Week Fourteen: Barney and Andrejevic

Justified worry or just paranoia? 

The topics of both works this week are proving themselves to be more and more relevant as we become more and more reliant on networking technology, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with some of the conclusions they reach.

Barney, I think, is on the nose about a lot of things, specifically passages like "...the response of those hoping to capitalize on the commercial potential of network technology has been to make the medium behave more like television... ."(pg. 182) There is more content than ever on the web, but in ways it seems more constricted and less free. Barney notes that everything is being divided into channels to deliver pertinent content to receptive audiences while diminishing content that may not be of interest. 

It's happening all over the web, and it's certainly a far cry from an idealistic democratic utopia of media, but perhaps the amount of content necessitates it. There's simply too much on the web for anyone to dive in unfiltered and attempt to find much of worth. The channeling of the net is probably something to remain watchful of in the future, but given the alternative of pure oversaturation and information overload, it might be favorable.

When it comes to Andrejevic, I feel like he supposes a hefty amount of motive and intent on those doing the surveillance that simply might not be there. I don't want to say that we shouldn't be concerned that everything about us is being recorded and tracked online, but it may just be pushing us out of our comfort zone and we venture into unknown territory with all the internet is capable of.

Maybe I'm too naive in not really caring so much about all the data tracking and personalization of ads that is happening. In a lots of areas, I think it's good. I like that netflix can recommend me movies I may like based what else I've watched. I like that Pandora plays songs it thinks I'll enjoy based on my listening habits. I like that amazon attempts to suggest what I might want to buy based on previous searches and purchases.

It ties in with my point about Barney. There's just too much out there to try and slog through it on my own. I don't mind sacrificing a bit of digital privacy to streamline the process (and really, digital privacy still seems a little nebulous to me). Or I could be way off base in assuming that all these monitoring agents are doing it just to make everything more targeted and efficient online, when there's really some underhanded scheme at work to track and label everything about us.

I don't see a reason to worry, but it could be the kind of thing that can't be seen until it's past the point of worry.

Week Thirteen: Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp

Where does it go from here?

A refreshing bout of optimism in this week's readings made for a nice change of pace. It hasn't all been doom-and-gloom so far, but for the most part I feel that the stuff we've read has tended towards bleak. Lurie and Tripp both presented some basic overviews on the web and its relations to politics. The whole feeling I got from them was along the lines of "here's this wonderful new tool that is hardly being utilized to its full potential. We can do wonderful things with this!" 

And we're seeing those wonderful things happen. Traditional means of media are all on the decline, either dying out or adapting themselves for integration with the internet. Not only that, but we're finding the internet to be wonderfully democratic, participatory, open, and accessible. The perfect storm of new media is upon us.

But the best thing from this week's readings was Kelly's "The Web Runs on Love, not Greed." He put it in great perspective in his discussion about the billions of pages and sites on the internet, and how its inventors would have thought those numbers quite impossible to attain in such a short time.

Yet here we are, moving closer and closer to the digital divide every day as the web becomes more and more useful and powerful. But what does it lead to?

I can't help but imagine that with anything but optimism. 5 years ago we were content to wait hours for a song to download, and now we're streaming entire films in high definition on connections that are "average." It's fascinating, and it's only going to improve. I saw a graph the other day of the projected storage capacity of SD cards over the next few years, and it was staggering. They've grown from a few megabytes to several gigabytes in a short time, but projections show that if they continue to develop at their current pace, we'll have SD card capable of holding several terrabytes.

Terrabytes, on something the size of a postage stamp. That's insane.

I believe it was Arthur C. Clarke who said something like, "Any prediction about the future that sounds reasonable in anyway is assuredly incorrect." That's the feeling I got from Kelly's piece, and it's an exciting feeling to have. Wherever media and the internet goes from here, as long as people like Kelly, Lurie, and Tripp are at the helm, it will be good.

Week Twelve

Does Media Really Die?

One problem I had with the Gilder piece, especially in the first half, was his constant insistence that TV is a doomed medium, headed for a sure death at the hands of new technology and broadcast standards. Sure, it's a little unfair to look at how the situation played out 20 years after Gilder wrote the piece, but it's a mentality I just don't understand.

Television today really only resembles television of 20 or 30 years ago in name only. Yet the medium persists. Content delivery shifted from over the air to cable, but the box still remains in every living room in the country. Computers rose, becoming more and more like the telecomputers Gilder wrote of, but the set still sits in the living room. There only functional difference between computer monitors and HDTVs is a tuner and a coax jack, but the big screens have only moved from sitting on a shelf in the living room to being mounted on the walls.

Television hasn't died, it has evolved, and this is becoming true for every form of media. We are far, far past the point of compartmentalized forms of media that become obsolete after certain advancements (although print media may be the last holdout). Rather, a breakthough in one area, such as the development of flat screen HD displays, becomes a breakthrough in every area. 

As the second half of Gilder's piece indicates, even though corporations and governments aren't quite past the idea of killing one form of media in favor of boosting their own, technology certainly is. Natural selection has worked its way into the technological sector in the form of the microchip, and it's becoming readily apparent that any media that chooses to adapt to it will survive for a long time to come.

Media will continue to blend and meld, like TVs and computers becoming nearly indistinguishable from one another, but neither is going away.

Week Ten

Turner and Hooch Hayles: Counter-culture in a Posthuman World

These readings came at a perfect time for me, as I spent a bit of the break reading up on some futurist theories, from the likes of Ray Kurzweil and this fun site. There's a lot of similarities between those and Hayles' discussion on Posthuman cybernetics.

Basically, and this became more apparent as the Hayle text progressed, we're rocketing closer and closer towards a world with little need for human form everyday. Person-to-person interaction is becoming increasingly less needed as digital alternatives to everyday communications and commercial tasks present themselves. I think an argument could already be made that the idea of consciousness no longer represents itself in the brain but in the fingertips as they frantically pound keys to transfer thoughts to the web.

Although pure Posthumanist life in a cyber-world may be more of a technological inevitability than the cyber-fantasy of decades past, let's ignore that for a moment and focus on the present. As the title, and later the text, or Turner's work declares, counter-culture is now cyber-culture. And it makes sense. Counter-cultures tend to be youth-driven and thrive on platforms that tend to go against the norm. The French student revolts of the 60s, for example, that seem to pop up all the time in this course. Using street posters and hand made signs gave the students a unique voice and a feeling of connectedness within their group.

The balance is beginning to tip, but cyberspace has been a welcome home to counter-culture for the last couple decades. One of the great initial possibilities it provided was a voice for anyone to say anything. Given the state of mainstream media at the time of the rise of cyber-culture, this was huge. The movement has only continued to grow and expand, through popular groups of today such as Anonymous and Wikileaks.

But there's the tipping point. If it's popular and the majority of people are getting involved, is it still counter-culture, or just culture in general? What becomes of counter-culture and we move closer and closer towards a Posthuman society?

Hayle touches on the idea of interventions being made to change or halt the disembodiment process. I think that's where future of counter-culture lies. As the general public begins its gradual shift to a home on the digital range, movements may arise about just what it means to be human. Can we still be considered human if we shed our bodies and upload our consciousness, and if so, what do we consider those who opt not to? 

Week Something: Hayek

Rule of Law and the Media?

I'm struggling to see a connection between Hayek's piece and new media. I understand the arguments on a broader political level, and it certainly seems to fit in with other post-Marxist works, but what does it have to do with media? So I'll try to apply it to something I can relate to, which I'm starting to feel like I can only write about: film.

Does our political system provide a Rule of Law for media, specifically film, or is it one of, as Hayek calls it, "moral" arbitrariness? I'd argue most definitely the latter. Our constitution provides freedom of speech and press, and film certainly won a huge battle when it was granted first amendment protection. Yet as it has played out, it's a tenuous freedom of speech.

To shorten a long lesson of film history, a governing body was created a handful of decades ago as film was coming into its own and really beginning to say something. This body, the Motion Picture Association of America, sought to create a set of guidelines by which to approve the content of film. Today, we know these guidelines as ratings: G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17.

So far so good. Seems like a fine start to establishing a Rule of Law for film. Clear rules are being established and enforced in a consistent manner so that the system can become self-governing. Only problem is, the transparency stops at the letter of the rating. There is no defined list of what material constitutes what rating. None at all. The rating for each film is a pure moral judgement call on the part of the ratings board, and it's led to some terrible and puzzling decisions. The whole subject is discussed quite nicely in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

On the surface it's a thin Rule of Law, but in actuality the film industry of America is ruled in a completely arbitrary fashion. Factor in the also arbitrary obscenity laws and freedom of speech suddenly isn't so free. An NC-17 rating is a kiss of death for a film, regardless of the message it contains. Such a rating makes it nearly impossible to distribute or sell.

But is this a bad thing? Is it really so wrong for a moral system to control film? I truly don't know. I certainly agree with the MPAA in making it more difficult for younger audiences to see more mature content. But then there's that arbitrary cutoff of what content is too mature even for mature audiences, and it all falls apart. I don't think a more clearly defined Rule of Law would be good for the industry, but when it's already so steeped in moral judgement how could a new system even begin to steer away from that?

I don't know. Maybe it's impossible at this point. Maybe it's meaningless. Maybe the connection I'm trying to make between Hayek and the MPAA is tenuous at best.

Week Six: Barthes and Focault

What's in a name?

It was interesting to see the general structuralist principles laid out by Barthes applied to different things by Focault. In the same way that Barthes broke down the meaning meanings and different "signifieds" of an image, so did Focault break down a name.

Particularly, Focault was interested in names of authors and what their meaning really becomes. His argument was that author's names are no longer representative of a person, but rather their body of work. For example, the signifier Stephen King does not have the signified of a middle-aged man in Maine, but has the signified of the associated horror and fantasy novels and short stories he has written. 

In thinking about this, I realized that Focault has quite a valid point, and not just when it comes to authors of literature. For myself, at least, when I hear the name of nearly any public figure, my mind immediately goes to what they've created, produced, or are generally known for. I don't hear the name Martin Scorsese and think of a nasally-voiced, bushy-browed New Yorker, I think of Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, etc.

But is anything lost by removing the person from the signified? Focault almost makes it sound noble, as he writes "...the function of an author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society." We make authors larger than life, just through the fact or recognizing them for their work rather than who they are.

Yet the mere act of publishing shows that a person is willing to strip themselves of original identity and be known only for their works. Maybe it's just a vicious cycle at this point, but if an author cares enough about a certain topic or piece they wrote, it seems natural that they would want to spread that message. Should it get to the point of changing the meaning of their name, I would think they would be glad as it almost serves as free advertising for the work they wish to spread.

Week Five: McLuhan

TV: Still Cold?

Throughout the reading, I was quite perplexed by McLuhan's assertion that TV is a cold medium. Admittedly, I have no experience with TV as a medium circa 1964, but I just can't imagine anyone would view it as a cold medium today.

Right off the bat, McLuhan says that film is a hot medium and television cold. He then defines hot and cold, noting the difference to be one of suspending a sense in "high definition" and the level to which they allow participation. Ignoring the obvious joke that modern TV is broadcast in nothing but "high definition," I see no difference between film and television by either standard of his definition.

"Hot media," he writes on page 23, "do not leave so much to be filled in by the audience." Okay, I can follow that. A photograph shows an image in totality: hot. A telephone provides only auditory transmission, often imperfect, while requiring the listener to put a face to a voice: cold. Alright, I'm still with it.

Film merges photography and sound, operating on the persistence of memory at 24 frames per second while simultaneously engrossing the viewer's eardrum: totally hot. Yet TV, functionally the same as film: cold? Lost me.

Going more in-depth into television on pg. 309, McLuhan writes, "TV is a medium which rejects the sharp personality and favors the presentation of processes rather than of products." This is certainly untrue of modern television. We've arrived at a singular term for hosts of talk shows and news programs: Personalities. TV has become hyper-focused on personality, as it's what non-fiction shows live and die by. Steven Colbert, Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, Rachel Maddow, etc etc. all thrive in ratings because of personality. Little care is given to the content of the program, and the focus is entirely on the personality of the host.

And then comes an interesting thought, after a discussion on the differences between film and TV images on pg. 313, McLuhan comes to the conclusion that TV could be improved to match film on a visual perception level, but that it would then no longer be TV but something new entirely.

Perhaps this is where I disagree with McLuhan, as modern film and TV barely resemble film and TV of the 60s. 35mm prints are still quite common, but digital film is on the rise. Digital film, in presentation, is identical to high-definition TV (and interestingly enough, progressive-scan HD operates in a very similar whole-image based technology to 35mm film). As consumer televisions grow in size and home sound systems become more robust, the difference between film and television is closing quite rapidly.

Should McLuhan have written on the state of media today, I don't doubt his opinion on the temperature of film and television would be different. But would film still be hot, and TV cold? Maybe I don't have the best grasp on his terms, but I seem to think he would regard both, especially when considering digital film, as cold. Even working within his terms, I can't see either as anything but unquestionably hot.

Week Four: Shannon, Weaver, and Weiner

Inmachine use of Machines

I found this week's readings quite fascinating. The breakdown of communications in the Shannon and Weaver text was something I had never considered. Communication, to me, had always been a vehicle for conveying information. The question of what made up the vehicle, and what the information it was conveying really amounted to hadn't crossed my mind.

The mathematical deconstruction of communication into small units of information and the process of viewing that information as a measure of freedom of choice seems groundbreaking. It's a bit like taking a step back compared to the other readings we've done. Whereas they are all concerned with meaning and manipulation based upon communication, Shannon and Weaver zoom in and examine the very nature of communication itself.

Weiner, then, comes in and makes a broader point. He agrees quite readily with Shannon and Weaver's thoughts, as he says on pg. 4: "If I am sending the letter e, it gains meaning in part because I have not sent the letter o." The more information contained in any method of communication, the more freedom of choice was available in communicating.

His most vocal point comes on pg. 16, as he states he "...wishes to devote this book to a protest against the inhuman use of human beings... ." To limit the human brain in any way, he feels, is one of the worst things a society can do.

So I begin to wonder, is this not a touch hypocritical when compared to his view on machines? The readings for this week all break communication down to a simple process, in many cases interpretations of electrical impulses. The human brain is only different from any other encoder and decoder in that it operates at ridiculous speeds. 

If a human forced to row a boat as a slave is a terrible crime in Weiner's eyes, is it acceptable to create a machine to do it? Surely the machine could be put to better use, the components it would be made of would be capable of furthering communication had they been put into an encoder or decoder.

Not that I disagree with Weiner's sentiments about limiting the abilities of any human. It just struck me as a little strange, when he spends most of his introduction discussing the possibility of machines replicating human behavior, that he should suddenly exclude them from his great crusade.

Hon 3013 Week 3 - Enzensberger and Habermas

Sports Writing and the Impossibilities of Modern Media Manipulation

Enzensberger makes very interesting and repeated points about the abilities of media to manipulate a society. First among them is that as new media continues to open channels of two-way communication between producer and audience, the possibility of total and complete control of the media vanishes.

In his case he was referring a government's ability to use the media as a tool for manipulation, but it applies to every aspect of society as well. Enzensberger could see the shift coming in a time before the internet, a time when radio was still relevant, and a time when the number of television stations in most areas could be counted on one hand. If his assertion was true then, it is doubly so today.

So let's ignore all the political implications for a moment and examine his claims in a relatively harmless realm: sports writing, specifically baseball. For the majority of baseball's lifespan, information could only be disseminated through newspaper and radio. These are both forms of media that Enzensberger described as "means of distribution" rather than "means of communication." They operate as one-way systems; whatever information they present is all the reader or listener can receive with no way to interact with the producers.

In such a system, manipulation is quite possible. With baseball, it was manipulation without malicious intent but manipulation nonetheless. Sportswriters at major papers were the only voice for the general public when it came to baseball news, and their word was law. Progressive thinkers like Bill James, a founding father of sorts of baseball's statistical revolution, would never be able to find work at as a columnist because their thoughts were so against the prevailing sentiment of the times.

So they were forced to write independently. James self-published his Bill James Baseball Abstract starting in 1977, and in it one could find statistical breakdowns and conclusions about players and the game as a whole that would never appear in a newspaper.

But one could only find them if they knew where to look. James was, in the words of Enzesberger on page 107, "at best an amateur but not a producer." James was coming to find that what the general public thought about baseball wasn't correct, but the general public couldn't know this because of the manipulative distribution structure of the media.

Fast forward to today, a time of new media and no prevailing manipulation. (It is still important to note, as Enzensberge does, that all forms of media are manipulative. It is only when control can be exerted over the media or that all manipulation is directed towards a single end that it becomes problematic.) The new media explosion has made it possible for every kind of opinion on every kind of subject to easily reach the general public, and the general public can just as easily make a response to the producers.

The old baseball mindset of valuing RBIs, scrappy play, and Gold Gloves has mostly been relegated to sports writers for major papers. Bill James and countless others like him now have just as much of a say as they analyze new defensive metrics, evaluating pitching independent of defense, and determine proper values for offensive production.

Bert Blyleven, a major league pitcher from 1970-1992, is a perfect example of the effects of sports writing before and after the new media age. Over the course of his career in nearly 5000 inning pitched, Blyleven proved himself to be worth 90 Wins above Replacement, good for 13th all-time.

But the media didn't know what WAR was while he was a player. They didn't know, or chose not to report on, everything he was doing that set him apart as one of the best pitchers in the history of the game. They didn't say he was bad, but they certainly failed to properly recognize him.

That showed when it came time for Hall of Fame voting for Bert. He first appeared on the ballot in 1998, and any decently informed baseball fan of today would say he should have made it in on the first ballot. Yet he only received 17% of the vote, a far cry from the 75% required for election.

That number hardly rose until 2008, at which point the new media of the internet had established itself. Not only were the opinions of those that participated in new media being heard by the general public, they were heard by traditional sportswriters as well. Blyleven received 62%. 

This year, he was elected with 80% of the vote, finally recognized as an all-time great by sports writers. In a way, as far as baseball writing was concerned, this event signaled the death of media manipulation on the public. Thanks to blogs, twitter, and web-based television, media has become a wonderfully open and useful system.

Hon 3013 Week 2 - Arendt and Benjamin

Mass Culture and Film

As a filmmaker, the first question I ask before starting any project is, "Who is my audience?" Not, "What is the value of this piece?" or, "What does this say about the world I live in?" but, "Who is my audience?" Along every step of the creative process, from conceptualization to finishing the final cuts in editing, consumption of the product is at the forefront of my mind.

This is not to say that I don't consider the other questions, But the nature of the film business in its current state, and really the nature of every entertainment industry, has so conditioned its producers to think of consumption first, content second.

As I read Arendt's essay, Society and Culture, this was all I could think about. While mass society has blurred the class distinctions and afforded someone like myself the opportunity to pursue a career in the arts, it has also brought into question the role and intentions of arts themselves.

While this is only a portion of what Arendt discusses, it is the topic that struck me the most. In particular, I felt the following paragraph on pg. 283 was noteworthy: "The entertainment industry is confronted with gargantuan appetites, and since its wares disappear in consumption, it must constantly offer new commodities. In this predicament, those who produce for the mass media ransack the entire range of past and present culture in the hope of finding suitable material. This material, however, cannot be offered as it is; it must be prepared and altered in order to become entertaining; it cannot be consumed as is."

Even though it was written in the 1960s, the message perfectly describes the current state of the film industry. Film is but a facet of culture, yet the audiences are just as hungry as the audiences of literature, music, photography, art, etc. As mass society grows so does the hunger for more, more, more mass culture. New films are kept in theaters for mere weeks instead of months as they were in the past, and the turnaround between theatrical and home release has shrunk to nearly nothing.

From this constant desire for more, the film industry has turned to the second part of Arendt's quote. It seems the vast majority of films released these days are remakes or reboots, each reimagined in some way to repackage the same product to resell to the same customers.

The truly visionary filmmakers, those that put content and meaning before consumption, find there is scarcely room for their work in the mainstream system. Their films, if they can find investors willing to fund and distributors willing to release a less consumable product, are relegated to art house theaters and limited audiences.

But perhaps this is not a bad thing. While the place of the producer, the intellectual, as Arendt states, may be one where the "sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to make them palatable to those who want to be entertained...," there are still those that make art for arts sake.

So while culture may have dubbed the Michael Bays and McGs of the world "intellectuals," there is still room for inspiring and fresh material. Society transforming into mass society, in turn transforming culture into mass culture, has made the intellectual more of an intellectual of, and maybe just as importantly, for the proletariat.

edit: Published before discussing Benjamin. His essay was written in 1934, a time in which film was just beginning to reach its potential as an art form and vehicle of culture. While he does not discuss film in depth the way he does literature or theater, a point he makes about good intellectuals in literature applies to film as well.

He states that for a medium to flourish and remain relevant to a culture, it must constantly redefine itself, building upon the successes and improving upon the failures of past work. He exemplifies this by comparing opera and epic theater. Opera, he wrote, had done little in the way of evolving, and was becoming stale in culture. Epic theater, on the other hand, imported techniques from film and radio to give the viewer an entirely new experience, one that kept it important to culture.

A similar trend is currently presenting itself in film. The revitalization of 3D has taken over almost every current release. In some cases, 3D (specifically every film converted to 3D in post-production) is just another means of making the product more consumable. In others (films shot and designed around 3D, such as Avatar or Tron: Legacy), 3D is being employed as a tool to further the experience.

While 3D has yet to really be properly explored as the next step in filmmaking, the possibilities exist, and it may bring new relevance to a media mired in the drive for consumption.

True Grit

The Coen Brothers. Jeff Bridges. A western. What more could I want?

A good ending?

Maybe I had hyped the film too much. The trailer had me convinced. True Grit would be the one, the first great western since Eastwood shut the door with Unforgiven in 1992.  Here were Joel and Ethan Coen, come to breathe fresh life into a long irrelevant genre. Here was The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, ready to abide on the open range. Here was newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, garnering rave review after rave review as the true star of the film.

And there I was, sitting in the theater, thoroughly underwhelmed.

I must take care to avoid being overly negative, because I liked True Grit. I really did. Just not as much I as had hoped to. The strengths of the film far outweigh the weaknesses, but the timing of the few mistakes only serve to call the whole thing into question.

The acting was top-notch. There's nothing left to say about Bridge's turn as Rooster Cogburn that hasn't already been said; it truly is the role of his life. Matt Damon is given relatively little screentime to shine as Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, but shine he does. Josh Brolin, in what amounts to little more than a cameo, creates a layered and troubled villain.

And of course, Steinfeld, as young Mattie Ross, earned all the praise she had been given. She single-handedly carries the first act of the film with such a precocious guile. No small feat, considering her most well-known work to date was the made-for-TV Summer Camp. She will  at least be nominated for, and should outright win, an Oscar for her performance.

The dialogue was marvelous. Gone was the typical stilted western drawl, in its place an almost medieval court-like reverence for language. Even unintelligent characters spoke with grace and eloquence that the words became surreal, giving the film a captivating and easily listenable pace.

The cinematography was breathtaking. But that's a given, it's a Coen Brothers film after all. Roger Deakins, long-time collaborator with the Coens, has a wonderful way of matching the look of the film to the mindsets of the characters. From the cold, unforgiving, snowy wastes of Fargo to the claustrophobic warmth of suburbia in A Serious Man, Deakins has proven his talent. He brought all of it to True Grit, creating a lush and hostile portrait of Indian Territory as Mattie and Rooster hunt their prey.

My issue was with the script, specifically, the ending. What was a well-crafted journey for Mattie, one of personal maturity and independence, was dashed after the action had seemingly been resolved. Rooster rode heroic ("Fill your hand you son of a bitch!" - glad they kept this line), LaBouef lived up to his big talk, and Mattie proved she was a woman true to her word. And then it ended. Lights up, everyone clapped, film of the year.

Oh wait. No, no it didn't end. For reasons that still baffle me, the film pressed on past its logical point of conclusion. Mattie fell in that hole, and with her fell my praise. Rarely is two hours worth of characterization and development cast aside as fast as it was in True Grit. In that single moment and the scenes that followed afterwards, the entirety of the film was undone. Mattie was once again weak and worthless without the help of others (in this case, most importantly, the help of a man).

It all just felt so pointless after that. An even more meaningless epilogue attempted to rectify this, but the damage had been done. I left the theater with a bad taste in my mouth, wanting desperately to say I loved it but finding myself unable.

True Grit situates itself firmly in the middle tier of Coen Brothers films. Not as great as the great, but not bad either. As far as westerns go, it fits in nicely with every recent attempt at the genre - flawed, and a far cry from definitive.