Jenkins: Entertainment isn't all Bad

            While a little more densely written and laborious in making his points, Jenkins walks a line very similar to Postman. They both see how the technologies of entertainment are being amassed against the thinking individual. Technology is a trap; a highly attractive distraction that can be enjoyed but carries with it the potential to imprison our minds. Much like The Matrix film series and convergent media project, we run the risk of becoming slaves to our technologies, so enthralled by the flashing lights and buzzing whistles, we are as likely as not to completely miss our own incarceration.

            Where Postman is looking broadly at the elements of television (and by extension the elements that exist in modern media) that keep us coming back, Jenkins delves into the realm of social media, examining how these amusements have become central to the creation of online communities. Through examinations of television phenomenon like Survivor and American Idol, Jenkins is able to argue that the community is as important a part of the viewing as the show itself. Survivor gave rise to “spoiling” communities, groups of people who combined their knowledge and time to attempt to guess the winner of the game. As Jenkins says: “What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic” (Jenkins 64). This is the glue that holds the spoiler community together; it’s not that anyone of them or even all of them are experts in any particular way, but that they all desire to learn something unknown, in this case the “survivor”. The search for this knowledge forms a community, fostered by the powerful communication potential of the world wide web.

            Jenkins restates all too often his points, making reading his work a little tedious. After the first couple of chapters, I felt as if I were being told many, many things I already knew. Of course Survivor and American Idol are wildly successful shows; they draw in the masses by making them feel like a part of the show. Of course The Matrix doesn’t make sense. I knew all that, if only in a vague way. What Jenkins does, and it took me some time to realize this, is say it so often and in so many different ways that it becomes impossible to ignore. Media are converging; different forms are meeting and blending together. Our habits are changing: because of this, the way we think about and form communities are changing too.

            This is a point Jenkins leaves me with most thoroughly. While I had always just written those television shows off as more bad TV, I had failed to notice how strong the community of followers were. Utilizing the Internet to generate virtual communities, formed around a central interest (in these cases entertainment programs) is a powerful new marketing tool. While there are those who will go on and on about the virtues of a connected world, corporations are wasting no time in turning this connectivity into profitability.

            So while we all enjoy the benefits of the Internet, there is still the looming presence of corporate America tossing ads at us. Even as I write this, my Facebook page is open with ads along the right margin. And my last Google search features “sponsored links” at the top of the list of search results. This corporate sponsorship may allow the Internet to operate under our capitalist system, but as we become desensitized to the constant stream of advertising and marketing we risk losing sight of the benefits of convergent culture. Jenkins makes this point plain in his closing chapter with the True Majority example: “True Majority’s goal was to get these ideas into the broadest possible circulation” (Jenkins 225). The Internet and the culture that is forming around it are about just that; utilizing any and all forms of media to make one’s message or art or music or interests known to the world, were these things can be admired, discussed, built upon and otherwise benefit society.

            Jenkins is telling us through repeated examples that our media are meeting, blending and becoming something new. No longer does a movie need only exist in that 120 minute span inside the darkened theater. We can log on to learn more about the movie, find fan fiction, tweet about what we like and dislike, become immersed in a gaming world set parallel to the events in the film and so much more. Media experiences are becoming larger, grander and more in depth experiences, all the while filtering us past numerous forms of advertising. This is a relationship that, while not really different than past means of getting at entertainment, has the potential to give voice to so many more individuals. Companies that produce convergent media are opening a door to fans and critics, giving them all an opportunity to participate, dissect and continue to enjoy the media they already love.

            This message is what I see as Jenkins’ lasting impact. While Postman poignantly makes us aware of how much influence and control entertainment has on our lives, Jenkins goes to great lengths to demonstrate how powerful newer entertainment technology can be in creating and maintaining communities of vastly separated individuals. Even if these people are coming together to deepen their entertainment experiences, they attest to the immense potential the Internet contains for building community. This is perhaps the great benefit of entertainment that Postman was unable to see in 1985: while entertainment is thoroughly distracting it also holds the potential to form diverse new communities. This kind of community building holds the key to democracy’s survival in an ever increasingly corporate world. If the average person is going to make themselves heard, producing fan fiction and participating in online debates are where they will learn to do so.

Cafe Press and Jenkins

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product2.aspx?number=670336754

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/product2.aspx?number=669067019

These are links to cafepress.com, featuring a couple of buttons I made up. Nothing overly complicated, but I love buttons so I decided to try a applying quick bits of satire in button form. The “corporate party” one is my favorite, blending the elephant and the donkey as they so clearly have become a single entity in political terms. I wish I was better with photo/video editing so that the image would appear a little cleaner and more proportional, but I did the best I could with Microsoft’s pre-loaded software.

The other button is just something I tend to say with a fair amount of regularity: I get the impression that a great many people try to think on the go, not really going over the things they say or contribute to FB, Twitter and other Net outlets. So many times I hear what someone has said or see what they have posted and have to say to them “stop and think”. I know I’m as guilty of this as the next, but that made creating the button as reasonable as my urge to push the notion on others. I wanted to remind myself to take my own advice, a button seemed like the perfect space to do this in and, as mentioned above, I really enjoy buttons.

I like cafepress.com ’s customized item idea. It’s a really great way to create an interactive buying experience. Along Jenkin’s line of thinking, this is exactly the direction our culture is moving in. We want to consume, but also to contribute and have our contributions consumed with an equal gusto. It doesn’t matter to cafepress what we actually buy, so long as we buy from them. By giving us a measure of freedom in our product, our purchase has become something personal. This is an ingenious and seemingly obvious marketing move. And it’s powered, at its base, by the connectivity of the Internet. Cafepress.com offers us more than a vendor; it offers us a community, a place to contribute something unique.

This is Jenkin’s argument when he is dissecting the media phenomena Survivor and American Idol. These two series transcend the standard television program, relying on viewer participation and an interest that expands beyond the hour long weekly production. Both have created and foster enormous online followings, from fans to doubters to speculators. All of these types of viewers create unique communities, making the shows into more than simple entertainment. The meeting of old and new media creates a comprehensive and potent new form of marketing.

Still Amusing Ourselves to Death

            Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is simply one of the best ways to frame the purpose and underlying goal of television and in a larger sense, media as a whole. In arguing for Huxley’s view of negative utopia, Postman is making plain the many and varied flaws our modern world of non-stop entertain and distraction contains. I first discovered Postman five years ago during a conversation about Orwell’s 1984. In talking to a friend about my fears for the future of our system of governance, I speculated on how wrong and at once right Orwell was: we are subjects to a strict set of controls, but they are nearly invisible, unlike Orwell’s blatant and forceful ideas of censorship and social modeling. As we talked, this friend suggested I read “Amusing …” to get a modern perspective on the phenomenon of invisible control that takes place all around us. I’d never read the book before, so I eagerly grabbed a copy.

            I was utterly engrossed by that first reading, taking in the entire book in the matter of a couple days. I very distinctly remember telling everyone I knew about how important it was to read this work. I felt personally ashamed that I’d been reading for more than ten years and had never come across Postman. I sought to rectify this by spreading his message and thoughts to anyone I knew who was willing to listen. I still am stunned by my father’s solution to my endless droning about how awful television is – he would simply turn up the volume and ignore me. Talk about feeding fuel to the fire!

            Postman reinforces and makes clear the damage a media culture does to the wellbeing and thoughtfulness of a society. In the early chapters, breaking down the many phases of culture American’s have gone through in route to our current state of extreme distraction, Postman makes a point that I have repeated and heard repeated numerous times: “the medium is the metaphor”. Postman argues that “[e]ach medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility” (Postman, 10). The mode of discourse for the written word is thoughtful and inflective. The reader must patiently process each word, sentence and paragraph, forming for themselves ideas based off the author’s own. This process is collective and ever expanding; a reader can react and respond with their own writing or oral argument for or against the original author’s, opening a conversation that can lead to deeper understanding for all parties.

            Television, and to a large extent the growing medium of the personal computer, offer a different sort of medium. Television in particular is a one sided delivery system for media. There is little to no conversation – the viewer watches what the media producers offer, is either entertained or is not, and decides whether to continue viewing based on this. There is little room for conversation or the meeting of minds in a television culture. And since television is a far more accessible and simple mode of delivery, individuals who lack the stomach for deep reading and consideration can simply plunk down in front of the TV and become immersed in what they delude themselves into think is culture, information and ultimately, entertainment.

            The effect of television on culture is unmistakable: people are less actively interested in confronting what is actually being presented. Television viewing is a one-way street, from the producers to the viewer with little to no recourse for the viewer’s input. Society becomes less involved and more entertained. It’s a frightening state of being, but the simple, addictive pleasure of being a consumer, a viewer, is hard to argue with. I know I personally grew up on the television. Sesame Street, a particular target of Postman’s, played an enormous role in my childhood. It was a means of casting off responsibility for my parents, who were less interested in raising a knowledgeable child than in enjoying their own opportunities for distraction. Sesame Street, proclaiming itself a potent use of the television medium in teaching a generation, may have imbued certain amounts of knowledge and problem solving skills, basic math and the like, but at the cost of our attention spans.

            The first time reading Postman, I was appalled by what he had to say about Sesame Street. I felt as if a huge part of my childhood was being shown in a new, disturbing light. If I wasn’t learning basic math and social etiquette from Big Bird and Oscar, what was I learning? It would seem I was predominantly learning how to be a good consumer of television, willing being absorbed into a culture of distraction and amusement, while fooling myself into believing it to be the best possible way to learn. How could it now be? The television wouldn’t lie to me, would it?

            Yet this is what Postman is telling us in “Amusing …”, that television is lying to us. It is a medium of distraction and entertainment, feigning importance and acting as if it has the answers to our problems. As earlier technologies like the telegraph showed us, the quality of information has taken a back seat to the abilities of the medium. How much information can the television contain? How far reaching can it be? How quickly can it extend across the globe? These questions have become the talk of media, with little or no regard for what is being extended. Postman puts it quite well: “in a sea of information, there is very little of it to use” (Postman, 67). We care more about how much information we can access and less about how that information affects us.

            This danger of subsuming knowledge for amusement should be at the front of everyone’s mind as we delve deeper into the “information age”. Technology marches on, with computers growing exponentially smaller and faster with each year. I can hold in my hands via a smart phone more information than people of a hundred years ago could hope to amass in a life time. The flip side of this is that I could not possible have need of that vast an amount of information and without a clear use for this knowledge, I flounder and find myself distracted without applying any of it.

            Perhaps most pertinent to our current state of being is Postman’s ninth chapter, “Reach Out and Elect Someone”. In this election year with corporate funding of politicians at an unheard of height, we run the risk of being amused into electing a politician without even thinking about how that politician might affect the issues that pertain to our lives.

Hooray for Twitter

            I love Twitter. I discovered it last fall and very, very slowly have begun to check it with regularity. At first I was very much against the spirit of the thing: condensing a thought into 140 characters seemed like an extreme dumbing down of our already dumbed down conversation. And there is the plethora of banal tweets that exist out there. Does anyone really need to know what a celebrity is doing with their day or when their dog takes a crap? Of course not. That piece of Twitter is the fat that had to be trimmed away to find the substance that this social platform is capable of.

            The most relevant thing I have found through Twitter is political information. I often have a fluid and varying schedule, making it difficult to sit and watch the news at a set time or to be on top of the daily papers. But Twitter is always there, always bringing to the forefront the newest information. In our world of constant connection and ever changing political and social structure, being up-to-date takes on a new immediacy. Twitter offers this immediacy and does so in fast short hand.

            As Postman points out in this week’s reading, media generation, beginning with the telegraph and growing into our modern Internet, insists on large scale conversations because the technology is designed to cover great distances. But such enormous conversations dictate that the participants be further removed from each other, lest they begin to converse about things of immediate importance to their small corner of the world.

            From what I have seen, Twitter does a better job than other social media when it comes to bridging the gap between distance and immediacy. Twitter is written in a language nearly unrecognizable to the uninitiated (it took me months to make sense of it and I still get confused at times) but it is so simple and elegant in the amount of information that can be dispersed. If our conversations are to remain worldwide, invariably the new language of the Tweet (or some similar short hand) will be the standard.

            Lastly I will bring in Dawkins’ well-known concept of memes – thoughts and ideas that “infect” the mind. The segment from Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” defines memes and further begins to delve into the way in which these thought viruses spread through a population as connected as ours. As Dawkins describes them, memes are “units of cultural transmission, units of imitation” – by this definition Twitter is the perfect vehicle for propagating memes. It is a fast, versatile and mobile platform that doesn’t beg us to know who starts the idea or even who shares the idea. A Tweet occurs, is re-Tweeted and spreads, is re-Tweeted some more and like a virus, all of us exposed are infected. Ideas that in the past might have died very shortly after their inception can now survive on the web via Twitter for much longer, infecting individuals with distance being no hindrance.

            As I said at the start of this post, I love Twitter. The information is not always relevant or useful, but who wants everything we learn to be such? Twitter appears to me to be one of the most versatile and likely to survive propagators of memes we’ve encountered yet. It’s made a believer out of me – and I’m perhaps one of the most adamant skeptics of new media – because Twitter can offer the best of both sides of the information overload. We can find both useful and pertinent information alongside trivial and silly information. And we can filter it so easily that our precious time is hardly wasted.

Internet Memes and Postman

            Dan Dennett’s TED talk serves as a nice introduction to the concept of memes. Most significantly for me, as someone who has read some Dawkins and knows at least of the concept behind memes, was Dennett’s assertion that memes exist and spread like viruses. Wikipedia defines memes as “a unit for carrying cultural ideas”. This seems closely in line with Dawkins descriptions of the word and the influence they have on groups of people. Memes are ideas that replicate and spread amongst humans because, uniquely, we care about ideas.

            Since this class is centered on the Internet, I went to Google and began searching different descriptions and phrases surrounding memes. Over and over I was bombarded with sites featuring “Internet memes”, while little academic or scholarly work appeared in the first pages of my search results. When going to Wikipedia to learn more about an Internet meme, I found the definition they provided interesting: “to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet”. The Wiki entry goes on to state how much narrower an Internet meme is than memes in general, as they only describe a single occurrence of memetic (is that the right word?) transmission. But they are overwhelmingly the most popular kind of meme when one searches the web.

            As it appears to me, the Internet has become a vast means of proliferating memes, something that has likely been occurring from the very first moment of the Internet. That the population at large recently has begun defining memes as specifically “Internet memes” does little to change that fact that the web is essentially a breeding ground for, as Dennett might say, “thought viruses”.

            I did find one nice article about memes, from the Smithsonian website: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Defines-a-Meme.html?c=y&page=1 . James Gleick, in rather blunt and concise language (particularly for him) defines memes in the contemporary culture. The article looks at a view specific medium for transmitting memes, such as music and catchphrases, and then focuses in on the way that information and words have become wedded in our minds. The greater argument that Gleick seems to be making is that we have become so immersed in a world of information, a world of memes, that we don’t even see them swirling around us, influencing our every thought and decision.

            I also spent some time clicking through various Internet meme sites, like knowyourmeme.com and memegenerator.net. While I guess these sites do promote singular ideas, centered on repetitious images, they do so in a haphazard, comic way. It is frightening to consider that we are infected with ideas, addicted to the infectious nature of ideas, and simultaneously overloaded with these terrible, degenerate ideas. The Internet, as it has done with so much of culture, has twisted the concept of memes into ultra-fast jokes, one-liners that at once define our culture and make light of it.

            Memes seem to be dominating our culture in an overt, almost comic fashion thanks to the Internet’s vast powers of proliferation. A thought can literally “go viral” overnight, spreading just like a disease throughout the minds of Internet users. This is a powerful and potentially dangerous facet of online life that is just beginning to get the recognition and consideration it deserves. If we, as information consumers, are not aware of the substance of our information, we lose a great deal of our ability to wield that information. When a social issue becomes an online joke it loses its teeth, becoming a mere caged animal for us to marvel at and move on from. As Postman’s title predicts, we are not engaging information, we are simply being amused to death.

Check this out! I made something with Youtube!

 I can’t say it’s something I’m particularly excited or thrilled with, but I’ve never done anything with Youtube prior, so as a first attempt, I think it is at least passable.

I find my Youtube experiences entirely centered on viewing; I’m not one to eagerly create video, nor do I see the opportunities to film interesting or amusing moments and leap upon them. This is a major short-coming on my part. I want to be connected and part of the tech-savvy world, to be on top of the latest trends and products, in short, to be in the know. But when it comes to contributing to that “know”, I find I would rather post to Facebook a description or use Twitter to send out a link. Video is something I have an aversion to. It’s partially that I dislike my voice and don’t feel photogenic; it’s also that I enjoy the editing process that writing allows for more naturally. Youtube has a feeling of raw, uncensored and unedited contributions that simply don’t jive with the way I see myself creating media.

That said, I agonized over this short and simple slideshow for far longer than I should have. I’m quite certain a BC film student could make something similar in a matter of minutes, for me it was the work of hours and fair amount of stress. If anything, this exercise has taught me where I land on Youtube – as a viewer, more fully than I had realized before. I won’t complain about having done this, any exercise is worth doing at least once, but I fully appreciate my lack of video skill.

Bringing this back to Postman, I find myself a little frightened. Well, I always find myself frightened as I finish his book, but when looking at it in conjunction with this assignment; I have a growing fear that the medium I prefer to produce in will not be entertaining enough for the masses in the near future. If a video of boy being bitten by his little brother can achieve half a billion views, how can I hope to compete? Or should I even be trying to? People, it seems, are dying to be amused, first by their televisions and now increasingly by user generated content like Youtube. While I think the latter medium is more valuable and honest, it’s still a form of entertainment that distracts.

Youtube proves Postman correct: we are amusing ourselves to death. While this newer form of media is less obviously a tool of moneyed elite to distract the masses, it none-the-less has the same affect. Youtube seems to me to be the next generation of television: a television made for the people, by the people, to distract the people. The silly becomes the sensational and we all have ample access to be amused.