Hollywood implosion: end of an era?

• Last month Steven Spielberg and George Lucas caused a bit of a stir when they predicted an impending "implosion" of Hollywood that would forever alter the filmmaking industry. Speaking at a USC event, Spielberg posited a scenario in which a series of big budget flops would necessitate a change in the Hollywood business model:

"That's the big danger, and there's eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm."

• These comments sparked discussion in the media and blogosphere. Forbes contributor Scott Mendelson unequivocally declared that Lucas and Spielberg were wrong; he cited recent mega-flops like Jack Carter and Battleship as evidence that the Hollywood status quo can take a licking and keep on ticking. But then The Lone Ranger flopped on the July 4th weekend, and industry watchers immediately noticed a troubling trend. The Hollywood Reporter called it "the third big-budget bomb of the summer," following the disappointing returns from After Earth and White House Down. A Vulture article cited Spielberg's warning of the impending implosion and said the Lone Ranger "represents everything that's wrong with Hollywood blockbusters". Den of Geek! writer Gabe Toro drew comparisons between the Lone Ranger and Michael Cimino's infamous Heaven's Gate, a notorious cinematic disaster often cited as ending the "new Hollywood" era of American director-driven filmmaking. (a great documentary on Heaven's Gate is available in pieces on YouTube) It seems that the trend is continuing this weekend, as this Telegraph article cites industry forecasts of R.I.P.D. bombing at the box office to continue the "summer crisis".
• The Lone Ranger received a score of scathing reviews, but my favorite analysis of the film so far is this io9 piece that sees the film as a statement on the overabundance of "shitty superhero origin stories" that have populated movie theaters for the last decade, as well as a discourse on power relations in pop culture hero figures:

People complain that The Lone Ranger is boring, that it's almost totally devoid of fun except for the final 10 minutes, that it's ridiculously violent and yet inert. And all of these things are true — but you have to understand, it's all part of a calculated strategy, to sink far enough to burrow all the way to the infarcted heart of the terrible superhero origin story.

The goal is to show you who is to blame for the crappiness of so many superhero origin movies — you — and to punish you for allowing movies like The Lone Ranger to exist.

[...]

We tend to think of superhero movies as power fantasies, in which the use of America's status as a superpower is reflected by the hero struggling to use his or her power responsibly. But Lone Ranger seems to be making the case that the real seductive fantasy of these stories is absolution from blame — the Lone Ranger gets the Native American seal of approval from Tonto, as long as he's wearing the mask. He gets surcease from America's original sin.

Twenty years of Last Action Hero, reality TV hoaxer, whistleblower heroics and more

• The film Last Action Hero opened twenty years ago today. I saw the movie in theaters and loved it as a child. Having been a fan of Terminator 2 (which came out a few years earlier) Last Action Hero elaborated on the boyhood fantasy of having your own personal Ah-nuld, just like John Connor and his robot pal. Over the years I developed an all new appreciation for the film as an original and endearing work of metafiction. To mark the anniversary Calcum Marsh at Esquire posted this piece about why the movie is "better than you remember":

And even better is the film's conception of movie morality, which it twists into a biting satirical treatise: Rather than suggest, once the fictional characters break free into the real world, that reality has rules and consequences that the film world doesn't, Last Action Hero does just the opposite, serving up hard truths about the uncaring streets of modern-day New York. "In this world," observes a villain named Benedict (Charles Dance), "bad guys can win" — a point he summarily proves by shooting a local mechanic in cold blood, loudly announcing the murder and looking disappointed when he hears no screams or sirens. Last Action Hero suggests that while the movies may seem like heedless spectacles, it's the moral chaos of our own world that's really dire. That's quite a thesis for a comedy made for kids.

• This fascinating LA Weekly article details one man's "reality TV racket":

What the host didn't know is that K.T. was actually 31-year-old Ken Tarr, a budding mastermind of the reality TV hoax. Over the past five months, working out of his modest Los Angeles apartment, Tarr had talked his way onto eight different shows taped in five different cities — each time cloaked in a different persona. He'd become a dissonant saboteur in the machinery of sleaze that sprawls across our televisions.

• Writing for CNN, Douglas Rushkoff declares NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a "hero":

We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving. Likewise, without conscious restraint, government agencies can't help but let the growing power of big data draw them into ever more invasive forms of surveillance on a population whose members simply must include those who intend harm on the rest. This is just how everything runs when it's left on "default" settings.

• Lastly, Space.com has posted this fantastic infographic looking at 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The spaceships of 2001 were designed by Frederick I. Ordway III, chief science adviser; Harry Lange, illustrator and concept artist (who later would design spaceship interiors for "Star Wars") and Tony Masters, production designer on "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dune" and other films. Real-life spacecraft contractors including IBM, Honeywell, RCA and General Electric were consulted for their predictions of the technology of 35 years in the future.

Zizek's guide to ideology, Netflix tackles TV, digital dualist conservatism

• I haven’t yet been able to see The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes’ follow-up to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dan Adleman reviews the film in the Mainlander:

Other ideological “masterpieces” that Žižek points to are much subtler, precisely because they occupy more prominent positions in the western cultural imaginary. He reads Jaws as a condensation of all the “foreign invaders” that privileged societies like upper-middle-class America worry will disrupt their peaceful communities. Part of what makes Fiennes’ film such a great showcase for Žižek’s approach to cultural studies is the persuasive effect of supplementing his explications with film clips. After listening to Žižek’s account of the ideological coordinates of the film, it’s difficult not to notice that all of the beach-goers scrambling to make it to the shore in one piece are affluent white Americans.

• Writing for Memeburn, Michelle Atagana considers the strategies employed by Netflix in trying to “win television”. The strategies include producing original content, feeding binge habits, and using product placement.

If Netflix refines its model and signs on more shows, chances are it will make a formidable foe of big cable players such as HBO. The model that the company is currently working could also be exported to film, essentially making the next cinematic experience wherever, whenever and on whatever device the audience wants.

• The Society Pages’ Cyborgology blog is one of my favorite resources for probing and provocative analysis of new media issues from a sociological perspective. One of the most interesting concepts considered by the blogs contributors is the notion of Digital Dualism. A recent post by Jesse Elias Spafford refines the digital dualism concept:

I posit that digital dualism, in fact, draws from both the ontological and the normative analyses. Specifically the digital dualist:

1. Establishes an ontological distinction that carves up the world into two mutually exclusive (and collectively exhaustive) categories—at least one of which is somehow bound up with digital technology (e.g., that which is “virtual” vs. that which is “real”.)

2. Posits some normative criteria that privileges one category over the other. (In most cases, it is the non-technological category that is deemed morally superior. However, charges of digital dualism would equally apply to views that favored the technological.)

After Earth's ideology, Assange on the new digital age, Voyager re-explored

• The new M. Night Shyamalan film and Smith dynasty vehicle After Earth​ underperformed at the box office last weekend, opening in third place. Neither the film or its box office numbers interest me, but elements of its inception and marketing are curious. Up until a few years ago Shyamalan's name featured prominently in promotional materials for films (most recently in 2010 for the Shyamalan-directed Last Airbender and the Shyamalan-produced Devil). Yet during the months of promotion for After Earth the director's name wasn't mentioned. In a piece on the Mother Jones site Asawin Suebsaeng refers to Shyamalan "he who must not be named", and asserts that the director's decline from "the next Hitchcock" to a "critical and pop-cultural punchline" made his association with the movie a liability for the studio.
  

Much in the same way that a marketing campaign will go out of its way not to use the word "gay" when promoting a film about two despondent gay cowboys, the marketing campaign for After Earth has gone out of its way not to mention the words "M. Night Shyamalan." That sort of tells you everything you need to know about how highly Sony thinks of the 42-year-old director and his current standing. ​

• Other commentators have focused what influence star Will Smith's affiliation with Scientology may have had on the film. (At the end of last year when trailers for After Earth and Oblivion were both playing before new releases I noted ​that not only the similarity between the film's post-apocalyptic-Earth plots, but also the fact that both movies starred prominent celebrity Scientologists.) The Hollywood Reporter ran an analysis of the film written by a former member of the church.
  

Will Smith’s character is pretty much devoid of all emotions for the entire movie. While this may be part of his character or something that was directed in the script, in Scientology, one goes through great amounts of training and counseling to control one’s emotions and “mis-emotion,” as described by Hubbard. Anyone who has done even the smallest amount of Scientology training will recall sitting and staring at a person for hours on end without being allowed to blink, smile or turn one’s head. Will Smith pretty much masters that for the entirety of this movie.

• ​Another piece at Vulture also finds evidence of Scientology ideology embedded in the film's themes and imagery.
  

Without being too obvious, Smith has delivered an incredibly mainstream platform for the Church's ideology. After Earth’s subtext makes every beat feel like a nod to the lessons of L. Ron Hubbard. Fleeing Earth to another planet only to return to home mirrors the idea of thetan resurrection. The ship Cypher and Kitai take on their mission isn't that far off from the Douglas DC-8–esque ship that took Xenu's kidnapped souls to earth. And the prominently advertised volcano that functions as a backdrop to a large After Earth set piece? Just look at the cover to Hubbard's book that started it all —Dianetics.

• ​This Gawker article contends that "After Earth is just a shitty movie, not Scientology propaganda".
  

If After Earth were intentional propaganda, it would be an even bigger failure than it already is – the path to self-enlightenment is reduced to an overlong, tedious quest to find shit. Who wants to join that club? For the strong-willed, fear may be a choice, but for everyone else this weekend, avoiding boredom is an even clearer choice. ​

• Perhaps The Onion's analysis has it, and audiences found the gimmick of Smith-and-son starring in a movie "more annoying than appealing".
  

Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that I was an average, everyday American consumer. Would I enjoy seeing an incredibly rich and famous man use his money and power to make his children incredibly rich and famous? Would I enjoy seeing the face of a young teenager plastered on movie posters across the entire nation, not because of who he is, but because of who his father is? To be totally honest, I’m not so sure I would. In fact, it’s conceivable that I might find it unbelievably infuriating and downright unbearable.​

• This past April Wikileaks published a transcript of a meeting held in June 2011 between Julian Assange and ​Google CEO Eric Schmidt. This week the New York Times published an editorial by Assange reviewing the recently published The New Digital Age by Schmidt and Jared Cohen.
  

This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” they tell us, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever.

• Lastly, I enjoyed this piece on Star Trek: Voyager​ by Brandon Nowalk at the A.V. Club.
  

“Caretaker” invokes ’90s environmentalism, a superpower’s role as world police, and two oppositional parties working together to run that superpower as best as they can, but it’s nothing so much as a reminder of Gene Roddenberry’s Prime Directive. Starfleet is expressly prohibited from interfering with the progress of pre-warp societies. The Caretaker’s species had no such guidelines and nearly wiped out a whole species. Now, Voyager has the task of upholding Alpha Quadrant standards in the absence of Alpha Quadrant hierarchy. ​

2001 book, Rushkoff interview

• ​Recently I learned of a book about the making of 2001 edited by Jerome Agel. Agel coordinated The Medium is the Massage with McLuhan and Fiore, as well as the Buckminster Fuller book I Seem to be a Verb. Long out-of-print, the entirety of The Making of Kubrick's 2001 is now available to read online.
  
• Leo Laporte of Triangulation recently interviewed Douglas Rushkoff.​

Kubrick's rooms, Tumblr teens, Understanding Media reading group

• Douglas Rushkoff's latest column for CNN ('Yahoo wants ​Tumblr's teens') addresses Yahoo's billion dollar purchase of Tumblr. Rushkoff writes that "Yahoo isn't buying a technology company so much as the community that uses it."
  

For its part, Tumblr is working hard to prove it still has indie cool street cred. In his blog post responding to the angst around his "selling out," Tumblr founder David Karp sounded like a young Steve Jobs by insisting "how awesome this is." Then, as if to prove Tumblr is still cool enough to do naughty things even though it's now owned by a zillion-dollar corporate conglomerate, he signed his post, "F*** yeah."

Maybe that'll work, but it looks to me like Tumblr has gone from being cool to trying to sound cool. And we all know where that leads.​

• I recently discovered this Understanding Media reading group​. The site has some interesting posts and a lot of great McLuhan content. For example, a conversation with McLuhan scholar W. Terrence Gordon, in-depth analysis of individual UM chapters, and vintage video clips of McLuhan.
  

• The new documentary Room 237​ features several elaborate interpretations of Kubrick's The Shining. Although the documentary has its flaws, it's slickly-produced and very enjoyable. It made me want to see something similar done for 2001. Joe Pack reviewed the doc for The Epoch Times:
  

​Fans of Kubrick’s 1980 film show how they have, like Kubrick himself, blurred the lines of artistic ownership of material by adding new meaning to a widely beloved, yet controversial film.

[...]

As it is stated by one person in the film, the act of “Shining” is like watching a movie. It is a dream-like liminal space in which the viewer decodes daily experiences and attaches meaning through narrative and action. Danny is able to successfully navigate the pitfalls of the hotel because he is tuned in to the situation, able to understand the past and the dangers of repeating history. 

Arrested Development returns, Star Trek analysis, Facebook's free speech, and more

• ​This Sunday 15 new episodes of cult-favorite TV comedy Arrested Development will become available on Netflix. In anticipation of the show's return NPR posted an impressive guide to the running gags throughout all three original seasons. Poynter has an article about the app and creator Adam Cole, the NPR reporter who pored over the episodes to track the jokes.
  
• I haven't seen the new Star Trek movie, and am already tired of hearing about it, but David Banks's article at Cyborgology is worth reading if you are interested in analyzing the political overtones (i.e. 9/11 and the War on Terror) of the film or just a fan of the franchise. My favorite bit from the post:
  

The cosmopolitan multiculturalism of Deep Space Nine and the late second wave feminism of Voyager are one 14-season-long transgression of the never-ending-present that The Next Generation sets up. Q, the omnipresent trickster god that saw it fit to put all of humanity on trial is now physically assaulted by Benjamin Sisko and romantically rejected by Kathryn Janeway. Janeway goes one step further and, in a deeply underappreciated series, stands in literal judgment of the Q continuum itself for its desire to keep one of its own from committing suicide. In a trial of her own, reminiscent of the time Data defends his sentience and Spock is tried for treason, Janeway actually rules in favor of individual autonomy over the Foucauldian power of the state to regulate life and death:

• Posting at memeburn Graeme Lipschitz discusses the assertion made recently by Facebook attorneys that clicking the "Like" button is "vital" to free speech.​

The court ruling states that “likes” do not amount to a “substantive statement” where “substantive” can mean “real” or “independent in existence or function.” Many have said that “liking” something on Facebook is similar to putting up a sign on your lawn endorsing a particular point of view — this is protected by free speech in the US. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a brief which cites examples like re-tweeting, signing a petition, and donating to a campaign online as examples of media that are created by “one-click” that are similar to Facebook’s “like” that are protected by free speech. It is thought that if the ruling is upheld, these forms of expression will be under threat too.

• Lastly, this is an older post I just came across on Mediaknowall about race and class in Django Unchained.​

Watching (and reading) the Society of the Spectacle

• Youtuber Azorek79 has a video in 2 parts based on The Society of the Spectacle, narrated with excerpts from Debord's book as well as selections from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and John Berger's Ways of Seeing.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHtSPub3w8&w=420&h=315]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN26E410Euk&w=420&h=315]

• Also, I just stumbled across a subreddit organized for a book-club-style reading of Society of the Spectacle. They began reading on Dec. 19 and are just over halfway done (they are ending by reading Comments on the Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life). Check it out here.

End of 2012 mega blow-out post

• "General Semantics and media theory": video of a 20-minute presentation by Thom Gencarelli from this year's IGS symposium.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sMo4cTZTgQ&w=560&h=315]

• "Game or be gamed: Douglas Rushkoff on prototyping democracy through play"

"Those levels of interactivity, for me, recapitulated the levels of participation that we as a society have had since the invention of media," Rushkoff said, referring to similar shifts that occurred when humans first transitioned from written language to the age of movable type.

• Find the Conversation: audio of interview with Douglas Rushkoff

Our conversation started with Rushkoff’s concept of “present-shock” and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable.

• So apparently there's a YouTube channel called PBS Idea Channel. This video poses the question, "are cell phones replacing reality?" and briefly engages Baudrillard's thoughts on hyperreality.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AXIAM7dTTg&w=560&h=315]

• This page on LearnStuff.com covers the life and work of Baudrillard and contains links to resources and further reading.

• WIRED's Dead Media Beat considers Lev Manovich's statement in a recent article that "there is no digital media, there is only software."

• "Drop the mic": an article about how the microphone changed Catholic mass.

In 1974, Marshall McLuhan argued that the microphone was the proximate cause both of the elimination of Latin from the Mass and of the turning around of the priest to face the congregation. Before microphones, a priest quietly said Mass in Latin, with his back to the congregation. From any distance, his voice was indistinct, although an instructed Catholic could follow what he was saying from a missal containing the Latin text of the Mass or a translation of it.

• "The humanism of Media Ecology": this address was delivered by Neil Postman at the 2000 MEA convention, but I just came across it and wanted to share it here.

I think there is considerable merit in McLuhan’s point of view about avoiding questions of good and bad when thinking about media. But that view has never been mine. To be quite honest about it, I don’t see any point in studying media unless one does so within a moral or ethical context. I am not alone in believing this. Some of the most important media scholars—Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, for example—could scarcely write a word about technology without conveying a sense of either its humanistic or anti-humanistic consequences.

Ithaca college media studies site

I recently came across an excellent page of media studies resources maintained by the Ithaca College Library. Here's the link. The site features a considerable amount of content including videos, reference links and more pertaining to media effects, media ecology, and media literacy. Definitely one of the better media studies-oriented sites that I've seen. It's a great resource and I'd suggest anyone interested in media studies give it a look.

Google settles over privacy violations, Social media segregation, the era of big data, and more...

• Google is reportedly reaching a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over an incident in which the Internet search giant violated an agreement with the FTC by tracking Safari users' data. From the Associated Press:

Google is poised to pay a $22.5 million fine to resolve allegations that it broke a privacy promise by secretly tracking millions of Web surfers who rely on Apple's Safari browser, according to a person familiar with settlement.

If approved by the FTC's five commissioners, the $22.5 million penalty would be the largest the agency has ever imposed on a single company.

• Adrianna Jeffries at BetaBeat covers a BBC report on how users of specific web sites break down along racial demographics. The article misleadingly refers to "segregation" in social media, but the information and analysis by danah boyd is interesting:

Pinterest is 70 percent female and 79 percent white, according to the BBC. By contrast, black and Latino users are overrepresented on Twitter versus the general population.

Ms. Boyd theorized that there was an exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook similar to white flight to the suburbs when the U.S. desegregated schools. Facebook, the vanilla of social media sites, was approaching the makeup of the U.S. population at the time of an analysis done in 2009. That was the year that white users stopped being overrepresented and black and Latino users stopped being underrepresented.

• Tom Silva writes about the Era of Big Data in this HuffPo piece:

Among companies of more than 1,000 employees in 15 out of the economy's 17 sectors, the average amount of data is a surreal 235 terabytes. That's right -- each of these companies has more info than the Library of Congress. And so, why should we care? Because data is valuable. The growth of digital networks and the networked sensors in everything from phones to cars to heavy machinery mean that data has a reach and sweep it has never had before. The key to Big Data is connecting these sensors to computing intelligence which can make sense of all this information (in pure Wall-E style, some theorists call this the Internet of Things).

• This short post at Kethu.org presents survey data and rhetorically wonders whether social media behaviors negatively impact life enjoyment:

Consider this: 24% of respondents to one survey said they’ve missed out on enjoying special moments in person because — ironically enough — they were too busy trying to document their experiences for online sharing. Many of us have had to remind ourselves to “live in the now” — instead of worry about composing the perfect tweet or angling for just the right Instagram shot.

• In this piece at Business Insider CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis offers insight into journalism education:

I’m coming to believe that classroom time is too limiting in the teaching of tools. At CUNY, we’ve seen over the years that students come in with widening gulfs in both their prior experience and their future ambitions in tools and technologies. My colleagues at CUNY, led by Sandeep Junnarkar, have implemented many new modules and courses to teach such topics as data journalism (gathering, analysis, visualization) and familiarity with programming.

Note well that I have argued since coming to CUNY that we should not and cannot turn out coders. I also do not subscribe to the belief that journalism’s salvation lies in hunting down that elusive unicorn, the coder-journalism, the hack-squared. I do believe that journalists must become conversant in technologies, sufficient to enable them to (a) know what’s possible, (b) specify what they want, and (c) work with the experts who can create that.

Figure/Ground interviews: Douglas Rushkoff, Noam Chomsky, and Eric McLuhan

It's been a while since I checked the excellent Figure/Ground Communication blog and I just noticed they've posted three exciting interviews:

• Douglas Rushkoff
• Noam Chomsky
• Eric McLuhan

in medias res: bridging the "time sap" gap, DIY politics, Google thinks you're stupid, and more

• When researchers started using the term "digital divide" in the 1990s they were referring to an inequality of access to the Internet and other ICTs. Over time the issue shifted from unequal access to emphasizing disparities of technological competency across socioeconomic sectors. The new manifestation of the digital divide, according to a New York Times article, is reflected in whether time on the Internet is spent being productive, or wasting time:

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

A study published in 2010 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children and teenagers whose parents do not have a college degree spent 90 minutes more per day exposed to media than children from higher socioeconomic families. In 1999, the difference was just 16 minutes.

• In an op-ed for the LA Times Neal Gabler writes that Obama's legacy may be disillusionment with partisan politics and a shift toward do-it-yourself democracy:

Disillusionment with partisan politics is certainly nothing new. Obama's fall from grace, however, may look like a bigger belly flop because his young supporters saw him standing so much higher than typical politicians. Yet by dashing their hopes, Obama may actually have accomplished something so remarkable that it could turn out to be his legacy: He has redirected young people's energies away from conventional electoral politics and into a different, grass-roots kind of activism. Call it DIY politics.

We got a taste of DIY politics last fall with the Occupy Wall Street sit-ins, which were a reaction to government inaction on financial abuses, and we got another taste when the 99% Spring campaign mobilized tens of thousands against economic inequality. OWS and its tangential offshoots may seem political, but it is important to note that OWS emphatically isn't politics as usual. It isn't even a traditional movement.

• In a piece on The Daily Beast Andrew Blum, author of a new net-centric book titled The Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, details the condescension and furtiveness he encountered while researching Google for his book:

Walking past a large data center building, painted yellow like a penitentiary, I asked what went on inside. Did this building contain the computers that crawl through the Web for the search index? Did it process search queries? Did it store email? “You mean what The Dalles does?” my guide responded. “That’s not something that we probably discuss. But I’m sure that data is available internally.” (I bet.) It was a scripted non-answer, however awkwardly expressed. And it might have been excusable, if the contrast weren’t so stark with the dozens of other pieces of the Internet that I visited. Google was the outlier—not only for being the most secretive but the most disingenuous about that secrecy.

After my tour of Google’s parking lot, I joined a hand-picked group of Googlers for lunch in their cafeteria overlooking the Columbia River. The conversation consisted of a PR handler prompting each of them to say a few words about how much they liked living in The Dalles and working at Google. (It was some consolation that they were treated like children, too.) I considered expressing my frustration at the kabuki going on, but I decided it wasn’t their choice. It was bigger than them. Eventually, emboldened by my peanut-butter cups, I said only that I was disappointed not to have the opportunity to go inside a data center and learn more. My PR handler’s response was immediate: “Senators and governors have been disappointed too!”

• A recent study from Penn State's Media Effects Research Laboratory investigated how narratives constructed by news media in reporting a story impacted consumers' empathic response to the material:

When news reports focus on individuals and their stories, rather than simply facts or policy, readers experience greater feelings of compassion, said Penn State Distinguished Professor Mary Beth Oliver, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory and a member of the Department of Film-Video and Media Studies. This compassion also extends to feelings about social groups in general, including groups that are often stigmatized.

"Issues such as health care, poverty and discrimination all should elicit compassion," Oliver said. "But presenting these issues as personalized stories more effectively evokes emotions that lead to greater caring, willingness to help and interest in obtaining more information."

The emphasis on "personalized stories" reminds me of Zillmann's exemplification theory, though the article makes no mention of exemplification.

• In an article for the Observer (apparently a sub-site of the Guardian...I'm really not sure) John Naughton writes about the real cost of the smartphone revolution:

The problem with living through a revolution is that you've no idea how things will turn out. So it is with the revolutionary transformation of our communications environment driven by the internet and mobile phone technology. Strangely, our problem is not that we are short of data about what's going on; on the contrary we are awash with the stuff. This is what led Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, to describe our current mental state as one of "informed bewilderment": we have lots of information, but not much of a clue about what it means.

If, however, you're concerned about things such as freedom, control and innovation, then the prospect of a world in which most people access the internet via smartphones and other cloud devices is a troubling one. Why? Because smartphones (and tablets) are tightly controlled, "tethered" appliances. You may think that you own your shiny new iPhone or iPad, for example. But in fact an invisible chain stretches from it all the way back to Apple's corporate HQ in California. Nothing, but nothing, goes on your iDevice that hasn't been approved by Apple.

FSR: 3 media developments videodrome predicted

Film School Rejects reconsiders David Cronenberg's Videodrome (previously) in light of recent developments in mass media. The three changes they credit Videodrome with predicting are: Viral Videos

Either way, it’s not only the “video” of “Videodrome” itself that spreads like a virus; the individual’s psyche is also affected. And this points to the more nuanced ways that the standardization of viral media has changed our perception of it – we become less patient with long-form media, our work lives are regularly interrupted by these viral representations which changes our routines, and our social lives are often characterized by the inclusive/exclusive practice of disseminating viral media, which makes for a rather different form of water cooler socialization than, say, traditional media like the last episode of MASH.

Blurring of Hot and Cool media

This readymade understanding of media technology speaks more readily to our current digital moment than to 1983. We no longer think of technologies or media artifacts as a given in terms of the way they’re presented to us: smart phones can be retooled for unintended use, movies can be re-edited and distributed on the web, and the supposed obsolescence of “older” technologies and media delivery formats only provide more opportunities for rethinking them. Thus, hot and cool mediums become more and more difficult to distinguish. The option for participation is not so much determined by the design of the media itself, but whether or not we choose to activate our own agency.

Convergence

Technology is not only modeled as an extension of the human body; it is the human body. Renn’s fingers become an abject flesh-machine hybrid that fires bullets, and his lower chest is transformed into a vaginal cavity for both consuming and delivering media. Now, while the reign of all things Apple may not mean that we’ll all develop electromechanical chest-vaginas, that distinctions between flesh and technology will continue to blur is certain, and this fact has both hopeful and strange implications.

Read the full post here.

Terrence McKenna: Riding range with Marshall McLuhan

Just came across this audio of philosopher and mushroom-enthusiast Terrence McKenna discussing McLuhan. Not sure where or when the recording comes from, it sounds like a small seminar, Esalen-esque.  It's a fascinating listen if you're in to that sort of thing...McKenna references McLuhan's work as a Joyce scholar and reads from Understanding Media. Runtime: approx. 53 mins. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxB6Tsd6J60&w=420&h=315]

In Medias Res: Chomsky Occupied, lolcats invade aca-meme-ia, the intention economy and more...

• Microsoft is opening a research lab in New York City staffed by A-list sociologists, computational scientists, and network theorists among others.

The NYC lab recruits bring in mathematical and computation tools that could work magic with existing social media research already underway at Microsoft Research, led by folks like Gen-fluxer danah boyd. "I would say that the highly simplified version of what happens is that data scientists do patterns and ethnographers tell stories," boyd tells Fast Company. While Microsoft Research New England has strengths in qualitative social science, empirical economics, machine learning, and mathematics, "We’ve long noted the need for data science types who can bridge between us," boyd explained in a blog post announcing the NYC labs.

• Noam Chomsky's latest publication is a "pamphlet" on the Occupy Wall Street movements that was released on May Day. Chomsky answered occupy-related questions for the Guardian, and wrote an op-ed for Salon:

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

• An article at the Atlantic poses the question: Are LOLCats making us smart? The article quotes Kate Miltner who wrote her dissertation on LOLCat memes:

According to Miltner, "When it came to LOLCats, sharing and creating were often different means to the same end: making meaningful connections with others." At their core LOLCats weren't about those funny captions, the weird grammar, or the cute kitties, but people employed those qualities in service of that primary goal of human connection.

• A Forbes contributor asks, What if we tossed out the advertising model? The article is largely a response to a book by Doc Searls called The Intention Economy.

A newer idea outgrowth of this is that information is so omnipresent and that consumers face so much of it that businesses are now in a completely different economy model fighting to get people’s attention. This Attentioneconomy has new rules based on how much time people are willing to spend paying attention to some piece of information and to their hopes the advertisements that may surround it. New tools are emerging to analyze not just what is talked about but also sentiment, audience demographics, and how quickly it spreads.

To push efficiency, the better way would be to be able the craft the message more accurately to specific people, not just a demographic: to me personally, not just to ‘people who live in that part of the city’. How would that be possible? It starts with trying to understand the intention of what people want, rather than trying to just grab their attention as they walk away. If we knew, or better yet, if the consumer each told us what they wanted and we could craft the message for each person as well as target exactly who would be interested, then the efficiency of that message suddenly shoots way up. It hinges on that dialogue with the consumer.

Scott Merrill at Tech Crunch also covered Searl's book:

Another substantial topic of the book is just how incorrect most of the information collected about us actually is. And still this factually wrong data is used to select which advertisements are presented to you, in the hope that you’ll click through. Aside from how intrusive advertising is, is it any surprise that click-through rates are so low when the data used to target ads to viewers is so wildly off-base?

Searls also advocates strongly for Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) solutions to give to consumers the same kind of tracking and information collection about vendors that the vendors use against us. The point of VRM is not adversarial, according to Searls. Instead, it restores balance to the overall market and seeks to actively reward those companies that pay attention to individual intentions.

In medias res: end-of-the-semester reading list

Due to end-of-the-semester activities posting has been slow the last couple of weeks. But my exams are finished and I've submitted grades so here's a celebratory news roundup:

• Wired reported on Sergey Brin of Google: China, SOPA, Facebook Threaten the ‘Open Web’

In an interview published Sunday, Google’s co-founder cited a wide range of attacks on “the open internet,” including government censorship and interception of data, overzealous attempts to protect intellectual property, and new communication portals that use web technologies and the internet, but under restrictive corporate control.

There are “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world,” says Brin. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle."

• From Gigaom: 3 key lessons from Facebook & Zynga’s shopping spree. Among the educational insights:

The post-social world is an “attention economy.” If you don’t have engagement, you don’t have attention and if you don’t have attention – well you don’t have anything really.

• Gizmodo asks Douglas Rushkoff about his geek origins (VIDEO).
• And another Douglas Rushkoff video, this one from Motherboard TV.

• Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges are two of the plaintiffs is a lawsuit filed over the National Defense Authorization Act.

• Danah Boyd wrote a piece for the Guardian: Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us

In the 1970s, the scholar Herbert Simon argued that "in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients."

His arguments give rise both to the notion of "information overload" but also to the "attention economy". In the attention economy, people's willingness to distribute their attention to various information stimuli create value for said stimuli. Indeed, the economic importance of advertisements is predicated on the notion that getting people to pay attention to something has value.

• UW professor and author of Castells and the Media Philip N. Howard: How to Predict Political Crisis With Your News Feed:

If one wanted to track three trends likely to have the most impact on international relations over the next decade, what three trends could help us anticipate global political crises? At the top of my news feed are items about who is in jail and why, rigged elections, and social media.

• Critical media theorist Douglas Kellner on school shootings:

School shootings and domestic terrorism have proliferated on a global level. In recent months there have been school shootings in Finland, Germany, Greece, and other countries as well as the United States. Although there may be stylistic differences, in all cases young men act out their rage through the use of guns and violence to create media spectacles and become celebrities-of-the-moment.

Class dismissed, have a great summer!

Neal Gabler on 50 years of Boorstin's "The Image"

Neal Gabler has written a piece for the Los Angeles Times to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Daniel Boorstin's "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America".

What is impressive even now about "The Image" is its sweep. There is nothing timid about it. It is epic social history in which Boorstin hoped to provide a unified field theory of cultural decline. Where he led, almost every serious observer of popular culture has followed, from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to American social critic Neil Postman, to the point where today almost everyone acknowledges what Boorstin so persuasively presented: the emptiness of much of our culture. Whether we share his anger or not, we all know we live in a world of images, a world where everything seems planned for effect rather than substance, and Boorstin no doubt would have had a field day dissecting "reality" shows that have nothing to do with reality beyond the description. They are practically designed to the specifications of Boorstin's thesis.

Tupac Shakur hologram 'performs' at Coachella

During Snoop Dogg's performance at the Coachella music festival this weekend dead rap icon Tupac Shakur was "resurrected" to appear on stage as a projected image that is being called a hologram. Check out the video below. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L73tGfOam4&w=560&h=315]

The effect was created by San Diego-based AV Concepts. From a press release:

Over 100,000 fans witnessed the “return of Tupac” as a Hologram performing on stage with hip-hop music legends Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, thanks to the combination of advanced projection technology and creative expertise available only from AV Concepts. The production followed months of collaborative planning between Dr. Dre’s production company and AV Concepts’ creative and technical experts to design and engineer the special effect.

TMZ reports that Shakur's mother was "thrilled" with the hologram.

Natt Garun at Digital Trends wonders if resurrection dead musicians via this sort of technology will become a trend.

With a lot of Tupac fans still around to support the late rapper, we wonder if hologram concerts will be the next big thing to keep music alive even when the artists have passed? Considering how realistic the hologram looked, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a hologram concert of The Beatles with the still very alive Paul McCartney leading the show. Who do you think could be next to get revived for a musical performance?

Anime characters created through similar technology have already been performing in Japan.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGZ3xWfxd1A&w=560&h=315]

Last year Mariah Carey performed five concerts simultaneously via projection technology.

Appearing to the audience as if she was live in concert for the first 10 minutes of the show, her hologram form then exploded into the sky, revealing the surprise, before she reformed to lead all the countries in a moving rendition of the traditional carol ‘Silent Night’, then finishing with the all-time favourite ‘All I want for Christmas is You’.

In medias res: Semiology of Batman, economics of attention, hypodermic needles, magic bullets and more

So I've decided to headline these posts with interesting (to me) media-related content from around the web "In medias res". Not very original, I know, but "in the middle of things" seems appropriate.

• I came across the semiotics-centric site Semionaut via this post: "Semiotics and non-verbal communication". It looks to have a practitioner-oriented angle but they have some interesting analysis up.
• In other semiotics news check out this post on Arkham City art direction and semiotics from the site How Not to Suck at Game Design.

Following the semiotics goals I defined earlier, we will explore the complex network of sign language of AAA games, comic books, the Batman universe and related pop-culture, we will explore the narrative themes behind it all and we will examine how Rocksteady implemented said sign language using semiotic principles.

• I've come across what appears to be a blog for a graduate course in new media and an assignment centered on exploring new media via Marshall McLuhan.
• Some folks at the site Communication Steroids recently posted a podcast discussing the Attention Economy.
• Recently I've been delving into the literature on the political economy of communication, and that means I've been reading Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. This blog post by Safiya Noble discusses the continued relevance of Herbert Schiller.

Schiller elaborates on the ways in which, "Corporate speech has become the dominant discourse...While the corporate voice booms across the land, individual expression, at best, trickles through tiny constricted public circuits. This has allowed the effective right to free speech to be transferred from individuals to billion dollar companies which, in effect, monopolize public communication (pg. 45)." Privatization, deregulation and the expansion of market relationships are cited by Schiller as the environment in which the national information infrastructure has been eroded (pg. 46).

• Tomi Ahonen, apparently the person who declared mobile technology the 7th mass medium (who knew?), has declared augmented reality the 8th mass media. The list of media, in order of appearance:

1st mass media PRINT - from 1400s (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards)

2nd mass media RECORDINGS - from 1890s (records, tapes, cartridges, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs)

3rd mass media CINEMA - from 1900s

4th mass media RADIO - from 1920s

5th mass media TELEVISION - from 1940s

6th mass media INTERNET - from 1992

7th mass media MOBILE - from 1998

8th mass media AUGMENTED REALITY - from 2010

• This New York Times article about the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook asks: With the advent  and adoption of smartphones, who needs the web?
• Henry Giroux wrote an op-ed for truthout about the war on youth wherein he borrows a phrase from Virilio: "the Suicidal State".
• The excellent media ecology blog Figure/Ground Communication has posted an interview with media ecologist (and coordinator of the upcoming MEA convention at Manhattan College) Thom Gencarelli. The interview follows Figure/Ground's recurring format of focusing on the interviewees academic background and thoughts on the tenure system.
• Blog Literary Theory and Anglo-American Culture has a post analyzing Chris Nolan's film The Prestige through a Baudrillardian lens.
• I came across this blog post of a video intercutting the poster's commentary with a video by Sut Jhally titled Deconstructing Dreamworlds (btw, Jhally and Mark Crispin Miller appear in Morgan Spurlock's newest documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It's worth a watch, and made me want to go to Sao Paulo).
• Sherry Turkle is quoted in this USA Today article that confirms: geek is officially chic. Which I guess means it is no longer cool.
• Finally, I noticed some mentions of old-school theories of media effects in a couple of recent articles. This piece at Arab Media & Society titled Technology Cannot a Revolution Make mentions the "magic bullet" theory in discussing how Western media researchers have analyzed the Arab Spring movements.

The return to the “magic bullet” theory has led many Arab and Western media scholars to focus on the study of the role of social media in developing popular movements. Little or no attention is paid to folk and traditional communication outlets such as Friday sermons, coffeehouse storytellers (“hakawati”), and mourning gatherings of women (“subhieh”). These face-to-face folk communication vehicles play an important role in developing the Arab public sphere as well as in introducing change.

And this piece about a new sex-advice show on MTV mentions the "hypodermic needle" theory:

When you talk about "young viewers" as helpless victims who are targeted by a message and instantly fall prey to it, you are positing a pre-World-War-II era mass communications theory known as the hypodermic model.

This model saw mass media as a giant hypodermic needle that "injected" messages into our brains. And no brains were more susceptible to the injections than those of children.