tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-379162412024-03-14T02:35:30.252-06:00zigziggermznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.comBlogger266125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-21290785278870728852015-03-31T14:00:00.002-06:002015-03-31T14:00:38.480-06:00Recent Work-Here's a book with a chapter I wrote, my first publication of original research to come from the project on early video games I have been working on for several years: "The Name of the Game is Jocktronics: Sport and Masculinity in Early Video Games," in <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807384" target="_blank">Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play</a> (ed. Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates).<br />
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-I wrote a post on Medium: <a href="https://medium.com/@mznewman/the-tweeting-child-or-what-i-learned-about-social-media-from-a-five-year-old-7b606cc6c43f" target="_blank">"The Tweeting Child, or What I Learned about Social Media from a Five Year-Old"</a> in which I talk about my son's twitter account.<br />
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-At In Media Res: <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2015/03/19/illustrating-media-history-problems-and-solutions" target="_blank">"Illustrating Media History: Problems and Solutions"</a> For this I made a video (below), which I also screened a few days ago at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies workshop "Making the Past Visible."<br />
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-And at Antenna:<a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2015/03/30/scms15-the-conference-as-media-event/" target="_blank"> "#SCMS15: The Conference as Media Event"</a> in which I compare the conference to <i>shul</i> on the high holidays, argue that live-tweeting is a kind of open-access publication, and point how some ways that twitter includes and excludes.<br />
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I'll skip the sad reflection on this blog turning into a place where I point you to other things I'm doing online.<br />
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<br />mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-76506004052310298282015-01-12T14:39:00.001-06:002015-01-12T14:42:25.121-06:00Cable vs. Network: Mad Men and the Poetics of Television Narrative Revisited<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitLgwcsj4mTer8MUkZ3S1ZPYa7HonPOcRaOT99To1jfLtx5_mxdYpRaUIXe3TpCKe9GFXjcreTkh02Ig9PBYoznq-P5_WYoYMVGOiVBcVaD1vcGsbJ54N7mYkubYSgMYw_oAoo/s1600/madmen-s3e8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitLgwcsj4mTer8MUkZ3S1ZPYa7HonPOcRaOT99To1jfLtx5_mxdYpRaUIXe3TpCKe9GFXjcreTkh02Ig9PBYoznq-P5_WYoYMVGOiVBcVaD1vcGsbJ54N7mYkubYSgMYw_oAoo/s1600/madmen-s3e8.jpg" height="187" width="400" /></a></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-9d2bd45b-dfb0-265d-5d4e-f366129da962" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: italic;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here is a postscript to my 2006 </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/the_velvet_light_trap/v058/58.1newman.html" target="_blank">Velvet Light Trap</a></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/the_velvet_light_trap/v058/58.1newman.html" target="_blank"> </a>essay <a href="http://my.fit.edu/~lperdiga/HUM%203085--Television%20and%20Popular%20Culture--Newman.pdf" target="_blank">“From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative”</a> to appear in an anthology of literary theory. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-style: italic; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ever since it was published, I have thought about writing a sequel of sorts to account for differences between conventional broadcast network dramas and the more upscale cable serials (at least as far as narrative structure is concerned). This is work in progress toward that end, so feedback is welcome.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ten years have passed since I wrote “From Beats to Arcs.” Television and the kind of shows I wrote about have changed in many ways major and minor in that time. From the vantage point of the present, disruptions can appear more prominent than continuities, and despite some of the shifts and novelties I observe in TV storytelling (along with TV as business, technology, and experience), I also see a stable and adaptable system. Advertising-supported TV narrative is still written around commercial breaks and seasons. Beats and arcs are no more or less significant than they were generally speaking as tools of narrative design and construction, though many network shows break for ads more frequently than in the past. In all genres of TV, episodic unity tends to be a strong value. Like anyone who has been paying attention, though, I have been aware of emerging forms and new modes of viewing. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 17.25px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I made a point to discuss broadcast network shows in “From Beats to Arcs” and avoided focusing on the more prestigious premium cable dramas like </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Sopranos</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which seemed in some ways to differ in narrative form. Their lack of commercials, shorter seasons, and apparent absence of industrial constraints often make them appear altogether different from network serials, which by contrast sometimes look quite formulaic. I emphasized commercial network fare in order to appreciate its aesthetic achievements in the face of widespread denigration. The network/cable dichotomy is often oversold, even more now than ten years ago, and can function as much to affirm conservative taste distinction as to identify two sets of conventions.*</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But the differences reveal that some forms of serialized TV storytelling work according to their own constraints and opportunities, which we can appreciate by looking at one exemplar of the cable style of the past decade: </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which ran from 2007 and is ending later this year.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like any television show, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men </span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is the product of extensive collaboration, but its creative authorship is strongly attributed to the showrunner Matthew Weiner, whose previous work included both network comedies and </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Sopranos</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As a prestige product adding luster to the basic cable channel AMC’s brand identity, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> draws on the cachet of premium cable HBO, whose original dramas have set a standard for artistry in television. It follows the HBO style in many ways.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d2bd45b-dfb8-d7be-03d3-08c7f98578c3"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What is the effect of episodes having no clearly marked acts? Acts in conventional TV storytelling build toward endings. In many instances, the break to commercial comes at the moment of greatest tension and uncertainty. Visual and musical techniques amplify these moments. A need to bring the drama to such a point four or more times in an hour produces patterns of rising action, raised stakes, complication and development. By ignoring the need for such moments, </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> perversely calls attention to the interruptive quality of commercial breaks. Perhaps a more ideal viewing situation is a binge on DVDs or streaming video. When viewing this way it is impossible to tell where the commercials would have appeared. And perhaps by refusing to adapt to the convention of interruption, Weiner signals his desire for autonomy from commercialism, adding authority to his creative identity.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span id="docs-internal-guid-9d2bd45b-dfb9-315e-dcea-bfe08611787b"><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And yet there is still pattern and rhythm in </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s episodes. Many of them introduce a new character, client, or situation in the first few scenes, leading up to a series of further events, some of which are resolved within the hour, and some of which provide material for further storytelling. An episode might be based around a trip to California or the development of a new campaign to be pitched at a meeting. Many episodes build toward parties, whether at home, in the office, or in another location. In the fourth-season episode “Waldorf Stories,” the Clio awards are first mentioned in the expository scenes, and later the contingent from the ad agency wins their Clio and faces implications and consequences of the characters’ drunkenness after the ceremony. This pattern is not so different from less prestigious shows like </span><span style="font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Revenge</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> typically building up to their third- or fourth-act parties with their confrontations and revelations. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While, unlike HBO, AMC is advertising-supported and breaks the episodes of </span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</span><span style="line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> into segments between commercial breaks, the episodes are clearly written and shot without these pauses in mind. Like many cable series, a season consists not of 22 or more episodes as remains typical on broadcast networks, but thirteen (the seventh season has fourteen, divided into two halves of seven). These two conventions of the cable drama, the absence of breaks and the shorter season, are both products of their own commercial logic. Success might not be defined as much by how many viewers watch a live airing, and audiences tend to be smaller though perhaps more desirable for their affluence. But unlike networks, cable channels earn income from cable or satellite providers per subscriber (“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_dispute" target="_blank">carriage</a> fees”) and have an interest in being desirable both to consumers and cable and satellite companies. It would be an odd blunder to see cable channels, whether they are ad-supported or not, as somehow less commercial than broadcast networks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Unlike many network shows, <i>Mad Men</i>’s beats tend to lack recapitulations of basic information. The subtle style of storytelling here avoids recapping, and rewards the audience for having paid close attention all along. For viewers who track the characters’ trajectories carefully over the seasons, there are pleasures in knowing what characters must be thinking without being reminded overtly. In the first few episodes of season three, the developments from the end of season two are never formally explained in dialog, and the control of Sterling Cooper by the British firm Puttnam, Powell, and Lowe is taken as understood. So many elements of the story work like this: you need to remember them. You need to remember that Don is Dick, that Peggy had Pete’s baby, that Joan was Roger’s mistress, and who knows what about whom. Occasionally, at moments of heightened drama and as payoff to a long series of episodes of development, one character learns another character’s story, as happens at the end of season two with Peggy telling Pete that she had his child and gave the baby away, and at the end of season three with Betty learning of Don’s past identity and family history. At these moments characters narrate their secrets in dialog, and the audience is granted the pleasure or pain of witnessing the characters’ reactions to deeply meaningful news. But the ordinary recapping in dialog scene-by-scene and episode-by-episode is absent. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While it might be tempting to see this as an aesthetic advantage, perhaps we can also see tradeoffs. The more obvious style of beats that introduce new information while reminding the audience of old information produces its own pleasures. The <i>Mad Men</i> style, while more obscure, emphasizes unspoken thematic or symbolic meaning often as a complement to more action-oriented plot developments. And by saving the repetition of key plot information for so many episodes, it boosts their impact. The dedicated, attentive viewer is rewarded for their insight and interpretive work, and their long-term investment in a slowly, elegantly unfolding canvas rich with historical and psychological insight and attention to detail in the show’s mise en scene.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Network and cable styles need not exist in hierarchy. </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and “quality TV” more generally is addressed at more than one audience, and increasingly the afterlife of such shows is not so much cable reruns as DVD or Blu-ray discs, video on demand, and streaming services like Netflix. In all of these secondary distribution outlets, viewers often watch many episodes in rapid succession, rendering recapping somewhat superfluous. The network drama is also addressed at this market, but its live audience (the audience for </span><a href="https://gigaom.com/2013/04/24/netflix-long-term-view-reed-hastings/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">what Netflix's CEO calls “linear TV”</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">) is still most crucial to the business model of the broadcast networks who sell audiences to advertisers. AMC’s business model is more complicated, and more than the networks, it has an interest in burnishing its brand identity. </span><a href="http://adage.com/article/tuning-in/mad-men-great-art-great-tv-business/233736/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">AMC’s reputation as a source of high-quality original programs, which <i>Mad Men</i> established, helped its clout in negotiations over carriage fees with cable providers, which ultimately increased its revenue from subscriber fees</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Many observers saw putting </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on </span><a href="http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/10/07/1527476411418537" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">as a way for AMC to become the next HBO, a cable channel with “brand buzz,” as Anthony N. Smith argues</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">, according to an industry trade paper, </span><a href="http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/programming/mad-men-lesson-buzz-lights-network/36595" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">put AMC “on the map with ad buyers and cable operators.”</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Unlike the typical broadcast program, then, </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men </i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">has been a loss leader for the network putting it on, appealing as prestige programming to bring benefits in addition to revenue from advertisements during breaks between segments. </span><a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/matthew-weiner-signs-long-term-173630" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">Its value is not equal only to the revenue its has earned from advertising, which does not cover the program’s costs.</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a product not of a less commercial production context, merely of a different one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">As for the macro units of the narrative, the unity absent from many seasons of network TV is much stronger in a shorter cable season. This is evident from the heavy marketing and promotion at the debut of each new season, and from the packaging of the show, like many other upscale cable series, in DVD and Blu-ray box sets and iTunes and Amazon downloads by season for sale to consumers. The logic of the aftermarket in TV distribution is strongly invested in seasons as a unit of narrative consumption and of meaning. </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">, like any show, is produced a season at a time. The writers break the story into thirteen episodes, seeing a shape for the story in advance, a task more likely in a thirteen-episode season than in a longer form.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">A season of </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> forms a well-defined arc. Season three, for instance, has a strong dimension of narrative unity as the intersecting stories of Don and the Draper family, the agency, and the other key characters (particularly Roger, Pete, Joan, and Peggy) have patterns of rising action, complication, and climax. When watching the season finale, “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” many of the threads of the plot are revealed in the significance they might not have had all along. We see the story of the family’s breakdown and Betty’s impending marriage to Henry; the agency’s struggles suffering under foreign control, only to break away in establishing a new firm; Peggy’s effort to assert her independence in her new professional role and be taken seriously by the men, until finally she is recognized (and tells Roger she won’t get him coffee); Pete’s business acumen being seldom rewarded until he is chosen over his rival Ken to join the new firm; and Joan’s return to the agency after her absence, having suffered from Greg’s failure to be named chief surgical resident, which showed the danger of a woman’s fortunes being tied up in her husband’s. (Roger’s conflict with his ex-wife and daughter after marrying the much younger Jane, culminating in the matching trauma of the Kennedy assassination and his daughter’s wedding on the same day, happens in the penultimate episode.) One of the effects of watching the season-ending episode is regarding the previous twelve installments as moments leading up to the climactic plot developments: the Drapers’ failure to keep their family together and the agency breaking off on its own. So many of the points along the way (such as the introduction of the at-first mysterious characters of Conrad Hilton and Henry Francis) were in anticipation of these events, which then push us forward into season four as we are introduced to a new office space for the firm with new characters, a new family for Betty, a new apartment for Don, new clients to pitch, and a new set of narrative questions to be answered over thirteen more hours.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">One way </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and shows like it have much in common with conventional TV network dramas is in the unity of their episodes. Despite a fair bit of open-endedness, a typical </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mad Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has strong coherence both in its plot and its theme. Episode titles convey, perhaps obliquely, not just a key moment of plot made into an abstract for the story, but often an allusion suggesting deeper meanings: “Babylon,” “The Wheel,” “The Gold Violin,” “Meditations in an Emergency,” “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” “Tomorrowland,” “Lady Lazarus,” “The Monolith.” Sometimes questions raised in the early scenes of an episode are answered by the closing credits, but just as often they are deferred, as is typical of serial narratives. The third season episode “The Arrangements” is a good example of </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Man Men</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s episodic unity. The episode’s heaviest moment is the death of Betty’s father Eugene, presaged by one scene in which he shows her the arrangements of the title for what to do in the event of his passing, and another in which he gives his grandson a dead German soldier’s helmet he brought home from the First World War. But there are two other storylines about relations between parents and their adult children that resonate with the death of Grandpa Gene: Peggy disappoints her mother by moving to Manhattan with a new roommate, and upsets her mother further by giving the gift of a television set (as if it can substitute for a daughter’s presence). And the agency takes on a new client, a rich kid who wants to make jai-alai into a major sport in the US (clearly folly), and whose exasperated father is a friend of the agency’s founder Bert Cooper. The satisfaction of “The Arrangements,” a combination of episodic and long-arcing storytelling, is in some ways not much different from any serialized narrative, no matter how distinctive the upscale cable style of this particular program.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is no natural reason why a serialized television series would have episodes with strong coherence and unity. It is a convention of production and reception, and it would seem no less vital to cable than to network series. Episodic unity works well in a system where episodes are the unit of consumption, whether in weekly doses or more rapidly. It works well in a system of production for managing labor and resources. Whether the unity is of story or theme, this convention works to the advantage of both the audience and the television industry. Episodes fit into patterns of both media work and audience leisure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is tempting to see the creative autonomy of quality TV writers and producers as a value in opposition to the compromised commercialism of traditional broadcasting. But it also functions within the capitalist media system as an appeal in its own right, a selling point to a desirable market segment and a means of product differentiation. And like all creative agency under capitalism, this autonomy always works in tension with the imperative of economic productivity. No action is unconstrained. The art of the cable drama is not greater or lesser than that of the network drama, and perhaps not even less bound by convention, but it is a somewhat different form as a product of its own industrial circumstances.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*Network and cable are simplifications, as both categories admit a fair bit of variety within, and Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming online venues for programming overlap with cable without being traditional TV channels.</span>
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<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.15;">Previously on zigzigger: recapping <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2010/07/turning-creative-success-into-business_26.html" target="_blank">s4e1</a>,<a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-brought-you-cookies.html" target="_blank">s4e2</a>, <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2010/08/sometimes-this-season-i-try-to-imagine.html" target="_blank">s4e3</a>, <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-would-get-her-so-pregnant.html" target="_blank">s4e4</a>, and after that I gave up. </i></pre>
mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-82939046566958458032014-04-15T10:53:00.004-06:002014-04-15T10:53:59.230-06:00Three Flow ColumnsI contributed three columns to <a href="http://flowtv.org/" target="_blank"><i>Flow</i></a> over the past few months. <i>Flow</i> signs up writers for three at a time, so these could be written as a set focused on a particular theme. I didn't write them that way on purpose, but looking back I do see a common thread.<br />
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The first, published in November, is <a href="http://flowtv.org/2013/11/when-television-marries-computer/" target="_blank">When Television Marries Computer</a>. This draws from research I have been doing on the connection between early video games, early home computers, and TV. It concludes that the convergence of television and digital technology has always been seen as a way of improving TV, drawing on the enduring status of television as bad object.<br />
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The second, published in February, is <a href="http://flowtv.org/2014/02/immersive-media/" target="_blank">Immersive Media: Whose Fantasy?</a> This is a report from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which I attended for the first time in January as part of the <a href="http://irtsfoundation.org/faculty-industry-seminars.html" target="_blank">IRTS Industry/Faculty Seminar</a>. I was struck at the trade show by the ubiquity of "immersive" talk and wanted to poke around at it. I see this as a way of the media and electronics industries both to sell the idea that their products will win over consumers.<br />
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And the final column, just published last week, is <a href="http://flowtv.org/2014/04/the-celebrity-sex-tape/" target="_blank">The Celebrity Sex Tape: Where Porn Meets Reality TV</a>. This is an analysis of a form of media I've had in mind to write something about since the third season of <i>The Hills</i>, when Lauren's good reputation is threatened by a dirty sex tape rumor. I used the opportunity of contributing to <i>Flow</i> to express these thoughts, particularly the idea that celebrity culture appeals to straight men too and how that works.<br />
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The theme I think these rather different brief essays have in common is fantasy. In all three, I think we learn something important about media forms and technologies by thinking about whose fantasies they aim to fulfill, and what these fantasies are really about. This interest is also central to the argument of <i><a href="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16951-6/video-revolutions" target="_blank">Video Revolutions</a> </i>and my work in progress on early games. Fantasies of the sort discussed in my <i>Flow </i>columns ultimately concern relations of power, whether between media industries and consumers or between conceptions of social identity.<br />
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One further thought while I'm blogging about these columns. The guidelines <i>Flow</i> gives writers includes a word limit of 1500, which sometimes feels arbitrary and frustrating. On the internet there is no scarce resource of paper or ink. But at the end of this cycle I find myself grateful for that artificial constraint, which can focus your writing. It's a productive exercise to see what can be done with a short form, and what is better left out.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-76668498357469689152014-03-17T12:22:00.000-06:002014-03-17T12:22:25.134-06:00Video Revolutions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/app?fileid=9798&height=275&service=thumbnail&width=183" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/app?fileid=9798&height=275&service=thumbnail&width=183" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-16951-6/video-revolutions" target="_blank">Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium</a> is a short book I wrote about the history of video from the early days of television to the present. It's around 30,000 words long and is selling for $9 in paperback and even less for the Kindle version, which will be released in April. I have always loved cute little paperbacks that you can read in an hour or two and I hope this will fit that description. For instance, last spring I spent a day doing research at the Chicago Public Library, taking the Hiawatha Express down in the morning and returning that evening. On the southbound leg I read Theodore Roszak's <i>From Satori to Silicon Valley</i>, and coming north I read Peter Krämer's BFI Classic on <i>2001</i>. There is a special satisfaction in reading a whole book in a single sitting, absorbing all of its argument and examples at once. This works if you download it as an e-book too, of course, though I don't know if an e-book gets to be cute.<br />
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I began to research this new work without knowing what I would like to do with it. While reading 1970s popular press sources about video games, I noticed that <i>video</i> had a number of connotations at the time that suggested being not only a novel use of television, but an alternative to it. Meanwhile, I had been trying to ascertain why video games came to be called that rather than other names they have gone by: TV or tele-games, electronic games, computer games, digital games, etc. So off on a detour I went, looking up uses of <i>video</i> going back to its origins as a name for television in the 1930s. At some point I thought an essay on the history of video would help answer some questions about the history of the medium, which has often been considered by media historians and critics but seldom taking a very long view. (For instance, books about video art or movies on video or video stores tend to stick to their more specific areas.) I started to take notes and conceptualize this history as a series of phases defined in part by video's relation to TV and other media, and in part by developments in video technology.<br />
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When I wrote the first draft of what took shape as an extended essay, I thought I might try to publish it as an e-book, a single or digital short. Perhaps you could call it a mini-monograph, though I don't think that's such a great term. A friend has suggested academic novella, which accounts for length but might suggest another genre. Whatever we call it, I was excited that CUP was interested, and a bit surprised that the press wanted to publish it as a paperback as well as an e-book. I imagined that the new digital format would free me to write something of unusual length, in a somewhat experimental format; conventional publication wasn't the initial goal. I'm surprised now how much picturing the writing as a physical object, as printed on pages bound between a cover, changes the way I think of the work.<br />
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For the cover, I suggested the wonderful art of <a href="http://www.hollisbrownthornton.com/" target="_blank">Hollis Brown Thornton</a>, who produces nostalgic images of old media like video game carts and VHS cassettes. I'm thrilled that he agreed to this use.<br />
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Part of the story the book tells is visual, and <a href="http://www.pinterest.com/mznewman/video-revolutions/" target="_blank">this Pinterest board </a>includes many of the illustrations in Video Revolutions as well as other related images. I have also posted many of these images over the past months and years at my <a href="http://newman.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">tumblr</a>.<br />
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Below are the catalog description and blurbs. And here is an interview I did with <a href="https://twitter.com/hleman" target="_blank">Hope Leman</a> at <a href="http://criticalmargins.com/2014/02/26/interview-michael-z-newman/" target="_blank">Critical Margins</a>.<br />
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<i>Description</i>:<br />
Since the days of early television, video has been an indispensable part of culture, society, and moving-image media industries. Over the decades, it has been an avant-garde artistic medium, a high-tech consumer gadget, a format for watching movies at home, a force for democracy, and the ultimate, ubiquitous means of documenting reality. In the twenty-first century, video is the name we give all kinds of moving images. We know it as an adaptable medium that bridges analog and digital, amateur and professional, broadcasting and recording, television and cinema, art and commercial culture, and old media and new digital networks.<br />
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In this history, Michael Z. Newman casts video as a medium of shifting value and legitimacy in relation to other media and technologies, particularly film and television. Video has been imagined as more or less authentic or artistic than movies or television, as more or less democratic and participatory, as more or less capable of capturing the real. Techno-utopian rhetoric has repeatedly represented video as a revolutionary medium, promising to solve the problems of the past and the present—often the very problems associated with television and the society shaped by it—and to deliver a better future. Video has also been seen more negatively, particularly as a threat to movies and their culture. This study considers video as an object of these hopes and fears and builds an approach to thinking about the concept of the medium in terms of cultural status.<br />
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"Video Revolutions is a stimulating and satisfying intellectual tour and argument, chiefly for Newman’s ability to encompass often disparate case studies within a single historical lens." — William Boddy, Baruch College, CUNY<br />
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"Michael Newman has carved out a fascinating intellectual space between television and cinema as they are traditionally understood, to illuminate both as well as to explore the new ground that the concept of 'video' established in the media imaginary. This is a concise and impressive work that should be on the reading list of all scholars of media and contemporary culture." — Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison<br />
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"Newman does for video what Lynn Spigel did for television: he ‘makes room’ for it in an accessible and compelling critique that shows how video has become an integral part of our lives. Video Revolutions is a book that is long overdue." — Michael Curtin, co-author, The American Television Industry<br />
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mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-21373182893802585352013-08-06T13:49:00.000-06:002013-08-06T13:49:48.174-06:00To all the VCRs I loved before<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBA-aq79lusi3qszRR-PYy_ORk41W0Nk0JYIMH_OGncOIdQ_gJBlLqW5EhXctZO3buTMzmPfiOnLzU3O9hNq6mCKdTTlPRrUEfqUDnYn_hrRzeloH339xnocEnozEid7O9Esi2/s1600/tumblr_mqm4i4DQvR1qz4bgwo1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBA-aq79lusi3qszRR-PYy_ORk41W0Nk0JYIMH_OGncOIdQ_gJBlLqW5EhXctZO3buTMzmPfiOnLzU3O9hNq6mCKdTTlPRrUEfqUDnYn_hrRzeloH339xnocEnozEid7O9Esi2/s320/tumblr_mqm4i4DQvR1qz4bgwo1_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Magnavox RIP</td></tr>
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<br />
A moment of passage into adulthood occurred for me upon the purchase, charged to a MasterCard not billed to my mom and dad, of a piece of consumer electronics. It was a Panasonic VHS deck from a Nobody Beats the Wiz in downtown Manhattan, either the cheapest or next-to-cheapest kind of VCR you could buy in 1994, in the ballpark of $50. I was sharing a 2-bedroom near the Sheridan Square stop of the 1/9 train. The console TV set in our living room was a hand-me-down from my grandmother, who that fall was being moved from an apartment in Brooklyn to a nursing home in New Jersey. We didn't have cable, though it didn't stop me from watching through terrible reception some of my favorite shows of the 90s, particularly <i>Homicide</i> and <i>My So-Called Life</i>. Mainly I watched movies rented from Kim's, a place that ought to have been preserved for exhibit at the Smithsonian. Kim's organized its tapes by director, which is really all you need to know about that VCR and what I did with it in the 1990s.<br />
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When we gave up the apartment, I kept the VCR and my friend and roommate Matthew kept the red formica and chrome table and chairs that we had bought at a flea market around the same time. Today I might rather have the furniture. At the time I needed that VCR more than I needed even one chair.<br />
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Before I succumbed to the pleasure of my own cable TV subscription at the end of the decade, when I was living in Madison, I used to get friends to record things. Everyone was talking about <i>Buffy</i> so I asked someone to tape it for me. <i>Felicity</i> came on afterward so she gave me that too to fill up the available two hours, and I loved them both, they were the highlight of every week. As I recall I was already watching <i>Ally McBeal</i> and the World Series, so I guess Fox came over the air but not the WB. Maybe I had Classical Film Theory on the nights when <i>Buffy</i> and <i>Felicity</i> were on and didn't know how to program the VCR. Now, of course, any episode of these shows can be summoned from the cloud in a moment. Maybe that's a loss as well as a gain.<br />
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Soon after our relationship began, Elana acquired a second VCR so that she could tape two shows at once. An exuberant extravagance, but an easily justifiable one. Within a couple of years I went from no cable and a VCR used mainly to catch up on the history of world cinema to cable and two VCRs used to record current network shows, as well as old stuff on cable (Elana watched <i>Happy Days</i> recorded off Nick at Nite while eating breakfast; I studied the TCM schedule to plan my taping). Elana taught me never to watch TV shows live. You save fifteen minutes per hour by recording them and skipping the ads, which adds up if you're a busy grad student.<br />
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Where is all of this hardware now, these objects of magical fetishistic delight? The VCRs are long gone. Two out of three television sets I watched while living on my own in the 90s (one from New York, two from Madison) are gone. The third TV set, a 1980s Sony Trinitron from Elana's parents' family room, sits in our basement and is used for Atari VCS games and the very rare playing of a <i>Bob the Builder</i> VHS cassette. Over the years we have cycled through numerous rectangular metal and plastic boxes, which we increasingly treat as short-term items, like the reusable-disposable Ziploc containers in which we pack cut up strawberries for kids' lunches.<br />
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There is a 1946 RCA Victor television set on a table in our dining room, a museum piece. It belonged to Elana's grandparents. People always ask if it works and we shrug. If it did work, what would you want to do with it? Would you sit in front of it to watch<i> Orange is the New Black</i> on its tiny black and white screen? I wonder if any such thing of our times would end up in the home of our grandchildren. It didn't take long for the blueberry iMac and the Razr phone, both of which I really wanted, to seem boring, out, even embarrassing to look at. <br />
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As part of an ongoing uncluttering project (with apologies to <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AO_t7GtXO6w" target="_blank">Glengarry Glen Ross</a></i>, one must Always Be Uncluttering), I took a trunkfull of old hardware to the Department of Public Works on the most recent electronics recycling day. Next to an enormous widescreen CRT set left by someone else, which is probably in perfect working order and not much more than ten years old, I stacked a stereo receiver, laserdisc player, two DVD players, three DVRs (all SD, two TiVo's), a laptop computer, and a video game console. Next to that I left a big plastic bag filled with cables. I was a bit reclutant to type that list, which seems to amount to a confession of throwing money into the fire. But most of these items had been unused for more than five years, and some more like ten. None of them are worth much at all on eBay. Some of the items work, some don't, and none of them were going to be of any use to us.<br />
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And then there are the fetish objects I am too reclutant to part with, a shelf cluttered with phones, iPods, cameras, and their chargers and cables. These tell a story and I don't feel ready to give them up, especially when they don't take up much space. But they're basically just marking time on death row. Once in awhile I do an exercise in a New Media class where I bring in "old" technologies, like a film camera and a videocassette and a clickwheel iPod, and ask the students to describe the object imagining it's the latest thing. It's useful to have some old things around for times when I want to make believe they're new.<br />
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We took responsibility for the disposal of our e-waste, but we're middle-aged homeowners, and we fear one day that we might have a basement like those of our dear parents, home to a lifetime of accumulated stuff. If there weren't so many other moments vying for the honor, I might say recycling such an impressive collection of hardware is another life passage, now into middle age, but really I just wish it were so. Meeting a lawyer to sign a will and buying life insurance already served that function. Still, giving or throwing meaningful things away, like saying goodbye, can be a reminder that eventually you will have no want or need of persons or things. For me, anyway, these times feel ceremonial.<br />
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Others might experience such passages differently. On moving days over the past few years, particularly in the campusy neighborhood near us, I have been paying special attention to the presence of so many CRT television sets abandoned by the curb alongside rotting sofas and broken chairs. Sometimes the TV has been damaged, it often seems intentionally, perhaps with a hole poked in the rear. Goodwill sells CRT television sets these days for 99 cents. Ninety-nine cents for a television. That's less than they charge for a hardcover book. People still want televisions, just not that kind. Maybe there is some pleasure in destroying and rejecting the old, obsolete, abject tube, in treating it like your shit. I have not felt this. Yet I have become fascinated by the ugly heaps left behind by college kids, hoping when I bike by a dilapidated sectional or a mound of old plastic shopping bags filled with leftovers of a few years of undergrad living that there will be a CRT set face down on the lawn for me to photograph and post on twitter.<br />
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While disgusted by the environmental and social and economic hazards likely to be caused by such fast cycles of planned obsolescence and overheated consumerism, what seems more interesting (to me anyway) are the emotional ups and downs of living amidst such an abundance of new and rapidly aging stuff. People want their e-things so badly, then they take pleasure in their destruction and abandonment so soon afterward -- unless they cling to them and refuse to let them go even after finding newer, better e-things to replace them, as I do with my iPods and flip phones. When I asked a class of 20 students to leave their smart devices on the table in the front of the room for 45 minutes one day last semester (I put mine there too), people got twitchy and felt the absence of those palm-sized bricks they keep by their flesh even as they sleep. In a few years those objects will no longer be anyone's whole life any more. They will have cracked screens and dead batteries, maybe they'll be dumped by the curb, maybe they'll be responsibly dropped in a cardboard recycling bin at Best Buy, if that is still a place you can go to. Whatever their fate, they will have been consumed, digested, and excreted.<br />
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For a long time, the future-minded among us have predicted an end of old technologies like paper and more recently discs and other physical wares. The trend now in electronics, particularly where software is concerned, is to move from objects you purchase and own to services you subscribe to -- from atoms to bits, from discs to the cloud. Maybe this will mean our homes will be less burdened by accumulations of stuff, though I doubt it. The consumer economy requires more stuff, ever more stuff, not less. <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/manufacturing/article/58608-print-output-rose-in-2012.html" target="_blank">More books were published last year, a time of e-reader revolution, than the one before</a>. And we still like our stuff.<br />
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Elana and I have been watching <i>thirtysomething</i> off and on for a few years, and until recently were doing so using the four box sets of DVDs on the shelf. Then we noticed that the series is also streaming on Amazon Prime, which we access through a Roku to watch on the television set in the living room. For the fourth season, we switched from the DVDs to streaming, partly because Amazon's HD picture resolution is better (though the image is also cropped), but mostly because we're too lazy and tired to deal with the discs. And yet the thought of getting rid of <i>thirtysomething</i> DVD box sets because the show is also available online strikes me as simply outlandish. They could disappear from Amazon for all we know. And I still want them, can't stop wanting them. These are the objects about which, like Alien in <i>Spring Breakers</i>, I say:<br />
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<i>This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin' dream, y'all!</i><br />
<i>All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit!</i><br />
<i>Look at my sheeyit! This ain't nuttin', I got ROOMS of this shit!</i><br />
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mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-86232046278388913972013-06-20T12:57:00.000-06:002013-06-20T12:57:36.605-06:00Blogging Then and Now<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLMcTxa_RthdfV6qaRZngW9595zBGC1RQSMDsAOfdpghIZlKN-R4HsxTygM9gsOpWNDTnoe3yXag7KKyhZj6AaMEs3N7yBc2fc6wImMh_yW2Wlv2Hc-p_OZS6YmGG4mQZlbfjG/s1600/163719314_c38d042645+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLMcTxa_RthdfV6qaRZngW9595zBGC1RQSMDsAOfdpghIZlKN-R4HsxTygM9gsOpWNDTnoe3yXag7KKyhZj6AaMEs3N7yBc2fc6wImMh_yW2Wlv2Hc-p_OZS6YmGG4mQZlbfjG/s1600/163719314_c38d042645+(1).jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">t-shirt for sale at Target in 2006, from my <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/88951160@N00/163719314/in/photolist-ft73N-qwL6e" target="_blank">flickr</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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When I was hired to my current job, two full professors in my department asked to meet with me on a summer afternoon to discuss expectations I would face in pursuit of tenure. My new senior colleagues encouraged me to publish my research in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals, and discouraged me from writing a blog. I don't know if they knew about my blogs (I doubt they did then); this was probably standard advice for junior faculty in 2007. If I were them, I probably would have said the same to a new hire. I remember thinking but not saying: of course I will blog, this won't stop me. But I will also do everything else I would need to do to succeed in this job.<br />
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Now I have tenure (official word came last week from the Chancellor), and here is this blog, infrequently updated and somewhat neglected. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, I've been practicing slow blogging. A sabbatical is coming in Fall 2013 and occasionally I wonder if this will be a time to get back into regular--maybe even daily--blogging. But that's pretty unlikely. I'm writing a book about video games in the 70s and early 80s and I'd rather do that than blog frequently. I know some people can mix blogging into a regular routine of other kinds of writing, but I'm not that kind of writer. If I choose to blog (as I am doing today), I am postponing something else. Once in awhile I like to write for the blog, but I like other kinds of writing more.<br />
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Another reason why I don't see myself blogging regularly during my sabbatical is that blogging ain't what it used to be. One thing people might have found unfamiliar if not offputting about blogging in the middle of the aughts when I was newly hired was that blogs were boundary-crossing in both form and content. People mixed personal and professional. They'd get first-persony and confessional even in efforts at engaging with intellectual concerns. They'd make the blog as much about process as product. No one was editing or reviewing your blog, so it had a raw immediacy missing from more formal writing. Now among media scholars, there isn't much of this kind of thing going on. Facebook and Twitter offer me more community and less permanence and official presence. A frequently updated personal blog on varied topics mixing personal and professional interests under my real name might seem weird today, and I don't know how comfortable I'd be writing this way.<br />
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I began this blog around the same time as I was hired as an assistant professor, at the end of 2006. But I had been blogging regulalry already; In 2006 I was not just starting a blog, but turning over a new leaf. Zigzigger was an effort to make a professional identity online apart from my earlier contributions to the blogosphere. At my earlier blog I went by MZN, which isn't exactly a pseudonym. But a web search for my name doesn't produce that old blog in the results and I still think of it as semi-secret, though lots of people know about it. Zigzigger was among other things an effort at SEO.<br />
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The impetus to begin that blog was to share experiences of cooking things I was excited about at a time when I was getting into food and its preparation. But I imagined that the blog would not focus on one topic only, so the name I gave it really on a whim was <a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Haverchuk</a>, after a character on a TV show. (Misspelled.) I would never have linked Haverchuk to my full name, because then my scholarly identity and my identity who writes about cooking on the internet would become confused. My graduate school advisor might read about these personal experiences, which I didn't want to happen.<br />
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The pseudonymity and anonymity of many scholars' blogs in the mid-aughts is evidence that my way of thinking was quite common among grad students and faculty. We had something to lose in blogging this way. The blog was not official scholarly publishing, and didn't count for anything official (you wouldn't put a blog on your CV). As with social networking sites, a discourse of legitimacy surrounded blogging: spending time that was way less legitimate than spending time at work. It might actually be worse than wasting time if you were doing this while being paid to do your work. Then it would be stealing time, and your writing would make you a kind of web outlaw. At any rate your public performance of time spent blogging was potentially rebellious and exciting, but also could attract unwanted negative attention. And the content of many academic blogs in the mid-aughts could be the kind of things you'd avoid saying in public under your own name. People were fired back then for things they wrote online -- <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dooced" target="_blank">dooced</a>. A high-profile blogger was <a href="http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002353.html" target="_blank">denied tenure</a>. Academics blogged about their teachers and students and colleagues. One popular blog of the time was called <a href="http://waiterrant.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Waiter Rant</a>, in which an NYC restaurant server dished on his customers. Dozens of academic blogs were basically Grad Student or Adjunct or Prof (most likely Assistant Prof) Rant. Bloggers confessed their insecurities and grudges. The tone was confiding and revealing.<br />
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Pseudonymity was only part of the warrant for writing this way. It also helped that your blog was not supposed to count, that it was shoptalk and scuttlebut rather than official work. If it was supposed to count, you would use your blog to publish first drafts of scholarly writing, reports from conferences, volleys in academic debates, updates on your accomplishments, etc. Your blog wasn't your personal brand or your home page or your "web presence." If it was the product of wasted or stolen time, or just your personal time, a blog had a different kind of value and function.<br />
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As for me, while I might blog about the academic life, in 2005 I didn't have that in mind very much even though I admired the pseudonymous academic blogs. I had just finished my PhD but was underemployed as a trailing spouse and uncertain about job prospects. We had a one year-old son, who I looked after half of the working week. The rest of the time he was in day care and I taught one or two classes and worked on research and writing. I had gotten into cooking partly as an escape from academic work, when I was avoiding my dissertation and feeling like I might not even finish the degree. Rather than force myself to write a few hundred words in which I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, I would bake bread from my own repellent sourdough starter. I'd experiment with Pad Thai techniques (what kind of tamarind product? what technique for cooking the noodles? ketchup, really?). I wasn't about to blog about an academic identity crisis, but I was eager to share adventures in trying new ingredients and dishes, and to have an outlet for another kind of writing. If I cooked something that excited me I wanted to show it to others. I blogged about trips to the farmer's market, and experiments making ice cream with cardamom or rice or green chiles, often while Leo napped. Eventually things started to work out in my work life and my cooking became less of an avoidance ritual and more a routine of feeding the family. I was offered a tenure-track job, got a book contract, published some essays, taught my classes, worked toward tenure, etc. I continued to cook pretty much every day, but I stopped buying new ingredients at Asian groceries just to figure them out, and I lost interest in the Food Network (which was less and less cooking-focused anyway). I also stopped blogging about food.<br />
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I also mostly gave up reading food blogs, which had given me some sense of community. I got to know some interesting people through Haverchuk, including a handful I have met IRL and who continue to be friends online. They're also academics, some of whom engage with food as a topic of study, and others like me who maintain multiple interests. I haven't made friends like these simply through Zigzigger, though I suppose there are people who have become friends who have gotten to know me partly through the blog and partly through other encounters.<br />
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I never had a pseudonymous blog about academic life and issues related to teaching and research and the academy, but I read many of them, such as Bitch PhD (gone, it seems) and <a href="http://crazyphd.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Dr. Crazy</a>. They were inspiring and influential, and their authors were like celebrities. It seemed like you could say whatever you want and people would pay attention to you at the moment you said it.<br />
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Nothing stays the same for very long on the internet. Blogging changed for many reasons, for better and for worse. This isn't meant to be a naive lamentation that the good old days are gone and forgotten, never to return. But here are some changes I don't feel entirely positive about.<br />
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1. Academic blogs, particularly in film & TV & media studies, became established as important, official ways of circulating ideas. While avoiding sounding too academic (the original guidlines for writing for <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/" target="_blank">Antenna</a>, for instance, specified this avoidance), they're still writing in a way that obviously cares about being taken seriously and seeming legitimate so that they can count. Some of the influential senior scholars in the field took to blogging, and rarely used the format for the kinds of first-person, confessional writing that was part of the mid-aughts blog style. I'm thinking for instance of Jenkins and Bordwell & Thompson, but there are many others. As blogs become more legitimate and serve these more official functions, they seem less appropriate for the more casual, sloppy, first-drafty ponderings that made the format seem vital in the first place. I do value the blog as a way of circulating ideas quickly to a potentially broad audience and without the filter of peer review. I like the community that scholarly blogs offer us. But let's recognize what kind of writing this is and is not, what is gained and lost with the legitimacy of academic blogging.<br />
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2. Personal blogs by academics are more rare than before. The outlets for this kind of online writing are now much more often Facebook and Twitter. In these places, writing can seem more private (Facebook) and less thought through and developed (Twitter). We think of Twitter as particularly brief and fragmentary, but Facebook statuses are quick and dirty too (sometimes when I have to click to continue reading a FB status I think, really?). Both sites are less about writing than blogs typically are. They are more like conversation, and the discourse is very oral-culture, and leans heavily on links, photos, and videos. These are all great things, but again, they're taking the place of blogs and replacing one kind of discourse with various others.<br />
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3. Pseudonymous blogging has withered as real offline identities become more of a norm and as society becomes more accustomed to oversharing, both of which serve the commercial ambitions of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. If I were a graduate student now I probably wouldn't care as much about my advisor reading my cooking blog posts, because everyone shares their shit these days. Definitely more than they did in 2005. The anonymous, pseudonymous, open-secret pseudonymous, pseudo-pseudonymous authorship of blogs permitted a voice of confessional intimacy that I just don't see that much of any more. Consider vaguebooking, the custom on Facebook of making oblique references to emotional ups and downs, and of life events of some consequence being kept under wraps. If we weren't writing under our full, real-world names on Facebook, for an audience of high school friends, distant relatives, parents and children, students and teachers, work friends and friends of friends, would people be doing so much vaguebooking?<br />
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When I started this more scholarly and official blog, I was reacting against what I perceived to be threats to my scholarly identity that would come from the type of mid-aughts blogging that I now miss. But I was also thinking positively in terms of how I could share writing related to my research and teaching interests. What didn't seem feasible at the time, as a beginning assistant professor, was to combine these modes of writing in one place. It still doesn't seem very feasible, even as I have earned tenure and no longer worry so much about other people's judgement. I would not have considered turning Haverchuk into a mixture of food writing and film and TV studies writing. From my present vantage, I see this blog as a product of my 2006-7 self. This has been an assistant professor, tenure-track blog. If I had been 7 years along my career trajectory in 2007 who knows what I might have done in the way of a blog.<br />
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When skeptics and naysayers want to trivialize the way people share their experiences of everyday life online, a favorite example involves eating. "I don't need to know what you had for lunch." Well, I am often happy to know, especially if you made it yourself or ate it someplace cool. And I have long considered this kind of common-sense TMI reaction to carry a strong dose of gendered distinction between what matters and what is deemed to be beneath the speaker. Food and its preparation, particularly in the more ordinary day-by-day experiences of eating, is trivial because it's associated with women and domestic labor. Many things that matter less than eating (after all, you need to eat and probably take pleasure from it regularly) are given greater cultural legitimacy if they are the interests of straight adult males, e.g., sports. Which isn't to knock sports - I like sports too, as both a participant and spectator. But let's recognize the patriarchal privilege that makes sports talk seem legitimate and food talk -- "what you had for lunch" talk -- not merely uninteresting but the epitome of uninterestingness.<br />
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There's a big exception here, which is that the masculinized upscale culture of restaurant chefs and "gourmet" home cooks is ok. Men and women experience food cultures differently. For women cooking can be a creative and professional pursuit, but it's always also tied to their gender role as nurturer and caretaker in the home. For men cooking is often seen more as a hobby or special interest, is more often professionalized (even men who don't work for a living in a kitchen might be called chef when cooking at home), and is tied more to masculinized notions of virtuosity and accomplishment. Men want praise for their cooking, and in many families their presence in the kitchen is a special occasion. I have experienced so many times the affirmations men get for domestic work that is merely expected of women.<br />
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Because my identity was only three initials on my old blog, it wasn't obvious to many of my readers who I was. I often wrote not only about grocery shopping and cooking but also mentioned looking after a young child. Some people assumed I was a woman or weren't sure of my gender. It wasn't exactly "on the internet no one knows you're a dog," but the pseudonymity allowed for a more fluid presentation of identity than we get on Facebook. Maybe if I had been writing about mainly dudely food topics like grilling or molecular gastronomy I would have come across more dudely. While some of my posts were about unglamorous dishes like tuna casserole, fried rice, and turkey pot pie, I also dabbled in kitchen experiments with things like aspic and organ meats and unusual ice cream ingredients. Some of this might have had a male kitchen-workshop flavor, but on the whole the food blog world is quite strongly gendered feminine, and most of the people I got to know there were women. What I was doing wasn't too different from what they were doing.<br />
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There's a similar distinction we can make between more feminized personal blogs (and tweets, status updates, etc.) and more masculinized professional ones, the ones in which daily life and its feminized concens (dressing, eating, care of self and others) is minimized and official discourse about stuff that counts is made central. The shift away from personal academic blogs toward more parascholarly writing was a boon for scholarly discourse, and I don't think anyone, even those who looked on skeptically in the mid-aughts, would deny that now. But it came at the expense of another kind of writing, which is often devalued because it is personal.<br />
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My old blog and this one reflect this development. The mid-aughts blog, often personal (though rarely very intimate or confessional) and centered around food, was not concerned at all with my scholarly identity or with participating in the kind of discourse that might ever count, though I did often talk about TV and media. This kind of blog, on the other hand, participates in a development in the neoliberal academy in which we are all concerned with the establishment and maintenance of an entreprenurial personal brand. Even if people don't take blogs posts as seriously as journal articles and books (a debatable point - people assign blog posts in class and cite them in scholarly work, and many people want them to count), these web self-publishing exercises are serving our professional goals by fashioning and building reputations and networks. We might need to do that in our present environment, but the personal, intimate, confessional, and yes feminized discourse of many mid-aughts blogs was also serving people's needs. It would be nice to be able to meet those too in longer or more open or less ephemeral forms of writing than Facebook statuses and tweets. It would be nice if some of the blurred-boundaries, not-counting qualities of the mid-aughts blogs were more available to us in today's and tomorrow's academic blogs.<br />
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This post was inspired in part by reading another reflection on scholarly blogging in the aughts at <a href="http://slavesofacademe.blogspot.com/2013/06/an-archive-of-self.html" target="_blank">Slaves of Academe</a>, one of my favorites from several years back. It was a pleasure to see a new Slaves post appear in my RSS Reader.<br />
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Haverchuk was active from July 2005 to March 2007. Revisiting some of my writing from that time gives me the urge to take the blog offline. But some of the posts make me feel other things, related to what my life and the world were like then. I also used the blog as an impetus to learn about photography so that my food shots didn't look horrible, and some of these posts have (if I do say so) interesting photos by a novice with a point-and-shoot camera we bought to take pictures of our baby. So here are a few of my entries that I can imagine you reading without feeling totally embarrassed.<br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2005/08/whats-haverchuk.html" target="_blank">What's Haverhuck</a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2005/10/old-food.html" target="_blank">Old Food </a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2005/11/cornbread-turkey-pot-pie.html" target="_blank">Cornbread turkey pot pie </a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2005/11/retro-food-eggs-in-aspic.html" target="_blank">Eggs in aspic </a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2005/11/doors.html" target="_blank">Office doors</a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2006/01/fun-with-schmaltz.html" target="_blank">Fun with schmaltz </a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2006/02/tripe.html" target="_blank">Tripe</a><br />
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<a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2006/05/ice-cream-project-egg-ice-cream.html" target="_blank">Egg ice cream</a><br />
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And some <a href="http://haverchuk.blogspot.com/2006/07/vast-vault-of-our-common-human-culture.html" target="_blank">YouTube videos of July, 2006</a>, when YouTube itself was just so incredible. Lots of links to videos no longer there :(<br />
<br />mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-13754048695048113152013-01-09T16:20:00.000-06:002013-01-09T16:20:23.920-06:00Tumblrs of Note<div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOpIEh60oxcOlJaLM7T1cGf3dkCW3AHGAut1XYCOsNQsaxk_7Qid8_k-M9ewjjFfR8XIo6ZGBVa5Xjv8S0eeoKJQUkXg8FjNPW7OrYgILvedMq_QRdU3kCCV0kiwIpFrHjb7Zv/s1600/tumblr_mgdmn0tnSr1qmik36o1_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOpIEh60oxcOlJaLM7T1cGf3dkCW3AHGAut1XYCOsNQsaxk_7Qid8_k-M9ewjjFfR8XIo6ZGBVa5Xjv8S0eeoKJQUkXg8FjNPW7OrYgILvedMq_QRdU3kCCV0kiwIpFrHjb7Zv/s400/tumblr_mgdmn0tnSr1qmik36o1_1280.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.41702988906763494" style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">The optimal tumblr experience is the rapid river of content that carries you along if you are following at least several hundred regularly updating accounts. Unlike tweets, the other great river of the web, the good stuff in your tumblr dashboard is images, so you can ride this current without much need of the parts of your brain that process language, the better to admire exquisite celebrity physique and physiognomy and the deep truths conveyed only by GIFs. Some of the posts will be typographical or texty, and you will need your reading glasses to refer to captions if you’re not sure who that possibly-famous person is or what that subtitle says. Actually the captions are a big part of the effect of some of my favorite tumblrs, but as with photography more generally, words are generally secondary even if they do anchor an image’s meaning.</span></span></b></div>
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<b style="background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="vertical-align: baseline;">At first the metaphor of curation seemed so delightfully to capture the spirit of the linking web, and to distinguish it from the oversharing mode of confessional blog posts about cheese sandwiches and suchlike (for the record, I have always preferred reading about boring snacks and meals to many other topics, particularly liberal political ranting and the humiliations of air travel). Of course it is arrogant to describe clicking “reblog” on a photograph of the president with a water pistol in the language of art exhibits. (For one jaundiced take, here is <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/you-are-not-a-curator-you-are-actually-just-a-blogger">The Awl</a>.)</span><span style="vertical-align: baseline;"> The thing about curation is, if everyone gets to do it then the whole world is our museum. That doesn’t sound so terrible actually, but once the activity has passed into ordinariness the title loses its luster and makes us sound like d-bags for talking like that. I like sharing better than curating -- it expresses a spirit of generosity, but also hints at the egocentricity and self-regard fuelling so much of this activity. As in, “Thanks for sharing.” Could be a compliment or a put-down or a bit of both in that sincerely ironic mode of advanced hispterism. It also cuts us down to size a bit.</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What I like in a tumblr is wit and verve, sensibility and personality, and expressions of appreciation. I like enthusiastic appreciation of many various things: television characters, baby zoo animals, bookshelves, abstract patterns, vinyl records, Polaroids from the set of <i>Blade Runner</i>, Anne Hathaway’s short hair, old magazines, wood paneling, donuts, VHS, one-sheets, runway models of the 80s and 90s, bicycles, fonts, black tights, Joe Biden. I like tumblr’s all-things-for-everyone, hodge-podgey eclecticism, the surprise awaiting every time I scroll down further into the bottomless page. Tumblr is all at once an adventure and a travelogue, a Dada slideshow, and a way of keeping tabs on Hollywood shooting and publicity schedules. It’s like going to the art, design, and photography sections of Barnes & Noble and paging through all the big books you’d never buy but wouldn’t mind to be given as gifts now and then, for the mid-century modern coffee table of your real estate porn fantasies. Now that channel surfing has been obviated by the program grid and the DVR, tumblr is a way of “seeing what’s on,” minus the ads and infomercials and cable news blowhards.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All of which is to say: if you work involves a computer connected to the internet, tumblr is a pleasurable way of not working.</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What follows are some tumblrs you ought to follow. If you’re not into tumblr already, though, I should explain that the experience of these sites is different in the dashboard than it is when you look at the individual page. You have to see the images in the context of the river, rather than all together and harmoniously thematic and coherent. You have to imagine each page jumbled up with all the others you follow. In this way, tumblr (like twitter) is very different from the “flow” of broadcasting and magazines, which is the product of decisions about organization and sequence. The aleatory nature of the river is part of tumblr’s magical effect, and you can’t see that without getting into the whole experience.</span><div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In my post on <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2011/12/faves-2011.html">2011 faves</a> I recommended these tumblrs, most of which are still posting regularly:</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><a href="http://unhappyhipsters.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">unhappy hipsters</span><span style="text-decoration: initial; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://unhappyhipsters.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://tumblr.photojojo.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">photojojo</span></a><br /><a href="http://tumblr.photojojo.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://ummhello.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ummhello</span></a><br /><a href="http://ummhello.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://murketing.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">murketing</span></a><br /><a href="http://murketing.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://iloveoldmagazines.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">i love old magazines</span></a><br /><a href="http://iloveoldmagazines.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://thisisnthappiness.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this isn't happiness</span></a><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> - my choice of them all, consistently high quality, a unique sensibility</span><br /><a href="http://thisisnthappiness.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://nickdrake.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nick drake</span></a><br /><a href="http://nickdrake.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://life.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">life magazine</span></a><br /><a href="http://life.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://bookshelfporn.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">bookshelf porn</span></a><br /><a href="http://bookshelfporn.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hipster animals</span></a><br /><a href="http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://dearphotograph.com/" style="font-weight: normal;">dear photograph</a> (as time goes on I'm finding the captions a little too schmaltzy for me, but it's still great)</span><br /><a href="http://dearphotograph.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://nailburgerlar.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nails and burgers</span></a><br /><a href="http://nailburgerlar.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://ridesabike.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rides a bike</span></a><br /><a href="http://ridesabike.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://fuckyeah1980s.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fuck yeah 1980s</span></a><br /><a href="http://fuckyeah1980s.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://slaughterhouse90210.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">slaughterhouse 90210</span></a><br /><a href="http://slaughterhouse90210.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><a href="http://old-video-game-ads.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">old video game ads</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But there’s more!</span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://surisburnbook.tumblr.com/">Suri's burn book</a>, which I think is an inside joke I don't totally get but still appreciate; the image above is from the top post at the moment, and the caption reads: "</span></span></b><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Every morning, she waits to get dressed until she sees what I’m wearing. I’m over it."</span></span><b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://philmfotos.tumblr.com/">FILMographies</a>, like Dear Photograph but with movie locations </span><br /><a href="http://surisburnbook.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://suicideblonde.tumblr.com/">suicide blonde</a> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and <a href="http://bohemea.tumblr.com/">bohemia</a>,</span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by a couple who post and reblog photos of celebrities, usually with some sensual or erotic quality</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://undergroundnewyorkpubliclibrary.com/">underground new york public library</a>, people reading on the subway even in the e-reader age</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://fuckyeahwoodpaneling.tumblr.com/">Fuck Yeah, Wood Paneling! </a></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://tgifreitag.tumblr.com/">tgifreitag</a>, eclectic and mesmerizing (I guess you could say the same for lots of these)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://celebsliketoeat.tumblr.com/">celebs like to eat</a>, a good reminder that even very attractive people look bad in photos when they're putting food into their faces</span><br /><a href="http://celebsliketoeat.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://oldloves.tumblr.com/">old loves</a> which I learned about thanks to <a href="http://twitter.com/kristenwarner">@kristenwarner</a></span><br /><a href="http://oldloves.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://fuckyournoguchicoffeetable.tumblr.com/">fuck your noguchi coffee table </a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/">the art of google books </a></span><br /><a href="http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://awesomepeoplereading.tumblr.com/">awesome people reading</a> </span><br /><a href="http://awesomepeoplereading.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://fuckyeahmanuscripts.tumblr.com/">fuck yeah manuscripts </a></span><br /><a href="http://fuckyeahmanuscripts.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://eyefortrash.tumblr.com/">eye for trash</a> and </span></span><a href="http://profnooney.tumblr.com/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sierra OffLine</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">, two tumblrs by media historians I'm also friends with elsewhere on the internet</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://celebritiesonthesubway.tumblr.com/">celebrities on the subway</a> </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Of course you didn't need me to tell you about <a href="http://academiccoachtaylor.tumblr.com/">academic coach taylor </a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or <a href="http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/">texts from hillary</a>, which I miss</span><br /><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">GIFs</span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">:</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://movingthestill.tumblr.com/">moving the still</a>, a “GIF festival” </span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">random juxtapositions in <a href="http://gifandcircumstance.tumblr.com/">#gifandcircumstance </a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://gifhound.tumblr.com/">gifhound</a></span><br /><a href="http://gifhound.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://vazetti.tumblr.com/">vazetti</a> I like for the nostalgia</span><br /><a href="http://vazetti.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://littleplasticthings.tumblr.com/">little plastic things</a>, classic films </span><br /><a href="http://littleplasticthings.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://teengirlenthusiast.tumblr.com/">teen girl enthusiast </a></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://notoriousgifs.tumblr.com/">notororious gifs</a> is very pop-culture-y</span><br /><a href="http://dvdp.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://zbags.tumblr.com/">zbags</a>, unusual black-and-white, old-looking animations, a big fave</span><br /><a href="http://zbags.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.technoir.nl/">tech noir</a>, movies</span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://moviesplode.tumblr.com/">movie splode</a>, explosions in movies </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://lunatictoons.tumblr.com/">lunatic toons</a>, crazytown old animated movies</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I watch most of my reality TV in GIF form these days: <a href="http://realitytvgifs.tumblr.com/">reality tv gifs</a> </span><br /><a href="http://realitytvgifs.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://whtebkgrnd.tumblr.com/">whtebkgrnd</a> and </span><a href="http://psykzz.tumblr.com/" style="white-space: pre-wrap;">psykzz</a>, two tumblrs of<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;">abstract gifs</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://whtebkgrnd.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Glitches (some of which are also GIFs):</span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://yearoftheglitch.tumblr.com/">year of the glitch</a> is one of the best glitch blogs</span><br /><a href="http://yearoftheglitch.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://glitchnews.tumblr.com/">glitch news</a> </span><br /><a href="http://glitchnews.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://foodmosh.tumblr.com/">food mosh</a> </span><br /><a href="http://foodmosh.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://glitch-hop.tumblr.com/">glitch-hop</a> (like food mosh but with hip-hop videos) </span><br /><a href="http://glitch-hop.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://porn-glitch.tumblr.com/">porn glitch</a> </span><br /><a href="http://porn-glitch.tumblr.com/" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://glitchgifs.tumblr.com/">glitch gifs</a> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">***</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I have two tumblrs of my own: I post mainly things somewhat related to my research interests at <a href="http://newman.tumblr.com/">fraktastic</a>. I reblog GIFs at <a href="http://giferrific.tumblr.com/">giferrific</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">So what are your favorites?</span></div>
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mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-92159116876487614502012-11-13T13:43:00.000-06:002012-11-13T13:43:48.986-06:00Wreck-It Ralph with the Boys<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/e1/pd/44692000001/44692000001_1678973405001_WreckItRalph-Trailer1-Rev-.jpg?pubId=44692000001" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://brightcove.vo.llnwd.net/e1/pd/44692000001/44692000001_1678973405001_WreckItRalph-Trailer1-Rev-.jpg?pubId=44692000001" width="320" /></a></div>
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I assigned my Approaches to Media Studies grad class to do a 750-1000 word audience analysis based on participant observation and/or interview research. Earlier course assignments of similar scope were industry, textual, and discourse analyses. Not having studied audiences this way, I decided to complete the assignment myself.<br />
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On Saturday I went to see an afternoon show of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772341/"><i>Wreck-It Ralph</i></a> with three eight year-old boys. One of them was my son Leo, and the others were classmates of his in the third grade of a suburban public school. This account of our outing considers a handful of themes. One is the status of moviegoing as something special. Another is the way in which adults and children experience stories differently. And a final idea is the social value of media in the context of everyday life.<br />
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I first became aware of <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i> from a commercial on one of the kid channels my sons watch in the morning and early evening. I told Leo I wanted to see it with him, and he and his friends evidently started talking about about it at school. Leo’s pleasure in seeing the movie, from what I could tell, was to a large extent social. It was an occasion for an outing with me and his friends, and would give him knowledge and experience that might be valuable among his peers.<br />
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We saw the movie at a theater where you sit behind a long table and servers take your order. Much of the pre-movie discussion concerned food and drink. Moviegoing authorizes going out for popcorn and french fries and sugary soft drinks with friends on a Saturday afternoon. We were seeing <i>Wreck-It Ralph in 3D</i>, so there was also some goofing around with the glasses. One kid pretended that an image from the screen was coming after him.<br />
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The feature began and we watched in silence. Aside from some food-related whispers, and slurping sounds from empty cups, I didn’t hear my companions during the movie. This was a contrast to before and after, when they talked loudly in the theater and the car.<br />
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When the lights came on and we stood while watching the credits, I asked if anyone liked the movie and everyone did. Some parts were a little scary, but no one seemed frightened at the end. All three found it really funny, and they quoted a few of the lines they liked, over and over and over.<br />
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“Why are you so freakishly tall?!”<br />
“Why are you so freakishly annoying?!”<br />
Repeat.<br />
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Later when I asked Leo what he enjoyed about going to movies with friends, he mentioned their repetition of this freakishly annoying bit. Of course, during the movie I was preoccupied with many thoughts that never would have crossed their minds. Like wracking my brain trying to figure out which actor voiced the kick-ass female avatar (it’s Jane Lynch). I’m not even sure these kids are aware of how animated films use actors’ voices.<br />
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So in some ways, the boys seemed to have been watching a different movie. They were especially amused by a line from the commercial I heard them repeat on the ride to the theater in which the humor comes from punning on “duty”/”doodie” and the confusion of meaning between honor and excrement. They remembered many lines that I didn't. But I remembered many of <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i>’s allusions and parodies.<br />
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As we were leaving, Leo saw other kids from school and neighbors from our street waiting to see <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i>. He got to tell them how good and funny it is. As we walked to the car and drove away I tried to initiate some post-screening discussion, asking what they liked about it. This produced more quotations but not much summary or description or evaluation. I left it at that - they were more interested in talking and shouting in the inside-joke language of kids that parents don’t understand.<br />
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The next morning, though, Leo began a conversation over breakfast. He has often found movies seen in the theater to be a rather intense experience, and for a few years was scared of dark and threatening scenarios. We avoided moviegoing. There were scary parts, he admitted, but not the parts I worried about while watching, set in a first-person shooter with dark imagery, militarized avatars, heavy weaponry, and creepy villains. He was frightened by a different scenario, in which a character’s real bad identity was revealed in a climactic sequence.<br />
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Actually much of the movie is about ambiguity between good and bad characters, with the protagonist being a likable “bad guy” who wants to have a chance to enjoy the status of the hero: social acceptance, material rewards, and recognition. He seemed to tap into its deepest thematic material. Because we are led to sympathise with Ralph, a destructive antagonist in an 8-bit arcade game, Leo was happy that in the end of the narrative Ralph was finally included and represented within the world of the narrative on an “anniversary cake” from which he had previously been excluded.<br />
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By contrast, I didn’t find myself becoming very involved in the story, which I found to be conventional to the point of cliché. I did find the visuals and the characterizations and the representations of gaming and game worlds and the arcade as a play space to be rewarding enough to make the movie well worth seeing. I wondered about how much he got of references to old games. He reminded me that we had been to a video arcade at the Santa Monica Pier in California, which gave him a context for understanding the arcade in <i>Wreck-It Ralph</i>. Of course the movie has lots of nostalgic or reference-dependent jokes aimed at grown-ups, like a comical AA-style support group for game villains and a key narrative role for Q*Bert, who cannot be a character known to that many spectators much younger than me. This seems like an excellent example of a movie pitched effectively at both kids and their parents.<br />
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Finally, I asked a few questions about the appeals of going to the movies. Leo appreciates the added value of a bigger screen and 3D. Moviegoing is special because you can only see a new movie in the theater for a limited time. He also said he liked being seated between his two friends. That way, he could be the one to pass the popcorn back and forth.<br />
<br />mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-15447906275523255772012-10-05T07:43:00.000-06:002012-10-05T07:43:18.820-06:00Free TV, Intermediality<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">New work! </span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Television & New Media</i> vol. 13 no. 6 includes my essay, "<a href="http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/13/6/463.abstract?etoc">Free TV: File-Sharing and the Value of Television</a>." This is the journal version of <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2011/03/free-tv-television-file-sharing-media.html">a paper I gave at SCMS in 2011</a>. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Abstract: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #403838; line-height: 19px;">Circulation of television programs in file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent is one of the many developments in the era of media convergence prompting a renewal of television’s place in the popular imagination. Scholarly study of file-sharing tends to focus on movies and music, keeping TV marginal despite its heavy circulation in P2P networks. By considering its cultural implications as revealed in the discourses of P2P TV sharers, this essay’s aim is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television’s value during the contemporary period. It is especially concerned with understanding the ethical theories of file-sharing participants. It situates these within the context of television’s shift from low, mass culture to a more legitimated status; from a freely accessible public good to a private good for which one must enter into terms of commercial exchange; and from a national/local form of culture to a global, cosmopolitan experience.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #403838; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #403838; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And last month I contributed an entry to the Center for 21st Century Studies blog. "<a href="http://c21uwm.com/2012/09/17/intermediality-and-transmedia-storytelling/">Intermediality and Transmedia Storytelling</a>" was my response on a talk at UWM by <a href="http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/hans-joachim.backe/">Hans-Joachim Backe</a>. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #403838; line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #403838; line-height: 19px;">Excerpt: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; line-height: 24px;">In Anglo-American film and television studies, as well as in the entertainment/media industries, “transmedia” has been a buzzword and object of scholarly attention in the past several years. Transmedia is usually short for transmedia storytelling: the expansion of narratives in media franchises such as <i>Batman</i> or <i>Star Wars</i> across multiple platforms including movies, TV, web video, comics, novels, and games. “Intermedia” was not a term I had noticed, though. As Backe described in his engaging presentation on September 13, intermediality has been a subject of much research and publication where he lives and teaches in Germany and elsewhere in Europe — more than a dozen books on the topic have appeared — particularly among literary scholars whose interests have turned to other media. Yet, in his words, it “furrows the brows of non-Europeans” to hear this term rather than the more familiar transmedia. The two ideas ostensibly do not have much to do with each other conceptually, and yet I kept wondering during Backe’s talk if it might not be productive to consider them side by side and see what each one reveals about the other.</span></span><br />
mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-12734702133476436582012-08-23T15:30:00.000-06:002012-08-23T15:30:51.872-06:00YouTube and Archives, Scarcity and Abudance<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf69B17_81NrmgRZy1JUB-2InCHhYIqwkdQbnMvrw52tKqVNu2y4vdukoNg-U7vT5msIHVwRLDrfuenLQBNcxEPgPeRPV7G77UPUiE611IQqo2UA-OI_VawlobHgkC0mGXxRVG/s1600/archive+room.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf69B17_81NrmgRZy1JUB-2InCHhYIqwkdQbnMvrw52tKqVNu2y4vdukoNg-U7vT5msIHVwRLDrfuenLQBNcxEPgPeRPV7G77UPUiE611IQqo2UA-OI_VawlobHgkC0mGXxRVG/s320/archive+room.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A room for viewing UCLA Film and Television Archive materials in the Powell Library.</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been in Los Angeles since early August with Elana and our two children mixing business and pleasure. Some of the time we have been tourists, and some of the time we have been doing research at the <a href="http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/" target="_blank">UCLA Film & Television Archive</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> while one kid goes to day camp (the eight year-old) and one is in the care of a babysitter (the two year-old). The initial motivation for the trip was (1) to get Elana time at the archive to watch old soaps for her book project on the history of daytime drama, and (2) to spend time in LA, a place we have both been eager to explore. Elana has been here a few times before doing research, but I had only visited on a family trip in 1985, when I was thirteen. Finding research for me to do here too was secondary (though it got me to apply for and receive a small-ish amount of travel funding -- and something productive to do for part of the three weeks we have been living in LA). As it turns out, there are materials in the Archive’s collection that I have been excited and grateful to access, that will be important for my work. I made some discoveries here too. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The research I have been doing is for my book project on early video games. I have been watching television commercials for game systems and game titles from the 1970s and early 80s, news segments on video games from the early 80s from the <a href="http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/education/NAPA" target="_blank">News and Public Affairs (NAPA) collection</a>, and an episode of the anthology drama <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight_(TV_series)" target="_blank">Insight</a> with a video games theme from 1983 (this was a discovery - I hadn't known about this series, and I watched several more episodes while here, all of which are fascinating in various ways and maybe material for a future blog post). </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As in <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2012/01/video-game-historiography-and-archives.html" target="_blank">a previous research trip</a>, I have been wary of “wasting” my time here looking at things that are freely available online - i.e., on YouTube. Every time I checked Google to see if the commercial I was watching is on YouTube, I said a little atheist prayer that I would be unable to turn it up online. At the same time, I would be a bit relieved upon locating versions on YouTube: my note-taking at the archive would not be the only record I would keep of my viewing. Any time I did find the same item on YouTube, I downloaded the video (using the Chrome extension <a href="http://kwizzu.com/" target="_blank">FastestTube</a>) and saved it to my research files for later reference. My folder of commercials is now swelling with videos downloaded from YouTube, many more than I have watched in archives. But of course YouTube <i>is</i> an archive, and increasingly it is <i>the</i> archive. It's a dangerous fallacy to assume that everything is online now, but it's also important to recognize how much public value there is in easily accessible materials that have only existed for a short time. I find myself in tension between these two kinds of excitement: at finding so much on YouTube, but also at finding the really good stuff that is not on YouTube. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You probably know why finding useful, important materials that are not on YouTube excites me. Perhaps most of all, it justifies my travel here, my time spent in the archive. It also gives me something to write about that others are unlikely to have discussed already, offering a claim on originality. It fits the romantic narrative of research as a quest for rare artefacts, for revealing clues along the way to solving the big mystery. It lets me perform a certain kind of scholar identity - I’m no mere armchair theorist, I’m a historian in the archive seeking documentary evidence. If your work requires a trip from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, that must make it distinguished and significant. There's also some of that self-satisfied elitism that comes with scare knowledge - like the masculinist record collectors, cinephiles, sports fans, etc., one-upping each other with the rarity of their acquisitions and experiences.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there is something a bit distasteful to me about the fetishizing of scarce archival artefacts in which I fully admit I participate. In a way I’m upholding a hierarchy of materials and practices, in which websurfing and watching YouTube videos is a kind of casual scholarship - if you can call it that - that practically anyone can do, while accessing the materials in the archive is more serious and productive. In the introduction to her book <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=DpuEgtDbZ8oC&lpg=PP1&ots=OQ0-Bkxz7u&dq=spigel%20welcome%20to%20the%20dreamhouse&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=spigel%20welcome%20to%20the%20dreamhouse&f=false" target="_blank">Welcome to the Dreamhouse</a></i>, Lynn Spigel writes of a distinction between "high" historical research in government or university institutions, and "low" research undertaken in retail environment, shopping for memorabilia and pop culture ephemera. She indicates an intention to "scandalize these divisions." (13) I would like to propose a similar point, but substituting watching videos online for shopping. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Watching videos online isn't the only way of accessing the moving image culture of the past, but we can do a lot with what we have available. Yes there are problems. There is the bias of the present to contend with - YouTube only has what people in the past seven years have deemed worth sharing. This bias applies to archives too, and YouTube is much more democratic, its "curators" and "archivists" representing much broader constituencies than those of institutions. There is often a question of provenance and completeness and identifying information. Sometimes we don't know what we're looking at on YouTube, and I never know if I can trust the YouTuber's facts - how do they know this was on TV in 1977? There is an ephemerality, too - things that were there once are gone, things that are there now might vanish tomorrow, and the copyright regimes of the future might end the freedom of access we now enjoy. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What I was most excited to access here were commercials for video games that I have never seen before, and I wish I could post them to YouTube - or that the archive could. This would help it broaden a mission of access to match its efforts at preservation. Issues of rights stand in the way, and as the archivist here, Mark Quigley, explained to me, advertising is often harder to clear than other forms of media because of uncertainty over who actually holds rights to materials - clients or agencies. It might not be possible to get me rights to reproduce images from these tapes or disks for publication, which I might like to do (I will probably request that the archive seek permission from the rights holders, but I'm not that hopeful). </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes archival materials come with helpful identifying data. The spots I watched were often preserved and deposited on reels submitted for awards. I often saw commercials preceded by title cards identifying the agency and the date, and sometimes other creative personnel (e.g., if an ad was submitted for an award for photography, the DP might get a credit). I don't remember ever noticing a specific date and ad agency given in YouTube tags or descriptions. Some of the ads I watched here represent video games and other electronic toys as space-age computer technologies, or as "new wave" trends for hip young people. Some of them are different from other ads I have watched. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, despite knowing who made them and when, I have no way of knowing from the archive's catalog or from the materials themselves whether these ads ever aired on American television. All I know is what I have found out at the archive - the catalog info and the info on the tape or disc. One reel I watched was of Canadian commercials that aired in the early 80s, but I only recognized this because I grew up in Canada in the early 80s - not because of any effort to identify the materials by nation in the catalog. Another researcher might assume they were American ads. One benefit of YouTube videos is that we know they were aired, and recorded off air, and their descriptions and comments often add more context. It is only by having been broadcast in the first place that they have made their way to YouTube: someone recorded them with their VCR and saved the recording. In some ways this information is as valuable as the data available from an official institution.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">YouTube videos can also be easier to study. One skill this trip has called upon is detailed transcription and description of speech and images. I am not ordinarily accustomed to this kind of detail-focused task. In most of my writing I have had video copies that I have personally owned of texts I am analyzing, and have often rewatched segments as necessary while writing about them. In writing about these archival videos I have only had one crack at the text, and I would pause and rewind frequently, eager to quote correctly and note details I might need to describe later on. I watched one episode of Nightline on video games from 1983 that I almost completely transcribed, only leaving out some short passages that didn't seem relevant enough to warrant the effort. I spent a whole morning just on about twenty minutes of video (when you subtract the commercials and the brief segment on a different topic). I wish that episode would be posted online. It would get a huge audience, I think, of retro gamers and more generally Gen X'ers nostalgic for the early 80s. A young Sherry Turkle appears talking about her book <i><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10515" target="_blank">The Second Self</a> --</i> about men in pinstripe suits replacing their lunch hour transcendental meditation with a midday session at the video arcade. A PTA official complains that kids are wasting their meal money and bus fare at the "video parlors," and that their time there isn't adequately supervised by adults. A junior high principal on Long Island calls video games "another nail in the coffin of our country." </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To wish that items like this were on YouTube is to desire to share and make accessible the media of the past. It seems wrong to feel good because this tape is only available to me as a researcher in an archive.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most of all, what I want to point out here is that one archive is not better than another. Archives, public and online and institutional, are historically useful, depending on your interests. The scarcity of the institutional archive doesn't make it superior to the abundance of the public online archive, and vice versa. There is value in both scarcity and abundance. Historiographically, scarcity is more manageable. Abundance can be daunting and it makes our work more time and labor intensive. But it's also, obviously, such a blessing to media historiography. And while it's easy to access, the hard work is to make sense of it all.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCZUrB9_LyrXuyHI2V3jqbXwl5NtnQ_lnfoUdY09UUrdi0IAq3Zox5d50FuBsIxBMFP27HPTqFUrnYLad7bfPdNRFFg2Z3YdLe35F8zD-NyB96En_Ribv8ToKoOejoDD_ucxv/s1600/powell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYCZUrB9_LyrXuyHI2V3jqbXwl5NtnQ_lnfoUdY09UUrdi0IAq3Zox5d50FuBsIxBMFP27HPTqFUrnYLad7bfPdNRFFg2Z3YdLe35F8zD-NyB96En_Ribv8ToKoOejoDD_ucxv/s320/powell.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Powell Library, home of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.</span></td></tr>
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzn37/" target="_blank">flickr</a> photos tagged <a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%22los+angeles%22&w=88951160%40N00&m=tags#page=0" target="_blank">los angeles</a> are mostly not of UCLA.</span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My tumblr <a href="http://newman.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">fraktastic</a> contains images relevant to this research project on video games; my tumblr <a href="http://giferrific.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">giferrific</a> is just GIFs.</span></i>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-1524616859626223552012-06-12T08:49:00.000-06:002012-06-12T08:49:43.665-06:00Spare the Snark, Or Why It Matters Who Invented the TV Recap<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii8b7Er_NVZtS-WfWw1Wkofi85FcJ-zznBmRsP6pUWqQacvolJ2VleY7fExh0Q5qiSbSMu30jKuSacJ0b0PxA1ng7dYlXevFIQ76VdGfpeXZJAygsKXRa2GK9DqepkJ2Awc8-m/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-06-10+at+8.44.52+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii8b7Er_NVZtS-WfWw1Wkofi85FcJ-zznBmRsP6pUWqQacvolJ2VleY7fExh0Q5qiSbSMu30jKuSacJ0b0PxA1ng7dYlXevFIQ76VdGfpeXZJAygsKXRa2GK9DqepkJ2Awc8-m/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-06-10+at+8.44.52+PM.png" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Roland Barthes lecturing on the enigmas and symbols of <i>Survivor: All Stars</i></span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A <i>New York Times Magazine</i> article appeared not long ago with this headline: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/how-roland-barthes-gave-us-the-tv-recap.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">How Roland Barthes Gave Us the TV Recap</a>. Hmmm. <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Television.html?id=9XYfPRBR3awC" target="_blank">How Raymond Williams Gave Us the TV Recap?</a> Maybe. (I will say no more about this appreciation of Barthes, which has very little to do with TV in particular and is concerned with his mode of criticism of popular culture.) I might have left these thoughts behind if not for a <a href="https://twitter.com/EmilyGould/status/210736020923219968" target="_blank">tweet</a> I saw a few days ago by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">Emily Gould, someone I happen to associate with the <i>NYT Mag</i></a>, saying (not terribly seriously) that Nora Ephron invented the TV recap in her book <i><a href="https://twitter.com/EmilyGould/status/210736020923219968" target="_blank">Scribble Scribble</a></i>, a collection of columns first published in <i>Esquire </i>in the 1970s. If two is a trend, then identifying the Ur-TV recap is now a thing.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnXxEVVGxqpWj1G8Sb7psAv8hBKFiOfgE8sllNplolWvvN0aw8P-HcO4wk3q12HvlOWiYvgt4sF2eWyuHkvABiDQN0uyVNlCCPq-9FauRRZa1_NBFcSHxYZejEexkPm7Tmcf-5/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-06-07+at+4.25.22+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnXxEVVGxqpWj1G8Sb7psAv8hBKFiOfgE8sllNplolWvvN0aw8P-HcO4wk3q12HvlOWiYvgt4sF2eWyuHkvABiDQN0uyVNlCCPq-9FauRRZa1_NBFcSHxYZejEexkPm7Tmcf-5/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-06-07+at+4.25.22+PM.png" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But hey, didn’t the <i>NYT Mag</i> explain, not that long ago, who actually invented the TV recap? Did I not read a longish article about this recently enough that I remember it fairly well? And doesn't everybody already know that it was <a href="http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/" target="_blank">Television Without Pity</a> aka TWoP</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, not Barthes or Ephron, that popularized if not invented the TV recap?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As five seconds with Google revealed, the TWoP article I had in mind (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/magazine/20INTERACTIVE.html?pagewanted=all" target="_blank">“The Remote Controllers,” by Marshall Sella, October 20, 2002</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">) was published practically ten years ago. Evidence, if any was needed, that both the TV recap and I are, you know, old. So I went back and read that piece and it gave me a series of little shocks. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It also helped me to see that the recap emerged at a particular moment in TV's history, and in the history of TV's cultural legitimation (which you might not need me to tell you is the topic of my book written with Elana Levine, <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/" target="_blank"><i>Legitimating Television</i></a>). Recognizing the distinctness of this moment and the difference between then and now tells us something important about television's place in contemporary culture -- about how TV and the culture of TV have changed. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ten years ago in TV and media history is at once of our time and before it. We can see ourselves in that world without having to change too many of the details, but some important things are different. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ten years ago online communities were burgeoning and the culture industries were quickly incorporating their efforts as audience feedback, e.g., by paying attention to the discussion boards on TWoP as the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> discusses at length. There was already a networked, digitally connected culture in which producer and consumer distinctions of old were being renegotiated. Television was being taken more seriously than in the past, and the HBO “Not TV” brand was well established with <i>The Sopranos</i> as its key prestige product. It was not so crazy to think that intelligent people would devote large portions of their leisure time to the explication of television shows. Part of what appealed to me about TWoP when I started to read it</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> was that it confirmed that others like me existed, passionate viewers of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Gilmore Girls</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and other shows I would never miss.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But ten years ago also seems like back in the day: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Dawson’s Creek</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>ER</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Friends</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYPD Blue</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> were still on the air, the WB still existed, J.J Abrams was best known for </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Alias</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Joe Millionaire</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> was the reality TV outrage of the fall season. No one outside of tech nerd circles knew about blogs or wikis, "social media" wasn't a phrase on anyone's lips, friend wasn't a verb, and you being </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Time</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">’s person of the year was still a ways off. iPods were “the perfect thing,” still strictly music players, and shuffle was a notable feature. DVRs were an early adopter technology; the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">article doesn’t mention TiVo. BitTorrent was brand new and file-sharing of TV wasn’t a widespread practice. Streaming video had not exploded and people were most likely to catch up on old shows by buying or renting DVDs. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Convergence Culture </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The Wealth of Networks</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The Long Tail</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Here Comes Everybody</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Remix</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> were yet to appear. Film/TV/media studies departments were just realizing that it would be good to have a new media person. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My most exciting <i>frisson</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> in reading this ten-year-old story about TV recaps came in the passages where unfamiliar terms are placed in quotes and explained: “show runner,” “shout out,” “IRL,” “spoilers.” The meaning of spoilers in this context is a shade different from what people usually mean today: ten years ago TV spoilers were typically plot details learned from sources in TV production, rather than from other viewers watching before you do. I get excited to read straight-faced usage of “the Net” to describe the online experience. Reading articles like these, you get to see today’s common sense, our everyday ways of thinking and behaving and thinking about behaving, spelled out for an uninformed reader. Historians of the recent past really get off on this stuff. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(In several of my research projects I have found that old </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> articles often offer the best evidence of formations of bourgeois American taste in media and technology. The magazine tells cultural elites what to pay attention to and how to understand it. It captures ideas that are in the air, but also circulates those ideas, marking moments of transition and emergence. It often expresses the place of media in popular imagination almost perfectly - it has more than once been that source I was looking for that crystallizes all the thoughts I hoped to find in the popular discourses of the time. (You think historians go to primary documents without hoping to find specific ideas? Really?) Here are a few examples, all well worth reading today even if you’re not doing research on these topics, all deserving to be remembered as key formulations of popular sentiment in a specific historical moment:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-"The Space-Age Pinball Machine," September, 15 1974 (early video games, which I will quote in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2012/01/video-game-historiography-and-archives.html" target="_blank">my book on video games in progress</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-"TV Rocks with Music," May 8, 1983 (MTV, quoted in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://api.ning.com/files/Y25YRO9R5tDnzqGv5zVO4I6TTlKA6f9Md99mjG0Lio7ulhBKmNg3H4giLOJtuCgeQNJehdKXQer8*QZTxTCTQonDNd2V1oHn/NewmanSnackCulture.pdf" target="_blank">my essay on the history of the attention span</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-"The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel," October 22, 1995 (serialized prime-time TV shows, quoted in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Legitimating Television</i>))</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another thing reading this article made me think about was: I haven't read recaps in years, if by recap people mean the sarcastic and exhaustingly detailed episode summaries, interspersed with personal asides, that I used to read at TWoP. (There is some controversy about what "recap" should describe, and whether it's appropriate to use the same term for snarky blow-by-blow </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>à la</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> TWoP </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>and</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> for episode reviews in a more analytical style of The A.V. Club -- for more see </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://cultural-learnings.com/2010/09/08/label-lamentation-the-growing-misuse-of-recap-in-television-criticism-semantics/" target="_blank">this post by Myles McNutt</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.) In the past ten years, writing about last night's TV shows online has become a significant genre of popular critical writing. Google the title of any popular current show + recap and you get page after page of links to summary and commentary of single TV episodes. Much of this writing differs in voice and style from the TWoP recaps of old. Much of it is written by pro critics for mainstream publications</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>. </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Authors of these recaps are not the outsiders that the meagerly compensated TWoP freelancers were ten years ago. The recap style of today, especially in treating high-end shows like</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <i>Mad Men, </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">is basically old-fashioned film or lit crit in the casualized voice of internet writing. Authors are unlikely to include tangential asides about personal lives and pet peeves of the kind described in the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> article.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The big change between ten years ago and today, the most interesting thing to think about as far as I'm concerned, has to do with the attitude assumed in both the writer and reader toward television. TWoP in its heyday generally took a tone of condescension, and the objective was not only to summarize but also to be humorous, to poke fun and impress the reader with not just insight but wit. Some people I respect speak highly of contemporary reality TV recaps at Vulture or Gawker by writers of comical skill. Reality shows get different treatment from Quality TV - some TV is to laugh at, some is to admire. In the passage of time, the balance (among cultural elites anyway) has been shifting away from laughing at TV or thinking of TV as something trivial, and toward taking it seriously.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another thing evidently happened: recaps became part of mainstream commercial media. Advertising on webpages about episodes of TV became substantial enough to sustain this practice on a much wider scale than ten years ago, and the TV biz welcomed the publicity, sending many critics advance screener discs to facilitate timely publication. T</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">hese posts can instigate lengthy comments threads, which is good for attracting and keeping attention. It seems like every website that covers entertainment and the arts features morning-after TV writing aiming not only for readers but also participation and community. I'm writing this twelve hours after the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Mad Men</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> S5 finale and in my regular RSS and twitter scanning this morning I've seen enough links to postmortems that I could read about last night's episode all day at least. You find these recaps not just at TWoP and The A.V. Club and Vulture and zap2it, not just in the blogs of amateur critics, but in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Slate</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Salon</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>HuffPo</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i> NYT</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>WaPo</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The New Yorker</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Grantland</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>indieWire, Entertainment Weekly</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Rolling Stone</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>WSJ</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Ad Age</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">... I am easily driven crazy by talk of TV's new golden age, of TV finally becoming art in the past decade, but there is no question this is the greatest time ever for people who like to read episode-by-episode commentary on Quality TV shows. Not a lot of comedy at television's expense in this stuff.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw7jSCxbTZLjlRQpb3wvS6Soxzfl2HIm_8GBPP5GanD2Ii_vSeBZW3I4Webvsz1AMzFx55xZWR-RC6L8echv_MAfdnOcODOJzQpE_R0NRqB5Dx1Bf9ZAWry4NKO1KrA8TfPcD/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-06-11+at+4.34.22+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="76" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKw7jSCxbTZLjlRQpb3wvS6Soxzfl2HIm_8GBPP5GanD2Ii_vSeBZW3I4Webvsz1AMzFx55xZWR-RC6L8echv_MAfdnOcODOJzQpE_R0NRqB5Dx1Bf9ZAWry4NKO1KrA8TfPcD/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-06-11+at+4.34.22+PM.png" width="320" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The tone of the TWoP recap, its stance toward its topic of discussion, would not be typical of most writing online about television today, and never represented my attitude toward TV shows I liked enough to read about online. Its signature mode of snark -- its tagline is still "spare the snark, spoil the networks" -- combined admiration and fandom with a strong dose of contempt and superiority. Some of the shows being recapped were highly prestigious -- the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> article discusses fan dissatisfaction with storylines on </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The Sopranos</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> like Carmela's infatuation with Furio -- but many were more like </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Survivor</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> or </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Dawson's Creek</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, the show that inspired the antecedent of the recap site Mighty Big TV, which became TWoP. Today's recaps of reality shows might preserve the smugness of the TWoP recap, but most of the morning-after writing I have seen on episodes of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Mad Men</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, for instance, treats the show with rather more reverence and aesthetic appreciation than I recall encountering in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Gilmore Girls </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">recaps ten years ago. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In his excellent essay on TWoP as a form of audience labor, Mark Andrejevic quotes many members of the site's community to the effect that participation in online discussions often held more value for viewers than the TV shows they were ostensibly there to discuss. One participant told him that TWoP "changes TV from a brain-dead pastime to an art and a science;" another said: "bad TV becomes good TV when combined with TWoP." (35) Although fan discussions might have influenced producers, TWoP participants saw their ultimate goal not as communicating their feedback to the TV industry but rather impressing each other "with wit, insight, and above all, 'snark.'" (36) The superiority of recappers and their readers is a product of the cultural status of television in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as television becomes more legitimated but still carries many of the negative associations it has suffered historically. Performing snark would be a way for "savvy viewers" to demonstrate that they "are not taken in by the transparent forms of manipulation practiced by producers." (37) Community members would contrast their own position as "insiders" with the "clueless losers" who make up the larger TV audience. As one viewer told Andrejevic, "TWoP makes it easier for us to convince ourselves that we are smart, while watching DUMB television." (40) </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The distinction between active, smart, intellectually engaged TV fans and more passive and unintelligent ordinary viewers underscores the cultural values within which TV has been legitimated. As we argue in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Legitimating Television</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, television's rise in status is premised on just this kind of distinction. TV worth valuing appeals to active and intelligent elites, and is routinely contrasted with other kinds of television associated with other viewers and with the medium's past. TWoP, as described in the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> of ten years ago, is what we call a "technology of agency," a way of making the viewer's experience of television one of active navigation, of assertions of choice and control rather than enslavement to the networks. It is one means of television's redemption by new technology. TV recaps emerge with the participatory internet, but also with the shift in cultural status of television. TV is important enough to give people something to talk about. However, it's still disreputable enough that participants have to show themselves to be smarter than the shows they watch.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The idea that Barthes or Ephron or anyone else invented the TV recap <i>avant-la-lettre</i> draws on a rhetorical trope familiar from the history of new media. Commentators frequently look for evidence that what we think is new is actually not, that novelty is deceptive, that much has been done already. Tom Standage's book <i>The Victorian Internet</i>, for examples, finds antecedents for many of today's "new" communication practices in the 19th Century. This kind of thinking can be a salutary historical corrective. To see that many of our hopes and fears about the internet are actually quite similar to earlier hopes and fears about writing and print, the telephone and telegraph, radio and television, cable and videotape -- these recognitions can be profound and unsettling. They force us out of presentist assumptions and into historical, contextual thinking. This is why <a href="http://newmediaseminar.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/syllabus/" target="_blank">I teach new media as the history of new media</a> and disdain the wide-eyed, gee-whiz mode of <i>Wired</i> magazine. (More examples of the kind of new media writing I have in mind: Carolyn Marvin, <i>When Old Technologies Were New</i>; Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, <i>Remediation</i>; William Boddy, <i>New Media and Popular Imagination</i>; Lisa Giltelman, <i>Always Already New.</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I wonder what gets lost in these identifications of now in then. The specificity of the TV recap is of a historical context in which technology, society, and cultural forms are all in flux. The </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TWoP story from ten years ago expresses many of the key ideas of television's legitimation at a time before we could have formulated that concept, when it was taking shape. The recap is an artifact of this confluence of forces. It fetishizes and reveres television, makes it an object of cult admiration. In offering instant feedback to TV producers, it promises that new technology can improve an old medium. As Sella writes in the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">: </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Television began as a one-way street winding from producers to consumers, but that street is new becoming two-way. A man with one machine (a TV) is doomed to isolation, but a man with two machines (TV and a computer) can belong to a community."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is so clearly the techno-utopian rhetoric of legitimation through the technologies of media convergence.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One more moment in that </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>NYT Mag</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> article is worth noting as a clear indication of the discourses of legitimation, of the recap caught between two valuations of TV. Robert Thompson, the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.nytpick.com/2010/10/its-true-spaghetti-tacos-expert-prof.html" target="_blank"><i>NYT</i>'s frequent academic source on pop culture</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, is quoted complaining about television's low status and celebrating its elevation.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"'If this were happening at any other time in history, we'd celebrate it,' he insists. 'When readers hold parties for Bloomsday and discuss James Joyce, we consider it an apex -- people taking culture seriously. But when viewers discuss the minutiae of a TV show, we call them crazy. One's got to admire it. Essentially what the message boards are is a panel of unpaid experts, with passion, analyzing culture.'''</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So television is worthwhile enough that a professor would compare its fans to those of the most admired modernist author, but its place is uncertain enough that the argument must be made in its defense. Today, I'd argue, the battle has largely been won by TV's elite champions.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As for Nora Ephron's writing that marks the invention of the recap: it is a column from July, 1976, on </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Upstairs Downstairs</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. It does summarize many plot events, filtered through the author's feelings about characters and her hopes and fears for them. It is not a recap as we know it, because it treats what seem like months or even seasons of drama. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Upstairs Downstairs</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> aired in the UK before it did in the US, and I haven't looked to see how it was scheduled here. But Ephron's writing does have much in common with the tone and sensibility of more recent online TV writing. She's passionate and personal, and reveals an intense investment in serial narrative. She is also, much to my excitement and to my absolute approval, staunchly anti-spoiler. This is how her story ends.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"We would all like to know some of the technical details of the show--how the writers are picked, how much of the plot is planned ahead of time--but it is too dangerous to find out. Someone, in the course of giving out information, might let slip a crucial turn of the plot. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>We would all rather die than know what is going to happen.</b></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"<b>Mostly, we all wish <i>Upstairs Downstairs</i> would last forever.</b>"</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (emphasis mine)</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These two parting thoughts capture an ethos of televisual experience of seriality, one prizing the perpetual unfolding of narrative. In some ways they're at odds with the common sense of legitimation, with its emphasis on an aestheticized text and narrative closure. But they also bespeak the value of TV for daily life as well as for elite cultural experience. Caring enough about the story not to want to be spoiled and desiring for the story to continue forever are strong sentiments to attach to a medium so often in the 1970s made into a bogeyman to blame for society's problems. Of course, it would be safest to confess to these feelings </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in the pages of <i>Esquire </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">when they have been inspired by a British show airing on <i>Masterpiece Theater</i>. Ambivalence about television in discourses of legitimation goes back a long way, as we argue in our book, and certainly pre-dates the invention of the TV recap.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtd0_gA5VRw5NoIRbz1DAU2atW5CXOaTnWQA42vXPJRGe05-oLb_8ZgnxQ9KK95F8PFhsfuocZizN1Mq6HmNr5_cBCtiC9kUFt6g4yQbMpBFltEnDkBXNJsg2avQ5OY2XUp4Oi/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-06-10+at+8.43.01+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtd0_gA5VRw5NoIRbz1DAU2atW5CXOaTnWQA42vXPJRGe05-oLb_8ZgnxQ9KK95F8PFhsfuocZizN1Mq6HmNr5_cBCtiC9kUFt6g4yQbMpBFltEnDkBXNJsg2avQ5OY2XUp4Oi/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-06-10+at+8.43.01+PM.png" width="188" /></span></a></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Reference</i>:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Mark Andrejevic, "Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans," <i>Television & New Media</i> 9.1 (2008), 24-46.</span></div>
</div>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-14165716688123651262012-03-15T09:13:00.001-06:002012-03-15T09:15:15.657-06:00Television Pictures<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6apzLlIhVveftYBmDvtWaQaRV2qP5XhvmHK9Eumsp9Sc1CxtnjBIcZjyBBcXWXaMbTJ_sMrLDh6Vv_uG8P6w_ByAJHGZccvmhEkAbq9rl69GkqS02Z5YzzCyN0C8Yx2V7fbkJ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-14+at+2.05.33+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6apzLlIhVveftYBmDvtWaQaRV2qP5XhvmHK9Eumsp9Sc1CxtnjBIcZjyBBcXWXaMbTJ_sMrLDh6Vv_uG8P6w_ByAJHGZccvmhEkAbq9rl69GkqS02Z5YzzCyN0C8Yx2V7fbkJ/s400/Screen+Shot+2012-03-14+at+2.05.33+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Magnavox ads, one for TV sets from the 50s, one for video games from the 70s.</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still pictures can be a rich source of meaning for historians of the moving image. Advertisements in periodicals, magazine covers and illustrations, promotional flyers, stock photos, among other representations, offer their own ideals of representation and use. They often express the same hopes and fears as language, but in their own vivid wordless ways. Sometimes they suggest different ways of thinking, or ambiguities about the value of popular culture. Because they don't state their meanings in words, they can invite more interpretation than writing does. But as Barthes says of myth, we can think of any cultural text as a form of speech, and think of our task in analyzing myth to be a process of decoding, making meaning evident. Barthes writes that myth makes history into nature, but we can reverse the process and return what seems to require no interpretation to meaning and value.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Still image representations are especially beneficial to the social historian of film, TV, video games, and other forms of moving image media interested is in the place of these media in popular imagination. Images like these offer us a sense of the range of possibilities of understanding. They are especially useful in considering new media, emerging out of the old and promising fulfillment through technology.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have been noticing, as I work on my video games history project, how consistently certain image tropes or representations recur historically. In general it's a good idea to take the skeptical view of new media rhetoric, and to think of change less as revolution and more as repetition with variation. For instance, the two Magnavox ads above differ in style (black and white vs. color, separation of type from photography vs. integration, more vs. less formality of dress and posture). They are advertising different products: a television set on the left, a video game console, the Odyssey 200, on the right. But the rhetoric of the image is remarkably constant: the same harmonious family circle is promised by both advertisements. I also like the way they both picture the set containing a representation of tennis, classiest of all televised sports.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is an example of an image concept itself being repurposed to sell a new product, related to but also distinct from the old one. It balances the familiar and the unfamiliar, which is important for the introduction of new technology. The iPhone is a phone -- it's not some entirely new idea of a gadget. But it is also the Jesus phone, the dream device that promises so much more.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In Lynn Spigel's <i>Make Room for TV</i>, she analyzes this image of an Emerson TV set in gigantic scale, facing a theater audience.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgltL6kE4hP8zc8jlK6d_5NtFNkUxHjVv05IrPKLgn6-AWiPdTMF7MRnJelaG5i37whBdHwk7K59TvGBQ7FUOV8dMbQrzkhREqbzT-PI9jbrNng-TTv3t6y749P7iSycI7aJQ6I/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.01.53+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718036578521875394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgltL6kE4hP8zc8jlK6d_5NtFNkUxHjVv05IrPKLgn6-AWiPdTMF7MRnJelaG5i37whBdHwk7K59TvGBQ7FUOV8dMbQrzkhREqbzT-PI9jbrNng-TTv3t6y749P7iSycI7aJQ6I/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.01.53+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 127px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Spigel discusses this to illustrate the idea of the television set as a home theater, which confuses ideas of public and private. Television is for private experiences of public events, part of the social development Raymond Williams called "mobile privatisation." For my purposes, thought, I find it interesting that this is so clearly an image promising the remediation of film, and fitting TV into an established conceptual scheme of cinema and cinemagoing. I have had this picture in mind while reading more recent periodicals, and these are two examples of images employing the same trope of gigantism to make sense of a new technology as remediation.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNiWkC-BZWgN94AflF0kxUMNOw5vpxRf8RieAqP6o7q7L169aqC9G2WukF_csTFT1-O5yNO4JmRtI-Y_RTNAjXNWe_7Xp6CSVGsjYxisT5JM2PvOzRJDZTJKCgMtt7KECSLolP/s1600/tumblr_lw98h3j6do1qz4bgwo1_500.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719193941902178178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNiWkC-BZWgN94AflF0kxUMNOw5vpxRf8RieAqP6o7q7L169aqC9G2WukF_csTFT1-O5yNO4JmRtI-Y_RTNAjXNWe_7Xp6CSVGsjYxisT5JM2PvOzRJDZTJKCgMtt7KECSLolP/s320/tumblr_lw98h3j6do1qz4bgwo1_500.jpg" style="height: 270px; width: 320px;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Wall Street Journal</i>, 1983</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This ad is for an e-mail service, represented by the familiar CRT display of a computer workstation that rivals a post office in scale, substituting the plastic casing and text on screen for the neo-classical facade of an institutional building.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimqqLAZhPnf48vND7btgzwzUq1UXe7KmMSgCLuCAEFWYUcYFJ9F7XkYrlxAuul-TzsxmfJLlu1fSCv3Ckvw8Y4uwbYBpWygqNXP6SiOT4HgpzH7jYiJe4rswW7NyzZveMIQzIv/s1600/tumblr_m02j8vc3Mp1qz4bgwo1_250.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719193661567142338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimqqLAZhPnf48vND7btgzwzUq1UXe7KmMSgCLuCAEFWYUcYFJ9F7XkYrlxAuul-TzsxmfJLlu1fSCv3Ckvw8Y4uwbYBpWygqNXP6SiOT4HgpzH7jYiJe4rswW7NyzZveMIQzIv/s320/tumblr_m02j8vc3Mp1qz4bgwo1_250.jpg" style="height: 300px; width: 217px;" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Newsweek</i>, 1984</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And this <i>Newsweek</i> cover from 1984 pictures a VCR as a cinema, with its buttons and tape slot (it's a front-loading deck) -- and a marquee to clarify that people are lined up to enter it as though it's a cinema -- all dwarfing the human figures. It also incorporates a screen on the right-facing side, though the TV aspect is less central in the illustration. Which is telling: the VCR is the revolutionary technology, not the television. In all of these images, however, a CRT display is pictured on a gigantic scale, dominating the human beings. Despite their historical divergences, all of them express a similar anxiety, as well as a similar hopeful futurism, about the potentials of audiovisual technology.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One common and ambiguous figure in the imagery of TV technology is the human figure with a cathode ray tube head. This TV-headed woman pictured in a <a href="http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/04/02/the-chip/" target="_blank">1982 <i>National Geographic</i> story on "the chip" </a>transforming society is promoting word processing rather than television per se, but the technology of computers included CRT displays in those days and the identity of the computer, especially the personal computer in the home, was closely tied to the technology of TV.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJSUGcSz4A-X7_fuLGNVa5g8uN_jS38YINGelFrYYqcQsLfgDp2P7Cr4_kU3wvoYvWv916biewGEqhAeDMqCAGch5dM3CcPh_sbk8PDAtsROdVOdMGBFsEo-PBr4ko_gVOL2M5/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-15+at+8.55.56+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJSUGcSz4A-X7_fuLGNVa5g8uN_jS38YINGelFrYYqcQsLfgDp2P7Cr4_kU3wvoYvWv916biewGEqhAeDMqCAGch5dM3CcPh_sbk8PDAtsROdVOdMGBFsEo-PBr4ko_gVOL2M5/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-15+at+8.55.56+AM.png" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>National Geographic</i>, 1982</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The boxers below pictured in an<i> Electronic Games</i> issue of the same time would seem to be representing the game pictured on each screen: <i>Asteroids</i> and <i>Space Invaders</i>. The muscular adult bodies contradict the typical identity of a video game player at this time, a teenage boy. They represent a fantasy of competitive masculinity, but one in which the human brain and face have been replaced by electronics.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqySt5zsvVQ58U5uQcZct1wpUJLp5T6M1yKDdDe-NJ27QsZ7XbgBU3halUlcj8EjB0YI4RApgoVblPFaHEJrHGq7vMFx8UEo67COHVo_wW8erLlmTlgpafqA5NIcay5I3BiQx3/s1600/tumblr_lvwpzrlFMO1qz4bgwo1_500.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719193944754813650" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqySt5zsvVQ58U5uQcZct1wpUJLp5T6M1yKDdDe-NJ27QsZ7XbgBU3halUlcj8EjB0YI4RApgoVblPFaHEJrHGq7vMFx8UEo67COHVo_wW8erLlmTlgpafqA5NIcay5I3BiQx3/s320/tumblr_lvwpzrlFMO1qz4bgwo1_500.png" style="height: 320px; width: 230px;" width="230" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Electronic Games</i>, 1982</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A similar illustration from the same issue pictures a related but distinct idea: boys controlling men. This image adds a racialized fantasy dimension, as white boys in a safe and heavenly play zone (maybe this image epitomizes the <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6696/jerked_around_by_the_magic_circle_.php" target="_blank">"magic circle"</a> of so much discussion in video game studies) control, through their joystick cables, the aggressive bodies of adult football players, black men in gladiatorial facemask-to-facemask conflict.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiByL2qDDHPalNLD5EH06U2vmsOijump6a9hP0KJZJB7Yhxg_QmK5y84rdnU_i992JiqLgEP4K06eSatS5TRXNxM-h_3UjgmqKIx0kzSfUPEUlr6dJqrZAgw003yzdSH5s7cjK2/s1600/tumblr_lvwpvt8WB01qz4bgwo1_500.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiByL2qDDHPalNLD5EH06U2vmsOijump6a9hP0KJZJB7Yhxg_QmK5y84rdnU_i992JiqLgEP4K06eSatS5TRXNxM-h_3UjgmqKIx0kzSfUPEUlr6dJqrZAgw003yzdSH5s7cjK2/s320/tumblr_lvwpvt8WB01qz4bgwo1_500.png" width="233" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Electronic Games,</i> 1982</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I first really started to pay attention to TV-heads when Elana and I were asked for ideas for the cover of our <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/" target="_blank">book</a>. This might work differently depending on the press, but in my experience cover design begins with suggestions from the author(s) for images, fonts, concepts, whatever you might have in mind. We had a fairly clear idea that we wanted a flat-panel TV in an upscale domestic space (actually I had a specific image from <i>Dwell</i> magazine in mind, but <i>Dwell</i> ignored our emails). A press editor sent us a list of links to pages in a stock photo website containing images of televisions, and I was impressed by how banal and irritating most of them were. Women grinning while pointing remote controls, happy couples watching TV, cutesy retro sets, etc. One of the recurring images that I noticed in these sites is the TV-head, as in the following sample:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikTuxP3iPz5rjJFkFUYrQ1TuS3ZOgaQqvnhu1A26F7duwlIoY6ZUlDfmMk4WoVDFUnIx-bnx5fHr863QoTaosLlAG36YiV4oqVmCWgBg2SoCWmdMd7f09tj3uJ9VC6SvqiMWc9/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.19.34+PM.png" style="display: inline !important; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719127110737412658" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikTuxP3iPz5rjJFkFUYrQ1TuS3ZOgaQqvnhu1A26F7duwlIoY6ZUlDfmMk4WoVDFUnIx-bnx5fHr863QoTaosLlAG36YiV4oqVmCWgBg2SoCWmdMd7f09tj3uJ9VC6SvqiMWc9/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.19.34+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 205px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here we have satisfied TV-head, bright color bars like a wide smile. If I had that much hardware on my shoulders I would slouch but it's Photoshop so no worries.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwJLHy2Hn6BUuO9QbwR2wrgZdmkXt6FASAiC2E-4ou-UH_mId_qDzXOiGr7UEqDABAKcSRj27ob7AHqa5QY5BAEHxF8hOclyhdAllwtHcuErNPa9FOH_9_e_g_sRklmu2z-Z77/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.19.49+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719127105116488146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwJLHy2Hn6BUuO9QbwR2wrgZdmkXt6FASAiC2E-4ou-UH_mId_qDzXOiGr7UEqDABAKcSRj27ob7AHqa5QY5BAEHxF8hOclyhdAllwtHcuErNPa9FOH_9_e_g_sRklmu2z-Z77/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.19.49+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 210px;" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Slightly concerned, possibly female TV-head--could be a <i>Home Alone</i> scream or maybe that head's just heavy and needs support?</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis7lbObvH4ThgHwTwEwYhCYqTNhvWlAyrEvtiYG8kmAZfa3Kduayz9GPvDWwLy5V2iEeS1EhlO645aLOZhbvMWyP5UrMYsuWX_a08EcEQRi6BGVCR71HIenyp1utHUBNeVpBiM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.20.03+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719127101591282306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis7lbObvH4ThgHwTwEwYhCYqTNhvWlAyrEvtiYG8kmAZfa3Kduayz9GPvDWwLy5V2iEeS1EhlO645aLOZhbvMWyP5UrMYsuWX_a08EcEQRi6BGVCR71HIenyp1utHUBNeVpBiM/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-12+at+4.20.03+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 264px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TV-head as anatomically bizarre (what shape are his thighs? how many fingers?) cartoon schlub with frazzled rabbit-ear antennae and a remote aimed at his electronic noggin, could be suicidal or maybe it's just time for a new show? Reminds me of this line from Billy Joel: "I got remote control and a color TV, I don't change channels so they must change me."</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0C2l_IHJ-5wqGGGYdXwR92-IJiNCIKqGl84bj-h7ZFrLtpOOUMcEeCy-585OrF4nTNcRCVcOpJqvJCKeAV_VfYqloNIQs70OZc446aJSnayK0N7wgDWi1mihPsefVepzUS1N/s1600/stock-photo-8945501-businessman-with-sky-computer-screen.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719127097309600322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0C2l_IHJ-5wqGGGYdXwR92-IJiNCIKqGl84bj-h7ZFrLtpOOUMcEeCy-585OrF4nTNcRCVcOpJqvJCKeAV_VfYqloNIQs70OZc446aJSnayK0N7wgDWi1mihPsefVepzUS1N/s320/stock-photo-8945501-businessman-with-sky-computer-screen.jpg" style="height: 240px; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Similar to <i>Home Alone</i> above, but blue skies and white clouds, above tie and suspenders, suggests total capitalist optimism. Also could be flat-panel, so he's also up-to-date.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUmjKtTLKbHuQgj9olcSChfQoiZwZbZNvc1FoqTJre2iDNUFB5g6muyHAoCqm03LPWnjFocCMplND9Mf9-qs4irczG34gSDSS3aHo8oczSbKGBvH9gGXZaynUN7-tzfFw4yqUR/s1600/stock-photo-16163601-tv-man.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719127093469832770" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUmjKtTLKbHuQgj9olcSChfQoiZwZbZNvc1FoqTJre2iDNUFB5g6muyHAoCqm03LPWnjFocCMplND9Mf9-qs4irczG34gSDSS3aHo8oczSbKGBvH9gGXZaynUN7-tzfFw4yqUR/s320/stock-photo-16163601-tv-man.jpg" style="height: 320px; width: 213px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Coffee-drinking TV-head. Sensible, trustworthy, knows the score.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAi83UlLzxXGJyq47rBwkzVuMwSHUmZoKryc36Y_3hNU5eFOAXPcFkQEBhrz6Z2gEsq9Xa8fF8zUKw3GUb2oTP5OqA40TTcVnNVUJcIADTo7C7biumESfU8SqTVmw11p1bubG5/s1600/stock-vector-man-of-our-time-visualization-of-the-internal-state-of-modern-person-86218969.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719126666715765682" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAi83UlLzxXGJyq47rBwkzVuMwSHUmZoKryc36Y_3hNU5eFOAXPcFkQEBhrz6Z2gEsq9Xa8fF8zUKw3GUb2oTP5OqA40TTcVnNVUJcIADTo7C7biumESfU8SqTVmw11p1bubG5/s320/stock-vector-man-of-our-time-visualization-of-the-internal-state-of-modern-person-86218969.jpg" style="height: 320px; width: 254px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Curvy cartoon TV-head with a cute white mole/power switch, cares about nature and is always heartened by the return of Spring.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCYL3eOKBfK2iWbOCw3J5_n_eYoYagOc15qoi_CNDmcVa3y6AiHe3tdkok7tHQfnAAzzrc1uxIgXD1kNZ2Oouwk4bwHe3TT7rKRyMvK4ebwfTP-MbVX4jlCWEO5myfG8PaQ0i4/s1600/stock-photo-tv-head-78340843.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719126656249404466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCYL3eOKBfK2iWbOCw3J5_n_eYoYagOc15qoi_CNDmcVa3y6AiHe3tdkok7tHQfnAAzzrc1uxIgXD1kNZ2Oouwk4bwHe3TT7rKRyMvK4ebwfTP-MbVX4jlCWEO5myfG8PaQ0i4/s320/stock-photo-tv-head-78340843.jpg" style="height: 270px; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TV-head cyclops bros. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Z5K1geO9a0plNshzWFfAs6dzShWKuVca_ZSxPb4DcsrwrH6oYVWOk_pyp7CWhDYPwVprW7qjgrGlmZ0KQ86SxnCkZV-yw8-s0UuHGZFZBPXLA-kZMRbyzbW-GMpGHSHcTBAF/s1600/stock-photo-a-man-with-a-tv-on-his-head-sleeping-on-his-bed-off-56739241.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719126656950092658" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0Z5K1geO9a0plNshzWFfAs6dzShWKuVca_ZSxPb4DcsrwrH6oYVWOk_pyp7CWhDYPwVprW7qjgrGlmZ0KQ86SxnCkZV-yw8-s0UuHGZFZBPXLA-kZMRbyzbW-GMpGHSHcTBAF/s320/stock-photo-a-man-with-a-tv-on-his-head-sleeping-on-his-bed-off-56739241.jpg" style="height: 258px; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Confusing -- you'd think the screen would darken when TV-head snoozes but nope.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5OgpPY3nQ0El2FpJLEQodJrKFnly4AWS08u6Xxetkait4_VxvhBOAkKZevgn1FOt5Lwznue1PFIBt_JFc1EmZUob8bW8gdXiT-AOsKGlHoSQvWSSqOuNbR0r01lZskzo83g2R/s1600/stock-photo-tv-head-people-symbolize-man-and-woman-relationship-concept-8494873.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719126631244922050" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5OgpPY3nQ0El2FpJLEQodJrKFnly4AWS08u6Xxetkait4_VxvhBOAkKZevgn1FOt5Lwznue1PFIBt_JFc1EmZUob8bW8gdXiT-AOsKGlHoSQvWSSqOuNbR0r01lZskzo83g2R/s320/stock-photo-tv-head-people-symbolize-man-and-woman-relationship-concept-8494873.jpg" style="height: 320px; width: 245px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Love among the normative heterosexual TV-heads. I could go on.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the early 1980s iteration, the TV-head evoked fairly coherent associations about the then-novel interface of ordinary people with computers and computerized technologies such as video games. Computers were often understood then to be a form of artificial intelligence, thinking machines. The components of electronic gadgets such as microchips were referred to as "brains" and programs were likened to thoughts. David Sudnow described in <i>A Pilgrim in the Microworld </i>(1983), "the entire syntax of thinking engraved on a sliver of silicon, our most perfected thought mirroring itself back in a visually moving display." Sherry Turkle wrote in 1984: "Video games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy with machines." She described them, in distinction to TV which you merely watch, as "something you become." The term microworld often used in this period makes video games into a place the player enters into, distinct from reality. This affects identity and identification: rather than seeing yourself in a character or feeling an affinity, the player was assumed to become the onscreen figure. Turkle compared video games with pinball, observing that pinball players merely "act on the ball," while "In Pac-Man you are the mouth."</span></div>
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<b id="internal-source-marker_0.08817208465188742" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #444444; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By contrast, TV is often seen as an unintelligent medium, a one-way stream of idiocy and a potential source of harm. If you think of the head as a computer, that's an upgrade; if you see the TV-head as a broadcasting receiver, that's a failure of identity and of rationality. Thus the following image:</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT_mRXFlGCCnR-YsEbYweY1mTmdp2azc73rLRux6RQ7jMD_4Sf2tG4sT1a-FR34z7moOAy_FboBaVhWS2bBNzvSnZBBNhmnX8Ycpll0X3cVoCzl2rGtc1AYBN0b6cmZg3DrQT/s1600/television_head+let+us+think+for+you.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsT_mRXFlGCCnR-YsEbYweY1mTmdp2azc73rLRux6RQ7jMD_4Sf2tG4sT1a-FR34z7moOAy_FboBaVhWS2bBNzvSnZBBNhmnX8Ycpll0X3cVoCzl2rGtc1AYBN0b6cmZg3DrQT/s320/television_head+let+us+think+for+you.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="207" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The "LET US THINK FOR YOU" TV-head is of unknown provenance, but can be purchased on hoodies and other apparel if you search around online. Note the discarded CRTs in the background and the spray paint on the surface, the former reminiscent of a museum installation by Nam June Paik, the latter subversive suggesting street art. This seems like one possible interpretation of the stock photo TV heads as critique of mass mediated society, but by contrast the stock photo TV-heads seem cheerful and satisfied, even if some of them are kind of pathetic.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This TV-head is in a collage on a book cover for sale for $4 at the Etsy shop of <a href="http://www.etsy.com/listing/87221677/tv-head">mrsnoggle</a>. I like how he seems to be glancing at us on his way somewhere else. Maybe he's meeting up with some of the boys from Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce for drinks at the Yale Club.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Brief aside, as well as a callback to my cover design story: TV heads have actually found their way onto the covers of two recent academic books: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Television-Invented-New-Media/dp/081355005X/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1331758850&sr=1-1-catcorr" target="_blank">How Television Invented New Media</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Television-Mockumentary-Reflexivity-Satire-Call/dp/0719073170" target="_blank">Television Mockumentary</a>; perhaps there are others.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">TV-heads have a number of antecedents. Shel Silverstein's poem "Jimmy Jet and his TV Set," from his 1974 collection <i>Where the Sidewalk Ends</i>, pictures a kid who watches so much television he has been transformed from person to appliance: </span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He watched till his eyes were frozen wide, </span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And his bottom grew into his chair.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And his chin turned into a tuning dial,</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And antennae grew out of his hair.</span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And his brains turned into TV tubes,</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And his face to a TV screen.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And two knobs saying "VERT." and "HORIZ."</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Grew where his ears had been</span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And he grew a plug that looked like a tail</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So we plugged in little Jim.</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And now instead of him watching TV</span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We all sit around and watch him.</span></i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These verses express the anxiety felt then -- as now -- about the amount of time young people spend in front of the screen, and the potential for media to mess with your head. But whereas becoming a computerized head can be figured as upgrade to your hardware, turning into a television set is more clearly a loss, even if Silverstein's rhetoric is gently satiric, in a spirit of play and fun. And after all, the child reading this poem is, you know, <i>reading. </i></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0mCvceV0lNRG1kuXHWDrvPBBleHpnrT_x6BYfcOCnbrJxuz-ErFbfcXcD-aEyiW9Zve5m8D7kzaTC5SXJkm9dE8xXw1S4WcCNLeTArW_UqUgldmNbb2riLvCDyf8kO-mPfDl/s1600/tumblr_lpa0582k8T1qmqpiro1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0mCvceV0lNRG1kuXHWDrvPBBleHpnrT_x6BYfcOCnbrJxuz-ErFbfcXcD-aEyiW9Zve5m8D7kzaTC5SXJkm9dE8xXw1S4WcCNLeTArW_UqUgldmNbb2riLvCDyf8kO-mPfDl/s320/tumblr_lpa0582k8T1qmqpiro1_500.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For polymorphous machine-human video forms of the 1970s, the motherlode has to be the <a href="http://www.bekerbots.com/" target="_blank">Beckerbots</a> of Gerry Becker. These robot illustrations in David Ahl's <i>Basic Computer Games</i> (1978) and <i>More Basic Computer Games </i>(1979)<i> </i>generally are pictured with cameras rather than screens for heads/faces. (The books contain page after page of BASIC computer code, which the reader might transcribe into a program to effectively write his or her own game. This is a kind of cake-mix idea of programming, but presumably users modified the scripts or learned from them and sometimes went on to write their own.) </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Beckerbot images of sentient television apparatus are reminiscent of the fear from the 1950s, also discussed by Spigel, of TV watching its viewers, returning their gaze and functioning as a surveillance technology. It also reflects the influence of <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i> and its representation of a sentient machine, which Becker has said made a big impression on him. As in the word processor scaled to a post office edifice, the CRT image in these illustrations is not so much the television condemned as the vast wasteland but rather the video display terminal of the computers of the present and future. Still, associations persist, and the promise of computer games to improve on television is inherent in the presence of a boxy CRT display (discourses of games in the early 70s routinely frame them as a positive alternative use for a TV set).</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What is most exciting and humorous about many of these drawings is how effectively anthropomorphized the familiar audiovisual technologies become, as though all along we have been keeping them as pets or servants. As in the revolutionary avant-garde visions of Dziga Vertov, the camera is an eye. An essay on video art by Jack Burnham from 1975 elaborates a similar metaphor: "Without too much difficulty, it is easy to envision television as a kind of human eye attached to a purposeful brain..." This borrows as well from the pervasive ideas of McLuhan at this time, who considered media to be extensions of our senses. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In this Beckerbot the monitors and cameras stand each other down like in a gunfight at high noon, playfully menacing each other. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2BNegCQKMSeW3wGImWV1lvJ3VY4jOKhOPyQVilNE-xrtsLOBsdiBezkoED8Ji4Xc9Mjz2l0wxhc8PP5dZk52T_tZi4cb52n70Mt6Z59EfDEKg0WjaC87YhRxIAtVnPJBC6DnH/s1600/beckerbot+bug.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2BNegCQKMSeW3wGImWV1lvJ3VY4jOKhOPyQVilNE-xrtsLOBsdiBezkoED8Ji4Xc9Mjz2l0wxhc8PP5dZk52T_tZi4cb52n70Mt6Z59EfDEKg0WjaC87YhRxIAtVnPJBC6DnH/s320/beckerbot+bug.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here the form is sort of ambiguously reptilian and insect-like, but the balance of organic and machine forms is gently uncanny. The riveted supports for the camera face are industrial, but the front foot striding forward is natural, even cute. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAa6dxH8rSXkmVNbNeSYkDLPVyoyPZVzPdL4Wvr_wgcafPdZaoF_SBWPt-gG7knHTFuXkVvQZtmHqjVsYyf-axW2otqOYqLFYNLU49oTY8q3JqimbQLZogCdtt9p3e7Whw60ip/s1600/beckerbot+checkers.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAa6dxH8rSXkmVNbNeSYkDLPVyoyPZVzPdL4Wvr_wgcafPdZaoF_SBWPt-gG7knHTFuXkVvQZtmHqjVsYyf-axW2otqOYqLFYNLU49oTY8q3JqimbQLZogCdtt9p3e7Whw60ip/s320/beckerbot+checkers.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These machines play checkers, with crane hands and camera-eyes, but conventional board and pieces. A nice contrast of old and new media coexisting.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj_2mr0cRekjt6yhUmOgyUYD2pyuQUd60B3qjf025Rziec4QXnIRx2oaFx0-HGsaNwWPg4tzz-VjUQVwB4ZU7OE-Ig6dPoIrb7ZCcIRR4GuuL6hNpX6JeXFFwLaO7L1BfnHHSX/s1600/beckerbot+golf.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgj_2mr0cRekjt6yhUmOgyUYD2pyuQUd60B3qjf025Rziec4QXnIRx2oaFx0-HGsaNwWPg4tzz-VjUQVwB4ZU7OE-Ig6dPoIrb7ZCcIRR4GuuL6hNpX6JeXFFwLaO7L1BfnHHSX/s320/beckerbot+golf.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along similar lines, the golfing robot has a mechanical caddy.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZURsOuBOYiaIMC0Dtkv1FobZTeNvDUQpPgy5ZbPpmQPepjMWKe5yYMyIvJYemUKeev9Fodxz2374Rt7YOMUd69dkzu7AhizuPtEQ8VBZZAG4KPP-X4OtQbeXenxVOEwaxMOr/s1600/beckerbot+guess.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZURsOuBOYiaIMC0Dtkv1FobZTeNvDUQpPgy5ZbPpmQPepjMWKe5yYMyIvJYemUKeev9Fodxz2374Rt7YOMUd69dkzu7AhizuPtEQ8VBZZAG4KPP-X4OtQbeXenxVOEwaxMOr/s320/beckerbot+guess.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This one, illustrating a game called "Guess," offers a dose of reflexivity as the television questions the camera that is the source of its images.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOZGDGrv6N2UpjnfFuKIarxBPhpqC2CRMJyKZpKRU9hmAx9hgoQCZ6lES8sHG61E5kW9CLWNaLxBFfc8gxVuzxhW_Qa6eJfWcukURNVoJOb_GboyatAGkmrv23E4woqmQX0V1/s1600/beckerbot+literature+quiz.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieOZGDGrv6N2UpjnfFuKIarxBPhpqC2CRMJyKZpKRU9hmAx9hgoQCZ6lES8sHG61E5kW9CLWNaLxBFfc8gxVuzxhW_Qa6eJfWcukURNVoJOb_GboyatAGkmrv23E4woqmQX0V1/s320/beckerbot+literature+quiz.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For the "Literary Quiz" illustration the machine reads a paper book and presumably displays its information on a television set.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5EI8SsClW09SzxmAn0mh65k_0v-G85ZoSyEHk3xahUVe1tsSTVaJPT7OBtKLG2di0_B-9PiaaU9bJzkIkgWz5HVthJwSm8vDZwbPKVPqlwViy1ImiG3EITRRxd7XHeXEfWAQ8/s1600/beckerbot+roulette.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5EI8SsClW09SzxmAn0mh65k_0v-G85ZoSyEHk3xahUVe1tsSTVaJPT7OBtKLG2di0_B-9PiaaU9bJzkIkgWz5HVthJwSm8vDZwbPKVPqlwViy1ImiG3EITRRxd7XHeXEfWAQ8/s320/beckerbot+roulette.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The roulette players have Vegas apparel (that hat!) and postures.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_oUf929SIsPl-YWDUjIBX1whltdmULhhKfk53NbxP2n3ebI9h-6iuOvSY__szL4bKSx-hj7l39oecGzwud-MSMfRKRFMfgOnAYIOpJoTvxxF_BN9PTBOpsHX_zTiaKMHT-fpo/s1600/beckerbot+russian+roulette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_oUf929SIsPl-YWDUjIBX1whltdmULhhKfk53NbxP2n3ebI9h-6iuOvSY__szL4bKSx-hj7l39oecGzwud-MSMfRKRFMfgOnAYIOpJoTvxxF_BN9PTBOpsHX_zTiaKMHT-fpo/s320/beckerbot+russian+roulette.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally this one is called "Russian Roulette" -- note that the CPU is the possible victim, not the CRT display. We might think of these images as proto-TV-heads, or alternatively as camera-heads, with the understanding that the camera is an input not to a recording or transmission device (film or tape, video signal across the waves) but to an informatic, computational machine. TV-head replaces the camera with a display, making the meaning ambiguous but returning us to the 1950s idea of television watching the watchers, and the Silverstein idea of television overtaking its viewer's identity.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjdon-4_chCl9Mr0pZkQwk7EzEi0hxYgHAYI-VE7qP0OZVpUyUQpdrvO3uHQtpMIV_J7PSWT3XiZ4u5_ukbWdHRly-JZj2HGr2FuwSGIFaRQwS2fAHZagH3TiQddwSiJR-A7_/s1600/tumblr_m0fi9fPYwm1qz4bgwo1_400.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEjdon-4_chCl9Mr0pZkQwk7EzEi0hxYgHAYI-VE7qP0OZVpUyUQpdrvO3uHQtpMIV_J7PSWT3XiZ4u5_ukbWdHRly-JZj2HGr2FuwSGIFaRQwS2fAHZagH3TiQddwSiJR-A7_/s320/tumblr_m0fi9fPYwm1qz4bgwo1_400.png" width="238" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>New York</i>, 1976</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Speaking of watching the watchers! Perhaps no images better convey the ambiguity of media representations as present and absent, powerfully real and ephemeral and impossible to capture, as those in which the image exceeds its boundaries and becomes part of "reality." The media room of the 1970s above is one in which a television (perhaps projected rather than tube-based) is one of a suite of electronic devices including video and audio decks, cable boxes, slide projectors, video games, and peripherals like remote controls. The erotic female form emerging from the screen is an odd combination of titillating and grotesque, a softcore gargoyle. But what's more important is its excess, its uncontainability. TV has always been represented as realer than real -- Spigel calls such images <i>hyperreal</i>, erasing the distinction of representation and reality, event and mediation.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The most common hyperreal imagery today is in representation of 3D television sets. The cliché of 3D ads and other imagery is of the image emerging from the set, impossible to contain. A running back falls over his tackle into the living room.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcF692KFMaHIJlQmyRTzj24lV2yliI7Obe3YSWaadXQJcctLwLdRV7OvtwTt83WRcecEkhQufylDKDynp_JQet1uqMvwKr2H0Zt8hPbcDMYbUvv3b2lL6wSE_Ey0oXSaMUgh3v/s1600/samsung-3d-hdtv-galaxy-tab-tablet.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719123093728797362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcF692KFMaHIJlQmyRTzj24lV2yliI7Obe3YSWaadXQJcctLwLdRV7OvtwTt83WRcecEkhQufylDKDynp_JQet1uqMvwKr2H0Zt8hPbcDMYbUvv3b2lL6wSE_Ey0oXSaMUgh3v/s320/samsung-3d-hdtv-galaxy-tab-tablet.jpg" style="height: 206px; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc0cvae4PbYV9csjV9z13VcbC24kJ6vuWZ2JYVlVHF4qpi9rtRiqBQ_2Xdkzk31eRR-2DkeRbMECZO3NSNaHKyakV2rvw5mdTQrAAxGGEaEm9GgtCcArDtdBWSzf7ZCeQf-A51/s1600/tv3d.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719123092300129314" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc0cvae4PbYV9csjV9z13VcbC24kJ6vuWZ2JYVlVHF4qpi9rtRiqBQ_2Xdkzk31eRR-2DkeRbMECZO3NSNaHKyakV2rvw5mdTQrAAxGGEaEm9GgtCcArDtdBWSzf7ZCeQf-A51/s320/tv3d.png" style="height: 282px; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The kids kick the soccer ball from the field straight toward you in your home. Here the antecedents are most obviously in film posters that use depth to dramatize the third dimension and assault the audience.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6FcQjLaj3XasW_6QmeHp0XDNo5guYw-YpXR8fTqvVoV_d46D5STESRxHtAC-gwnvqFBnJTkqadcnVcs0e5usTqxQ899Qww0IVywaCb0ryt8RQaWI3lT-wlTHQMUOnS5TT-C85/s1600/outerspace.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719123088388144546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6FcQjLaj3XasW_6QmeHp0XDNo5guYw-YpXR8fTqvVoV_d46D5STESRxHtAC-gwnvqFBnJTkqadcnVcs0e5usTqxQ899Qww0IVywaCb0ryt8RQaWI3lT-wlTHQMUOnS5TT-C85/s320/outerspace.jpeg" style="height: 320px; width: 207px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the poster for <i>It Came From Outer Space</i>, the enormous eye is the source of an arcing beam that appears to project outward from the movie to the world outside, while the typography seems to cascade from the screen out into the space of the auditorium.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpPakZ6mL3LIkHIvez2XJb3tUpuBDF9-fyzNaTHiNAUOGTim0Vghbk9iKPrGW0jDvF28MuP9eRvgjWQfGSNN5voeJjyVzfj0rPpHBYnu6Ks1EopUrR1_whHbG8ZacN2kgPjBPc/s1600/bwanadevil.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719123083743756402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpPakZ6mL3LIkHIvez2XJb3tUpuBDF9-fyzNaTHiNAUOGTim0Vghbk9iKPrGW0jDvF28MuP9eRvgjWQfGSNN5voeJjyVzfj0rPpHBYnu6Ks1EopUrR1_whHbG8ZacN2kgPjBPc/s320/bwanadevil.png" style="height: 320px; width: 235px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Bwana Devil</i>'s poster<i> </i>uses perspective cues to make image, letters, and audience seem to share the same space, while the roaring lion bursts from the rectangle of the screen out at the spectators.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBpVcpNk1lmZhyYRa7G6MGCLn2KYTZxxDFKkiq4zIzhMMEKdKImEa4DzMgGccK5fV725MF_KUui_ZebpZKO49CrDpsRBuzXQBGCH3tLMckFoxhSyrsuhgzsENZ4Dv2w0mEcUIN/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.14.59+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718039963480965874" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBpVcpNk1lmZhyYRa7G6MGCLn2KYTZxxDFKkiq4zIzhMMEKdKImEa4DzMgGccK5fV725MF_KUui_ZebpZKO49CrDpsRBuzXQBGCH3tLMckFoxhSyrsuhgzsENZ4Dv2w0mEcUIN/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.14.59+PM.png" style="height: 185px; width: 247px;" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And in the <i>House of Wax</i> poster, the characters come from the movie screen to step on the heads of the people watching. As in the other 3D movie posters, the written text, along with the figures, are represented as bursting forth from the movie.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These movie posters of the 1950s offer the inverse of the representation in some of the hyperreal TV set ads of the same time, such as these from a campaign for Sparton (also discussed in <i>Make Room for TV</i>).</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9i0sY1Cn7Zk-i9njtkl-ZqLEjvDkc7-TQe3SKNZSFmQQcso0n1gJ7CBbPyFuBSOMueH1rVXMd1QIeSnT33aHZqCAPJlAzVTS5ZCVdWlyqECLiQIECX-4M7LuAXSveQPpDg8f5/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.04.54+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718037357429661362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9i0sY1Cn7Zk-i9njtkl-ZqLEjvDkc7-TQe3SKNZSFmQQcso0n1gJ7CBbPyFuBSOMueH1rVXMd1QIeSnT33aHZqCAPJlAzVTS5ZCVdWlyqECLiQIECX-4M7LuAXSveQPpDg8f5/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.04.54+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 239px;" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1xvu7l_5lJyDW8fDEHqHiGmg5SE5vzB1u09LA98zOtWWUTMF9DtYQySF1tcUKOQMKO-o3juwFkJCpPrmUdrHRl9HppKSNNevFVPfLLmWaWoyAYkfTIaPLWuaIieZnyB2rvzX/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.04.19+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5718037231150032162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1xvu7l_5lJyDW8fDEHqHiGmg5SE5vzB1u09LA98zOtWWUTMF9DtYQySF1tcUKOQMKO-o3juwFkJCpPrmUdrHRl9HppKSNNevFVPfLLmWaWoyAYkfTIaPLWuaIieZnyB2rvzX/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-03-09+at+5.04.19+PM.png" style="height: 320px; width: 248px;" /></a></div>
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The fusion of public and private space is especially pronounced in the second ad, with a chair on the on-deck circle and the batter standing not in the batter's box but in a picture on a TV set occupying that space. Both of these ads flip the logic of the 3D representations around by placing the mediated image in the space of the representation. But the same ideological dynamic informs them: a confusion of reality and representation, and a sense of television or 3D film, as new technologies of the image, being realer than real. 3D TV may be new media today, but nothing about its representation in promotional still imagery is the least bit fresh or exciting. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What I find most exciting about the older images of the television set, the TV screen, and the experience of watching television are their sense of possibility and their promise of a better life: in a moment of novelty, meanings are going to be established. I get a similar <i>frisson</i> from the imagery of computers and games from the 1970s and early 80s. The 1950s sets are aimed at families that have never owned one, whose routines will be permanently transformed, whose relations to the world outside will be shaped by new patterns of mediation. It's not going too far to think that television images from the 1950s are poised to change our ways of thinking, though the more McLuhanish ideas about the medium being the message now seem so clearly to be overblown fantasies, by turns utopian and dystopian, of social transformation through technology.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This same spirit of technological fantasy informs the illustration below from Ted Nelson's famously prophetic book <i><a href="http://www.digibarn.com/collections/books/computer-lib/" target="_blank">Computer Lib/Dream Machines</a></i>. It comes after a page about the cathode ray tube's potential to be used for something more impressive than broadcast television (he calls it "lightning in a bottle"), and the box in the thought bubble is presumably a TV set. It's a nice image playing on a reversibility of thoughtful machines and machine-minded humanity. I'd like to think of this as a gloss on the TV-head, an image to interpret an image. The thing we watch is watching, the ideas we think about think about us, the mechanical contraptions are animate, cognizant -- they're brains. But the things they think about are totally reciprocal: the medium and its user are dreaming of one another. Maybe this is especially apt as a way of understanding computers, but the idea of the medium projecting a user, and of it addressing itself to him or her, has been a powerful one in many moments in the histories of film, television, and video games.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdWs1J96W9fQvCQZZzRjBtiVSkEWPxVkBppAp1sVnRy8TJ7zZQ6u_eIaPRbrhBGNvzH4gOdDEoee4mNdeqaK34MdBMnVb1SYgE_IFg04K0vTi2dmMKBUfbFfPfFmD7fncd74l/s1600/computer+lib+dream+machine+illo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdWs1J96W9fQvCQZZzRjBtiVSkEWPxVkBppAp1sVnRy8TJ7zZQ6u_eIaPRbrhBGNvzH4gOdDEoee4mNdeqaK34MdBMnVb1SYgE_IFg04K0vTi2dmMKBUfbFfPfFmD7fncd74l/s1600/computer+lib+dream+machine+illo.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nelson, <i>Computer Lib/Dream Machines</i>, 1974</td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Selected References</i>:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Roland Barthes, <i>Mythologies </i>(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jack Burnham, "Sacrament and Television," in <i>Video Art</i>, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1975.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ted Nelson, <i>Computer Lib/Dream Machines</i> (Tempus, 1974).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shel Silverstein, <i>Where the Sidewalk Ends</i> (Harper Collins, 1974).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lynn Spigel, <i>Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America</i> (Chicago, 1992).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">David Sudnow<i>, Pilgrim in the Microworld: Eye, Mind, and the Essence of Video Skill</i> (Warner Books, 1983).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sherry Turkle, <i>The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit</i> (Simon & Schuster, 1984).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Raymond Williams, <i>Television: Technology and Cultural Form</i> (Fontana, 1974).</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Links of note</i>: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.bekerbots.com/" target="_blank">Gerry Becker's website</a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/" target="_blank">Vintage Ad Browser</a></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">PS: even if you can take or leave the words, you should totally follow me on <a href="http://newman.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">tumblr</a> for the pictures.</span></div>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-7496580315199053762012-01-30T08:05:00.003-06:002012-01-30T09:12:13.164-06:00Video Game Historiography and the Archives of New Media: A Research Report<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHLMA1dl5WYTl91z8oGMqgYfnCkOaQg4Cf-9NEPLTNoXTpTv01HqgHztrnv5yKjmxM6UfnRBuUmcQLvPbAraOH1HaJvdS2FVRd_QpU20RtYCMq6wygXpGEBHukpGqMud05ovdM/s1600/nostalgia+odyssey.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 241px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHLMA1dl5WYTl91z8oGMqgYfnCkOaQg4Cf-9NEPLTNoXTpTv01HqgHztrnv5yKjmxM6UfnRBuUmcQLvPbAraOH1HaJvdS2FVRd_QpU20RtYCMq6wygXpGEBHukpGqMud05ovdM/s320/nostalgia+odyssey.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702501519364442578" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">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.</span><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=legitimating%20television&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CEUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FLegitimating-Television-Convergence-Cultural-Status%2Fdp%2F0415880254&ei=_lsjT-DOIend0QG66tHWCA&usg=AFQjCNEG-U1BHTrLSQp77nRl9d49nibqQQ&sig2=bOnIFviQGnJyjRqyM78hcA">Legitimating Television</a> at the intersection of television, technology, new media, and gender.<br /><br />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.” <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwwE1-N_NIXK9_j0vtTCUOvRX6en4OVC-ZXOXFEC_1xrXF7y23jwFtquc2dxAbpZAOsYyVB1Ji2PvVaB4GG2KCOSPS2F0wG-0gcHdPK3ZrhoXVfYMACLijI-uhVQzzCsB2iss/s1600/APFTVFun-Model401-RetailBox.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 245px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbwwE1-N_NIXK9_j0vtTCUOvRX6en4OVC-ZXOXFEC_1xrXF7y23jwFtquc2dxAbpZAOsYyVB1Ji2PvVaB4GG2KCOSPS2F0wG-0gcHdPK3ZrhoXVfYMACLijI-uhVQzzCsB2iss/s320/APFTVFun-Model401-RetailBox.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702499567707660466" /></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Television-Invented-New-Media/dp/081355005X">book chapter</a>, 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. <br /><br />(<a href="http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/1137/Before-the-Crash">Before the Crash</a>, 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, <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11696">Racing the Beam</a>, about the Atari VCS, is another example of recent scholarship on the period I'm considering.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqkYNbtGJXyZJFykGJ5boEYO7SBTR6xyqgcNxeeE9dl7iiIEitgvpcMHaQxd5tY1r0s78UfM2h5ciYgusniqfnEec6RcXlc4awBe6RJModsNiuywPWXda_kZ4ZIRDU40wPHw6/s1600/pong-box.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 184px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYqkYNbtGJXyZJFykGJ5boEYO7SBTR6xyqgcNxeeE9dl7iiIEitgvpcMHaQxd5tY1r0s78UfM2h5ciYgusniqfnEec6RcXlc4awBe6RJModsNiuywPWXda_kZ4ZIRDU40wPHw6/s320/pong-box.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702499567430285314" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigCDgCJp_LEwYUJaUjRbQpHXphMuoadyHplkrSJaEkJaS4gfiZCnX_9fz7V19WPoCjQxLPlH17G9Xi-kusTU9KK7gzwFEiKXbtmDkUb0ALkjOaLZ9YUW_0zFByE3xTrKGnW7eP/s1600/readersguides.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigCDgCJp_LEwYUJaUjRbQpHXphMuoadyHplkrSJaEkJaS4gfiZCnX_9fz7V19WPoCjQxLPlH17G9Xi-kusTU9KK7gzwFEiKXbtmDkUb0ALkjOaLZ9YUW_0zFByE3xTrKGnW7eP/s320/readersguides.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702500062411083586" /></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMH6cwH7DenzHz8LyCTFyS-H5bMq3qvVMN7FGYsjjSKqQD8Yqp9CzKLsgiixM93KHNrzQqxOOpYsH65t-Ti3jSN7aj7ZgWdTplCU7JM6neRahDsSOrM2-4boT1LN5Gxt0RXnY_/s1600/230-3.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 242px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMH6cwH7DenzHz8LyCTFyS-H5bMq3qvVMN7FGYsjjSKqQD8Yqp9CzKLsgiixM93KHNrzQqxOOpYsH65t-Ti3jSN7aj7ZgWdTplCU7JM6neRahDsSOrM2-4boT1LN5Gxt0RXnY_/s320/230-3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702503763274092450" /></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> has some of it, which is a boon to my research.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie4Guwoyd-KhwM2-FRNHYcNv4NZxoeBPfpdXdQRKuO4c9v1PpxI_cimYNBvgWUDwNgQSJsMh-SjqQNbzciLc9CZDm3O3gE8cvw3LlQjEHiodvoiwl2woBRnFj0fkGzb7g9UGDw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-01-27+at+8.28.45+PM.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie4Guwoyd-KhwM2-FRNHYcNv4NZxoeBPfpdXdQRKuO4c9v1PpxI_cimYNBvgWUDwNgQSJsMh-SjqQNbzciLc9CZDm3O3gE8cvw3LlQjEHiodvoiwl2woBRnFj0fkGzb7g9UGDw/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-01-27+at+8.28.45+PM.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702504341761015106" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.icheg.org/">International Center for the History of Electronic Games</a> (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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1kNGUTSb0pQbvQFSqnh1fhdu3J7EtoePDFpG0Q8E9FIJj0PBYBK3UryoDddB6HWbXGKvS9Ke301wKMtJKipFgUFxdf9iX0KPqcybPt5YkgXJ6l2jy4t4YHzxOJ919PVUc-Pdd/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-01-30+at+9.07.43+AM.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 243px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1kNGUTSb0pQbvQFSqnh1fhdu3J7EtoePDFpG0Q8E9FIJj0PBYBK3UryoDddB6HWbXGKvS9Ke301wKMtJKipFgUFxdf9iX0KPqcybPt5YkgXJ6l2jy4t4YHzxOJ919PVUc-Pdd/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-01-30+at+9.07.43+AM.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5703442283122384370" /></a><br /><br />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 “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns">unknown unknowns</a>” 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 <a href="http://www.icheg.org/about/staff">JP Dyson</a>, 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://intothearchives.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/what-i-used-to-do-part-iii/">Into the Archives</a> 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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiIEhmkry8_U6_WZALXMFbtV58Kx-KRV6xzE01RCmfJGtDQBMJePB33oo3fjAVUxLZtibV9l3GcVhItiv1iQ5pC5DRg-A_z4OSk64Oe8R_SRUHo0WYgXzbkAc9nlw8UBNMkxcn/s1600/Intellivision_Plimpton.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiIEhmkry8_U6_WZALXMFbtV58Kx-KRV6xzE01RCmfJGtDQBMJePB33oo3fjAVUxLZtibV9l3GcVhItiv1iQ5pC5DRg-A_z4OSk64Oe8R_SRUHo0WYgXzbkAc9nlw8UBNMkxcn/s320/Intellivision_Plimpton.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702499571608032754" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/aYLly625cXE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /> 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 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joystick">joystick</a>, 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.) <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjff55eJfoanTF1NKGwMA59qjQ9beinKWVrOFfxoPKCr9Nz6HKwJXXlgffIVcpspIOdyde1JfNCZyYxSd_vqcXLLvNI4q0CwENfM9aN-vUiSLpRmlpsRKGFczI5ybso8dnZ1Gt/s1600/intellivision+controller.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 272px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjff55eJfoanTF1NKGwMA59qjQ9beinKWVrOFfxoPKCr9Nz6HKwJXXlgffIVcpspIOdyde1JfNCZyYxSd_vqcXLLvNI4q0CwENfM9aN-vUiSLpRmlpsRKGFczI5ybso8dnZ1Gt/s320/intellivision+controller.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702500051030725778" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUu-0tU03sWDMKHvJ4cfkGy_ah6kKtixPrB6wqCBekQMWAiQMgXOlDCRSJfwGjPXzC-W_1eX_jTitN7NHLDMCPOT_Mo0sdyhC8TLWh69tKFZBempEg8MrQ2w8U_ZHkyqU5vRUN/s1600/intellivision+baseball+overlay.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 198px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUu-0tU03sWDMKHvJ4cfkGy_ah6kKtixPrB6wqCBekQMWAiQMgXOlDCRSJfwGjPXzC-W_1eX_jTitN7NHLDMCPOT_Mo0sdyhC8TLWh69tKFZBempEg8MrQ2w8U_ZHkyqU5vRUN/s320/intellivision+baseball+overlay.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702499579595265810" /></a><br /><br />To play Intellivision Baseball as a novice, it helps to spend a few minutes with the <a href="http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/instructions/sports/baseball.txt">instructions booklet</a> 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?<br /><br /><iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6L1sWZCeCgw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDHpB_ssF4-EjocYJkMDUJ1GwKAML3hm8L6OFvnlLrUjP0dKV5PMlOXJDGVJEm7AjmN13PUdvURsUSVE5JmV3cvaueBKn8j-iO4Ulod6uzLsGwySFZgyjE_Ub1RMO3qb0QmmzB/s1600/6644562413_19a165a7f9.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDHpB_ssF4-EjocYJkMDUJ1GwKAML3hm8L6OFvnlLrUjP0dKV5PMlOXJDGVJEm7AjmN13PUdvURsUSVE5JmV3cvaueBKn8j-iO4Ulod6uzLsGwySFZgyjE_Ub1RMO3qb0QmmzB/s320/6644562413_19a165a7f9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702501707742433474" /></a><br /><br />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? <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3566/thinking-mans-football">Thinking Man's Football</a> and statistically-based baseball games like <a href="http://www.apbagames.com/stadium/games/board/baseball/index.html">APBA</a>. 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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6y3LrTlykMbBPJ50pVH4REhZAbhQK2UOZr86IaycHgQlE1Sdej-VKj9RrJI4kjXpSveY0_trqpOcBHYY6XV2E_KRlsCkjEiKal0YZhdMGxYSfNxgQ6dpkTkuVfWVN4LITX-a/s1600/thinking+man%2527s+football.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 185px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6y3LrTlykMbBPJ50pVH4REhZAbhQK2UOZr86IaycHgQlE1Sdej-VKj9RrJI4kjXpSveY0_trqpOcBHYY6XV2E_KRlsCkjEiKal0YZhdMGxYSfNxgQ6dpkTkuVfWVN4LITX-a/s320/thinking+man%2527s+football.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5703442884671380466" /></a><br /><br />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 -- <a href="http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/pacman_flash/">Pac-Man in flash animation</a>, <a href="http://www.intellivisionlives.com/retrotopia/lives.shtml">Intellivision Lives! software</a>, <a href="http://appadvice.com/appguides/show/missile-command-for-ipad">Missile Command on a tablet device</a>? A huge number of Atari games in particular are available to play in a variety of formats, like the <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8">Greatest Hits app</a> sold by Apple. What's the difference between the original and the recreation?<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm">Benjaminian aura</a>. To play Breakout on an Atari 2600 is not the same thing as to play the same game using a <a href="http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/productdetail.jsp?navAction=jump&isProduct=true&id=23558711">"plug-and-play" device for sale at Urban Outfitters</a>, 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!<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV9s3rgzdY5dDwEE5JNEhL2jc20MrTuZ2HTo5QI6BpKkfJcFlkUGCCr6P6q9afyfxam-Sgm1DcreQ0iNls4OOAAmreLOyXhluIPjphCSNL0ACW0p6pdaaYCfPXTrFJo6DK9i_9/s1600/odyssey+100.medium"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV9s3rgzdY5dDwEE5JNEhL2jc20MrTuZ2HTo5QI6BpKkfJcFlkUGCCr6P6q9afyfxam-Sgm1DcreQ0iNls4OOAAmreLOyXhluIPjphCSNL0ACW0p6pdaaYCfPXTrFJo6DK9i_9/s320/odyssey+100.medium" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702499572861012114" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif8x7QUbdedxvt834-nHBBmFodzUD1R24KI34TomaxXUbDZX4NwSJ7HUtWqFyCp8ZGr8B4Hr1-0Eei3QWpby-0sBq7Per161ninjTqeeBRUuMe5pV_EfFhhW-YGRDD9EQZQSyd/s1600/high+scores+tempest.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 233px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif8x7QUbdedxvt834-nHBBmFodzUD1R24KI34TomaxXUbDZX4NwSJ7HUtWqFyCp8ZGr8B4Hr1-0Eei3QWpby-0sBq7Per161ninjTqeeBRUuMe5pV_EfFhhW-YGRDD9EQZQSyd/s320/high+scores+tempest.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5702501703974780946" /></a>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-10756560391165909692012-01-24T10:54:00.002-06:002012-01-24T10:57:00.193-06:00Video Games SeminarIn Spring 2012 I'm teaching a <a href="http://videogamesseminar.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/syllabus/">graduate seminar on video games</a>. (That link takes you to my syllabus on the <a href="http://videogamesseminar.wordpress.com/">course blog</a>.)mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-34455602523978946142012-01-13T21:25:00.001-06:002012-01-13T21:31:30.209-06:00Juror #12I 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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? <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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... <br /><br />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.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-17720907611468635952011-12-31T06:00:00.001-06:002011-12-31T06:22:00.834-06:00Faves, 2011<a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=hilaryclinton.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/hilaryclinton.gif" border="0" alt="hilary"></a><br /><br />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? <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=metropolis.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/metropolis.gif" border="0" alt="metropolis"></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Silver Screen: Still Bigger and Louder than Most Television Sets, Still Can’t Fast-Forward the Boring Parts<br /></span><br />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 <a href="http://disney.go.com/muppets/">The Muppets</a> 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.” <br /><br />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.<br /><br />Of the not-for-kids genres, I most highly recommend <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478304/">Tree of Life</a> and <a href="http://www.foxsearchlight.com/thedescendants/">The Descendants</a>, 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=treeoflife1.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/treeoflife1.gif" border="0" alt="tree of life"></a><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=treeoflife2.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/treeoflife2.gif" border="0" alt="tree of life"></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br />I’ll give an honorable mention to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1478338/">Bridesmaids</a> 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Word and Image<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Three of my favorite ways to read, depending on the nature of contraints in any given situation, are the Kindle app, the <a href="http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html">GoodReader</a> app, and <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/">Instapaper</a>. 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 <a href="http://ifttt.com/">ifttt</a> 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.leechild.com/">Reacher novel by Lee Child</a> (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). <br /><br />I also recommend all of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/House-Holes-Nicholson-Baker/dp/143918951X">Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Uncoupling-Meg-Wolitzer/dp/B005K5DVO2/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324697258&sr=1-1">Meg Wolitzer’s The Uncoupling</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Plot-Novel-Jeffrey-Eugenides/dp/0374203059">Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot</a>, 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://twitter.com/YourLink"><img src="http://www.socialmediabuttons.com/images/twitter-5b.gif" title="By SocialMediaButtons.com" width="180" height="37" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br />twitter > something > something > something > facebook <br /><br />Twitter’s structure allows for other websites to use its content in interesting ways and one site that does so is <a href="http://stellar.io">stellar</a>, a network aggregating favorited tweets (also flickr photos) in a kind of crowd-curated best of twitter. (<a href="http://stellar.io/mznewman">These are my faves</a>.) 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. <br /><br />The year in hastags could be its own long essay. My favorite of the year has been <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/humblebrag">#humblebrag</a>, 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=rollercoaster.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/rollercoaster.gif" border="0" alt="roller coaster"></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id378469670">TumbLiking</a> 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:<br /><br /><a href="http://unhappyhipsters.com/">unhappy hipsters</a><br /><br /><a href="http://tumblr.photojojo.com/">photojojo</a><br /><br /><a href="http://ummhello.tumblr.com/">ummhello</a><br /><br /><a href="http://murketing.tumblr.com/">murketing</a><br /><br /><a href="http://iloveoldmagazines.tumblr.com/">i love old magazines</a><br /><br /><a href="http://thisisnthappiness.com/">this isn't happiness</a><br /><br /><a href="http://nickdrake.tumblr.com/">nick drake</a><br /><br /><a href="http://life.tumblr.com/">life magazine</a><br /><br /><a href="http://bookshelfporn.com/">bookshelf porn</a><br /><br /><a href="http://hipster-animals.tumblr.com/">hipster animals</a><br /><br /><a href="http://dearphotograph.com/">dear photograph</a><br /><br /><a href="http://nailburgerlar.tumblr.com/">nails and burgers</a><br /><br /><a href="http://ridesabike.tumblr.com/">rides a bike</a><br /><br /><a href="http://fuckyeah1980s.tumblr.com/">fuck yeah 1980s</a><br /><br /><a href="http://slaughterhouse90210.tumblr.com/">slaughterhouse 90210</a><br /><br /><a href="http://old-video-game-ads.tumblr.com/">old video game ads</a><br /><br />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:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thelateageofprint.org/">The Late Age of Print</a>, by Ted Striphas, about the fate of books in these digital days, among other things.<br /><br /><a href="http://sparklebliss.com/blog/">Casual Scholarship</a>, about video games, by Carly Kocurek.<br /><br />My grad school buddy<a href="https://ethandeseife.wordpress.com/"> Ethan de Seife’s blog</a> on a sparkling miscellany of topics, including cartoons, Ice Cube, soda commercials, and rock lyrics.<br /><br /><a href="http://feministmominpostfeministworld.blogspot.com/">Feminist Mom in a Postfeminist World</a>, a personal blog by a film scholar, Pam Wojcik.<br /><br /><a href="http://miriamposner.com/blog/?p=1050">Miriam Posner’s blog</a>, often concerned with tools of digital scholarship.<br /><br /><a href="http://televisionfutures.wordpress.com/">The History of Television’s Futures</a> by Max Dawson, not updated lately though :(<br /><br />Of the venerable older sites, I am generally moved to audible laughter by <a href="http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/">Ludic Despair</a>. I never hesitate to recommend <a href="http://theawl.com">The Awl</a> to anyone who doesn’t know about it. Media scholars cannot ignore <a href="http://www.newsfortvmajors.com/">News for TV Majors</a> and the <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/category/columns/what-are-you-missing/">fortnightly link roundups at Antenna by Chris Becker</a>. Allison McCracken’s essays on Glee (<a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/05/03/glee-the-countertenor-and-the-crooner/">1</a>, <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/05/10/glee-the-countertenor-and-the-crooner-part-2/">2</a>, <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/05/17/glee-the-countertenor-and-the-crooner-part-3/">3</a>) were my favorite posts on Antenna not written by Chris. <a href="http://xkcd.com/">xkcd</a> is still my choice of web comics, but honorable mention goes to The Oatmeal, for <a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/email">“if you do this in an email i hate you.” </a>l I used to like <a href="http://gawker.com/">Gawker</a>, then I hated it, now I like it again. I still read <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/">Metafilter</a> but not religiously. My abiding "guilty pleasure" is <a href="http://dlisted.com/">Dlisted</a>.<br /><br />I like the content of <a href="http://languageoffood.blogspot.com/">The Language of Food</a>, 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.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=crtsnow.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/crtsnow.gif" border="0" alt="crt"></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">MeTube<br /></span><br />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 <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23firstworldproblem">#firstworldproblem</a>, but a problem is a problem!)<br /><br />The show that makes me laugh the most is <a href="http://www.hbo.com/curb-your-enthusiasm/index.html">Curb Your Enthusiasm</a>. The Jewish humor and the social commentary really just kill me. Larry David’s characterization as “<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ8RQ8H3er4">social assassin</a>” 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.<br /><br />The show that made me cry was <a href="http://www.nbc.com/friday-night-lights/">Friday Night Lights</a>, 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.<br /><br />The show that made me most eager for new episodes to air was <a href="http://www.sho.com/site/homeland/home.sho">Homeland</a>. 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=goodwife.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/goodwife.gif" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.cbs.com/shows/the_good_wife/">The Good Wife</a>. 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=awesomesauce.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/awesomesauce.gif" border="0" alt="awesome sauce"></a><br /><br />I am also in awe of <a href="http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/louie/">Louie</a> and <a href="http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation/">Parks and Recreation</a>, 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. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.ifc.com/shows/portlandia">Portlandia</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://crushable.com/other-stuff/gallery-how-much-of-steven-tylers-wardrobe-could-we-find-at-chicos/">Chicos-esque wardrobe</a> and Jewish grandmother demeanor) made the judging portions of the show occasionally watchable.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=30rock.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/30rock.gif" border="0" alt="30 rock"></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Tunes</span><br /><br />I’m hesitant to name any music at all since I follow it so little, but I’d like to mention <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ladygaga">Lady Gaga</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Favorite Thing<br /></span><br />I cannot stop loving the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format">animated GIF</a>. 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. <br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=lebowski.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/lebowski.gif" border="0" alt="lebowski"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=bachmanneyes.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/bachmanneyes.gif" border="0" alt="bachmann"></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://idgifher1.tumblr.com">porn sites</a> (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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=keaton.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/keaton.gif" border="0" alt="keaton"></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">GIF links of note</span>:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.uproxx.com/webculture/2011/12/the-20-most-important-gifs-of-2011/#page/1">Uproxx lists the 20 most important GIFs of 2011</a>. <br /><br /><a href="http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/">If We Don't, Remember Me.</a> is a tumblr of subtle, often poetic "living movie stills" GIFs. Like theses ones from Belle de Jour and Ghost World.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=belledejour.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/belledejour.gif" border="0" alt="belle de jour"></a><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=ghostworld.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/ghostworld.gif" border="0" alt="ghost world"></a><br /><br />Similar: <a href="http://tinycinema.tumblr.com/">tiny cinema</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/animated-gifs-triumphant.html">Anil Dash celebrates the form</a>, including an appreciation of the <a href="http://www.gifmuseum.com/">Animated GIF Museum</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=25&article_id=122">Other Cinema celebrates the GIF</a> 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.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.kellimarshall.net/film/animated-gifs/">Kelli Marshall appreciates the GIF</a> in terms of its recreation of early cinema aesthetics and technologies.<br /><br /><a href="http://designmodo.com/3d-animated-photos/">Design Modo offers a page of "3D animated photo" GIFs</a>, images staged and shot to be animated GIFs rather the the more common repurposed scenes.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.changethethought.com/category/animated-gifs/">Change the Thought's GIF tag</a> is a rich source of <br />trippy and mind-bending and graphically experimental GIFs including the spinning circle image at the very end of this post.<br /><br /><a href="http://myfuckinggifblog.tumblr.com/">My Fucking GIF Blog</a> is self-explanatory. <br /><br /><a href="http://gifzette.com/">The Gifzette</a> is a snarky, critical daily news site ("All the News That's Fit to Gif") illustrated by a big animation.<br /><br />A page of <a href="http://fourfour.typepad.com/fourfour/2011/05/dunsts-finest-role.html">GIFs of Kirsten Dunst's anguished reactions sitting next to Lars von Trier at Cannes</a> is a nice demonstration of the power of multiple frames of GIFs presented together.<br /><br />And <a href="http://www.gifgifgifgifgif.com/">gifgifgifgifgif</a> is the best. I took many of the images in this post from them.<br /><br />If you have a cocktail handy, please drink with me to more crazy, funny, sad, stupid, smart, and favorite things in 2012.<br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=theend.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/theend.gif" border="0" alt="the end"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://s1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/?action=view&current=circling.gif" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1122.photobucket.com/albums/l534/mznewman1/circling.gif" border="0" alt="circling"></a>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-55199339383673690512011-11-09T15:20:00.002-06:002011-11-09T15:33:34.280-06:00Laugh TrackI have a post up at <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/">antenna</a> called <a href="http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/11/09/notes-on-the-laugh-track/">Notes on the Laugh Track</a>, which is a blog version of some thoughts I presented last month in <a href="http://tvcomedy.commarts.wisc.edu/">Madison at a conference on TV comedy</a>. Some of the ideas in it may be familiar to long-time readers; for more, see these old posts:<br /><br />-<a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2007/08/hating-on-jezebel-james-laugh-track-as.html">Hating on Jezebel James: The Laugh Track as Bad Object</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2010/04/upgrading-situation-comedy.html">Upgrading the Situation Comedy</a><br /><br />-<a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/10/18/tween-comedies-and-evolution-genre">Tween Comedies and the Evolution of a Genre</a> (this one is from In Media Res)mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-82093456387426278382011-10-26T19:41:00.003-06:002011-10-26T19:51:33.653-06:00PowerPoint<a href="http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc">The International Journal of Communication</a> has just published a new section of essays on academic labor edited by <a href="http://superbon.net/">Jonathan Sterne</a>, 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, <a href="http://www1.carleton.ca/communication/people/wagman-ira">Ira Wagman</a>. It's called "<a href="http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1298/650">PowerPoint and Labor in the Mediated Classroom</a>" (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.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-71725983747185579542011-10-26T04:50:00.000-06:002011-10-26T05:53:02.228-06:00Gchat Status, an Appreciation<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXsokR5v2kOXclf5nHhDe0bmO5bCj_r1OEkH92plGy98dSSiZiVLoIjCseswxUdcnIQ48AUGkClh1tUbjCoTq_H5Kctty91UR_dynQpp0Owg-ivaHnACapJx8JWGWqylyFvdU6/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-10-25+at+8.30.50+PM.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 304px; height: 144px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXsokR5v2kOXclf5nHhDe0bmO5bCj_r1OEkH92plGy98dSSiZiVLoIjCseswxUdcnIQ48AUGkClh1tUbjCoTq_H5Kctty91UR_dynQpp0Owg-ivaHnACapJx8JWGWqylyFvdU6/s320/Screen+shot+2011-10-25+at+8.30.50+PM.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5667617900405599906" /></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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??!?). <br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qeWuRwM-eOfIxUVkDtHFGKesCpNYFuzZAimfyhvTC0cPSZQAIVJK4WYGUkvE13cOIG9eeCC6r_2tBzo5whKoLlsF7atMnVXMSE1QVSEt1Y_0XfFbFUKqRC93To4NdTtGmjah/s1600/3100631817_edd1ec6837_o.png"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 162px; height: 162px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2qeWuRwM-eOfIxUVkDtHFGKesCpNYFuzZAimfyhvTC0cPSZQAIVJK4WYGUkvE13cOIG9eeCC6r_2tBzo5whKoLlsF7atMnVXMSE1QVSEt1Y_0XfFbFUKqRC93To4NdTtGmjah/s320/3100631817_edd1ec6837_o.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5667617893700824754" /></a><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />* <br /><br />LIKE MAH STATUS.:<br /><br /><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BPnP_zlYU44" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">images by me and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorywithserifs/3100631817/">dorywithserifs</a> (used under a Creative Commons license)</span>mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-17209864804807616252011-09-23T09:29:00.003-06:002011-09-23T09:37:32.907-06:00Legitimating Television: BlogversationThis is cross-posted at <a href="http://drtelevision.blogspot.com/">Dr. Television</a>.<br /><br />In this post, Elana Levine and I aim to offer a look into the origins and purpose of our new book, <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/">Legitimating Televison: Media Convergence and Cultural Status</a>. 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.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Why we wrote this book<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Influences<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Challenges of writing about the present<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">What do we hope will come of Legitimating Television?<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">What you should know before you read<br /></span><br />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.<br /><br />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.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-76193369293764992962011-09-19T07:05:00.000-06:002011-09-19T08:23:51.171-06:00Legitimating Television, Process<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9wbMsjMmZc2Vt-AuQomGFr900c0MvPYr15cFq685R8NW0oOBXALMsAn-WitzJdh7ImC9kt6wuXcBbCn1kLOO5BtmnHLLuYyX6MsACOG4YTUY_JCnyymoADpJGUvndfhJE-AK/s1600/legitimatingcover.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 215px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf9wbMsjMmZc2Vt-AuQomGFr900c0MvPYr15cFq685R8NW0oOBXALMsAn-WitzJdh7ImC9kt6wuXcBbCn1kLOO5BtmnHLLuYyX6MsACOG4YTUY_JCnyymoADpJGUvndfhJE-AK/s320/legitimatingcover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5653123455535632994" /></a><br /><br />This is the first of two planned posts about <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/">Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status</a>, the book I have written with Elana Levine (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legitimating-Television-Convergence-Cultural-Status/dp/0415880262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1316235187&sr=8-1">Amazon</a>). In this entry I reflect on collaboration as a scholarly endeavor, and elaborate a bit more about the processes of academic work, picking up where I left off in <a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-i-did-on-my-summer-vacation.html">my last post on the academic summertime</a>. A subsequent post will discuss the book’s ideas.<br /><br />Like most academic works, ours is the product of years of research. My computer files tell me that I began to take notes on the topic of legitimation of TV about four years ago, fall 2007. But our project began at least a year or two before that moment, which is just the time that legitimation became a concept bringing our thinking about television’s changing cultural status into sharper focus. <br /><br />We began by collecting research on TV on DVD and what I was thinking of as the cinematization of television in terms of audiovisual style and storytelling, but also in terms of distribution (as on DVD). I’m not sure when this was exactly but it was likely around the time that so much popular press attention was being given to the significance of discs for television’s business model, story forms, and cultural circulation. For instance, between 2004 and 2007 we saw a steady stream of articles in newspapers and magazines singing the praises of DVD as a solution to some of television’s enduring problems, such as: <br /><br />-James Poniewozik, “Show Business: It's Not TV. It's TV on DVD,” <span style="font-style:italic;">Time</span>, April 19, 2004.<br /><br />-Scott Collins, “Some Television Reruns Hit Their Prime on DVD,” <span style="font-style:italic;">Los Angeles Times</span>, November 13, 2005.<br /><br />-Toni Ruberto, “DVDs offer viewer freedom,”<span style="font-style:italic;"> The Buffalo News</span>, September 17, 2006.<br /><br />-Claire Atkinson, “What to Watch? How About a ‘Simpsons’ Episode From 1999?” <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</span>, September 24, 2007. <br /><br />DVDs (as well as DVRs) were also central to the discussion of television in Steven Johnson’s 2005 book <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Everything_bad_is_good_for_you.html?id=9_YZyOfgqbEC">Everything Bad is Good For You</a>, key to his brief in favor of contemporary popular culture as a kind of cognitive pencil sharpener. The repeatability of television made possible by the digital revolution was supposed to have improved television and pushed its place in the cultural hierarchy from disreputable trash to a more elevated level. <br /><br />Television scholars were remarkably quick to assess the implications of this new development. Derek Kompare and Matt Hills wrote important articles on the topic -- both highly recommended to anyone interested in how TV has changed in the past decade -- just as the popular press was also grappling with the same developments:<br /><br />-Derek Kompare, “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” <span style="font-style:italic;">Television & New Media</span> 7:4 (November 2006), 335-360. (<a href="http://web.mit.edu/uricchio/Public/television/Kompare%20publishing%20flow.pdf">pdf</a>)<br /><br />-Matt Hills, “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf: 'TVIII' and the cultural/textual valorisations of DVD,” <span style="font-style:italic;">New Review of Film and Television Studies</span> 5.1 (April 2007), 41-60.<br /><br />But the moment I most vividly remember as having made an impression on me, an impression that would remain as we worked through our ideas and towards the book, was even before these popular press discussions became commonplace. One day in January, 2003, we were wandering around a Tower-records-type retailer (this was in Paris, which is why I remember the date but not the name of the store), and were quite overwhelmed by the television section of the DVDs. It had not been that long since shows were first appearing in season and series box sets, and to see the number of American Quality TV series packaged so lavishly and appealing to our sensibilities so strongly was really shocking, as was, in my recollection, the typical price tag. I remember the HBO titles like The Sopranos, and I’m sure there were cult shows like Buffy. I recall that store’s TV on DVD section was quite large at a time when TV on DVD was still pretty new and exciting. <br /><br />Season box sets of highly regarded programs produce such a different identity for TV shows as objects of intense consumer desire and significant commodity value, especially compared with the earlier reputation of television as disposable and ephemeral mere entertainment. In this new figuration, television was clearly attaining a newly high value that was quite the contrast against its historical identity as mass culture, as a vast wasteland, as the idiot box or boob tube. Over the span of time between 2002 and 2007, then, Elana and I began to collect research materials and to talk about how we might write something that would engage with this shift (individually or together, I’m not sure when we decided this was something to do together). A lot of our thinking coalesced in a series of conference papers we gave, which developed our project and provided an initial base of evidence and concepts on which the book would build. At the same time, both of us were busy with other things and this work was rarely if ever on the front burner for long (for starters, I had <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14464-3/indie">another book to write</a>), which is partly why is took a long time to come to fruition.<br /><br />In general I believe it’s beter to avoid working up new material for a conference presentation, and to try to present material that’s more or less publication-ready. This way you don’t stress out for three weeks before the conference figuring out what you are going to say, you don’t end up deciding you don’t like your topic after all and trying to give a different paper under the published title, and you don’t give a really rough draft that makes you look sloppy and abuses the audience’s attention. Perhaps more importantly, if you are working up new material, you might end up writing something 12 pages long that never goes anywhere, which seems to me, despite what I’ve said earlier about reconsidering what it means to be productive, like a squandered opportunity.It’s unusual that 12 pages of work all by itself is publishable as is in a journal or book in today’s academic publishing world, though maybe that’s too bad.<br /><br />In working on Legitimating Television, though, we did a lot of our initial writing for conferences, and these presentations were a great value to our process. Elana and I both gave conference papers that became book material at Console-ing Passions <a href="http://www.filmandmedia.ucsb.edu/cptv/cptv.html">2008 in Santa Barbara</a>, and <a href="http://cptv.uoregon.edu/home/index.php">2010 in Eugene</a>. We both gave papers at the one-day <a href="http://beauty.gmu.edu/visualcultures/">Unthinking Television conference in Fairfax, Virginia, in 2009</a>, that found their way into the book. Of the book’s eight chapters, four were to a great extent built around those six conference papers, cutting and pasting parts here and there and integrating different papers together. My 2008 CP paper ended up partly in chapter 4 and partly in chapter 7 (see the book’s table of contents below). Elana’s 2008 CP paper gave chapter 6 its main ideas and some of its examples. Her 2010 CP paper was the basis for chapter 5, while mine was mostly integrated into chapter 4. The book also includes work here and there that first appeared on Zigzigger (<a href="http://zigzigger.blogspot.com/2008/04/shape-shifting-tv-opens-w-i-d-e.html">this post on widescreen TV</a> lives on in chapter 7), though with much modification. We also included a few bits and pieces from an unsubmitted column I wrote for <a href="http://flowtv.org/author/michael-z-newman/">Flow when I was a columnist</a> (2008-2009). I decided not to submit it because it seemed too much like the introduction to a book and not enough like a column for a web publication. Chapters 2, 3, and 8 are just about all new, but the rest of the book is a patchwork integrating material previously shared in some way with an audience as work in progress.<br /><br />Some people have asked us how we went about co-authoring a book. It’s not that unusual to see original research monographs have more than one author, but in the humanities it’s still something a bit out of the ordinary, and people seem to wonder how the process unfolds. Our training in graduate school, especially in the humanities, assumes single authorship and offers little guidance in producing collaborative research. Editing a book or writing a textbook might lend themselves more to collaboration than this kind of work, though I haven’t done either of those things so I can’t speak to their finer points.<br /><br />We might think of collaboration as having greater or lesser degrees of intellectual integration. There may be some projects where work can be divided among collaborators in a way that doesn’t require them to share all of the same ideas and expectations, and to work out arguments and evidence together. Ours is the kind of book that does require that kind of collaboration. We conducted research separately and wrote separately, but we did not divide up the work into discrete sections and each keep to our side of a line. We wrote the chapters one at a time (you work on this one, I’ll work on that one) but they are all still products of our collaboration. Sometimes the ideas of a section come more from one person but the words are composed mostly by the other. I wrote most of chapter 6’s first draft, but the conceptual work was mostly Elana’s. There are parts where the research was done by one of us and the other wove it into an argument. In chapter 2, for instance, I wrote a section of a couple thousand words to be integrated into a longer discussion written mainly by Elana, but she revised my part to make it fit, and I revised hers after that. And in revision, there was never any sense of the words being proprietary. Some parts of the book were revised so many times by us both that they really were written by two people. Having said all of this, there are passages of the book only I could have written, and passages only Elana could have. I would rather preserve the veneer of total collaboration than reveal which parts these are, but people who know us will be able to figure them out. There are also phrases I’m especially happy with that I wrote, and quotes that express a thought especially nicely that I found, and I feel pleased about these. There are similar passages that Elana wrote or quoted, and I admire these no less, but in the way you admire someone else’s good job.<br /><br />Sometimes I infer that the subtext of the co-authorship question is that for a married couple it might be a special challenge to write a book together. This would depend on the couple, but for us it was undoubtedly easier to co-author a book with each other than it would have been with anyone else. We talk about TV all the time anyway, and our “work” and “life” are continuous. The ideas benefited from the continual hashing out during car rides and over lunches at home, and we could discuss progress bit by bit as each of us worked on separate parts. I think it helps to live with your co-author, though I can see that in other situations it might be preferable to be separated by some physical distance. I like collaboration for many reasons: it solves the problem of scholarly loneliness and isolation, it makes possible synergistic productivity, and it might lead to a multi-dimensionality that one person’s work can never have. I also believe it provides some of the same rewards as solitary scholarship at a reduced rate of labor (though certainly not reduced by half). I like collaborative writing and I want to collaborate more in the future, though a collaboration I might have with people other than Elana will have obviously different dynamics. (I have co-authored one other publication, a journal article soon to appear that I look forward to linking to when it’s out. That experience, writing with someone other than my wife, has also made me eager to collaborate more.)<br /><br />Most of the book’s research had been accumulated by the time we signed a contract with Routledge in fall 2009, and the writing was done in a sustained effort between the spring of 2010 and the early winter of 2011. It’s definitely easier to write a book quickly with two authors, though having an infant child (born in late 2009) whose care both authors are responsible for providing can add more than a bit of difficulty. It also, however, provided us time away from teaching, which was technically family leave but (now I speak mainly for myself) actually freed up some extra writing time. We wrote the book mostly <br />one chapter at a time and passed them back and forth through cycles of editing and revision. In the final weeks, once all eight chapters had been drafted, we often worked across a coffee shop table to facilitate discussion of revisions. When the page proofs arrived a few months ago we returned there to pass them back and forth marked up in different colors of ink. We still go to that coffee shop sometimes and sit across the table from each other. Of course we’re pleased that the book is done, but we also miss those days.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status </span><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Contents</span><br />1. Legitimating Television<br />2. Another Golden Age?<br />3. The Showrunner as <span style="font-style:italic;">Auteur</span><br />4. Upgrading the Situation Comedy<br />5. Not a Soap Opera<br />6. The Television Image and the Image of the Television<br />7. Technologies of Agency<br />8. Television Scholarship and/as Legitimationmznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-14907925741054117312011-09-01T08:27:00.001-06:002011-09-01T09:19:31.815-06:00What I Did on my Summer Vacation<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2LxCkhypCWMhCo36D22DkZ__xvzxRD6nmG9-McoSKwDBTS8fh-rrz1vI-PIOHAbk72o0T0fHhSIzzENPnfaMurJhZ9cM-Pgr7B0zXVjO0Xhy_c_SFW_PHP3RNYB5bPS2BIxT/s1600/4949524754_97bf88fd13.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 310px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib2LxCkhypCWMhCo36D22DkZ__xvzxRD6nmG9-McoSKwDBTS8fh-rrz1vI-PIOHAbk72o0T0fHhSIzzENPnfaMurJhZ9cM-Pgr7B0zXVjO0Xhy_c_SFW_PHP3RNYB5bPS2BIxT/s320/4949524754_97bf88fd13.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647217703813092722" /></a>
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<br />Fall is practically here. The public schools are back in business and a fresh crop of freshmen have appeared at UWM, wandering the campus in packs and wearing those lanyards they must give out with room keys and ID badges, but which no one seems to need once classes start. We don’t begin the semester until after Labor Day but my course syllabus has been ready to go for a few weeks. I’m starting now to think more clearly about what the course will actually be like. It’s an advanced new media course which I am adapting from a <a href="http://newmediaseminar.wordpress.com">graduate seminar I taught last fall</a>. I have just begun a year-long fellowship at the <a href="http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/">Center for 21st Century Studies</a>, which is the reason I’m teaching only one course each semester in 2011-12, and on Monday I claimed the keys to a new office with a view of the city and the lake.
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<br />I love (ok, enjoy and get various rewards from) teaching, but I also love the annual summer break from teaching. From May to September I have been granted 122 happily classroom-free days. Academics get irritated when civilians think we have the summer off, but this kind of conversation is so familiar and in my experience well-meaning. Actually, I say when feeling like talking about myself, I’m kind of busier during the summer. Graduate students are hurrying to finish MA theses, sending me work to read chapter by chapter and thesis by thesis. Service is supposed to pause but it doesn’t. I worked this summer on an assessment for the large lecture course I taught for many semesters. If teaching a new course or even a modification of an old one in fall, books and articles need to be collected and ordered and requested from the reserves at the library, but only after a process of deciding which to assign. Peer-reviewing manuscripts is an all-season task, though I am still not asked to do very much of it. Research has the biggest claim on my time, and I have spent much of this summer reading, taking notes, writing and rewriting, editing, revising, looking up dates and names on Wikipedia and IMDb and Google Books, corresponding with coauthors and editors, planning future research, and more generally managing a number of ongoing projects. Since May I have been juggling work on a couple of journal articles, a couple of book chapters, a co-authored book soon to be published, and two large projects in the early stages of research. I’ve been making conference plans for fall and spring. I also spent some of my time researching a project that I decided to abandon despite having spent a lot of time thinking about it and shlepping to the library to claim ILL books (maybe it will linger in the deep archive of my mind, some day to be integrated into another project or brought back to life on its own).
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<br />Summer is also a time of leisure, though, and I always feel a tension between the need to “be productive” as an untenured prof, and the desire to enjoy the season, the welcome visits from friends and family, the outings and trips and times of recreation and fun. This makes the summer not only busy but unfortunately stressful. I know this is a “<a href="http://whitewhine.com/">white whine</a>” and I don’t really work for a living like the vast majority of people who toil at jobs that really feel like work all day, all week, all year. But time is finite and an afternoon at the beach sometimes, perversely, looks like a missed opportunity to “be productive.” An afternoon of “being productive” can also seem like a missed opportunity to have fun, which is after all why God gave us summer. Even supposedly multi-functional fun+productive time, like a weekday afternoon at the movies (privilege of the film scholar!), can seem like a decadent indulgence. One day in early August I was going to spend an afternoon writing an essay while my sister and brother-in-law, visiting from out of town, took our 7 year-old son to a water park. After waffling briefly I opted for the water park and was pretty glad. But at the change of seasons I always feel frustrated by the incompleteness of the summer’s work, by the inevitability of goals unmet (even if I knew they were unrealistic all along).
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2VuAlZ51VstSwHmqjj8LlltLl2mmrDUWJg6SJ4ebDkbT0XCy85mcSdC70UYYOegR55dFmeIMWMmUvLObO9edozKMWKZCgbkLr0s1Dc9scbxVLJvSssv22iByu3QUaZ1AGNMAe/s1600/cottoncandybeach.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 315px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2VuAlZ51VstSwHmqjj8LlltLl2mmrDUWJg6SJ4ebDkbT0XCy85mcSdC70UYYOegR55dFmeIMWMmUvLObO9edozKMWKZCgbkLr0s1Dc9scbxVLJvSssv22iByu3QUaZ1AGNMAe/s320/cottoncandybeach.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647220907355851202" /></a>
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<br />Despite the prevailing cultural mandate of summer exuberance, my favorite time of year lately is actually the first few weeks of January. Our campus wedges a three-week winterim session in between fall and spring, and if you don’t teach winterim (I haven’t and will avoid it until we feel like we need the money) you have a nice month-long break from the classroom. The Christmas-New Year’s week is a wash as school and daycare are closed, but the first three weeks of the year are almost perfect. The kids are occupied all day, the weather is shitty, there is no sense that January ought to include leisure, and the weekdays are free for reading and writing, which is how I prefer to spend them most of the time. But the afternoon at the movies or the long lunch can be that much more pleasurable in winterim, when the rest of the world is really at work, the grind of teaching isn’t making every week into a struggle just to get to Friday, and there is so little expectation of fun. When I say that I wish the summer would be more like the winter it’s not just that I like indoors better than outdoors and sweaters better than shorts.
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<br />The problem with the academic summertime is a problem of how to think about academic work. Academic time (at least in my experience) has to be seen as fluid and multidimensional. The interest lately in promoting “work/life” or “work/family balance” is misguided, for a number of reasons, one of which is that work and life, business and pleasure, aren't separate. (Another reason is that it depends on a gendered conception of both life/family and of work, requiring women to shoulder an unfair share of the burden of an inequitable system of academic labor, childcare, and domestic responsibility). The idea that time is spent either on business or on pleasure, and that time spent on one is stolen from the other, is deeply ideological, rooted in an ethos of productive labor and industry that ultimately serves the interests of capitalism and class stratification. It is the right-wing politicians and neoliberal culture that sees the individual academic's productivity in terms of quantifiable return on investment, and questions the value of teaching and study as an end in itself. This is the same culture that makes <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/how-much-should-time-on-campus-matter/29302?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en">academics eager to demonstrate their long working hours and quantify their productivity</a> to answer the call that higher education pay, that it be economically accountable rather than an institution worthy of pubic investment. But even putting the deep ideological problem aside, it's also wrong to think of productivity in terms of the typical quantifiable metrics of an academic worker in hours of labor or courses taught or scholarly output.
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6iZ2KfpVi4SsBb_MqGYO57vVdJxrdIWHo8k22SSDk3CMfR44crsbB4Q1f_0B712pOAk_4jDd4-0KXua4umSXeIb_kwyCpsJkpHgWIhEhse2hhOZjdoNuPYifGnnufd_IRyaZa/s1600/susans.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6iZ2KfpVi4SsBb_MqGYO57vVdJxrdIWHo8k22SSDk3CMfR44crsbB4Q1f_0B712pOAk_4jDd4-0KXua4umSXeIb_kwyCpsJkpHgWIhEhse2hhOZjdoNuPYifGnnufd_IRyaZa/s320/susans.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647221010688258578" /></a>
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<br />The idea that producing articles, chapters, talks, books, blog posts — and more generally work to be lines on a vita or entries in an annual report — is "being productive" is a consequence of a flawed system for qualifying academics and establishing reputation and value. We can't easily change the system, but we can change how we think about our work. It's true that publishing is a sine qua non of academic success today, and that it is unfortunately more likely than teaching to lead to many people's professional fulfillment. But quantity isn't quality, and sometimes it's more productive to spend your time taking a walk or watching TV than forcing words out of your miserably typing fingers. One really good paper should be a more impressive accomplishment than half a dozen mediocre ones. My summer’s aborted research project, which was going to be a series of brief essays on Billy Joel songs (maybe blogged, maybe to become a short book), led me to a number of really good articles and videos, and inspired me to listen to the entire catalog of a recording artist I have felt strongly (positively) about (well, until An Innocent Man, after that I can’t really take that much of him) for almost thirty years. It helped me clarify in my own mind what I find so interesting about Billy Joel (this must wait for another time), which was satisfying in itself. Another of my big new projects, a book about taste in popular culture, might accommodate some of my ideas on this topic, so this research could prove "productive" down the road. But if it isn't, I don't really care. I liked reading and listening and thinking about Billy Joel these past few months, and I refuse to see it as a waste. I refuse to force myself to write an article or chapter on this when I don't know what shape it would take, who would read it, what scholarly conversation it enters into, and whether I have enough expertise to analyze the material as I might want to and interest to see it through to completion.
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<br />Sometimes I find the most useful and rewarding scholarly experiences are these kinds of meanderings, readings in topics that I decide are wrong turns, obsessions that come and go. Some inform my work in some way, eventually, and some turn out to be diversions, hard to know. Sometimes as a media scholar you can get into something seriously for months or years, and figure out what to do with it later. This seems to be my habit. I've watched cooking shows fairly avidly for ten years, sometimes more avidly than others. This summer I wrote an essay about a Food Network show, Everyday Italian with Giada de Laurentiis, for an edited book. I didn't realize six or seven years ago when I started watching Giada that this time was ultimately to be "productive," except maybe in practical culinary ways.
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtuXsIwJDZmKwbujoEzuSL5rmJoN19JiIsulm_6i1_4WznNn8LuOgkabktuqvz0DTmrRHwEU0QTeL2FGkIV7EL8f9bNYhSL337mNEzHq_SnBQgAxHKZkcaJRSsKlbtQehN7EDT/s1600/fishcreek.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtuXsIwJDZmKwbujoEzuSL5rmJoN19JiIsulm_6i1_4WznNn8LuOgkabktuqvz0DTmrRHwEU0QTeL2FGkIV7EL8f9bNYhSL337mNEzHq_SnBQgAxHKZkcaJRSsKlbtQehN7EDT/s320/fishcreek.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647222033102635634" /></a>
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<br />My other big new project, the one I proposed in my application for a Center fellowship, is research on the early history of video games in the home and the connection between games and television especially in the 1970s and early 1980s. I have been reading up on this for almost a year, trying to discover scholarly literature on this topic (it's scant) and assessing what primary sources could prove useful in a social and cultural history of games. To the extent that my childhood experience playing Atari and Intellivision in friends' basement rec rooms informs this work, that time was also "productive." But I see this project as something I intend to spend years doing. I don't know if I will write anything this year, as I collect, read, and make notes on popular and industry press and try to get my hands on the games themselves. That’s why I also have the taste project, which is more writing-ready. Scholarship can be like slow food. I'm not just cooking a dish all day, I'm growing the vegetables, raising the hog, waiting for the wine to get to be a better age. The payoff will come much later. But even thinking of the reading and note-taking as productive is too limiting. Time I spend thinking about it while driving kids to lessons and practices and half-watching youth soccer games, while walking across campus or riding my bike to a coffee shop, or while telling friends about my work are also part of the process. And sometimes it’s more productive to take a nap or watch a baseball game or bake a cake and come back to work later.
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<br />Some of the most tedious labor of the summer was the work Elana and I did on proofs of our book <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/">Legitimating Television</a>, which is supposed to be coming out in a couple of weeks. Some of our standard academic practices, like conforming to Chicago style, insisting on knowing the place of publication of books we cite (who needs to know?), determining the dates of film releases (you weren’t sure which North by Northwest I was talking about?), are actually counterproductive. They suck our time and energy and divert our attention from more worthwhile activities. But when you do them you’re “being productive.” The proofs required long and careful attention to small details, and this took effort and put other pursuits on hold. But we’re happy the book is coming out and eager for people to read it. It’s the product of years of “being productive” in the usual various ways, and our process in writing it will — I hope — be the toping of another blog post soon to come.
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4-hezMQWxvjtnS59h6DcFJ_lxg8c6Bg5RAf6bLh-RwY5ECedIudCi8D47HoahYb6O8rjKhIM8POSQV1lbkzikcRdSAQq3sZwUJzu_5isQIFei9s8aEhKZOJO0Y2TDLinrBqDa/s1600/3706259384_6a432609c8.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4-hezMQWxvjtnS59h6DcFJ_lxg8c6Bg5RAf6bLh-RwY5ECedIudCi8D47HoahYb6O8rjKhIM8POSQV1lbkzikcRdSAQq3sZwUJzu_5isQIFei9s8aEhKZOJO0Y2TDLinrBqDa/s320/3706259384_6a432609c8.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5647217001048800002" /></a>
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<br />Other things I did on my summer vacation:
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<br />-Watched 2 seasons of The Good Wife, and a fair bit of thirtysomething and Parks and Rec.
<br />-Read A Visit from the Goon Squad and House of Holes.
<br />-Listened to Gillian Welch, The Harrow & The Harvest.
<br />-Went to see Tree of Life at 2pm on a Thursday, and watched The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou on DVD one sunny morning.
<br />-Read Walter Everett, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07494460000640051#preview">"The Learned vs. the Vernacular in the Songs of Billy Joel," </a>Contemporary Music Review 18.4 (2000): 105-129.
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<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">photos from recent summer vacations are by <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/mzn37/">.michael.newman.</a> published under CC attribution, noncommercial, no derivative works license
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<br />mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-14783525779855841252011-05-06T15:16:00.001-06:002011-05-06T15:16:31.904-06:00The Television Image and the Image of the Television<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHkAn4sLSZGSXu4gBKSpbltA1akSC7kXQ_QlWLLkvbmVzOQhF9LGa9bOI90UxPQQga7HXOB8bPLv6XWz89bcwnYTUJcxjFoSzjgFwHGD67OEy5oSkNVnbRpdwOdMOZFL90Tw-G/s1600/dwell_tvwall.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 262px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHkAn4sLSZGSXu4gBKSpbltA1akSC7kXQ_QlWLLkvbmVzOQhF9LGa9bOI90UxPQQga7HXOB8bPLv6XWz89bcwnYTUJcxjFoSzjgFwHGD67OEy5oSkNVnbRpdwOdMOZFL90Tw-G/s320/dwell_tvwall.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5603713473317125474" /></a><br /><br />Next weekend I will be at the <a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/index.html">Media in Transition 7</a> conference at MIT, where I am giving a paper called <a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/newman_mit7_paper.pdf">"The Television Image and the Image of the Television"</a> (pdf) about flat-panel HDTV sets. This work is part of the book I have been writing with Elana Levine, <a href="http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203847640/">Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status</a>, which we are told will be published in September (though the copyright will be 2012). <a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/newman_mit7_paper.pdf">The full paper has been posted as a pdf at the conference website.</a> If you come hear me present at the conference, you will get to see lots of pretty pictures of HD television sets, like the one above from the March 2011 issue of Dwell. My paper identifies the switch from 4:3 CRT sets to 16:9 flat-panels as one facet of the wider cultural legitimation of television during the era of media convergence. It addresses the upscale and masculinized sophistication of the new sets, and their significance for TV's convergence with cinema and gaming.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-60218367951955300582011-04-30T15:59:00.005-06:002011-04-30T17:50:34.125-06:00Mad Men ClassIn the past few weeks I have begun to teach an independent study with Lynn Reed, a student in the <a href="http://cms.skidmore.edu/mals/">Master of Arts in Liberal Studies</a> program at Skidmore College. The topic is<a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/"> Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s</a> (link is to the class blog). This program allows students to do courses with faculty they approach who have some expertise and interest in topics they want to study, and I'm really grateful to Lynn for getting in touch with me because I have been finding the experience rewarding and (if I can speak for her) I think she has too.<br /><br />I wanted to mention this here not just to share the <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/mad-men-class-syllabus.html">syllabus</a>, which I think will be of interest to serious Mad Men viewers, but also to link to Lynn's writings on the show and related readings, and to publicize her good work. Thus far she has written about <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/theory-on-character-motivation-in.html">character motivation in serialized narrative</a>, <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/conclusions-from-character-goal.html">character goals in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy"</a>, <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/time-travelers-and-perspectives-on.html">the dislocation that comes with cultural change</a>, <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/autonomy-and-social-change.html">Reisman's ideas about conformity as applied to Don Draper</a>, and <a href="http://madmentvclass.blogspot.com/2011/04/autonomy-cool-and-social-change.html">"cool" in the 1960s</a>, among other topics. <br /><br />The course description to follow is Lynn's. The readings and viewings were put together collaboratively. <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Mad Men: Serialized Television Narrative and Depictions of Social History in the Early 1960s<br /></span><br />The acclaimed cable television drama Mad Men depicts the process of cultural change in early 1960s America through narratives of the personal and professional lives of men and women in a New York City advertising agency.<br /><br />The series two most central protagonists, creative director Don Draper and secretary-turned-writer Peggy Olson, are attempting to:<br />-re-make themselves and re-tell their own stories,<br />-while working in an advertising industry that defines desires and creates narratives to sell products,<br />-at a time in which the country is re-making itself, re-telling the story of what it means to be an American and who can participate in the telling of that story<br /><br />In this independent study, we will examine both the social history of the early 1960’s, and the ways in which this serialized television narrative tells the story of cultural change in this period (1960 – 1965).<br /><br />From that examination, we will also look at larger questions. Contemporary politics and popular culture debate the meaning of “the sixties” through broad symbols and shorthand references. Does this study of Mad Men and the social history of the early 1960s tell us something about the current cultural fault lines that are seen as resulting from “the sixties”? Can it tell us something about which cultural changes have been accepted and absorbed by American culture and which are still up for debate?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Reading and Viewing Assignments:<br /></span><br />The book <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad Men: Dream Come True TV</span>, a collection of scholarly essays on Mad Men edited by Gary R. Edgerton, will be published April 26, 2011. The essays will be assigned reading and integrated with the syllabus as appropriate. (MN note: this is the language as we drafted it in the syllabus; this book has now been published and I just got my copy this week.)<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Week 1-2 -- Overview of Television Storytelling & Serialized Narrative<br /></span><br />“From Beats to Arcs: Towards a Poetics of Television Narrative”, Michael Z. Newman<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Storytelling in Film and Television</span>, Kristin Thompson<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen</span>, Glen Creeber<br /><br />Mad Men episodes:<br />1.6 “Babylon”<br />2.7 “The Gold Violin”<br />2.12 “The Mountain King”<br />3.6 “Guy Walks in to an Advertising Agency”<br />3.11 “The Gypsy and the Hobo”<br />4.4 “The Rejected”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Week 3-4 -- The “Crisis of Conformity” in the late ‘50s<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Conquest of Cool</span>, Thomas Frank, chapters 1-3<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Lonely Crowd</span>, David Riesman<br />“The White Negro”, Norman Mailer<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment</span>, Barbara Ehrenreich<br /><br />Mad Men episodes:<br />1.1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”<br />1.8 “The Hobo Code”<br />2.11 “The Jet Set”<br />3.7 “Seven Twenty Three”<br />4.7 “The Suitcase”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Week 5-6 – Changes in Advertising and American Culture<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Conquest of Cool</span>, chapters 4 – 8<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Hidden Persuaders</span>, Vance Packard<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America,</span> Lizabeth Cohen<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Rise of the Creative Clas</span>s, Richard Florida, chapters 1-2<br /><br />Mad Men episodes:<br />3.2 “Love Among the Ruins”<br />3.13 “Shut the Door. Have a Seat”<br />4.5 “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”<br />4.7 “The Suitcase”<br />4.11 “Chinese Wall”<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Week 7-9 – Feminine Mystique and the early Women’s Movement<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The Feminine Mystique</span>, Betty Friedan<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s</span>, Stephanie Coontz<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Sex and the Single Girl</span>, Helen Gurley Brown<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown</span>, Jennifer Scanlon<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks</span>, Alice Echols, chapters 1-4<br /><br />Mad Men Episodes:<br />1.3 “Ladies’ Room”<br />1.13 “The Wheel”<br />2.6 “Maidenform”<br />3.8 “Souvenir”<br />4.9 “The Beautiful Girls”<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Week 10-12 – Political Change and Social Change / Re-telling the American Story in the Early 1960s<br /></span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage</span>, Todd Gitlin, chapters 1-7<br />Port Huron Statement<br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963</span>, Taylor Branch<br /><br />Mad Men Episodes:<br />1.12 “Nixon vs. Kennedy”<br />2.13 “Meditations in an Emergency”<br />3.3 “My Old Kentucky Home”<br />3.12 “The Grown-Ups”<br />4.13 “Tomorrowland”mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-37629781312862503012011-04-07T07:33:00.003-06:002011-04-07T07:41:59.506-06:00Indie PromotionThe Columbia University Press website has published some of my work online, and I just wanted to alert those of you not following my every thought and link on <a href="http://twitter.com/mznewman">twitter</a> to these two items:<br /><br />1. Indie's <a href="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14464-3/indie/excerpt">introduction</a> has been posted for all to see. It begins:<br /><br />Like so many cultural categories, indie cinema is slippery. The same term refers not only to a diverse body of films spanning more than two decades, from Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008) and beyond, but also a cultural network that sustains them. This book is about American indie cinema as a film culture that comprises not only movies but also institutions—distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media—within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings.<br /><br />To read the rest, click on over.<br /><br />2. The <a href="http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14464-3/indie/excerpt">CUP blog has posted an interview with me</a>. It starts off like this: <br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Question: Why “indie” rather than “independent”?<br /></span><br />Michael Newman: At some point, maybe in the 1990s, indie became a kind of catch-all for describing edgy, youthful, subcultural, or alternative culture...<br /><br />The rest is on the CUP blog.mznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.com0