Archive for the ‘Popular Culture’ Category

« Older Entries

Marshall, Will and Holly Sell Some Routine Tobacco Products

Monday, October 19th, 2009

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the mismatch between levels or scales of social action and social knowledge. Mostly I think that’s a question that involves the design and organization of institutions, governments, and social networks.

Sometimes, though, it’s a lot simpler: it’s a big organization that doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about and thus being all thumbs when it sets out to act. Case in point: the American Medical Association has a group that looks on an annual basis at the representation of smoking in the movies. The report uses standard media effects analysis, which is to say that it already starts with a lamentably crude understanding of what culture is and how it works.

It’s not wrong to say that Humphrey Bogart’s films helped give smoking a stylish, beautiful image at an earlier moment in American life, for example. That was then, though: films which helped give smoking an embedded attraction did their work within a time and place, and they did their work subtly, even when the message was not at all subtle (as, for example, in early television advertising for cigarettes).

Today? Well, the AMA report names the film Land of the Lost as the chief menace seducing the nation’s youth to the vile ways of tobacco. Land of the Lost. The biggest flop of the summer. Featuring a Will Ferrell character who is a pompous professorial ass. Who smokes a pipe as a sign of his pomposity. Why is the film the No. 1 cultural villain? Because you multiply the number of times smoking appears in a film by the number of people who saw it and the number tells you how many people’s minds had impressions of smoking ground into them.

It doesn’t matter if the film was a flop or critically reviled. It doesn’t matter if Dr. Rick Marshall is very nearly the utter opposite of Sam Spade in every imaginable respect. It doesn’t matter what culture means or how it works. A simple multiplication saves you from having to deal with anything messy or complicated. Number of representations times number of ticket sales. It’s science, I tell you, science.

Posted in Popular Culture | 4 Comments »

Less-Convergent Culture

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I’m broadly sympathetic to celebrating the power and range of audience productions of culture and to Henry Jenkins‘ arguments about convergence culture and about reading the total range of textual production around a cultural property.

Sometimes Jenkins gets carried away: I don’t think consuming the totality of productive work around The Matrix rescues the second two films, to mention one somewhat infamous example of his tendency to argue that paratext and metatext inevitably or commonly elevate the richness and value of cultural production. In fact, the wider range of Matrix-work has frequently been just as wretched or pretentious or half-baked as the two sequels were.

I was thinking about this issue tonight because my daughter has a Halloween-costume request that I felt sure would be easily served through standard commercial channels. She wants to be one of the female X-Men, partly because she’s been watching the more kid-friendly X-Men animated series X-Men Evolution.

So I know my X-Men pretty well, though I took a long hiatus from reading their books during much of the ghastly 1990s and really only dialed back in somewhat during Grant Morrison’s run on the title. My daughter’s favorite character, unsurprisingly, is Kitty Pryde. I pointed out that over her lifespan as a character, she’s mostly known for having hilariously bad costumes. I offered to see if we could find the somewhat standard-issue black leotard with yellow overlay that a lot of the X-Men have worn at times and some wear on the cartoon show. Rejected. I showed her pictures of other Kitty/Shadowcat costumes. Agreement that they’re pretty horrible, she’s less committed to Kitty Pryde.

So we move on to Rogue. Daughter loves the more recent Rogue costume, the green-and-white one with a hood. I take note, but suspect that’s going to be a cosplay-only sort of thing. Maybe the older green-and-yellow thing with the headband. I show her some Phoenix costumes, she grudgingly allows that these might be ok.

So I sit down afterward to do a bit of searching. Here’s what I find as far as standard commercial outfits. If you’re female and a kid and you want to be a superhero, you’re basically out of luck unless Wonder Woman is your favorite.

Well, not quite. You can be an X-Man, it turns out. You can be Emma Frost. Well, not the usual slutty Emma Frost outfit if you get the kid version, just, well, it looks like a slightly repurposed angel costume. If you’re a tween and up, though? You can go full-slutty Emma Frost. I don’t even think she appears in the Evolution show. If she did, I doubt she’d be the kind of character a pre-teen girl would love to dress up as. Heck, even given her more heroic turn in recent years, she doesn’t exactly scream out “role model for young girls”.

So. What else? There’s still a few Teen Titans costumes out there, but she was the cartoon version of Raven last year. Most Batgirl, Catwoman, Supergirl costumes are for teens or adults or have a much more sexualized look. (There’s a Catwoman costume for girls based on Halle Berry’s fetish-style costume from the film. WTF?) There’s a Girl Captain America. There’s Pink Spider-Girl.

About the only one that I think is kind of ok besides the Raven costume that she’s worn already is Violet from The Incredibles. Or she could be a female Green Lantern, I guess. These suggestions are shut down immediately.

So I start to think about making a green Phoenix outfit, which seems a bit easier to contemplate than the Rogue-with-green-hood outfit. A green leotard as a starter seems doable. Then I start searching for yellow vinyl boots and gloves and end up pretty much right away at lingerie-and-naughtier web sites. Time to put this aside for a bit and figure out how much work I’m going to do here. (There’s cosplayers selling outfits but they’re adult sized and mucho money, as they should be.)

To go back to where I started, though, this is where you start to see how much some subsidiary systems of cultural production are curiously impoverished when it comes to standard commodities that align with the readings and desires that various pop-culture audiences can produce.

Yes, I know full well that the superhero genre comes into the game with all sorts of hugely sexist preloading. I mean, I started throwing out other female superheroes to my daughter to see what else might work, and I had to bite my tongue on most of them just in case she agreed: Zatanna? Black Canary? Um, no. I don’t really want to start googling for sites that sell pre-teen-sized fishnet stockings, thanks very much.

I really do think that women and girls who read comics make much more out of them than what the source text ostensibly provides. I think that kind of work happens in all media, with all texts. It’s just that the whole system is a series of funhouse mirrors: an audience makes the text richer and then turns to look for some other product which will echo or redouble the work they’ve done, only to find most secondary commodity systems even more impoverished and threadbare. Or, as in this case, they find the sexist content of the core properties is hugely amplified. (It doesn’t help that the sexualization of Halloween has gone from being one dimension or angle of adult participation to being pretty much the only commodified approach available to women. At this point, if you’re a woman and you don’t want to be “Whore Nurse”, you’re pretty much going to be making a concept-costume for yourself.)

Whatever the political and social significance of that amplification, I can’t also help but feel that it’s also a lost business opportunity. I don’t know that there’s that many girls my daughter’s age who want to dress up as Rogue, but surely there’s enough who don’t want to be “Pink Female Captain America” for there to be a payoff to manufacturing some slightly more expensive superheroine costumes.

Posted in Popular Culture | 7 Comments »

Effect Size (Again)

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

Deirdre McCloskey’s great little pamphlet The Secret Sins of Economics, which you can read in expanded form in her books The Cult of Statistical Significance and If You’re So Smart, argues that one of the two “secret sins” mentioned in the title is that economics treats statistically significant results as if they were significant in every sense of that term. I don’t agree with her that this is peculiar to economics, however. A lot of social science that rests on quantitative data has the same issue.

I agree that if a researcher can establish that a particular effect or phenomenon has a statistically significant influence or role in social behavior, it matters, that this is a finding worth reporting. The problem is, as McCloskey notes, that some findings matter more than other findings, and that the reason they matter more or less can only be worked out through something other than statistical argument, that the weight we should give such a finding has to come from some philosophical, moral, political or normative claim.

This perspective hit me most forcefully when I first started reading the literature on media effects in relationship to violence and children’s television (mostly from social psychology) and it still holds for most media effects studies, such as work on video games. I’ve written before about how astonishingly weak some of the earlier foundational research in the field is when you look at it closely, such as Albert Bandura’s “Bobo doll” experiments. But I’m perfectly willing to accept that some of the later research demonstrates that there’s some kind of hazy relationship between media consumption by children and an immediate propensity to act aggressively in a controlled setting, some quantifiable effect. It’s just that it strikes me as pretty minor compared to all the other influences on behavior that are in motion in the complexity of the real world, in the explanation of real actions.

In part, I think that it’s minor because if the effect size were significant enough as to warrant serious discussion of a major change in public policy towards the content of popular culture (a change which would have, to put it mildly, philosophical or moral implications for an open or free society), the effect would have very singular and visible consequences on a large scale. At a general level, it’s fair to summarize the history of visual media accessible to children in the United States as having the following trends between 1940 and 2009: vastly more media consumption, far more unmediated by parents or adults, and media with a wider variety and type of representations of violence. So if you’ve found in a laboratory setting that among children there’s an observable relationship between consumption of representations of violence and some action that can plausibly be labeled aggressive, and you stack that up against the basic trends in children’s media over 70 years, you have a prediction. Several generations of children should be successively more and more aggressive or violent. It doesn’t work out that way, however you want to talk about what constitutes measurable violence at the large scale of American society. There are trends in violent crime, trends in interpersonal violence, trends in social tolerance of aggression, but they don’t match at all well against the steadily increasing prevalence of violent images in media accessible to children. That’s just sticking with the United States. Get comparative on a bigger scale and it gets even messier.

So if you want to argue against children’s media in general, or against representations of violence, you need to stop saying that the science proves it, that it’s all in the numbers. The studies that found small laboratory effects represent a prediction about large-scale consequences that already went bust, didn’t pan out, not going to happen. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and get into arguments about morality and politics, freedom and constraint, rights and ethics.

Sometimes when I make this argument, the rejoinder I hear from people who are strongly invested in media effects research is that media effects only become important when you’re focusing on uneducated and impoverished populations, that they’re cancelled out by education or wealth or strong family structures or good parenting, etcetera. Fine. Then the point still holds: focusing on media effects is a red herring, when the discussion should really be about education or poverty or family life or parenting practices.

——

I’m thinking about this today in part because I heard this morning on NPR a news story about new figures on average life expectancy in the developed world and how they’re expected to continue to climb steadily in the future. The researcher who was interviewed noted that the basic driver for this increase in life expectancy is the relative wealth of those societies and how that produces beneficial health dividends at several key points: better nutrition and caloric supply in childhood, better clinical medicine, better geriatric care, better standard of living all around.

The interesting thing is that the increase in not just life expectancy but to some extent quality of health during life is something that most people in Western societies are aware has been occurring. Sometimes I find that people project recent trends towards longer life backwards too far into the past, concluding that most premodern people suddenly dropped dead at 30 because that was life expectancy back then, when the truth is that most people born dropped dead before they were a year old. If they made it past childhood, they usually lived a lifespan not that far off the mid-20th Century norm. Human beings stopped dying so much in infancy first, well before they started living in steadily greater numbers past the age of 65.

So we’re aware that in this pretty important sense, the population of the developed world is healthier at this moment than it has ever been in world history, and barring some sudden catastrophic intervention such as a devastating pandemic, this trend appears likely to continue. In the developing world, not so much. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, for example, has been moving full-throttle in the opposite direction for the past decade. Life expectancy is also a big indicator of inequality within societies, as different populations have often quite varying life expectancy.

Anyway. I raise this in relationship to the effect size problem because on the whole, this overall trend in the health of human populations ought to be a meaningful check or consideration to certain other kinds of conversations about public health. By no means all or even most of them: if you’re a researcher studying the health consequences of heroin addiction or the impact of antibiotic-resistant staph or innumerable other trends in conditions that have pronounced effects on particular groups or individuals, it hardly matters that as a whole, human beings are healthier and more long-lived than they were a century ago. But if, for example, you’re seriously concerned by rising obesity and you think that trend is very serious, you need to think about which kind of serious you mean. If you mean, serious in the sense of “more obesity means higher health care costs”, that’s pretty valid. If you mean, “more obesity means lower quality of life”, that might be, but you just started chasing a different kind of argumentative white rabbit down a different kind of hole at that point. If you mean, in some form or another, “more and more of us are going to die earlier and earlier”, it sort of looks like you’re wrong. And yet, I think if you look at popular rhetoric in the U.S. about rising obesity levels, that’s pretty much what it sounds like. You might do what media effects researchers do and clarify to say that what you really mean is that poor people are going to see a larger hit on their life expectancy because of rising obesity in their demographic, but then, as with media effects research, why get hung up on something other than the underlying problem, poverty? Or maybe there is an effect on life expectancy from rising obesity across the whole of society that is substantially cancelled out by trends in much larger effects (quality of medical care, overall nutrition and calorie supply, basic levels of physical fitness, etc.) In which case, you’re getting too strongly worried, in terms that are too strongly voiced, about a phenomenon that isn’t as forcefully important as you think it is.

There are a lot of examples like this spread across social science and natural science. Probably one of the root issues here, which I’ve talked about a lot on the blog, is that there’s very little interest in or reward for research which makes modest claims about mildly significant results. But maybe this is an even more important kind of research than straightforwardly negative findings, at least as far as fueling public policy and public discussion. If we don’t know what kinds of effects are present but not hugely significant in our lived environment, we can’t really know where we need to take small incremental actions instead of sweeping and drastic action that’s festooned with alarm bells and cries of urgency.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 4 Comments »

District 9

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Watching District 9, I could feel my mind splitting into different tracks of internal dialogue and reaction.

The first track was simply taking pleasure in the film’s deft mixture of intelligence and high-octane action in a science-fiction idiom. Even potentially trite plot hooks come off as as having a bit of satisfying ambiguity, such as whether the protagonist’s seeming moral awakening is merely a mixture of self-interest and despair.

The second internal dialogue I was having as I watched involved the film’s South African setting, which was awesomely (if unsurprisingly) spot-on. I frankly felt like I’d somehow met the faux-academic commenters who pop up in the documentary-style segments of the movie. I couldn’t really think of another film with some degree of mainstream commercial success in the U.S. market that was set in an authentically imagined South Africa.

The third internal dialogue I had took off from the film’s setting. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film. Basically, I can’t wait to teach this film in several of my classes. Obviously, it makes for an interesting retrospective commentary on apartheid, something that a lot of middlebrow American film critics have picked up on. Even more, however, I was thinking that it’s a fantastic film to show in a course that deals with cosmopolitan identity, hybridity, and creolization in colonial and postcolonial societies. Or, similarly, to frame a discussion of the situation of early modern contacts between European and non-European societies. There’s some scattered comparative scholarship on castaways, shipwreck survivors, scouts, ambassadors, outpost guards, lone traders and similar types who litter the early modern landscape, but I keep thinking that we haven’t paid enough attention overall to this motley assemblage of people in really fascinating circumstances.

I was just reading again about Portuguese explorations of the coast of Africa, leading up to Dias’ and da Gama’s expeditions, and how on a number of these voyages, they dropped off either Africans that they had captured or acquired at other stops on the journey or Portuguese men to establish outposts, make contact with the locals, and learn languages. Thinking about the circumstances of those people raises some really profound questions about cross-cultural relationships in general, but also sharp questions about how we tend to view European expansion. In quite a few cases, people dropped off or abandoned in this way disappear from historical view, or are known to have died from disease or violence. But in many other cases, they learned local languages, became a respected part of local societies, married and had families, while still quite evidently longing to return home from exile. I kept thinking that District 9 was a really fantastic, evocative compression of a lot of those kinds of experiences, a really good way to think about contact, transformation, exclusion. I kept making little “double features” in my mind: District 9 and Aguirre, the Wrath of God; District 9 and Tarzan, and so on.

What’s really nice is that District 9 isn’t just a conventional “going native” narrative dressed up with laser beams and cute aliens, because Wikus van der Merwe is not living out the typical fantasy of liminal mastery that most modern narratives of this kind offer (Tarzan, Dances With Wolves), where the Westerner turns out to be a better Other than the Others. Sure, Wikus ends up at the center of events, playing an important role in determining the fate of the prawns, but largely by accident. When the dust settles, Wikus is just an alien still mourning the life he’s lost, most of the other aliens are in concentration camps, and the critical actor with the meaningful decisions ahead is on board a spaceship heading who-knows-where. Wikus is really much more like those early modern men shoved overboard and marooned by ship captains and kings (and like them, is briefly valued not for who he is as a human being, but for his instrumental usefulness to the powerful).

————–

The last track in my mind as I watched the film was a kind of dread at the inevitable appearance of complaints from the sort of Africanist scholars who typically raise a great hue and cry about any film or TV program that doesn’t represent Africa and Africans in sanctified terms (or similarly fails to envision colonizers and colonialism in purely demonic fashion). I tried reasoning with this cognitive module: surely, said my inner voice, this film is so richly imagined (not to mention entertaining) that the usual aggrieved griping about representations of Africa will be muted or non-existent. Surely, said my other inner voice, the more cynically experienced one, such quasi-nationalist monitors of representation do not abandon their guardposts nor relax their watch for negative imagery. My more sympathetic voice replied, “Hey, don’t forget, buddy, you used to rattle off complaints about negative images and so on yourself with appalling casualness”. The cynic coughed and mumbled something about salad days, etcetera.

In the end, both voices have been right: I’ve seen some really positive reactions to the film from Africanists I know, but also some typically disproportionate condemnations, particularly of a relatively minor part of the film, the Nigerian gangsters.

I’m not really sure what a properly sensitive respectful pop-culture representation of muti murders or violent criminality in South Africa (which are real, if also sensationally reported and imagined by a variety of observers) might look like. I know, I know. The criminal warlord could be a more rounded individual. There could be less of his fetishizing lip-smacking desire to consume Wikus’ arm. The Nigerians’ “witch-doctor” could be less of a freakishly envisioned trope. Or better perhaps to excise the “Nigerian” part of the film altogether? Perhaps better that the film not be set in South Africa at all, because having aliens and Africans in the same representational frame is just dangerous to begin with. Maybe in fact better it not be made in the first place: science fiction as a genre is so deeply implicated in the colonial imaginary. If you’re going to worry about the Nigerian warlord being a stereotype, why not worry equally about Wikus’ father and his associates being a stereotype of a brutal apartheid-era bureaucrat? Or Kobus Venter being a stereotypical villainous soldier? Ah, because those stereotypes have a “good” politics to them?

It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about these questions in relationship to this film. Blomkamp’s representation of the Nigerians certainly does invoke a very specifically South African kind of xenophobia in some problematic ways.

However, the film is doing some fairly complicated work with the way that racial Others have been imagined in general: the prawns do appear to be disgusting to human sensibilities. But to simply get outraged, as some already have, that Blomkamp seems to be reproducing the idea that the racial Other is disgusting is to miss the hermeneutical forest for a few trees. Would you be able, if confronted with something undeniably alien, to see through that to some sense of a commonality and equality, to understand and appreciate and embrace the alien? That’s the situation that early modern humanity was in: not just Europeans looking at non-Europeans, but non-Europeans looking at Europeans as well. There were “Occidentalisms” as well as “Orientalisms”. The difference from the standpoint of the 21st Century is that the way that Europeans imagined other societies became vastly more socially and politically powerful than other such imaginings within the global system that coalesced between 1650 and 1950. That’s a very important history, and one that continues to confront 21st Century global society, but if we forget that the encounter with difference has always challenged local understandings of the definition and nature of the human being, we lose the ability to think in better ways about difference in the future.

The people who see District 9 and think, “Blomkamp is just reproducing the idea that racial Others are disgusting” are revealing themselves to be the real problem, revealing themselves as the reproducers of a racialized and racializing script. They say: The prawns crave cat food! They eat pig heads! They’re dirty! They look weird! They act violently! They urinate where they shouldn’t and they smell bad! The point should not be that human beings have never legitimately appeared exotic to one another in the history of cultural contact (post-European expansion and otherwise). Read ibn Battuta’s accounts of his journeys and you’ll see him offering distortions and exoticizations galore, generally based on surface impressions and gut reactions.

Blomkamp is using a speculative frame to ask whether liberal modernity is in any way more capable of looking past those kinds of filters at the underlying reality of a shared humanity. The film offers plenty of evidence that there is far more to the prawns than what human observers “see”. Even the sympathetically tweedy academic commentators in the documentary portions of the film suggest that the prawns are aimless, without purpose or guidance, having lost their commanding castes before being shipwrecked on Earth. By the end of the film, we learn that’s certainly not the case, that Christopher, his son and his friend, presumably with the collaboration of other prawns, have been working carefully to escape from Earth all along. But even early on, there’s a lot of evidence of the prawns’ “humanity” for anyone who cares to notice: they don’t want to leave their shacks, they strategize about how to evade or frustrate the authorities, they have their own desires and ways of being in the world, they all speak a fully realized language. None of them are really drones or animals. The critics who look at the film’s depiction of the prawns and see nothing but a representation of racial Others as animals completely miss the point, in the process almost absurdly proving Blomkamp’s suggestion that if 21st Century liberal consciousness were once again confronted with a new or novel experience of difference (as opposed to fighting against some historically-derived system of discrimination and oppression based on racial or sexual difference that liberalism knows that it’s supposed to try and combat) it would fail at the test.

The basic problem with this entire line of criticism in film and media studies is the theoretical and empirical simple-mindedness of how it sees the reproduction of culture. A trope is treated like a virus: if it’s visible or identifiable, it’s a contagion, and the only legitimate response is a quarantine. That leaves only representations so safely comforting and purified for a grade-school kind of nationalist or identarian sensibility that they might as well come with a “Sanitized For Your Protection” wrapper on them. The bloody-minded literalness of this approach to cultural criticism is equally exasperating: a trope is considered to come with all its possible negative meanings fully encoded inside, doing exactly the work of remaking audiences and their consciousness that it was meant to do.

That’s not the way culture works, nor the way that audiences work with culture. District 9 is the kind of film that’s good to think, not the kind of film that the representational posse should be chasing with torches and pitchforks.

Posted in Africa, Popular Culture | 13 Comments »

A Tale of Two Game Movies

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

I’m pretty surprised that Sam Raimi has agreed to make a film based on World of Warcraft. I still enjoy World of Warcraft as well as find it intellectually interesting but the idea that its mashed-up, derivative, internally contradictory, heavily baroque game fiction could serve as a platform for an interesting film strikes me as unlikely. On the other hand, I like a lot of Raimi’s films, and he’s got a good sense of how to compress baroque pop culture properties into punchy narratives. So maybe he sees something I don’t in the treatment he’s looking at: maybe some Xena-like fantasy cheese or maybe some metatextual thing that plays with the idea of Warcraft-as-game. I can’t imagine a straight-up mock-epic treatment like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films would be anything but a Uwe Bollesque stinkfest.

On the other hand, a World of Warcraft-based film makes a ton more sense than a film based on the game Asteroids. The announcement of that signing deal, which apparently followed on a four-studio bidding war, raised a lot of eyebrows among pop culture observers.

As it should: this is one of those stories where the surface p.r. explanations just don’t cut it. Let’s say you’re a mid-level studio executive at Universal and you say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about a lone spaceship doing some asteroid mining”. Only the most feral, predatory intellectual property lawyer is going to tell you to pay off the people holding the rights to the video game Asteroids if you want to make that movie.

You could even say to yourself, “I bet we could make a totally cool movie about how kids playing videogames here on Earth are actually controlling spaceships that are doing asteroid mining and other jobs.” You might want to lawyer up about infringing on The Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game, I suppose, but not Asteroids.

So what’s going on here? I think again this is something less about business and profit and more about organizational sociology of contemporary cultural, economic and civic institutions. Most of them tend to have a big, amorphous layer of middle managers who make all the serious concrete decisions about resource allocation. All of those actors have strong incentives to claim sole credit for successful resource allocations and to obscure their involvement in unsuccessful ones. All of those actors need to provide a constantly renewed account of their own accelerating productivity: it’s never enough to be maintaining or supervising existing activities. And in a lot of these institutions, middling figures frequently arrange (implicitly or explicitly) to collaborate with a counterpart at another institution to mutually enhance their prospects along these lines, to manage their institutional capital and engage in quid-pro-quo dealings that make the dealers appear productive.

Hence in many cases an interest in paying out money for intellectual properties that are completely non-necessary to making a new cultural work. If you buy my mothballed intellectual property out of the attic of my megacorporation today, I’ll buy yours tomorrow, old chap. If you pay off the lawyer-troll under the bridge today in order to clip-clop across, then we’ll pay off yours too. Licensed properties are also a great alibi for failures (the source property is the problem! the adaptation is the problem!) and a great way for a studio executive to claim a successful adaptation (it’s not the film itself, it’s that I recognized the value of the property itself!)

In a lot of institutions, those middle-rank incentives drive some actions that people accountable for the total institution find frustrating or perverse, and end up constraining the generative actions of people who actually have to enact what the middle layer decides upon. Not to mention that the hidden incentives that drive institutional action sometimes produce results that outsiders find completely laughable or baffling, like a film based on the game Asteroids.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 7 Comments »

Gaming Roundup

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

So I’m catching up after a week of household projects and hiking with family. First, some miscellaneous thoughts about digital games and virtual worlds after State of Play.

1. The theme for State of Play was “Plateau” and unlike most such conference themes, it seemed pretty descriptive of where academics, policy-makers and developers are with virtual worlds at the moment.

On one hand, they’re undeniably established as subjects of study, areas of interest for policy and law, and as a media form which some companies will continue to produce, operate and profit from.

On the other hand, all the utopians who expected virtual worlds to have a transformative impact on culture and sociality, to be the transcendent media form of the 21st Century, or to be the perfected experimental instrument that would at last permit social scientists to generate knowledge comparable to the natural sciences have mostly moved on to the next technology of desire or have tempered their expectations. Academic work on them is unmistakeably segmenting into more disciplinary or focused kinds of questions, which I think is largely a good thing and a sign of intellectual maturation.

This sense of a flattening out of expectations did sometimes manifest as a kind of gloom or resignation. When the occasional panglossian voice piped up about how exciting their organization’s presence in Second Life was going to be, there was often a kind of bemused ripple in the audience, that someone hadn’t gotten the message that they were trying to peddle yesterday’s news. It’s hard to come down to earth and just deal with virtual worlds as merely a form of entertainment, only a form of communication, another interesting flash (but no more than a flash) of particular insight into human sociality and culture in the 21st Century. It’s maybe especially hard if you’re trying to pull down some money either to develop a virtual world project or to support major research into virtual worlds. I have no such ambitions so I can kind of afford to sit back with a bemused grin as others try to refine old turns of seductive phrasing, or to cop a superior pose at the frustrations expressed by people whose genuine artistic ambitions and life’s work are heavily invested in MMOs as a form.

This is a bit of what I was getting at with my remark that the developers’ panel seemed to be “chasing their own tails”. It seems to me that a few existing virtual worlds are meaningful commercial and cultural successes within their own terms, and that’s a good enough starting place. I’m the first to complain that the form is capable of so much more even within its areas of strength, but I don’t really expect a persistent-environment MMO with 3d avatars to have the dissemination of a popular Facebook or iPhone app or the commercial success of a Top-Ten television show. Especially not in a fragmented cultural marketplace which may never again have products which are truly dominating mass-market experiences shared by most or all of the North American audience.

I have a lot of the same wish list (or hate list) as the developers, but I think it might be time to stop and ask some questions about those ambitions without sidelong glances at World of Warcraft or recapitulations of the history from MUD to now as a kind of trauma. Why don’t we have dynamic or sandbox worlds? Is it all the bad money men who don’t get it? Are we talking about the same thing when we invoke those words and ideas? If there was an unlimited budget for development, what else would cap or frustrate those ambitions: absent or embryonic technologies, limitations of existing infrastructure, expectations of players, the organization and sociology of game design itself? Or maybe there’s some conceptual flaw that’s deeper still, I dunno.

The nice thing about getting to a plateau is that it might be a good time to rest, have a picnic lunch and enjoy the scenery and reconsider whether to try and climb the cliff looming above the current plateau or to climb back down and look for another mountain.

———

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the recent issue of The Escapist that focused on frustration. This is not unique to virtual worlds, really. I keep being struck that no matter how much I like digital games of all kinds, they are just rife with pleasure-killing features and designs that really seem wholly unnecessary, that aren’t part of the challenge of a game or even just a case of “filler”. Contrary to the editor’s note for the issue, though, I wouldn’t say that these experiences are what make it all “worth it”. Instead, I think they’re a real limit condition for digital games: a limit to their audiences, a limit to their success in their own terms as a cultural form, a limit to their success as products. More than a few experiences of dropping $60.00 on a bad, aggravating cultural experience is a pretty serious disincentive to keep going. I know, books, films, and TV can also be frustrating. But digital games have turned the unnecessary assault on the audience’s patience and sanity into a nearly standard feature.

————–

By the way, last week was also a big week for industry mergers. What does it all mean? Hell if I know, but Electronic Arts is certainly an interesting company to study if you want to try and understand how the drive to consolidate, absorb and monopolize a given industry is ultimately even against the interest of the consolidating company. EA clearly has executives who understand that the company’s size and structure actively impedes it from consistently producing the best products it can or even from making consistent marketplace successes. But this is sort of old news for cultural industries in general.

It’s hard not to see changes in the management at Mythic as a sign that Warhammer Online is recognized within the company as coming up short against benchmarks for minimal acceptable success that Mark Jacobs himself announced prerelease. I wonder a bit if WAR is actually going to survive more than another year or so.

This makes me note also that elsewhere, SOE has become a curious niche with MMOs, a kind of elephant’s graveyard where wounded, underperforming or neglected games end up. Which, if they’re all making some kind of profit, makes some degree of business sense.

Going back to my first point in this post, though, you’d think this would all make it a bit easier to drive the point home with the money people in these firms that the last thing anyone needs is a clone of World of Warcraft. You can’t possibly out-WoW at release at this point, and so you’ll inevitably suffer by comparison, no matter how bored people are with WoW. When I read about something like the new Star Trek MMO and get the vague, possibly inaccurate, impression that there are going to be tank ships, healer ships, dps ships, or that the game-mechanical questions around cloaking are going to be imagined in roughly the same terms that rogue stealthing in WoW are imagined, it really depresses me. Most attractive IPs aren’t necessarily suited to be MMOs at all, and very very few are suited to just be a reskinned WoW. A Star Trek MMO might work, but only if the basic structure of the entire project is reconsidered from soup to nuts.

——-

Moderating a panel on methdology and the study of virtual worlds at State of Play, I was suddenly struck that even though I’m more inclined to the methodological practices of my anthropologist colleagues who were on that panel, the foundation of my own methodological approach to the form is really quite different, and ultimately very much unlike my work on African history. Basically, I think I’m a memoirist at heart when it comes to games and virtual worlds, more like Julian Dibbell or Jim Rossignol. I think this is also a legitimate methodological approach within academic contexts as well as outside of them, and an approach that has a kind of tense, uneasy and sometimes rivalrous relationship with ethnography. I think I might try to work up a more formal commentary on this for Terra Nova.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | No Comments »

It’s a Trap

Monday, May 11th, 2009

So. This Star Trek film? It’s pretty goddamn excellent. It’s sort of like the second time that a good play gets performed and the new casting is better than the old casting, the new staging is better than the old staging, the dumb lines and unworkable scenes have been edited out, the dramatic narrative shifted in good ways. It’s still recognizable as the old play, but way better in many respects.

If you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re planning to see it based on the trailer, I’m guessing you already recognize the excellence of casting Simon Pegg as Scotty. You probably are already impressed at the look of the film. Well, your presentiments are spot-on, only it’s even better. The cast nails the essence of the characters without ever sliding into a Rich-Little-style impersonation, except maybe Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy, but his McCoy is so right that it’s never an issue. The Kirk-Spock relationship is freshened up (K/S fans have some new wrinkles to work with: more in a minute) but even better, all the supporting characters are given great defining bits. Chekov in this version, for example, is so much better as a character than he ever was in The Old Show.

When the credits roll at the end, I think just about everyone will be clamoring for a sequel.

———-

So what’s the problem? Well, there isn’t one, if we’re just talking about it as an entertaining film or even as an attractive, sustainable version of Star Trek. No bashing the film for being fun and watchable here.

No, what I’m wondering is whether geeking out about the plot is part of the fun or not. Spoilers follow from here on.

J.J. Abrams makes stuff that you’re meant to geek out about. He does geek service and feeds off of geek service. So in that sense, you’d think the welcome mat would be out for thinking about the plot, the setting and all that. But in this case, I’m worried not so much that plot holes are large, but that thinking too much about them might actually deflate some of the pleasure of the film.

There are the traditional Trek gripes to have about the film, maybe preserved as much as homage as anything else. (The film has tons and tons of great little Easter eggs: McCoy calls out for “Nurse Chapel” at one moment, there’s a tribble in a cage on Scotty’s desk, and so on.)

Trek has never ever had a “total mythos” that makes any sense. Starfleet makes no sense as an organization, the Federation makes no sense as a culture, the future that Trek shows us is plainly a cardboard cutout for the fun characters and schticks to perform in front of. This film keeps with that tradition. I could just barely find a way to rationalize a Romulan mining ship from 130 years in the future being armed to the teeth with photon torpedoes that can wipe out Klingon and Federation ships with ease, and for that ship to be 50 or 75 times bigger than ships in the past. It’s one thing to be a Somali pirate overhauling a supertanker, but if a supertanker with 100 well-armed crewmen and deck guns was coming to crash into an East African port and a little pirate speedboat was given the mission to stop it, that would be another matter, and maybe comparable to the situation that the Enterprise is in. But on the other hand, it’s pretty hard to come up with an explanation for why any single Starfleet captain has all the passwords to permanently turn off every single defense that the Terran solar system possesses and why (as usual) there isn’t a constant hum of interstellar traffic (military and otherwise) around both Earth and Vulcan. A lot of Trek films treat Earth and Vulcan more like they’re the most isolated, underdeveloped and undefended locales in the entire galaxy.

Like I said, this kind of plotting is a Trek tradition. With the exception of DS9, no Trek show has ever paused long enough to work up any consistent representation of its overall setting or tried to make a single world or culture really make sense. It’s not the point of Trek, something which the original writer’s bible made clear by expressly declaring that the show would not ever return to Earth as a setting and where questions about the cultural, religious or social nature of the Federation would not be welcome. Still, at least Abrams saved some Trek traditions for the next film (or two), such as the fact that every admiral in Starfleet is secretly a power-mad authoritarian, budding lunatic or screaming incompetent.

Geeking out about all that is just the usual thing. The real issue is the choice to “sideboot” the franchise with a complicated time travel story. Time travel is NOT one of Trek’s better traditions, though it’s occasionally spawned a good episode. Russell Arben Fox has a nice entry about the way the film plays with time, causality and history in the context of Star Trek. I was thinking about some of the same issues as I watched, and in many ways, this approach was just as troubled as I suspected it might be.

One of the few clumsy bits of exposition in the film involves the central storytelling conceit: Spock pauses and comes pretty close to breaking the fourth wall to deliver the word about what to expect from Abrams’ version from here on out: that nothing is predictable about what will follow, that anything could happen, that the characters have been cut away from their prior histories.

If you look at the way the film handles the reboot with a deeply geeky eye, that declaration doesn’t really follow. The only person whose history is changed by Nero’s original timejump is Kirk. Instead of being a conventionally ambitious scion of a military family, he’s a rebel without a cause. This leads him to a bar on a night when Starfleet cadets are in town (it’s not entirely clear why they’re in Iowa: to visit a ship construction site, maybe?) which leads to a barfight which leads to him meeting Captain Christopher Pike which leads to Kirk meeting Leonard McCoy aboard a recruitment ship and enlisting in Starfleet Academy.

I’m heading into deep geekery now, so follow only if you dare. There are a lot of small but important changes which now follow on this shift. McCoy and Kirk are fast friends from the very beginnings of their career and serve together from the first moment onward, which was not true before. Presumably because of this, Kirk does not become close friends with Gary Mitchell. There’s no mention of two of his known girlfriends at this point in his life (Ruth and Carol Marcus), presumably because Rebel Kirk is even more of a devil-may-care horndog than Ambitious Kirk, and also because Gary Mitchell isn’t pimping for him.

Sulu, Chekov and Scotty still have character histories that could well be consistent with what they were before, given that we knew nothing official about them. But Spock and Uhura, on the other hand? There’s never been even the slightest hint in the old continuity that they were romantically involved. This is a nice touch, but it means that Spock’s personal history is also different at a moment in time when there’s no reason for it to be. (As is Uhura’s.) So even the rules of the premise, so loudly and mechanically declared three or four times during the film, are being broken.

By film’s end, everybody’s history is different. They’ve all come together at an earlier date in their lives than they did before. Kirk is captain of the Enterprise even earlier than he had been. Christopher Pike is not horribly disfigured and as far as we know, has never visited the planet Talos IV. Spock and other Enterprise stalwarts don’t serve with Pike. We may have glimpsed Number One briefly, but none of the cast members appear to serve with her. Gary Mitchell is not part of Kirk’s circle or one of his officers. Kirk takes command as an unrepentant rebel and hotshot with no real service record prior to becoming captain. As far as we know, the experiences that he is known to have had prior to being captain in the old continuity have not happened: he hasn’t seen a massacre of colonists by Kodos the Executioner or encountered a vampiric space cloud which kills his captain. Spock now has a completely different backstory: his mother is dead, his planet gone. Scotty’s been given technological knowledge that comes from his future (actually, have we ever seen that kind of transporting in any version of the show?). When the Doomsday Machine shows up, does Kirk even know Decker? Presumably he’s not been the butt of Finnegan’s jokes: it’s hard to imagine Rebel Barfight Kirk putting up with that kind of crap.

You get the idea. This sideboot of Trek is a bit like DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earth series, which promised a simplifying reboot of DC’s superhero comics and ended up a bleeding narrative wound, a storytelling Rube Goldberg machine. Precisely because it insists that these are the characters you already know, in the universe that they were originally situated within, but now changed by a single intervention in their timeline, it means that every story that happened to them before is now an open question. If Pike doesn’t go to Talos IV, who will? If Kirk and company don’t go to the edge of the galaxy and have a crew member endowed with incredible psychic powers, will anyone? Who will discover the Guardian of Forever now? Hard to see this Kirk as having the gravitas to fall in love with Edith Keeler if it’s this crew that does find it. Presumably there is no all-Vulcan starship to go inside a giant space amoeba and die. There’s no Vulcan to go to for pon farr, in fact, which is doubtless going to lead to horny, violent Vulcans wandering around the galaxy in confusion like a bunch of salmon confronted with new dam construction.

Then there’s the biggest headache of all: Old Spock. I was kind of stunned that they didn’t find a peremptory way to get rid of him at the end of the film: send him back to his future, drop him ambiguously into a black hole, or just outright kill him. At the least, send him off to exile. But no, he’s right in plain sight, hanging out with the surviving Vulcans, without even the fig leaf of a secret identity. (Kind of hard to do when you’re hanging out with a telepath who is your father.) So on Nova Vulcan, there’s a genius who knows how to make black holes, the Genesis wave, transwarp drives, the USS Defiant, and so on. He knows the locations and useful secrets of many planets and cultures which the Federation has yet to explore. He knows about the Borg. He knows about the Dominion. He’s trying to save the heritage and culture of the Vulcan people, so he can’t afford to be sanguine about galactic-level threats that he’s aware of. Besides, once the word goes out (and can it possibly be kept a secret) that there is one person who is the key to total power somewhere on Nova Vulcan, every galactic nutcase and conqueror will be hunting for him.

And so on. With a clean reboot, none of those questions come up but the good storytelling directions of this movie as an origin story would still be in force. So why do it? Well, there’s the obvious reason of trying to keep the old continuity viable as an intellectual property (same reason DC Comics didn’t just start every single comic over with #1 with Crisis). But I almost wonder, given that Abrams likes to see geeks laboring in the narrative saltmines, if the purpose wasn’t precisely to give Trek fans all those unbelievably nerdy questions to fret and debate about, to launch a thousand convention panels and fanfics. I’m just not sure that this is much fun, compared to trying to learn Klingon or trying to figure out the backstory to green Orion women.

Posted in Popular Culture | 27 Comments »

She Did It Her Way

Monday, April 27th, 2009

By now, you’ve probably seen Susan Boyle’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent. At least a few scholars and critics, bless their skeptical hearts, have argued against accepting the seeming spontaneity of the clip at face value.

I’ve argued in the past for the everyday intelligence of popular audiences, most especially children, and I would do the same in this case. Meaning, while people may react to the narrative framework of reality TV as if it were “real”, I believe they’re also aware at some level of its artifice. Holding a particular piece of reality TV up as authentic is a relative rather than absolute judgment. Viewers may be conscious on some level that the editors of The Amazing Race have chosen to highlight, underscore or compress the evolving story of this season into a clash over the terms and themes of identity politics and the limits of competitiveness (a popular hook with reality shows). But if they respond to that story and to the ways that the players act within it as real or vivid, that’s both because the narrative itself is real to their own social experience (however compressed and edited it may be in the show) and because they appreciate the artfulness of the editorial compression, the craft of the staging.

So Jason Mittell is undoubtedly right that the producers at Britain’s Got Talent had some inkling of what was coming when Boyle stepped to the mike, and possibly the judges as well. Possibly even the audience, who knows. Certainly anyone who came to the clip on YouTube knew from the first moment, given the set-up, that they were not about to see another William Hung “She Bangs” clip.

Mittell asks why the clip is seen as “another triumph of the human spirit”. Here is where I think debating the clip’s authenticity or spontaneity is beside the point. With reality TV, the question is the same as it is with drama, even if the genre framing of narrative is different, even if audiences do imaginative work with what they see in some slightly different ways. The point is not to be surprised that a story is being told, but to ask what story, and why.

The story of Susan Boyle in her clip is, as Mittell notes, something of a revisitation of the earlier performance of Paul Potts on the same program. In one sense, it is a story about performance, audition and the audience themselves (with the judges including themselves expansively in the “we” of the audience) in which the audience are asked to cast themselves as Snidley Whiplash, as the villain. Like all actors playing villains, we like to chew a bit of scenery (hence the eye-rolling and derision captured on the faces of the audience). We know of ourselves that we’ve watched other competitions and laughed or mocked the ineptitude of early auditions, accepting the ways in which appearance and stereotype are sometimes used by such programs to cue us that a laughable or pathetic spectacle is going to unfold. The Susan Boyle and Paul Potts clips are offered as moral reversal and thus as rebuke of us as audience and to a very limited extent, of the programs themselves, though mostly if anyone’s held to blame, the framing holds us and our desires to blame. This is a kind of debate that always works around and within reality TV: who watches? who determines? where does the authorial responsibility come to rest?

At another level, the Susan Boyle clip is gripping because it is a powerful version of the primal moral fable of modern liberalism. One of the things I still like about Paul Berman’s book Terror and Liberalism, given the disastrously consequential hubris of much of its argument, was Berman’s observation that one of the weaknesses of liberalism in the 21st Century is that its appeal is cold, distant, disembedded from community and passion and everyday experience. Berman’s bad answer to that dilemma was that liberalism would have to be more militant, “hot” through the violent deployment of power and struggle.

In a way, the Susan Boyle story is a reminder that liberalism actually has heartfelt, emotionally rich stories that are intimately familiar to many people in many societies. Chief among them is the insistence that individuals contain within them talents, character, particularities which are poorly described by stereotypes or collective identities and poorly managed or appreciated by social institutions and conventions. We hear that story constantly from childhood in various cliched forms, to the point that we’re scarcely aware of how embedded it is in our common sense: never judge a book by its cover, ugly duckling, I am somebody, self-made man, I did it my way. Sometimes we tell it as a story of struggle: the heroic individual seizing or wresting their particular worth away from hostile forces. Sometimes we tell it as a story of epiphany (tragic or comic): how the world or the community comes to realize its failure at appreciate an individual and thus to appreciate individuality itself.

That’s as “warm” a narrative as you could ask for, and it’s certainly one which motivates and underwrites social and political action in the world as strongly as communitarian, collective or religious visions of belonging. Of course it’s also trite and sentimental and in its stupider or uglier forms just as prone to underwriting malicious or extreme action as any illiberal narrative. But I think the positive reaction to Susan Boyle’s performance has as much to do with the continued appreciation for the idea of the heroically unique individual liberated from stereotype and social convention as anything else.

Posted in Popular Culture | 1 Comment »

Set Course For Reboot, Mr. Sulu

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Enough politics! Time for geekery!

Yes, the new trailer for Star Trek makes me want to see it. Just the music does! Plus, come on, there’s a call-out to Vasquez Rocks about 3/4 of the way through.

I’m with the geeks who are a little nervous about the time travel angle, because that concept was responsible for some of the most corrosively stupid stories and ideas in the show’s previous TV history. Brannon Braga, out with thee!

Rebooting is fine with me, though. Just call it Star Trek 2.0, forget everything that’s gone before. Some of it was good, some wasn’t, none of it is harmed by a complete do-over.

In fact, a do-over clears a lot of narrative storytelling crud out of the intellectual property. As far as shared-universe serial fictions go, Star Trek is not one of the more coherent or consistent out there.

If a reboot, the question is, which way do you go? It looks just from all the fragments and pieces of information out there that J.J. Abrams has decided that the core of the property is the characters coupled with a bit of optimistic space opera. I think that’s basically right.

If you decided instead that you wanted to really work out the idea of the United Federation of Planets, explore the concept of the Prime Directive, and all that jazz, then you don’t really want what Abrams is bringing. But neither do you want what Star Trek has been to date, because all of those ideas as developed by Roddenberry and his successors were painfully stunted, dramatically hollow, unsatisfying. What you want is basically Iain Banks’ Culture novels (I’m not the first to point this out, mind you). But Banks’ novels, much as I love them, are pretty cerebral: it’s hard to imagine any of them being the foundation for a popular film or television series.

So if you go with the familiar characters, surrounded by some of their technological fetish-objects and a bit of mumbo-jumbo about Starfleet and tolerance and the final frontier, you still have an interesting problem, and I’ll be curious to see how Abrams handles it.

The basic Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad still is a serviceable dramatic engine. The man of action who has to mediate between the man of reason and the man of feeling. Simple, sometimes crude, but entertaining and a pretty good generator of stories. Once you overcome Roddenberry’s crippling ideal that perfect people in the perfect future don’t have internal conflicts, this lets you set these three characters against each other while also getting them to cooperate in lots of situations and permutations.

But what to do with the secondary characters? You can do what the later Star Trek shows did and distribute the triad’s characteristics among them in various ways that echo the central dramatic engine. (As opposed to what the original show did with them, which was more or less nothing in the case of Sulu or Uhura.) Or you can try to give them their own distinctive schtick, which is what sort of happened by accident to Scotty. (Though notably shows built around Scotty as a dramatic character were among the worst of the original show, because he’s got nothing going for him in dramatic terms, and therefore the only thing to do with him is give him a really bad romantic problem or something of that sort.)

Judging from the trailer, it looks like Sulu might be “Secondary Man of Action”. Scotty, given the casting, looks like he’ll still be doing amusing schtick, basically as comic relief.

Uhura? I kind of hope she doesn’t just end up being the new Ensign Janice Rand. If there’s one character whose job should suggest something about her character, it’s Uhura. If she’s the communication specialist, make her the person who knows the most about aliens, who specializes in mediating between conflicting characters, who is technically expert in modes and technologies of communication. Rather than being a switchboard operator, which is how the original show treated her.

Posted in Popular Culture | 9 Comments »

Cramer and Stewart

Friday, March 13th, 2009

I’m very much enthused by the proposition that Jon Stewart and his merry band of TIVO-ing staffers should step up their attacks and go after much of the rest of the media.

The basic drive behind the Daily Show’s criticism of CNBC is that at the end of the day, truth matters. Getting it right matters. That it’s time to cowboy up and act like adults, to be responsible for what we say in public. To wipe off the clown makeup when we’re performing in roles where what we do is consequential.

One of the off-stage handmaidens of the mess we’re in now is that a lot of the mainstream media, a lot of online writers and a lot of public figures all arrived at the same place over the last two decades, that your schtick was what mattered, your brand name, your spin. That you didn’t have any responsibilities beyond that. That you’re just a performer, an entertainer, that anyone who takes you seriously is a rube. That if you’re wrong about fundamentals or facts, bluster and splutter a bit, throw up some smoke, out-yell the other guy, change the subject, and if that doesn’t work, shrug and say, “Who cares, none of this really matters anyway.”

Stewart didn’t let Cramer or his colleagues off the hook with that excuse. It would have been very easy, much less emotionally excruciating, to just open the door to that alibi, to say, “I understand, you’re just trying to entertain, it’s not meant seriously, your viewers understand it’s all an act, maybe you should just put a more explicit disclaimer in front of your show”. But Stewart didn’t invite that escape, and Cramer wasn’t able to seize it from him.

The jaw-dropping refrain from Cramer throughout the segment was, “Well, I talked to this well-placed source and he lied to me.” You talk to a source and if you trust that source, that’s it, case closed, story finished, judgment rendered. It was delicious to see Stewart constantly circle back to this defense and express unfiltered anger and disgust at its patent inadequacy. This is especially true with financial reporting because there is a public record, there is public information, there was enough out there beyond the sources that could have been consistently used to push back on them. There were observers who saw the over-leveraging, the bad debt, the hubris coming from a long ways off, and they didn’t see all of that by calling up a couple of CEOs and asking them if there was a problem.

I do not think that this description of methodology is limited to Cramer. I think it’s what a tremendous amount of mainstream journalism has become, the pimping of connections, the passing-on of self-interested representations from powerful and influential people who are otherwise safely insulated from skepticism. Judith Miller had the same alibi.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics, Popular Culture | 21 Comments »

« Older Entries