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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paying for Liveness

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

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

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

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

Panic/Panek & Social Media Use

As I write, there is a tornado warning in my area. I have taken the appropriate precautions: I'm in my basement away from the West and South walls. And I brought my laptop. Aside from being the most valuable of all my possessions, my laptop (assuming its connected to the internet, which it is) is quite a valuable thing in this situation.

First, I should say that I have very little personal experience w/ tornadoes. My closest brush was when I visited a friend in Iowa and woke up to an ungodly, sustained siren. Half-conscious, I thought the world might be ending. My knowledge of tornadoes - the odds of them occurring, the damage wrought - was informed by weather channel specials and mediocre Bill Paxton movies. It turned out they were just testing the siren and there was no tornado at all.

So, I had no personal experience w/ this danger, and the second-hand knowledge I had was from unreliable sources. There's this air of paranoia that comes w/ over-preparedness that gets drummed into our heads by authority figures legitimately concerned for our safety. I would assume that this leads us to believe that the odds of encountering a life-threatening earthquake or tornado or hurricane are far higher than it actually is. Am I a fool to be in the basement?

Anyway, back to my laptop. I first knew about the warning via an almost comically old-fashioned medium - the siren. I then went online and tried to go to the weather channel website which wasn't loading, so i turned on the TV and indeed there was a tornado warning. I googled "tornado safety" to confirm my hunch that being in the basement was a good idea. I felt like an idiot for doing this, partly b/c it suggested that I was dependent on technology and possessed no horse sense of my own. Its only a matter of time before I start asking google whether or not I'm in love or where I should move.

Then I went to Twitter, which, aside from being a terrific way of knowing what David Allen Grier had for lunch, really is a great resource for immediate local news and/or reaction to an event. The only other time twitter was of use to me was when my phone wouldn't send/receive texts. I wanted to know whether it was just me or whether the network was down and Twitter told me what was up. Similarly, now, I want to know if I'm a fool for being in my basement. Twitter tells me that, at the very least, I am a fool in good company.

Its funny to imagine people like me, in a basement, who feel the need and have the ability to broadcast something to the outside world about their unusual condition. For every remarkable tweet or blog post or YouTube video of an earthquake, a tornado, or an insurgence, there must be a growing number of false alarms, dispatches from intact basements.

There is something absurd about someone in a time of genuine peril using social media, kind of a "I know I'm about to die a horrible death, but just let me tweet about it first" thing. This is not as absurd as it might initially seem. This is a natural instinct - to reach out, to try to connect w/ as many people as possible. 9/11 happened before the rise of web 2.0, mobile access to social networking sites, etc. People on the planes called the people they loved and left poignant messages. If they had the means, why wouldn't they also want to connect w/ other people they loved?

In reality, these dispatches provide valuable information to others and serve a primal instinct to connect when one's demise (however unlikely) might be near. I think of them as moments in which our survival instincts overcome social mores (the "boy, is this lame" view of the actions) and do something that we "should" be doing.

Now, with the oldest medium of all - my own two ears - I have detected that the storm has passed. That's how they did it in the old days, I suppose, before Twitter, before the emergency broadcast system, before the sirens. Weather.com still says there's a tornado warning. How long do I stay in the basement? Do I believe my ears or do I believe the website?

Last Thoughts on Lost

I never really liked Lost all that much. Every now and then, I would become immersed in it the way anyone can become immersed in a good story, but mostly I enjoyed it as a popular experimental narrative. It is the type of show that makes one reflect on one's own journey, so I struggled to recall when I started watching the show, while I was in Austin, off of bootlegged DVDs my roommate scored in Hong Kong. Since then, I've changed. Maybe I've become less tolerant of sentiment, or at least I look for it in different places (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the music I love give me all the deeply emotional experiences of memory that this show only began to give me). I've become more cerebral, less ashamed to engage in long debates about the possibility of time travel and social science experiments, and there again, I've found other places to scratch that itch (the internet, more school).

If we left behind the goal of loyalty or fidelity to an initial spirit of a show, the flexibility of written-as-they-go narratives could be a strength: they can grow with or grow apart from the audience and the creators. Most shows seem to become victims of their own success, losing the original thread and exploiting the trust of the audience. What Lost added to this was the transparency of the audience reaction to the show as it went along. Everyone could see the reactions to each show. The debate about how good or bad the show was in some way affected by viewers' immediate knowledge of others' opinions. I would think this would hinder a show from growing or changing.

What seems more significant is the ways in which my TV watching and media use habits have changed since I started watching the show, along with everyone else's. When I started watching, the show, like pretty much every other show, wasn't easy to watch online. For the last season, I watched most of the shows online, delaying watching as long as possible, reading synopses when I didn't feel like watching. For the series finale, I watched as a friend skyped with her sister hundreds of miles away, the laptop open, half of our attention focused on the show. In other words, I half-watched the show, something that wasn't possible in the way that its now possible. I did this not because I can't give TV shows my full attention anymore (I gave my full attention to Mad Men and continue to do so next season). I only half-liked Lost, only cared about the philosophy and the scientific experiments and mentally or physically tuned out when things got sappy. The show seems as ripe as any for a re-edit.

Then there are all the strange things happening outside of the show on ABC, the things that reminded me that I was watching television and not sitting in a darkened theater. The emotional ending gave way to a teaser for the local Detroit news: real people, really dead. Then, Jack Shepard walks out on the stage of Jimmy Kimmel's show for some incongruously semi-serious analysis of the show. Kimmel seemed unclear on whether to play things straight or crack wise, as I was while the last show was airing (should I make a snarky comment? Should I cry?).

I suppose what I liked most about the ending was that it ended with a death. That's the only real ending, right? The end of an individual consciousness. And the more I think about it, it really reminded me of Donny Darko: airline related disaster that does/does not kill the protagonist, protagonist engages in what may or may not be a prolonged hallucination about time travel after which he finally comes to terms with his own death and, in a way that is uncharacteristic of most Western narratives about death, dies peacefully, fondly recalling the lives he touched. Both stories tap into some cultural preoccupations: post-9/11 anxiety about flying (DD was made before 9/11 and was oddly prescient; its popularity might have something to do with the cultural resonance of plane crashes after its release), considering the implications of recent developments in philosophy and physics, trying to make sense of death and memory (these are more universal, long-standing preoccupations).

Living while distracted

As I walked hurriedly down South University on my way to catch a bus, fishing my headphones out of the jacket pocket as I went, I passed an older man who was standing still. He was holding his hands behind his back, idly gazing in the window of an ice cream shop while students whizzed by him on their way to class. His idleness struck me - what might he be thinking about all the people around him. In particular, what might he be thinking of me or any of the many students fiddling with Ipods and phones. The answer is: probably nothing (I tend to assume people are thinking about me when they're not, so egocentric am I), but it made for a productive jumping-off point for some musings on media distraction.

Media is an exceptional tool for distraction, perhaps the best that has ever existed. It is always available. It presents significant variety in terms of songs we can listen to, people we can text, shows we can watch, profiles we can check out. We can use it to distract ourselves (actively choosing the content or people we access) or we can be distracted by it (being confronted by people or content we didn't seek out). Usually, its some combination of the two: going to a site that links to some unexpectedly interesting other site, texting one person and getting a text from another, etc. All of it serves to take our minds off whatever we happened to be thinking about or feeling before. It distracts us.

Distraction has a bad reputation. First, it is other people's doing. We wouldn't choose to be distracted, but more and more, we are confronted with a distracting environment, cluttered with advertisements and solicitations. It prevents us from working efficiently, prevents us from thinking deeply or for sustained periods of time about problems which helps us to solve those problems (either personal or societal). It reduces us to attention-depleted pleasure junkies, incapable of reflection.

OK, fine. I'm not necessarily doubting this curmudgeonly way of thinking about our modern world, a view I probably falsely ascribed to the stationary man staring into the window of Stucchi's ice cream. But I think there is pleasure in distraction (or at least the potential reduction of pain). Its not something that advertisers forced upon us.

Jonah Lehrer cites the research of Walter Mischel on self-control, finding that the key to preventing yourself from indulging in something you desperately want but should not have is distraction (this is a gross oversimplification of it, but whatevs). Children were presented with a short-term reward - a marshmallow - and told that if they held out, they could receive a larger long-term reward (two marshmallows). Some kids were able to hold out, others were not. Those who were able to hold out, on average, went on to be more successful in life, having fewer behavioral problems, higher SAT scores, and better jobs.

What helped those children delay gratification wasn't that they desired the reward any less, but that they were skilled in the art of “strategic allocation of attention.” In Lerher's words, "instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the 'hot stimulus'—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from 'Sesame Street.' Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten." It isn't just that the children were distracted and that they resisted temptation b/c of this, but that they understood how their minds worked. They engaged in meta-cognition, and were able to make themselves think of something else to help them hold out for a long-term reward.

In other words, self-imposed distraction was good. It helped prevent the children from indulging in immediate gratification, helped them hold out for long-term rewards which, as it turns out, is a big part of succeeding at life. Could we then think of media as an aid in this process, a super-effective tool for self-distraction? When we are tempted to indulge in some immediate gratification that will hinder our abilities to succeed in the long run, if we pop on our ipod or distract ourselves with an episode of Glee or text a friend, all other things being equal, does that help prevent us from indulging?

There are other effects of this kind of use of media, ones that may hinder our abilities to achieve our long-term goals (lowered attention span, expecting positive and novel stimuli at the push of a button at all times, etc). But it is interesting to consider this particular incentive for using media, as a way of distracting ourselves from things that we should be distracting ourselves from, things that it would be in our best interest to forget about for a bit. If you distract yourself from working through an issue you have with, say, your father or your job, this isn't good. You should take time to reflect on those problems, think about how to resolve them in a way that benefits all parties. Otherwise, they will fester and grow bigger. But if you distract yourself from your immediate desires for the proverbial marshmallow, this may just help you hold out for long-term rewards. No amount of reflection on that desire will help you. its just rumination, perseveration. It helps no one.

How, then, to tell the difference between the two, between escapist distraction and beneficial distraction?

Substitutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Compared to Whom?

After finishing up another semester of GSI-ing a media effects class, I returned to considering what the effects of social media might be on its users. Of all the theories covered in the class, the one that seemed the most applicable to social media is social comparison theory. If comparing ourselves to others is something we do naturally in order to establish an identity and an idea of what constitutes normal behavior (especially when we're young adults and teens, which happens to be SNS's key demographic), what better tool could you create for comparing your self to others than Facebook? The questions, from a public/psychological/emotional health standpoint are: in what ways does FB present a distorted image of others, and could the ease with which one can compare one's self to others lead to increased time spent dwelling on how well or how poorly one measured up to one's peers?

I think one key variable to look at is how one uses the site. Do they spend more time looking at other people's pictures, comments, and friends, or do they participate by posting their own? What moods are they in when they go to FB? Some research indicates that people in high affect states tend to be social, talking with others, going to parties, while those who are in low affect states (though its not exactly equivalent to "bad mood," we might think of it as such for now) watch more TV. I could imagine going to FB in either state: when bored and in a bad mood, just to passively look at what others are doing, or when I'm excited to express something about my life.

Then there's whether or not you see FB as a place to "put your best face forward." Obviously, everyone does a bit of image tailoring when they post pictures of update their statuses, but some people seem more keen on impressing others (or inspiring jealousy?) with their images, while others display a more warts-and-all aesthetic. I would think there would be a tendency to assume that others use the site in roughly the same way you do: if you're a warts-and-all poster, you assume others are, too, and if their profiles are pretty much squeaky-clean, you assume their real lives are.

The reason why I think FB is so appealing for the social comparer in all of us is the ease with which we can see what other people very similar to us are doing with their lives, and we can see it evolve in real time in some sort of context. Of course, you can do this by observing your peers at work or at school. You can do it by tuning in to local gossip. You can do it by hearing/watching/reading stories (even if they're fiction, the fact that they ring true with a large audience tells you that they're depicting behavior, identities, and values that are, in some sense, normal; even more so w/ reality TV, probly). But the nice part of using FB to compare yourself to others is that you can't be seen while you're doing it. Also, these people are usually more similar to you than your work peers (though some of them might be your work peers). The lives of people you grew up with seems like a more natural thing to compare one's self to. These people, unlike people you meet later in life, had the same starting point as you.

In a way, this reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows: the Up Series. I always saw that show, which explicitly compared documentary footage of a few people who grew up together as they aged from 7 to 49 (so far), as one of the most useful tools for learning about what you can do with your life, why some people's lives turn out different than others, and why most people try to make themselves happy whether or not they live lives that are seen as "successful." It did what a lot of reality shows don't do: examine the criteria we use to compare ourselves to one another and show how it varies from person to person.

In some ways, Facebook is like a reality TV competition shows and the Up Series in that it presents an opportunity for social comparison. However, there is no narrative built into it to guide you to think about the nature of comparison, success, or happiness or guide you to decide who the winners and losers are and which one you happen to be at the moment (and how you might go about becoming more of a winner). My hunch is that it can accentuate any tendency you bring to it, the tendency to compare or the tendency to think about why and how we compare ourselves to one another.

Losing The Passive Companionship of TV

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

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

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

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

The Day the Texting Died

T-Mobile's services have been failing tonight. I discovered this when someone called me and told me that they were having trouble texting me. I then tried to send a text and it bounced back. Then, I tried to call T-Mobile customer support to find out if the problem was with my network. When I didn't get an answer (all agents busy, don't even bother hanging on, call back later), I knew it wasn't just me. I then googled T-Mobile news and got a story, posted within the previous 30 minutes, that T-Mobile was having massive outages. Kinda neat how I was able to find out how big the problem was so quickly.

Then, I went over to twitter (the news article in pcmag mentioned outraged phone users taking to twitter to register their disgust w/ tmobile). Indeed, it was clogged with complaints about T-Mobile. My first reaction was laughter. There was something that just struck me as funny about how upset people were about losing texting service. It was the kind of exaggerated outrage that pervades online fora (LOTS OF CAPS, EXPLETIVES, AND EXXXCLAMATION POINTS, DAMMITT!!!!!!). Maybe I felt entitled to laugh at this outrage (or self-parodying fake outrage (fauxtrage?)) b/c I was in the same boat as them. For me, it was a comically minor inconvenience, one that, frankly, prevented me from being distracted by getting into a text conversation (though here I am, avoiding my work by blogging, so maybe the outage didn't help my productivity after all).

Then I checked myself. It would be bad to laugh about a total failure of telephone lines. Phone lines are used by emergency units to save people's lives. While I know that it wasn't everyone who lost texting capabilities (I guess some lost voice, some lost both), it got me to thinking about what it would mean for lots of people to lose the ability to text for a night. Would there be anything seriously bad about that?

It got me to thinking about the overall character of texting. Is there really anything serious about it? There's the hyper-coordination, so an outage might mean a bunch of people would get slightly lost or be slightly late, and get ticked off at one another. I suppose it is possible that if someone didn't know about the outage and was waiting for a call or a text, they might think that the other person was ignoring them, causing stress in the relationship (maybe even the end of a (probably already tenuous) relationship?). Imagine that happening to thousands of people at once.

But really, I feel like the overall character (aside from coordination) of texting is joking, flirting, and gossiping. What would it mean to lose that for a night? One could study this in the way that Berelson (1962) studied what it meant to live without the newspaper for awhile back in the day. Maybe it'll be a nice moment of self-reflection for people. That's what its been for me.

What it Means to Like/Hate a TV Show

The question seems simple enough: what TV shows do you like?

This phrasing aims to compare two variables: individuals (you, and other people answering the question) and TV shows. It doesn't take into account certain episodes or aspects of TV shows and certain moods or states or stages in life of an individual, or the intensity of liking or the duration of liking. There's not really a problem with this, as temporary changes in mood can be averaged out, as can the better or worse episodes of a TV show. Indeed, whenever anyone is asked a question such as this, they engage in that kind of averaging.

But there's one particular facet of TV that doesn't get averaged out by a viewer, but rather is ignored, or treated as a separate question: what kind of TV shows do you like when you're around other people. My intuition is that people would answer the first question with shows they like to watch by themselves, more apt to ignore the shows they watch with others (after all, they probably like them less). But the shows people watch with others have just as much of an effect on them. They still spend their time watching them and still pay attention to the ads embedded in the programs. In short, we tend not to think of shows we watch with others but they still have an impact on us. Arguably, this question matters because given the rise of mobile viewing devices, online viewing, more time-shifting, and changing patterns of co-habitation, we're watching more and more TV content by ourselves. As Morley and others have noted, watching TV was a social act, as fraught with domestic power dynamics as cooking or sex. Not any more, perhaps.

Even the definition of "liking" a TV show changes for me depending on whether I'm watching with someone, or even discussing a TV show with someone. I could see myself “liking” Sex & the City, or So You Think You Can Dance, or country music, or Christian music, or 80’s music, if I was watching it/listening to it/discussing with someone who liked those things. More precisely, I could find something to like in each of those things. I don't think I would be lying by saying that I found something to like about those things. They would genuinely lead to some sort of positive affect. If I'm by myself, my standards are much higher (or different). These days, I can barely find any music or TV that I can tolerate for more than a minute that (in the case of music) doesn’t exactly fit my mood or (in the case of TV) isn’t Mad Men or sports without changing the channel or shuffling through my ITunes.

Also, its funny how liking of media, amongst any group, tends not be uniformly hierarchical. That is, many "favorited" shows are also near the top of other people's most hated shows lists. But perhaps this is true with all matters of taste. Let’s say we were ranking any other thing not related to taste (greatest football teams, tallest buildings). It seems odd that someone could hate Citizen Kane or Seinfeld when others have written endless paeans to their objective greatness. People who hated these shows or movies wouldn’t think that those films/shows were just "less great" than whatever they happened to love. They would think they were among the worst.

More Technology in Our Lives = What, exactly?

This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.

I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.

Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.

1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.

This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.

2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.

It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."

This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.

3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"

So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.

Why we hate TV now more than ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad Moods

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

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

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

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

Pros and Cons of Road Tripping w/ IPhones

Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.

First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"

I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.

Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.

But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.

In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.

If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.

The Pitfalls of Hypothesizing about Film Success

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

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

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

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

The Politics and Psychology of Academic Language

The most lively panel I attended at this year's ICA conference was the "Keywords: Effects" panel. 4 panelists were, in their own ways, demanding that we move beyond "effects," or, to put it another way, were proclaiming the death of effects research. One problem with effects researchers: they proclaim to study actual real-world violence when they actually study people's tendencies to administer sound blasts to other people in a lab setting. Another problem is that effects studies only measure an effect at a set point in time when it is likely that true media effects take place gradually and constantly over time (so it would be better to call them "processes" than "effects"). Afterward, Ron Tamborini had a great comment, basically saying that the argument over effects research was a semantic one, and that proclaiming that "effects research is dead" is just a good way of scaring those new to the field that what they're doing is worthless. His comment garnered applause from some members of the audience, and I have to say that I agreed with what he was saying.

I've read and seen more disputes similar to this one. Basically, they take this form: one group of researchers does some research with obvious, acknowledged limitations. Despite the limitations, the research moves us beyond what we used to know about that phenomenon. They select a word for their work. Time passes and methods improve. Another group of researchers comes along and pokes holes in the work of the first group of researchers. At this point, two things can happen. The first group of researchers can take heed of the criticism and modify their methods while retaining the original term they used for the phenomenon or their study of that phenomenon OR the second group of researchers can come up with a new name, decry the old names for the old methods/constructs to be obsolete, and move the field forward.

Note that in both cases, the actual research, the actual methods and the actual bits of information that we know about a phenomenon are exactly the same. The debate is not over what we know, but over how much and in what ways language shapes our ideas of what we know. For decades, we've known that language matters, that word choice constricts and opens up ways of thinking. But this valuable observation has been used in only one way: to point out the ways in which existing power structures foreclose the possibility of new meanings. Unfortunately, it has not been applied to an equally common and equally problematic use of language: the invention of new words and terms to further one's career or to aid the progress of one's in-group. The side effects of this political use of language are that we get bogged down in semantic debates and the growth of our collective, public knowledge of actual phenomena is retarded (while smaller groups in the private sector accumulate vast amounts of knowledge about people). Though the intentions may be good and the observation that "language determines and is determined by power structures" is a valuable one, those making this observation have released a cacophany of go-nowhere neologisms that sell a few books and then are lost to academic linguistic history.

What I see too often is the construction of straw men by up-and-coming researchers who, instead of helping to build knowledge for all, make careers for themselves (nevermind whether they intend to do this; their motives don't determine the outcome). In order to do this, they deny the possibility (indeed in many cases, as with "effects research," the plain reality) that researchers working within the existing paradigm can modify their methods to accomodate things we've learned about the phenomenon or new tools we have for studying the phenomenon. Effects researchers have acknowledged the weak construct validity of earlier studies and have adapted accordingly. They've tested various outcome variables at various points in time, developing data on trends rather than static outcomes. They've changed their ways. Do they need to change their name? To what end?

Along with "effects," the words "rational" and "cognitive" were hotly contested words at ICA this year. The debate over whether people are "rational decision makers" fits this pattern. Just because people decide, at a certain moment, to weigh the importance of one thing (be it their marital bliss, their libidos, their faith in God or community or justice) and just because they had certain restrictions on the information available to them doesn't mean that their brains worked in a fundamentally different way than they would if they had more information or valued different things at that given moment. To say that people are "rational" or "irrational" decision makers (or "cognitive" or "emotional" decision makers), to me, implies that people's brains work in fundamentally different ways, which is not the case. The circumstances under which decisions are made change, but the mind still works the same way: take in information, consider how it changes our belief that an action will help bring about a state we desire at that moment, and act accordingly. This applies to every human action I can think of, no matter how supposedly "irrational" it is. Yes, I'll acknowledge that different parts of the brain are activated when making certain kinds of decisions (what we might refer to as "emotional" decisions), but I think that the brain is still taking in information and acting based on a desire. The word "irrational" implies that its either random or totally at the whim of some other guiding force. In reality, the thinking is just based on different temporary priorities and limited amounts of information. There is also confusion over whether "rationality" assumes that we are deliberate in our actions. Again, I don't think that it means that. We can be rational even if we make rational decisions on an unconscious level.

Ann Gray's preference for the words "research material" in lieu of "data" provides another example. She claims that " 'data' has strong associations with 'evidence', 'information' and 'proof' as well as being associated with the products of more conventional sociological research methods." Its hard to deny this, and yet won't using the term "research material" confuse a lot of people? Those words already are loaded with their own meanings for every reader. How do you weigh the consequences of your word choice: causing confusion vs. freeing us from the restrictive nature of old paradigms?

In the giddiness of having seen the connections between language choice and power, we've gotten bogged down in debates over words, overestimating the power of an academic to alter language and misunderstanding the ways in which languages actually evolve over time (I have the feeling that language interventions are destined to fail, though I'd welcome any evidence that suggests otherwise). These debates serve to turn off anyone outside of a small number of in-group academics (as Tamborini noted, they even turn off and confuse undergrads and grad students) and, again, allow other people in other fields to advance knowledge of the world while we quibble over what words to use.

There have been some failures of those actively seeking to change language for political/ideological reasons, as well as some successes. Why do some words fail to catch on? I would argue that even if a word is loaded with meaning that hinders the population who must use it, the change in language will only take if the substitute is clear and concise enough.

Who uses the word matters (Wanda Sykes PSA for not using the word "gay"). If a more and more diverse set of people use a word or stop using a word, the word will have more/less of a stigma, or will gradually stop being perceived as a grammar rule that P.C. academics are trying to force us to adopt.

In the end, the internet has taught us that language spreads like a virus (though its hard to say how long some of the neologisms will be with us). Language is important and it affects how we behave and think, but changing it is quite difficult. It seems that you cannot change it simply by presenting evidence that a word is somehow discriminatory. If you really want people to use your new word, or to stop saying "faggot" or "nigga," I think you can't just lecture people or point out that powerful people dictate language. There has to be a more nuanced understanding of the spread of words throughout a population. I don't study linguistics, so for all I know, there is such an understanding. I'd be interested to learn what it is.

Are Online Communities Sustainable? (or online relationships, for that matter)

Reading an interesting post by Trent Reznor regarding his departure from social media (in particular Twitter, but also his extensive participation in online fora w/ fans). He charts his progress from idealist (hoping that he could make the relationship between artist and fan more intimate and unmediated, no PR people, etc) to cynic. His major problems with social media are trolls and anonymity. Essentially, its the classic problem of anonymity leading to more purposefully disruptive hate speech. Reznor offer a little dimestore psychology based on his discovery of who was behind the trolling. It is more or less consistent with the findings of Mattathias Schwartz in his NYTimes article on trolling: people who troll are looking for a way to get back at the world for hurting them, marginalizing them, or rendering them powerless, and anonymous internet fora provide them with the easiest way to do this.

Reznor's relationship with fans is unlike most social media users' experiences. There's a significant real-world power imbalance between star and fan, one that attracts trolling. Trolling doesn't happen everywhere or in random places; usually, its only highly-trafficked places or in communities that someone has something against. Reznor notes how moderators can use filters to reduce the effects of trolls (and places like Digg and Youtube do good jobs of getting rid of spam and trolls by using collective downvoting to obscure them and render them ineffective) but its still trouble to do this and if the benefits don't outweigh the trouble, then you stop doing it.

Social media as a whole seems sustainable to me. People really want the ability to connect with others who share some of the same values, preference, or beliefs, some who may not be available in the real-world social networks they inhabit. But individual online social networks or applications like Twitter and various message boards seem precarious. Some of their appeal might be in their novelty. Another problem might be the "tipping point" effect when several key members decide to leave or have some real-world commitment that draws them away. As with a real-life party, if a couple of key people leave, that tends to clear everyone else out, even if those people wouldn't have planned on leaving that soon in the first place. Its just group-think and there are no negative repercussions for bailing on an online social scene.

Its possible that online social scenes develop at a point when its members have some down-time, in transition periods in their real world lives. Its not that they're "losers" and can't make it in the real world social scenes (though that might still be the case for many). Its more that they have an appetite for sociability that is underserved at the time they join the social scene. So really, members have two things in common: whatever the raison d'etre of the scene is and the fact that they're all in some sort of transition period (which could include a period of identity questioning, hence popularity w/ teens). Anyway, these scenes don't last b/c the law of averages says that each person's real life will eventually interfere with their participation and the group will splinter.

But perhaps that depends on how much the group is really about the people in the group or whatever the group happens to be "about" (e.g. Nine Inch Nails, funny online videos, hunting, etc). I guess the latter are more informational exchanges or opportunities to share amusement over a subject while the former are something resembling (and perhaps standing in for) real world social scenes. Real world social scenes break up, too. People move away, get jobs, have kids, get divorced, etc. But I still suspect that b/c they are joined during times of real world social transition and there's no negative repercussions to leaving, online social scenes are more apt to disintegrate (or at least cycle through members) than real world social scenes. Really, they haven't been around long enough to say one way or the other.