Mad Men: Another Suprise Pregnancy? Really?

Did I love the conclusion of the second season of Mad Men? Sure. Don's reappearance seemed rather sudden, so sudden that I thought it was a figment of Betty's imagination (something Weiner was prone to doing as a writer for The Sopranos). The Cuban Missle Crisis, Betty's infidelity, and Peggy's revelation to Pete were so big that they blotted out the slow burn of Don's trajectory. He just seems completely erratic to me, and not in a way that's compelling. Still, I liked the power play between Don and Duck Phillips. And the HBO touches are still there: the concern with organizational hierarchies, the slight ironic distance between the characters and the audience, the possibility that a flawed main character living a life of ill repute could reform thanks to psychology, religion, or larger cultural trends or institutions. For those, I'll gladly watch another 3 seasons.

But here are my main problems with the last episode and, by extension, the show as a whole: the centrality of romantic relationships and the inevitable emphasis on two revelations: pregnancy and infidelity. I was reminded of two things I watched last night: an interview with Charlie Kaufman on Charlie Rose in which he notes that the depiction of romantic relationships in most Hollywood films is inaccurate (5:22 into the clip). I'd agree, and I wouldn't even say that the main problem is that there are too many happy endings (or any kind of endings for that matter, b/c real life relationships never truly end until one person dies). The problem, as I see it, is the overrepresentation of surprise pregnancies and infidelity. The second thing that I was reminded of is essentially a rebuttal of the first (written by the same man, Charlie Kaufman): its this scene (1:30 into the clip) in Adaptation in which Brian Cox (as Robert McKee) berates Charlie for claiming that these types of things (the melodrama of everyday life) do not happen in real life. Everyday, someone gets murdered, someone falls in love, etc. McKee/Cox is right. All of that stuff does happen everyday. People have probably been fucking around behind the backs of their wives/husbands since the beginning of time, and they'll probably continue to do that forever. It is a universal theme. And yet, in practice, it happens to individuals only once or twice in a lifetime on average.

Its the overrepresentativeness of surprise pregnancy and infidelity that bug me, not their mere presence. Maybe its the fundamental discontinuity between character's lives and viewer's lives that does it: the character, presumably, only has one or two revelations like this in their fictitious lives, like us. However, we keep flitting around, watching the same excerpts of fictitious lives, cutting from one moment of relationship drama to another. If we compared our lives to the lives of individual characters, no problem. But, according to cultivation theory, the individual viewer compares his or her individual life to some aggregate life cobbled together from the bits and pieces, the brief windows into millions of people's lives (real and fiction) that we experience through stories. These aggregate lives are typically distorted, to heighten drama, to shorten plotlines, to sell products. They have no single author and they're not expected to be perfectly realistic. As long as they are realistic enough, we'll go along with them, and in doing so, we'll begin to modify our conceptions of human nature and social mores, whether we're conscious of that or not.

A student in the Media Effects class I'm GSI-ing for has proposed a study that hypothesizes a cultivation-like effect of overrepresentation of troubled relationships on heavy viewer's real life relationships, and I'm pretty damn sure she's on to something. Writers need drama, so they put infidelity in their storylines. In and of itself, no individual instance of this is unrealistic. But as they pile up, they give the impression that infidelity is extremely common (read: acceptable?). Though people would never admit to it, I wonder if, in the backs of their minds, they think that many other people are cheating and so they go ahead and do it, thinking "I know its 'bad,' but people do it pretty frequently." In fact, its especially likely to happen and especially hard to ferret out because our culture, every culture, likes to believe that it doesn't happen. I suppose we're that way with a lot of elements of sexual relationships: publicly denying certain aspects, speaking to one another in the code of fiction about how things "really are," but in the process, we overrepresent the dark side and make our lives darker through the cultivation of values that come with heavy viewing.

Its not even the prevlance of infidelity per se that I object to. Its the tired, cliched depiction of how it unfolds: the boredom with fidelity, the temptation, the lapse, the secrecy, the guilt, the revelation, the begrudging forgiveness. Yes, I'm sure it happens a lot like that in real life on its own, but whose to say that we don't go through this charade thinking it is in our nature when we're merely repeating the scripts that were embedded in stories for purposes of selling more soap (or more stories. There's no need to pin the blame solely on commercially-sponsored storytelling. 19th century novels and serialized stories were just as likley to include such heightened drama in order to keep the buying public coming back for more)?

Stories do not implant or invent desires. In real life, there is infidelity and there are secrecy and revelations. And yet, due cheifly to constraints of economy and technology, stories are required to reflect only certain aspects of our desires. Its not the values reflected in the stories that shape our beliefs on human nature and social mores. It is their collective and individual structures. Compare one society in which individuals read one grand narrative (e.g. the Bible, which is a collection of smaller stories, yes, but they have a unifying thread and they're typically treated as a single text) and see their lives as one grand narrative to a society in which individuals watch hundreds of different, unrelated narratives a year. We have little fragments of lives. It might have a baring on our desires or expectations for long-term relationships, as part of a marriage, a business, a country, an institution, etc.

Surprise pregnancies (especially the kind that happens when two people fuck each other once and only once) are another matter. It just seems biologically unrealistic. If you took the number of times one night stands resulted in pregnancy on TV and compared it with the number of times they resulted in pregnancy in real life (again, good luck trying to prove this, but its still my hunch), you'd see a discrepancy.

But the effects issue is beside the point. I'm just sick of it is all. Yes, infidelity, pregnancy, and will-they-or-won't-they romances happen in real life to most people and, as they are universal, are compelling for that reason. But they're overused. In this world overcrowded by stories, it is not enough to be realistic. You must be original, even if it means being unrealistic, in order to be compelling.

So, I wasn't wild about the fact that this season-ender included the old stand-bys of pregancy and infidelity. But at least it treated the former in a somewhat unique manner, lingering on the scene of the revelation in which both characters were neither horrified nor overjoyed, but conveyed something in between (perhaps horror masked by a facade of acceptance and decorum, something that pervades the show). The music, the fade to black: it all had a nice feeling to it, set it apart from the slaps-in-the-faces and the rivers of tears that characterize most pregancy revelations. Or, to be more accurate, it didn't quite set it apart by itself. It characterized the show as an HBO show. It was the kind of scene, the kind of conclusion, that you would expect of The Wire or The Sopranos, that disquiet of ambiguity, the frustration of the need for closure that we all feel when we engage with stories, that frustration mirroring that of the characters.

Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.

Flow Conference 2008: Thoughts on Media Metrics

After a day at the Flow conference, I’m reminded of how good this conversational round-table format can be. The Narrative Franchises panel was amazing: 40 or 50 people in the room, some of which were experts in the field who probably knew more and thought more deeply about the this phenomenon than anyone else on the planet, and instead of just throwing out self-indulgent tangents about their ultra-specific area of interest (as often happens at academic gatherings), they were contributing information or viewpoints that were totally relevant to the discussion, fleshing out the picture we had a franchises with examples, considering exceptions to rules and considering whether they constituted the re-write of those rules. I got the feeling we were building a larger understanding of the phenomenon than any of us came in with. It reminded me of the kind of collaboration that I thought could only happen online.

Media metrics (the most famous of which is Nielsen TV ratings) are to be thought of as currency, like money, or degrees on a thermometer. They provide a universal, transferable, singular standard by which we measure the value of something.

What creators really want to know is: what combination of textual characteristics and audience characteristics lead to more people buying an advertised product within that text and/or paying for the text itself? Whether or not certain people choose to watch a show or see a movie at a given time is an imperfect measure of that. The perfect measure would: not just measure whether or not someone was tuned in, but what was going on in their heads (look to transportation measures for this). It would also measure whether they viewed something at any given time (look to Tivo data for this). It would also measure the degree to which they talked about the content with their friends (look to optimedia’s measurements of buzz, or searches like Technorati that could tell you what people are blogging about, but also take valence into account). It would take into account previous viewing and purchasing experience. It would take into account characteristics of the text itself. Its not an infinite number of things you need to quantify and combine into some sort of quotient or scale, but its more multifarious than we thought it was before, or had the ability to measure before.

One of the dilemmas confronting researchers, ad people, and producers/networks will be whether or not they go with a census (in which case they're bound to lose a lot of the aforementioned nuance) or a sample (in which case you might not get the generalizability you desire). Maybe a flexible system like YouTube, where the stakes are lower, ad money-wise, will evolve new metrics quicker. They’ll weed out the ones that don’t tell you anything new about viewers and their desires and habits, but new tools for gauging that will evolve. Insight is just the beginning of that.

The Value of the Venue

Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.

I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.

This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.

We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?

Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.

That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.

Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.

Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.

Another Ad Rant (w/ Some Love for Nike)

Reading Josh Levin's terrifically funny and insightful ad crit on Slate prompted me to examine one of my abiding passions = Nike ads. Ever since I was a scrawny teen trying to cobble together an identity from the images and words around me, I had some sort of deep emotional connection to Nike ads. To this day, some Nike ads are capable of stirring up my emotions in less time than any video, TV show, or film. Sure, the power of these ads chiefly derives from other people's accomplishments: kick ass music and superhuman athletic performances. In this way, Nike ads are just really well executed mashups, ideally suited to the era of remixes and contextless clips, AND they've got the $ to do it legally by paying the exorbitant use rights for the clips. The critical acclaim these ads garnered only serve to legitimize my connection to material in the most debased of all cultural forms: commercials.

This strong emotional attachment is the effect that all advertising creators hope to forge. And yet, how many pairs of Nike shoes have I bought? Quite a few when I was in high school, but none since then. Price, comfort, and fashion trumped that emotional bond. Is an emotional connection with an ad the same thing as an emotional connection with the product? Is the associative link between an emotionally affecting 1 minute spot and a shoe strong enough to overwhelm my preference for a more comfortable, cheaper, more fashionable shoe?

The larger question is: What is the value of advertising today? Studies have shown that ads (be they 30 second spots or banner ads) work on a sub-liminal level, that most of the time we are not aware of how they prompt us to notice brands in stores or online. Its also thought that by getting people talking about that last Nike ad, Nike remains in the popular consciousness and is thus more likely to be purchased and preferred over other brands. Advertisers and product peddling companies stretch this logic of these links between appealing, memorable, or controversial advertising and product purchase way too far. No one has taken them to task thus far, and no one will have to. There is some link, though its hard to prove exactly how much advertising affects purchase decisions b/c the ads are part of an ocean of symbols and mixed messages about products.

Ads became popular because mass communication (magazines, radio programs, TV programs) were very expensive to distribute. They needed to be subsidized someway. Given the choice between paying high subscription prices for content and tolerating content that was not their choosing (i.e. commercials), viewers would probably have chosen the unwanted content of advertising. In effect, the question posed to the viewer/consumer was "would I pay 1/10th of my monthly salary for content I chose or not pay anything and tolerate some content not of my choosing?" But that equation has changed. It is considerably less expensive to create and distribute content. As more and more of the country and the world gets wired to broadband Internet, these costs will continue to fall. Soon, the consumer may ask him/herself "would I pay 1/1000th of my monthly salary for content I chose or pay nothing and tolerate ads?"

The prevalence of advertising is an artifact of the era of expensive distribution. There are already ad-less websites with business models that understand this: wikipedia and craigslist for starters. Craigslist works by soliciting micropayments from users and wikipedia asks for donations of time, expertise, and money. It would be an interesting economic experiment to see if consumers would be willing to pay small amounts of money to keep a site ad free. Such efforts failed to catch on in the past, but I'd argue that was b/c the amounts weren't small enough ($5-$10 per year seems appropriate to me) and that people don't recognize the true "cost" of advertising.

Most people say that they're not bothered by small banner ads, but I would counter by saying that they didn't choose that content nor is it consistent with the content they chose in terms of its emotional tone, the values it promotes, and its aesthetics. Therefore, it is a kind of cognitive tyranny imposed on the consumers who, though she or he is not aware, have their emotional experiences dampened by the interference of ads. I must stress the point about self-awareness not mattering. Just because you report not minding ads doesn't mean they don't affect your viewing/listening/reading experience in a detrimental way. This would be easy enough to test: show a group of people a show w/ ads and another group the same show w/o ads. If the group who sees the show w/o ads rates the experience higher in terms of enjoyment and information retention than the group who views the show w/ ads, then ads are costly to the consumer even if they are not aware of such a cost or claim to not mind ads.

Ads have costs for the producer (market research, ad creation, ad distribution) and for the consumer (worsened media experience, lost time). Ads have benefits for the producer (more products sold) and the consumer (directed to goods that they benefit from, an occasional laugh). Their costs and benefits change as the cost of producing/distributing content falls and consumers' access to information on various products increases via search technology.

This isn't to say that ads can't be brilliant, like those Nike ads or whatever ads you happen to find funny, moving, or thought provoking. But the creative folk who put together the ads are hampered by having to shoe-horn in a product, and if brilliance happens its more of a happy accident than anything else.

BTW, Levin's cataloging of random images from that one Nike spot is terrific but not exhaustive. Around :49, there's Pete Sampras vomiting and a drawing of two lute-playing jesters. wtf.

Washington Week in Review 2: How Bills Become Laws

We don't have to shrug our shoulders and cynically declare that the inner workings of Washington are too byzantine to understand, though when you get into the nitty-gritty of telecom policy, it can be tempting to reach such a conclusion. That shit seems to be written by lawyers, for lawyers.

How do we combat this cynicism? To quote one of my favorite professors, “start with the obvious.” This is an advantage of being an outsider: you may not have the expertise to really know the specifics and complexities of how things work, but you can see things in a light that insiders have long since lost the ability to see. This approach might oversimplify things, but it gets all the assumptions on the table, gets to the root of what people believe in and where the disagreements are.

I’m making claims about things that are inherently, intentionally obscure. It’s in people’s best interest to not talk about how things really work in Washington. You might never see a documentary about it, but maybe reporters or people who are involved in it write fictionalized versions (or tell-alls) afterward. I have but one keyhole to look through, one story to present.

The government is just another large group of people, albeit with some rules that don’t apply to other groups like families or businesses. People in groups behave in fairly predictable ways.

There’s a lot of speculation about people’s behaviors and motivations on the parts of both activists and legislators. There certainly isn’t the assumption that some people are inherently evil or wrong, which seems to be outsiders’ perspective on politicians, lawyers, and big businessmen. Here, there’s a tacit assumption that politicians, like everyone else, care about their careers above all else. But this isn’t the same as just caring about money. Careers have to do with respect, status, and future earnings. The justification: As long as you have a family to support and you can imagine a rainy day in the future (which isn't that hard to imagine these days), the maintenance of a career is not greed. Its survival.

We need to remember that in most cases, politicians are only going to be in office for a few years, so they ally themselves with certain people (often in an industry). They make sure not to piss off industry people for two reasons

#1 Those industry people can help politicians get re-elected by donating large sums of $ to their campaign. The connection between campaign operating budget and success is well established, but I think it is flawed for the simple reason that it assumes that money = visibility = votes. Yes, there is some connection there, but its grossly overstated by the self-justifying media, in the same way that the effects of advertising are grossly overstated (and what is a politician but another product to be marketed?). It assumes the use and effects of old-school, one-way, extremely costly media and does not take into account word-of-mouth, viral, low-cost media.

Don't get me wrong: one-way media still has more of an impact than the internet, but I wouldn't be surprised if its impact is lessened and its value diminished in future elections. If that gets to be the case, then a certain amount of money will be required to gain some initial name recognition, but from there, more money will not necessarily equal more popularity. Look at the world of music. Yes, most of the people at the top of the charts were products of big label ad campaigns from the beginning. But others are not. Others are just skilled at marketing themselves. Or just plain skilled. This is a function of the falling cost of distribution of information about people's reputations, their talents, and what they believe in. There's no reason why it won't effect politics in the similar ways. Its just more information, just more personalities to package.

#2 Politicians need jobs after they leave office. The stakes are very high. If they decide to legislate in a way that is sympathetic to the industry, they get a very high paying cushy job. If not, they might get blacklisted and not be able to work in the industry at all.

Politicians care about getting re-elected, so they care about votes and what the people think. The will of the people tends to be a very vague concept based on calls, emails, letters to them, polls, etc. None of those have inherent value. They only have value in so far as they reflect that person’s future voting behavior and their ability to convince others to vote a certain way. If you frame yourself as an influential member of your community, then you’re liable to get farther than if you’re just one person. The politicians are concerned with the behavior of the voters, to some degree.

Activists want certain bills to get passed. They’re concerned with the behavior of the politicians. They frame issues by highlighting how many voters in their district want that bill to pass, so that if the politicians want to get re-elected, they should co-sponsor the bill. Also, activists frame the passage of a bill in terms of the bearing it will have on the internal allegiances and hierarchies within the organization of congress. The chances that any bill has to pass depends on who gets elected. That's what makes Washington so interesting and unlike companies or academia (at least in theory, if incumbents didnt' win 4 out of 5 elections): the frequent turnover keeps you from just figuring out how to please one person and instead everything is qualified by who might get elected or appointed in a year or two. There are contingencies for various scenarios, different angles to work. No one really knows what kind of legislation is going to go through 6 months from now b/c no one knows who is going to be the next president or congressperson.

For the activists, it becomes a question of how to frame the issue to highlight the advantages for other people (politicians, voters, people in the industry), to get them to realize that, hey, there’s something in it for them. I keep using the word "frame" b/c, from my POV, that's what its all about, more than truth, more than what's right, even more than money: rhetoric. It is therefore no surprise that there are plenty of lawyers in Washington, being as they are schooled in the art of rhetoric. But why aren’t there more behavioral psychologists? Maybe b/c people would balk at voting for someone with that kind of degree b/c it means they’re skilled at manipulating people, whereas lawyers sometimes do good things for people? Personally, I'd rather have a skilled psychologist fighting for me on the Hill than a lawyer.

The Politics of the Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is, in many ways, the ideal movie to blog about. Its complex, so complex that I'm sure I missed a few things. After seeing it a second time, I still wasn't sure whether The Joker, when he was informing Batman of the Harvey Dent/Rachael Dawes hostage situation, told Batman who was at which address. My friend and I had conflicting memories about this, and I heard a reporter from Slate say that Batman had intended to save Harvey when I'm 90% sure he said he was going to save Rachael (though who can tell w/ that ridiculously gruff voice!). You can pause and review a DVD, but not theater flick, so we're left with the collective memory of the blogosphere to get everything straight.

But more than facts, its the meaning of The Dark Knight that needs unpacking and debating, specifically the political meaning. I'm reminded of why outlandish fiction (particularly sci-fi and comic books movies which, in some ways, have taken over sci-fi's domain in the past 5 years) can work so much better as a way of talking through issues of the day than more literal historical fiction like that rash of Iraq war movies from the last year. Even a movie I adore, The Lives of Others, is ill-suited to really dig into the philosophical and moral issues around surveillance in an impartial way. We know who to side with - those fighting the Stasi. Similarly, we know to side against the US administration and with the hapless, brave soldiers in most movies about 'nam or Iraq.

It would be very easy to read The Dark Knight as an allegory for post 9/11 America, though we don't have to read it that way. In fact, I think its a great way to think about a hypothetical world with hypothetical heroes and villains that our world might come to resemble in the future, in which case we should think about how we would act in those situations.

Being a Role Model: Batman wanted to be a symbol of good actions, so that if he died, there would be others who would take his place to step up and do the right thing. Trouble is a lot of those people bastardize that good symbol and put their own spin on it. To them, its OK for Batman to carry a gun, and b/c they're not mega-millionaires with military R&D people working for them, they don't have much choice but to carry guns and wear hockey pads. Then there's the matter of inspiring madmen like the Joker/terrorists, but its tough to say that Batman's hubris and his clones created The Joker, just as it would be tough to say that any given culture or Cowboy president created terrorists, though its to their advantage to make you think that.

Surveillance: In real world "prisoner's dilemma" situations, the best course of action is to try as hard as you can to find a third option. Its Batman's use of illicit surveillance that resolves the prisoner's dilemma on the two ferries. Thanks to the cell phones as cameras, he's able to track down the Joker before he throws the switch and kills the people on the two ferries who, in a strictly Utilitarian sense, made the wrong decision not to kill each other. There are two significant things about that cell-phone scene in the Bat lab: Lucius Fox objects to the surveillance on moral grounds, and even though he capitulates, the fact that he objected makes it more thought provoking than if the scene were just passed off as cool gadgetry (Bond, anyone?). And before we jump to making the obligatory Orwellian metaphor, its worth noting that the civilians do not know they're being spied upon. When people know they're being spied on by their leaders, it can have a chilling effect on their behavior. But if they don't know, well then, is there any harm? This leads us to the next moral dilemma.

Lying to the Public: Bruce has trouble with this one at first, wanting to come out and tell the world he's been living a lie, coming clean and telling them that he's Batman. He wants crime to be fought by a public figure - Harvey Dent (Obama to Bruce's Bush? Just a thought). Alfred insists that there needs to be someone who does the dirty work, who makes decisions that he knows are unpopular and probably illegal. The solution? Do those deeds but invent a persona that is distanced from you that can take the public's disapproval. At first, its just Bruce's reputation that needs to be kept clean. In the end, of course, its Harvey's. But all of this assumes that the public simply can't handle the fact that a good person - Harvey Dent - did some really bad things. Knowing this would make them lose all faith in themselves. Is this true? What if we found evidence that MLK shot a bunch of people in an insane revenge seeking fit? Interesting question, but I really find it shocking that any movie would say that the answer is that the public can't handle the truth. What are we, children?

Killing people: I would argue that b/c Batman cannot kill anyone, even his arch nemesis, he has to commit other sins against the freedom of the people he protects. Sometimes, martyrs for non-violence don't get assassinated. Sometimes they live long enough to have to make some unpopular decisions, to see themselves become villains.

So what does the movie really say about any of these? I think it leaves a lot of questions open to debate. If the movie has a moral voice, it is not that of Bruce Wayne but that of Alfred. Bruce eventually comes around to Alfred's "things have to get worse before they get better" philosophy, which is oddly similar to Ra's Al Ghul's, the villain from Batman Begins. Something about the way in which Alfred and his message is presented makes it seem authoritative in a way that Bruce isn't. Bruce, like the audience, is trying to work through difficult real-world moral dilemmas, whereas Alfred seems to have it all figured out from his years of experience.

Still, I'm not convinced that if we are to call Alfred's version of reality a bit...right wing that we must dislike or dismiss the movie if we do not share those values. It reminds me of one of the most praised films of all time - The Searchers. From what I understand, critics love that movie b/c the morality it apparently presents in the end (lunatic racist hyper-macho psychopath hero decides to reform for no reason at the last minute) shows how ridiculous traditional Hollywood Western morality (and, by association, the morality of 1950's America) really is. You could read the end of The Dark Knight the same way. Its holding up a mirror to our political culture. We're scared of people we think just want to watch the world burn (maybe you think its terrorists, maybe you think its Cheney/Bush/corporations). We want a knight in shining armor, but sooner or later, that knight has to do some things that aren't going to look so good to others. In order to maintain power in this democratic culture that values popularity above all else, the knight has to hide his or her dirty work and maintain a nice face for children and the ignorant masses. At least that's my reading. What's yours?

Superhero Movies - More Diverse Than You Think

At the risk of using a classic snowclone, Superhero (or comic book) movies are the new Westerns. What I mean is that the genre is both popular and diverse enough to be regarded as a venue for working through our collective philosophical and psychological issues.

Other genres (horror, melodrama, comedy) also hold up a mirror to our collective psyches, but not in the way that the Big movies do. The lesser genres show us what we want - morally, aesthetically, emotionally - but only part of what some of us want. The dominant genre of the time, be it Westerns, gangster movies, or superhero flicks, reflects most of what most of us want. I would consider comparing gangster movies and TV shows to Westerns, if you were to say that Westerns were more of a way of defining masculinity. But I think Westerns, in their time, were bigger than gangster films/shows like The Sopranos, Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface are today.

No one would doubt that superhero tales are quite popular, more popular in the last 5 years than ever before and more popular than any other type of film with the possible exception of talking-animal-CGI films. If you were keen on making an older comparison, you could liken them to myths or fairy tails, other dominant genres of their times. But what about my claim that the genre is diverse?

Enter The Dark Knight, in some sense a synthesis of the superhero movie and the gangster flick. And yes, I know Batman isn't technically a superhero because he doesn't have superpowers. But genres and classification aren't defined that way. They're defined by the language we use to refer to the texts, by marketers, vendors, critics, and fans. And I'm willing to assume that most of them would classify this as a superhero blockbuster film. While watching it, I couldn't help but compare it to another superhero blockbuster - Iron Man. These films came out in the same year, they're of the same genre, I'm willing to wager they make roughly the same money (they're as popular as one another), and, significantly, they have almost the same amount of critical acclaim (79 for Iron Man on metacritic, to Dark Knight's 82).

If we were going to plop down $15 to see the Dark Knight on the Imax, maybe we'd like to have a good idea of what we're in for. Ads are of no service here, as they remain startlingly homogeneous. They have to. Ads have to appeal to the largest group possible, even if they have to misrepresent their product, which they frequently do. Ads for Iron Man, Hancock, and Dark Knight look pretty similar to one another - lots of action, some ironic wit, good-looking wounded-yet-rough men, sexy women. To take Dark Knight as an example, its interesting to note that almost all of the clips in the many previews come from the first 2/3 of the movie (which, in my opinion, are the least interesting part of the movie, certainly not as morally complex as the last third). So ads are not a good indicator of content.

What about critics? Shouldn't critics be the corrective to misleading advertising? Well, it depends on how much you bother to read. If you're just looking for general thumbs-up-thumbs-down assessment, as most people are, then the critics are of no use. Yes, all of the critics like both movies, but I have a tough time believing that the public will like both movies equally. One is pretty frothy and fun, the other is pitch black and quite complex. If you dig a little deeper and read the reviews, you can see that most critics recognize these differences. Its important to say that I do not think critics should've praised Iron Man, damned Dark Knight, or vice-versa. But to fail to acknowledge the stark differences between these movies, as thumbs-up-thumbs-down reviewing does, seems to indicate that there's something wrong with that kind of popular film criticism.

Let's go over some of the differences:

Humor: the humor in Iron Man relies primarily on understatement - the hero reacts to a huge explosion with raised eyebrows. There are plenty of catchphrases and instances of Tony Stark reacting in more laid-back fashion than the situation dictates. In the Dark Knight, the humor is more dry and British, quicker and, depending on your taste for these things, either clever or too clever. There's more gallows humor as one would expect with the Joker (here's hoping that Heath Ledger's death doesn't totally overwhelm critical appraisal of this film).

Romance subplot: While both protagonists are playboys, Tony Stark gets the girl in the end while Bruce Wayne is left to brood over a dead lover. Not exactly a minor difference in terms of tone.

Morality: Iron Man dabbles with moral complexity, casting a reformed arms dealer as hero (who ultimately ends up using weapons he designed to kill bad guys, much like the military does). The Dark Knight, on the other hand, had scene after scene in which characters were made to ask themselves (and the audience) tough moral questions: is it ever moral to kill large numbers of people? Is it okay to lie to the public in order to maintain order? Is it okay to survey the public without their knowing? Does using force against the enemy breed more insidious, amoral enemies? Can we delegate the killing that our situation demands to superheroes (read: soldiers) because we can't do what needs to be done? The film was practically an ethics class.

There's one scene that really brings home the dissimilarity. At the end of Iron Man, Tony Stark holds a press conference and announces that he is Iron Man. The scene is subversive, in that it goes against what we know about superheroes: they like to keep their true identity a secret. In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent calls a press conference and announces that he is Batman (when we know that he's not). Iron Man is content with a few double crosses here and there but doesn't want to confuse the audience with too many. The Dark Knight assumes the audience can maintain an understanding of character motivation even when there are many, many more double crosses.

If there's anything to learn from this, it is that looking at who wrote and directed the movie might be a better indicator than any as to what the film will be like, lending credence to the beleaguered auteur theory. I think that auteur theory is imperfect in that it fails to recognize the fact that creators could create something especially similar to other creators' works and dissimilar to their own previous work. This happens plenty, and the good critic can recognize it.

So, what are the recurring authorial themes? Right away, there's identity. In the first two scenes, the Nolans play with our expectations of who's who, just as they did with the twins in The Prestige, the hero/villain of Memento, and superhero-as-symbol-transcending -individual concept in Batman Begins. They take the idea of superhero's symbolic power being more important than their individual identity to a new level by making a mockery of the personal-history-as-destiny concept. The Joker tells a couple of different versions of how he got to be as fucked up as he is, and none of them is the truth. Each version suits his situation. This film deals far more with moral, political, social, and philosophical issues than psychological or personal ones. Another point of difference from some comic book heroes (Hulk) but not terribly different than others (Spiderman).

And for those of you who think web criticism doesn't matter, check out this article from Slate. Be advised that the article never claims that critics cause a movie to be popular. Only that they are able to anticipate the popularity of a movie better than non-experts and better than chance. Surely, some critics exert some effect on the popularity of a movie (probably the ones who have been especially good at predicting how much the public will like it). Anyway, if critics learn to write from the point of view of the experienced expert and not from the point of view of the cultural elitist, then they will be valued widely. As long as they assume that their job is to say what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is trash, instead of being able to distill the differences of films and be able to present those differences in a way that consumers can make decisions based on them, they'll be writing for just another niche.

Why Facebook? Why Not? The Social Networking Divide

One of my friends just joined Facebook and was greeted with tons of posts that basically said the same thing: "what took you so long?" The criticism isn't altogether serious, but its probably rooted in some truth: maybe those of us who are surrounded by heavy internet users find it more "normal" for someone to join a social networking site than to not join. Normal is just a numbers issue. If 80% of your peers are doing something and you're not, then you're abnormal in that respect. Obviously, being normal isn't necessarily good or bad, but its something that people tend to be aware of on some level.

In my quest to find out whether it was normal to join a social networking site if you were 31 and from my hometown in Massachusetts, I noticed this funny little trend. About 1/3 of my high school class listed themselves on Facebook as part of the class of 94. I thought I'd check to see how many people per class were on Facebook for other years, expecting the number to go up the closer you got to this year (on account of millenials' affinity for all things digital). Instead, I found that the number stayed right about at 1/3 for the past 15 years, then started to drop off in the early 90's to about 1/5. it stays there for about a decade, until the early 80's when it goes down to 1/10. Surprisingly, there are people who graduated from our little high school in the 60's on Facebook! (didn't even know our school was around back then).

I'd suspect that as you go back further in time, people would be less apt to join b/c Facebook is primarily a young person's network (unlike, say, reunion.com which probably advertises on email sites which older people are more apt to use). But then what accounts for the plateau at 1/3 around the mid-90's? Maybe every group separates into two halves: the technologically outgoing and the technologically shy (which don't necessarily correlate to real-world outgoing/shy groups). Both groups seem to regard the other with a kind of contempt.

So there's roughly 2/3 that either doesn't want to be on Facebook or, like me, forgot to mark themselves as alumni. Is it people who are so "well off," socially, romantically, and professionally, that they don't feel the need to join this particular network? Conversely, they might be such big losers that they wouldn't show up at the online equivalent of a class reunion. Maybe they're just not into social technology.

It made me wonder: what are the motivations for joining Facebook? There's people who use it to network, usually related to dating or their occupation. There's "staying in touch with friends," though I'm dubious of this reason; email works just fine for that. There's some sort of nebulous desire to be with familiar people, some desire for company. There's the reunion factor, which I think is rooted in people's desire to compare themselves to one another, using the internet as a means of social surveillance, as a way of determining how normal they are, be it whether they're married, how well they've aged, what job they have, where they went to school, etc. Its not something we like to admit, so I don't think you'd find it in self-reported motivation surveys. But still, it might be driving people to use the sites (you could find out by tracking how much people scan the news feeds and how much they actually message one another).

I've been doing some work here in Washington on closing the digital divide. In terms of the degree in which it socializes people and helps them learn about the world, the internet is more like public school and less like television. I know a fair amount of people who don't watch TV, and I don't think of them as fundamentally different than me or anyone else I know. But people who don't use the internet? Though there are some socio-economic, ethnic, and age gaps, plenty of poor people are on the internet, plenty of old people are on the internet, plenty of rural people, urban people, all genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities are on the internet. So internet culture isn't white, wealthy, or hetero (not to the degree that TV and film culture is), and in the future it might not even be especially young. After the years and years I've spent immersed in online culture, I'm starting to think of non-users the way that I think about people who didn't go to school. 80% of the US is part of something that they're not part of.

Social network adoption numbers aren't even close to 80%, and I'd guess they are and will continue to be much more popular among younger people who are shaping their public identities. But adoption rates have gone up steadily in the past few years. What if the 1/3 plateau is temporary? No doubt if you were to take MySpace into account, it would be closer to a half, maybe more (also keeping in mind that some high schools might be more apt to adopt Facebook than MySpace). At any point will there be genuine social pressure to join a network? If you say that you're not on any of these networks, will people assume that you're paranoid about technology or have something to hide?

I'd say yes, keeping in mind that there's a significant difference between people who have minimal online presences (people who've used Facebook once in the last year) and those who have no online presence. Light users may not be interested in finding others, but they've put themselves out there so that others, if properly motivated, could find them. There will always be people who hate this or that social networking site, but to hate them all will be like hating every person on the planet. Even most misanthropes have a friend or two.

Absolute Privacy

In the increasingly strident and polarized popular discourse surrounding privacy, people tend to break down into two categories.

Absolutists: the right to privacy, like freedom and justice, is an inalienable right and an abstract concept that does not have to be defined in any specific way relating to the real world. What I choose to watch on TV or YouTube is just as private as my social security number or 24-hour surveillance footage of me or what kind of cereal I choose to buy. Any monitoring of these activities or collection of data pertaining to them constitutes a violation of my Constitutional rights. These rights may as well have been handed down by God; that is to say the morality, logic, and appropriateness of their application to any given situation cannot be questioned. In fact, their strength derives from their universality, from the fact that they are appropriate to all possible situations (and, I would argue, from their vagueness).

Situationalists: The value of privacy in a given context depends on what can be gained by the individual or the society when it is sacrificed.

Imagine two worlds: one in which no one has any weapon larger than a slingshot and another in which everyone has an atomic bomb. In order to use any weapon in either world, people must go through various preparatory acts which include talking on the phone, emailing others, and doing other things in the privacy of their own homes. An absolutist would say that we should not monitor phonecalls, emails, or other private activities. We should work to make sure people don't use the bombs, and we should try to dismantle the bombs. But if we can't do those things, then it is worth running the risk of having a few angry people use the bombs and thereby destroy the world just so long as privacy is preserved. A situationalist would also advocate weapons control and anger management, but once those options have been exhausted, then they would say that the slingshot world requires one level of privacy (no wiretaps, etc) while the atomic bomb world requires another (24-hour surveillance).

We do not live in either of these worlds, but we've been moving steadily from the slingshot world to the atomic bomb world. Its increasingly easy for a small group of angry people to kill a lot of people. This has less to do with Bush or Bin Laden, Islam or Christianity, China or Palestine, and more to do with technology and our interconnectedness (side question: has our interconnection via the internet made us less vulnerable, as it was originally intended to do, or more vulnerable to attack?).

This steady move doesn't make the atomic bomb world an inevitability. We need arms control. We need to remember that two things made 9/11 as bad as it was: jet fuel and architecture. If jets were battery powered and people in buildings were more spread out, it would be harder to kill large numbers of people. We also need to figure out why people who launch attacks are so pissed off and try to do something to resolve those conflicts non-violently. Taking steps to reduce inequality, even if that means (god forbid) regulating a market or implementing a governmental program every now and then, would almost certainly help in this regard. Once we've done those things to the extent that we can, we need to decide whether we are absolutists or situationalists about the remaining risk and our privacy.

Resolutions: approximating the likelihood of and identifying the motivations for abuse of surveying power. Designing mechanisms to detect abuse and punishing abuse severely. Figuring out ways of assessing the risk of failing to survey the population properly and punishing the over-valuation or under-valuation of a threat severely. These are, of course, extremely difficult to even approximate. And yet, I would argue, this is what people in power are already doing, and this is what they must do. My hunch is that people who aren't in power (Joe Blow on the internet forum) tend to be absolutists because they do not have to face the negative consequences of being wrong. Those who are in power must face these consequences, and so they tend to be situationalists. If we were ever to have a more direct democracy and really give the power to the people, I'd wager that we'd make some pretty big mistakes b/c most people are not used to dealing with the consequences of very bad decisions made on a large scale. We'd learn, of course, but it would be pretty ugly.

The problems go beyond the rapid evolution of technology. I think that our culture (primarily on the left) is running into a conflict that we (primarily on the right) had when we tried to reconcile modernity with another document written in another era: the Bible. The way we think about the world - in particular language and the self - is not the way that we looked at it when the Constitution or the Bible were written. The shift happened gradually, as the population became more educated and interconnected, more industrialized. I'm not saying that the way we perceive our world and our selves is superior or inferior to the way we perceived them before; only that it is different, so different that words written in one paradigm, while still maintaining some semblance of meaning that applies to our lives today, need to be translated and updated.

This sounds really dangerous, I'll admit. This way lies moral relativism. But I'd argue that there is no other way to deal with our inner conflict between the modern reliance on technology, logic, and interdependence and our obsession with the roots of our democracy.

To sum up, we need to shift the debate away from whether there is potential for abuse of surveillance power (there is) to the likelihood of it being abused (how easy does the technology and socioeconomic structure make it to abuse that power) and the motivations for abuse. We also need to take a longer view with surveillance and let go of the idea that we ever lived in a world where determining our levels of privacy was completely up to us. We need to be vigilant for abuse of surveying power, aware of structures that concentrate this power, and we should question the legitimacy of outside threats. But we cannot keep getting freaked out about a few cameras, invoking Orwell every time a new technology hits the market. We need to realize that cultures and even species have been playing this game of hide and seek for awhile now. When a culture is surveyed, its mode of expression changes. A more intricate slang language develops. A subtle sense of irony develops, one that is indiscernible to outsiders. Pranksters demonstrate how sophisticated photoshop and video editing technology is so that courts will no longer be able to use video surveillance as proof that an event occurred. Like any power struggle, it does not end. Both sides evolve more sophisticated ways of outsmarting the other side. Better eyes lead to better camouflage, ad infinitum.

YouTube: Public or Private?

One of the most interesting things about the case of Viacom ordering YouTube to hand over its information on users is that the act of watching videos is being referred to as a private act. Is it as private as our social security and credit card numbers? Half as private? Twice as private? Where did the idea of what you watch being private come from? Here's one answer to that last question:

"'(the right to watch videos in private) is protected by the federal Video Privacy Protection Act, 'Mr. Opsahl added. Congress passed that law in 1988 to protect video rental records, after a newspaper disclosed the rental habits of Robert H. Bork, then a Supreme Court nominee."

One might have guessed that Bork's rental history was similar to that of Clarence Thomas. Actually, Bork, who's nomination was rejected, had fairly tame tastes while Thomas, who serves on the court today, claimed to have watched some less mainstream fare.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the act of watching a video on YouTube is similar enough to the act of watching a video cassette to qualify that act for protection under the video privacy protection act. I would argue that YouTube is not very similar to watching videos in the privacy of your own home. There are so many things about the site that make it feel public - the comments, the favorite lists open to the public, the usernames. It is precisely those attributes that set YouTube apart form existing online video sites and led to its massive success. YouTube became what it is today b/c it is not as private as watching TV. It is communal and public.

Watching a video on YouTube is NOT (and never was) a simple private act. Opsahl makes the classic mistake of thinking that just because YouTube has video, like VCR tapes, it is used in the same way and has the same relationship to publicness/privateness as its visual predecessors. He is not alone in the error of attribution. Viewers, lawyers, privacy advocates, and even users may mistake watching YouTube for a private act, but be assured, it is not.

New Media Mood Rings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Washington Week in Review

I feel obliged to write about my experience as an intern for the Media & Democracy Coalition here in Washington DC. This wasn't my first instinct, given that policy is not my area of expertise, and so I imagined that I'd have more to gain from and little to add to the online conversation about media policy. But since this is a fairly unique opportunity for a media scholar to see how the sausage gets made (is it me or is this metaphor becoming more and more popular?), I thought I'd write about it, albeit from the perspective of an under-informed outsider.

Today, I attended a meeting put on my the Media Access Project with two representatives of the presidential candidates, a representative from Skype, and one from AT&T. They talked about what the next administration would do regarding telecom policy in the next 4 years. For the most part, there were no surprises. I was reminded of everything that frustrates me about political discussion. You have two sides of an ideological divide stating and re-stating their beliefs on one central issue: what actions do legislators and businesses take in order to bring about the broadest benefits for all? One side privileges government regulation. The other privileges unfettered markets. Both of them speak in familiar generalities. When they do recognize that regulation might be appropriate for some circumstances and not for others, they don't talk about the attributes of that circumstance (say, the rate at which people adopt a technology, or the rate at which the cost of a product falls). Instead, they point to the fact that innovation occurred after a certain policy was enacted. One side interprets the innovation as an acceptable level while the other sees it as less than what could have been under a different policy. In the real world situations that they're comparing, they cannot make logical claims about causality between policy and innovation, but that doesn't stop them from doing so.

The whole discussion seems like posturing, just a way of publicly declaring, yet again, that the individuals in question (Obama, McCain, and their surrogates) stand where you would imagine them to stand on the issues. This kind of public posturing isn't without value. In a representative democracy, citizens need to be familiar with candidates so that they can make voting decisions based on something substantive. But is that all there is to such talks? Posturing in public, and decisions made to placate the wealthiest players behind closed doors? No.

I think that the answers to the questions being debated by these two sides can be found using behavioral media studies and behavioral economics. You could say, definitively, whether or not Skype was in direct competition with Verizon (and therefore deserving of the same kinds of regulation as Verizon) by finding out if a sample group of consumers acted as though the goods were substitutable given what they are bundled with (Skype with internet access, Verizon with cable TV and internet at a higher price). If they treat it as a substitutable good at a certain price, then it should be regulated like a service provider when sold below that price level.

You could see if regulation or deregulation of a communications market (be it at the application level or the equipment/backbone level) results in more innovation or less innovation by creating two parallel online environments where avatars are inclined to gain some resource (virtual $) and need to communicate with other avatars in order to compete or cooperate with them to achieve their goals. One of the environments has regulated communications competition and the other does not. Wait a few months, give the providers of the communications a chance to innovate or fail to innovate, and compare the results.

It wouldn't be prohibitively costly to run such studies. A few thousand dollars would get you properly motivated subjects and the environments needed to conduct the studies. You could say that parties with certain interests will fund certain studies that reinforce their stance on the matter (which has little to do with what is empirically true in terms of consumer behavior). This might have been true at one point. I wouldn't argue that, historically, behavioral economic studies had limited impact on policy and the everyday reality of businesses and consumers. But when the cost of conducting such experiments falls, along with the cost of disseminating transparent results and the cost of duplicating experiments, it becomes harder to propagate a lie about consumer behavior.

I'm not certain of this. Its just a hunch that came to me as I was listening to the candidates' proxies debate (it could've just as easily been telecom lobbyists on one side and NGOs and non-profits on the other). Information on behavior gets out there. People judge whether or not it is accurate, and if the results are really important to them (if they were trying to decide if a de-regulated biotech industry would come up w/ a cure for their cancer any faster than a regulated one), then they won't care about free market or socially conscious ideology. They'll care about accurate predictions and repeatable results. I'm placing my faith in the openness of information and lowering of barriers that the internet allows for. I'm assuming that this openness will somehow prevent politicians and businesspeople from propagating false information about behavior, that openness will make it so hard to maintain a lie that it will be easier to just work harder, honestly, to achieve your goals. People will do so not out of any moral inclination, but just b/c it'll be easier. Perhaps this faith is misplaced, but it seems like the best way to maintain my optimism in this town.

Unions & the Quality of Screenwriting

A thought came to me as I was watching the end of season 3 of The Wire while listening to the director and writer's commentary. The director talks about lens lengths, subtle camera movements, blocking. All of these have effects of on the viewer, ones that they likely can't quite put their fingers on. I certainly wasn't conscious of some of the track-ins that were happening during conversations between two characters, but I bet that, subconsciously, it helped to boost the sense of tension and importance in the scene for me, all the more so b/c The Wire doesn't use the crutch of emotion-directing musical cues. But I couldn't help but think that the camera movements, the lighting, the music (if there were any), the performances, and everything else serve to augment the core of the text - the script. Even though I know that TV and film are collaborative arts, I cannot help but think that the script is the most important element of either medium.

I had a sudden pang of guilt about an earlier entry I wrote about why screenwriters will never get much pay or much respect. I've enjoyed The Wire so much and believe that it will go on to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in DVD, online, and cable syndication revenue; how could I say that its writers weren't entitled to most of that revenue when they created the core of that text?

I still believe what I wrote in that entry: that unlike directors, producers, financiers, cinematographers, agents, and actors, writers do not need a lot of capital to ply their trade. The reason why all the rest of those individuals get paid so much is not b/c they're equally or more responsible for what shows up on screen. Its b/c they need capital and, in the case of agents and producers, connections to practice their trade, to get better at it, and to get anything done in that industry. Capital is rare. Pens and paper (or laptops) are not. Because of that simple economic truth, writers will never get all that much money. There are always more out there.

Of course, there aren't that many George Pelacanoses and David Simons out there. Good writing is rare. But how do you know that one writer is better than another, that one script is better than another?

I'd argue that unions, because they encourage producers and studios to pay flat rates for scripts that have little to do with the number of people that will actually see the movie or the TV show, encourage mediocre writing. Producers would pay writers more if there were some way of knowing what they were paying for.

And what about the David Simons and George Pelaconoses that are just starting out, that could use the support of the unions to make it through the lean years so that they can get the time to write something as good as The Wire? I think that with the storytelling incubator that the internet allows for, either through making low-budget web-series or no-budget blogs publication of scripts (hell, even fanfiction gives scouts an idea of who the good and the bad writers are), financiers will be able to spot the writers who can please large audiences without having to guess, offer them the contracts they deserve, and stop taking bad bets on bad writers. Good writing has always been rare, but b/c financiers had to guess as to what might be popular, they had no incentive to pay them all that much, and unions didn't help by encouraging those financiers to compensate good and bad writers equally based on the misguided premise that today's hack could be tomorrow's Herman J. Mankiewicz. Not anymore.

The Architecture of Serendipity

After watching this provocatively titled vlog about blogs and whether or not they work to limit our viewpoints and fragment our society, I got to thinking about how we might get more evidence to support either of the opposing theories - blogs give us a much wider range of views and help us better understand our fellow humans vs. blogs prompt us to make strong bonds with like-minded individuals and do not prompt us to consider alternate viewpoints.

If we're comparing blogs to older media with its top-down editing and broad audiences, then one key difference between the two is what Cass Sunstein artfully refers to as "the architecture of serendipity." When you see or hear some bit of news or an opinion that you would not have sought out, either b/c its content did not interest you or its point of view conflicted with your own, then you are consuming media serendipitously. This choice of word is a bit misleading, as the arrangement of content in a newspaper or a broadcast is not haphazard. It is designed to be something that the consumer will like enough to keep tuning in, but also to be something that the creator either believes the consumer should know or an unconscious reflection of the creator or, in most mass media cases, the creators.

I think the question at the heart of this is: is there such a thing as too much choice?

And I'm not talking about the excess of choice that paralyzes people and forces them to make lousy decisions. I'm talking about choice that seems to be a prerequisite of individuality, identity, and self realization. We can become individuals because we have options as to how to think and how to act. The more options we have, the more our selves we can become.

This may be our future, but it certainly was never our past. Society pushed back against people's self interests for, well, most of the history of society. If one wants to get Freudian about it, one could say that society acted as our super-ego via mass media and, before that, networks of gossiping locals who subtly or unsubtly expressed approbation through information you really didn't want to hear.

But enough high falutin speculation. How do we put this to the test?

Study 1: two groups provide a list of interests to the media creator. Group 1 is instructed to provide a very general list of topics while group 2 is asked to provide a very specific, exhaustive list that includes topics and opinions about those topics. They are then provided with news feeds that are tailored to their interests. Both groups feel as though they have exercised some choice in the process of consuming media (just as the TV viewer with the remote control and the blog reader both feel as though they choose what to view or read), but group 1 has less control over what they're consuming. In fact, you could have 5 or 10 groups with varying levels of specificity in their lists of interest.

So then, what would you measure after this part of the study, and how would you measure it? What do we fear about blogs or mass media? We use words like "cocooning" and "fragmentation," but what are we really talking about, and how could you measure it? You could measure:

Happiness: do people with more information choice report being happier? Do they act happier? Yes, this would be tough to measure, but psychologists have done it before, I'm sure.

Knowledge: What would probably happen here is that the group with the most choice would have knowledge that was deep but not broad, the group with some choice would have fairly broad and fairly deep knowledge, and the group with little choice would have knowledge that was neither deep nor broad. Is in-depth knowledge better than a broad range of knowledge? No way to tell, but I think we could agree that having both is best.

Open-mindedness: If you had a debate with someone who held a belief opposite of your own, would you just get really angry at them and start yelling, would you adopt some of their beliefs while sticking with some of your own, or would you just roll over and let them convince you of anything?

Social Skills: How well are you able to communicate with someone who is not like you, in terms of what they believe (it would be interesting to see if blogs were different than video blogs in this regard: maybe b/c you can't see who writes a blog, you're more apt to base your similarity judgment solely on stated opinions rather than visible characteristics like race, class, gender, and age).

It seems silly to defend a paternalistic media or society, to think that our happiness, our range and depth of knowledge, our open-mindedness, and our social skills would be better if we submitted to a society that severely restricted our choices. Just because society has always been that way doesn't mean that it always should be that way. But I really think that people instinctively believe that more choice is better and that this notion should be questioned. We have never experienced true self realization. Maybe its not what we think it would be.

I'd wager its a matter of degree. A total reduction of choice would make you feel lousy and make you into an automaton. But is the other extreme any better? It might just make you less open-minded, less able to get along with a lot of other people, and less happy. I bet we could begin to find the answers to these questions with controlled studies of information consumption and blogs.

Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.