Scrutiny

This is fun. Cornell’s publicity office has been asking me and my department colleageus to offer pithy quotes about media industry news events, in the hopes of circulating us as experts to journalists. Hence the last post, about Tribune Company filing for bankruptcy, and this one. What a wonderful university-sanctioned opportunity to spout off about things I find interesting. I’ll keep posting them here.

Whose bedtime is it? NBC has announced that it will hand Leno the 10pm time slot five nights a week. Not so long ago, that 10pm time slot was the one chance for the TV networks to offer dramas with adult themes and concerns, because the kids had been shuffled off to bed. ER, Law & Order, The West Wing, L.A. Law, Homicide, Hill Street Blues, even Miami Vice. Now, with the kids watching The Hills and Grey’s Anatomy online and on DVD, the 8pm shows more explicit and explosive than ever before, and the real drama being provided by HBO and AMC, the networks have nothing left to do but make the economic, rather than the creative decision: to offer up five more hours of cheap talk and celebrity chatter (and, honor their costly contract with Conan). Will the day come when the parents are nodding off to Leno’s monologue at 10, while their kids stay up late downloading True Blood? Or is this shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, the very idea of a TV schedule sinking fast?

Will the information industry be next at Congress’ doorstep, looking for its own bailout? With the Tribune Company’s declaration of bankruptcy today, the recession of 2008 has again proven adept at revealing those industries whose business models were already top-heavy and unworkable. But, while many will point to a decade–long decline revenues for paper-and-ink news and blame this all on the Internet, I wonder whether the business that failed them was that the entertainment industry, so eager to lash together every entertainment property it can swallow into an advertising megaplex. Isn’t it telling, that Tribune is struggling not just because readers are canceling their newspaper subscriptions for digital feeds — after all, Tribune has an enormous web presence — but because they were unable to sell off the Chicago Cubs in time to make this year’s debt payments?

LA Times report here; CEO Sam Zell’s letter to his employees here.

A regular concern in my class this past spring was whether the kind of worries about media concentration in broadcasting had any parallel in the online world. While its easy to point to Google / Microsoft / Yahoo as an apparent oligopoly, and Microsoft’s attempts over the last few months to benevolently devour Yahoo seemed confirmation, its not exactly clear that the way that media concentration among broadcasters seemed to dovetail so powerfully with commercial imperatives carried over to these players. yes, Google is, at least financially, primarily an advertising company, their business model is to serve every interest, not narrow to a select few that serve everyone, as with NBC.

But here’s a key glimpse of why these concerns do matter in the new media industries, care of Farhad Manjoo at Salon. and I don’t care about this because its “anti-academic”, as I never used their service myself, but in terms of the driving corporate logic:

Microsoft has announced that it is shutting down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, two search engines that aimed to index scholarly works that are often difficult to find online. The company is also ceasing its ambitious effort to digitize library books, a project that it had long promoted as an alternative to Google’s own such efforts.

The company says it “recognizes” that closing these services will “come as disappointing news” to publishers and Web searchers. And yet Microsoft says it must shut them down anyway, because letting people search through books and academic journals no longer fits into the company’s business strategy.

What’s that new strategy? Microsoft wants to help people who have “high commercial intent.”

I am not making that up. Satya Nadella, the company’s vice president for search, actually uses those words. Microsoft would simply prefer to build search engine just for people looking to buy stuff.

Sigh.

In the next month or so, I’m going to be attempting to back up a bit in my thinking, to take in the big picture of the issues I’m invested in examining in my scholarship. I’m calling it the Big Think 08. We’ll see if the practical realities of life allow it. But, as I go, I’d like to throw to the blog moments and aspects, in an attempt to partially develop this snapshot.

One issue that has always troubled me is the persistent myth of the liberal media. Many have attempted to address this, so its not exactly a new area of study. But its persistence in the face of this examination is quite amazing, and speaks of something else entirely, the way the press gets played within the contemporary U.S. political context. Glenn Greenwald at Salon has a sharp critique of it today, spurred by a comment made by Scott McLellan, former White House Press Secretary for Bush, in his new autobiography:

“the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.”

Greenwald follows this with a litany of evidence of this deference, from the failings of the New York Times in allowing Judy miller’s reporting to stand, or the press adoration of McCain, or their use of military analysts in their Iraq war coverage that were made available by the DoD. He finishes with:

Press secretaries of all types instinctively view the media as adversaries and typically feel besieged by what they perceive to be the media’s unfair hostility. So if even Scott McClellan recognizes the mythical nature of the “liberal media” cliche and sees political journalists as meek little handmaidens for government propaganda, how much longer can this myth be maintained?

I’m in a conversation right now in a pre-conference workshop, organized by Pat Aufderheide, on “Mapping Public Media,” and part of our charge is to think about what counts as public media in a contemporary media environment, and how we might protect and support that. Much of the conversation has turned on how we define public media, in a way that is generous enough to throw its net widely, but specific enough to be actionable by funders and lawmakers. But we’re also coming up with ideas for how to research and intervene in public media in useful ways.

So here’s my idea, built on a suggestion made by Kevin Barnhurst. Kevin’s point is that, rather than identifying something that counts as public media (the new NPR for the digital age) but rather we articulated certain  criteria and principles that public media should honor — transparency of funding and purpose, openness to user engagement, neutrality of platform, commitment to  ublic mobilization — then encouraged media to offer up data on how they serve those functions. This data would be very easy for third parties to scrape and analyze, and offer up to citizens and critics a lens on how our media are serving these various principles. My idea is we add to this a carbon “emissions trading” notion. Those that are serving these principles well would get support as public media. Those that were failing to meet these criteria could “offset” their footprint by buying credits against their “pollution”.

Its only a half-serious suggestion, but I like the idea that FOX News would regularly have to support DailyKos.

One of the most challenging tasks in teaching a class on new media is to get past Internet-centric stories about contemporary change. We could call this “technological determinism,” the tendency to explain social change by pointing to the Internet as the cause, but I think that actually doesn’t help. There are many claims made about how a new technology causes change — “hey, the web is changing politics!” But even when scholars and critics are trying not to simplistically pin their explanation on the technology, there is a convention of using technologies to discursively mark and comprehend moments of change. It’s a kind of shorthand, like “The Industrial Age,” where the author may not actually think that the cotton gin or the assembly line changed everything, but they need a reference point to make sense of a broad period of time when ceertain kinds of things mattered and took effect. Its also an acknowledgement that certain technologies, the Internet certainly one of them, often motivate a public attention to changes, changes that may already have been underway but that become clear or problematic around a new technology. And, as new technologies emerge in certain moments, amidst change, they often become playgrounds and battlegrounds for the exploration of contours of that change, and so become entangled with it.

But this does tend to do an injustice to the process of understanding these changes and the forces behind them, because the technology often figures way too prominently in the discussion, and can often stand in as a shorthand explanation. So how do we talk about the Internet and politics, or new media and journalism, or online advertising, without incessantly telling a pre- and post-Internet story, and without having to claim that nothing has changed?

In the course of teaching this class, I’ve noticed one tactic I find useful: drawing attention to changes that were already underway, that predate the Internet, but that got taken up around new media. This draws on a tradition in the sociology of technology, that suggests that technologies are the product of social negotiation rather than the other way around, and from a lesson I learned from Phil Agre in graduate school, when he said “instead of studying the Internet, study the social phenomenon you’re interested, then consider the 5% of that phenomenon where the Internet matters.” (I’m paraphrasing; its been a few years.) Of course, one of the challenges is that you have to really know the social or political phenomenon in question, and you need a sense of history, something I find under-emphasized in my department’s curriculum.

This insight keeps arising for me, even in surprising ways. So I’m re-reading Zizi Papacharissi’s article “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere,” from New Media & Society 4.1 (2002), where she astutely examines the question of whether online political discussion is fostering or undermining a public sphere, in Habermas’ sense of the term as well as his critics’. She works through lots of the issues around how online discussion spaces work (or worked: the article pre-dates blogs, wikis, and social networking), including issues of access and overload, diversity and fragmentation, and commercial pressure. In her conclusion she notes a concern raised by Breslin, that “the internet promotes a sense of sociality, but it remains to be seen whether this translates into solidarity.” (21) But her reaction is excellent: that while we may wonder if online communities and political debate can match the kind of organized solidarity that communities or unions or political organizations or rallies could, that may in fact not be how political engagement works anymore. Forty years of “identity politics” have moved the political discourse from solidarity to individual expression as a political gesture. And the political use of the Internet may fit much more neatly with that version of political discourse. So its not, “is the Internet helping or hurting the political process?” but rather “as the politicla process continues to struggle with structural tensions, for instance around communal versus individual political engagement, how does the Internet get taken up in this process, play into or against that tension, and afford unanticipated opportunities that other communication technologies did not?”

The most striking moment in the course so far, where I felt like a rich sense of cultural history would help focus us on a long change that predates but tangles with the Internet, is around journalism. We discuss the question of whether newsblogging is a form of journalism, mostly because it helps reveal the complexity of journalism as a social category, how it has always tangled with the shape of the dominant media form, and how ideals and arrangements get re-thought in light of a new medium. But as we discussed the history of media journalism, especially around the superb Frontline documentary “News War” (part three is especially relevant, but its all good), it became clear that, rather than thinking about blogging as this radical new form that throws journalism into disarray, that it was useful to think about two longer-term trends (maybe others are relevant here as well): the intersection of news and entertainment under increased pressures on news organizations to turn a profit, and the increasing public skepticism around the ability of mass media journalism to take an independent and forceful position in relation to government.

Journalism once enjoyed high regard in the public eye in the days of Watergate, it has squandered that in the days of a de-fanged Reagan press corps, the embrace of infotainment formats like newsmagazines, a series of scandals about falsified news reports, and cost-cutting in the newsroom while demanding higher profits. As David Simon, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “The Wire,” put it in a recent Salon interview, the Internet isn’t exactly what is killing newspapers:

“Making an 18 percent profit and thinking that there was nothing else on the horizon and you were the only game in town … You can’t tell me that they were saving the money for a rainy day. Nobody knew that the Internet was going to be what it was. Nobody at my paper did, anyway. And now it is what it is, and there is no money, and they didn’t spend the window that they had building something that was so essential and so vibrant and so necessary to understanding the world well that you couldn’t do without it.”

And, in competition with more and more outlets for news, especially with the rise of cable, news providers needed to distinguish themselves, one of the ways they did so was to emphasize punditry, political stripe as brand, a la Fox News. The rise of talk radio in the 1980s and television news punditry in the 1990s, combined with the emergence of “citizen journalism” and “peace journalism” all highlight a call for more user involvement to break the chokehold that professional journalists had on the agenda and presentation of wordly events.

To see newsblogging in this context suggests that, rather than blogging emerging from what the Internet offers technically, it is the expression of some long-brewing frustrations with traditional mass media journalism, and does so by, not surprisingly, extending those shifts that were already bubbling up: subjective voice, the blurring of news and commentary, user involvement.

If we want to extend our historical lens even further, this in fact situates blogging as just the latest step of a very long back-and-forth in American journalism, about whether the provision of public information should be political or commercial or independent, amateur or professional, local or institutional. I’m cribbing here from the masterful work of Michael Schudson on the history of American journalism and political participation.

So the question I’m left with is, how to best incorporate this perspective in the classroom? How do you know enough history, and teach enough history, to really put these changes and tensions into sufficient context? There’s a part of me that’s tempted to teach classes not in the Communication framework, but like American Studies classes: that to understand the Internet you need to understand Western society, culture, and politics of the last century — maybe longer, and maybe beyond the Western context even. My courses have always had a historical dimension, but only in the sense that phenomena we were examining were always understood as historically situated. But if your class is full of kids who were born in the 1990s, how do you give them a rich enough sense of the historical context itself, for them to get that the contemporary phenomena they know emerged from it?

I don’t claim that this is original, and I bet I could guess who’s already said something like this, if I had an afternoon to go look at their books/blogs/articles. This is just a thought, walking out of my class today, a way I found I could make sense of something worth making sense of.

The topic this week was whether the classic concerns about media concentration around broadcasting and publishing, i.e. the worry that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies, applies and raises the same implications in new media industries, such as the search business. The point I think I closed with today, though it’s only coming clear in my head now, is that the concerns we had for traditional media emerged from the “economic imperative of mass appeal”: If your business model depends on helping an advertiser get the same message in front of as many eyes as possible, and the economics are such that it costs a whole lot to make the movie or show that’s going to draw them in but cheap to get that show to a huge audience, then the tendency is to try for a mass audience, make one thing as appealing to as many as possible, and be sure its something tht advertiser won’t shy away from. And from that, the risks and abuses that can come from media concentration are of a certain kind: shying away from volatile topics, homogenizing the content, chasing past successes, failing to report on news that might damage your own business or that of your advertisers. (This is not to say that this always or even endemically happens, but that it can, and does.)

On the other hand, in the search industry, the business model is to attempt to give each user what they’re looking for, not give them all the same thing. And advertisers pay to associate themselves to specific terms and pages, not to be everywhere for everyone. So the business logic, and with it the risks that emerge from economic concentration, come not from mass appeal but from the “economic imperative of comprehensiveness”. The best search engine will be the one that catalogs the most of the web, or the most of the web that’s relevant to the most people, and serves that index up in a way that satisfies users requests, or seems to. The goal is to give every user to the right advertiser, every advertiser to the right user. And it benefits the search company to find ways to bring users to them and to keep them there, not just by doing search well, but by building themselves into other services so users are channeled back to them. (Google does this by building its search into a browser toolbar, into other websites, by building the search into GMail and YouTube and Picasa and Google Maps and Google Books and iPhones and so on…) This is the “googlization of everything” that Siva Vaidhyanathan has been writing about.

And, thus, all the kinds of risks and abuses that have emerged around Google’s dominance in the search industry and around concentrated corporate ownership in the new media realm all stem from this economic imperative of comprehensiveness. It is not about content control or political timidity, as it can be with traditional media. Instead, its Google choosing to scan books first and letting copyright owners opt-out (rather than asking them all for permission first, which would have been legally safer) — the value of that library will depend in large part on being able to say that its “everything,” or close to it. Its the temptation to mine GMail messages and search queries and Deja News posts as consumer data to better fit ads to users and search terms, because Google needs to know as much as it can about every user and every kind of interest, no matter how obscure. Its the Google Maps “street view,” where privacy concerns come second to the impulse to document every inch of every street corner.

This framework, I’m sure, was inspired by Elizabeth van Couvering’s dissertation work on search engines, part of which was assigned reading for my class today.

I just wanted to share with everyone the syllabus for my new course, 320: New Media and Society, which is offered in Communication and cross-listed in Information Science. I’m pretty proud of it, and hope it will be of some interest to those who might be reading this blog. Here’s the blurb:

We are all immersed in a complex and pervasive media culture, which makes it particularly difficult for us to recognize the complex relationship between media and society: how what we see, hear and read is in some ways the product of our society and its particular political, economic, and cultural shape, and how it also shapes our understanding of ourselves, our community, and our world. And at the moment, our media culture is undergoing a series of transformations - as new forms of entertainment, new venues for political debate, and new models of journalism emerge online, and as the established producers of media struggle to adapt to the challenge.

This course will interrogate how the cultural landscape has changed in relation to media and information technologies, how broadcast media and traditional publishing are converging with networked computing, and what implications these changes may have for society, politics, and culture. It will focus on cases drawn from new, information-based media - online news, blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, mashups, social networking applications, TiVo, video gaming, etc - but will examine them so as to understand the underlying relationship between media and society.

 http://www.tarletongillespie.org/syllabi/320.S08.html

I’m extrapolating from a comment made by Nic Sammond, in in interview with Henry Jenkins (part one, part two) I just finally came across. This never, ever occurred to me. I’m really looking forward to Nic Sammond’s new book, where he draws the links between the American “minstrelsy” genre (blackface) and animation. His first book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960, is superb — it began as his dissertation at San Diego, where we both got our graduate degrees. And he seems to be building off of Eric Lott’s amazing book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which changed my thinking about popular culture as a new graduate student.

(This post was written for the MIT PressLog.)

The writer’s guild has complained for years that they’ve been unfairly shut out of profits from digital versions of the TV shows and movies they helped create; as networks and studios continue to expand the web presence of their programs, providing “webisodes” and character blogs and background stories for their on-screen content, they have further enlisted writers to produce material they’re not being adequately compensated for. Perhaps the current strike will help rectify this inequity.

But are screenwriters inadvertently helping to shift the new media landscape – just as they get their extra slice for their “webisodes,” are they digging out the ground beneath their entire venture? In 1988, the last writer’s strike, grinding the prime time television season to a halt was a powerful move: we were still in a world of four channels and “must-see TV”. The absence of new programming was disruptive enough to audiences and advertisers that the networks and production companies felt compelled to enter negotiations. Today, the scope of that media universe has changed. What are viewers doing without their new episodes of House or The Office? They may be catching up on series they hadn’t gotten to, finally exploring Friday Night Lights or Mad Men or Weeds, either through on-demand services, iTunes, the network websites, Netflix, or even illicit peer-to-peer networks. The networks may actually cash in on the opportunity, if they’re smart: “never got around to Aliens in America? Want to see what critics are talking about? We’ll start at season one, let you come in from the beginning, starting Monday!” An array of other options loom: video games, social networking sites, blogs.

And what if viewers (and advertisers with them) find themselves gravitating to that massive “channel” of content produced by non-unionized writers, i.e. the rest of us: YouTube? Will some ascerbic amateur writer, especially as we head into the heart of the presidential season, become the YouTube stand-in for the political humor of The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and SNL? Will dramatic shorts or amateur sitcoms, produced by aspiring writers or just those bored college kids, finally become a viable entertainment form, filling the current vacuum on TV? It would be ironic indeed, though not unprecedented in the history of media, for this squabble over one version of the digital media future to end up giving a boost to a different digital media platform, a tectonic shift in viewer preferences and cultural legitimacy that would be difficult to undo.

Is it a sign of the times that we’re about to have a movie where the good guys get in trouble for copyright violation?

Be Kind, Rewind (trailer)

I can’t decide whether to proclaim this as the most important “fair use” movie of the modern age, or just cringe (and I like both of those guys…) But I do have great faith in Michel Gondry… and, at least for the moment, it’s scheduled to come out on my birthday.

The “official site” is still a GoDaddy default page…

I just got the latest table of contents (v23n4) for the journal Critical Studies in Media Communication, and they reproduced a series of papers from last year’s NCA in San Antonio as a Critical Forum. In their article, Roderick P. Hart and E. Johanna Hartelius put Jon Stewart on trial:

We accuse Jon Stewart of political heresy. We find his sins against the Church of Democracy to be so heinous that he should be branded an infidel and made to wear sackcloth and ashes for at least two years, during which time he would not be allowed to emcee the Oscars, throw out the first pitch at the Yankee’s game, or eat at the Time-Warner commissary. Our specific charge is that Mr. Stewart has engaged in unbridled political cynicism. And it is no coincidence that “sin” and “cynicism” have an assonant quality. But we are not accusing Mr. Stewart of being an apostate, one who has abandoned the Democratic Faith altogether. Unlike an apostate, a heretic professes faith in the overall tenets of the religion but disagrees with, or fails to practice, or tries to undermine, its most vital beliefs. In contrast, Mr. Stewart cleverly claims to advance the tenets of democracy during his nightly assignations while in truth leading the Children of Democracy astray. He plants in them a false knowledge, a trendy awareness that turns them into bawdy villains and wastrels.

Then both Robert Hariman and W. Lance Bennett rise to his defense. here’s Bennett’s start:

Esteemed members of the jury: is there anyone here who is not a fan of Jon Stewart? As no hands are raised, I move to empanel all of you as jurors in this case. It is clear that our task is less to decide the fate of one comedian than to dispel the common prejudice that a cynical brand of comedy is somehow undermining the capacity of citizens (particularly young citizens) to gain enough knowledge and perspective to enable intelligent political participation. Indeed, the core charge is that the prevailing brand of comedy epitomized by practitioners such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not only distracts people from serious understandings of events, but stigmatizes the political process and demeans citizenship itself.

The article’s are smart, and are also a nice reminder that scholarship can also have style. Sadly, the journal is by subscription, so unless your library has it, you need to pay to get access to the articles.

Despite my copyright politics, I actually have a great sympathy for the efforts by authors and musicians to control how their work is first released. Call me old-fashioned, but I do think there’s a difference between unpublished and published, and I like that part of the artistry can be about crafting that first moment. Still, I wanted to point out a comment from Salon blog-umnist Farhad Manjoo at Machinist (a terrific blog that’s become my second click when I go online, after Salon) about how the multiple leaks of the new Harry Potter book demonstrate that the information environment has forever changed, and that security measures (like DRM) simply cannot cope. Despite millions of dollars of extraordinary security measures to protect the higly-anticipated final installment, including satellite tracking of delivery trucks, leaks of the final book’s major plot points, and even digital photos of each page, have surfaced online. Again, fans are largely fuming about the leaks, and I can appreciate it, though Manjoo makes some very compelling points about how this is unlikely to hurt Rowling or Scholastic financially.

But then he delivers the sad truth:

Rowling intended her story to be released a certain way. She wanted it to come out on July 21, she wanted it to come out on paper (and audiobook), she wanted people to delight, together and simultaneously, to the climax of a tale they’ve been waiting a decade to read. The artist, in other words, expected a certain fate for her art…

So let me try to say this kindly, hopefully without causing any offense: What the author wants is not, anymore, all that will happen. Today, artists — even those as powerful as J.K. Rowling — can’t reasonably expect such dominion over their art. A well-laid plan is dashed by some guy with a camera and a lot of time on his hands, and that’s that. And mostly this loss of control is a good thing, for fans as well as for artists. Rowling and her wizard have, after all, benefited tremendously from the Internet; through fan fiction and unending online discussion, creative Pottermaniacs have immeasurably deepened and intensified her work, keeping it thriving between releases.

Much of the discussion about the internet and copyright and peer-to-peer and control mechanisms have been about the economics (are sales going down? do people try new works and then buy them?) and the law (should re-distribution be illegal? Is copyright working in this altered environment?). But I think some of the most interesting questions are going to be about the cultural questions. How will the experience of entertiainment change? Will we have these blockbuster moments, where many of us gather at the same time for a carefully crafted mega-experience? If not, is that good or bad? How will the relationship between the original and the secondary material (parodies, sequels, reviews, criticisms) change, perhaps in ways that fundamentally change what “the” and “original” mean? And how will artists and writers innovate in this new environment, conjuring up new ways to thrill people never before possible in the bottlenecked, mass-produced, blockbuster version of culture we’ve had for the last century or so?

Is Harry Potter the last blockbuster? Probably not. We’ve been wondering about the death of the mass culture experience for a long time now, long before the Internet, as film attendance declined in the 60s and 70s, the three television networks become hundreds, the VCR allowed time-shifting, and the terrain of popular music fractured into dozens of sub-genres. But I do wonder if the pop culture phenomena of the near future will have very different contours, in part because of the power to circulate and recreate that is so taking advantage of digital technology and the Internet.

Jonathan Sterne pointed out this article in Canada’s Globe and Mail, about a visit from Justice Antonin Scalia to a panel discussion hosted in Ottawa. Things got surreal when a Candian judge made the mistake of saying, “Thankfully, security agencies in all our countries do not subscribe to the mantra ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’”. Apparently, Scalia jumped to defend the fictional hero of 24:

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Judge Scalia said. Then, recalling Season 2, where the agent’s rough interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist nuke, the Supreme Court judge etched a line in the sand.

“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. “Say that criminal law is against him? ‘You have the right to a jury trial?’ Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.

“So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes.”

Jonathan reminds us that, when scholars of media and communication fret about the effects of media, they too often are thinking of particular kinds of audiences: children, the poor, the uneducated, immigrants. We don’t often think about whether media shapes the worldviews of highly educated, white, Supreme Court justices, or even military school undergraduates.

This would be funny, a Quayle-esque Murphy Brown moment, except in light of recent concerns raised by teachers at West Point, who appealed to the producer of 24 to stop presenting torture as a reasonable and effective way of getting information. In the West Point classrooms they were finding that students had an increasingly blasé attitude about torture, borrowing the outlook of the show that “whatever it takes” is acceptable in the name of national security. I’m still inclined to see this as more of an indicator of how powerfully the public debate in this country is still gripped by a security-or-catastrophe paradigm, that makes it possible for the hyper-muscular ideology of 24 to strike the chord it does. But it does concern me that someone like Scalia, despite his conservative inclinations, should know better than to legitimize that kind of blurriness between political concerns and narrative ones.

I finally got to see the final episode of The Sopranos, just a day late. I’m not going to join in on the debate about the narrative choices David Chase made (ok, I think it was startling and brilliant). I;m not even going to reveal them: I’m sensitive to those who haven’t watched yet but intend to, as I did (it was a tricky 24 hours, avoiding articles, skipping emails from friends that might reveal details). But there’s an interesting dimension to how the show ended that keeps coming up in articles I’m now reading. Without revealing the details of the ending, I will say two things: first, the episode ends abruptly, cutting to a silent black screen and holding for a few seconds before rolling the credits. Second, based on the way the show ended, many have commented that David Chase was, among other things, poking an elbow in viewers ribs a bit, perhaps for the endless speculation about how the saga would close.

Many viewers, when confronted with the black screen, thought for a moment that their cable or TiVo had failed them, that perhaps the show had run long and not been recorded, or the signal dropped at that crucial moment. Even watching it on HBO on Demand, I had the same sensation (exacerbated by the fact that the HBO on Demand service had initially failed when my we tried to start the program). Its a gut panic, an existential dread that, cruelly, our technology has failed us at the crucial moment of dramatic denouement, and its a terrible feeling. And a revealing one. My good friend Josh Greenberg has written about the complexity of thinking about media technology, and one of the things he has noted is that we are constantly making a very subtle but seemingly simple distinction between what is the text and what is the technology. The radio blares out a song, that’s the text; it blares out static, that’s the technology. There’s even some artistic room to meddle — a song that starts with the hiss and pop of a turntable, or a character in a television show “knocking on the glass” of our TV.

That final moment in The Sopranos put us in an ambiguous space of technical ambiguity, one where we could not decide for a moment whether the black screen was a purposeful aesthetic decision on the part of the makers of the show, or the sign of a technical failure in the distribution system that brought it to us. I suspect that the choice may even have been Chase poking an elbow in our ribs, as the producer of an epic drama in an age of “snack culture”. I may be making too much of a small point, and certainly the ending deserves discussion on its narrative merits more than on this. But it strikes me as an intriguing moment — as the ways we watch TV multiply (cable, on demand, iTunes, broadcaster websites, DVD, peer-to-peer downloads, subscription streaming), the distinctions we have to make between technology and text, between what is the media and what it is mediating, grow more complex.

I should read it more regularly, because Andrew Leonard has an absolutely terrific blog over at Salon called “How the World Works“. It’s startlingly smart about more things than any one person should be smart about.

And this post does not really capture the flavor of what he usually talks about, the politics and economics of globalization, but it came nearest to my own particular fascinations, so I wanted to share it. He’s loosely reviewing the film “Pirates of the Carribbean III: At World’s End” and, after winkingly commending the film for its realism — that is, for having made the East India Trading Company the villain that it in fact was — he makes this comment, about how odd it is that Disney is celebrating lawless pirates triumphing over the first mega-corporation:

In “Pirates” we’re expected to root for the anarchic lawbreakers against the forces of repressive order. That’s why the third film starts with a bunch of pitiful about-to-be-hanged islanders being told they no longer have any constitutional rights. But it’s always been kind of a nifty trick for a supposedly squeaky clean, family-friendly corporation like Disney to market pirates, famous for raping, pillaging and murdering their way across the seven seas, as not only PG-13 entertainment but also as freedom fighters against totalitarian rule. This is an effort laden with gross contradictions, leading to such hysterical high points as the shock expressed by Disney when Keith Richards, who makes a cameo as the keeper of the Pirate Codex in “At World’s End,” claimed to have snorted his own father’s cremated ashes. Whether joking or not, what could possibly have been be more piratical in spirit then that!? But Disney frowns on true piracy — and for understandable reasons. In a global marketplace, there are bound to be some cultures where potential ticket-buyers would look askance at nasal consumption of one’s progenitors.

I love the additional irony, of which Leonard is certainly aware, that Disney has often been the harshest combatant against another group of lawless troublemakers they love to brand as “pirates,” those who rape and pillage their precious copyrights. In legal and policy contexts they love to throw around the metaphor, comparing Internet file-traders to high-seas marauders, yet their summer franchise gives us Johnny Depp as a most appealing, and in the end (I assume, I haven’t seen the most recent sequel), good-hearted rebel.

The bigger irony is of course the way that entertainment corporations have to regularly offer us tales of those who throw off corporate shackles, stick it to the man, move beyond vacant consumer materialism, and find their true voice despite the lure of success. One could argue, and many have, that these stories are hollow triumphs, plastic tokens of revolution and
individualism we enjoy while sitting quietly in a room watching the blustery commercial product we gamely paid for. And I tend to agree, but there’s something else, an awkward beauty to capitalism, where it can’t hold to its own ideology if there’s a buck to be made beyond it.

In an article today in Salon debating the merits of the Democrat pundits who appear on Fox News, Alex Koppelman pointed out not only that Fox is the most watched of the U.S. cable news networks, and that the median age of their viewers is 60, but also this amazing little tidbit:

“In the 2004 election, according to Mark Mellman, Fox viewers preferred President Bush over John Kerry by an astonishing 88 percent to 7 percent. Bush’s backing among Fox viewers was more solid than his support among white evangelicals, gun owners or supporters of the Iraq war.”

I just found that bizarre and amazing, and felt the need to say so.

I am just beginning a significant revamp of my course “Mass Media and Society” for next year; the course will be retitled “New Media and Society” (with a humble nod to the journal of the same name) and will be a course that serves both the Communication department and the program in Information Science here at Cornell. The idea will be to introduce students to some of the classic questions addressed by sociological approaches to media, and address them to emerging new media forms. Do the old concerns persist, or do they need to change?

So as I go, I’m going to use this blog to highlight what I find to be compelling work in this area. This is not intended to exclude readers who aren’t academics; one of the criteria for selecting essays to point to here (and for inclusion in the syllabus) is that they speak clearly to a much wider audience who just happens to be interested in such things.

Much of the academic scholarship that addresses new media and society suffers from one or several of the following failings: (1) embracing the hype around new media and technologies, at the expense of critical and thorough scholarship, (2) accepting uncritically the distinction between “new” and “old,” thereby presuming that the history of these forms and the research that addressed them have nothing to offer to current cases, (3) making the opposite assumption, that nothing of substance has changed, (4) merely attempting to document the phenomenon without any attention to the context, the implications, the shifting paradigms, (5) leaning uncritically on quantitative methods merely because digital tools allow so much data to be gathered automatically, and (6) falling back on reductive versions of the ‘effects’ approach to media that existing communciation scholarship has already shown to be problematic and ideologically fraught. It is surprisingly difficult to gather a semester of readings that avoids all of these pitfalls, both because of the sheer quantity of this clumsier work, and because the stuff that does succeed in tackling these questions with subtletly and insight tends to be scattered acorss mutliple fields, approaches, and topics.

Here’s one:

Turow, Joseph. 2005. Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597(1): 103-121.

This essay comes from a special issue of the Annals, edited by Eric Klineberg, on “Cultural Production in a Digital Age,” and the entire issue is excellent, including notable pieces by Gina Neff, Phil Howard, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Mimi Ito. But Turow’s piece stands out for me
because it skillfully makes an argument about change without fetishizing “new media,” it maps a coherent history connecting mass media forms to the current moment, and it highlights technological change without slipping into determinist thinking. It also offers one insight into a phenomenon that I think is one of the most pressing questions of media and society in the current moment.

Turow’s premise is that the practices of advertisers are changing in part because their notion of who the audience is and what their doing is changing. Marketers once focused on simply reaching the largest possible audience for their pitch, a tactic both driven by and reinforcing the move towards national brands. This fit well the belief that radio and television were bringing together a single audience. This tactic shifted in the latter half of the 20th century, as marketers began to fret that the increasing proliferation of media choices meant they would never again reach the massive audience they once did. Their anxiety about narrowcasting and niche audiences became a strategy: market more accurately to exactly the demographic or interest group you want, reaching, if a smaller audience, than an audience more likely to be interested in and willing to buy the particular commodity being pitched. This “market segmentation” led, in Turow’s view, to advertisers thinking of audiences not as a mass, but as an increasingly complex diversity of publics and interests groups.

With the rise of TiVo, DVRs, online file-trading, pop-up blockers, and the like, marketers began expressing a new anxiety: viewers were skipping the ads altogether. Once again, the concern led to a re-framing of the audience itself: marketers began describing audiences as fickle, as having little allegiance, as lacking in attention span, as unwilling to be sold to. This frame also begat a strategy: address individuals, enlist their participation in an ongoing relationship, wall them into branded spaces — and most of all, encourage them to give up valuable personal information by turning privacy into a commodity: for the right “price” (discounts, personalized content, entry into a social network), consumers will reveal their buying habits, preferences, and financial resources. This data can be used to develop personalized ads and promotions that seem to speak more directly to their wants and desires, that maintain consumers as life-long buyers, and that feel less intrusive by comparison.

Clearly, traditional commercial forms in conventional media still represent by far the most prevalent approaches in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, marketers in the early twenty-first century believe firmly that the genie is out of the bottle. They insist that the difficulties of targeting in a hypersegmented media world combined with new digital technologies that allow for the elimination of commercials mean they must be prepared to use new ways to ensure that consumers attend to their electronic solicitations. Increasingly, they are turning to alternatives to standard advertising as instruments to force consumer attention.

As these separate sets of activities develop, they are coming together in a new industry strategy for reaching the public that holds important implications for information privacy and ad-induced anxieties… American consumers, they say, are willing to allow advertisers and media firms to collect data about them and track their activities in return for relatively small but useful benefits that make their frenetic, attention-challenged, self-centered lives easier—discounts, entries to media channels, or similar special attention. Converging media and marketing activities based on this proposition are leading to an emerging set of strategic logics in favor of an emerging culture-production system in which surveillance marketing is deeply embedded. (112-113)

Turow’s essay sheds light on a troubling phenomenon that many have noticed but few have explained — the willingness of consumers, especially the young, to volunteer private information with little concern for how it might be used, and their seeming naivete about where that information may end up. Despite an increasingly vocal criticism of the privacy implications of digital, networked culture, there seems to be a significant disconnect for younger users. Much of this, I believe, has to do with the way personal information has been reframed as a commodity, as a passkey to rewards, even as a necessary ticket to entry into social life. The economic bargain offered is not new: sign up for the frequent flyer program or the reward card at the grocery store, and get discounts; the fact that your purchase habits are tracked and recorded is easily overlooked. The value of posting a detailed, revealing profile in Facebook or MySpace is something more. This act of self-presentation is seen as a communicative gesture to a circle of friends — more than a “public” proclamation, as is painfully clear when high schoolers are shocked to find their parents can read their diary-like confessions, college graduates are shocked to find that potential employers have seen their photos of drunken parties at school — and is a small price for entry into the social networks that follow. The more honest detail you offer, the more you are automatically placed into circles of common interest, the richer the interactions with people there can be. Turow’s essay situates this impulse in an commercial paradigm shift that makes this invitation an increasngly valuable, and seemingly necessary commercial strategy.

Turow’s essay also helps advance our understanding of the discourse that surrounds new technology. I find that an attention to discourse is a vital element of the study of new media: the shifting paradigms that situate who users are, what technologies are for, how things are changing, help reveal why technological and economic “imperatives’ fail to explain the particular paths these phenomena take. But, it is easy to look only at the general talk about new technology, and let the high-gloss claims in places like Wired spin you back into the superficial, utopian musings that have surround these new technologies from the start. What Turow does is consider discourse around new media in a particular context, and how the frames adopted by (in this case) marketers, spurred by technological change but inflected by their own particular economic and ideological outlook, leads them to behave in particular ways — ways that shape the very media we’re trying to understand.

As I am currently teaching my course on media and society, some of my attention is drawn to issues other than technology and copyright. Those interested in issues of contemporary journalism might want to check out Frontline’s new 4-part special called “News War“. The first part is set to run on your local PBS station on Tuesday, Feb 13 at 9pm. Here’s their description of the program:

In a four-and-a-half-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Through interviews with key figures in the print and electronic media over the past four decades — and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, FRONTLINE traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration’s attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other global forces now changing — and challenging — the role of the press in our society.

Topics included in the discussion will be the press’ relationship to the Bush administration, the question of using anonymous sources, the implications of the Plame investigation, reporting on issues of national security, the implciations of corporate ownership, the challenge posed by cable news and by emerging forms of online journalism, and how international news coverage may shape global opinion about the U.S. These are vital issues, and Frontline has a history of handling questions of media quite well — check out Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders in that regard.