seth godin on the quality of video: do you actually watch TV, dude?

It’s always entertaining when people who haven’t actually studied the media talk about the media.

Seth Godin claims that the quality of video has decreased as the amount of entertainment options has proliferated. His example? “think American Idol vs. M*A*S*H”. If you’ve read Steven Johnson’s very entertaining book “Everything Bad is Good for You“, you see the obvious flaw here.

You can’t really compare the most critically acclaimed show of one decade with the, um, least critically acclaimed show of another. A better comparison would be M*A*S*H vs. Six Feet Under, or Grey’s Anatomy, or LOST (when it was good). Or American Idol vs. Fantasy Island or Battle of the Network Stars.

I think Johnson’s analysis of politics is crap, but in TV at least he’s right-on. He explains that multi-threaded story arcs, complex plot lines, and episodes that require multiple viewing are fairly de rigueur in network dramas these days, and he’s totally right. Because TV shows make so much $$ off syndication and DVD sales, rather than airing once during the season and once during the summer, they can — and have to– be more complex in order to appeal to customers who watch them multiple times. Even sitcoms like Seinfeld or Friends (admittedly two of the best sitcoms of the last decade) are highly self-referential with complicated character developments and nods to previous episodes and in-jokes.

Anyway, regardless of all that, I’m not sure what the logic is in claiming that the increase in video (by which I’m assuming Godin means the rise of video-related entertainment options, like YouTube, video games, DVD’s, and cable shows) has led to diminished quality. That might be so if the amount of talent producing videos was finite and would then be spread too thin with increased numbers of products, but that’s simply not true. Instead, we see the rise of participatory culture and user-created content, and cool stuff like elaborate fan-produced videos and cable shows that can take more risks and push the envelope more than they could on advertiser-sponsored network television.

Actually, I think we’re living in a golden age of video content. YouTube is great for wasting time at work or adding comments to MySpace or cracking your friend up over IM, but it’s not great for immersion or emotional connection or any of the other reasons we watch movies or long-form video content like television shows. There’s definitely room for both as they fill different needs.

Finally, I asked a few people last week whether they’d rather watch movies or TV shows on DVD. Most people said the latter, and so did I. A really good television show (my favorites being Freaks and Geeks, Veronica Mars, Six Feet Under and Grey’s Anatomy) is much longer than a movie, can develop the characters in much richer ways, and can incorporate varied/riskier/more diverse viewpoints than movies can. For example, the hubbub over Brokeback Mountain is odd when you consider that gay-themed television shows, even risque ones, had been around for ages before that. The sex on the British Queer as Folk or on Six Feet Under was way more explicit than in Brokeback.

I’m babbling, but my point is: there is no diminishing in video quality, and Seth Grodin should stick to making vague claims about viral marketing. Also, he’s right about the slashing and burning of foreign news departments, but it’s not because of atomized content, it’s because of A) the pressure on TV news to be profitable and B) the pressure on newspapers to be profitable once they’re bought by Big Media. And does he /really/ think the future of foreign journalism is random bloggers flying themselves to Havana to report on stories? I need to pull some numbers on foreign bureaus before I start getting bitchy about it, but it just frustrates me that these subjects are studied — in depth — in communication and media studies departments, and yet people throw around aphorisms and opinions about them without even bothering to see if someone else has looked at the subject first.

Technorati Tags: seth godin, steven johnson, tv on dvd

WAM! Keynotes

Here’s an online radio show that provides downloads of the keynotes from last week’s Women, Action and Media conference. Worth a listen.

Maria Hinojosa: CNN correspondent, editor/host Latino USA

Caryl Rivers: Professor of Journalism at BU. I blogged this lecture, now hear it!

WAM keynote: Caryl Rivers

Caryl Rivers is a journalism professor at BU who writes awesome books around media literacy and the lying lies in mainstream media. She was the keynote at WAM this morning and was seriously great - she talked about something I’ve posted about several times, mainly the mainstream media’s penchant for studies that are (pick one) not peer reviewed, with a non-standard sample, extremely old, or the only one out of dozens that conclude a certain way. (See my post on Maureen Dowd doesn’t know how to deal with social science for an example).

She walked us through many of the mainstream media myths about women, like:

• Women who get too much education can’t get a man
• Women who work too much end up infertile
• Girls get all the attention in school while boys languish because of evil feminist teachers
• Ambitious women have lousy sex
• Women are dropping out of the workforce to take care of their kids

She examined mainstream media (NYT, Time, WaPo, etc.) stories on these issues and concluded that the majority of them used the following techniques:

• Citing a fake trend with no statistics to back it up
• Citing studies with small, non-representational samples
• Inferring causation from correlation (OMG top ten peeve)
• Backpedaling: make sweeping claims early in story and then back away from it
• Using anecdotes as evidence

Unsurprisingly, these stories usually follow a pretty similar discourse, and that’s the same one that Susan Faludi was talking about in 1990’s masterwork Backlash: women should quit working and getting an education or they won’t be able to get married and have babies. OH NOES.

Full notes after the jump.
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Digital Divide a Thing of the Past?

Front page NYT article yesterday on the end of the Digital Divide, which they define as black and hispanic people having equal access to the internet as white people. Statistics do hold up the idea that the traditional idea of the digital divide is closing, especially among young people. Honestly, though, the digital divide has never really been about race, but mostly about class and education. The class and education lines have always affected internet access, especially when it comes to where people access the internet. It’s much more difficult to work on the internet at the library or your school, not only because these places aren’t open as much, but also because they usually have terrible filtering software set up that restricts tons of content because it’s mistakenly labeled as “porn”. (You also see unequal access in rural vs. urban communities, with the former having much less access since there’s less infrastructure to connect to the internet).

But moreover, where is the data on the global digital divide? This is really where the divide becomes very significant, and this is where entire regions of people are severely restricted in their internet access. This is changing, luckily, but we’re still seeing huge gaps in access in many developing nations, and most of those gaps again, fall across class lines, where the higher educated and elite populations are the ones who do have net access in these communities.

Finally, let’s look at the gaps in technology development, where black and hispanic people are severely underrepresented, as are women of all ethnicities and races. I’ve said it again and again, technology production is a feminist issue. When you have technology that’s being used by all types of people, but is only being designed by (and in many cases for) one type of person, it’s a problem.

We should definitely continue to invest in different communities around the US to close the digital divide in terms of race, class, and location. But we also need to invest in global internet technologies, and we need to commit to superior science and math education in public education, especially in underserved communities. These are the real digital divides.

I’m Internet Famous

Here’s Businessweek’s current article about Giving good Google (you are what you post)
where I’m used as an expert source and my seriously internet famous friend Josh is the example du jour. I’m always glad to contribute to people’s burgeoning fame.

The Baton Rouge Advocate also interviewed me for a MySpace story, which is again about the implications of revealing personal information online. I come off as kind of paranoid, but I am definitely paranoid about microtargeted marketing, so I guess it fits.

(I just got back from a whirlwind 36 hour trip to Seattle.. this week should see a regular posting schedule once again!)

Torture, Guantánamo, and Presidential Power

There’s a fantastic article in this week’s New Yorker about the US government’s use of torture in the War on Terror. The article indicts the government for clearly and knowingly violating the Geneva Convention, for using techniques at Guantanamo that, if not outright torture, certainly count as cruelty:

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.

These are not techniques that were previously deemed acceptable, signalling a significant change in US policy. Whatever your thoughts on the US military, it’s fairly clear that international human rights law, like the Geneva Convention, has historically been taken quite seriously. Of course there are exceptions, and there are certainly plenty of instances of egregious military violations of human rights. But in 2002 President Bush specifically made the decision to circumvent the boundaries of the Geneva Convention, refusing to outlaw cruelty towards suspects.

Of course, the Pentagon now says that this has been taken care of, that post-Abu Ghraib the list of “approved interrogation techniques” has been significantly limited. But there is still no evidence that the military is taking the Geneva Convention as a framework in which to limit these actions, and there is no clear deliniation between acceptable and unacceptable techniques in terms of cruelty or torture.

But even more significant than this–and this is very significant– is the overall Bush Administration movement toward greatly increased and consolidated presidential power.

Lawrence Wilkerson, whom Powell assigned to monitor this unorthodox policymaking process… said, “I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation.” Cheney’s view, Wilkerson suggested, was fuelled by his desire to achieve a state of “perfect security.” He said, “I can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe, but he’ll corrupt the whole country to save it.” (Wilkerson left the State Department with Powell, in January, 2005.)

The President should NOT have the right to do whatever he wants. In fact, the idea that the President CAN do whatever he wants is in direct violation of the Constitution, the general philosophy of checks and balances in government, and is the first step towards a far less democratic and far more despotic type of government.

I’d urge you to read the whole article: coming about a week after the new photos from Abu Ghraib and the UN urging the US to shut down Guantánamo, it really shows how incidents of torture of “terror suspects” are NOT, by ANY means, isolated incidents of a few people acting inappropriately. Rather, they are systemic, condoned from the top-down, and part of a larger discourse of expanded presidential power that should concern all Americans, no matter what their political leanings. In case you can’t tell, I’m really, really bothered by this, and I’m trying to figure out if there is anything that the citizenry can do about it.

The problem with fair and balanced

This isn’t news to anyone else in Communication, but I just wanted to state for the record that the American tradition of providing “balanced” reporting does more harm than good. Say I am doing a story on global warming. Say 98% of reputable scientists agree that global warming is a serious concern. However, as a journalist I have to provide a “balanced” view. So I drag out some crackpot petroleum-funded scientitian to give the “other side”, which represents about 2% of the actual debate, but 50% of the coverage. So an issue that is for all intents and purposes settled becomes a debate. This happens all the time. Don’t get me started that “sources” are like 75% of the time people in government, politics, or law enforcement, when there are plenty of issues that regular people are concerned about that most people in government, politics, or law enforcement are not going to talk about on television or in the newspaper.

Related links:

• Fantastic post from realclimate.org about public discourse around evolution & global warming: similarities and differences.
• The very well-written decision in the Dover Panda Trial. (It gets really interesting around section E1.)
• New Yorker Q&A on the Dover Trial. They did a really great and comprehensive piece on the trial a few months ago, but it’s not available online.