that's just b/c they assumed an exclusivity that no longer exists. Inflexible unions and collective bargaining are relics of a less open marketplace. This is a golden opportunity for non-unionized entertainers (i.e. everyone with a camera, a laptop, and an ego) to become semi-famous, make a few bucks, and have some fun.

Most Favorite Media Vs. Most Popular Media

One of the many things I love about YouTube is the function that allows the viewer to see what the most watched videos are AND what the top favorite videos are. That's an important distinction that box office figures and Nielsen ratings don't make.

Even the "favorite" function on YouTube leaves something to be desired, since marking a video as your favorite isn't that exact an indication of one's adoration of the video. I've marked some videos that I found mildly interesting as favorites, and others that I've gone back and watched over and over again. There's no ranking feature within favorites (yet).

If you could see how people rank their favorite videos, movies, books, TV shows, that would really tell you something that initial revenue or viewer #s wouldn't, namely: how much a person would be likely to pay to own the media text in question, or shell out for a sequel or another text made by the author of the text; how deeply influenced the individual is, in terms of their values, by the text.

From some evidence I've gathered (an audience study I ran as an MA at UTexas; conversations with undergrads I taught at Emerson), Fight Club is among young people's favorite movies. And yet this film didn't do so well at the box office. A more extreme example of this is Donnie Darko, which tanked upon its initial release, yet seems to have quite a following. The DVD sales numbers indicate that these films have more of a following than initial #s would indicate (the same is true of ratings challenged TV shows that do well on DVD), but even that is an imperfect gauge of how much people really love something. The thing is, we've got the technology to tell what media texts really resonate with people right now - you can see the Top Favorites in various social networks on Facebook.

So, let's say your a TV exec. One show does really well in the ratings, but its not on any of the top favorite lists in any social network on Facebook. Another show has mediocre ratings, but is featured in many of the Top Favorite lists. You've got the opportunity to create a spinoff of both shows. In a world where TV execs are beholden to Nielsen ratings, you definitely go with the first one. Its entirely possible, maybe even probable, that the spinoff of this highly rated show won't do well b/c the fan base of that show was probably watching it not b/c of any inherent quality, but b/c it happened to be popular. They'd be just as likely to migrate to any other new show (probably whichever show was on during a time slot that appealed to them, or whichever show was most heavily promoted) as they would be to watch the spinoff. The fans of the highly favorited show would be much more likely to watch its spinoff, and maybe more likely to preach the gospel of how good the shows are, acting like an unpaid viral marketing team.

Bottom line: the technology to gauge fan passion exists. Even beyond Top Favorite lists, you can see how many people wrote lengthy positive reviews of something, etc. Its time to start paying attention to this, not just b/c you want to know what movies, TV shows, etc people will like in the future, but b/c you care about what media influences people's lives. The idea for this blog hit me when I thought: "which movie resonated more with people, and arguably shaped the philosophy and actions of its viewers: Fight Club or Norbit?" If you go by box office revenue, Norbit was 3 times more influential than Fight Club.

And you Thought Your Roommates were Annoying

Finally, the era of (semi) high-profile web series is upon us, an era of more shows with smaller budgets and smaller audiences. The first entry: MySpace TV's Roommates.

One way to critique it would be as a reality-based show. We could evaluate how contrived or realistic the relationships and dialog are. After debating the level of reality of various reality-based shows, I've sworn off trying to determine how "real" any show is, and I think that ultimately what matters is not whether the show's producers claim it is real but whether or not the show "rings true." That is: can viewers identify with the situations and characters? Even if the characters are being as real as they possibly can be, it might not appear to be real from someone outside of their subculture. In this respect (and many others), Roommates plays like a cheap knock-off of Laguna Beach and The Hills. Producers understand that attractive females are probably the best way to get young viewers (young straight males like looking at them, young females can, perhaps, identify with them), so you can't really blame them for focusing on the same demographic as producers of LB and The Hills.

The characters in LB and The Hills tend to talk more about other characters who aren't there on camera with them at that moment, and this, to me, feels more realistic than the characters in Roommates who, like inhabitants of The Real World or Big Brother, force conflicts on people in their immediate vicinity. That's a key difference between reality and many reality-based shows: real social lives tend to sprawl, which makes them hard to film, and certainly hard to film and edit in a compelling way on short notice. The Real World made filming everyday melodrama more feasible by concentrating it in one physical space, but they sacrificed some crucial elements of the way people talk, fight, and hook up. There's also a woeful lack of passive aggressiveness in Roommates, another thing that I think makes LB/The Hills more realistic. Its part of that need to make as many dramatic things happen as quickly as possible.

We could judge it as a scripted drama, in which case it plays like a WB show with worse acting and worse writing. We could judge it as a sexy "romp," but if you're going for the male demo, why wouldn't they just watch free porn (which doesn't seem like its ever going to irritate its fanbase with interstitial ads, like MySpace is likely to do) instead?

One big problem seems to be the fact that they have to crank out one episode every day. Most vloggers don't even produce that much content. Really, I don't think its possible for any group of writers and editors to produce that much quality content. Most reality-based shows have the luxury of an extended period to edit the footage into something resembling a story. Also, if the action takes place over a long period or time, the producers might be able to get a sense of where things are going and intervene so as to create a compelling narrative. The "quantity, not quality" schedule of Roommates seem like it would lead to a shapeless, meandering story with endless make-ups, break-ups, and make-outs, not unlike the most enduring once-a-day narrative, the soap opera.

The only compelling aspect of the show so far is the acknowledgment of the cameraman as a male friend/possible pervert/possible audience proxy. It would be cool if he changed from fly-on-the-wall to active participant, shifting the show from 3rd person to 1st person. But i doubt that will happen. In the meantime, we have to put up with the lazy producer's way of conveying plot and background info: the direct address confessional.

Can't producers have more faith in audience's voyeurism and just shoot a year's worth of someone's, anyone's life, edit it down to 20-30 eps, put some decent music to it, and show it online? They should've copied the form of Laguna Beach and not the characters/setting/content.

WGA Strike and Online Video: Talking Through Some Scenarios

This blog entry at Newteevee.com got me thinking about the role of unions in the development of online video. Let's assume that the best writers are part of the WGA. If the WGA uses its clout in the TV industry by preventing its members from generating online content in order to get its members more benefits, then it seems likely that many creative people who want to break into the business will create better online content to fill that gap. Granted, the content they produce probably won't be up to TV/film standards, but it won't have to compete with TV/film that's very good b/c the writers will be on strike. In that sense, a strike is the best thing that could happen to budding online video makers.

As I scanned the past month's blog entries on newteevee, I began to realize just how big the rapidly expanding world of online video has become. I started to feel overwhelmed and a bit guilty about not knowing more about this world, but I tried to use my outsider status to put it all in perspective. Really, I have yet to see anything that isn't in sync with my general thoughts about the motion picture ecosystem: online content (be it blogs, video, whatever) is of some value, but it will always be more disposable than books, TV, and film. Maybe that's why there would be no point in offering a subscription to an online video series. But I still think those things are tied together - that online video will be disposable because it won't adopt a subscription model, because it chooses to embrace the advertising model.

Its not just the disruption-of-narrative issue. Its a sign of a lack of faith by the creator or owner of that story. Distributing your story through an ad-based model is essentially acknowledging that it is not worth people's time and attention. Watching motion pictures with advertising is paying for it, not with dollars but with cognitive energy and attention, both of which are in short supply these days. The viewer who thinks they "put up with" ads is actually depriving him or herself of complex (and therefore superior and lasting) narratives and diminishing his or her ability to complete complex tasks relative to those who pay for their content. Just because we haven't been able to measure this effect doesn't mean it is happening or won't happen in the future. Nor does it mean that it will, but I'm committed to following up on my hunch.

What HBO Taught Me That Ethnographies Couldn't

After reading a play based on Harry Wolcott's controversial ethnography of Sneaky Kid and after making my way through another qualitative study of a marginalized group, I became frustrated with the mission of qualitative research geared toward social reform. Of course, I agree with the motives and ethics behind the research, which aspire to make the world a more tolerant, egalitarian place, but the actual experience of reading this work gives me the impression that its authors are trying to wrap their politics in the guise of science. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that per se, but at the end of the day, I think the most important question is: is it effective? Does it actually change minds and behavior, or does it just make its authors feel good and boost their chances at tenure?

It should be obvious by now that I feel that the latter is more true than the former. So then I asked, what could change people's minds and behavior towards marginalized groups? What had changed my mind about such things? The most valuable attitude/politics-changing information comes from 1st hand experience. Spend a few years in a poor neighborhood or a poor country, or befriend members of a marginalized group, and you're bound to sympathize more than you did before (although Robert Putnam's work on diversity and distrust might disprove this) . In the absence of such experience, I think a well-told fictional story can do the trick. At least that's what's worked best for me.

After watching The Wire and The Sopranos, I feel differently about the cause and remedy of pretty much every social ill. At first, you wouldn't think that qualitative research and TV shows have all that much in common, but I think that they have or could potentially address a lot of the same issues. If you take a close look at any aspect of society, you start to see how messy things really are, how everyone is guilty to one degree or another - something that these shows are able to convey.

Both shows even have stand-ins for the ethnographer that act at proxies for both the audience and the author - Melfi in The Sopranos and the entire police force (particularly McNutty) in The Wire. Both Melfi and McNulty wonder whether what they're doing really makes a difference. They wonder whether they can possibly help reform society, and wonder what gives them the right to intervene the ways that they do, just as an ethnographer would. I wondered along with these characters whether or not I merely used my hope that Tony would reform as an excuse to vicariously experience his supreme selfishness, and also whether that vain sense of professional competitive satisfaction mattered more than actually helping people, which might be impossible given the extent of corruption in 21st century urban America.

Supposedly, it is up to the reader of the qualitative study to decide if qualitative researchers' work is generalizable beyond the population that was studied, but the very fact that they're bothering to publish this work implies that they do see it as indicative of larger patterns. Wolcott gets into a whole mess of trouble by becoming involved with his subject of study. Its hard to fault the subject because, really, who likes to be scrutinized to that degree and used as an example of a certain type of social problem? Even if you make the study anonymous so as to protect the reputation of the subject, I still feel uneasy about the relationship between ethnographer and subject. Either they make these people into bad guys, repaying their openness with harsh criticism of every aspect of their lives, or they lionize them, which isn't telling the whole story and ultimately helps no one.

That's what you need the protective layer of fiction for. Not only does it protect the identities of the not-so-innocent. It also doesn't necessarily claim to be realistic and generalizable the way that qualitative research does. If people happen to think The Wire and The Sopranos are realistic, great. And as much as the creators and fans of the shows crow about the "realism" of the show, what makes them both great, what sucks people in and keeps them watching, is the entertainment value of the show. They're exciting, hilarious, dramatic, ironic, and moving. Ehtnographic studies can be all of these things, but its much easier to make a story reliably entertaining if you're permitted to take massive liberties with reality, and that's something qualitative researches have no business doing.