Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I watched the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica this morning. This wouldn’t be surprising except that I don’t get the Sci-Fi channel, which broadcasts that show on Friday evenings. I watched it over at hulu.com, the video site started by NBC (which owns the Sci-Fi channel) after they pulled their content from iTunes last summer.

What’s interesting is that NBC lost money from me in this process. I had been paying $2 an episode to watch Battlestar Galactica last year on iTunes. On hulu.com, I watched it for free, except for a total of two minutes of advertisements, clumsily sprinkled throughout the episode. I can’t imagine that the advertising revenue they are getting is worth more than the cut of the $2 they got from iTunes. So how does this make sense? It doesn’t to me. And there are a few other questions about television that don’t make sense to me either.

Why doesn’t HBO have an online portal where I can see their shows? I want to see the final season of The Wire. I don’t even get basic cable, so it would cost me $40/month to get the “standard cable” package, and then another $15/month to get HBO on top of that. It doesn’t make sense for me when I just want to watch one show. I went to iTunes but The Wire was not available there, even though I would have gladly paid $2 an episode. Heck, I would have paid $5 an episode which is comparable to their DVD pricing of $50 for a season); after all, I pay $10 for a two hour movie, and an episode of The Wire is much better than most movies. But HBO had no way for me to give them money in exchange for watching a specific show as it is released (I have to wait for the DVD).

Why do all broadcast networks have an online video on demand service now? I love it as a consumer. If I forget to tape a show, or if two shows I want to watch are on simultaneously, I can just go to the network’s site a day later and watch the show I missed. Most sites even store four episodes so that I can catch up on a series if I lost track for a few weeks. NBC has the entire run of Friday Night Lights online to try to build viewership. While it’s tremendously convenient, I don’t know how it makes sense economically (NBC doesn’t even put advertising in their online episodes).

I suppose one possibility is that the networks are using online rebroadcast of their content as a way of gaining access to a highly profitable market segment, which would be people like me that have broadband video connections and the tech savvy to even want to watch a TV show online. The problem I see with this explanation is that they don’t have any way of targeting me currently. I don’t login to hulu.com or to the network sites. So unless they start delivering advertising interspersed with the show, they’re not making money, and given typical online advertising rates, I don’t know if they’d be profitable even then.

I have been waiting for years for the “a la carte” option of television to become a possibility, where I can pay for just the content that I want to see and nothing else. I wanted this as a cable subscriber - I hated paying for the entire cable package when I really wanted just four channels. I want this as somebody who follows specific shows - I got into television as a result of becoming a Buffy fanboy, and still have an instinctive revulsion for the idea of flopping on the couch and “seeing what’s on”. The funny thing is that I would be willing to pay more to get what I specifically wanted - while the cable company charges $40/month for 40 or 50 channels, I would pay $10/month happily for the 4 channels I actually wanted. I know the economics don’t work that way (the channels I want cost more because they are higher profile) but I hate the idea of paying for something I’m not using.

I was excited by the advent of iTunes video, as it seemed like I could finally pay for only what I wanted. I’ve been following The Shield and Battlestar Galactica on iTunes because those are shows on cable channels I don’t get. I would have happily paid for The Wire if given the option. But with various content producers like NBC pulling their content from iTunes so that they can go their own way, it does not appear as if iTunes will be the “a la carte” solution I had hoped.

I wonder how much of my disappointment is because I’m decidedly atypical in my television consumption. I used to use a VCR and now use a DVR to ensure that I only watch shows that I want to watch. So I record shows, and play them back at times convenient to me, generally skipping the commercials. I’m a nightmare for the traditional television advertising model in the sense that I both time-shift and skip commercials. My viewing habits ensure that I am an advertising money-loser, so the “a la carte” solution would seem to be the only way to make money from me.

But I’m guessing most people aren’t like me when it comes to television (the Nielsen ratings back up that assertion). Most people come home from work, flip on the TV and watch whatever’s on. They surf through the channels available to them, rather than focus on specific shows. And when they do focus on specific shows, they don’t set their Tivo - they make sure they’re home to watch it. A digital analogy would be that I’m one of the minority that uses an RSS reader to follow blogs, where most people just go to a site when surfing to see if there’s new content.

Beyond the “a la carte” subscription model, there are a few other possibilities for how television gets made in the future. One possibility is a donation culture, where customers donate money to get the next book or record produced. I’m not sure that scales to the amount of money necessary to get a television episode produced, though.

Another intriguing possibility that may be what the networks are thinking is using content as a loss leader. ValleyWag had a recent article suggesting that “Recorded music is no longer a product, but advertising”, where artists should give their music away as advertising for things they can actually sell, like t-shirts and concert tickets. Perhaps television episodes could now be used to increase the power of the brand, with the actual money being made from DVD sales and other merchandising. Again, this seems unlikely with the much greater money necessary to make television than music.

Another possibility that occurred to me after posting is that networks may still consider the TV show aired in its normal time slot as the franchise. The video on demand on their sites and sites like hulu.com are merely designed as ways to bolster the original broadcast. This way, if I miss an episode, I can catch up and not feel like I missed a key plot point. Or I can watch a few episodes online and start watching a show that I might not have otherwise (this is how I started watching Friday Night Lights). The network assumes that I will then start watching the broadcast version so they can get their advertising revenue that way. But this assumption is headed towards breakdown as people become more comfortable with technology options like DVRs and video over the internet, which is inevitable as the net generation grows older.

I don’t really have answers. I’m not sure I’m even asking the right questions. But it’s an interesting topic, and I wanted to write about it while the hulu.com/iTunes discrepancy was still fresh in my brain.

Last night after class, I was skimming through my RSS feeds and saw Kevin Kelly’s post on how creators can make a sustainable business for themselves if they can get 1000 True Fans. I really liked Kelly’s take on it being more important to reach a smaller number of fanatics than to reach the mass market, as fanatics evangelize for you in a way that casual fans do not (plus they spend more).

That article linked to an article co-authored by Bruce Schneier, called The Street Performer Protocol, which suggests a way for artists and fans to securely negotiate with each other, so that fans can donate money and have some assurance that the artist will deliver a product. This is similar to the model that Jill Sobule is apparently using to fund the recording costs for her next album.

The real problem was that Kelly also mentioned that Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are doing the same thing. I adore the Liaden Universe books, and they’re posting the newest book online a chapter at a time, fuelled by donations ($300 of donations is another chapter). I said “Oh, I’ll only read a few chapters”, and the next thing I knew it was 1am and I’d read all 31 chapters (then I read the 6 chapters of the next book this morning). *sigh* I did chip in my $25 donation towards the cause, which felt good as their books have given me many hours of comfort reading pleasure over the years (plus it gets me a trade paperback edition when the book is completed and published).

I wrote about the growing Internet donation culture last year, and it’s cool to see the different ways in which it is being taken. That post mentions the different strategies people can use to get their work funded, from straight up donations to selling merchandise (T-shirts or books) to posting ads.

My favorite movie reviewer is currently struggling with these issues (see his entries on February 3rd and February 10th). He’s added several ads to his site (including a pop-under - yuck), and has been asking his readers to click on an ad or two per visit to show support. I wrote him and asked if he could add a donation button since I’d much rather give $20 directly to him than to click on ads. Interestingly, he feels more comfortable with ads than with donations, as he feels indebted if he receives donations. I don’t particularly get that, but I loathe ads.

As Shirky observes, the Internet is giving us many new ways to organize ourselves. Instead of having to go into debt with a record company to make an album, Jill Sobule can raise the money to do so from her fans. Radiohead can sell its album online with a pay-what-you-wish model. Kevin Kelly is writing his new book online in front of all of us as he tries out ideas and gets feedback. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are writing their book online, but trading chapters for donations. So many different ways to do things, and new ones are being invented all the time. It’s a pretty interesting time to watch as the “standard” way of doing things collapses because the barriers to publication have collapsed. Now it’s up to us to iterate and find new ways that suit our needs.

I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading to bed. In either case, I don’t have the brainpower to write a good blog post (as evidenced by my lack of posting) or even read a book.

The interesting thing I noticed is that I’m much more prone to watch TV rather than movies when I want to be braindead. It’s not a matter of channel flipping - I only watch DVR’d TV without commercials. But for some reason, starting to watch a TV show feels like less of an investment than starting to watch a movie.

Part of that is the time commitment. A TV show without commercials is about 40-45 minutes, whereas a movie is double that length. But I’ll often watch two episodes of TV, so that negates the “I didn’t have time” argument. So what’s going on here?

I was talking about this with my friend Rebecca over Thanksgiving, who had noticed the same tendency in herself. Her explanation? “Movies are a thing.” This is the sort of argument that would be better handled by Grant McCracken, but I’ll take a swing here at what she means, which resonates with my own experience.

Watching TV is just watching TV. All of our connotations about TV are relaxed and comfortable. We flop onto the couch, grab the remote, flip on the TV and see what’s on. It’s the ultimate in informality. If we don’t like what’s on, we change the channel or turn off the TV. Many people leave the TV on while doing other activities, just to have some background noise and chatter. It’s an acquaintance, one that we can drop in on anytime we want.

Watching movies is a “thing”, a cultural experience and ritual. We make a trek to our local shrine (theater), and pay obeisance in the form of purchasing tickets. We are ushered into a temple for worship purposes at specified intervals decreed by the movie gods. Suddenly, the curtains are drawn back to reveal our object of worship, with images that are literally larger than life and surround us with a wall of sound. We shush others who dare to interrupt our experience of the movie, and leaving the theater in the middle of the movie would be sacrilege. Watching movies, at least in the theater, is a far more formal experience than watching TV ever is.

Even though watching a movie on DVD isn’t the same as going to the theater, I think these sorts of connotations and cultural archetypes affect my perception of how to consume the different forms of media. I feel like when I start a movie, I have to block out two hours of time to watch it uninterrupted, and I have to be in a frame of mind where I can focus on the movie. This rarely applies when I’m just looking for some distraction in the evening before starting class work or going to bed, so I end up watching a TV episode from my DVR or DVD collection instead.

I think I might feel differently if I were a Netflix subscriber. My sister has a much more relaxed attitude towards movies than I do, where she’ll start DVDs and stop them, leave them on while doing other things, etc., and I wonder if some of that is due to the fact that movies come to her in her living room rather than being part of the cultural ritual. The effort of going to rent movies, even back in Oakland when I lived a couple blocks from a rental place, was enough of an obstacle that I rarely did it.

The anthropological observation of my friend amused me, so I figured I’d blog about it. Plus, we got out of class early tonight, so I’m a bit more awake than usual and figured I would procrastinate productively for once. But it’s time to take another look at my master’s project.

As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read.

Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and former communities and see how their media usage influenced their structure and interaction.

Community: TEP
Media spaces: Email lists, real world gatherings
Comments: TEP’s been using a couple email lists since before I was a freshman, and those email lists provide a level of background connection to the greater TEP community of alumni and friends of the house. As an alum who doesn’t live in Boston, I often only know the undergrads that post to the mailing lists - the others are invisible to me until I go visit. The TEP community is also obviously supplemented by regular gatherings. It’s unclear whether the mailing lists would be able to bind the community together if our community was not based in a living group so that many of us lived together at one point or another.

Community: nextNY
Media spaces: Email list, real world, wiki
Comments: The main interaction space of the nextNY community is the email list, but Nate Westheimer observes that nextNY is valuable as a social network because it spawns real world interactions. Charlie points out in a comment that the email list functions effectively because the community feels a sense of ownership in the list, and I don’t think that community ownership would exist without the regular reinforcement of actually meeting other people on the nextNY list, as people aren’t “real” when you only know them online.

Community: Ultimate frisbee games
Media spaces: Real world, sometimes email
Comments: Playing ultimate frisbee, both here in New York and back in San Francisco, is primarily centered on the real world interaction of, well, playing frisbee. We use email lists, but primarily for the purpose of organizing when people are going to be playing frisbee (somebody’s been posting about non-frisbee stuff to the NYC ultimate list and getting flamed for it). It’s interesting because the community is so focused on playing frisbee that I have spent hours in people’s company without learning their last name or where they work - I only know which throws they prefer and what routes they run on the field. I had similar experiences with singing in the chorus or playing volleyball in grad school.

Community: alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer
Media spaces: Usenet
Comments: I spent a couple years posting on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer - I even co-wrote the first FAQ for the group. Because the community had a tight focus like ultimate frisbee, I learned how other atbvs posters thought without knowing anything about their lives. Because the interaction was purely electronic, I had no idea what these people looked like or did for a living, but we could still have endless discussions about the characters and writing on the show.

This list makes clear that communities with a tight focus can function as single purpose communities. I have several “ultimate friends” who I know nothing about other than I like hanging out with them on the field. A friend of mine used the phrase “party friend” yesterday to indicate somebody they liked hanging out with but wouldn’t depend on if they needed help. I guess that’s a reminder that friendships and social connections don’t have to be all-encompassing - one can interact happily in a limited domain without ever desiring to expand the interaction beyond that domain.

The other thing about the list is that it reinforces Nate Westheimer’s point that social software needs to “affect my offline life”. My strongest communities are the ones which either grew out of or are augmented by real life interactions. Purely online community interactions seem more fragile - when I dropped out of alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer or out of playing MUDs, nobody reached out to me and asked where I’d gone.

I’m curious what other people’s communities look like and how you think the media used to communicate affects the interactions of those communities. I don’t know if we can come up with any sort of general observations, but I think it’d be interesting nevertheless. I’d be particularly interested about experiences with wikis, as I’ve never been part of a community that used one effectively - is anybody out there a Wikipedian?

My mentor from the Columbia program, Jon Williams, recently started a blog, and asked me if I had any advice about blogging. That got me thinking about what makes for a good blog, so I’m sharing my thoughts here.

The blogosphere is intensely competitive in terms of the attention economy. When blogs I read link to other blogs, I’ll bring the new blog up in a tab and read half a post. If that snippet doesn’t interest me, I’ll leave and never come back. If I actually finish reading the post, I’ll click on a couple other recent posts to see if they can write on more than one topic, and then if it’s promising, I’ll add it to my RSS feed.

In other words, a blog has at most 30 seconds to convince me that it’s worth my time. And my experience generalizes. According to Google Analytics, the average visitor to my blog from a search engine spends about 30 seconds before leaving. That’s not much time, especially when it’s impossible to precisely control the visitor’s experience, because search engines may deposit them on any page. That’s why every page here has the sidebar that introduces me and links to recent and random posts, so visitors can have a sampling of what this blog is about no matter where they arrive.

What does a blog have to do to capture my attention?

• It has to be well-written. That may seem obvious, but there are plenty of bad writers out there. One of the hardest parts of writing for the Internet is learning to edit before publishing rather than posting stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Since there’s no editorial process, we have to do our own filtering to avoid such writers rather than relying on a gatekeeper like the editors of the New Yorker.
• It has to talk about something of interest to me. I won’t read a blog about knitting, no matter how well-written it is.
• Blogs I like tend to have a focus. They’re not for everybody, but they appeal to their core audience. Creating Passionate Users or Joel on Software make it clear from their titles what their focus is. It’s related to the process of becoming “The Guy” - having a focus makes it much easier to become _the_ reference on that topic. The first question I asked Jon was to articulate why he was blogging (his answer is in his sidebar). That focus will make it easier for him to determine what is appropriate for the blog and what isn’t, what should be cut in editing and what should be left in.
• It has to be authentic. If the writing shows no soul or personality, I’m gone. I have to feel like I know the person from reading that first half-post. This doesn’t mean over-using slang, but making it clear that the author has a point of view and is sharing it with you via their writing. I need to be interested in learning more about how they see the world.
• At the same time, the blog has to be more than just a vehicle for self-expression. In many cases, the blog is a way for the blogger to share their experiences with friends and family. That’s great, and the reason why sites like MySpace, LiveJournal and Vox exist. Heck, I have a LiveJournal account so I can keep up with what’s going on in my friends’ lives. But I don’t think I read anybody’s personal journal who’s not also a real-life friend. Such sites are the extension into cyberspace of real-life relationships, which is interesting to me, but a separate topic.
• Having comments is a good sign. It means that the blogger is trying to start a conversation, and is interested in more than just hearing themselves speak. One of the great achievements a blogger can attain in my eyes is to be the seed around which a community forms.
• Attention to detail must be apparent on every page. Because of search engines, the author doesn’t have control of where a visitor will arrive, so having high quality content throughout the site is important.

So those are the thoughts I have on writing a blog that would be of interest to me. Note that I don’t feel strongly enough about these recommendations to follow my own advice. This blog doesn’t have a focus. It is more in the realm of self-expression than of fostering community. My posts tend towards the rambling. But I’m okay with that - I have not yet found a focus that compels me enough to write about it regularly. We’ll get there.

You convinced me. I think I was just cranky on Wednesday evening because I’d been up until 2am finishing a paper the night before, worked all day, gone to three hours of class, and then wrote that blog post. So consider this a giant retraction and flip-flop on the last post.

Christy brought up the great example of Instructables as an example of amateur hobbyists banding together and helping each other. I forgot that media such as the Internet, in addition to making us more aware of “world-class” talents, also gives amateurs a way to find each other, which is far more empowering. “Hey, if they can do that, I can do that too!” When we are only presented with the finished glitzy product as often happens in mass media like TV and magazines, it can be discouraging, and that had been the point I made last time. But social software like Instructables help us see the process, and provide a support structure for people starting for the first time.

The Internet has all sorts of great examples of this once I started thinking about it. NaNoWriMo provides the same role for would-be novelists, giving them structure, encouragement, and guidance on how to achieve their goals. I know several people who have completed novels during NaNoWriMo that would not have done so without that site existing.

I mentioned a few other examples in my post on community, such as Chris Heuer starting up the Social Media Club, which basically started with him deciding to pull together an unconference alternative to Web 2.0, posting about it in a couple places, and now it’s spun into an organization with meetings in several cities around the world. likemind is another example - Piers and Noah wanted to have coffee together six months ago, posted about it on their blogs, and now it’s a monthly get-together in 14 cities, with about 50 people showing up to the last likemind in New York.

Another factors contributing to the rise of the amateur is the democratization of technology. You used to have to invest thousands of dollars in purchasing sound editing software. Now you just buy a Mac and use GarageBand. If you are interested in photography, you don’t need access to a darkroom and tons of film, you just need a decent digital camera and Adobe Photoshop. The wonders of Moore’s law and other virtuous circles of technology are reducing the price of increasingly powerful tools so that they are affordable to somebody goofing around in their spare time.

My own blogging experience should have tipped me off. While I continue to blog mostly for myself, as a way of recording ideas as I think of them, it is truly humbling and inspiring to find that other people are reading what I have to say and take it seriously enough to respond, as evidenced by the several comments on that last post. I’ve gotten emails from around the world from people who read my blog and wanted to offer feedback. Being able to garner feedback early on is a great help to the amateur, because it’s easy to get discouraged (although based on the responses to the last post, that may be a personal hangup of mine which is probably related to Po Bronson’s article).

Now I just need to take Wes’s advice from the comments and figure out what I truly love doing, that I would continue doing even without positive feedback.

I went to my third likemind a couple weeks ago (and, yes, I plan to continue mentioning likemind each month because I think it’s a wonderful concept, and because I continue to enjoy it). I was chatting with somebody there who expressed the opinion that he couldn’t start a blog because he wouldn’t be able to post at least once a day, and that’s now the expectation. As a blogger who posts at wildly erratic intervals, I thought that was interesting. I tried to express the idea that blogging could be used purely for expressing one’s own ideas and not to satisfy an audience, but he didn’t really accept that.

After thinking about it some more, I think this is part of a wider trend in our society. Because of media and Internet saturation, we are now exposed to the best talent in any field in a way that can be overwhelming. Taking the example of blogging, it seems pointless to try to blog when there are sites like BoingBoing or individual bloggers like Henry Jenkins or Kathy Sierra generating fantastic thoughtful content on a daily basis. Why should I even try to compete with those people?

The same extends to almost any field. When I read the brilliant writing of David Foster Wallace or Malcolm Gladwell, I sometimes find it frustrating rather than inspiring. When I watch the fantastic exploits of professional athletes, I am in awe rather than enthused to try to imitate them. I wonder if this exposure to world-class talent in every possible field is leading to the decline of the amateur practitioner, as people give up before they even start, or are told they should give up. The media often reinforces this viewpoint by telling the story with hindsight such that it seems inevitable that the star ended up as a star. They rarely tell the story of the almost-star who did everything the same way and yet failed to be successful.

Another side of this is that the world-class practitioners didn’t get that way overnight. They were not born brilliant. David Shenk, as part of his new project The Genius in All of Us, makes the observation that “We see people being good at stuff — we don’t see them becoming good.” He also points out that the main differentiator of musical talent is deliberate practice, not innate ability.

The one exception to this trend away from the amateur seems to be that of bands. There are an insane number of people who play in bands. American Idol will never run out of singers who think they are good enough to make the show. I’m not sure why this particular arena seems to be more resistant to giving up.

I think they have the right idea, though. Doing something for the sheer joy of it, for the sense of achievement and improvement, seems far more healthy to me than constantly comparing oneself to the elite in a field. I’m never going to be a great essayist like Christopher Hitchens or a prolific blogger like Scoble, but the process of writing these posts has made me a better writer and continues to give me practice in the craft of expressing my ideas clearly and concisely. And occasionally I can sound clever in conversation because I have already worked out my thoughts in writing a post here. I enjoy playing sports for the same reason. And I need to remember this attitude when I’m starting a new endeavor - measure my own progress and don’t get discouraged by comparing myself directly to the best in the world.

This semester, I’m taking a class in “Managing Emerging Technologies”. One of the points of the class is to consider not just the technology itself, but all of the social and cultural and political ramifications of the technology. To illustrate this point, we watched the movie The Future of Food in class last week, which examines some of the issues surrounding genetically modified seeds made by Monsanto, including the intellectual property battles that Monsanto waged against farmers, etc.

The thing that struck me as I was watching the film was the rampant use of framing to tilt the dialogue. Here are just a few examples that I can recall without consulting my notes:

• When the film reviewed the history of man’s use of technology in agriculture, they showed people with gas masks spraying crops down with insecticide, presenting the frame of insecticide as poison.
• In a similar vein, they repeatedly showed planes cropdusting fields, using angles and sound effects to evoke bombing runs.
• When talking about how the recombinant cell technologies work, they used the term “cell invasion techniques” to frame it as a foreign invasion, rather than a recombination of existing genetic material.
• They made sure to play up the angle of the one lone farmer fighting against the charge of patent infringement filed by the multinational corporation Monsanto, framing it as David vs. Goliath. Of course, they failed to mention that the way IP law works right now, if Monsanto does not protect its patent in all possible venues, it loses the right to that patent in all venues.
• It mentioned a ballot initiative in Oregon which would have required genetically modified foods to be labelled as such. The ballot lost due to, according to the movie, an advertising campaign, despite polling that was 90% in favor of such an initiative, also according to the movie. It wasn’t that voters disagreed with the initiative - it was that they were weak-minded and could not resist the evil companies

I mean, the interesting part is that I agree with the thesis of the film for the most part - that the ramifications of genetically modified food are manifold and we should probably be more careful before deploying them. But the presentation of the material was so overtly manipulative that it completely turned me off. It reminds me of DocBug’s idea that Advertising is a form of violence, because I did feel attacked during the movie and became very defensive.

Ironically, part of the reason I’m so sensitized to framing issues and the use of tilted propaganda is because of the extensive work of the left to make me aware. Between Lakoff’s work, AlterNet, and organizations like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I am all too aware of the omnipresence of media bias and have learned to distrust it. So even when such techniques are used in support of positions I agree with, I react against the techniques.

I’ve mentioned this before (also here), but what I’d really like to see is more training done in the area of media literacy, of teaching people how to see the frames and either ignore them, or at least distrust the sources that rely on framing. One of the things that really bothers me is the last item in that list above - that our citizens may actually be influenced enough by the media that advertising will overwhelm their ability to vote for their interests. That’s a truly depressing thought. And, unfortunately, bombarding them with propaganda using those techniques, even in the name of good, will only reinforce their herdlike mentality and inability to think for themselves.

Of course, a populace that can think for itself is a threat to pretty much all of our currently entrenched powers, from politicians to corporations to even non-profit organizations, as they are all designed around the principle of being able to scare us into obedience. So none of those powers have any incentive to teach such media literacy, which means we’re pretty much doomed. Eit.

P.S. Man, I keep on meaning to post more, but I was down with a cold last week that pretty much kept me muzzy-headed all week. I left work early on Friday afternoon, and then didn’t leave the apartment for forty-plus hours, and slept for a large percentage of that. But I think I’m mostly better now. Of course, now I’ve got to do homework for class. Eit again.

Became very defensive: I never saw Fahrenheit 9/11 or An Incomplete Truth for a similar reason. I knew I already agreed with the basic gist of those movies, and watching them would only anger me against the filmmakers because they were designed to be overtly manipulative.

In an amusing example of the way in which conversations can take unexpected turns, somebody on a mailing list I frequent posted the question “Are Xena and Buffy Really the Same Show?”. As a long-time Buffy fan, I immediately had to jump in to claim that they were not because Buffy was far superior. As did another fan. Somehow the discussion that ensued turned to the question of what made one piece of media superior to another, whether there were any sort of objective criteria and eventually the topic of what is art. It’s gotten me thinking about these sorts of topics, and so I figured I would capture some of my ideas, cribbing liberally from my recent emails on the topic.

Let’s start with the question of what is art. I’ve talked about this before and even specifically on what makes art powerful, but let me recap. I currently think that art is about creating a connection between the artist and the observer. A work of art, in isolation, is just an object. It has no intrinsic value. We should judge the quality of a work of art by how successfully it delivers its message, how it reaches its audience. That audience may be as small or as big as the artist desires. The piece may only be intended for one person. But there has to be a connection made for it to be art.

When I sang in a chorus, there was some part of me that enjoyed the process of mastering the music, getting it technically perfect. And I sometimes wondered whether a group that only rehearsed, but never performed, would be satisfying. And the conclusion I came to was the one above; it would not be satisfying because there would be no connection made (well, there would be between the singers, but that’s not the same thing). To complete the artistic process required an audience. Up until the work was performed, it is craft; it may be technically excellent, but we rarely think of a well-executed piece of engineering as art. To use a sports analogy, figure skating measures both the craft of skating with its technical ratings, and the art of skating with the artistic ratings. They are two separate things.

A lot of modern art strikes me as being full of craft, but lacking in connection. It may be craft in terms of theory, where I admire the way in which the artist is commenting on a particular mode of thought or whatever. But it still doesn’t work for me as art. Stuff like John Cage and Schoenberg fall in this category. I think that they were trying to do interesting things, things that pushed the envelope and made people think about what music was. But sitting through the performance of one of their pieces is downright painful. Schoenberg’s alleged disdain for the audience is made pretty clear by his music. But then again, he wasn’t speaking to them. So does it work as art even if I’m not the intended audience?

What’s interesting to me these days is how we try to impute the artistic work with a given value, as if the value were measurable in some objective sense. And I think that is just not the case. We all come from different backgrounds, we have different perspectives, we’re at different places in our lives, and that has an effect on how we perceive a work. So for any of us to say that a given work is objectively better is presumptuous in projecting our own experience and our own connection to the work onto others.

There’s also an interesting discussion to be had about the ownership of art, and in particular the appropriation of shows by fans. But I think that will be a separate post that I will write at some point when I don’t have 6 chapters to read for homework.

I saw the movie Sweet Home Alabama yesterday. It was decently entertaining, but later in the evening, I started thinking about the cultural memes that it is propagating, possibly because I have been reading too many of Jessie’s posts. The rest of this post will involve spoilers so if you have not seen the movie and plan to, you have been warned.

Quick plot summary: We first meet Reese Witherspoon as a successful fashion designer in New York City, getting engaged to the New York City Secretary of Housing, who is also the mayor’s son. She tells him she wants to tell her estranged parents about the engagement personally, so she flies back to rural Alabama. There we meet her childhood friends, including her high school sweetheart and husband, from whom she was never officially divorced. Wackiness ensues. By the end of the movie, she chooses her high school sweetheart over the overly coiffed New York paramour.

It’s a bit preposterous on my part to think of such an inconsequential movie as having an agenda, but I thought it was interesting that the film centers on the rejection of New York culture in favor of a simpler, more friendly, family-oriented Southern culture. The New York mayor is portrayed as manipulative and cold, always calculating the political consequences of an action. The Alabama friends are portrayed as living in the moment, having a good time down at the bar each evening. At the climax of the film, where Reese breaks off the engagement at the wedding, the mayor tries to stop her, saying that no poor white trash can do that to her son’s political ambitions, and starts excoriating Reese’s mother. Reese punches the mayor, saying “Nobody talks to my mama like that!” as the crowd cheers this victory over the Yankees.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a snooty New Yorker now, but this portrayal really bothers me. New York seems to represent a lot of what is great about this country. It is a true melting pot, with people of all nationalities mixing together; it’s almost more common than not to hear languages other than English being spoken. It is a land of opportunity, where people move every year in search of their chance to make the big time, whether in finance or media or theater or whatever. Everybody here is ambitious, aspiring to something great. Yes, New York can be harsh, but as the lyrics state, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”.

Meanwhile, the stereotypical Southern culture as portrayed in the movie is far more static. Her childhood friends are all still mostly the same, living in the same town, doing similar things. Reese’s father is a Civil War re-enactor, still fighting for the Confederacy. Nothing had changed in the seven years since she had been home. At one level, it’s very comforting; “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”. However, I could also call it stagnant. It promotes a conservative worldview where we can aspire to nothing more than what we already have. In fact, anybody that does aspire to anything more should be thought of as crazy because such ambition implies that the status quo is not the best of all possible worlds. Such ambition disrupts the comfortable community, and thus the agent of change must be treated as an outcast.

At the end, the film tries to have it both ways, by having the high school sweetheart create a business that he can then move to New York and join Reese, holding true to their past but moving forward together into the future. But I find it interesting that they were unable to carry out their dreams in their hometown. They had to move someplace new, using a new context to create a new identity, as Reese did in her initial move to New York, and as she got her husband to do later in the movie. Even in a movie where New York is portrayed as a shallow glitzy sort of place, it is still an environment of change.

And change is good. Change allows for the possibility of improvements. It can mean progress. Change is also scary and terrifying because it brings the unknown, but that can be good as well. I think we should celebrate agents of change like New York; if it weren’t for people like ambitious New Yorkers striving to make their mark on the world, we would not have made nearly the amount of progress that we have.

I find it interesting that the rest of the country despises liberal bastions like San Francisco and New York, and yet celebrates American ideals like innovation and competition, which are best exemplified by those bastions. Conservatives tend to despise the Old World of Europe for holding on to the past, and yet idealize small-town culture (or the stereotypical Southern culture portrayed in Sweet Home Alabama) which is stagnant and unchanging.

It’s interesting how I ended up with a political rant from an attempted movie deconstruction. Cultural memes are transmitted through movies, which influence people’s worldviews by reinforcing certain attitudes and deprecating others, and those worldviews influence how people end up voting. Frames trump facts. It’s also interesting how I’ve become such an intellectual leftist relativist postmodern freak, for having once had such an objective hard-science viewpoint. But that’s another story and another post.