Now that I’m getting comfortably into the dissertation-focused phase of my education, I want to keep up regular blogging. My focus will shift mostly to working out thoughts in this semi-public space about my research project and about the course I’m teaching now – New Telecommunication Media. Most of this will probably be stuff that would be just as at home tucked away in my own journals or private computer files. But why not cast that bottle into the digital sea?
This morning I’ve been trying to think through various categories schemes to capture theories how journalism changes. By this, I mean factors that influence significant changes in basic expectations for and forms of news. Most of the case studies I’m thinking through come from two areas: 1) inquiries into the development of the ideal of objective journalism 2) the usually less historically rigorous, accounts of “tabloidization” as an increasingly prominent feature of the most popular forms of news in the last couple decades (or so). Here are some of the major types of explanations I can think of now:
Cultural shifts
o On one hand, there are explanations that focus on journalism as responding to new social tastes, anxieties, desires, concerns, stratifications, or the development of popular expressive forms that have grown independently of mainstream journalism.
o On the other hand, there are a few accounts of shifts in the “culture of production.” From this angle the press changes reflect changes in the sentiments, aspirations, widespread beliefs, or work routines of news producers. Some examples of this might include two of Schudson’s explanations for the rise of objectivity after the penny press; one being his focus on the desire among journalists to establish themselves as legitimate professionals, the other being the way he describes a loss of faith in naive realism after WWI as a phenomenon particular to the class to which journalists belong.
Changes in the structures of political life and institutions. Richard Kaplan’s Politics and the Press best exemplifies this kind of explanation that sees journalism reshaping to siphon legitimacy from political leaders as the sources of that legitimacy shift.
Technological changes. The most well known theory here is probably the idea that telegraph led to the rise of objective reporting.
International influences. This type of explanation is less prominent in histories of U.S. journalism, at least from what I can tell.
Economic changes. New market conditions might be reflected in changes in news form, such as the well-supported claim that the professionalization of journalism and codification of objectivity in the 1920s was a way for owners to legitimize what were being widely monopolized local newspaper markets. I’m leaving this as too broad a category right now, for clearly there are differences between economic changes like the monopolization of the local press and reconfigured audience segmentation strategies.
Individual innovators. While the “great man” mode of historical explanation is mostly rejected by social and cultural historians, there is no reason to deny that particular people in influential positions acted as agents precipitating changes that might not have happened without them.
Innovative professional practices. As the aesthetic principles and practices changed for certain professional groups only partially situated within journalism, such as camera operators or graphic designers, these changes manifest themselves within journalism. Barnhurst and Nerone discuss the influence of graphic designers on late 20th century newspapers. Outside of news, John Caldwell’s Cultures of Production explores how the changing aesthetic philosophies of all sorts of video-related professions affected television.
Transformations of “the industrial popular.” This is a concept I used in trying to explain innovations in cable news. It refers to ways in which communities of producers think about what their audiences want and what kinds of fare are potentially popular.
Where do I go from here? I will certainly continue to brainstorm ideas such as the ones above (and add them to this list), but I also need to think about various ways of conceiving of the interrelations among different kinds of factors. For instance, one notion of “overdetermination” (which is perhaps an overhyped concept) is that an event has multiple sufficient conditions. Another way more common way people use that term to mean that multiple factors have played a role in causing an event. Yet how those multiple factors relate to each other can be an important question. One factor might be considered “primary” even in a non-reductionist accounts. For instance, the claim could be made that a cultural shift initiated the need for a change in news form, making the cultural shift the primary factor. However, that doesn’t many the other factors need to be reduced to inert billiard balls. Let’s say a there is a cultural shift as a population is losing interest in the dry tone favored by professional journalists. There may indeed be contingent and creative ways in which journalists react to that change. Journalists or other news producers than still have some agency even while their actions are in response to something else that’s occurring outside their professional control.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Friday, January 02, 2009
Reading Bourdieu: Questions About Engaged Scholarship
Before going to grad school, I worked at MIT as the Service Learning Coordinator. Basically my job was to set up relationships between MIT instructors and community organizations or NGOs for collaborative projects in which students could work for the community organization as part of their coursework. Much of this involved engineering or design classes, for instance in one class students worked with an NGO developing designs for de-mining technologies. There are many criticisms of "service learning” (which certainly can go under many names), and I was always aware that this work can lead to a paternalistic attitude towards "helping" others or to a general self-congratulatory consciousness. Yet on the whole, I believed the benefits of this pedagogy, when done well, far outweighs its harms. In my past two media literacy classes, I have incorporated community learning (a more preferable term perhaps) projects into my own class.
This is just background to get at a problem I've been trying to make sense out of since entering university life again as a student. I have been quite surprised at how much resistance there is to notions of engaged/public/activist scholarship among left-leaning academics. Now it’s probably true that much more of what I've noticed is lack of interest and initiative for changing the kinds of routines you get used to in the professional life of an academic (I certainly know this inertia personally). But beyond these habits of practice, I've heard many arguments about why aspirations for more direct scholarly interventions into political or social arenas outside the university are a bad idea. At first, I was admittedly dismissive of many of these lines of thoughts. But now I realize that there are serious questions and problems to consider here, and that not all of the resistance to changing academic routines can be disregarded as prophylactic defensiveness.
I'd say there are two main poles to the objections toward engaged scholarship - one is that is it is a danger to communities outside of the university (i.e. academic meddlers will try to assert rule as philosopher-kings), the other is that it will degrade scholarly integrity itself. It's the latter objection I want to focus on here, particularly through looking at Pierre Bourdieu's warnings about the pernicious effects of journalistic celebrity on academics in On Television.
The kind of engaged scholarship that Bourdieu approaches with caution, though certainly not total refusal, is academics working with popular media. Bourdieu's main concern is that when academics become to intertwined with journalists, what he calls the "journalistic field" starts to gain undo influence over academic/scientific fields. Without getting into detail about Bourdieu's complicated but suggestive analysis of fields, he is worried that journalism is much less autonomous from market forces than academic fields. From Bourdieu’s perspective, Journalists are in a strange social position. What they do wields enormous influence over the rest of society, yet they have relatively little control as individuals or even as a professional collective over the rules that journalism must conform to. Journalists' work, especially since the dominance of television news, is more beholden to the judgment of audience ratings and the advertising market than to the judgments of their peers. This is what makes journalism less autonomous than entomology, let's say, as a field in which professional entomologists act as the primary judges of the merits of each others' work.
In a nutshell, Bourdieu is worried that working with journalists will make academics conform more to journalistic expectations and this could take precedence over their own professional prerogatives. Being in the U.S. and not at an Ivy league school, the world of public French intellectuals that Bourdieu describes seems a bit remote to me. Yet I take his analysis as a good warning about what could go wrong if there were to be an increase in prominent public intellectuals here.
The counterpoint that Bourdieu seems to miss is that feedback from broader publics could actually make for more sensitive academic work, work that is even more rigorous in a certain way as is forced to respond to a wider array of criticism. If history tells us anything, insular groups of professionals studying society, ethics, politics, etc., miss a lot due to their homogeneity. Think of all the ways that considerations of race and gender throughout the history of every discipline were neglected or mostly reflected the narrow perspectives of restricted memberships groups admitted the professional field. While one solution is of course to diversify the groups recruited into each academic field, I think Bourdieu would be one of the thinkers most cognizant of limits to this approach even under the most ideal conditions. There are always going to be certain "ways of knowing" that will never be able to fully incorporated into the professional norms of academic thought. Nonetheless, academics may be able to encounter and react to these foreign ways of knowing in productive ways.
The problem is that journalism may not always provide a good space for such encounters or the kind of feedback from excluded knowledges that would be most humbling and ultimately most beneficial for academics. I agree with Bourdieu that under many conditions the circulation of ideas in certain journalistic spheres may only provide very limited forms of market-driven feedback from journalistic publics. However, I still have hope that many "alternative" forums from blogs to lefty magazines to journalistic forums yet-to-come can provide space for ideas to circulate among academics and larger publics without everything being reduced to market logic.
While I can't find the passage now, somewhere in On Television I recall Bourdieu fantasizing about academics working collectively to negotiate the conditions of their entry into the journalistic field. I understand how greatly difficult this might be to achieve, but I think there are some rather realistic steps that could be taken (many of these already happening):
1) Academics could seek to work with journalistic outlets that offer them more favorable conditions for expressing their views. Maybe academics need to work on building more relationships with the broad variety of the alternative presses instead of being so fixated on the prestige press, i.e. New York Times, or the most popular outlets, i.e. broadcast news, Time, etc. (Again, I realize this is already the case for many engaged academics, yet this tactic does not come to the forefront enough in at least the discussions I’ve witnessed concerning engaged scholarship).
2) Academics and other groups could try to work with the mainstream journalistic organizations to make some relatively simple structural changes. For instance, maybe people interviewed in stories could be offered special prominent spaces to comment on the stories publicly on their websites.
3) Academics can help create new forums for thoughtful analysis and discussion. The few sites I know in which humanities scholars have created such forums are Bad Subjects, Flow, and the public sociological magazine Contexts. If anyone’s reading this, please let me know of others!
This is just background to get at a problem I've been trying to make sense out of since entering university life again as a student. I have been quite surprised at how much resistance there is to notions of engaged/public/activist scholarship among left-leaning academics. Now it’s probably true that much more of what I've noticed is lack of interest and initiative for changing the kinds of routines you get used to in the professional life of an academic (I certainly know this inertia personally). But beyond these habits of practice, I've heard many arguments about why aspirations for more direct scholarly interventions into political or social arenas outside the university are a bad idea. At first, I was admittedly dismissive of many of these lines of thoughts. But now I realize that there are serious questions and problems to consider here, and that not all of the resistance to changing academic routines can be disregarded as prophylactic defensiveness.
I'd say there are two main poles to the objections toward engaged scholarship - one is that is it is a danger to communities outside of the university (i.e. academic meddlers will try to assert rule as philosopher-kings), the other is that it will degrade scholarly integrity itself. It's the latter objection I want to focus on here, particularly through looking at Pierre Bourdieu's warnings about the pernicious effects of journalistic celebrity on academics in On Television.
The kind of engaged scholarship that Bourdieu approaches with caution, though certainly not total refusal, is academics working with popular media. Bourdieu's main concern is that when academics become to intertwined with journalists, what he calls the "journalistic field" starts to gain undo influence over academic/scientific fields. Without getting into detail about Bourdieu's complicated but suggestive analysis of fields, he is worried that journalism is much less autonomous from market forces than academic fields. From Bourdieu’s perspective, Journalists are in a strange social position. What they do wields enormous influence over the rest of society, yet they have relatively little control as individuals or even as a professional collective over the rules that journalism must conform to. Journalists' work, especially since the dominance of television news, is more beholden to the judgment of audience ratings and the advertising market than to the judgments of their peers. This is what makes journalism less autonomous than entomology, let's say, as a field in which professional entomologists act as the primary judges of the merits of each others' work.
In a nutshell, Bourdieu is worried that working with journalists will make academics conform more to journalistic expectations and this could take precedence over their own professional prerogatives. Being in the U.S. and not at an Ivy league school, the world of public French intellectuals that Bourdieu describes seems a bit remote to me. Yet I take his analysis as a good warning about what could go wrong if there were to be an increase in prominent public intellectuals here.
The counterpoint that Bourdieu seems to miss is that feedback from broader publics could actually make for more sensitive academic work, work that is even more rigorous in a certain way as is forced to respond to a wider array of criticism. If history tells us anything, insular groups of professionals studying society, ethics, politics, etc., miss a lot due to their homogeneity. Think of all the ways that considerations of race and gender throughout the history of every discipline were neglected or mostly reflected the narrow perspectives of restricted memberships groups admitted the professional field. While one solution is of course to diversify the groups recruited into each academic field, I think Bourdieu would be one of the thinkers most cognizant of limits to this approach even under the most ideal conditions. There are always going to be certain "ways of knowing" that will never be able to fully incorporated into the professional norms of academic thought. Nonetheless, academics may be able to encounter and react to these foreign ways of knowing in productive ways.
The problem is that journalism may not always provide a good space for such encounters or the kind of feedback from excluded knowledges that would be most humbling and ultimately most beneficial for academics. I agree with Bourdieu that under many conditions the circulation of ideas in certain journalistic spheres may only provide very limited forms of market-driven feedback from journalistic publics. However, I still have hope that many "alternative" forums from blogs to lefty magazines to journalistic forums yet-to-come can provide space for ideas to circulate among academics and larger publics without everything being reduced to market logic.
While I can't find the passage now, somewhere in On Television I recall Bourdieu fantasizing about academics working collectively to negotiate the conditions of their entry into the journalistic field. I understand how greatly difficult this might be to achieve, but I think there are some rather realistic steps that could be taken (many of these already happening):
1) Academics could seek to work with journalistic outlets that offer them more favorable conditions for expressing their views. Maybe academics need to work on building more relationships with the broad variety of the alternative presses instead of being so fixated on the prestige press, i.e. New York Times, or the most popular outlets, i.e. broadcast news, Time, etc. (Again, I realize this is already the case for many engaged academics, yet this tactic does not come to the forefront enough in at least the discussions I’ve witnessed concerning engaged scholarship).
2) Academics and other groups could try to work with the mainstream journalistic organizations to make some relatively simple structural changes. For instance, maybe people interviewed in stories could be offered special prominent spaces to comment on the stories publicly on their websites.
3) Academics can help create new forums for thoughtful analysis and discussion. The few sites I know in which humanities scholars have created such forums are Bad Subjects, Flow, and the public sociological magazine Contexts. If anyone’s reading this, please let me know of others!
Friday, November 07, 2008
Obama and Academic Reason
Like millions in the U.S. and abroad, Obama's election has given me a profound surge of hope. This hope doesn't come from the idea that an Obama administration will implement policies that will make everything better right away. I'm tempted to say it's hard to believe in the prospect of policy changes by themselves doing all that much to improve life. Yet even though "policy" may in general have such a sterile connotation seeminging incapable of generating felt responses, I realize that my own position from which policy changes are not likely to have an near-term felt impact is a particular one. My dismissive attitude towards policy-centricism was certainly humbled yesterday talking with a good friend who told me that his number one electoral concern was health care -- because he knows the pain for his mother and many of the poor folks he works with who are unable to afford it now.
That said, for me hope about Obama's victory has been more a sense that this will signify some exciting changes in American culture. On one hand I think there will be a new energy and vigor among progressives here, perhaps also an expansion of alliances among white and minority progressives. Obama will "disappoint" I'm sure in making certain decisions and not pushing forward some urgent issues. Still, my bets are that his administration will make progressives feel like they have more of a shot at being heard. Large-scale grassroots mobilizations on issues from poverty to media policy to war just might be able to wield a political pressure that hasn't even seemed to be a possibility in the recent past.
Even more narrowly focused, this Obama and Democratic victory are likely to make this a better time to be a publicly-engaged intellectual than any time since the 1960s. Let me offer just one example. A couple years ago I worked for a media activist/reform organization called Free Press (www.freepress.net). Throughout the Bush years, this organization experienced increble growth (after its founding in 2002) and played a large role in holding back some of the pro-media monopoly policies that Bush folks wanted to pass through Congress and the FCC. Still, the Free Press was a sidelined player in media policy, mostly working on the defense. Now their role is likely to be much more constructive. There's a good change that some of the visions for a more democratic media that Free Press advocates have in mind might actually get put in play. Tim Wu, the current chair of the Board at Free Press, has already served as an advisor to Obama during his campaigm. I happen to know media policy better, but I imagine in all sorts of sectors of government we're going to see new opportunities arise for progressive thinkers and advocacy groups to have a larger role in shaping policies -- the EPA, HUD, transportation, perhaps even the Treasury department.
As a graduate student, this makes me think that there are going to be new opportunities for scholars to play a role in shaping some of these debates and policies. Certainly academics and scholars are not always going to bring the best goods to the table - legacies of the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan should give us pause in any sort of unbridled celebration of rule by academics. But certainly I'd much prefer to have Robert McChesney drafting media policy than lobbyists for Time Warner or AT&T.
That said, for me hope about Obama's victory has been more a sense that this will signify some exciting changes in American culture. On one hand I think there will be a new energy and vigor among progressives here, perhaps also an expansion of alliances among white and minority progressives. Obama will "disappoint" I'm sure in making certain decisions and not pushing forward some urgent issues. Still, my bets are that his administration will make progressives feel like they have more of a shot at being heard. Large-scale grassroots mobilizations on issues from poverty to media policy to war just might be able to wield a political pressure that hasn't even seemed to be a possibility in the recent past.
Even more narrowly focused, this Obama and Democratic victory are likely to make this a better time to be a publicly-engaged intellectual than any time since the 1960s. Let me offer just one example. A couple years ago I worked for a media activist/reform organization called Free Press (www.freepress.net). Throughout the Bush years, this organization experienced increble growth (after its founding in 2002) and played a large role in holding back some of the pro-media monopoly policies that Bush folks wanted to pass through Congress and the FCC. Still, the Free Press was a sidelined player in media policy, mostly working on the defense. Now their role is likely to be much more constructive. There's a good change that some of the visions for a more democratic media that Free Press advocates have in mind might actually get put in play. Tim Wu, the current chair of the Board at Free Press, has already served as an advisor to Obama during his campaigm. I happen to know media policy better, but I imagine in all sorts of sectors of government we're going to see new opportunities arise for progressive thinkers and advocacy groups to have a larger role in shaping policies -- the EPA, HUD, transportation, perhaps even the Treasury department.
As a graduate student, this makes me think that there are going to be new opportunities for scholars to play a role in shaping some of these debates and policies. Certainly academics and scholars are not always going to bring the best goods to the table - legacies of the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan should give us pause in any sort of unbridled celebration of rule by academics. But certainly I'd much prefer to have Robert McChesney drafting media policy than lobbyists for Time Warner or AT&T.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Econ at the Bowling Bar
The Gazelle had taken a mighty long nap in a faraway pasture, but now she has arisen again!
Last night I went to the Bryant Lake Bowl to see "Cafe Scientifique: Principles of Economics." According to the UMN website, where I learned about this event, it was to be a lecture-performance. The sole author, performer and lecturer Andrew Cassey just recently completed his economics Ph.D. at UMN. Apparently Cassey first put this kind of performance together, based on years of teaching intro to econ, during a fringe show event when he "conceived of the notion of teaching economics as 'a performance art.'"
I posted this event on the Big Tent and got several takers right away, all perhaps with different reasons for wanted to see The Principles of Economics. Foremost for me, I wanted to see the adaptation of the lecture form to the theatrical situation. Somewhat to my surprise, there really was not that much adaptation. Cassey was full of energy, he dropped a few 'f-bombs' and he made a some irreverent asides. But all in all, this could have been a lecture taken right out of his intro to econ class. There was a way in which Cassey was able to distance himself from the serious and official demeanor associated with the classroom at the same time as he drew charts of GDP-and-CPI curves on a green chalkboard center stage. Was this position achieved through Cassey's own inventiveness, or did it at least partially have to do with economics place in our culture today? Can economics today claim a certain position of common-sense logic that more "critical" schools of thought would have difficulty achieving?
The audiences' response was the most interesting part of the whole event. They were not entirely compliant with all the demands of the lecture scenario, though they were to a large degree. There were side conversations, and a few challenging questions (None of these questions, however, really aimed at revealing the ideological assumptions encoded into the strand of economic thought Cassey was espousing. I didn't see a good chance to offer such a question myself). No one really heckled him nor was there any sort of revolt by audience members bored by the didactic nature of the lecture. Most everyone seemed in good spirits and thankful for their entertaining knowledge-nourishment. Maybe it was the peculiar self-selected crowd (not many academics, I suspect, but more middle-age good-citizens types), or maybe the lecture as a form is not so antithetical to popular culture as we might think.
I
Last night I went to the Bryant Lake Bowl to see "Cafe Scientifique: Principles of Economics." According to the UMN website, where I learned about this event, it was to be a lecture-performance. The sole author, performer and lecturer Andrew Cassey just recently completed his economics Ph.D. at UMN. Apparently Cassey first put this kind of performance together, based on years of teaching intro to econ, during a fringe show event when he "conceived of the notion of teaching economics as 'a performance art.'"
I posted this event on the Big Tent and got several takers right away, all perhaps with different reasons for wanted to see The Principles of Economics. Foremost for me, I wanted to see the adaptation of the lecture form to the theatrical situation. Somewhat to my surprise, there really was not that much adaptation. Cassey was full of energy, he dropped a few 'f-bombs' and he made a some irreverent asides. But all in all, this could have been a lecture taken right out of his intro to econ class. There was a way in which Cassey was able to distance himself from the serious and official demeanor associated with the classroom at the same time as he drew charts of GDP-and-CPI curves on a green chalkboard center stage. Was this position achieved through Cassey's own inventiveness, or did it at least partially have to do with economics place in our culture today? Can economics today claim a certain position of common-sense logic that more "critical" schools of thought would have difficulty achieving?
The audiences' response was the most interesting part of the whole event. They were not entirely compliant with all the demands of the lecture scenario, though they were to a large degree. There were side conversations, and a few challenging questions (None of these questions, however, really aimed at revealing the ideological assumptions encoded into the strand of economic thought Cassey was espousing. I didn't see a good chance to offer such a question myself). No one really heckled him nor was there any sort of revolt by audience members bored by the didactic nature of the lecture. Most everyone seemed in good spirits and thankful for their entertaining knowledge-nourishment. Maybe it was the peculiar self-selected crowd (not many academics, I suspect, but more middle-age good-citizens types), or maybe the lecture as a form is not so antithetical to popular culture as we might think.
I
Sunday, September 09, 2007
The World According to Water
I've recently gotten back from a wonderful trip to Finland and Russia, a new semester has started in the middle of a workers' strike at the U which has lead to all sorts of strife as well as political enthusiasm, I'm delving into some interesting readings about early media studies . . . all this could provide plenty of material for my first post in over a month.
Instead, I'll start with a much more modest piece of reportage: the writing on the bathroom wall (water pipe, actually) at Cahoots:
Humans were invented by water as a means to transport itself from place to place.
Reading this bathroom poet's inversion of human and inanimate nature seemed quite inspiring to me. Yet as I followed the arrow toward a penciled in reply to this statement, a respondent's comment diffused some of my awe:
Yeah, because clouds do this so poorly . . .
Instead, I'll start with a much more modest piece of reportage: the writing on the bathroom wall (water pipe, actually) at Cahoots:
Humans were invented by water as a means to transport itself from place to place.
Reading this bathroom poet's inversion of human and inanimate nature seemed quite inspiring to me. Yet as I followed the arrow toward a penciled in reply to this statement, a respondent's comment diffused some of my awe:
Yeah, because clouds do this so poorly . . .
Sunday, July 08, 2007
More on short stories
I still haven't found any short stories that have really moved me, tho mostly I've been looking in the same places, reading more from the America's Best New Voices. I need to switch it up. But now what I've noticed is lots of detached description that seems intended to be slightly satiric. Little windows into rural life, the lives or retired suburbanites or other semi-exoticized lives that I sense are written in tones intended to be respectful but also attempting to highlight common absurdities of these places. Lots of humor that's not really funny, though the kind of lines I could imagine getting a somewhat forced laugh during a writing workshop.
Though just about every story I've read has been first-person, I've come across very few instances of narrating thoughts or feelings rather than events. One major exception was 'Winter Never Quites' by T. Geronima Johnson, which I enjoyed most out of what I've read from this collection or the Granta stories so far.
Though just about every story I've read has been first-person, I've come across very few instances of narrating thoughts or feelings rather than events. One major exception was 'Winter Never Quites' by T. Geronima Johnson, which I enjoyed most out of what I've read from this collection or the Granta stories so far.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Update on Kinsella Interview
Though I had some technical glitches, my interview with Tim Kinsella with an introduction and a few edits has now appeared on the TC Daily Planet. I'm very glad I was able to get this out before his show tonight!
Friday, June 29, 2007
Tim Kinsella Interview
Well, I'm in a little bit of a pinch here. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to interview Tim Kinsella before his upcoming show with Make Believe here this Saturday. I thought I'd be able to post the interview on the TC Daily Planet since I'm a registered user and I thought they offer open uploading. But apparently that's not how the Daily Planet works, or at least I haven't been able to figure out how to get my interview uploaded. So while I try to find a way to publish it, I thought I might as well at least post the interview here. I sure enjoyed this conversation. . .
Tony: First, I just heard that you were leaving Make Believe. Do you know if the band is going to continue to record and perform without you?
Tim: That’s the plan, yeah.
Tony: Do you know if they will have vocals at all?
Tim: I don’t know if they know what they know exactly what they are going to do yet. I mean they’re at practice right now, and I’m at home, so . . . .I don’t know what the plan is. Now is a good time for me to quite because we have the new record mostly written, too much to throw away. But the songs still aren’t developed enough, so [Make Believe] can figure out a way, if they want them to be instrumental or bring in someone new or something.
Tony: And will your vocals appear on the new album?
Tim: No, no. That’s what I’m saying that they have time to re-write, minus that aspect.
Tony: Are you going to be coming to the show in
Tim: Yeah, I’m going to play these last two shows.
Tony: You just finished producing a film?
Tim: Yeah, I wrote it and directed it, and my wife and I produced it. She edited it. Our friend Chris Strong shot it. W have a premier August 15th at this theater here [
Tony: This is your first filmmaking experience?
Tim: Yeah, I’ve made a couple shorts before. And my wife works as an editor and has made a few documentaries and I’ve helped her with stuff. But this is the first feature.
Tony: Have you felt there is any similarity between filmmaking and musicmaking?
Tim: Oh, very much, yeah. I mean, the few people who have seen it are kinda shocked how much it has reminded them of a Joan of Arc record. I took that as a good sign. I’m not trying to make Joan of Arc records in a certain way, and I’m not trying to make this film in a certain way. I took it as a sign, I must have been able to express something true to myself clearly, if that same quality comes across.
Tony: Are there any particular filmmakers who have been influential to you in terms of filmmaking or general perception?
Tim: Yes, sure. I had a film minor in college. Not with Make Believe, but with other records I’ve been involved with in the last few years, I’ve felt like a lot of film theory was influencing the dynamics and pacing of how records were coming together, sorta the whole approach, having a lot of collaborators. . . . That’s been true a couple times in records.
I’ve really enjoyed that I’ve been totally immersed in this film for the last year except for when we go on tour. Other than that it’s all day, every day. It’s been a few years since making a record has felt like that for me. So it’s very exciting for me.
Tony: You are still planning on making music with Joan of Arc? According to a press release Joan of Arc has two albums in the works, is that correct?
Tim: Once, twice a week, I’ll be playing and something will sound good to me, and I’ll go in my little room and hit record. Then I forget about it, and I just have this pile of songs sitting around without any sort of ambition for when the record will get made. It’s just sort of a natural thing. This is how Joan of Arc records have come together for a while, I just get to point where I’m like – wow, there’s 60 songs here, let’s check them out. Without keeping count or anything, I just move some into a folder, some good, some throw away. And then there’s 25 songs that sound okay to me, and within that folder, it’s just weeding out.
Tony: Do you conceive of songs first more abstractly or mentally then move to a point where you can make it into something that’s made out of actual sound?
Tim: I think it’s more of a matter of trying to stay out of my own way. And trying to dig deep without any sort of editing or self-censorship, without – how should I say this? - any sort of logic. I don’t want my rational mind involved in it. My rational mind has enough preoccuptions, with going to work, and trying to make rent, and remembering to pay car insurance bills and stuff like that. Ideally music will be this liberating force. I think the greatest potential for those moments is actually in performing when you can sorta tap into a shared mind, with the performers and the audience.
Tony: I know that Make Believe played for a while on an all Christian venue tour. I was wondering whose idea was that, what were the motivations behind that, how did you feel about it?
Tim: You know how Christian culture sorta appropriates things that they think might corrupt the youth, then defangs it , and makes a Christian version. We were vaguely aware of there being a Christian indie rock scene but didn’t really have any interaction with it. Then this band, Me Without You, asked us to go on tour with them. At first we were like - no way, we’re not going do some Christian tour. But then we talked about it for a couple days and we realized it would be an incredible opportunity to have access. . . I mean that’s sorta like the whole idea of punk rock, to be able to go into different contexts and drop some kind of bomb. In general at Make Believe shows, people show up knowing what they’re getting into and just having their expectations satisfied. We decided that we could do the tour and go out there sort of being confrontation towards people’s assumptions.
Tony: Yeah, I really wish I had been able to attend one of those shows, not impurify the rest of the audience. But it definitely reminded me, hearing about that, of the Sex Pistol’s tour of the South.
Tim: Yeah
Tony: That sort of clash being the performer and the audience.
Tim: Yeah. There was definitely a small group of people there for us every night who seemed more excited than more because of the strange context and the confrontational aspects of it. I should say Me Without You are some of the coolest guys ever, and they’re our friends now. There were certain days we hung out. I think they are frustrated with Christian culture and how it operates. They were frustrated enough with Christian culture to ask us to do the tour.
Tony: Right now, do you think the indie rock scene is part of countercultural movement? Do you think rock music is part of any sort of subversion or break with more commercial culture?
Tim: I think there will always be a countercultural scene. But I don’t think it’s very related to “indie rock” as a style. I think indie rock as an infrastructure or like a business model, might the way that bands like that exist. Like I said before, music is just a means of communication and it could be anything. There’s definitely a lot of bands that I’m very excited about, that seem very vital and engaged in the present, finding new connection between neurons. But I don’t think of indie rock is a social force, I think it’s more lifestyle music.
Tony: You’ve been involved in indie rock infrastructure for a long time. Have you felt many changes in the indie rock infrustructure since the early 90’s?
Tim: Many. There were incredible changes since the early nineties. There’s sorta like two camps. There’s the indie rock bands who are there because the ideas they are trying to express aren’t represented anywhere within the dominant culture and this is an infrastructure that will allow these more subversive ideas to be shared. And then there’s sort of the indie rock camp that are just like the farm league to the major labels. I mean potentially millions of teenagers could love it, and it would satisfy the same sort of nostalgia, or whatever popular music satisfies in someone. They could potentially satisfy the same requirement in anyone who hears it; it’s just people haven’t heard it yet. Like a band like Postal Service, I’ve never heard them, but I have a sense that they are not very subversive. That’s indie rock, right?
Tony: Yeah, I certainly think that’s what would go under what a lot of people would conceive of indie rock or what comes to mind first often with that phrase.
Tim: Yeah, I don’t feel a connection to that.
Tony: Do you read reviews or other sorts of music journalism about your own stuff or other stuff you listen to?
Tim: Yes. When Joan of Arc first started, in the early days of Internet music journalism, I was really totally stunned by the response. The totally vitriolic response. It had never really even occurred to me to read the reviews, it wasn’t something I thought about. But then I remember getting a press kit from Jade Tree (a Joan of Arc label), opening it, and just reading something on the front page about what a horrible person I was, all this stuff. I read the whole packet. It was like all this hateful stuff that seemed to have little to do with the music. I was really shocked. So I had to purposefully not read stuff for a while. But I occasionally read stuff now. I think I’m over letting it affect me. The me that I’m most in the habit of being every day feels very little connection to guy that I read about in most of the reviews. So it doesn’t really phase me.
Tony : I don’t know if you’ve thought much about this or if you really want to answer this. But I’m wondering if you’ve thought about what about some of your work did produce such a vitriolic response in certain parts of the indie rock community?
Tim: Well. When Joan of Arc started, there was a real self-consciousness about it, a self-conscious confrontational aspect. We didn’t we know what we really wanted to sound like. But we were away there were these sort of micro-scenes that I felt a part of, and detached, from all over
In defense of the journalists, I was probable a bit cocky at 23. I’m not super hung up on it or regret it or anything. I don’t remember specific stories of - Oh god, was I an idiot! But I imagine that if I now met myself as a 23 year old, I would maybe be annoyed by that guy. I thought I had things figured out a lot more than I think I do now.
Tony: Do you feel your disposition as performer has changed that much, or is this more of outside of the stage that you’re talking about these changes happening?
Tim: I don’t know. I try not to think of my disposition as a performer. There was maybe more of a self-conscious confrontational aspect back then than there is now. And I think that confrontational aspect faded, then was rekindled at the first immediate thrust of Make Believe. At that point, this was before the 2004 election and before even John Kerry represented some sort of alternate voice. I was just really overwhelmed by this fascistic, single monotone voice of power everywhere. There was no voice of dissent anywhere in popular culture. I was very aware of wanting to be confrontational and trying to shake people out of some comfort zone. Whereas, now I don’t feel that being confrontational in public toward an ambiguous mass of people is the most effective means of protest for me these days.
Tony: I saw some of those early Make Believe shows, and I thought that sense of confrontation was what made it so memorable
Tim: Thanks. It’s also something you’re bound to get tired of. And it’s not something I would want to fake. I’m kinda tired of it. I like the idea of being in a band and playing a lot. But it would need to be a band with wider parameters of what it could be. I couldn’t do it as just a singer, I’d need to play guitar too. (Unlike many of his other bands, in Make Believe shows, Kinsella would sing without playing an instrument).
Tony: One last question. You’ve been such a prolific songwriter for so long now. I’m wondering if you ever go through any sort of songwriter’s block, or if you go through any periods where you just don’t have anything you can materialize into sound? Or does it just keep on coming?
Tim: I don’t know. Like I said about how Joan of Arc records come together, I don’t really put any effort in to it. Not to say it’s an effortless thing that just comes to me, I just mean I don’t worry about it.
Tony: So you don’t really set aside certain times of the day and say, this is my song writing time - or anything like that?
Tim: I used to be far more disciplined in that way. I definitely feel that to-whom-much- is-given, much-is-expected kind of responsibility. I feel like I am really luck. I mean, I work, I’m a bartender. I’m not really getting away of anything. But on a global scale, in a global context, I feel so lucky. I’ve been able to travel and do what I love. But I definitely feel a responsibility to work harder at it. But I don’t care if I’m not ever able to write another song. I don’t care, it doesn’t really matter. I guess that’s why I don’t get writers’ bloc, because I don’t care if I do.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Short Stories
I have had ambitious goals for summer reading, thinking I would make a whole syllabus for myself. But I’ve been jumping around different projects and ideas too much to really attain this goal.
Besides for finishing Marylin Robinson’s Housekeeping, the only fiction I’ve been reading has been short stories. There’s a lot I like about this form, particularly the time it takes to complete a work. Whereas novels can do a lot with change over time and different sorts of development, short stories can provide very interesting perspectives on particular moments and states. Yet it’s been hard for me to find the kind of short stories I most enjoy. Basically, I’m looking for short stories offer some sort of radical perspective or perspectives on some aspect of life. My favorite examples are just about anything David Foster Wallace has written. He’s able to do all sorts of things to cut into a scene from different angles to make it fresh and provocative. Yet, I also like more traditional narratives that usually rely on the thinking of thoughtful and original character’s to complexify and turn over their realities into something interesting. A good example of this that I picked up recently was the neurotic minds in Richard Ford’s Women With Men, a collection of three long short stories (an awkward phrase, I know, but I think that’s the language of the trade these days).
But I’ve been trying to get away from the old standbys and seek out some new writers. Since I don’t have many fiction-reading friends now (except you, Dave, who I should turn to), I’ve just been searching for new writers that literary magazines or other authors have named as good ones. I checked out a couple of short story collections based on Granta’s list of Best of Young American Novelists. I read a smattering of stories from writers on this list, and so far didn’t find anything close to what I was looking for.
Another tactic I’ve tried is reading stories from the collection Best New American Voices 2007 guest edited by Sue Miller. This is an anthology that every year selects stories solicited only from writing programs, from summer programs to M.F.A. programs to more community-based classes like
I’m not so sure. I think many of these stories do have a “workshoppy” quality, though I don’t know if this says as much about the students in writers workshops or the editorial regimes. More than anything, in these sorts of collections, I feel like I read a lot of good writing without insight. Certainly, I recognize that kind of insight I’m looking for only represents one way of making a good story (I also really like many stories without this quality), I just don’t know why this kind of writing is so hard to find. It seems to me that there’s a real fascination with what I might call, very cautiously, simple-minded characters in short stories. These characters might be portrayed as having complex lives, ambivalent feelings, etc. Some represent sophistication in an urbane sort of way. But rarely do writers tap into the struggling minds of the characters to flesh out original or jolting ways of perceiving the world.
If anyone has some suggestions for contemporary books that might fit what I’m looking for, drop me some recommendations.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Another Threat to Net Neutrality: Copyright Cops
It sounds like AT&T is cooking up a new plan to get Internet users, media activist and media scholars all hot and bothered. It’s a new front against Net Neutrality both on an ideological and technical level. The plan is that AT&T will somehow create a technology to monitor their mammoth network, searching out copyrighted material uploaded to the Internet. According to a good article by Geoff Duncan at Digital Trends, this is the first time a large Internet provider has assumed the role of “copyright cop.” Because such a move will mean AT&T will creep into and discriminate against the content of Internet users’ traffic, this plan raises all sorts of ethical concerns as well as questions about what the unintended technological effects could be (Duncan suggests a new round of technology wars between providers and uploaders and problems uploading copyrighted material even when its legal) . Net Neutrality, Digital IP Rights, Surveillance . . . if AT&T continues to pursue this plan I suspect all these hot themes might help awaken some media theorists from their activist slumber.
AT&T and other big telecommunication companies clearly seem to be losing the battle of minds in their fight against net neutrality. Every segment of the public, once aware of the issue, seems to strongly favor an Internet in which all users can access any startup webpage creator’s site just about as easily as big corporate sites. The arguments offered by the telecommunication companies in their astroturf faux-populist campaign against Net Neutrality (Hands Off the Internet) have been glaringly pathetic: the smokescreen claim that Net Neutrality laws would be a layer of bureaucracy, the spurious claim that telecoms need to charge content providers for a new sources of revenue to build network infrastructure up and out, and, my personal favorite, the if-there-ain’t-a-problem-yet-why-fix-it argument. But now they’re trying to tap into an issue that the public seems more genuinely conflicted about – intellectual property rights and piracy.
In addition to
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Make Believe
I still enjoy going to music shows much of the time, but there are only a few bands that really I count on to give me a visceral sense of engagement, especially: Faggot (http://www.myspace.com/aidsfaggot), the Knotwells (http://myspace.com/theknotwells), and Har Mar Superstar (www.harmarsuperstar.com). More than anyone, I remain admittedly obsession with the otherworldly performances of Tim Kinsella. My anticipation will begin to swell weeks before a show, and it will usually leave me with unshakable visions and fantasies for weeks afterwards. That’s why I’m overjoyed to hear that one of his bands, Make Believe, will be performing at the
Tim’s performance often have the feel of something important, of some kind of transformational experience. A contortion of body, facial expressions and, on a more abstract level, emotion itself. My reaction, of course, may be a bit idiosyncratic. I’m not claiming any sort of transcendental sublime to Make Believe, tho the only reason I feel the need to make such a qualification is because I know my enthusiasm for him will make me sound like an adolescent extolling a pop messiah. Tim’s music is one of those rare glimmers of inspiration that unleashes a hyperbolic response in me.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Save Small Magazines!
In the midst of hundreds of cable channels, a full dial of radio stations, and maybe billions of webpages, investigative journalism and thoughtful cultural and political analysis still thrives more in small magazines and newspapers more than in any other medium. I'm thinking of magazines ranging from Mother Jones to The Nation to Bitch to the International Socialist Review . Yes, blogs too can be good spots for analysis but not much yet in the way of investigative journalism and blog posts (like this one) are usually whipped out with much less care than a well-written magazine article (not that speed is always bad, but it has its disadvantages for sure).
Whether such magazines, or newspapers, are in danger of becoming obsolete in an Internet age, I really don't know. Certainly, such a dodo bird fate does not seem imminent just because of the net. But there's a new threat on the horizon for small magazines in the
The Time-Warner plan is very complicated and has all the smacks of neoliberal paternalism, rewarding publishers for good behavior, like bundling mail to be sent in particular areas, generating their own special labels, etc. But what these rewards end up doing is none other than providing further advantage to corporatization and large-scale operations. The complexity of the calculations makes it hard to know exactly what the hike will be for each magazine, but a study by McGraw-Hill estimated that many small magazines would see a 20-30% hike instead of the 10-12% that that they expected (see a press release from Sen. Sanders: http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0501-03.htm). Presumably, Time and People would do rather well under the new plan. Small magazines had very little time to comment on this plan before it was accepted; it is set to go in effect July 15th. Now, magazines across the political spectrum from the National Review to The Nation are banning together to fight this hike. Many magazines are saying these rate hikes will force them to fold. The best site for information about this issue and ways to get involved is the Free Press's page: http://action.freepress.net/freepress/postal_explanation.html.
As media activist and historian Robert McChesney reminds us, it's important to remember than from the beginning of the
I've cross-posting this entry on Matt May's Socialism for Gunslinger:
http://democraticgunslinger.blogspot.com/.
Hopefully, I'll soon figure out how to get my links back up!
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Lutsen
No, a new blogging hiatus is not already on the horizon. I just spent a good part of this last week up at Alice's parent's cabin in Lutsen, right on the shore of Lake Superior. It was still a bit brisk up there (though I guess its the proximity to the lake rather than the latitude that makes it so much cooler); lilacs were just beginning to bloom there, about a month later than in Minneapolis. The Lepperts have a lovely, truly cabin-feeling cabin with a little gazebo perched right near a small cliff of the lake shore. We played lots of badminton. I learned to play spades, and most curiously, I learned that the supposed divide between wild and domestic animal may not be so great. Alice's dad has feed a chipmunk, who lives in a hole near their garage, for several years. Sunflower seeds and walnuts. Now he is so grateful that he lets us pet him while he eats or stuff his cheeks with seeds for later.
I got into a couple of discussions with Alice and some of our friends about popular culture and art. Now, I'm not happy with these categories (right now, resisting a temptation to throw them in some quote marks), but none of us could find more convenient terms. I was basically arguing that I don't think that because one cultural product is more commercially successful than another product, this doesn't mean that the greater selling product (or some might say more popular) says something more about the cultural moment than the other. I certainly agree that for a movie, a song, or a dance (the macarena as defining expression of the mid-90s?) to become a hit, there must be a certain degree of cultural resonance. But I think that this resonance is only one factor in a much more complex equation that involves a lot of market-based variables. This argument got me in some trouble because some of my interlocutors took it as a way to deny that what is most typically considered to be pop culture says more about the desires of most people in our society than what might be considered art or an expression more of a subculture. Does anyone know of any writers who really tackle this question of what a cultural theorist can extract from the popularity of a work in a market context? I'm especially interested in someone who would take seriously the numerous difficulties of this problem.
I got into a couple of discussions with Alice and some of our friends about popular culture and art. Now, I'm not happy with these categories (right now, resisting a temptation to throw them in some quote marks), but none of us could find more convenient terms. I was basically arguing that I don't think that because one cultural product is more commercially successful than another product, this doesn't mean that the greater selling product (or some might say more popular) says something more about the cultural moment than the other. I certainly agree that for a movie, a song, or a dance (the macarena as defining expression of the mid-90s?) to become a hit, there must be a certain degree of cultural resonance. But I think that this resonance is only one factor in a much more complex equation that involves a lot of market-based variables. This argument got me in some trouble because some of my interlocutors took it as a way to deny that what is most typically considered to be pop culture says more about the desires of most people in our society than what might be considered art or an expression more of a subculture. Does anyone know of any writers who really tackle this question of what a cultural theorist can extract from the popularity of a work in a market context? I'm especially interested in someone who would take seriously the numerous difficulties of this problem.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Hiatus . . . OVER!
So April did not bring any showers of Bedford St Gazelle postings. I've spent much of the last month and a half finishing three term papers (and revising a fourth), bringing me to a total of over 100 new pages of paper writing this semester. As in the past, I greatly regretted saving so much writing until the end. I had told myself this would never happen again. So why? Have I simply not learned my lesson? Is it just laziness or a more complex reoccurring pattern that makes me save so much paper writing for the end of the semester? This is a major question I'm trying to answer for myself this summer; it's part of a general question I'm asking myself about whether and in what ways is grad school inspiring me to write and to think. One hypothesis is that I don't write until the end of the semester because I keep waiting for a feeling that I really have something to say, and when an inspirational feeling doesn't strike me, it's up to deadlines to do the motivating.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Product Place This
One reason I decided to go to communication studies program instead of another home for cultural studies is because I thought more comm academics would be in touch with conversations about media and culture going on outside of academic journals. I thought there'd be a lot of people with backgrounds in journalism, filmmaking, may even TV writers in comm programs. I'm not sure if that was a correct assumption in general or not, but one of my classmates is just the kind of student I had in mind. Pam Nettleton has really enriched our program through bring knowledge from her many years in journalism.
Pam just wielded her writerly skills in an op-ed piece to portray commericial saturation of TV shows through product placements. She evisions what Dickens would sound like as a TV writer: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Luckily, I could easily tell time because I was wearing my Citizen 200 Meter Chronograph watch with titanium case and bracelet, only $400 online"
Pam' op-ed is funny and incisive: http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1073509.html
Pam just wielded her writerly skills in an op-ed piece to portray commericial saturation of TV shows through product placements. She evisions what Dickens would sound like as a TV writer: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Luckily, I could easily tell time because I was wearing my Citizen 200 Meter Chronograph watch with titanium case and bracelet, only $400 online"
Pam' op-ed is funny and incisive: http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1073509.html
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Bad Blog Changes
Hopefully only temporary, but I just lot all the links as I tried to "upgrade" the template for this blog.
As expected . . .
Yep, the new Star Trib owners have been making rampant cutbacks in news staff. A City Pages article details the cutbacks: http://citypages.com/databank/28/1372/article15245.asp
When the City Pages run an article talking about their new ownership regime?
When the City Pages run an article talking about their new ownership regime?
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Another Writer's Block
I'm devoting most of my spring break to writing a paper analyzing how sixties rock critics helped to imbue rock with a sense of political importance. I had been really looking forward to writing this paper, but alas, it's eeking out all too slowly and uncomfortably. Alice has poked fun at me for my tendency to have more breakthroughs in terms of reflecting on general writing principles while I'm trying to write than actually getting anything on the screen (probably a more apt metonymy these days).
Lots of my reflection dwells on one of the most mysterious and fickle qualities of writing - flow. Flow is just as relevant to good academic writing as it can be to more literary genres, especially when you want academic writing to share at least some of the qualities of literary prose. I think the major factors that determine whether academic writing will seem just academic or move closer to a literary work has to do with "evocation." I take this ideas from Michael Hyde, tho perhaps I've distorted it a bit. But by evocation, I mean whether the writing calls forth something vivid - an image, a feeling, a tone. A perfectly logical argument or one that is backed by "good" (as in difficult to refute) evidence is not necessarily evocative in itself.
At first I was thinking that evocative writing is much more difficult than just writing good arguments, but I've come to think that assumption is flawed. One of the situations in which I write with the most ease is when I get to a section in my paper where I can write a narrative. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in the structure of human consciousness that makes narratives feel more natural. Narrative writing tends to be evocative and relatively easier to write than other modes that require careful planning to lay out a synthetic exposition of interlocking ideas. The hard part in writing academic papers can be finding narratives that actually fit in well with what you're trying to say. One reason I tend to like to read cultural history more than other forms of cultural studies is because historians rely more heavily on narrative. But it ain't easy to find the right narratives for good cultural history, as I'm finding out now trying to write about sixties rock critics.
Lots of my reflection dwells on one of the most mysterious and fickle qualities of writing - flow. Flow is just as relevant to good academic writing as it can be to more literary genres, especially when you want academic writing to share at least some of the qualities of literary prose. I think the major factors that determine whether academic writing will seem just academic or move closer to a literary work has to do with "evocation." I take this ideas from Michael Hyde, tho perhaps I've distorted it a bit. But by evocation, I mean whether the writing calls forth something vivid - an image, a feeling, a tone. A perfectly logical argument or one that is backed by "good" (as in difficult to refute) evidence is not necessarily evocative in itself.
At first I was thinking that evocative writing is much more difficult than just writing good arguments, but I've come to think that assumption is flawed. One of the situations in which I write with the most ease is when I get to a section in my paper where I can write a narrative. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in the structure of human consciousness that makes narratives feel more natural. Narrative writing tends to be evocative and relatively easier to write than other modes that require careful planning to lay out a synthetic exposition of interlocking ideas. The hard part in writing academic papers can be finding narratives that actually fit in well with what you're trying to say. One reason I tend to like to read cultural history more than other forms of cultural studies is because historians rely more heavily on narrative. But it ain't easy to find the right narratives for good cultural history, as I'm finding out now trying to write about sixties rock critics.
Friday, March 02, 2007
Radio KAOS
I had thought I was on a blogging momentum that wasn't going to let up, obviously not. It's not so much been a matter of having too much to do, just failure to really integrate blogging into my day-to-day routines.
A couple days ago, Radioactive Gavin from Evergreen College interviewed me for his Digital Crossroads program on Radio KAOS out of Olympia, Washington. I met him at the National Media Reform Conference in January, and I was surprised that he was interested in a paper I presented on applying anti-trust measurements to media markets for FCC regulation. It was a rather technical piece I wrote this summer while serving as a research fellow at the Free Press.
But I thought I'd be able to talk about the basic idea and give some descriptions of problems with ownership regulations at the FCC to an audience who might not be too enthralled about the details of adapting the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to media markets. It was tougher than I thought, however, to be able to speak well for a recorded interview. Being "on the record" made me realize how much I typically allow myself room to skirt around details I don't know. But aside from calling Michael Powell Colin's brother (instead of son), I think I got by well enough for Gavin to be able to make something coherent and accurate through chopping up the interview tape. The interview should air around noon pacific (2pm Central) time today on Radio KAOS (http://kaos.evergreen.edu/).
A couple days ago, Radioactive Gavin from Evergreen College interviewed me for his Digital Crossroads program on Radio KAOS out of Olympia, Washington. I met him at the National Media Reform Conference in January, and I was surprised that he was interested in a paper I presented on applying anti-trust measurements to media markets for FCC regulation. It was a rather technical piece I wrote this summer while serving as a research fellow at the Free Press.
But I thought I'd be able to talk about the basic idea and give some descriptions of problems with ownership regulations at the FCC to an audience who might not be too enthralled about the details of adapting the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to media markets. It was tougher than I thought, however, to be able to speak well for a recorded interview. Being "on the record" made me realize how much I typically allow myself room to skirt around details I don't know. But aside from calling Michael Powell Colin's brother (instead of son), I think I got by well enough for Gavin to be able to make something coherent and accurate through chopping up the interview tape. The interview should air around noon pacific (2pm Central) time today on Radio KAOS (http://kaos.evergreen.edu/).
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Inevitability of Billboards
Let me admit right away to feeling ambivilence about sweeping categorizations of "the cultural logic" of our times. Making big claims about cultural trends on the level of postmodernism, neoliberalism, empire, etc is of course lifeblood of many academic critics, especially those of the 'theory' bent. Even trends such as fragmentation or "suspecion of grand narratives" often appear more interesting to critics as pangea-like formations rather than in their fragmented particularities. It can be a bit too tempting to reduce what's going on in the world at any one time to a set of understood principles. Maybe there's not other ways of writing effectively about such trends without a good dose of overgeneralization.
With that half-hearted qualification, let me attempt to squeeze some culture into some overgeneralized boxes myself. The box is a big one, a very popular one these days among cultural theory folks - neoliberalism. The cultural fragment I'd like to place in the box is a story by America Public Radio's Future Tense (http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2007/02/05.shtml#009646).
The story's lead: ClearChannel Outdoor is suing the muncipality of Minnetonka for cutting off power to two digit billboards. Minnetonka is one many communities around the country who have passed laws prohibiting moving billboards due to the risk of distracting drivers. So how do you think this story would be structured - maybe some opposing views on whether billboards with moving images distract drivers? Maybe some interviews of people's opinions of moving billboards? No, while about a 10 seconds is given to a county attorney explaining the way Minnetonka defines "flashing billboards" in their ordinance, the arc of the story follows the inevitibility of this technology.
First, comes testimony that "the new technology [digital billboards] is the way world we're living in." According a ClearChannel Outdoor VP, "advertisers are demaning a proper forum to display their messages . . . it is an evolution of media. . . it is somewhat inevitable."
I guess there's no messing with advertizers' demands. Future Tense certainly doesn't suggest that option. After the ClearChannel interview, the story shifts over to Carnegie Mellon "Professor of Design" Ben Fry. He starts by describing another kind of evolution, that of the human's natural response of a attentiveness towards motion. The inexonerable evolution of marketing sophistication has caught up with human evolution. Whereas our "long-ago ancestors who would be eaten or killed" without an instinctual response to motion, today the utility of this instinct might go to waste if it wasn't for modern innovators, like advertisers.
With that half-hearted qualification, let me attempt to squeeze some culture into some overgeneralized boxes myself. The box is a big one, a very popular one these days among cultural theory folks - neoliberalism. The cultural fragment I'd like to place in the box is a story by America Public Radio's Future Tense (http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2007/02/05.shtml#009646).
The story's lead: ClearChannel Outdoor is suing the muncipality of Minnetonka for cutting off power to two digit billboards. Minnetonka is one many communities around the country who have passed laws prohibiting moving billboards due to the risk of distracting drivers. So how do you think this story would be structured - maybe some opposing views on whether billboards with moving images distract drivers? Maybe some interviews of people's opinions of moving billboards? No, while about a 10 seconds is given to a county attorney explaining the way Minnetonka defines "flashing billboards" in their ordinance, the arc of the story follows the inevitibility of this technology.
First, comes testimony that "the new technology [digital billboards] is the way world we're living in." According a ClearChannel Outdoor VP, "advertisers are demaning a proper forum to display their messages . . . it is an evolution of media. . . it is somewhat inevitable."
I guess there's no messing with advertizers' demands. Future Tense certainly doesn't suggest that option. After the ClearChannel interview, the story shifts over to Carnegie Mellon "Professor of Design" Ben Fry. He starts by describing another kind of evolution, that of the human's natural response of a attentiveness towards motion. The inexonerable evolution of marketing sophistication has caught up with human evolution. Whereas our "long-ago ancestors who would be eaten or killed" without an instinctual response to motion, today the utility of this instinct might go to waste if it wasn't for modern innovators, like advertisers.
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