Video Game Historiography and the Archives of New Media: A Research Report

In which: Atari, Ms. Pac-Man, TV Fun, early cinema, my seven year-old son, George Plimpton, Urban Outfitters, Lynn Spigel, International Center for the History of Electronic Games, Computer Lib/Dream Machine, Blip, Pilgrim in the Microworld, the Internet Archive, J.C. Penney, home economics, Harvard, the Business Periodicals Index, an orange Odyssey 100, Benjaminian aura, Vectrex, YouTube, nostalgia, Parks & Recreation (the magazine), Thinking Man’s Football, Rochester, NY, Milton-Bradley, Milwaukee Public Library, Tom Gunning, Scott Baio, and me playing tennis against myself, not in that order.

I began my current research project, a book about early video game history, with a handful of motives and enough ignorance to fill several arcades. I wanted to study something that had not been studied very much before. After two projects that were fairly contemporary, I wanted to do historical research on a period far enough in the past that no new developments could change the landscape very radically. I wanted a project that would allow me to read lots of old magazines, which I thought would be fun (it is, though ILL scans make it hard to appreciate ads and context, and fiche and film reproduce vivid color pages in blotchy black and white). I wanted to make up for my childhood deprivation of home console games like Atari. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to continue to do research in an area I began to become interested in with my work on Legitimating Television at the intersection of television, technology, new media, and gender.

One of my first insights came from the discovery -- it was new to me -- that in the 1970s, video games were often called TV games or tele-games. One console from the mid-70s was called a “TV Fun.”



I looked to see if television historians have said much about the development of game devices that used the TV set as a display (and as a source of sound). With the exception of one book chapter, I have not found anything published on this topic by a television scholar. Yet the emergence of games in the home beginning in 1972 was seen at the time as a development that would have a significant effect on television and its viewers. Popular press accounts of TV games often made reference to the impact of games on the value of the television set (e.g., now you can do more than just watch) and the potential of the new technology to ameliorate TV’s putative deficits. No longer a distraction for passive viewers, the TV set connected to a TV game console would be made active and purposeful. The gender implications of this discourse are consistent with the discussion of newer technologies of agency that Elana and I discuss in chapter 7 of our book, including remote control devices, VCRs, DVDs, DVRs, and web and mobile video services. TV games would masculinize a technology associated from its emergence as a mass medium with domesticity and femininity. Studying video game history would offer an opportunity to learn about the gendering of video games from their beginnings in the home, the better to understand the development of video game culture. Cinema and television studies have established the early years of each medium as an important area of concern for scholars. Without the contributions of scholars such as Tom Gunning in film studies and Lynn Spigel in TV studies, these fields would look a fair bit different, and much less robust. I don’t think video games have a similar body of work yet.

(Before the Crash, a not-yet-published essay collection edited by Mark J.P. Wolf might be the beginning of what I’m talking about. The first entry in the MIT Platform Studies series, Racing the Beam, about the Atari VCS, is another example of recent scholarship on the period I'm considering.)



I initiated this historical research by searching for secondary sources. Academic game studies is a burgeoning multidisciplinary field, but rather little of it is historical. What has been written about the history of electronic games, which is no small literature, is seldom scholarly. Journalists and enthusiasts have written about the history of games as technology and industry. Even the best of the non-academic history suffers in some respects from having been based on journalistic rather than scholarly methods -- using interviews where documents would be more reliable, making storytelling more central than analysis. There is undoubtedly an excess of nostalgia and great-man-ism in this work, but there is also a wealth of facts and lore, and we can learn a lot from it.



For more than a year I have been collecting primary sources to use in writing my history. My approach is to collect as much as possible, to exhaust the potential of primary research. Using a number of bound indexes including the Reader’s Guide and the Business Periodicals Index, I have been tracking down every item about electronics games in the popular, business, and trade press I can find. These sources run the gamut from Time and Newsweek to Advertising Age and Business Week to Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics to Merchandising and Stores. I have articles from Esquire and Smithsonian, and from Hotel and Motel Management and Parks and Recreation. I have a hundred items from the Wall Street Journal. I have also been collecting contemporaneous academic or intellectual writing, such as social-scientific studies, ethnographies, and first-person accounts. I have famous books like Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machine and David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld, and obscure dissertations in fields like home economics. There was a conference on games at Harvard in 1983, and I have the proceedings and the reports in the popular press. Scholastic published a book called TV Today in 1983 and put Pac-Man on the cover along with Scott Baio and Lisa Welchel, and I have that too. My focus has also widened to include some of the literature on the history of personal computers, which is considerable.



There are plenty of other sources on my list that I haven’t tracked down yet. I am going to look through department store catalogs and watch films depicting video games (like Tron and War Games). I have collected some advertisements and some game catalogs and other promotional or marketing images but will get more. I have some items like a Mad magazine with a Space Invaders cover and issues of Blip and Computer Gaming World. I’d love to find more of this kind of stuff. The incredible Internet Archive has some of it, which is a boon to my research.



All of this material is accessible to me in some fashion from Milwaukee: the library at UWM has the indexes and many of the periodicals, bound in volumes or on microforms. For some sources I have gone to the Milwaukee Public Library, but I also request a lot through ILL. For the sources freely accessible online, from the Internet Archive or fan sites, one needs only to be connected to the web. With videos and PDF files easily found online, the archives of today flow through the ether of the network. But to actually play old games, to have an experience of them first hand, you can't go to the library or the web browser.

Playing games, trying to learn from playing them about their representations and gameplay, about how they might have been used and understood in the past, is the biggest historiographic challenge I now face. I recently travelled to the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG) at The Strong museum in Rochester, NY, where I spent three and a half days playing old games, including Magnavox Odysseys 1 and 2, many variations on Pong, Intellivision, and Vectrex. While there I also looked at print materials in their archive, such as Mattel, Milton-Bradley, and Coleco catalogs for retailers and price lists from the late 70s. I looked at the papers of Ralph Baer, who is among those identified as the inventors of video games.



Researching this kind of history presents a number of challenges when considering the constraints of time and money a researcher like me faces, and the availability of various materials in different forms and venues, online and offline. In undertaking my travel to Rochester I was constantly wondering if it was going to be worth the time and money, and if I was going to find my time there to be sufficiently productive and useful. To some degree I still don’t know. When the book is written I might be able to look back and say how much of the research was important and how much of it was not that useful, even if interesting at the time. For now I don’t care. I had a great few days and learned a lot. Some of what I learned falls into the “unknown unknowns” category of things I wasn’t seeking but was glad to discover, which is exciting. Some of what I learned came not from the official research but from conversations with JP Dyson, the archive director, and from connections I made while touring the institution’s storage areas. But some of what I found there might have just as easily been learned from home, searching the web. It’s hard these days to know what merits travel to an archive and what can be accomplished with a network-connected PC.

For instance, after returning home I discovered that one of the game catalogs I reproduced from the collection at ICHEG is available as jpg files online. (The topic of finding out that archival holdings are available online is considered in this post at the Into the Archives blog, which I recommend to anyone doing historical research these days.) I could have stayed home and accessed that material more easily. But should I regard this time as wasted? I found materials and made copies of them, and learned about the materials. Even if you can access some of the same things from home that you can access at an archive, once you’re there you might as well get what you came for. This is my big issue about the archival work we can do with games, which I imagine applies with many other forms of media history: where is the balance between finding things on your own and going to the archive to access materials? And how important is the archive when so much is online?

A number of the more interesting practical questions facing a historian of video games have to do with engagement with the game text as historical artifact and as cultural work. The game text, as I am using the term, includes not only the "play" aspect but also the artifactuality of the console, controller, packaging, etc. I would say it includes the representations of the game on the cartridge and box, especially with such abstract old games as are typical for the 2600. Where and how do we access the game text?



Let's say I want to study Intellivision Major League Baseball, which is of historical importance because Mattel promoted their product as superior to Atari's, famously in the ad campaign featuring George Plimpton made to appeal to the adult, sophisticated market Mattel was after.



Intellivision games are played using a more complicated keypad controller than the Atari joystick or paddle. Each controller has four buttons on the sides (two left and two right), twelve keys in a 3x4 grid as on a push-button phone on which a cartridge-specific plastic overlay indicates the various keys's functions, and a disk-shaped direction controller on the bottom somewhat similar to a joystick. (The joystick, familiar from aviation and military usage and easily mastered, was the most successful direction controller of the classic era of games, though there were many others, in part I believe because it was easy for anyone to figure it out quickly.)




To play Intellivision Baseball as a novice, it helps to spend a few minutes with the instructions booklet packaged with the game before getting started. This is true of many of the early games that are more complex than Pong: like a board game, one needs to read directions before starting to play. Even having read the manual, one should expect to spend some time becoming oriented with the interface. The player controls many aspects of play - not just swinging at pitches but selecting fastballs or curveballs, throwing at the right base, etc. If like me you have made time and found funding to spend three and a half days in an archive filled with games, how much time should Intellivision Baseball command? Is it better to be a little confused by dozens of games played for little more than a few moments each, or really get to know a handful of games well after playing them for hours?



Now here are some complicating factors. The internet is filled with videos of people playing games. The people who post videos of themselves playing are generally really good. How long would it take me to get to be really good at Intellivision Baseball? Way, way longer than I have during my research trip. Just figuring out how to hold the controller and which fingers to press where takes a couple of minutes. As it happens, I own an Intellivision console, a bequest from my mother-in-law's basement. I have not gotten it to work yet but I'm hopeful. Even then, should I be struggling to master every game I want to discuss? How much will I get in return from this expense of time and effort? How much will I want to write about the details of play, the specific game mechanics and possibilities? Impossible for me to know at this time.

I have often learned as much from watching others play as from playing myself. The spectatorial aspect of gaming sometimes seems undervalued. If I'm trying to get a sense of how dozens and dozens of games worked, what kinds of representations and play experiences they offered, what is my best strategy? If I can access videos of play, how typical should I consider them? If I can access the videos but not the artifacts, how much have I missed? If I could afford to, should I hire assistants to play for or with me?

The solitude of this kind of research can quickly get frustrating. A scholar in the archive is an archetype of solitary intellectual adventurer, on a quest for knowledge undertaken by one mind. But video games are often a social experience. Of course people have always played them alone, but the interpersonal aspect is hugely significant. The games I play well that I really love are games I experienced in social settings. I know how to clear five boards on Ms. Pac-Man because of all those afternoons in the neighborhood variety store spent standing off to the side of the older kids, observing their strategies and overhearing their advice to one another. I stopped dying after ten seconds in Super Mario Bros. 3 when a friend came to visit who really knows these games, and her example showed me the way. And in two-player games, the competitive and instructive back-and-forth dynamic is also essential. Some games can only be played by two players -- Pong and similar games are meant to be played by pairs.



As a researcher playing these games I often wished I had brought along a friend (or my seven year-old son, who would have loved the place, though probably not for three and a half days), or had the use of player from the museum's staff, a kind of play guru/ assistant. At ICHEG, I played Odyssey tennis against myself (above), controlling right and left at the same time. I would love to be guided by good gamers in this research, because I can figure these games out alone but it would be much more productive to be schooled by my betters. Is there a tradition of research in the humanities that has any model for this kind of interactive and interpersonal method?

Another thing I wondered at various times in my visit to the archive was whether I might have done just as well to stay home and have the games come to me. If you have poked around eBay lately you might be wondering why I did not acquire the games instead and play them without such constraints of time and expense of travel.

As it happens, some games are harder to find than others. If I had bought all of the games I played at ICHEG, all of the consoles and the cartridges (assuming they could be found for sale, which they can't), it would have cost more than twice the plane and hotel expenses, and there is never any guarantee that these old second-hand items will work. A 1972 Magnavox Odyssey can be had on eBay but the price is steep -- generally more than $300, though someone is asking $4000 for one. The 1972 Odyssey I played at ICHEG seemed very lightly used and contained all of the original components. Even if you can get one for $300, that’s more than a plane ticket from Milwaukee to Rochester costs, and it’s only one game console.

But let's say that I could have bought all of the games I wanted to play for the exact same price as the trip cost. What then?

There is no question: I would choose the trip. For one thing, my university was willing to fund $500 of research travel expenses (it offers this as a research travel grant, for which any faculty member can apply). Would the university have given me the same $500 to buy forty year-old electronics off eBay? Not as easily, though I haven't tried asking. Having been granted this funding, my department was willing to make up the remainder of the expense, which meant the trip wouldn't cost me anything. Again, a good deal. It might have been more of a challenge to get my department to buy me old video games, though perhaps they would. But in general, the availability of funding for research travel, to archives and conferences, is standardized while funding for more unusual expenditures is not.

Another reason I would rather go there, though, is that they offer me a number of additional services and experiences. Staff had tested all of the games before I arrived to make sure they are functional. Someone was available to help me connect and disconnect the games using the various adapters and connectors they have on hand, and to show me how they work. The staff of the institution are experts on electronic games and offered me tips and suggestions, ideas of books to consider reading, helping me generate new ideas. The museum's storage holdings, which I was allowed to tour, contain a number of artifacts that got me thinking. For example, their collection of sports-themed board games reminded me a lot of Magnavox Odyssey's football game, which is played with a cardboard field in addition to the onscreen one. It made me think about sports video games like the Intellivision one as remediations of older forms of simulated sports play, games like Thinking Man's Football and statistically-based baseball games like APBA. I don’t know if I would have seen this connection without having played the video game and seen the board game archives in the same afternoon.



Even if I couldn't access all of the same games from home as I played at the archive, what about playing the emulator versions and online recreations -- Pac-Man in flash animation, Intellivision Lives! software, Missile Command on a tablet device? A huge number of Atari games in particular are available to play in a variety of formats, like the Greatest Hits app sold by Apple. What's the difference between the original and the recreation?

The classic-age artifacts, despite having been mass produced and distributed, despite their status as commodities, as toys once sold in department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney, have a strong component of Benjaminian aura. To play Breakout on an Atari 2600 is not the same thing as to play the same game using a "plug-and-play" device for sale at Urban Outfitters, or in an iPad app. Watching my own batter get a hit in Intellivision Baseball is not the same as watching someone else's batter get the same hit on YouTube. What the difference is exactly I cannot fully explain. It's more than the difference between using a joystick and the cursor keys of a QWERTY keyboard or an index finger pressing on a touchscreen. It is a difference and it won't go away. To be in the archive and play the consoles offers something that mediated representations of the same experience does not offer. The things have their thing-ness. There is some tactile and existential feeling one has, and who knows if this will somehow be represented in my writing about these representations and artifacts. Maybe what I really get is bragging rights: I've played an RCA Studio II, an orange Odyssey 100, a Vectrex, a Heathkit paddle game that came with instructions for assembly of parts. I'm not above boasting of such things!



Most of all, though, the great benefit that the archive experience gave me was three days of dedicated time, where my only work was play. I had gone there for the games and all I was going to do, once I was done looking at the print materials, was play as many different games as I could. Even if I had a big collection of old games at home, it would be a huge challenge to carve out three days in a row in which no responsibilities or obligations or fun things I might rather do would get in the way of my playing them -- no errands, no emails, no course preps, no daycare pickups, no writing deadlines, no meetings, no episodes of favorite shows accumulating on the DVR... In this way, I imagine archival research is not so different for digital media as it is for other forms of media, and not so different today as it was yesterday. The site of the archive remains not only a storehouse of knowledge but, perhaps just as important, a place dedicated to encounters between scholars and their evidence.

Video Games Seminar

In Spring 2012 I'm teaching a graduate seminar on video games. (That link takes you to my syllabus on the course blog.)

Juror #12

I was a juror in a criminal case earlier this week. I went for jury duty with the idea of comparing the experience with representations of court proceedings in narrative media. I wasn't exactly hoping to be selected for a jury, but I also wasn't trying to avoid it. What follows are just my observations, and I hope I don't seem to be making them out to be more noteworthy than they are. My experience as a juror was probably pretty typical. The case wasn't dramatic, and the outcome wasn't surprising. I didn't learn a lot, or make friends, or find my life changed. But I'm sure I will find the experience to have been quite memorable.

There is a widespread notion that one should avoid being on a jury. The whole experience is supposed to be unpleasant, and you're supposed to prefer being rejected to being selected. But assuming the trial is short, I would now rather serve on a jury than sit around for two days waiting. Being a juror certainly isn't fun and it isn't really that interesting either, but sitting around waiting for two days is Kafkaesque tedium.

The biggest difference for me between representations of court cases in fictional (or for that matter non-fictional) narrative and my own experience is that storytellers work hard to make narratives interesting. It's no one's job to make a real court case interesting. For instance, on The Good Wife, there are many secondary characters whose eccentric traits are played for comedy, like Ana Gasteyer's Justice Lessner who insists that lawyers preface every statement with "In my opinion..." It's no surprise that real courtrooms are unlikely to contain such types. More importantly, the conflict and drama of a well-made story are constructed to engage an audience. There are high stakes and narrative twists and turns -- reversals, complications, enigmas, surprises. I didn't encounter any of this, but I did witness some banal, everyday suffering that engaged me emotionally.

The first day of jury duty begins at the entrance to the courthouse, an imposing 80 year-old Neo-Classical Revival edifice of limestone and marble, where you pass through metal detectors and find your way to room 106, jury management. They check you in and you find a seat. At the Milwaukee County Courthouse there are several rooms for jurors. I initially sat in the first one I saw, an auditorium with seating for about 100, with plush theater seats and flat-panel TVs hanging from ceiling mounts. I found a spot near an outlet, plugged in my MacBook, connected to the free courthouse wifi, and went about my usual business. After a few minutes an orientation video began and I paid half my attention to it.

In the introductory segment, we were warned that the representations of a trial in movies and TV are not very accurate. This is a big theme in the legal discourses addressed at jurors: don't expect this to be like a courtroom drama. But nothing in the orientation video contradicted my sense of how things work in the courtroom, which is almost entirely learned from fictions. The video explains things like voir dire, objections, opening and closing statements, counsel approaching the bench, etc. It's a perfectly adequate instructional program but anyone who has seen movies like Anatomy of a Murder or watched Law & Order now and then would know all of this already.

Soon afterwards the lights dimmed and a movie began. I picked up my things and went to find the other rooms, realizing that the people who planned to read or work were camped in a different space. This is where I spent most of the morning, at a table near an outlet, drinking coffee from a machine. The morning wasn't very different from one I might spend in a coffee shop except that I was surrounded by bored, silent strangers in an institutional space with harsh fluorescent lighting, anticipating an unknown future. Many people had books, newspapers, magazines, kindles, or smartphones to pass the time, and some had earbuds or headphones. Some appeared to be attempting to sleep. Very few had laptops like me -- maybe three others out of well over a hundred people. Everyone appeared to be bored and wishing to be elsewhere, but the silence bothered me more than the resentment of having to serve. It felt like a rather lonely crowd.

Around 11 a.m. a voice on the PA began to call names and numbers. If you don't hear your name, you just go right on doing what you were doing, being bored and resentful. When your name is called ("Michael Newman, 12") you gather your things and line up in a hallway standing on a number painted on the floor. Mine was called just before noon. We lined up and a man instructed us to go for lunch and be back at 1:00 for assignment to a courtroom. A lot of jury duty is just being herded around, here and there and back here.

I got a sandwich from the courthouse cafeteria and sat alone reading. I gave up my table when I went to buy a cup of coffee rather than leave my things unattended. Now the dining area was more crowded and I asked a man in a suit if I could sit with him. Noticing my juror badge he warned me that he couldn't talk if I was on the case he is trying. I told him I hadn't been in a courtroom yet and I asked what kind of cases he tries. He can't talk about that.

Two minutes hadn't passed before he began telling me about the kinds of cases he tries. He's a criminal defense lawyer and the courthouse is by his telling a place where the problems of sad, poor people get worse. He told me about men landing in jail because of traffic tickets leading to suspended and revoked licenses. He told me about domestic violence cases and drug cases. If you take away poverty, drugs, and mental illness, he told me, there's not much left going on in the courts. And he agreed with me that all of these things are connected in fairly obvious ways. We also talked about jury selection, and he said that "smart" people and people who work in law enforcement are often bounced from juries. Lawyers would prefer not to have a professor on their jury. (He did once have a sheriff's deputy on his jury -- which he now thinks was a bad idea.) I told him about the orientation video and we talked a bit about how the law is represented in TV and movies. He said jurors should be made to watch 12 Angry Men.

After lunch we were taken up to the fifth floor and led into a narrow corridor called a bullpen. There were 25 of us lined up. We were told to turn off our phones and men were made to remove hats. A sheriff's deputy gave us instructions about where to go in the courtroom and after a voice boomed out "all rise for the jury," we were led inside. The courtroom was a stately space with a soaring ceiling, high windows facing a courtyard, and wood panelling with classical embellishments of pilasters, pediments, and numerous carvings of eagles.

We were seated in the jury box and adjacent wooden seats and voir dire began with the judge's introduction and the first of many words of thanks for our service. The back-and-forth between judge and jury, and subsequent portions of the trial when she gave us instructions and told us where and when to go and come, were the one part of the trial that I found unfamiliar. These moments are seldom represented in legal narratives; there is nothing dramatic or intriguing about them.

We were asked a series of questions to be answered with a raised hand, and possibly with follow-ups from the judge. Does any of us know the lawyers, the defendant and his wife, or the judge? The first identification was made by the judge herself: one of the jurors was formerly a colleague of hers at a law firm. Did he think he could still fairly serve? Yes. No one else had any knowledge of the parties involved in the trial. The case was to be one of alleged domestic violence: does any of us think he or she could not be a fair juror in such a case? Has any of us worked for a law firm, or in law enforcement? The case will probably take more than one day, but probably not more than that. If it had to go to a third day, was there anyone who would be unable to make it to court? After this series of questions we were asked one by one to stand up and state our marital status, whether we have children and their ages, where and how long we have lived in the county, our employment and our spouse's, and two hobbies. At this point I was pretty sure that five jurors out of the 25 would be struck: the lawyer who was acquainted with the judge, another who had been a criminal defense lawyer until a suspension from practicing, a man who said his own ongoing divorce would make it difficult for him to participate, and two jurors who had medical reasons why they would be unable to come to court on the third day. I thought they would probably excuse me too.

The prosecutor then asked us some questions. He was clearly trying to begin his prosecution during this stage by making a strong impression and telling his story first. I don't remember all of his questions, but two that stand out were about juror expectations of evidence. He asked if anyone watches shows like CSI, and one juror raised his hand and was asked this follow up: does he expect the kind of evidence presented in a real-life courtroom to be as detailed and scientific as what you see on TV? No, of course not. The other question was about how you can tell if someone is lying. He asked if anyone has children, and many raised hands. He asked if anyone can tell when their children are lying, and many hands remained up. He called on one juror, the suspended criminal defender, to explain how he can tell when someone is lying. These two lines of questioning were clearly an effort to prepare us for receiving the evidence to be presented during testimony in a way that would advantage his case. No objection was raised.

When it was the defense attorney's turn, he passed on asking jurors any questions, which I found surprising. I expected the lawyers to be using voir dire to maximize their chances of getting a sympathetic jury. But neither appeared to be concerned with including and excluding jurors who might help or hurt them. The prosecutor was using voir dire as extra time for his opening argument. The defender seemed uninterested in the process. Maybe he was naive or incompetent (I was constantly looking for signs of his incompetence), maybe he was trying to hurry through the case, or maybe he was confident that any jury would acquit his client. This is what the experience was often like for me: trying to read other people's motives by filling in the limited array of cues presented, and being frustrated by being given much too little to go on. Narrative representations of trials can be ambiguous, but they generally will pay off your attention to human behavior in the end because they organize their information to solicit a particular response. But very few of my questions about these people and their inner lives will ever be answered.

The lawyers followed the judge into her chambers and we sat in silence and did nothing, as we often did as a jury. After a few minutes I began to read a magazine. When they returned the judge asked the people whose names she called to stand. This was an awful lot like a results night on American Idol, with one group of contestants to Ryan's left and the other to his right. When she was done calling names, half of the jurors were sitting, half were standing. Which half would be the jury? (At this point Idol would have cut to commercial.) I knew I was on the trial when I was standing and the man whose surgery was scheduled for Friday was sitting. But the lawyer who had been the judge's colleague stood as well. This was as as surprising to him, he later told me, as it was to me.

The charge was disorderly conduct. The judge read the statute, which is awfully vague. You can be guilty of disorderly conduct if you act in a way that tends to cause a disturbance. But it is a violent crime, and we were to decide whether the defendant, an African-American man in his 40s dressed in a baggy striped sweater, had acted violently against his then wife, an African-American woman of similar age. We had been prepared during voir dire to hear testimony from four witnesses: the wife and the police officer who responded to her emergency call for the prosecution, and the defendant and his aunt for the defense. The opening statements were brief. The prosecutor told the alleged victim's story. The defender said very little, mainly that there were two sides to every story. He used a simile that I found unpersuasive and a little odd, which he would use again in his closing: the two sides of a story are like two sides of a coin. But there is that thin third side, and that thin side is credibility. We would need to judge which story was true based on who we thought was credible. He said nothing specific about the defendant or his alleged victim. I wondered about his competence.

On the first day of the trial we heard testimony of the alleged victim, of the police officer, and of the defendant. The alleged victim, the wife, was asked to narrate the events of the day in question, when an altercation between the husband and herself in their home had led to his injury and to her calling 911 to report his abuse. She was not claiming, however, to have been significantly injured during the incident. He had left, to be taken to the hospital seeking care for a wound inflicted by the wife, and was absent when the police arrived.

The police officer who took the call testified, which revealed some inconsistencies between the wife's story and the police report he wrote the night in question. The incident had taken place a year ago, and all of the parties involved remembered the incident in partial, sometimes inconsistent fragments. The cop seemed unable to remember very much without consulting his report. Accounts varied widely in terms of the time the incident occurred, and how long it took.

The husband testified, contradicting many details of the wife's story, but the day ended before his testimony was complete. We were instructed to return at 9:45 the following morning to resume hearing it.

I went home thinking that the case for convicting the defendant seemed weak, and wondering why the case had been brought to court at all. But more than that I felt sad, really sad. The parties were poor, desperate people. Their marriage had failed -- they were divorcing, and are now divorced -- but they continued to live under the same roof. The husband had been jobless for a year and a half and had nowhere to go. The wife continued to hold a job, but it could not be very well paying. Their house was in foreclosure and both would be moving out soon enough. I wondered if people who are not suffering a life of poverty are ever brought up on domestic disorderly conduct charges. I didn't doubt that the two had fought on the day in question, and that they probably were quite nasty to each other. She argued that the cut on her husband's head, for which he took several stitches, had been inflicted in self-defense. I didn't doubt that the husband had been nasty to the wife. But I also didn't think he should be convicted of a violent crime without the presentation of more compelling evidence than we had seen. I had reasonable doubt.

I took my responsibility seriously, feeling like a man's future was in my hands. It was hard not to be able to talk about it. At dinner that night with friends I talked about being a juror on a trial but I didn't say a word about what kind of case it was. In the morning when I stirred prematurely, a little after 5 a.m., I immediately started to think about the case and couldn't fall back asleep. Some things I kept wondering were, why was this case being tried? What will the consequences of a conviction be for these people? Why is the DA's office pursuing disorderly conduct charges in such instances? What's the context? What social forces have caused this situation? What do the other jurors think?

I found it frustrating that my usual ways of thinking and understanding were unavailable to me in this experience. To find out about this situation, I would have liked to be able to do research, but jurors can only consider the evidence presented at trial. However, our background knowledge enters into our considerations in myriad ways. For instance, our assumptions about race, gender, and class can be significant factors in our judgement, no matter how much we think we can avoid "prejudice." We know a fair bit about how the law works in our society, and mostly as a product of exposure to various forms of media. My interest in assessing the competence of the defense attorney was a product of knowledge of the justice system: poor defendants cannot afford to pay lawyers, so they are represented by public defenders who might have fewer resources, less experience or expertise than the lawyers hired by those with money. I don't know anything about the attorney defending this case that you can't tell from looking at him (he's a middle-aged African-American man in a grey suit and tie), but I wondered if he was a good lawyer. The prosecutor, younger and white, seemed like he could be a bit of a bully, as might often be the case in lawyer shows, but it's his job to try to convict criminals. Did he have a choice about whether to try this case, or had his boss assigned it to him? Did he think it was a case worth trying? Did he feel any compassion for the man he was trying to convict? Was the judge thinking that one side or the other had an advantage?

I wasn't allowed to take notes during the trial, I wasn't allowed to talk about the trial during the trial, and I wasn't allowed to look up anything about the situation. In my scholarly work I do research by collecting evidence, making arguments, drawing conclusions, putting things in context. None of the usual ways of doing these things were allowed in this case. I found this frustrating and stressful, given that the ultimate outcome of my judgment was to affect people's lives in potentially quite serious and long-lasting ways.

On the second day I returned to the courthouse and entered the jury room through the bullpen. Courthouse architecture separates jurors from other participants in a case by moving jurors in and out of a door to the rear. The front door by the section of seating for observers (a section separated from the rest of the room by ten-foot-high glass, like the cashier booth in a ghetto fast food joint) is never used by a juror. At the end of the bullpen corridor is a small room where a sheriff's deputy sits at a desk. On the wall is a charging station for tasers and hooks for manacles to restrain prisoners. This room is where criminal defendants being held in custody pass through on their way from the county jail to the courtroom. Another door leads to a stairway upstairs to the room where juries deliberate. In contrast to the august courtroom, the corridors and backrooms are dilapidated. Paint is peeling from the walls in the stairwell. The worn jury room table looks like something you'd find for sale in an cluttered antique mall for $100. A west-facing window opens high over the city from behind the stone foliage of a Corinthian capital on the exterior, but nothing on the interior is the least bit distinguished. A buzzer on the wall is labeled ring once for a question and twice for a verdict. We waited here for the trial to resume, the sooner to be given an opportunity to buzz twice.

The defendant took the stand for the completion of his testimony, and his aunt testified next, corroborating his story of what happened after he left the house on the night in question. The judge then gave us instructions for deliberation and sent us upstairs on a break. We sat around this room making chitchat, texting and playing Angry Birds, forbidden from discussing the case. The main topics of conversation among jurors were weather and parking. The courthouse is downtown and parking all day is expensive and not subsidized. I rode my bike the first day and took the bus the second.

Closing arguments took ten minutes each. The prosecution again warned us not to expect CSI forensics and to decide based on the facts we had been given. The defense again likened the sides in the case to the sides of a coin and urged us to assess credibility. We took 45 minutes for lunch and then the twelve jurors returned to deliberate. (An alternate had been dismissed before lunch.) The bailiff collected our phones on a cafeteria tray to ensure that no juror would have contact with any person outside the jury room. Everyone on the jury had a phone, and I didn't inspect them closely but almost all appeared to be "smarter" than mine. The lawyer who knows the judge was made foreperson, taking possession of the two forms issued by the judge to be submitted as a verdict, one for guilty, one for not guilty.

The jury was polled by show of hands. One or two jurors weren't sure, two were prepared to convict, and the rest voted not guilty. The jury was fairly evenly split by gender. Three jurors were black, two might have been Latino (I don't remember their names and can't tell just by looking). The youngest was 18 or 19, the oldest around 60. The two who voted guilty were a young black woman and an older white woman. Most of the time of our deliberation was spent in back and forth between these two guilty voters and others expressing doubt. It seemed that the pair in favor of convicting believed the wife's story rather than the husband's, and were not concerned as the rest of us were by the inconsistencies and implausibilities of the various accounts. Neither one of the guilty voters spoke very articulately about the case, or made any serious effort to persuade the rest of us and see the error of our judgement. The younger of the two was unaware that juries must come to a unanimous verdict, and was expecting the majority to rule. In this regard at least, she would have been well served by watching more movies and TV shows with legal settings. She also remembered an important detail of the police officer's testimony wrongly in a way that disadvantaged the defendant, but was not about to change her vote after being corrected. She maintained that the defendant should be found guilty.

After less than half an hour the bailiff appeared to check on us as he said he would periodically. As instructed, we went silent at his knock on the door. He was in a chatty mood and started to share details of his personal life. He just hit the big five oh and has three young kids. He hates working out on the treadmill but likes to play basketball. (This was apropos of being a bit winded by climbing the stairs to the jury room.) But on Thursdays, the guys at the courthouse gym sometimes don't show up for the basketball game...

As soon as he left the room, the foreperson asked for another poll of the jury. All twelve hands rose immediately for not guilty. Perhaps being deprived of phones hastened the process. Could be, but no one wanted to be there in the first place, and no one seemed willing to endure a long deliberation. In effect, the majority did rule. In the courtroom the judge read our verdict aloud, asked us one by one if this was our decision, and dismissed the jury ("all rise for the jury"), thanking us again for our service. For the first time, the defendant looked in my direction. I saw no expression worth noting on the face of the prosecutor, or of the defendant's ex-wife sitting on the other side of the high glass. I didn't notice the defense attorney's expression but I wondered if he was at all surprised to win the case as I reevaluated my sense of his competence. We were led out through the bullpen and a few of us said polite goodbyes as we scattered at once through the corridor to elevators, bathrooms, and stairwells. Downstairs I passed by the young woman juror, the one who would have convicted the defendant and who didn't know verdicts must be unanimous. She was standing inside the courthouse door clutching her phone. Snow was falling and there was still enough time to go somewhere and do something on a Thursday afternoon. I said "see ya" and gave her a friendly wave as I walked out to catch my bus.

Faves, 2011

Good grief! Not another year, another catalog of cool shit. Isn’t practically your whole life -- or the important, internet parts of your life at any rate -- an interminable sequence of people imploring you to look at this, look at that, be impressed by me and my taste!? Do we need quite so many tips and MUST READs (must I, really...really?), so much advice, so much performance of discernment and intelligence and habitus?

As in previous go-rounds, I have not done a very good job with keeping up with the newest of everything. I might like your favorite movies and TV shows of the year when I see them in 2012 or 2025 or 2041, God willing. I seem especially bad at even knowing what new music is around, and when I look at the year-end top 10s and top 100s, I feel gratified to recognize a few titles here and there. Although I spent half the year doing research on old video games, I have hardly played any new ones. I’m best at watching TV these days, but even then we have little more than an hour each evening between the kids’ bedtimes and our own. I guess I could try to squeeze another show in here and there while working out at the gym or at my desk eating lunch. But the pdfs and blog posts and newspaper or magazine stories on my screen need me then.

So here goes: my favorite things of 2011, the last year of the 12-inch extended dance mix version of my youth. I turn 40 in a few moments (ok in February) and am anticipating the narcissistic burdens of feeling middle-aged to drop on me like a lead blanket, so until then I am going to keep on feeling young. Young-ish.



The Silver Screen: Still Bigger and Louder than Most Television Sets, Still Can’t Fast-Forward the Boring Parts

Many of the handful of 2011 releases I saw at the cinema were kidpix I would not likely have seen but for my dadhood. The less said of The Smurfs the better, but The Muppets was a brilliant and clever romp, and I would gladly watch it a second and third time in the theater. “Travel by map” has become a familiar phrase for me and my 7 year-old, and we have taught the toddler (too young for trips to the cinema) to laugh at “Mahna Mahna.”

It’s gotten to the point that I don’t even read that much about movies and assume the word-of-mouth filter will help me figure out what I really need to see. Opportunities are fairly rare for Elana and me to see movies together, and I seldom go alone these days. Early this year we saw many of the Oscar-buzz films of 2010, including Winter’s Bone, True Grit, The King’s Speech, and The Black Swan. True Grit was my favorite film that I saw in 2011, but it belongs to last year. Seems odd to be comparing it to The Muppets, not just because of genre and audience. They don’t seem to belong to the same time, despite having been released within twelve months of each other.

Of the not-for-kids genres, I most highly recommend Tree of Life and The Descendants, both of which are about painful family ties. Tree of Life has some parts I would gladly have fast-forwarded past while watching on DVD, but the naturalistic scenes with the kids growing up and the hard father played by Brad Pitt, are gorgeous and evocative. The photography conveys an uncommon spiritual power, and the film, as someone on tumblr said, is as powerful as still images or as animated GIFs as it is unfolding in cinematic time.



The Descendants is just sad through and through, and funny in many places. I don’t know why, after years of thinking about it, I still don’t understand the pleasure I take in feeling sad at the movies. I’ve considered the usual explanations (catharsis, etc.) and they don’t satisfy me. I could say more in detail but I’m against spoilers, and one of my greatest pleasures in seeing this film was that everything about it was a surprise. All I knew was Alexander Payne and George Clooney. I didn’t even know to expect it to be set in Hawaii.

I’ll give an honorable mention to Bridesmaids for shooting a few exteriors in familiar spots in Milwaukee and offering a kind of feminist comedy for a broad audience. I like Rose Byrne as a comic actress though it’s hard for me to shake my associations with her dour character in Damages, and the Melissa McCarthy bits are a tad more outlandish than is my taste. However, I laughed quite a lot pretty much from the beginning to the end.

Word and Image

In describing favorite things I have read, I'm going to say as much about technology and interface as about content. This year, the way I have read has often seemed just as important as the words and pictures.

Although my scholarly work addresses media of the moving image, I still get much of my pleasure from media of the printed word, even as they are increasingly delivered through the same channels (screen devices) as the moving images of games, shows, and films. Increasingly I become frustrated by the constraints of the various formats of print, and not just of hard copies. One of the things I most want from reading materials is their ability to lay flat on a surface, like the reading ledge of an elliptical trainer or a table where I’m eating a meal. I also like them to be easy to read while laying on my back in bed or while standing around in the kitchen waiting for a slow stream of water to dispense from our fridge. For these uses, the tablet or iPod touch may be an ideal device. I also want numbered pages for teaching, which makes the Kindle device (for me an iPad) a bad option in some instances. But another thing I want is easy annotation, and PDFs beat Kindle books because they can be transferred easily from device to device. Even PDF annotation isn’t as good as writing in the margins of the page, though. I also want access to any digital form of media anywhere or anytime, but some reading requires internet connection, which I don’t always have. And electronic devices have batteries that run out, among other issues. As an author of books and other old-fashioned kinds of publications myself I would like to make my words available on whichever platforms, through whichever interfaces, the reader most desires. But constraints abound.

Three of my favorite ways to read, depending on the nature of contraints in any given situation, are the Kindle app, the GoodReader app, and Instapaper. Each of these is for a specific kind of publication. The Kindle app is for books or portions of books (more on this momentarily). The GoodReader app is for PDFs, which may be documents I have written myself and am revising, or magazine or journal articles, or book chapters, or books I downloaded from the web, perhaps legally. Instapaper is for anything published on the web, from news stories to blog posts. Using the website ifttt I automate certain tasks so that my Instapaper fills up with reading material over the course of the day, giving me material to read in the evening and the following morning, or when I have time to kill and my iPod handy, like when I’m sitting in the play area at the mall or waiting for the dentist. For instance, if I star a Google Reader item or favorite a tweet, it sends the content (including the material in the page linked from the tweet) to Instapaper, which I read later on my iPod or iPad.

Despite a widespread consternation I sometimes share with many others over the fate of book retailing, which makes it seem like it’s an important civic duty to patronize bookstores (though not Amazon), I still generally avoid paying for my reading materials. I won’t buy a book I can easily get out of the library, and I won’t buy a newspaper I can get for free online. I hate the pricing of Kindle books, which I think should come free when you buy a paper-and-paste book and should certainly be cheaper than paperbacks. I do buy them sometimes for convenience. But more often I read the free sample chapters.

During the summer, which is my genre-fiction season, I solicited recommendations for mystery novels and my Facebook friends came through with more than a dozen titles of books I wanted to read. The one I actually picked up was a Reacher novel by Lee Child (don’t remember the title but it was great), which my mother-in-law passed on to me when she was done with it. I read a large handful of the first chapters of the other books I was told to try, and I always started reading a new one waiting in my app rather than heading over to the Amazon.com to buy the rest of the one I had started. The free samples aren’t the same kind of immersive, suspenseful engagement as reading a whole book, but it gives you more of a smorgasbord kind of experience of tasting lots of different things, and I quite liked it. I probably read one kindle book for every ten I sample, though I sometimes get a book I have sampled this way out of the library if I decide I want to keep going. I wonder how much I’d change these habits if Kindle titles were cheaper. I doubt very much. I recommend the first chapters of Tana French’s In the Woods, Jo Nesbo’s The Red Breast, and Walter Mosley's White Butterfly (which I did read till the end, but the library's copy).

I also recommend all of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes and Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling, both 2011 titles. I have never disliked any writing by Baker, though, including his non-fiction, so take that into consideration. My favorite contemporary novel that I read this year was Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, though not for the skewering of the culture of theory I was hoping to relish (it's much more minor a part than I anticipated) nearly as much as the bravura shifts in point of view, the depths of characterization, and the telling of a good love triangle story.



Sometimes I tinker with a ranking of all of the social networks that I have used. It’s not that interesting, and I generally abandon such foolish diversions quickly. But no matter where flickr, tumblr, or Linked In might rank, Facebook is always last and Twitter is always first.

twitter > something > something > something > facebook

Twitter’s structure allows for other websites to use its content in interesting ways and one site that does so is stellar, a network aggregating favorited tweets (also flickr photos) in a kind of crowd-curated best of twitter. (These are my faves.) As far as I know the user base thus far is limited (I asked to join and was quickly let in a few months ago). It’s a nice supplement to twitter in which you can see what other users are collecting and what they are indicating as worthy of other people’s attention.

The year in hastags could be its own long essay. My favorite of the year has been #humblebrag, a form of discourse you have found annoying all along but never really recognized as its own thing until this name for it came along to put everything instantly into focus. I would give it the word of the year award if I were magically tasked with the important job of choosing it.



For me, tumblr is mainly for images. I skim or skip more than a couple of lines of text in my dashboard. Like twitter, I find tumblr works best when you follow a critical mass of others so that every time you check in, the flow is totally new. My favorite thing with tumblr is to flip fairly quickly through a whole day of posts in the TumbLiking app a few minutes before falling asleep. I don’t often remember my dreams but I would like to think the surrealistic juxtapositions of imagery I find in these (and many other) tumblrs is helping me keep the demons away from my slumbering subconscious mind. Here are some of the ones I like these days:

unhappy hipsters

photojojo

ummhello

murketing

i love old magazines

this isn't happiness

nick drake

life magazine

bookshelf porn

hipster animals

dear photograph

nails and burgers

rides a bike

fuck yeah 1980s

slaughterhouse 90210

old video game ads

As for the blogs, I will refrain this year from listing every one written by a person I have met in real life. At this point I’m not noticing many new blogs coming along each year, which makes sense but is still a little sad considering how many awesome people could be blogging. Here are a handful of new-ish ones that I always look at as soon as a new post appears, even if I have more important things to do:

The Late Age of Print, by Ted Striphas, about the fate of books in these digital days, among other things.

Casual Scholarship, about video games, by Carly Kocurek.

My grad school buddy Ethan de Seife’s blog on a sparkling miscellany of topics, including cartoons, Ice Cube, soda commercials, and rock lyrics.

Feminist Mom in a Postfeminist World, a personal blog by a film scholar, Pam Wojcik.

Miriam Posner’s blog, often concerned with tools of digital scholarship.

The History of Television’s Futures by Max Dawson, not updated lately though :(

Of the venerable older sites, I am generally moved to audible laughter by Ludic Despair. I never hesitate to recommend The Awl to anyone who doesn’t know about it. Media scholars cannot ignore News for TV Majors and the fortnightly link roundups at Antenna by Chris Becker. Allison McCracken’s essays on Glee (1, 2, 3) were my favorite posts on Antenna not written by Chris. xkcd is still my choice of web comics, but honorable mention goes to The Oatmeal, for “if you do this in an email i hate you.” l I used to like Gawker, then I hated it, now I like it again. I still read Metafilter but not religiously. My abiding "guilty pleasure" is Dlisted.

I like the content of The Language of Food, a scholarly site with infrequent posts in great depth on topics in the history of foods and the words used to describe them. Another thing I like about this site is how it offers a model of slow blogging. Only three posts this year! I aspire to such a careful and stingy routine. I wish for less but better blogging for us all in 2012.




MeTube

My sense from twitter glimpses into the daily routines of others is that television is a much more frequent presence for them. If I can help it I never mix business and pleasure when it comes to TV (e.g., watching while grading or emailing), and lately I pay little attention to the stuff the kids watch now as the older one has taken a liking to violent Japanese cartoons and the little one is at the Wiggles and Teletubbies stage. I'll care more for his shows when he moves onto the Backyardigans-level fare. It’s a constant effort to watch enough TV. Recently I had the bittersweet father-son moment of breaking the hard truth to a 7 year-old that one often must choose between television and sleep, and that sleep is ultimately the smart priority. (This is what twitter people call a #firstworldproblem, but a problem is a problem!)

The show that makes me laugh the most is Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Jewish humor and the social commentary really just kill me. Larry David’s characterization as “social assassin” expresses so many of my own repressed desires. It often seems that the show was made especially for me. All those hip thirty and fortysomething women who think of Tina Fey as their imaginary best friend? That’s me and Larry David.

The show that made me cry was Friday Night Lights, the final several episodes one by one. If you haven’t made it to the end yet and have any tears to shed, prepare to be a sobbing mess.

The show that made me most eager for new episodes to air was Homeland. A couple of months ago we would prioritize The Good Wife over Homeland for fear of being spoiled by loose-lipped twitter reactions to The Good Wife, which seemed to inspire more chatter. Then the priorities flipped. A brilliant political thriller and character study. Less impressive to me as cultural commentary and meditation on the war, but still an engrossing show with actors I love.



My favorite prime-time drama of the old-fashioned network variety (actually the only one I watch unless you count Prime Suspect, which seems doomed) is The Good Wife. We binged on seasons one and two over the summer, so it feels like this was a Good Wife year, and I have trouble remembering which parts were from 2011 and which parts were from earlier. Smart stuff.



I am also in awe of Louie and Parks and Recreation, for very different reasons. Louie’s seeming formlessness and crudity are bracing and inspiring. The show is clearly about something, but its absence of conventional narrative structure and its willingness to be disgusting and shamefully personal make it seem especially fresh. I’m not such a huge fan of Louie CK’s comedy, and I actually don’t like most standup at all, so I surprise myself by liking the show so much. And Parks and Rec has a warm heart and generous spirit, and a brilliantly witty style of writing outlandish but lovable characters.

Portlandia is spot-on satire of hipsterism and alternative cultural ethos. Nothing I have written about indie culture will ever be as good as Portlandia at conveying contradictions between countercultural opposition and self-congratulatory elitism.

I like moments and characters from other programs. Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy, the occasional scenes of The Big Bang Theory, contestants making Drew Carey grin on The Price is Right, hugs and tears on practically any reality show. The Idol finale still offers plenty of showbiz, and Jennifer and especially Steven (with his Chicos-esque wardrobe and Jewish grandmother demeanor) made the judging portions of the show occasionally watchable.



Tunes

I’m hesitant to name any music at all since I follow it so little, but I’d like to mention Lady Gaga, not just Born This Way but also her HBO and ABC specials. I like the music and listen to it a fair bit. But aside from a few sparkling pop classics like “Born this Way,” “Poker Face,” and “Bad Romance,” I find most of her songs forgettable, in the sense that I actually forget them. But I really do believe she is a force for good in the world, for preaching love and tolerance. I’m not a 100% fan of the “It Gets Better” campaign because of its failure to account for the shitty lives so many people lead as adults, and especially for its hegemonic middle-class presumptions, as if any gay person must be like the ones who grow up to work at Google or The Ellen DeGeneres Show or the State Department. I think “Born This Way” and the larger message of Lady Gaga’s appeal to her little monsters is doing similar work, and potentially more effectively.

I also listened to plenty of Adele, Fleet Foxes, and Gillian Welch. I like old music, which I think is what it’s often like to be old. When the Teenage Fanclub song came on in Young Adult, the movie basically had me in its pocket, and when the character rewound to play it a second and third time, well. I will always recognize every pop hit from around 1981 to 1988. For music from before and after that period my knowledge is spottier. I doubt this will ever change.

Favorite Thing

I cannot stop loving the animated GIF. It doesn't usually occur to me that an animated GIF is a short silent movie, though I have seen this pointed out in a number of appreciations of the form. Silence is part of its appeal, but surely what is most great about the GIF is its mixture of appreciation of a momentary, ephemeral pop culture pleasure, and the repetition of that significant moment potentially forever. Unfortunately, this neat formula misses some of what I love about many GIFs that are not captured from film or TV, that are not found footage or remix culture. GIFs are absurdly catchy, like the hook of a pop song. And they're like a spinning carousel set to the same snippet of circus music, circling back on the same spot again and again, an infinite loop of crazy fun.





They can also be subtle or creepy, even minimalist. Some of my favorite GIFs are perfect loops of a repeated action appearing to be an endless back and forth, round and round. This is one thing a GIF can do that lends itself, for instance, to use in porn sites (totally fucking NSFW!) where the in/out of straight sex is made to appear like efficient factory mechanics. But a GIF can also seem to capture a single moment rather than a repeated action. Or it can offer a sequence of moments without a sense of repetition. There's no one best kind and the form is actually fairly versatile. I also noticed sometime in 2011 the growth of GIFs displayed in grids of multiple panels (2x3, 2x4, 3x4, 3x5, etc.) and GIFs incorporating captions and subtitles. I guess I'll expect to see new trends in GIF creativity in 2012, can't wait.

Another thing to love about the GIF is that for now at least, making and sharing them occur in an amateur province of a web culture in which increasingly the corporate voice is enmeshed with the ordinary person's. As far as I know, NBC is not yet offering its own GIFs of last night's Community for the fans to post on tumblr. Our own appropriation and sharing economy still define the GIF's life online.

Finally, the GIF is a critical tool. It's the amateur scholar's most ideal form of quotation of the moving image. The fans are showing us the way we might illustrate our more serious-minded efforts to support our words with images in scholarly discourse.



My new year's resolution last year was to make animated GIFs. I spent a bit of time trying it out, and I need to devote more effort before I know what I'm doing and can share GIFs with the world. I was glad to learn, however, that like anything worth making, it's not always easy to produce something that looks simple but actually has depth and meaning.

GIF links of note:

Uproxx lists the 20 most important GIFs of 2011.

If We Don't, Remember Me. is a tumblr of subtle, often poetic "living movie stills" GIFs. Like theses ones from Belle de Jour and Ghost World.




Similar: tiny cinema.

Anil Dash celebrates the form, including an appreciation of the Animated GIF Museum

Other Cinema celebrates the GIF as an example of nostalgic cultural revivalism, and as evidence of a move away from realism and toward artifice in contemporary online and digital culture.

Kelli Marshall appreciates the GIF in terms of its recreation of early cinema aesthetics and technologies.

Design Modo offers a page of "3D animated photo" GIFs, images staged and shot to be animated GIFs rather the the more common repurposed scenes.

Change the Thought's GIF tag is a rich source of
trippy and mind-bending and graphically experimental GIFs including the spinning circle image at the very end of this post.

My Fucking GIF Blog is self-explanatory.

The Gifzette is a snarky, critical daily news site ("All the News That's Fit to Gif") illustrated by a big animation.

A page of GIFs of Kirsten Dunst's anguished reactions sitting next to Lars von Trier at Cannes is a nice demonstration of the power of multiple frames of GIFs presented together.

And gifgifgifgifgif is the best. I took many of the images in this post from them.

If you have a cocktail handy, please drink with me to more crazy, funny, sad, stupid, smart, and favorite things in 2012.

Laugh Track

I have a post up at antenna called Notes on the Laugh Track, which is a blog version of some thoughts I presented last month in Madison at a conference on TV comedy. Some of the ideas in it may be familiar to long-time readers; for more, see these old posts:

-Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object

-Upgrading the Situation Comedy

-Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre (this one is from In Media Res)

PowerPoint

The International Journal of Communication has just published a new section of essays on academic labor edited by Jonathan Sterne, and I'm really excited to have my work included in it. The essay is one I co-wrote with a friend I made at a Zionist summer camp in Canada in 1987, Ira Wagman. It's called "PowerPoint and Labor in the Mediated Classroom" (pdf). It draws on various sources, including my experience teaching a large lecture course (Intro to Media Studies) for many semesters and feeling like the PowerPoint component was taking up too much of my time and energy, even as I was always unsure I was using the slideware well enough. We tried to write our essay as both an assessment of PowerPoint, its functions and its value, and a set of practical suggestions not so much for how to use the software, but how to think about using it.

Gchat Status, an Appreciation

It is possible to do something special with a Gchat status, though the number of authors doing it thus far might be in the low double digits. The Gchat status, like much of what we do online these days, is a form of verbal communication, and the status is an art of language like poetry or rhetoric. Tweets and blog posts and Amazon reviews and comments on a Facebook photo can likewise be places for good writing, but I have chosen the Gchat status for this appreciation because it strikes me as a functionally unique instance in this particular moment, and because I happen to have been noticing Gchat statuses that I really like lately.

Gchat, the IM service of Gmail, lives in the sidebar of your inbox, though you might not have noticed it. It’s the only IM experience I’ve ever had. While I’m probably on the young enough end of Gen X to have been introduced to AOL and ICQ and other formative experiences of my Millennial friends and family, I was strictly an email person before my Gchatting began. At first I only ever Gchatted with one or two people -- my younger sister whose IM chops were developed in her teen years and an old friend living in another country where phone calls would be more expensive than IMs. Over time I have kept up with eight or ten friends and students (and students who became friends) with regular Gchats, and in my immediate family (mother, sister, wife) we use it as much or more than the phone. There are also contacts in my chat window with whom I have never or very seldom chatted, but whose statuses I regularly see and enjoy.

Gmail’s chat sidebar offers a narrow space for a status, which like a tweet or Facebook posting can take a variety of forms: a word, a phrase, a question, a quotation (with or without quotes), the title of what you’re reading (or writing), a report, an observation, an exclamation, a curse or blessing, a call to action, a cryptic reference, a fragmentary image, or a link to your new blog post or to a video you think is cute of pets or babies. On Wisconsin! Office job. This is what I do. Now 20% smarter! When is 112:30? Just chillin’. Snowdrift. feministmusicgeek.com. And you are? It is definitely too soon to be writing Interim Reports. Home. Asleep (how did I type that while I was asleep??!?).
I’m going to eat my feelings for dinner. Most of my contacts either have no status or have one that they update very infrequently -- effectively never. Some write a new one every few days or even more often.

The characters in a Gchat status are limited to around 500, but anything longer than around 20 characters (it depends on how wide your letters are -- you’ll run out of room for big A’s faster than little l’s) is truncated at that point and finished off with ellipses. When you mouseover the name in your chat list, a window appears with the contact’s picture, the full status, their gmail address, and a few buttons offering options to chat, email, and change settings. Thus approximately 20 is not exactly a character limit, but it is functionally important: most of the time people will only see that much. I’m more likely to mouseover a new status, or a status that hooks me in the first 20. I’m less likely to mouseover a link without description, because the likelihood of my following a link is always lower than of just reading a status. If you think 140 characters makes tweets into the most exemplary form of contemporary web brevity, Gchat statuses offer us even less room for expressing ourselves. But as in any form, constraints can be opportunities.



There are a number of things I find especially pleasurable about Gchat statuses. Unlike most of the things you can write nowadays on the internet, the Gchat status offers no direct feedback mechanism. You can’t like or favorite a status, you can’t share or retweet it, you can’t start a comments thread under it, you can’t give it thumbs up or down, digg it or bury it, or give it between one and five stars. You can’t mark it as spam or as inappropriate content, and you can’t recommend it to your friends with one click. Just try to share it on Facebook -- try it! I love how self-contained the Gchat status is, content to be its own thing and not a come-on inviting your participation.

On the other hand, there is one way of finding out more about a status or expressing your admiration for it: starting a Gchat. The absence of likes and retweets is actually an incentive to use Gchat for the central purpose of IM: person-to-person communication. Sometimes I have had others begin chats with me by asking more about my status, which works especially well with quotations of my one year-old son. (E.g., NO, Dada! got quick chat responses from his grandmother and aunt). One time a friend liked a link to a video and told me as much in a chat message. I have no real issue with the depersonalized nature of likes and faves and thumbsups, but I have noticed that sometimes they seem to offer a substitute for more interactive and substantive communication.

Another constraint of the Gchat is its total ephemerality. Unlike so much of our web lives, the status does not become part of an archive or timeline or profile. It doesn’t turn up in web searches, and doesn’t ever appear in roundups of tweets or comments. There is no way to link to a status, no way to easily save them for posterity. Aside from myself, I don’t know of anyone who collects them. I don’t believe the Library of Congress is on the case, and I don’t imagine we will ever see publication of the Gchat statuses of tomorrow’s great novelists or presidents, though you never know.

The beauty of a nice Gchat status is in part a function of it having appeared in a place you weren't expecting something so good. It is also a function of being an artifact of so little practical value, addressing an audience of perhaps a few dozen people, probably fewer, who are unlikely to respond in any way, and whose reception is untraceable. Unlike a blog, you can't keep track of user data. Unlike twitter there is no count of chat status followers. The status doesn't occupy a point in the web reputation ecology. It barely matters, isn't meant to last, and can hardly ever hope to make more than a gentle ripple in a great sea. It is approaching the purest mode of creativity, a gift. Sometimes I wonder if the chat statuses that I like are meant to please only the writer, and the public performance of this private expression is almost accidental. But of course these are appearances only. Communication ordinarily serves more than one function. A status is always, among other things, an expression of status. It just does a nice job of not always seeming so.

*

LIKE MAH STATUS.:



images by me and dorywithserifs (used under a Creative Commons license)

Legitimating Television: Blogversation

This is cross-posted at Dr. Television.

In this post, Elana Levine and I aim to offer a look into the origins and purpose of our new book, Legitimating Televison: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. We include an abstract of our argument (which is also our back cover copy), and then engage in a “blogversation” about the project and its aims.

Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the twenty-first century. Once looked down upon as a “plug-in drug” offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, particularly as critics hail the rise of “cinematic,” Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a family-centered household appliance, offering a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.

Newman and Levine argue that television’s newfound, growing prestige emerges in concert with the convergence of media at technological, industrial, and experiential levels. Television is permitted to rise in respectability once it is connected to more highly valued media--and more highly valued audiences. Legitimation works by denigrating “ordinary” television associated with the past, and thereby denies the continuities between past and present. It also distances the television of the present from the feminized and mass audiences assumed to be inherent to the “old” TV. It is no coincidence that the most validated programming and technologies of the convergence era are associated with viewers of elevated economic and cultural status. The legitimation of television articulates the medium with the masculine over the feminine, the elite over the mass. In so doing it reinforces cultural hierarchies that have long perpetuated inequalities of gender and class.

Legitimating Television urges readers to move beyond the taste question of whether television is simply “good” or “bad,” and to focus instead on the cultural, political, and economic issues at stake in television’s transformation in the digital age.

Why we wrote this book

EL: While we have been excited by much of the scholarship emerging that deals with the many changes television has been facing, and continues to face (economic, technological, experiential), we also noted some gaps in that scholarship. We kept noticing these discourses of distinction in popular, trade, and scholarly talk about TV, but no one seemed to be talking about it or acknowledging their implications. And once we started noticing it, it was everywhere! I, for one, worry about all of the “future-casting” that seems to be going into contemporary talk about TV (scholarly and popular) and wanted, in part, to do the historian’s work of noting both the continuities with and the disruptions to the past in contemporary developments. So we wanted to historicize a lot of the conversation about convergence-era TV, and specifically to do so around questions of cultural hierarchy and value. In addition, we wanted to inject more of a cultural studies-influenced sense of struggle over television’s status in the cultural hierarchy, something we don’t see a lot of attention being paid to these days.

MZN: We have now seen a fair number of attempts to grapple with how television has been changing during the digital age. Some say television has changed so much that it’s not even television any more (e.g., one book has the title Television after TV), which seems like such a radical break. We wanted to make an argument about the cultural implications of convergence as it works in relation to TV, and in particular how issues of social power underlie many of the shifts we observe in TV’s identity under convergence. We see the old concept of TV as crucial to the newly legitimated medium. A lot of people seem to be aware of some of the same things we observe, but I think our concept of the legitimation of television explains recent developments in a way that has not been done, and puts their meaning into focus. The gender and class implications of television’s legitimation have not been very well recognized.

Influences

MZN: Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV and William Boddy’s New Media and Popular Imagination are most foundational in my thinking about our work, as both are ultimately concerned with how people think about television as a medium, and what place television has in our everyday lives as a result. We are also building on essays by Derek Kompare and Matt Hills about TV on DVD, and by Dana Polan and Christopher Anderson on the cultural status of Quality TV, particularly around HBO and its series. More in terms of background knowledge and approach, I am always inspired by Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which is a book I think everyone across the humanities should read. Bourdieu, of course.

EL: I come to the project with the same influences, although I would also add two other streams of work: British Cultural Studies approaches to television, especially John Fiske’s Bourdieuian takes on cultural hierarchies and appreciation of the tastes of “the people.” For me, the study of television has always been about seeking an understanding of and empathy with a culturally denigrated medium and the subordinated social positions of those who find in that medium their culture. The legitimation of the medium, as much as it is still struggling to achieve dominance, seems to me to dismiss all of that. And that feels like a betrayal of what both television and the cultural studies-influenced field of television studies mean to me. I’d additionally add feminist scholarship on TV melodrama/soaps, especially work by such scholars as Tania Modleski, Jane Feuer, and Lynne Joyrich. These scholars understand deeply the gendered nature of cultural hierarchies and attend to television’s feminized texts as a challenge to such easy dismissals.

Challenges of writing about the present

MZN: When you write about the present, you aim at a moving target. You can think you have figured out what to say about something, and just as you are saying it, the subject changes or new developments complicate your points. You lack historical distance and risk seeing change as more important than it is. We tend to think of our present moment as a break from the past, and to see ourselves as somehow special. Actually I think part of our book’s contribution is in questioning this very tendency toward misapprehending the present, and failing to recognize historical continuities. We call it a history of the present and a polemic, and I wonder if a history of the present can avoid being a polemic in some sense, as our concerns are so immediate and so present in discourses we encounter day by day.

EL: Yeah, I worry about the “ranty” nature of the book at points, but I also feel so strongly about the ideas that I’m kind of proud of the rants, too. My worry is not so much that we come off sounding cranky, but that that crankiness will soon be seen as short-sighted, in that it misses a development that is about to come. Still, we’ve been studying these discourses for a number of years and, if anything, see them increasing rather than decreasing or changing.

What do we hope will come of Legitimating Television?

EL: I hope that readers of our book will think about contemporary TV and the discourses surrounding it in new ways, that they will start to notice the discourses of legitimation all around us and the ways in which these discourses operate in tension with those of denigration. I hope that scholarship that focuses on the economic and technological convergence of TV and other media will not reproduce the classed and gendered hierarchies of so much legitimating discourse--or will at least be more self-conscious about it. I hope that the critics and other journalists talking about contemporary TV will avoid the either/or dichotomy of trash or art that pervades discourses of legitimation and delegitimation and consider the ways their words shape the way we all think about TV. Mostly, I just want to see thoughtful, socially and politically engaged work on TV that has an historical sensibility and that tries not to reproduce damaging cultural hierarchies.

MZN: I’m eager to see more scholarly engagement with television texts in aesthetic terms, and some of this book indeed works in this area, e.g., the discussions of sitcom and drama forms. My previous work on TV storytelling is also an effort in this area. But I’d like to see aesthetic considerations of television proceed in full consciousness of the power of aesthetic discourses, and to the extent possible without the naive appreciation of “good TV” or denigration of “bad TV” that reinforces the cultural hierarchies central to legitimation and delegitimation. This is a challenge to be sure, but one that I think must be undertaken if TV studies is to maintain a critical perspective. Similarly, with new technologies and audience practices, we ought to be wary of endorsing the so-called control and activity of new ways of watching without recognizing drawbacks and their ideological implications.

What you should know before you read

MZN: I wonder if some people might see the book and infer that we’re rooting for TV to be legitimated. Sometimes when I tell people that the book is about the idea that TV has gotten better, they seem excited by the thought and eager to endorse it. (Others are more cranky and say things like, “I disagree!” or “I don’t watch television.”) Our purpose is to document and analyze legitimation as the emergent common sense, but also to argue that it’s not ultimately a force for good.

EL: You put that so democratically. We say legitimation is bad! But, at the same time, it’s important that readers know: 1) We love TV. 2) We know there are some benefits to the legitimation of television, but think the discourse as it now stands does too much damage to television writ large and to classed and gendered conceptions of cultural and social worth. 3) That is not our living room on the cover.