Here’s the third entry in my series of posts highlighting my students’ work from my Media Technology course. One key medium that we studied was videogames, and it has been a challenge to think about how to create a project that allows students to make media criticism using videogame technology - if I had the skills and time, we’d teach students how to design games and have them build a game that offers a critical perspective on gaming. But that’s out of my league, and the class would have be entirely focused on that project throughout the semester.

So instead we set-up a game lab in the library, complete with XBox 360, PS2, Wii, and gaming PC, all wired into video recorders so they could capture gameplay footage easily. The assignment was to create a video that offers a critical analysis on gaming in some form, a mode of analytical machinima. One interesting insight is that the most rewarding projects all employed a comparative approach between games or comparing the virtual to the real - I think that highlights one of the most positive potentials for this genre of video-delivered videogame criticism, as the comparative visuals and modes of engagement can be quite striking. The best-of results are beneath the fold:

Although the assignment did not require any use of video cameras, Thompson and Mica took a big leap by creating a full-fledged music video about the game Rock Band. Thompson is an accomplished musician, playing every instrument on this original song, while Mica put her editing (and virtual musician) chops to the test. I’d love to see this clip go viral!

Stephen and Melissa used a more explicitly analytical rhetoric in their video, comparing the way that both The Sims and GTA: San Andreas ask you to fashion and tend for an avatar, to quite differing results:

George & Kyle do a similar comparative project focusing on driving games, through a contrast between Mario Kart and Forza Motorsports 2 that highlight our differing expectations of visuals and interface within the seemingly narrow genre:

Finally, Derek & Brian explore sports games and the elusive concept of fun, through a video that embraces the idea of fun in a way that most academic papers cannot:

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.

- Liberal arts colleges can have schedules amenable to research. Many people I know at state universities need to teach over the summer to supplement mediocre salaries or to fulfill unspoken departmental obligations. At Middlebury, there’s no opportunity for summer teaching (at least in my discipline) and no financial need, making the summer a research-centered block of time.

Additionally many liberal arts colleges have unusual scheduling systems like Middlebury’s Winter Term, where students take a single course or project for the entire month of January. At Middlebury, most faculty teach Winter Term every other year - the years you’re on, it’s a brutal marathon, but when you’re off, you have 2 straight months out of the classroom, almost a mini-summer (without the distractions of sunshine and family vacations). At Middlebury at least, this doesn’t translate into a longer academic year, as semesters are 12 weeks long, making the entire year a standard 28 weeks. Very reasonable and amenable to concentrated research opportunities.

- Advising graduate students is not all that its cracked up to be. Many faculty at top research institutions point to the close mentorship of grad students as hugely rewarding, the prize of self-regeneration that is bestowed upon a successful academic. But for every fabulous budding scholar that reinvigorates her advisor, there are more problematic cases of writers’ block, laziness, or otherwise unrealized promise. And add in the frustration of investing years into someone’s growth only to end up underemployed or disenchanted by the academic system, and the departmental politics often involved in advising, and the sheer time that advising a dissertation can take that’s not counted in the on-paper teaching loads, and so on. I think unless you’re leading a small, highly selective graduate program without internal strife and a perfect placement record - or really wanted to be a therapist instead of a professor - the joys of graduate mentorship are typically offset by its discontents.

And there are still great opportunities for mentoring at a place like Middlebury. I’ve worked with brilliant undergrads to write excellent theses and point them on a path toward further study. I’d like to think that my mentoring will be more significant in the long-term for more students that I would have in a graduate program, but even if it’s not quantitatively more valued, I take pride in those students who clearly made choices inspired by our collaborations. And I love receiving the random emails from old students who stumble across my name and are moved to say that they still occasionally think about something they learned in my class - while that might happen at large universities, at least at Middlebury I also have a good chance of remembering them as well.

- The junior/senior faculty splits are not as pronounced. Obviously this differs by institution, but I’ve found that the phenomenon of dumping the crap work on junior faculty is less common at liberal arts colleges than universities. As the Ghodsee article mentions, “service teaching” is less common at smaller schools with more flexible curricula, and I’ve found that the load or this type of work is fairly balanced within a program. While the general service expectations at a school like Middlebury are higher than universities, we do a pretty good job insulating junior faculty from onerous committee work. I’ve done more service in my four months since tenure than my four years here pre-tenure!

And at Middlebury, governance is not tied to seniority that much - most departments treat their untenured colleagues as equal voices in decisions (aside from the tenure process, of course), and all faculty have equal votes in faculty elections and meetings, whether tenured, tenure-track, or term-appointed. From what I hear at some universities, senior faculty often treat juniors like their employees, inferiors, lackeys, or producers of raw materials to poach, rather than equals at different stages in a career. Obviously there are exceptions at every institution, but the vast majority of faculty here treat others respectfully regardless of rank, and it’s much common to try to protect the untenured rather than piling it on.

- Lower key academic politics. Again, experiences vary by institution and discipline, but graduate programs tend to be invested in battling as a way of life - fights over theories, over resources, over titles, over students, over parking. At a liberal arts college, the stakes are lower (I guess parking squabbles are a universal), as we all know that what our department does will not “shape the field” in any meaningful way. Plus we all must be generalists to enough of a degree that we have to accept some plurality of approach and topic in the classroom, and hopefully that extends in attitudes toward other people’s research. Since most people at such colleges are the only ones who work in their particular field, there’s little of the intellectual infighting that I’ve witnessed in larger departments - I’m the only person here who does media studies, and my colleagues are content to let me do whatever I want to do in that field.

Even when fights get nasty - and a few years ago, one of my departments was involved in the nastiest academic battle anyone at Middlebury can remember - most people try to insulate the junior faculty members from the battlefield. We’re all in such a small community and ultimately there are few rewards and prizes to be gained from “winning” such battles, so usually civility and respect trumps drama and discord in the end. Usually.

- Potential for more experimentation. Obviously experimenting in the classroom is encouraged and rewarded at schools like Middlebury, but I think research that follows atypical paths can find more fertile ground here. Because ultimately nobody else at a college this size keeps up in my field, I am able to chart my own path and define my research and publication trajectory, not needing to mirror someone else’s choice in presses, journals, or the like. In my tenure review, my external reviewers praised my work in non-traditional publication venues, like blogging and online journals, and there was (seemingly) no resistance to that internally (or at least none that mattered in the final decision). Things might have been different if I hadn’t also published a book and refereed print journal articles, but the personal scale at small colleges provides much more opportunity for a candidate to self-define their own research and for the administration to treat each case as unique, rather than measuring everyone with identical scales of quantity and rigid tiers of presses and journals.

- More honesty about what we do. In the end, the thing that matters the most for me is that I feel that my institution’s expectations for what I do match my own priorities of how I want to spend my time. One of my greatest pet peeves is when faculty refer to their research as “my work” (as in “I’m glad the semester is over so that I have time for my work“) - our work is in the classroom as well as in the library/lab/office. I create great synergies between my teaching and research that are rewarding and rewarded in both facets of my career, and neither could thrive without the other. I became a professor not because I loved research as the abstract process of discovering new knowledge, but because I love to share my ideas - whether its in the classroom or the conference panel, the book or the blog.

My greatest frustration with large universities is that teaching is seen as a pull away from “productivity,” rather than a feeder for ideas and intellectual energy. While I gripe about too much grading or too many demands on my time in the semester, I still typically walk away from a classroom thinking more energetically about my ideas than being burnt-out on them. The greatest strength of being in a small liberal arts college like mine is that the institution as a whole shares that approach to melding research and teaching productively rather than as competing poles of a career.

I’d love to hear from others about their perspectives from the various places where you work at - how does your institution enable or limit your ability to find career satisfaction? (With the necessary caveat that no matter what else you compare it with, it’s hard to beat the life of a faculty member!)

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.

Thompson & Melissa are both musically-minded audio folks, so their piece explores the concept of “fidelity” as it relates to music. As per the assignment, they deliver something that simply could not be done effectively on paper, and offer a tone appropriate for the audio medium:

Keeping with the musical theme, Brian and Jessie explore the lyrical genius that is Soulja Boy and highlight how musical tone interacts with lyrical content:

Derek & Kyle created a parodic game show to play with the origins of sounds and how sound can evoke realism in misleading ways - be sure to keep listening, as the project “pays off” toward the end:

Finally, Laria & Ross play with technologies of sound creation to reflect on how we respond to sound emotionally, using a nice combination of juxtaposition and explicit narration:

I’d certainly appreciate any comments on this assignment, the students’ work, or the class as a whole. I’ll be writing a follow-up post soon with links to some excellent remix videos for the next assignment.

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.

Many people call The Wire a bleak, grim, or cynical show. I’ve always found it more of a dark & realist vision of a world that is quite grim, but imbued with a sense of hope and respect for human spirit. The people on the show may be broken, beaten-down, trapped, or disenchanted, but they retain a sense of humor and a belief in keeping on playing the game (whichever one they’re involved in). The characters ability to laugh in the face of demoralizing circumstances, or believe that they can buck the systems they’re stuck in, feels like the lifeblood of the series, not a cynical hopeless view of society.

The finale certainly paid off this more optimistic reading - after episode 9 saw Michael abandon Bug and  Dukie, and cut himself off from his childhood, it felt pretty bleak. But while Dukie’s descent into drugs was a heartbreaking image, most other characters had their moments to rise above the limited options available to them. Michael managed to become the reborn Omar, a much more hopeful position than another Marlo or Avon. Sure, shit rises to the top (Rawls, Valchek, Templeton, the shell of Carcetti), but the noble cast-offs found some contentment in either doing their jobs, or finding a way out.

But when I think of the episode, I’ll always remember the image of Bubbles bounding up the stairs. 60 hours of TV earned that payoff, a tiny gesture of survival and redemption that captures the hope in individuals to rise above - not through Capra-like flourishes or American self-made men, but the belief in doing what you need to do to get by. It was a hopeful moment that rises above the intractable scenario that the show paints of our urban reality. That’s not cynicism, but an earnest and well-earned romanticism.

So the show ends with many tie-backs and cycles to the first episode, emphasizing the unity and cohesion of the whole series. It ended on its own terms, and while I’ll miss it, The Wire did not warrant infinity - it earned an ending. Without a doubt, it’s the best TV series I’ve watched, and the best argument for viewing television as a unique art form.

I’ll be writing more on The Wire soon, but for now, let the words of Kima ring out:

Goodnight moon
Goodnight stars
Goodnight po-pos
Goodnight fiends
Goodnight hoppers
Goodnight hustlers
Goodnight scammers
Goodnight to everybody
Goodnight to one and all.

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.

As most of the blogs I’ve seen attest, this episode was simply perfect in its emotional ups and downs, delivering payoffs and undercutting them. For me, Bubbles’ little triumphs outweighed the uncertainty facing Dukie, as he is left amongst the A-rabs for a potential echo of Bubbs’ fate. But I hold onto some hope that he too might find his redemption, hopefully a bit earlier than Bubbs did.

I also buy Kima’s decision to turn in McNulty. She’s always had more professional than personal integrity (”sometimes things just have to play hard” from season 1), and letting Jimmy get away with his scam would have been a major sell-out for her. It’s ironic that the reason Jimmy told her was because of his own remaining shreds of integrity, not wanting to see good po-lice wasting her time on his bogus case. But his scheme was bound to fail, with no exit plan once the tap was turned on. Hmmm, starting a crusade on false pretenses at the cost of huge public resources and human lives with no plan to get out? Remind you of anything else going on in our world?

And seeing Bunny & Namond having risen above the fray was just a delight, along with Bunny offering a moment of moral humiliation to Carcetti. “Wow, Mr. C - you know the Mayor too?!”

As for what’s to come, here are some predictions for the record - The Wire’s not a show tied to suspense, as it’s less about what will happen than how it’ll go down. But here’s how I can imagine things playing out:

- The dual corruptions of Daniels’s buried sins and Levy’s courthouse leaks will come together. And Daniels will suffer more than Levy - I could see Levy making a deal that lets the case against Marlo and his crew stand if they let Levy off the hook for his corruption. The show has always shown that the drug game is an extension of larger political forces, and ultimately Levy is a bigger player than Marlo, Avon, Stringer, or anyone on the streets. And it’s completely consistent with the show’s take on Baltimore that kids on the street take the heat for the machinations by the powers that be. And the Greeks and Levy will find a new pawn to head the street division of their business enterprise.

- McNulty will do what he can to spare Lester, Sydnor, Bunk, etc. from the stink of his shit. But he’s going down hard and probably not alone, and I don’t think he can live with himself after that. I see him wrapped around a telephone pole with a bottle of Jameson’s in his lap, and Beadie’s prediction of his wake will come to pass. Meanwhile, Kima will be an outcast among the police. Lester better get off the hook, though, as he’s earned a noble retirement.

- Fletcher will write a stellar profile of Bubbles that captures the dynamics of individuals relationships to social conditions and institutions, but it’ll be Templeton’s fabrications that will win the Pulitzer. Gus will be forced to take a buy-out after trying to nail Templeton. And critics like me will read this as an allegory for how The Wire was treated versus Emmy winning shows. Dickensian indeed!

- Prez will return for the last of the cameos, but won’t be able to save Dukie. The kid’s gotta do this on his own.

As for what song will frame the final montage? I have no idea. But I should be back from Philly in time to find out on Sunday!

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!