Okay, I’ve only browsed the book, never really sat down to scrutinize it… But one of the things I remember that they say White People Like is “Not Owning A Television”. Mainly for the purpose of bragging that they don’t.
We’re headed into an uncertain future for television, perhaps: I know people who watch TV on a cell phone. Not, you know - a lot of people like that - but all the same… I can watch some shows on my laptop - not too shabby. Meanwhile, ever larger flat screen plasma or LCD or whatever they are come on the market - screens so big you might not have a big enough wall to hang them on… And, watch out for tight turns in stairways: once I got a couch stuck in mine.
I was deliberately unplugged for a time in the 90’s. When my sister and I first moved in together, we watched a lot of dinnertime Simpsons episodes on the tiny B&W I salvaged from my childhood. Then she dropped it. The tuner knob was busted. I took it as an omen… but later on I discovered that a pair of pliers could tune it just fine. I left it on UHF and discovered a channel with lots of foreign films and newscasts. After that, I inherited first one bulky Zenith, then the Sony from my dad - a man with plenty of televisions. Coincidentally, also the only person who ever mentioned “Stuff White People Like” to me, despite having worked for a bookstore when it came out and having reported it many weeks as a best selling item.
Such a short period of time - such a brief experiment in… well, what would you call it exactly? Am I more overwhelmed by culture because I have a more developed critical sense, and can’t let anything upsetting slide, or is that all just a load of crap? I must have something of the spirit of the intellectual - even if I haven’t really done much with it.
All of this is prelude to something I just read in “Nixonland” this afternoon. The same paragraph that just had me fussing about the “eggheads”…
(Nixon went on television to defend himself against calls to resign as vice-presidential candidate in 1952…) There weren’t all that many televisions in America then, though the number of sets was growing exponentially, as part and parcel of America’s postwar economic boom. These were the types [the eggheads] who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them… They saw themselves as the guardians of American decency.
Incidentally, I see myself in a similar relation to mobile phones: As the market for these things was still approaching saturation, I had a lot of disdain for all those people who didn’t seem to have anything worth communicating. It felt like a poor use of the airwaves, and a sure sign that the resource was not being priced correctly - no doubt the management of those airwaves was the reason. Anybody who complains about their cell phone bill now is an idiot: it could be a lot more expensive, and they could be using it for only the most urgent needs. But that’s off-topic.
There are probably going to be many waves of technology with the same effect: inspiring a backlash of conservatism from all corners of the political spectrum. Take the book - now in danger, but once the world changing new technology that humbled manuscripts, papyrus, and stone tablets.
I have to wonder now… Over the course of a few paragraphs, Perlstein has really stirred up my mind:
The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator - public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men.
You know who else catered to the basest and most sentimental emotions in men?…
Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war.
Posted in politics, media-studies, books | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:56:00 GMT
So, if I’m reading a biography about one of the most memorable directors of the French New Wave, I’d better make sure to watch some of the films, eh?
“À bout de souffle” seemed like a good place to start. You probably know it as “Breathless”, and it was Godard’s breakout film from 1960. From this remove, it can be hard to see how revolutionary it was. I wasn’t watching a lot of the films that existed before it. Heck, people were still getting fussy about hand-held camera on the TV show Firefly in 2002. So the technique still isn’t that acceptable. The excuse given in the book “Everything Is Cinema” was that it was filmed as a documentary - a fictional story ‘captured’ as it was acted out. Both the book and the interviews on the DVD (which, I’m guessing constitute some of the primary material for the book anyway) make a point of how skipping all the rigging, cables, and crew allowed them to casually record without too much planning. They ignored how films were supposed to be made.
On the other hand, it’s also a film known for its jump-cut editing well before rock videos started doing it. The whole thing is recorded without sound, which meant overdubbing in the studio.
In the book, Brody has a remark that startled me when I first read it:
“[Antonioni’s next step was] to show a society of mass culture and media, of technology and ostensible progress, and to consider the transformations in individual consciousness that were taking place in this new world”
Cause - you know - I wish I could do that. It wouldn’t take too long to come up with a list of SF writers who do that. Maybe it comes through when those films are made, but… Wait! There’s more:
“Rossellini believed so strongly in the freedom of individuals that he could not make sense of the idea that […shouldn’t this be ‘of’?] people who could be alienated from themselves by the mass media, which he considered merely to be a form of rhetorical persuasion that should be rejected by claims of reason.
Yes, that’s right, Rossellini! it should be ‘rejected by claims of reason’. So explain to me why it isn’t.
This is one of those subjects where I can be pretty sure a lot of ink has already been spilled. I don’t see what sense I can contribute to it today. But we can leave it at this: The jump cuts, when I pay attention - you see, they’re not even noticeable to me under normal viewing conditions - are brilliant. The scenes are not necessarily even in the order they were shot, as film running through the sprockets usually demands. Or, might I add, the sequential instructions of computer code. That overdubbing is a concession to convention. If you’re going to chop up the frames and rearrange them however you want, then why even have dialogue? Why have events in sequence? Why not ‘ensembles of imagery’, like the junk in a junk shop, which probably could tell a story, but lies around in piles instead?
Posted in film-and-TV, books, media-studies, writing-craft | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:22:00 GMT
I was just reading this article: “Secrets of Book Publishing I Wish I Had Known” over at Good Experience. From what I’ve learned on a daily basis at a modest-sized independent bookstore chain, a lot of this information is exactly right.
And when you consider that the average reader doesn’t read all that much - heck, I can’t even read nearly as much as I want to - and there are so many books being published, it shouldn’t be too hard to see why 10-15 thousand copies is a successful book. And that’s 10-15 thousand dollars for the author. If we can assume a perfect market here, (I’ll get to that…) then the obvious message is: Stop writing so many books, there are too many as it is. Heck, if nobody ever wrote another new book, the publishers could keep cranking out the classics, and you still wouldn’t read them all.
And they wonder why the book is dying. It might be nice for books to be scarce enough to value them highly - but it doesn’t do much for society… Hold on - it may not even matter if people can get their ideas from the Internet.
Books are not all the same - you might have noticed. They are never going to be commodities “give me a bushel of paperbacks…”, except in the case of those “Books By The Foot” operations for decorating the homes of rich people who want a badge of literacy. What’s that kind of market called? I’ll have to go looking for it… Each book almost has its own market - but there is still some coupling among books that are not exactly substitutes. Deciding which book to buy involves substitutes if you just want to read. If you’re poor and want to read, you can pick up a used copy (sometimes from dumpsters, even), a remainder or a Dover thrift edition. If you absolutely have to have the latest book by your favorite author on the day it is released, or want it autographed, then you can’t just buy some other book. I’m tempted to say that you can buy any book, throw that in the dumpster, and claim “Sales are up by one book! All authors benefit incrementally!”
Posted in economics, books, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:15:00 GMT
Music is an emotional subject. All sorts of people get excited about their identification with a form of music. We invest emotionally in music, and it stands in as marker of our identity to others.
But a lot of that is just marketing. Companies selling us back the identity that was already ours - albeit in a non-standardized form. It’s a little like a dairy farmer buying homogenized milk from the grocery store.
But despite all that, I would agree that millions - potentially billions - of people feel completely comfortable adapting to musical styles and in turn making those styles undeniably their own. It is like fashion in this respect: Fashion for the mind. In fact, often enough musical tastes are reinforced with fashion - could you have punk music without the torn fabric, dyed hair, and safety pins?
Major demographic shifts in the 20th century are reflected in changing musical tastes. One major shift is from Rural to Urban: That is how we lose Folk and Country but gain Soul, Rock, and further mutations like Punk, Metal, Rap, House, Electronica, etc.. Country music doesn’t die out entirely, though… The feel of the musical traditions we have flow into the creation of new music in an almost Darwinian way: Successful new styles are what listeners can accept - Generation after generation of small changes (or even punctuated equilibrium) in song styles that have to pass the test of popularity (even if only for a particular niche), and then become embedded in the consciousness of the listeners. Something similar happens as immigrants arrive - another great shift in our recent history. (I’m listening to Flamenco at the moment…)
Industrial scale reproduction of music puts the whole process into overdrive. Just as screws and other hardware were standardized, the whole concept of genre depends in part on the necessity of affixing a label and flooding the market. There is a real basis for the labels, and if a musician wants to market anything novel or hybrid, trouble arises - sometimes the work is thereby doomed to failure.
Go one step further and you find that even audiences tend toward standardization - for the reason I discussed earlier: People identify emotionally with music. The music a person will or will not listen to appears to be a matter of musical genre. Fashion follows from genre. Genres can be linked to attitude, clothing, or even skin color. Play that funky music, white boy. Nothing says we can’t all enjoy our own bizarre deviations from the musical norm. Renaissance music on period instruments? Or perhaps some Nobukazu Takemura anyone? I could go on and on.
Musicians are listeners, too: They gravitate toward musical genres as they learn their craft partly because they begin to hear in genres at an early age. They seek psychic comfort in identity too.
So please don’t get upset with me if you happen to enjoy Country Music…
I consider Country Music moribund. It is presented as a shiny new thing with a fashion to match, but I think all the signifiers are artificial: Repurposed; Expropriated; A Sham. Somebody out there in America is not a rancher - but they are wearing a cowboy hat anyway. I could say similar things about running shoes and basketball shorts.
I think Country Music is a cynical ploy to capture a subset of the pop music audience that was mildly uncomfortable with the offerings - a real business opportunity, if you will. These people were not well served by the closest mismatch. Someone will no doubt suggest (if anybody actually reads this…) that I am only expressing my prejudice for style. But, maybe my point is larger than just Country Music. Maybe if I try hard enough, I can unravel the entire music industry. It pushes people to buy in to an identity as a prerequisite for the acceptance of others. That’s one of the reasons music gets along with fashion so well.
Country music is a fact, as much as my personal prejudices might indeed make me wish it would just go away. But I also think that as an identity, Country Music represents a deep-seated disaffection with reality; A conservative barrier to new thinking. The past gives us a lot of rich tradition, but I wouldn’t want us to go back there.
I’m already moving on to a new argument: We have painted ourselves into a corner in this society. A lot of the problems you read about in the news are a gradually increasing mass psychosis caused by the wrong kind of incentives. And I won’t apologize for thinking that Country Music is not a helpful device for assisting us in the future.
Oh well, I guess this is what it looks like when I publish first drafts of half-formulated ideas…
Posted in music, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:07:00 GMT
Take a look at this New York Times article: Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner
My favorite quote so far: “If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
Posted in media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 29 Jun 2008 23:26:00 GMT
The more I read in the news media about what I’ll call the “Energy Crisis”, the more I wonder if people were paying attention in Physics class.
CNN: ‘Hypermilers’ test limits of fuel conservation
Reuters: U.S. drivers should think in gallons per mile
Wikipedia: Electric Car
If you want to think only in terms of money, then knowing your different forms of electricity, how much you use of each, how much you waste of each, and how much each costs can be helpful.
If you are mainly worried about polluting the environment, then you need to know the same things, but with an emphasis on the pollution each causes. That’s not easy in a world where energy suppliers are unwilling to share the details of their process.
Would you run your car on coal? Would you run your car on electricity? How about electricity generated in a coal-fired plant? Maybe the power plant takes advantages of economies of scale that aren’t available to a coal-fired automobile.
Maybe you should drive a hydrogen powered car. Where does the hydrogen come from? Maybe the plant separating the hydrogen uses electricity generated from solar cells, and maybe it uses electricity generated at a nuclear plant. And, maybe that nuclear plant is on the verge of a containment failure, which wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t use so much electricity and build exotic generating sources.
Every transformation of energy from one form to another is lossy. So increasing the number of transformations is usually a bad idea from an efficiency point of view. On the other hand, we have cars that run on gasoline. The same technology can be adapted to run on other flammable liquids. That might cause you to wonder if gasoline is the best way, but there were other concerns involved: Volatility (could have been worse), transportation, contamination, safety.
I was always suspicious of the reported MPG on automobiles. While you’re idling the engine in a parking lot or at a stoplight, you’re getting zero. The long-haul, cruising efficiency is going to be a lot higher than the average driver. YMMV. Did you ever ask how they came up with those numbers? When lawmakers debate things like the CAFE standards, do they just ignore the methodology? Like dubious accounting practices, I’m sure automakers could jigger the statistics in their favor. At least for a little while.
As with most things, the statistics are just a starting point. The real concern is total cost of ownership. Or maybe I should say ‘cost of operation’. As with every transaction, you give something to get something. Are you getting what you want? Are you giving too much? Can you even compare the alternatives? Are there hidden costs down the road to those do-it-yourself tweaks, like frequent engine replacement? The more complicated we make the calculations, the less anybody is willing to ask those questions.
The “Gallons Per Mile” discussion was priceless: It’s mainly an attempt to reframe the discussion in a different psychological light. Because people aren’t very good at dividing numbers; at thinking in ratios. But the point is well made: You can’t hope to get to 50MPG if you’re using your vehicle to ferry the soccer team, haul a ton of groceries up a mountain, or make frequent stops. And if that is what you hope to accomplish, then you ought to know the cost. And, small increases in efficiency make a big difference when you start low.
Did NASCAR ever think of running races with a fixed quantity of fuel for each driver? How much do those guys use in a race, anyway? If they burn it too fast, they will never reach the finish line: Efficiency matters, even at 200mph. That would emphasize for millions of people the importance of doing more with less, wouldn’t it?
When you store electricity in a battery, and use it to do work later, there is loss both coming and going. It is not necessarily the best way to store energy. The mere flowing of electricity causes some heat in the wires. The less it moves around, the better. Hybrid cars are a pretty good solution - most of the electricity is generated as it is needed. Even a gasoline powered vehicle has to store some energy a battery. A completely electric car can make you feel good because you never have to smell the gasoline fumes, but it isolates you from the site where that electricity is generated - and, some of the electricity is lost along the way. You could feel green, but cause some of the worst pollution of anybody - and when is someone going to come along and say “Soot and grime are good for global climate - it’s those odorless, colorless gases that are destroying the planet.”?
Anybody care to venture: What is the theoretical maximum efficiency for an automobile? Whose automobile? Are you considering the fabrication and maintenance costs? Usually, the price tag is supposed to incorporate those costs, but sometimes they’re waiting to surprise you later.
Posted in economics, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:32:00 GMT
If you start thinking that the world is falling apart, and you go looking in the media for the reason why, you’re going to miss it. Because it isn’t going to be one thing - it’s going to be an ensemble of related things.
Here I am, reading a book about the Economics of Attention… I realized a number of things about how I browse media. And about how it is presented. Basically, if I have a limit on how much I can pay attention, most news outlets are horrible time wasters. Maybe the problem is my own: Maybe I never learned to ignore things properly, so I constantly get hooked on anything that seems the least bit interesting.
Television is the wrong medium for information. Or, all the channels are competing to be the worst. If you’re going to sit through a presentation of the day’s news, you’ve got to trust the presenters to do the selecting for you. And of course, they never do this particularly well. Sitting through a news broadcast is very boring to me. And, the payoff for sitting there is minimal.
The problem du jour is that the local news reports much of what I already saw online. This puts a spotlight on their cluelessness. Yes, okay, they occasionally manage to spot the same things that interested me, and so they are ‘relevant’ in this very limited sense, but I’m not looking for reassurance that I am hip - I’m looking for a source that compliments my other sources. And when I see the throwaway stories online, I can spend the proper amount of time - a quick glance - and move on. The perceived authority of the slickly produced TV news reports adds a false weight to their choices of what to cover. But they care about different things than I do.
I want to know everything, but of course, I can’t. The next best thing in my mind is to soak up as much as I can get away with. And this requires a kind of speed-reading technique. Listening to someone else read out loud is not like speed reading.
Web sites can be like newspapers. A visual array that allows you to zoom in on what you consider relevant, while remaining aware of the whole field. You can easily ignore and skip without creating that feeling of nothingness that accompanies the things they chose not to report. Now there’s a problem that dogs every medium. Omission implies irrelevance, but it actually reflects bias introduced in the filtering.
By sampling from many sources, you can adjust for this bias. Rapid fire TV news doesn’t care about complex stories that they can’t tell quickly. So I guess that means there are not complex stories, right? Omission implies irrelevance?
When the world ends, you’re simply going to get a preponderance of evidence from the media. Not proof. Most media outlets won’t be able to trace the connections - to step up to the meta-level where they analyze what they’ve been saying. There’s a lot of uncomfortable self-criticism down that road, anyway. I just worry that it’s going to be very hard for people to see the problems coming. Not out of total ignorance, mind you: But because they’ll be looking in one direction at one disaster, and not looking in a different direction at another disaster.
Some of us are a little more accustomed to holding more than one idea in our heads at once. But it’s going to take a lot more than that. People are going to have to band together a little more than they’re used to if they want to understand what is happening to the world, how it was ‘our’ fault. (Hey, I didn’t tell anybody to straighten rivers in the midwest and build all those fast runoff parking lots.)
There must be something more important going on here than just individual attentions gone astray. It has something to do with this ‘authority’ problem in news outlets. I don’t worry that they’re lying to me. But I do worry that their poor choices about what should be important causes an undue amplification of those stories and ideas. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy: Most audiences will not question the source like I do. But all my questioning doesn’t get me very far. It’s not until I interrogate many sources that I start to see the truth of the matter.
Posted in media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:48:00 GMT
I liked how this article Distracting Miss Daisy in The Atlantic meshed right into the stuff I’ve been reading lately. The writer says they do traffic control better in the UK, and it results in fewer deaths. But mainly, I was interested in the claim that having so many signs to warn drivers takes their eyes away from the road. I seem to remember thinking that way back when I drove regularly.
This item on Infowars, Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012 Leaked? had the interesting element of wondering whether a YouTube video was a hoax. And then, realizing that it didn’t matter anyway. Even if the video is only looking for attention (check out the cleavage on that interviewer! - not very professional), what they are talking about is very real. I encourage you to look further into “Network Neutrality”, because it’s on the slippery slope to a dystopian future of corporate slavery. Then again, there’s nothing in the constitution that says you can’t gradually rewrite the whole thing through the years to completely oppose the spirit of the original.
For a minute, I was thinking that this represented a naive idea about what an internet is, but I see the danger. The web could probably “go underground”, but that would only encourage the actual criminalization of the activity on it - the premise seems to be that governments want to lock down this aspect of free speech to stop terrorists. Even if it’s true, it’s still a red herring. The sort of content that draws most people to the Web is exactly the sort of content I could happily live without. For the most part, this content is already on a broadcast model. Social networking and video uploads are a threat to that model, so the people who derive power and money from broadcast would naturally want to block it - or as they do now, leave it as an incubator and steal all the good ideas. These types are understandably uncomfortable with individuals expressing their own opinions. It messes up the status quo. I guess if I were rich and powerful, I would get pretty excited about the ‘status quo’, too.
The Infowar site itself is a bit lurid. I enjoy the irony that fringe ideas require flashy animated banner ads - as if plain text wasn’t exciting enough. It’s that very mode of attention-grabbing that undermines sober analysis of issues. We get what we deserve - two sides shouting over each other to be heard.
The article also mentions: “The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress.”
I haven’t been writing a lot of politics: this is still a fairly mundane account of what goes on in my personal life. It’s so boring some days, I don’t even bother to report. But this distrust of citizens is the sort of thing that will radicalize me. Report my activities? I thought that was in the text of the blog. The intention was to report my activities on the site. Of course, I did just say that I omit a lot.
On to Media Mindlessness: I didn’t catch this one on the Internet, I saw the local news hyping the video. Local news is now completely useless. They get fooled all the time - they’re only good for amusement. Check out Timur Bekmambetov Punks the World With Viral Video from Cinematical. I figured it was something like that. A video surfaces of a guy freaking out in an office, and some junior TV news producer spots it. From there it’s a short hop to millions of viewers. They don’t even bother to authenticate anything - that’s the legacy of so many years of entertainment reporting. If you really think about it, your life isn’t substantially different without it. Not only have people been suckered by marketing, but the news can’t even be trusted anymore. My personal reaction is that I can’t trust anything I hear. Which will probably get me killed some day when the news is both true and important.
If only there were some fable about irresponsible boys giving false alarms until they can’t be believed anymore!
Posted in media-studies, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:03:00 GMT
I remember now why the ideas in “The Economics Of Attention” seem so familiar. I’ve read some of it before in David Shenk’s books “Data Smog” and “The End Of Patience”. I just pulled “The End Of Patience” of my shelf and started re-reading it after about ten years. The chapters are all short pieces that appeared elsewhere, although when he was writing, I wasn’t reading a lot of those online sources.
Shenk sounds a cautious note, and for me it resonates. I’m happy to take and use technology that I think is helpful, but not all of it is. In fact, a lot of it is dangerous in subtle ways. A culture of techno-enthusiasm doesn’t stop to consider what might go wrong - even if it does legitimately devote some resources to studying the problem while it goes.
There was a fashion for the type of writing you might impugn as ‘Neo-Luddite’ for a while there. It probably had a lot to do with the advanced age of the people in publishing. As the younger generations gradually take over, that kind of literature is less in vogue. It turns out that I have read copious amounts of it, and I’m not quite old yet.
Shenk strikes out at Television’s thought suppression. He bemoans the Flash and Java web replacing older textual formats. He blames journalism for shirking its duties in an information-rich environment. There’s a section on Microsoft-bashing (that sure didn’t die off in Internet time!). He also takes aim at computerized toys and their potential to replace education with marketing. It’s a free-for-all in there.
I can’t be sure, but in the years since I first read Shenk’s book, I have probably lost a lot of patience. I am at least as distracted as I ever was - if not more so. I don’t know if I could really appreciate what he was saying ten years ago. A lot of that has to do with what I’ve read since, confirming a lot of his ideas.
Posted in books, media-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:32:00 GMT
