Bad News, Richard Posner and New Media

Richard Posner, who is a Federal Appeals court Judge as well as Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and an active Blogger, is one of the most prolific writers in the United States. He has a lengthy article in the New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 31, 2005.

It is a superb piece of writing and a profound analysis of the role that the media play in the everyday lives of the American people. He makes a series of points that I would like to comment on: the proliferation of Blogs means that audiences have more power; that the traditional press has lost a significant percentage of its readership, especially among the generation of twenty to forty-year olds; that the media have become more sensational and polarized along traditional political fault lines of right and left. There is a great deal more in the article, but these three points are central to the Posner’s direction and orientation.

It is interesting the Posner has the stated aim of reviving and enriching public discourse and that he has on numerous occasions commented on the weakening of the role of the public intellectual in American life.

Blogs

The vast majority of Blogs are directed towards a very small readership. They are really more like old style bulletin boards, written sometimes for the pleasure of writing and other times to proclaim allegiance to one or another of the many ideologies that surround us. In general, however, the vast majority of Blogs are private and confessional in orientation. They testify to the everyday experiences that people have, but more importantly Blogs are a sign of the extraordinary importance that Bloggers place on the activities of writing. Ironically, it is the news media, which has highlighted a relatively small number of Blogs and made them the reference point for what is happening in the Blogosphere as a whole. Clearly, publicity is a good thing for those Blogs that receive it. But, for the most part, Blogs are private affairs, diaries that have the potential to be read by a large number of people, but generally are read by family and friends. Are they important? Absolutely. Are they a significant shift in the way the public (which is an amorphous term anyway) sees itself and its neighbors? Yes. Is news being disseminated in a different way because there are now so many people commenting on nearly every aspect of American life? Yes, but here I depart from Posner’s analysis, because my own feeling is that that it is almost impossible to summarize what is being said with the kind of accuracy that is needed to explain and comment upon most Blogs.

Blogs, in my opinion are not about the creation of large communities of interest. They are about communities dividing into smaller and smaller groups with people sharing their interests and concerns through the written word and sometimes through the use of visuals. Blogs reflect and represent something akin to what happens among people when they use the telephone to talk to friends and family. They are about telling stories and more often than not, the stories aren’t that interesting to anyone outside the group. Posner makes a common error in media analysis. He uses the mainstream media themselves as the source for commentary on Blogs. What we need, I believe, is a more historical overview, which links Blogs to nineteenth and twentieth century reading clubs and other organized community based clubs and groups.

Learning from Popoular Culture (2)

Chris makes the following point:
"What strikes me about these debates is that the center seems so western and middle class. I don't think the phrase "popular culture" has any meaning at all and by extraction maybe popular culture itself is meaningless."

This is an interesting point. Popular culture as a term is probably too broad and overly general to mean that much. Nevertheless, from a social and societal point of view, the term has become a "category" that is both provocative and a continual part of debates about the direction in which most cultures are headed. India has a strong base of "popular" cultural activity in film, if the measurement for that — millions of viewers — is acceptable. During my recent visit to Shanghai I was amazed at the proliferation of popular cultural artifacts from Western DVDs to local shows on television many of which were built on soap opera principles. The more profound question is whether people are learning from the experiences that they are having. And, this question needs to be at the center of debates about culture in general. There is a superb article by Joel Garreau in the Washington Post on this debate. It was reprinted in The Vancouver Sun, Saturday, July 16, 2005. This is the link to the Post

Learning from Popular Culture (1)

Steven Johnson's new book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter popularizes an argument that has been at the core of debates in communications and cultural theory for over thirty years. The argument is that analyses of popular culture cannot be reduced to a simple and uni-dimensional approach. For the most part, the analysis of video games, for example, has focused on their negative effects upon children. There may be some validity to suggestions that young children are not able to discriminate with enough acuity to explore the differences between real life and gameplay. The counter argument is that a great deal of what we describe as play among children is filled with violence and aggressive behaviour. In general, and Johnson makes the same mistake, it is difficult to come to conclusions about the impact of the media both on children and adults.

It would take a long and detailed empirical study not of the behaviour of individuals, but of their reactions to the experiences of engaging with popular cultural artifacts. Note the two words, reactions and experiences. How long does it take you to articulate your reactions to a television show or to a film? Furthermore, which part of your discourse reveals the truths about what you are saying? The complexities of analysis and reflection surrounding these issues are rarely dealt with in the popular media. Rather, in a lovely irony, the popular media generally trash their own activities pointing to the dangers and never analysing the audiences they make claims about other than through the most primitive of survey tools. I would argue that we know very little about the impact of the media and popular culture and I therefore welcome Johnson's intervention in the debate. As with any analysis, it would take more than a simple set of generalized assumptions to really investigate what happens when viewers engage with various aspects of popular culture. In any case, popular culture is not a monolith. There are as many counter-arguments as there are arguments about its value and relationship to everyday life.

Part Two…

Reflections on New Media (7)

The Vancouver International Digital Festival brought practitioners/creators, programmers, engineers, artitsts, designers, and many other categories of people together around a common interest in New Media. Actually, the common interest and excitement is around creating content for new audiences. These are audiences for whom the Web, cell phones, networking, chats and so on are an integral part of their daily lives, as integral as all forms of communications have become in the early 21st century.

STOP! What does it mean to make this kind of claim?

How do we know what people know? How do we gain access to the acitivities of individuals and to their understanding of their own experiences? Even the use of "we" in these questions is presumptuous, since I am claiming to stand in for the reader. The problem here is that a particular ideology based on what appears to be "use" has overwhelmed any thinking about quality. The number of people who play videogames explains very little about the experience of playing. It would take a holistic approach involving among other things, experience, background, location, context and so on, to extrapolate anything interesting from figures like, two million people are playing a particular game online. In fact, it would take a "new" approach to ethnography to really open up some substantive discussion about the experiences individuals and communities are having with new technologies.

For example, when hundreds of thousands of people play a game together across a network, pay money, experience pain, loss and gain, how can this phenomena be investigated and thought about?

An example of why this question is so important comes out in Steven Johnson's new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter where so many claims for audience and youth experience are made, that the book loses its shine because so little of the information comes from any serious ethnographic research and investigation. Not that I disagree with the fundamental premise of the book (which should be clear from its title), but that such an important point needs genuine field work which takes time and effort.

Part Eight…

Reflections on New Media (6)

The panel I chaired at the the Vancouver International Digital Festival was very interesting. Among the comments that were useful: Blogs have been overwhelmed with spam: The Blogosphere is full of people who want to talk and exchange ideas and thoughts, but often that degenerates into arguments and as one speaker put it, "crud": interactivity is a poorly thought out term and needs a great deal of work: we need many new and evolving tools that will allow people to generate content in a variety of ways that are simple and direct, in fact, as direct as using a pen to write on paper: many Blogs are places for confessional writing and this is extremely attractive but also dangerous.

I will add more to this over the coming days.

Part Seven…