This is not a nostalgic post, nor is it an attempt to judge the present on the standards of the past. And I’m not trying to tell any kids to get off my lawn.

Rather it just struck me that there’s a pretty big shift in the media ecosystem. Actually, this isn’t news to anyone who is paying even marginal attention, but what came to me today is a crystallization of a certain aspect of that change: when I was a kid, consumption was simultaneous and timely, while feedback was variable and subject to time-lag. Today, media consumption is variable and subject to time-lag, while feedback is more simultaneous and timely. The timetables for consumption & feedback have swapped places.

Case in point: Costas Now. Tuesday night, April 29, a live HBO show featured some roundtable discussions about sports & various media. The segment on the internet featured Deadspin’s Will Leitch and “serious sportswriter” Buzz Bissinger, who proceeded to rant and rave about how blogging will destroy civilization in a way that needs to be seen to be believed. In the old media landscape (overlooking the fact that the content was all about the new media landscape), the live broadcast would have been consumed simultaneously around the country by whomever was interested, and millions of other people with nothing else to watch. Any reaction to it would have filtered out slowly - perhaps a few newspapers would mention it the next day, maybe it would generate some watercooler buzz that resulted in follow-up interviews with the participants, and if it really hit, magazines would catch on to make it a relevant slow-boiling story for a few weeks. While millions would have seen it, only those who caught it live would have been able to experience the segment beyond a few clips that might have been rebroadcast if TV news did a story on the topic.

In the digital world, the reactions are fast-paced and furious. Within a few days, excellent commentaries were posted on Deadspin, the great Joe Posnanski, the also great Fire Joe Morgan, and the still great King Kaufman. These are simply from the sports blogs I read regularly, but Technorati points to hundreds of posts in the last five days. I’ve yet to see any trying to defend Bissinger.

But more interestingly for me, the experience of viewing is much less compressed - I doubt many people watched the show live, as HBO is a niche premium channel reaching a small portion of the television audience. Additionally, most sports fans were more likely to be watching one of the many NBA or NHL playoff games, an MLB game, or anything else besides a bunch of sports media folks navel gazing. But the segment has been seen by many online, as the feedback frames the viewing in an accelerated loop. Personally, I’d TiVoed the show (as I do like to watch media navel gazing), but only finally got a chance to watch it last night, thinking I might have something meaningful to say about the issues it raises. But by the time I watched it, everything has been said - except perhaps for a long commentary about what this instance tells us about the timing of new media!

This cycle ties into concerns about spoilers, as the ability to watch a show via an online, DVR or DVD delay for convenience raises the chance of stumbling across a revelation in an RSS feed or unlikely website. For instance, we missed the first season of Friday Night Lights (based on a book by noted blog-hater Buzz Bissinger), but are catching up on Universal HD via our DVR. We’re heading toward the end of the first season now, but I’ve already seen accounts about a major plotline from season 2, coloring my experience of the first season.

Today, we have much more freedom to watch on our own timetable, and many more opportunities to make our thoughts, opinions, and commentary public than in the classic network era - but the timetable for online reactions seems to be moving much faster than the more relaxed pace of viewing on DVD or DVRs. Perhaps the next killer app for the internet will be a really nuanced filter that allows you to stipulate what episodes of your shows you’ve seen, and hide revelations and commentary further on in the narrative. Or even more impressive would be a way to publish backwards to the web retrospectively, allowing you to post commentary to your blog about programs you haven’t gotten around to watching yet. Let me know if anyone comes up with Firefox plugins like that…

All of this is just a long way of saying this: the main reason this site has been distinctly more Not Quite TV than Just TV lately, is that my television consumption has been lagging in both quantity and timeliness.

I’ll try to do better.

Over the past week or so, the Middlebury College campus has been abuzz about the new site Middlebury Confessional. The site is part of a chain of Confessional sites that started at my alma mater, Oberlin College - this article outlines some of the controversies surrounding other incarnations of the sites. I’m quite interested in this phenomenon as an example of what new media forms can offer, and the downsides of such models as well.

The basic idea of the site is to create an anonymous board to post thoughts and questions that you wouldn’t want to be tied to your name. In some ways it mirrors Post Secret, although the posts are rarely as artful or heartfelt. More importantly, each post starts a discussion thread on that topic, leading to a string of anonymous comments. Topics range from the emotionally serious (confessions of closeted homosexuality, experiences of being raped and abused, lamentations of stress and depression) to the practical (good/bad faculty, politics, advice on sticky situations) to the lewd (every sexual topic you can imagine, and some you can’t) to the defamatory (hating on minorities, rich kids, poor kids, athletes, musicians, etc.). Not surprisingly, the conversations have drifted from the serious to the lewd and hateful over the course of the site’s short existence.

To call it completely anonymous is a bit misleading. If you click on the link to the site and are not on the Middlebury College campus, you will discover how it is not an open community - to access the site, you either need to be on a Middlebury IP address or need to get an authorization code for your browser delivered to a middlebury.edu email address. So immediately the site is linked to a physical place and affiliation, a rarity for the web. But while the site requires a physical or email link to the institution, that is the only explicit marker of user identity - each posting and comment is anonymous by design. So while everything posted is specifically anonymous, every poster is the member of a fairly small community. And that matters intensely - as you walk around campus, you’re left to wonder which one of these people might have posted what. And it’s certainly changed my perceptions about the student body.

It’s interesting to read the site’s explicit goals and terms of use, and compare it to how it’s being used. From the Terms of Use:

Please try to maintain some semblance of dignity and intelligence when posting. Think about whether or not what you have to say is interesting, useful, and/or kind. Confessions and comments that are personal attacks, blatantly mean, obscene, rude, untrue, have been reported as inappropriate, and/or are in violation of these terms are subject to deletion at our discretion. Do not pose as someone else. MIDDLEBURY Confessional is a community based project and we are trying to echo the MIDDLEBURY College community. Let’s be accepting, open minded, and kind to one another. Everyone on this site is your peer, they are people you go to class with, people you dine and even go to the bathroom with. Treat the confessional as a public space. Please, be respectful.

From the actual site: a thread on why financial aid students ruin Middlebury; threads about possibly gay athletes that savage both athletes and gays/lesbians; threads about hottest students or body parts in any possible category; and a thread that starts “Sometimes, at parties, I hit on ugly chicks. To mock them.” Let’s just say that browsing the site does not paint the most flattering picture of Middlebury students.

So there’s been a lot of talk about what to do about this site, both among students and the administration (as well as on the site itself) - an interesting discussion emerged on the blog for my Media Technology course. The possibilities for shutting it down are limited and unlikely - a firewall blocking access to the site, forcing the owner to remove Middlebury from the URL, appealing to the owner to close shop. Even if any of these were tried, it could easily reemerge in another form, and I’m doubtful that the administration would want to take such forceful measures as to squash an outlet for speech explicitly.

My own take is that we need to put the site in perspective. Like any other medium, it follows Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of its content is crap. But there are important functions being served as an outlet for students to say the unsayable, ask for help and seek solace in a group. The danger is that the site devolves into such an antagonistic place that people will be less likely to actually confess for fear of mockery, even if anonymous. There’s a good chance that once people get the juvenalia out of their systems, the more productive uses will dominate - but there’s also a chance that the site’s reputation will be exclusively as the place for raunch, flaming, and pranks, driving away any serious uses.

There are moderation tools on the site - you can report any post or comment as inappropriate, sending a message to the site owner to be deleted. But there are dozens of threads that violate the terms of use that have been up for days, so clearly the self-policing is not working on the reporting and/or administration end. I’ve reported some posts that I found offensive and inappropriate, but they’ve not been removed. And since the site is hosted outside of the Middlebury community, there seems to be little incentive for the owners to take an active moderating role.

Here’s a modest proposal: a group of Middlebury students who believe in the positive potential of the site could adopt it, taking a more active moderating role and providing more accountability to the community. They could set local norms of participation that would encourage productive dialog, discourage naming names and flaming, and model the way that an anonymous web forum does provide a needed outlet for many members of the community. I imagine the administration could do a similar ownership claim, but I would be that what the institution feels is productive and appropriate wouldn’t fit the students’ own sensibility, and it would fracture the bottom-up possibilities enabled by such web projects.

So what do students think? Is anyone willing to take over managing the site to make it a more productive and community-based outlet? Or is it just more fun to let it continue down the path of raunchy excess that makes Middlebury appear to be a far less accepting and thoughtful place than I believe it to be? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts…

One of the things I’ve found myself doing more and more lately is talking to junior faculty and new PhDs about the job market and career options. I enjoy such conversations, mostly because it allows me to vicariously experience the exciting possibilities tied to starting a career, with none of the attached uncertainties and risks! I also like to highlight how rewarding and exciting a career at a liberal arts college like Middlebury can be, explaining why my own move within the tenure track from an up-and-coming R1 institution with an emerging PhD program, to Middlebury was not a step-down.

This article by Kristen Ghodsee from the Chronicle does a nice job of exploring many of the opportunities and possibilities of being an active researcher at a liberal arts college, focusing on Bowdoin. One point she mentions but needs much more emphasis is that the picture she paints is exclusive to only the most exclusive schools - Middlebury is in the top tier along with Bowdoin and the other colleges she mentions, yet we lack a number of the benefits she cites. I know people at second-tier liberal arts colleges whose experiences more closely mimic the myth of liberal arts colleges as “academic death” that her article debunks. (However, I’m not sure that being at a lower-tier university would be any better either, based on the reports from friends at such institutions.) So if you’re on the job market, be sure to judge an institution by its explicit terms and features, not its reputation or place in rankings.

As another newly tenured liberal arts professor, I want to add a few points that Ghodsee doesn’t mention or give enough emphasis, with the caveat that these apply to my own experiences at Middlebury, certainly not to all liberal arts colleges - read more below the fold. Continue reading ‘Being a Researcher at a Liberal Arts College’

In honor of TV Turn-Off Week, I wanted to link to my dissenting comments from last year for any newer readers - my opinions haven’t changed, so I’ll be dutifully watching!

Following up my previous post sharing my students’ projects in my Media Technology course, the second assignment was to create a remix video that in some way offered a critical examination of media, posting it to YouTube to potentially generate some feedback from people who stumble across it. One of my pet peeves about teaching is that often you get wonderful student work that is, by design, written for an audience of one, and has no lingering presence beyond the semester. By asking students to blog, share, and otherwise publish their work, it both raises the bar for their own sense of engaging a community with their ideas, as well as offers an opportunity for faculty to publicize their excellent work. Hence this blog, sharing a smattering of student work for your viewing pleasure.

One of the models for remix videos I share with my students is the political collage that recuts political speeches to offer subversive messages - a classic from the 1980s is the Reagans’ pro-drug message, and a more recent one is remixed Bush State of the Union speeches. George and Stephen followed this prototype to remix a Rupert Murdoch interview - I like how the form of the remix becomes increasingly odd and uncertain, with stutters and flaws suggesting a breakdown of the media machine:

Mica and Ernest took an experimental approach by playing with the possibilities of using the time-based control of video text to highlight how messages can be manipulated and controlled, focusing on multiple visions of Mica’s home country of Argentina. Be sure to watch through to the end for the payoff:

Another subgenre of remix video we watched was the parody trailer, especially the idea of shifting genres (like the classic Shining remix). Derek and Jessie took that approach with Independence, although they note that their goal was “to highlight the signifiers of romantic comedy under the frivolity that Independence Day seems to exhibit as a sci-fi/action genre film.”

Finally, Ross and Thompson take the logic of the trailer, and make a trailer for media convergence itself:

As always, comments are welcome, and feel free to poach this assignment for your own pedagogical purposes.

Be sure to read this excellent bit of investigative reporting in today’s New York Times by David Barstow. It lays out in painful detail the way that the Pentagon created and nurtured a web of “independent” war analysts to serve as talking heads on TV news for the past 6 years, and how nearly all of them are employed by military contractors and other defense-related businesses. Combined with the essential Bill Moyers documentary Buying the War, these reports do a lot to explain how an aggressive administration-sponsored PR campaign combined with a timid and unquestioning commercial media enabled our current fiasco of a war.

The biggest gap in Barstow’s article is an explanation for why the media allows its “experts” to hold forth unchecked, whether due to conflicts of interest, ethical lapses, or demonstrated ineptitude for actually displaying expertise. The end of the article tries to address this, but the networks stonewall Barstow in a range of ways, from ABC saying it’s the responsibility of analysts to report their own conflicts of interest, to Fox’s outright refusal to participate in the article. Of course looking too closely at these issues would force the Times to justify why it publishes its own discredited “expert,” William Kristol, despite nearly every claim he’s made for the last 7 years having been proven wrong.

One of the chief claims you hear from Republican candidates is that they’ll run the government like a CEO, taking lessons from corporate America to cut through government inefficiency - Bush certainly ran in part on his business-background, as an MBA rather than a lawyer or politician (ignoring the fact that every business he’d run had failed). Clearly one of the chief lessons that this “government as a business” mantra has brought to Washington is to embrace the PR industry’s dubious record of manipulated news and fraudulent expertise.

274 days and counting…

Welcome to anyone finding this blog from NPR, where I was just interviewed about American Idol. While I thought the story they put together was pretty good, especially in interviewing a range of fans of the show, I’m usually struck by how the soundbites producers pull out of my mouth rarely convey the context of what I was trying to say. But since I have my own platform here, I might as well clarify for myself.

One of the quotes you can hear me say involves my claim that the appeal of American Idol boils down to romantic attraction and “teenybopper swooning in front of a pop star.” Yes, I said that, but in the context of the multiple appeals of the show - the key quote was that AI offers “something for everyone,” with the possibility of teenybopper swooning, alongside the pleasure of watching people humiliate themselves early in the audition process, alongside the competitive thrill of any well-staged contest, alongside the nostalgia for remaking classic pop songs from past decades, etc. So I wasn’t claiming that everyone who watches the show is a swoony teenybopper - and I wasn’t trying to say that swooning was a shallow or problematic pleasure, or any less legit than people who focus on singing talent or musical ability.

Another quote refers to the idea that the show offers opportunity for “anyone to rise up and be the next pop star - that’s the American dream.” I then went on to talk about how good the show is in creating that myth of the land of opportunity, and that it is a myth, not actuality. Of course, that more critical reflection didn’t soundbite well. So it sounds like I’m promoting American Idol as a bit more utopian than I really did.

I guess the lesson is to always embed caveats and clarifications mid-sentence, creating challenges for producers looking for snappy quips - and that the next time Robert Thompson says something that sounds too simplistic, there’s a decent chance that complexity was pared down in post-production.

Another unfortunate gap between blogging. Let’s just say that March did not go out like a lamb, with numerous personal and professional traumas, hiccups & hurdles causing stress and eating away time.

I’ve been meaning to post some reflections on my Media Technology & Cultural Change course for awhile, as my students this semester have been doing some excellent & innovative work. So here’s the first in a series of posts discussing & presenting student projects. The basic hook of the course is that we treat new media both as an object of study and means of expression - every assignment is a “meta-media object” that uses a form beyond the printed essay to offer critical arguments about media.

In the past the results have been hit-or-miss, with many students having trouble thinking outside the margins of the paper they’ve been trained to compose for years. Last year’s projects were a giant step forward, in large part due to my collaborative teaching with Joe Antonioli to provide technological training, guidance, and mentorship. This year, the projects have been consistently even stronger, as students seem much more organically comfortable with new media environments - or perhaps the class roster was just more consistently geek-heavy (with geek being used as affectionately and self-inclusively as possible). Plus the choice to require collaboration on projects has really helped, both in teaching collaborative skills and raising the quality of the work.

The first assignment was to create an audio “podcast” (although not technically an RSS-fed series, but a stand-alone mp3) that offers some critical analysis of digital audio. The results were quite creative and interesting, spanning a wide array of tones - some people did more essayistic analysis, others used more experimental and parodic strategies to explore the dynamics of audio. Some of the best examples for your listening pleasure follow beneath the fold.

Continue reading ‘Teaching Technology: Audio’

One of my favorite bloggers is Joe Posnanski, a brilliant Kansas City sports writer whose posts are entertainly digressive ramblings inspired by David Foster Wallace as much as Peter Gammons. Recently he launched a second blog, Favorable Ratings - inspired by Buck O’Neil, the late Negro League legend whom Poz wrote about in his book The Soul of Baseball, and the question of what would Buck have made of today’s Presidential race. Poz thinks Buck would have loved things about all three remaining candidates, and would have only had positive thoughts about how they each inspired him. In this spirit, Poz asked his readers to email him a short essay focusing on a positive and inspiring aspect of one candidate, creating “the most naive political blog on the internet.”

I sent him the following, and don’t know if it will make it onto his site, so I’ll share it here as well. The sentiments will be familiar to the readers of this blog, but perhaps the articulation will provoke discussion:

The Taste of Obama

One of my favorite quotes is from Nick Hornby’s brilliant novel (and the excellent film adaption) High Fidelity: “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” Like much of Hornby’s work, we’re supposed to read this quote as both an indication of the hero’s emotional shallowness, and as inherently true. Taste matters - what you like helps define what you are like.

And thus my support for Barack Obama stems from the many ways that I respect his personal accomplishments and intellect, agree with most of his policy proposals, and embrace the ethic of his campaign - but at the gut level, I return to one bit of trivia: I want Obama to be my President because his favorite television show is The Wire.

Obama’s taste speaks a lot to his character. Just the fact that he would publicly proclaim admiration for such an unpopular and marginal program demonstrates courage - no focus group would ever suggest that pledging allegiance to such a show would be a prudent move. The Wire is a grim program shining a light onto issues and people that television never highlights, except as passing mentions in local news stories itemizing inner city casualties. For a candidate who is running on a ticket of hope and idealism, being a fan of a bleak portrait of urban decay shows a level of complexity and understanding that, to me, says his message is not “just words,” but an optimistic outlook grounded in a pragmatic realism.

Moreover, I just love the idea of a President having spent meaningful time in The Wire’s version of urban America. The corruption of today’s political system is not that lobbyists buy votes from politicians - rather, they buy access to spending time with politicians. The more time you spend with a particular group of people, the more your outlook and frame of reference begins to resemble theirs. I am reassured by the prospect of a President having spent 60 hours in The Wire’s Baltimore, connected to the experiences and emotions of its characters and aware of the structural challenges they face. When Obama is facing decisions on trade policies, perhaps his mind will flash on Frank Sobotka making deals with drug dealers to save his dockworker union. When tempted by politically easy “tough on crime” legislation, perhaps he’ll think of how such policies might impact the real-life versions of Bubbles, Dukie, and D’Angelo.

It would be too much to ask that a President spends real time getting to know and listening to the homeless and the hopeless, all victims of American excesses - but it is reassuring to think that he has spent quality time in a fictional world where he cares about the human costs of the policies he’ll be making. Hopefully in this case, what he likes shapes what he is like, both as a man and as a President.

Endings are hard. One of the most unusual things about American television is that success equals an endlessly deferred ending, an aspect I’ve previously discussed as the “infinity model” of storytelling. In  other countries, most shows have a limited term with a clear understanding that a show ending is an important part of its run. But in the U.S., most shows keep going until the ratings erode or the producers pull the plug. One of the many things to love about The Wire is that the producers had a finite scope in mind, and that HBO allowed it to play out despite weak ratings (not that HBO cares about ratings per se).

So few series are allowed to end as designed, with either pre-mature cancellations, an endless stretching out for bigger paydays, or no real creative rationales for an ending at all. Given the rise of narrative complexity that I’m studying, endings play a crucial role in reimagining how television can tell stories. I’ve written about my disappointment with The Sopranos ending, and so I’m happy to report that The Wire paid off the conclusion with much more satisfaction. I’ve been both too busy to blog about it, and wanted to let it sink in more before writing it up. Details below the fold.

Continue reading ‘Cutting the Wire’

I’ve been swamped with tasks that have prevented me from blogging what I’ve wanted to talk about - the finale of The Wire (which was utterly satisfying, of course), the brief run of Breaking Bad (in which Bryan Cranston becomes the most compelling actor on TV), some post-SCMS thoughts - but I read an interesting exchange I couldn’t resist exploring a bit tonight.

My good friend Michael Newman got into a bit of a scuffle with Vulture, the New York Magazine entertainment blog. Vulture has been blogging with spoiling headlines for TV shows, especially The Wire. Mike ripped them for that. Vulture laid out a manifesto proclaiming that TV shows can be discussed openly shortly after airing, and a chart outlining the statute of limitations for spoiling across media. Mike schooled them further, highlighting how Vulture is not adapting to the realities of TV-as-file, as they’re stuck in TV-as-flow. Vulture responded by mocking Mike and his high-falutingness, which also yielded an interesting debate in the comments thread, mostly among Vulture writers.

I’m not too invested in who is right or wrong in this debate - although I agree with Mike and a number of the Vulture writers in the comments that spoiling in an article headline is simply wrong, with no upside beyond agitating readers. My own interest in spoilers is more of a meta-interest, looking at why people try to consume them (as covered in this essay on Lost spoiler fans), not the ontology of spoilerdom itself.

But what I find particularly interesting in this exchange is the relative perception between the journalists on Vulture and Mike as academic - both seem to see the other side as more of an empowered authority than themselves. The Vulture journalists regard Mike as an elite academic, laying down ‘power-knowledge’ from on high. Mike sees the Vultures as part of a media industrial elite, monetizing eyeballs and fighting for an old-media paradigm. It’s a battle of the underdogs, each claiming less power than their foes.
Being a pop culture academic is an odd hybrid - we are certainly imbued by the power of the academy to profess and pontificate with a degree of authority (and compensated adequately for doing it). Yet we rarely have the ability to connect with either the creators of the works about which we claim expertise or the bulk of viewers who comprise a medium’s audience, especially when compared with entertainment journalists who have broad access and readership. I’ve been reading the coverage of The Wire’s with both admiration of the many thoughtful and insightful writers covering the TV beat, and jealousy of the access that journalists can get to talk with David Simon and other cast & crew. I want to connect with television creators, but find the gulf between academy and industry too wide to easily cross. And yet these same journalists often call us academics to offer an “expert” quote on the broader historical or social significance of television. So who is the elite here? And what’s the role of the academic who reaches out to a broader audience, not from the lofty heights of the university but via the generic frame of a WordPress or Blogger site? Who has the power-knowledge here?

I’m preparing to head down to Philly tomorrow for the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference. I’ll try to report a bit from the road, but definitely if you read JustTV and go to SCMS, be sure to say hi. A faithful reader came to my presentation at Pomona on Saturday, and it was nice to see the connection between the blog and face-to-face pay-off.

(Speaking of the blog, I always enjoy monitoring what incoming searches are bringing people here. And thus was quite amused to discover that Googling “hockassin” gives this post as the #1 result!)

I returned from Pomona on Sunday in time to catch the penultimate episode of The Wire. Inspired by Shaun Huston’s post, I’ve got some reactions and predictions for the finale beneath the fold.

Continue reading ‘The Wire: Waiting for the end’

Just a note that I’m heading for a quick cross-country jaunt to present at the Claremont Colleges Media in Transition Conference on Saturday. If you’re in the LA area and want to hear some smart people talk about digital media - and also hear my presentation - I believe the conference is free & open to the public.

[And an early morning update - it was -11 degrees when I left my house this morning. California here I come!]

Check out this great video from Slate highlighting the (quite intentional) parallels between Barack Obama and The West Wing’s Matt Santos. I hope the result is the same, although I can’t imagine that the parallel will persist, with Obama choosing Leon Panetta as running mate!

Nothing to say that’s not spoilery, so move beyond the fold at your own risk if you haven’t seen the first 8 episodes of season 5 of The Wire.

Continue reading ‘The Wire and the Damage Done’