Acxiom scares me. It is everything that we are fighting and hating about the data mining and personal information debacle of our own government, but outside of any purview, controls or transparency. They have the LEGAL RIGHT to know all of this information on me, my family, and my life, data that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago, and is now completely for sale to the highest bidder. My government has to delete information on me, and I can audit it and obtain it, through the FOIA, but I will never be able to see what this company is selling about me without buying it myself, and even then I have no control, whatsoever, on this information, how it used, or who has it. Even my own government has the right to buy this information about me from this company, although they, themselves, are not allowed to store it themselves. Narrowcasting by companies, politicians, my own government, with no way to force them to reciprocate. Bad.
“It’s not about what you want to tell the public, it is about what they want to hear” -This statement by Frank Lunz was brilliantly covered in the Frontline piece, as the line between redefining an issue and obfuscating the issue continues to blur….Death tax? Bad…but the public doesn’t know that it doesn’t kick in until the amount is over 10.5 million dollars!
Climate change sounds like something normal, a natural occurrence, and obfuscate the cause implicit in the actual term Global Warming. Language matters, of course, but the deliberate use of language to cover what the term actually means? Creating lies.
“I know I’m wasting half of my ad dollars, I just don’t know which half….” is a humorous axiom, shared by Bob Garfield of On The Media fame, used to explain the confusion in the advertisement world. As I read my previous paragraphs on this subject, I am clearly a jaded, angry consumer, tired of language, images and video being manipulated to, well manipulate me. How, then, does anyone sell to me? I choose to live, and thrive, in a world of capitalism, and yet I bristle at the darker elements of that system. Is the answer, perhaps, companies who are “flawsome”?
While reading the TrendWatching.com article, I really clicked with the companies who I feel are human, flawed and responsive in a transparent and authentic way. Perhaps this is where corporate advertising dollars need to flow, in ways I will actually respect and respond to in a positive way.
First, I know I am biased; I have never really watched reality TV, (unless one can claim cooking shows are a form of reality TV…love those!) and have always had a negative view of the genre, and, honestly, the people who watch it. I just could not understand how, using what is the worst about our humanity, greed, lust for power and fame, envy, and inane superficiality, could be worth my time, or anyone’s time, for that matter. I would like to say that studying Reality TV in this unit has changed my mind, or opened my eyes, or made me begrudgingly begin to understand…but it hasn’t.
Maybe because so much of what I love about TV (and media, in general) is the stylized, unreal aspects of what I watch. The shows I love are CLEARLY not grounded in reality, although they explore aspects of our current reality through a lens of fantasy. Dr. Who, Firefly, Pushing Daisies, Supernatural, and The Big Bang Theory are all shows that are far away from reality, who use fantasy or fantastical premises as a framework for their stories.
Not that reality TV shows don’t concoct their stories of reality. Nsenga K. Burton stated in her blog post, “To keep it real, there isn’t much reality in many reality shows.” So much of reality TV is just a lazy person’s way of contriving a show. Instead of writers investing in invention, creativity, imagination or originality, they use preconceived constructs “reality”, manipulate the “reality” , and finally negotiate the “reality”. What seems often like exploitation, well, is. Kathleen Parker, in her Washington Post article “Can’t We Do Better Than Honey-Boo-Boo?”, states that “Responsible parents steered their children away not only to protect them but also because, we were taught, it wasn’t right to enjoy the misfortunes or disadvantages of others. No such lessons seem to prevail today. If we don’t revel in the hilarity of poor, uneducated people, neither do we protest their exploitation. Our silence conveys approval while ratings disprove objection. Culturally, we are all complicit in the decline of community values.”
Jennifer Pozner, in her blog, does not sugar coat this complicity “…and where’s the outrage about the “Honey Boo Boo” precursor, “Toddlers and Tiaras,” hypersexualizing kindergarteners in itty-bitty bikinis, Vegas burlesque costumes and, in the case of one 4-year-old, the outfit of the prostitute played by Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”? These prepubescent girls cannot possibly understand or consent to what TLC is doing to and with their images, making “Toddlers and Tiaras” the most exploitative reality show of the decade. Viewers are complicit in celluloid child abuse.”
One of the realities of which I was reminded in this unit is that television is an economic tool, one used to generate dollars through entertainment, not a system for making our culture and community better. As Mark Andrejevic pointed out in his blog, “The reason reality TV is not going away any time soon is that its production fits neatly with the logic of the emerging surveillance economy. It provides relatively cheap and flexible programming for a massively multichannel era by inviting cast members to submit to monitoring as a form of participation, self-expression and even therapy.” Kirsten Acuna, in her article “When Did The Learning Channel Stop Teaching?” pointed out that the original TLC was sold in 1991 for 31.5 million dollars, because this is what commercial television is about- dollars. But dollars rarely is a good indicator of quality, nor does free market capitalism offer the best way to determine what is the “best”. If dollars were the landmark for great writing, then the entire genre of Romance novels would constitute the current height of literary greatness.
The one show I did watch was The Willis Family on TLC. It follows a large family of singers and song writers, from their large home where they live to the road and tour bus where they travel. Interesting combination of the performing arts and reality TV, of the creative process, family obligation and financial realities of being a modern performer, all tied together in a show supporting supposed family values.
Not really my cup of tea, but interesting.
So, here is a list of reality TV shows from the Acuna article, and the reality show I might like to see take its place.
“Big Sexy” should be Powerful Sexy- Real women of power and prestige explore what sexy is for them, and how they are sexy.
“Breaking Amish” should be The Amish Are Broken- a show about how simplified morality and stifling adaptation to change has made this group not only out of touch, but has made them irrelevant.
“Craft Wars” hosted by Tori Spelling should be Crap Wars- Uninspired, unimaginative crafts are hurled at opposing teams via catapults, Monty Python-style.
“I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” should be I Wanted This Baby- Women and their partners discuss how they planned and built a life and system that allows them to have and raise a baby to its fullest potential.
“Little Chocolatiers” should be Bathe Me In Chocolate- Title says it all.
I am a product of the internet age, a Millennial with mad eSkills. I roam the internet, scour media, consume music, video, even poetry and bad jokes, all on-line, in real-time. But radio, a vestige of not only my grandparents but my great-grandparents, still warps and influences me.
Act One- The Story of Radio
Radio, despite its decline and Frankenstein-like rise from the internet flames that torch it daily, continues to illuminate, frustrate and dictate the culture it flows through and around. There is an intimacy about radio, as Ira Glass stated in the This American Life podcast of April 24, 1998. He continued in his prologue to share that when certain radio personalities go off air, it feels as if he is losing a friend, not a feeling he has when an television personality leaves the TV airwaves. Radio is ephemeral and transitory, with the moments of a radio transmission coming and going like waves on a beach, never to return.
Pirate Radio- radio of the people by the people for the people, and hidden from “the Man”, is a great example of this transitory, mysterious and momentary quality of radio. When I hang out in San Luis Obispo (the best BBQ and street party on Earth!), there is a great college radio station, totally devoid of commercialism, that has seemingly real people playing what they want to play and saying pretty much what they want to say, much like DJ-Funky-1 in the Little Havana section of Miami. Never heard the same song, or the same content, ever from this station.
The Lowell Association for the Blind broadcast of Gordon and Mike reading the local news and commenting in their middle-American, Mid-Western conceit, warmed my heart, and made me nostalgic for the radio of my family’s past. My great grandmother, Thelma, had her own radio show for years in the Kansas City area, a mix, I’m told, of music (she played piano and cornet) and talk and gossip of the area. A real local hit. And, I imagine, sounding much like Gordon and Mike. The storyteller made a connection with Prairie Home Companion (a family favorite) and the Lake Wobegon section, except for Gordon and Mike, the men were not always strong, and the kids below average.
Ida Hackele, the despondent DJ from the past, who was swept up and left behind when classic rocks stations simply played music, and liners, the small hooks used by the DJ’s to keep listeners connected to the station, made her feel completely disengaged from her audience, unable to connect with them in any real way. She left radio, and can only find radio as she knows and loves it from a Canadian station she tracks via Yahoo. Is this what radio has become?
Act Two- Radio In My Life
As I stated before, my family has roots in radio- not only did my great grandmother have a radio show, but my grandfather sold records from local Kansas City artists to the radio stations, as a A and R man for a Kansas City record label. My dad developed one of the original student-created podcast for education in the early 90’s. And I have always been listening to radio.
For many years, my family lived in the mountains above Riverside County, and we drove anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half each way to the school where my parents taught and I and my brother attended. I listened to a radio pair, Mark and Brian, each morning, a mix of comedy bits, commentary on life, and music I would learn to love (for example, Queen!). On the way home, we would listen to NPR.
Once podcasts of our favorite NPR shows became available, our family would listen each week to our favorites- Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, On The Media, Science Friday, Car Talk, and more recently, The TED Radio Hour and The Infinite Monkey Cage. I continue to drive long distances (Humboldt to Riverside is a minimum of 12 hours) and continue to love these shows, as well as NPR news.
I am really done, I think, with “classic” rock stations (I loved the distinction that Ida made in her interview- butt-rock, soft-rock, hard-rock, classic-rock) and found myself listing more and more to country radio stations. Probably the same demographics-driven play list, but the songs are new to me, as we the radio personalities.
The V-103 formula for scientific programming of radio, to hit specific demographics, seems the future of Radio. I was so disheartened to learn in the This American Life podcast that even NPR music stations, from jazz to classical, use demographic and audience-driven play lists. This scientific use of data to create playlists is endemic, even in my internet life. Pandora, my favorite way to listen to music, is simply driven by algorithms. I found the article about keeping Pandora financially viable, especially when the big internet player, Apple, began its own streaming music service. A more recent update of that story informs us that Pandora is buying “real” radio stations to lower their subscription costs for music, and that Apple is not streaming their service for free, and is not directly competing with Pandora after all.
This leaves the future of radio rather murky. I believe that our love of music is going nowhere, and with the taste of control that streaming radio can give listeners now the way my generation experiences radio a norm, the trick will be in monetizing the delivery of music. If Pandora, with millions of listeners, can not turn a profit, than streaming may change in ways I and my generation do not like, or can control. I do love the eclecticism of today’s radio, as my generation embrace artist from across different styles, backgrounds and generations, all made possible by streaming and the digital music revolution.
When it came to picking an artist this week, I wanted to pick the band that was most influential in my life and then work from there. There was only one band I would say shaped my childhood and still is prevalent to my life after all these tears and that band Queen. Queens heart, Freddy Mercury has been a hero of mine since I was a child. I was introduced at such a young age that I honestly do not remember music without them. My family still has a tradition that every holiday we blare Queen tracks, Freddy Mercury’s golden voice and Brian May’s ground shaking guitar solos residing through every room in the house. As I grew up, the albums A Day at the Races, A Night at the Opera, and News of the World became my go to hangout and study music. My connection may seem ridiculous or over exaggerated, but Queen really has played a huge role in my life in many ways.
Productivity
The productivity of Queen is clearly shown by the bands incredible sales, effect on the entire music industry, and the continual impact they have had on pop culture. No song better surmises all three of these faucets of Queen than the famous Bohemian Rhapsody, which won two Grammys, is UK’s third best selling single of all time, and is consistently put in the top songs of all times lists. Its ground breaking sound and accompanying video changed music forever and is still an important part of our pop culture.
I believe that the productivity of Queen is almost self evident, so I will move on to the next two categories…
Honesty
So, is the music Queen produced honest? For me it is Freddy’s sincerity and passion in his music that has always driving force in his music when you listen to songs such as The Show Must Go On …
Mercury was not afraid to write his songs about anything and every thing, and rarely let a certain genre pin down what he
wanted to say. On of my favorite example of this is the Queen song, All Dead, All Dead…
Though Mercury’s pain is undeniable in this song, at first listen one might think this song is another run-of-the-mill, woe-filled song about a lost lover. But the heart-filled track is actually about the death of Freddy’s cat. The song Death on Two Legs is another example, a song capturing the anger, hurt, and doubt a cheating boyfriend caused the singer (and he holds nothing back).
I think when it comes to the honesty of Queens’s music, it is hard to question the raw emotion the band put into every song.
Influence
Though I vehemently believe that the Queen had honest, moving lyrics, that ranged greatly in topic and had unquestionable influence in pop culture, there is no question that Queen has seen its far share of commercial use and corporate influence.
They wrote the soundtrack for the cult classic Flash Gordon:
Their songs have been used in other films and commercials too. Such as my personal favorite:
The Pepsi Commercial featuring Brittany Spears, Pink, Beyonce, and Enrique Iglesias:
I myself am not much of a magazine reader. The closet to the magazine buzz is having a subscription to Cooks Magazine, which is a completely recipe and skill based cooking magazine. So when I set out this week to study and learn more about the world of magazines, I was not enthusiastic to say the least. To be perfectly honest, I find most gossip magazines annoyingly self occupied and fashion magazines have little to no connections to my life, and to me are very boring. But I was surprised to find that I did find, at the very least, one of the articles very interesting this week, and the one I thought least likely to perk my interest at that.
The Browbeat article, “A Brief History of Cosmo Covers” by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo and J. Bryan Lowder was very interesting to me in an unexpected way. It is how these covers so clearly reflected, and perhaps shaped, our society through out the last century that amazed me. Not only did this article bring to life Helen Gurley Brown (Cosmopolitan’s editor-in-chief for 32 years) hand in leading the sexual revolution by, “making it acceptable for young women to have sex and enjoy it without guilt,” something I am definitely very grateful for, but she also kept the magazine relevant to the quickly changing times. The first cover the article features is from May 1896 and features titles as demure as, “Hilda Stanford A California Story” and “The Progress of Science.” By April 1956, the cover begins to reflect more beautification issues and celebrity interviews, with an article entitled, “Are we becoming a race of flabby giants?” and an interview with Doris Day.
By the 1970 we start to see Brown’s hand in the article as the covers begin to discuss the topics of sex and woman issues. By 1980 the covers featured articles entitled, “Why Most Men are Still Attached to Dumb Women but Times are Changing” and “Is Marital Fidelity Still a Must? Pros and Cons of the Secret Affair”
and “5 Smart Working Women Tell How They Handle their Money.” These Titles are not only straight forward about the issues woman faces but answer controversial issues that were arising at the time, such as morality, infidelity, woman empowerment, and woman’s place in a changing world. Brown obviously had a huge effect on the famous magazine, Cosmo’s 2012 cover still reflects her hand. The current magazine covers are, in the author’s view, “Perhaps over insistent on the sexiness of its sex articles, but the essential aesthetic that Brown pioneered so many decades ago remains in place.”
The piece, “All Good Print Magazines Go to Digital Heaven… Or Do They?” explains why Cosmo is still a relevant and growing magazine empire. This article tells about the deaths of magazines like Teen People and Gourmet in whirlwind fashion. But the main point of the article is that it is not the move to internet but rather, “When you loose contact with the people who matter, your customers, and treat them as numbers instead of members of this community of experiences you have created for them you’re going to lose.” This is what I believe Cosmo has excelled at, especially in the years Brown lead the magazine. Even though they do not generally perk my intrest, they have been successful with keeping up with the times and focusing on the problems their readers face.
Through out my life I have had three distinct relationships with books. When I was young, I excelled at school –I had perfect scores, was a model student, ect.- in all subjects except reading and writing. I failed every spelling test, was chastised for my terrible handwriting and my miserable tendency to flip my letters and numbers, was utterly mortified to have to read aloud in front of the class, and never finished my reading assignments in time. It didn’t take long for my teachers to have me tested for dyslexia, but having a title to what I saw as a great failing in myself just made me feel more hopeless about my inability to keep up with my class mates when it came to reading and writing. Though my writing grades improved drastically when the teacher had me tell them what I wanted to write, and my hand writing slowly began to improve with lots of hours of repetitive work, my reading and spelling skills continued to lag wretchedly behind my class mates. Because of my utter hatred for my perceived failings, I developed a panic induced dislike of all books. In this early stage of my relationship with books, novels only represented the thing I hated most about myself; they taunted and mocked me, and I hated them because of it.
Then, in fifth grade, I decided I would not let my dyslexia hold me back from where I wanted to go in life. I decided that I would no longer be shackled by some title that meant I could not, could never. So I picked the most daunting series my grade level offered at the time: Harry Potter. I promised myself that I would do anything to finish the whole series by the time I went to middle school. Thus I turned a new chapter (no pun intended) in my relationship with books. They became the mountain I would clime, the land I was going to conquer. Those Harry Potter books were my struggle filled obsession. I worked endlessly at my goal, reading them nonstop, despite my frustration and headaches and bedtimes. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone was the very first real book that I ever finished on my own. Soon the books grew from a self-imposed regimen to a heart-filled passion.
After I finally finished all 7 Harry Potter books I was utterly hooked. Next came The Giver and Illusions, then Aragon and The Hobbit, then WatershipDown, Golden Compass, Fahrenheit 451… And then the final stage of my relationship with books had completely grew into one of love. This transformative story of my relationship with books sounds embarrassingly like that of a cheesy romantic comedy, where the players are convinced they don’t like each other, then they are forced into impossible circumstances with each other, and, in the end, realize their true love. Like I said, embarrassingly cheesy. But this long and complicated affair with books has given me a deep appreciation for books and authors of all genres.
That is why I was very relieved to read “Some Good News from the World of Books.” Like most of us, I had heard the whispers that our beloved books were “dying.” But, according to Mcsweeney’s Editors, “Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high.” The statistics and shear numbers clearly back these findings even as the ebook becomes a new entity in the book industry.
Unlike other book lovers though, I do not buy into the take over of the ebook scare. Though James Warner’s piece, “The Future of Books” was both charming and entertaining, I believe I disagree with the underlying idea that what everything we know of books will disintegrate, only to be replaced with the technology and social networking we surround ourselves with. I believe that throughout time humans have loved one thing: stories. Humans have participated in the output and intake of stories for as long as we can remember. The only thing that has changes is the medium and availability of certain stories. Whether it is being told vocally, on the pages of a book, or on the screen of a computer, humans will always need stories, and the medium through which we get them is rather irrelevant in my opinion.
It is for these reasons that I did not agree with Ken Auletta’s argument that low priced ebooks some how lessens the literary value of a book and hurts the entire writing industry in the New Yorker Podcast, “Are Cheap E-books Bad for Readers?” First, I believe writing, like reading, is an act of love and heart, not just profits. His argument implies that great works of literature only came about because booming book markets or hopes of making large amounts of money – both of which history and almost all classics will show you is not true in the least. Not only do I not find eBooks a threat to the future of reading, but I believe having more availability of literature to the masses is always a good thing- another thing I believe history would back me up on!
The factor I found interesting in John Storey’s piece, What is Popular Culture, is how we can use popular culture, specifically mass media, to change an idiocy of an entire country. John Storey gives five different definition of ideologies in his article, so I feel that I should specify which definitions I am referring to when I say “ideology.” In the broad sense I am referring to the definition, “ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people.” But as we move into the specific case of utilizing mass media and popular culture to spark social change, I believe the second definition Storey gives might be more appropriate – ideology meaning making a certain “masking, distortion, concealment” of reality, a “distorted reality” if you will, that “work in the interest of the powerful against the powerless.” This definition of ideology seems to especially ring true when we talk about the gay rights movement’s successful use of mass media and popular culture to combat the pre-existing ideology that stands against them in our country.
To further explore this power of popular culture, I will be looing at the different ways the LGBT movement utilized mass media to provoke really change in our country and around the world in the last few years. The first aspect, what I see to be the first toe in the water, is the use of viral videos, propelled by humor and compassion, to introduce the problem in the current ideology in America. Viral videos such as Spencer’s Home Depot Proposal, Prop 8 the Musical, and Gay Men will Marry your Girlfriends. These videos, and many like them, used humor and moving moments to rise to the viral video status, and from there utilized the power of viral videos, the epitome of popular culture, to bring the issue of LBGT rights to the publics attention.
Once these issues have become a part of the collective consciousness, The LGBT movement benefitted greatly from celebrity endorsements. This use of popular culture’s King’s and Queen’s is effective because it answers the implanted questions with voices that are already trusted and accepted. These voices of changes, such as Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harrison, and Macklemore, create a strong back bone for the argument, persuading the masses that the new way of thinking is already part of the accepted culture and ideology.
These uses of mass media are then driven home by more serious and straight forward assessments of the flaw in the current ideology to drive home the main points of the movement. Videos of these sort usually show the absurdity of the opposing argument and gives the backing argument for their movement.
This ingenious use of mass media and popular culture to evoke change in the ideology of a country is both ingenious and effective.
Journey through Mass Media and the Popular Arts 