Communication Arts 250 (SPRING 2019)

2018 - 2019

Dr. Lori Lopez and Jonathan Gray

To the extent possible under law, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Communication Arts 250 (SPRING 2019), except where otherwise noted.

© 2018 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

This book was produced with Pressbooks.

1

Introduction - Week 1

Welcome to Pressbooks!

This week, all the online lesson material is available in Canvas. Each week for the rest of the semester there is a lesson in this PressBook, which is linked from the Canvas course weekly pages.

Please note: some of these chapters are still being updated, so don’t read too far ahead… since content may change.

2

Week 2: How Technology Changes Society

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 1:24 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=28

Introduction video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+2+-+How+Technology+Changes+Society/0_wi8ceu2p/32607362

Key Questions

- What is technological determinism and how is this way of thinking expressed?

- Who is Marshall McLuhan and how did he understand technology?

- How did the development of media technologies change society?

- Literacy

- Print

- Photography

- How can media impact the relationship between time and space?

Understanding Technological Determinism

Technological determinism is the idea that technology is a primary driver of our society, that technology causes cultural and social change, and shapes human existence. It’s the idea that the technology itself (e.g: cell phones, television, the Internet) — and not the content (what’s on the phone, television, the Internet), the company (Facebook, HBO, match.com), or the user (the person or community using the phone, television, or Internet) — is what determines the way that our society develops, and that technology is regularly more significant than other factors.

Technological determinism is rampant in how a lot of people talk about media. When you hear people blame television or social media for a (supposedly) stupid population of people who can’t communicate (and not the specific shows or sites), for instance, you’re hearing technological determinism. When they say we should all read more instead, since a society that loves books is (supposedly) a smart, cultured, civilized society (without noting what should be read, and assuming anything we read is good for us), that’s technological determinism.

For another example of this perspective, watch this scene from the famed Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey and think about what message is being conveyed about the relationship between people and technology.

2001: A Space Odyssey – the Dawn of Man | 9.33 mins (clip)

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=28

2001: A Space Odyssey clip: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://youtu.be/ypEaGQb6dJk

We see the monkeys first as animals, very primitive in the way that they relate to one another and their surroundings.  They resolve conflict through testing their physical strength against one another.  Then we see the unexplained arrival of something much more technologically advanced than them, a mysterious structure that they reach out to interact with.  In the very next scene, the monkey looks at the pile of bones and starts to have a new realization: the bones can be useful to him.  He bangs them on the ground and realizes that they enhance his physical strength, perhaps enough for him to physically overpower another creature.  The next time that a conflict arises within the group, he uses this newfound technology to assert his dominance.  In discovering the tool, he is set upon the journey toward progress and change, and eventually the evolution from primitive animal into human.

Precisely because technological determinism is such a common way of thinking about media and technology’s importance, meaning it can be found everywhere from people’s grumblings about “kids these days,” to famed films, to memes about the effects of media, this is why we start this course about media with that concept.

Artwork and a meme that each offer technologically determinist messages

Is technological determinism a good way to talk about media, though? Does it help? Between this online class and the next whole class session, we’ll ultimately suggest that it poses fascinating questions about media and technology’s effects on society and relationship to culture … but that a truly thoughtful, academic, rigorous analysis of media must move beyond technological determinism too. Before we note its limitations and problems in our whole class session, though, today we’ll examine the idea further and see what it offers us.

In doing so, we’ll also cheat on the course’s title, and consider how this way of considering media can be applied to any medium, not just “contemporary” additions, and we’ll consider how literacy/writing, print, and photography all intervened in society and culture in key ways.

Technology as Defining Quality

The logic of technological determinism is even baked into the language we regularly use to classify periods of human history, the suggestion being that humans evolve based on their relation to the development of technologies.  Titles such as “The Stone Age” and “The Bronze Age” clearly emphasize the role of technology in shaping how we think about our own history.

The names we give to the ages are often connected to technology.

Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the message.”

This focus on the centrality of media technologies can clearly be seen in the work of Marshall McLuhan, a public intellectual from Canada who rose to prominence in the 1950s, and who was one of the earliest and most prominent scholars to talk about electronic media. His work has been connected to ideas of technological determinism, particularly with his famous notion that “The medium is the message.”

Watch this clip of McLuhan speaking in a televised interview, and listen to how he describes this idea.  What does he mean when he says the medium is the message?

The Medium is the Message – Marshall McLuhan | First 8 mins (clip)

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=28

McLuhan video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Marshall+Mcluhan+Full+lecture-+The+medium+is+the+message+-+1977+part+1+v+3/0_4whgw2r6/32607362

Let’s dig deeper into McLuhan’s theories to understand how he came to this understanding of media.

First, McLuhan argues that all media entail mediation. This is the idea that the content of any medium is just another medium. For instance, the content of television is moving images and sound; the content of the newspaper is articles or perhaps images; the content of a newspaper article is speech; and the content of speech is thought. This is why he comes to believe that content is not what is most important, because content can be traced further and further back until it is simply the thoughts in your head.

So if content is not important, what is important? McLuhan wants us to be careful not to get blinded by content, or overly fixate on content, but to be aware of how media themselves are shaping our world.

“The personal and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”

As he says in the clip, his belief is that it doesn’t matter what you say on the phone, the important thing is that telephone technology is shaping society. The important fact is that everyone has access to telephones and is using them. Similarly, it doesn’t matter what kids are reading: the important thing is that they grow to value literacy and stories and education, that they’re able to use literacy to accomplish things. Or even bigger, the important thing is the impact that literacy has had on society, and how society was shaped by the advent and spread of literacy. The same is true with television—it’s not what is on television that matters, it’s the entire technology of television as something different from a radio or a movie that has changed society. We can start to see that he is fairly critical of television in this clip, but we can also understand that his bigger point is that having television as a widespread media technology has clearly impacted all of our lives.

McLuhan proposed that multiple media, such as the book and television, extend the eye

McLuhan calls media extensions of man because they extend our senses. They allow us to see and hear and touch things that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. Telephones extend our voice and spreads it influence, movies extend our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain and memory. If media are seen to be metaphorically part of our bodies and central nervous systems, part of who we are and how we operate in the world, we can see how he thinks they’re so important. He believes media and society are closely connected, so we always need to think big picture about the effect that media have on society and human functions.

So when McLuhan says that “The medium is the message,” he means that “the message” is the social impact that a technology has, the way it changes the course of human life. It’s the medium that changes the way we think, and what is possible. It makes it possible for us to think and to do new things, and that’s what we need to pay attention to.

A brief and Select History of Media

To further understand how prevalent discourses of technological determinism are, let’s look at a select history of media technologies. This lesson is obviously very limited, because there are many different histories that together tell the story of how our media ecology evolved. But we can point to a few select advances in media technology and discuss what they mean. These will include:

- Literacy

- Print

- Photography

Literacy

Although today we take literacy and our written culture somewhat for granted, writing itself is a technology that needed to be developed over the course of human society. The earliest human societies were oral, relying on spoken language to convey messages and maintain relations over time. Epics like Beowulf, or Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were all transmitted orally from generation to generation. We might think about what these stories would have meant to us if they were only heard, and if we never had the chance to read them or see images of them.

Although continuous print scroll is one form of writing, it’s not the only option.

But then this kind of experience shifted with the advent of technologies such as the alphabet and the manuscript.

What we think of as “the book” was adopted around 400 AD, but this technology could have developed differently. Before the book, words were recorded on technologies such as long scrolls of continuous print, and hammered tablets.  But the technology that stuck was the codex book, which consists of a series of pages bound together at the spine.  To access content, readers flip through its pages.

The codex book was not developed until 400AD.

The question we want to think about is, how does the ability to write things down impact society? How does society change because of this technological advancement? Writing was actually met with skepticism when it was introduced, because changing from an oral culture to a written culture was such a huge change. This reminds us that all technological change is difficult and part of a long process because it has such a big impact on society.

Impacts of Literacy on Society:

- Writing distances the speaker from the listener. While oral cultures relied on forging connections with others, and trusting their expertise, writing distances the speaker from the listener. You no longer need face-to-face contact to spread information. This distance can also entail distrust, or misinformation.

- The development of “virtual” communication, where the speaker didn’t need to be present. Documents become the repository for information, rather than people. Written words can disseminate information without needing to rely on person-to-person contact.

- Writing allows for built-upon knowledge.  Knowledge is no longer something that is internal to individuals; people can use the information from multiple sources to increase knowledge, starting where someone else left off.

- Training and education become more important and “knowledge classes” become more prominent.  This allows for the introduction of concepts such as linear time and recordable histories.

When McLuhan says “the medium is the message,” he means that all of these changes are the most important thing. The social impact of the technology of literacy is “the message.”

Monopolies of Knowledge

Some of the impact of literacy that extends to all new technologies comes from what Harold Innis called monopolies of knowledge. This concept refers to the situation when a ruling class possesses communication technologies and keeps them from the masses. They hoard and protect access to technology so they can be the only ones to benefit from it.

Innis charted how most of world history’s great empires relied upon the establishment of monopolies of knowledge. Applying this to our discussion of literacy, at its most basic level, the technologies of literacy (from codex books or ink to the alphabet itself) were at first kept from the masses. Scribes were the only ones who knew how to read and write, so they wielded enormous power in society, and only they (and the people they served) could experience some of literacy’s transformative powers most acutely. Indeed, not just at that moment in time, but at various times throughout history there has been an effort to make sure everyone can read and has access to information, and then there have been times when access to information has been severely limited. And so too have subsequent media played a key role in forming monopolies of knowledge or sharing knowledge — in certain countries today, for instance, large portions of the internet are censored and made inaccessible, while in others the internet is seen as something that must be opened up to everyone equally. As with all media technologies, it’s important to always ask who benefits and who is held back by access and knowledge.

Print

The printing press is another important technological advance. In 600 A.D. we saw the invention of the Chinese printing press, where books were being printed with woodblock prints. Around 1045, movable type was invented—though, because the Chinese written language consists of over 10,000 characters, it didn’t really catch on. In the 1450s, Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, with the 26 letters of the alphabet in metal on wooden frames. They were covered with an oil-based ink and then pressed onto paper with a large hand-cranked press. By 1500, printing presses and mass-produced books were commonplace. In fact, over 20 million books had been printed before 1500.

More Monopolies of Knowledge

Before print, even if you were literate, getting hold of books was hard, since books were sparse, requiring an arduous process of handwriting every thing again to copy one. Another monopoly of knowledge existed, in Europe, when priests and religious leaders were not only some of the only people to be taught to read, but the only people who had ready access to many books, in church libraries. The common person’s limited access to books extended to the one book said to contain the Word of God, the Bible, and thus most Christians’ relationship to that Word and to God was mediated by Catholic priests. The Roman Catholic Church quite literally restricted the power to speak for God to itself in this era.

Religious leaders learned how to read, but kept that knowledge exclusive so that they could maintain their power.

But then Martin Luther came along and was a leader of the protestant reformation in the 1500s. It’s important to realize, though, that one of Luther’s key interventions in the history of Christianity was entirely about media. How? One of his central ideas was that people should be able to read the Bible themselves, not requiring church officials to read it to them. He translated the Bible into vernacular German instead of Latin in order to make it accessible to the people, and then one of the first things that Gutenberg published with his printing press was the Bible. This act was said to have started “the Gutenberg Revolution” (or “the Gutenberg Galaxy,” as McLuhan grandiosely called it). So the Protestant Reformation coincided with the availability of bibles and the ability of ordinary people to read them and develop their own relationship to their faith that wasn’t mediated through clergy and the church. This was a huge blow to the power of the churches, who could no longer control knowledge—and as a result, they lost some of their political power as well.

Public Education

With the accessibility of printed materials, it became possible to teach entire nations to read, through standardized, mass-produced, and inexpensive textbooks and such. The level of literacy among all social classes thus grew exponentially, creating a literate culture. Farmers could keep track of weather, merchants could keep track of purchases and sales, citizens could write contracts with their fellow citizens.

Public school systems were important tools for conveying literacy and writing.

Literacy training and a more literate population also contributed to the rise of science and the scientific method. This is the notion that ideas should be tested and those tests should be recorded, rather than just trusting someone who claims something. Scientists could convey to each other how they had been testing ideas, and then once those ideas are proven accurate, they could be disseminated to the public and recorded for history. Even after the scientists and authors had died, their ideas could live on, and where they stopped, others could start.

Literacy and access to printed works also help to create an informed electorate. The press could convey ideas about the state and how it was being run, and citizens could form opinions about what was going on. They didn’t just have to blindly trust what their leaders told them in public gatherings.

Effects of Print Technologies

- Mass communication is born

- Democratization of knowledge—normal people can have access to books and other texts. Normal people can also write their own books and spread that information to the masses.

- Development of journalism and advertising.  Not necessarily the birth of advertising, newspapers started to provide a reliable new way of conveying ads to the masses

- Rise of public education

- Science flourishes

- Knowledge becomes more of a commodity.  Also there is a shift in how we view knowledge; it’s not just something the elites possess and maintain, it’s something that someone can put into a book and then sell for money

- Prices increase for producers and decreases for consumer—more people can buy books and newspapers and pamphlets

Photography

Photos by Thomas P. Peschak (whale), Joe Rosenthal (flag raising), Kanesan Nathan (LEGO figures), and uncredited

Photography emerged in the 1830s with the daguerreotype (named after inventor Louis Daguerre), though subsequent developments brought photography to film in 1885 or 1889 (depending on how you “count” it), and to the digital realm in the 1990s. In the age of Instagram, we’re now suffused with photos, but imagine the experience of seeing your very first photographic image back in the 1880s, an experience that surely could change forever how you see yourself, how you see history, how you see the world.

Photography opens up all sorts of doors to the modern world. Consider how many criminal cases, for instance, require the evidence that photography alone can provide. Journalism is revolutionized when readers can see parts of the story, and when journalists can convey arguments or information visually. Possibilities for empathy with absent, distant others increases too — think of the directive to “look me in the eyes and tell me that,” then consider photography’s ability to allow us to look distant others in the eye. And think of how important images are to all sorts of things, from politics to celebrity, advertising to charity.

Reflection

If you use Instagram, Flickr, or any social media site/app that allows you to share images, think about what you can communicate best via images, what you can communicate best via written text. What can photography do that you’d struggle to do with words alone? And what kind of images do you like looking at and why? Could words do the same thing? You might also look at this collection of famous photos or this one, or even this collection of National Geographic’s best pics of 2017, to consider what they communicate, and whether you feel words could do this as well.

One of the first important uses of photography in 1837 was that it allowed journalists to share images of the Civil War. Photographers were embedded in the front lines to document the carnage and help to communicate the terrible human cost of the war. They helped to shape the way that the pubic viewed war, since people who were nowhere near the battlefields could see how dangerous and awful it was. More than this, though, photography was used to help communicate why the war was being fought, as photos could show how horribly slaves were being treated to Northerners far-removed from the everyday realities of slavery who might otherwise consider the war an extreme measure. Here’s a short video from CBS Sunday Morning about the power of photos in Civil War reporting and its aftermath:

Images of War | CBS News: Sunday Morning  | 7:03 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=28

CBS News video. Click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/photography-that-changed-the-way-we-view-war/

Images of families suffering during The Depression conveyed emotion.

As cameras got smaller and lighter and processes for developing got safer, photography continued to spread. Photojournalists in the 1930s captured the tragedy of the Great Depression, taking pictures of families and their situations, of the Dust Bowl and its destruction. This generated support for President Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. Photos had the ability to tell stories without words and share them with wide audiences. Photographs were thought to accurately mirror the world and show that it could be known and understood.

Effects of Photography

- Challenged the authority of the written and spoken word, as photos seemed more authoritative and objective than people or the writing of people. This was despite the fact that photographs have always been manipulated, staged, reshot, and edited during processing.

- Photographs were used as identifying documents to establish one’s identity, as evidence in court, and as illustrations of news and journalism.

- Photography provided a different way of recording history—a visual history. Beyond telling audiences a story, they could show the story in one singular frame. We understand images and read images in different ways than we do words, and this vocabulary needed to be developed.

This is only a selective history, and there are many other important landmarks in media development that each had profound impacts on society as they came about. But hopefully this brief narrative helps us to see common ways of understanding these technological developments.

Time-Space Compression

What we are beginning to see is that one of the big changes media bring to society is the compression of time and space. Media actually change our relationship to time and space. Space is compressed because you can interact with someone thousands of miles away. Time is compressed because you can access people, information, and ideas quicker, whether they are happening currently or happened years ago.

Consider the speed of news throughout history. Before the telegraph, if news was to travel, it would need to do so physically, either by a human running, riding a horse, getting on a boat or train, or so forth, or by tying it to a pigeon or some other information-carrying beast. With the telegraph, though, news could now travel great distances at speed. But not everyone or everywhere had a telegraph, so the news still needed physical carriers on either end, a cumbersome step that meant most people only used telegraphs for truly important news. Then radio and television revolutionized the possibilities for transferring news even further, since both became almost ubiquitous, allowing many, many more people to receive news … though the power to broadcast messages was still held by relatively few people, and receivers needed to be listening or watching, thus requiring ritualized news broadcasts only at certain points of the day. Now, though, with first the Internet and then mobile media, we can take it as granted that news will reach us quickly, instantaneously even, regardless of whether the news is global or intensely personal, banal even. With each step forward, the experience of distance between the sender and receiver of the message shortened, as did the time it took for the message to send. Whereas in the early days of print, therefore, Madison and Hong Kong would have felt light years away from each other, our ability now to text-message someone in Hong Kong, read news from them online, see social media postings, etc. compresses the space and time between the two cities, making them feel much, much closer.

Now Read: Joshua Meyrowitz

One of the key authors proposing that media have compressed time and space, while also reconfiguring space and place in important ways, is Joshua Meyrowitz. Go read the pdf of Ch. 7 from his book No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior before continuing.

Media as Travel

With the compression of space and time, there have been other impacts of media on our social realities.

“When we communicate through the telephone, radio, television, or computer, where we are physically no longer determines where and who we are socially.”

– Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place

Media is changing our perception of space and what space means. Instead of space meaning a physical space, it can mean something social. You can be in your living room, but take an online class and be “at school”; you can be on a bus, but be emailing your grandma all the way across the country; you can be in your college dorm, but part of a conversation with your family at home. Not only is physical movement unnecessary, but there aren’t physical thresholds to mark boundaries either. No walls, doors, guards, moats. Access is a function of technology, not physicality. As technology has changed, our social situations and social identities have changed too.

Another relevant concept here is that of mobile privatization, which refers to one’s ability to “move” a private sphere (or “home”) around with one, to “escape” the public through mobile technology, or to use media and technology to be mobile in the first place, from the comfort of one’s own home. If you’re sitting on a bus but blissed out on your music, on a plane watching a film and therefore oblivious to the people around you, or feel able to have an intensely personal conversation over your phone while in a very public place, you’re experiencing mobile privatization.

In some ways media create presence, because you can be all alone and feel connected to people. They can give you social support, friendship, information, and really feel like they are right there with you. This is how media create presence.  But we can think of the flip side too, where you literally are in the presence of physical bodies, and yet everyone is absent. Media can create boundaries where people become so immersed in their media worlds that they are actually absent even when they stand in close quarters with other human beings.

So those are some of the ways that we might say technologies themselves are fundamentally changing the shape of society and how we are living in it, but we also want to think about challenges to this way of thinking. This is what we’ll be doing in our next lesson.

Key Concepts

- Technological determinism

- Marshall McLuhan

- Media as mediation

- “The medium is the message”

- “Extensions of Man”

- Media’s inseparability from society

- Effects of Literacy

- Monopolies of Knowledge

- Effects of Print

- Effects of Photography

- Time-Space compression

- Media as Travel

- Mobile Privatization

- Mediated presence / absence

3

Week 3: New Media Technologies

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Lori Lopez | 1:11 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=42

Introduction video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/id/1_vm5kjpl9?width=650&height=400&playerId=25717641

Key Questions

- What are “new media” and what theories can we use to understand what fits in this category?

- What is the “network society,” and does it mean we all have access to new media now?

- What is the difference between interface and technology?

- How do algorithms shape our access to information?

In this unit we’ve looked at debates about technological determinism, and you’ve seen some of the different perspectives on causality.  Is it technology that causes changes in society, or is it society that causes changes in technology?  Do we think that media have all the power, or people?  After viewing both sides of the debate, you should now be prepared to make a more nuanced argument that demonstrates a synthesis of both perspectives.

We can see some of this middle ground here:

“First, the capacity to act, which media undoubtedly have, should not be confused by the capacity to determine. Second, even if media-technologies have the capacity to determine, this does not mean that they can do so unconditionally themselves, let alone on their own. In simpler terms, the fact that media are capable of acting, and perhaps even conditioning, does not mean that other forces (e.g., social, economic, cultural, political, physiological, psychological) are therefore irrelevant.”

– Joost Loon, Media Technologies: Critical Perspectives

In today’s lesson that wraps up our Technology unit, we will be specifically considering the idea of “new media” and the way that theories from technology studies can further complicate and nuance our understanding of technology and agency. Grand, sweeping statements about media (“television rots your brain,” “cell phones have killed people’s abilities to communicate,” “social media democratizes the world”) are doomed to be wrong, since they’re bound to flatten and ignore the varying industries, texts, representations, and audiences behind each and every media that make them what they are in any given time and place. But there are still all sorts of tools and theories we can use to help us better understand new media and how they are new. Today’s class aims to introduce a variety of these tools and theories.

What is “New Media”?

“New Media”

Start by reading Lisa Gitelman’s very brief keyword discussion of “new media”

As Gitelman reminds us, “newness is a matter of perspective and a moving target” (p. 130).  The media technologies that we put into the category of “new media” are constantly changing as they lose their novelty and become commonplace.  It’s important to recognize the fact that all media technologies were once new; our online lesson on the history of technologies like the book and photography reminds us of how this works.  Nonetheless, we can recognize some of the common elements across the category, such as a reliance on digital computer technologies.  Lev Manovich provides some other helpful categories for understanding what differentiates new media.

Lev Manovich is a theorist who has been very influential in how he talks about new media.  He put forward 5 principles that define new media:

1. Numerical representation

2. Modularity

3. Automation

4. Variability, and

5. Transcoding

1. Numerical Representation

Analog clock

Digital clock

First we have this idea that new media objects are composed of digital code, which is made up of numerical representations.  If you are familiar with the way that binary code works, you know this means that digital code is expressed only in 1s and 0s.  But another way of thinking about this is simply to distinguish between analog and digital.  With an analog clock, the second hand sweeps across the face with no disruption, continuous and smooth.  But with a digital clock, it can only show you the specific increments, jumping between each numerical increment.

An analog object like a sculpture is still the same object when you look at it very closely.  But when you zoom in to look closely at digital representations of a sculpture you will start to see discrete pixels, as is represented in this image of a sculpture by Banksy.

Image of sculpture by Banksy

2. Modularity

PowerPoint  presentations combine discrete units

A new media object is a collection of discrete units that can be combined without losing their independence.  They are made up of independent modules that are made up of smaller modules.  When you make a new media object like a PowerPoint, you can insert an image or a video.

Each object maintains its independence even as it is inserted into the new media object.  You can manipulate those objects, making them bigger or smaller, and each module still operates independently.

A webpage can also be thought of in a similar way.  Every web page contains separate media elements—text, images, media clips.  If you want to change the website, you can just change the individual parts without needing to redo the entire structure.

3. Automation

Siri – artificial intelligence

New media objects are created through automation that is subject to manipulation.  This is the idea that computer programs use algorithms that are built into their software, rather than humans needing to make decisions about every single thing. Since computers are involved in the coding of media objects, human intentionality is not always as important as it is in older media objects.  We use software to do things like edit images, create layouts.  Programs like Photoshop or even apps like Instagram can use automatic filters to edit an image, with pretty minimal human intervention.  Or they even automatically generate an image.

If we get more high-level, new media objects can be connected to artificial intelligence.  For instance, now we have all sorts of Twitter bots that just pretend to be human and steal tweets from other people. Or we have Siri on our phones, whom we can turn to for all sorts of help, and she uses algorithms to help us to make better use of our phones.

4. Variability

Once information has been made digital, it can be presented and organized in a multiplicity of ways.  New media objects aren’t fixed forever, they usually are created to be able to be adjusted into different situations.  Old media technologies have a human creator who manually assembles text, visual elements, and audio elements into a specific sequence and then stores it.  New media often come in different versions, which is sometimes related to automation, and sometimes it just means that users can make their own decisions and chart their own path through a single form of media.

5. Transcoding

Transcoding is the idea that when information is stored in digital form, it takes on characteristics that originate from the computer.  This means that media and culture are then being shaped by the logic of the computer.One example of transcoding might be the rise of autotune.  Think about putting an analog song into a computer, and starting to manipulate its sound.  The sound may start to become more digital as we shape it using the computer, as we often hear in pop music today.  With the rise of autotune, music itself is altered—where now, we often hear songs on the radio with digitized voices, and singers don’t even have to have good voices to become famous.  This reminds us of the way that media and digital culture have started to become inextricable.  Culture is transcoded into a digital form.

Auto-tune

Singers or digitized voices?

Networks and The Network Society

New media are also characterized by their role in creating a network society.  At a basic level, networks are an interconnected system that allows flow between a set of nodes.  For instance, a subway system is a network that allows passengers to move from the node of one subway stop to another.

Networks allow flow between nodes

Digital networks are the systems of interconnected computers that allow individuals who connect to one another virtually and share data nearly instantaneously. Recall the lessons we learned about how media technologies transform time and space, and the way that the telegraph led the revolution in shortening the period from sending a message to receiving it.  This transformation helps us to see the significance of improving communication networks through new media technologies.

These digital networks that transfer information have become fundamentally integrated into every aspect of our society, including culture, politics, and our economy.  This is what Manuel Castells calls “the network society,” because information technologies are pervasive throughout our entire social structure.  Digital networks can be seen at work in large systems such as banking institutions and the stock exchange, or television networks and multimedia conglomerates. They can also be seen in interpersonal networks, such as those on Facebook or our mobile phones or via email.

Digital networks transfer information

Networks such as these are important because they may be dynamic and able to grow infinitely large, but networks are also restricted in many ways.  Not all information can flow freely in any direction, or to anyone.  Certain cities may be hubs for communication and economic development because of the ways that they are central within the networked economy, while other cities struggle to participate.  Certain people may be able to use their cell phones and ATM cards while they travel, but others cannot.  On the one hand inequalities such as these are the result of digital networks being computerized and automated, operating on their own without needing constant human intervention.  But of course we also realize that networks are shaped by and reflective of social, economic, cultural, and political relationships.

“Network”

For more on networks, now go read Marina Levina’s short keyword entry on “Network”

Digital Divides

But new media technologies are often taken up unevenly throughout society, which we recognize through what is called “the digital divide.”  The digital divide is the gap between those individuals and communities that have and do not have access to the information technologies like computers and the internet.  This concept acknowledges that not everyone has the same opportunities to engage with communication technologies.

There are digital divide issues with regard to many different factors, including geographical location, race, income level, education level, ability or disability, and age.  For instance, those who have tended to have less access to technology include people who are Black and Hispanic, lower income, less educated, older, or living in rural areas. On the latter, for instance, here are maps of the US and Wisconsin from this FCC report showing the divide in broadband coverage in 2016:

Geographical disparities across the US in broadband coverage, 2016

Geographical disparities across Wisconsin in broadband coverage, 2016

Or here’s information on the divide by income level (and geography) from this MIT Technology Review report:

Internet use in the US by income group and geography, 2015

When talking about the digital divide, it’s important to consider what assumptions we have about what it means to have access to technology.  On the one hand, we might say that access is a social good, or even a right, so we should make technologies available to everyone regardless of these factors.  But we also need to be careful what assumptions we make about people who don’t use technology or have access.  Of the one in five American adults who do not use the internet, almost half say that the main reason they don’t go online is because they don’t think the internet is relevant to them.  So it’s important to consider if it’s access or desirability that precludes certain people from using technologies.

Interface

Another way of understanding the interplay between agency and control with regard to technologies is through considering interfaces.  An interface connects two distinct components within a communication process.  This can include the hardware, software, designs, and protocols that connect users to technology and make it accessible and useable.  But they are also distinct from the technology itself, which may have significantly more capabilities than are allowed through any one interface.

Skeuomorphs are designs that mimic analog objects

For instance, a mobile phone of course relies upon wireless technologies to allow users to make phone calls.  But when you look at your phone, all of your engagements are mediated through the user interface.  The interface masks the digital codes that are actually working behind the scenes, and turns them into easily understandable graphics for users.  Sometimes interfaces even imitate the analogue by using skeuomorphs, or photorealistic designs that mimic analog objects.  Apple uses the image of a yellow legal pad to communicate that you are using note-taking software, and the image of a camera shutter closing across the screen to indicate you have snapped a photograph.

Interfaces play an important role in shaping how we engage with and understand technologies.  For instance, think about the difference between the two social networking apps Snapchat and Facebook.  Both can be used by individuals to connect with members of their social network through sharing images, videos, and messages. But if you think about why you prefer one app over the other, you can see some of the differences that set them apart in terms of interface. Facebook allows you to update your Timeline with static posts conveying a wide range of identifying information, while Snapchat allows you to string together a set of videos that are shot live and disappear after 24 hours.

How are the platforms of Snapchat and Facebook different?

Depending on what functionality you are looking for, you may select one interface over another.  But we should also note that when interfaces allow and disallow certain actions, these decisions are not arbitrary.  In many ways they are guiding users toward certain actions and you may not think to realize or question why you are doing so. If you’re interested, for example, see this Wired article about Talia Shroud’s experiment of replacing a “like” or “recommend” button/icon on social media with a “respect” button that suggested this small move could encourage people to engage with opposing viewpoints; in other words, her experiment suggested that Facebook or Twitter users’ avoidance of opposing viewpoints may be encouraged by their interfaces, not just by the technology or even the people alone.

The Social Role of Search Engines

Interfaces also shape how we find information, which is largely through using online search engines.  As Alex Halavais states in Search Engine Society, “Search engines are at once the most and the least visible part of the digital, networked revolution” (p. 2).  The reality is that over 80% (possibly up to 95%) of the internet is hidden from horizontal search engines, or the general purpose and commercial search engines we use on a regular basis.  In the graphic below, we can see a representation of the fact that sites like Google lead us to that top layer of visible websites, but that there is an ocean of content beneath the surface.

This is an artistic rendering of what is only available in “the deep web.”

This includes what is known as “The Deep Web,” where there are great quantities of data that are not discoverable through search engines.  This includes a wide variety of content—some nefarious, such as black market sites for trafficking illegal substances, and some that seek to help people, such as whistleblowers and political dissidents avoiding government censors. Given the reality that we each have limits on our attention span and desire to comb through the thousands of options presented to us, it’s important to think about how information is distributed and made available to web users.  Scarcity of attention is exactly why attention has become such a valuable commodity.

Halavais, “Attention”

You’ll find more on search engines in this week’s reading by Alexander Halavais, from his book Search Engine Society. Earlier in that book, he writes: “There is a common assumption that we have found a cure to stupid questions. Folded into that assumption we find a host of others: that even the unintelligent have access to and can use a search engine, that a search engine will lead someone to a page that contains accurate information, and that questions are best directed first to a machine, and only after that to other people” (p.1). Halavais aims to problematize those assumptions. Go read it now.

If we want a quick answer, though, and trust Google to find it, we’re putting an awful lot of trust into how Google works, and into how reliable its top ten search results are (since much research suggests that people rarely move beyond those first ten results). This gets us to the importance of algorithms, a topic we’ll return to in a future class (“The Business of Big Data”), but here’s the Department of Communication Arts’  Professor Jeremy Morris discussing the importance of algorithms:

Algorithms | Dr. Jeremy Morris | 5:53 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=42

Algorithms video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Algorithms/0_16fkrqen

Technological Agency

Through these descriptions of the way that search engines and other algorithms work, it should be clear that technologies take a lot of actions on their own that impact our experiences with them.  But does this mean that technologies have agency?  People and objects are said to possess agency when they have the ability and power to act on their own.  Agents are generally assumed to have the ability to take actions and make choices of their own free will, or intentionally.  On the one hand, technologies such as computers or televisions do not have the recognizably humanistic qualities of “free will,” and do not undertake actions “with intention.”  Most often, technologies are assumed to be simply intermediaries, serving to facilitate the transfer of information and data between human agents.

“A more useful approach…is to ignore traditional questions about the division between technology and humans, and concentrate on analyzing the cultural field in which we live as a field of forces, relations, processes, and effects.”

– Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. McGregor Wise, Culture + Technology: A Primer, p. 123

But Jennifer Daryl Slack and J. McGregor Wise argue that technology needs to be understood as acting independently, even if not with intention, with something we might call “technological agency.”  This perspective helps to remind us that technologies are just like any other agent in being able to take actions that cause responses in humans, do tasks that humans used to do, shape human behavior, and make connections to other humans and technologies.  If we think about our cell phones, we can easily think of the changes we have made to accommodate them (perhaps organizing your bedside table so the phone is near its charger), the tasks they now are fully responsible for (such as waking you up in the morning), the way we have responded to their reliability (allowing you to travel to and navigate a totally new city), and the connected network of interactions in which our phone plays a role.  Of course we need to be careful not to say that technologies are freely choosing to do any of these things, but this idea of technological agency does help us to see how technologies should be recognized for the integral role they play in our society—regardless of whether or not it’s technology or people that ultimately have the most power over our lives.

Key Concepts

- New Media

- Lev Manovich’s 5 Principles of New Media

- Numerical representation

- Modularity

- Automation

- Variability

- Transcoding

- Networks and The Network Society

- Digital Divide

- Interface

- Search engines

- The Deep Web

- Algorithms

- Technological Agency

4

Week 4: Ownership and How it Matters

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 1:40 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=195

Introduction video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+4+-+Ownership/0_jdxywh5h/32607362

Key Questions

- What are conglomeration and consolidation?

- What are the key media conglomerates that control much of contemporary media?

- Why do companies conglomerate, and in what ways? What is their rationale?

- Why does conglomeration, and who owns a conglomerate matter? What concerns have citizens expressed with how the size, power, and behavior of media conglomerates?

- What other concerns might we have about who owns and leads media companies?

Two interrelated key terms that loom large in an examination of media and ownership patterns in recent years are conglomeration and consolidation. A media conglomerate is a company that in turn owns many media companies, that has brought them together (through mergers and acquisitions, and/or through creating multiple divisions) or “consolidated” them to make one big entity.

Key Media Conglomerates

Let’s “meet” a few examples.

News Corporation & Twenty-First Century Fox

News Corporation (or News Corp for short) recently devolved itself of Fox, and Fox is in turn in the process of being sold off (mostly, though not completely) to Disney. But it’s a good place to start since its majority owner Rupert Murdoch is in many ways the guru of media conglomeration. Murdoch was born in Australia; the son of a journalist, he soon turned to buying newspapers. While his American counterparts were focused almost completely on the US, Murdoch was ahead of the game in realizing the potential for growing a truly multi-national, global media conglomerate. A selective tour through his purchases thus sees him expanding a minor empire of Australian and New Zealand newspapers to include several major British newspapers in the late 60s through the 80s, and the New York Post in 1976. He then picked up the pace in the 80s, buying Twentieth Century Fox, Metromedia’s family of television stations, TV Guide, and Harper Collins, thereby expanding from newspapers to film, television, magazines, and book publishing. Soon after purchasing the Metromedia stations, he launched the Fox Broadcasting Company and television network with them, while in England he launched Sky Television, the major satellite provider. Television was expanding in the US largely through cable, but in the rest of the world, satellite reigned supreme, and Murdoch was ahead of his time in purchasing and launching many satellite providers, including Star TV (based out of Hong Kong), Tata Sky (in India), Hughes (owner of DirecTV), and other satellite services in South America and Asia. Murdoch’s newspapers had long thrived on sports coverage, and his awareness of the power of sports led to him seeing it as a “battering ram” (his words) into foreign markets, as he aggressively pursued the rights for many major sporting events and leagues worldwide, to drive up the desire for his satellite services. Meanwhile, he also launched the Fox family of channels (including Fox News, FX, and Fox Sports), bought Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal, and also invested in numerous new media outlets including MySpace and IGN Entertainment. In 2013, facing scandal, News Corporation and Fox were split into two publicly traded companies, but with Murdoch retaining majority ownership of each. At peak, News Corp looked like this:

What News Corporation’s domain looked like at peak, around 2011-2012

Rupert Murdoch and FinSyn

Murdoch is also one of the key architects of FinSyn’s death. FinSyn was aimed at “networks,” but Murdoch and his lawyers have always been savvy readers of policy documents, leading to them wondering “what is a network, according to the FCC?” The answer, they found, was linked to how many hours of content the “network” provided to stations. And thus when Murdoch launched the Fox network, it only provided two hours of prime time programming, not three (a practice that remains today). This meant that it didn’t count as a “network” officially, thereby allowing Murdoch to ignore FinSyn. Fox could produce its own shows and keep the syndication rights when its network competitors – ABC, CBS, and NBC – couldn’t. In the wake of Murdoch, and of Ted Turner performing similar sneaky feats through his own cable empire, the FCC eventually struck down FinSyn, paving the way for today’s system in which most shows aired on all of the major networks are produced by and belong to the parent company.

At its peak, News Corporation and Murdoch owned a major film studio, a major US television network, one of the largest book publishers in the world, major newspapers and magazines, a suite of cable and satellite channels, and new media. And though News Corporation has regularly been out-earned by one or two other companies, Murdoch’s investment in developing markets in China, India, and South American in particular still leave the company – or whoever purchases it – with tremendous upside to its future.

The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is another key conglomerate that has actively pursued a wide range of media services, growing into a company that is regularly rated as the second most lucrative media company in the world, after Google. Led first by Michael Eisner and then Robert Iger as CEO, Disney went from a movie studio famed for its animation and family fare to purchasing Capital Cities/ABC, which gave it the ABC network, A&E Television Networks, and ESPN, and founding Hollywood Records. Its amusement parks and cruises have thrived, and the company also turned to purchasing remarkably successful content including The Muppets, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm.

A display of some of The Walt Disney Company’s holdings

Warner Media, CBS and Viacom, Comcast

The other major American conglomerates that sit alongside News Corporation/Fox and Disney in earnings and power are Warner Media (now owned by AT&T), NBC Universal (now owned by Comcast), and CBS/Viacom (which, similar to News Corporation and Fox, are officially separate but Sumner Redstone is majority owner of both). Look at some of their ownings, and some other players below. I’d also recommend entering a company’s name and “holdings” into Google and browsing the sheer size of some of them. You needn’t memorize them all, but knowing the big media conglomerates and their key holdings is amazingly helpful as you study media.

A graphic of the media landscape in 2018

iHeartMedia

And yet several other companies of course deserve mention too. The unquestioned powerhouse of radio ownership is iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), who regularly owns well over 850 channels nationwide, 23 in Wisconsin alone. iHeartMedia owns channels in 248 of the nation’s top 250 markets, and has stunning control of certain genres: 60% of the nation’s rock audience, for audience, find their songs via iHeartMedia’s channels when listening to the radio. It’s called iHeartMedia, however, since the company also owns a huge swath of outdoor billboards, easily more than any other company with over 650,000 traditional or digital billboards worldwide at peak; this division regularly out-earns its radio stations several times over.

Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft

No tale of media conglomerates would be complete without mentioning the new media giants of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, however. In pure monetary terms, Alphabet (Google’s owner) sits uncontested at the top of media revenue charts, CEOs Larry Page and Sergey Brin worth an estimated $48 Billion each. And Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are similarly comfortable near the top of revenue charts. All three companies should be considered as major conglomerates, as all three have succeeded not simply by being a unitary successful service (as is the case with something like Netflix, for instance), but by aggressively scouting for talent and gobbling it up when it sees it. Thus, Google bought YouTube, DoubleClick, and “flipped” cellphone provider Motorola in two years simply to get its hands on valuable intellectual property for its own services, while Facebook bought Instagram for $1 Billion and WhatsApp for $19 Billion, and Microsoft’s history of success is predicated as much on its ability to buy and either incorporate or strangle its rivals, as on its own bona fide innovations.

Other Major Global Conglomerates

Finally, before we move on to ask why, it’s worth noting that conglomeration is a global sport not just American, and not just American-led. Every American conglomerate has considerable holdings internationally, and vying for top earnings alongside Google, Disney, and friends are Germany’s Axel Springer, Bertelsmann, and ProSiebenSat.1; China’s Baidu, CCTV, Tencent; Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Fuji Media, Yomiuri Shimbun; Brazil’s Grupo Globo; England’s ITV plc; France’s JCDecaux; Finland’s Sanoma; and Italy’s Mediaset.

Who owns the media you watch?

Note that there is very little assigned reading for today’s class. With your extra time, go on a treasure hunt of sorts. List your favorite media, then go looking for who owns them, and who was involved in their production. Wikipedia pages can often be very helpful here (most television shows and films, for instance, have a boxed-in area on the right of their Wikipedia page that lists production company and distributors). And/or, using Wikipedia, find one of the major conglomerates listed above (like Viacom or Disney) and read that company’s history of mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, etc.

Why Conglomerate?

When companies consolidate, they do so to offer themselves multiple opportunities for synergy, hoping that each part of the bigger company will help each other considerably. Consider the following Sony ad, for instance:

Sony – Script to Screen | Sony Commercial | 1:10 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=195

Here, the pitch is that Sony keeps it in the family, offering products for each step in the life of a script. When conglomerates aim for this form of synergy, owning (as much as is possible) the entire production line, this is called vertical integration. Non-media companies do this too. Imagine, for instance, if you owned a restaurant that (in good Wisconsin style) specialized in selling menu items with cheese; you might ultimately find it beneficial to buy a cheese production company so that you never need worry about cheese supplies, the price of cheese, or cheese crises.

So, too, with media conglomerates. Most media businesses can be divided, in particular, into three stages: production, distribution, and exhibition. When a conglomerate owns companies operating at two or more stages, it is vertically-integrated.

Vertical Integration — when a conglomerate owns companies operating at different stages of the media business

The ABC Network (a distributor), Disney’s various film and television studios (producers), and ABC’s television stations (exhibitors), for instance, can work together to plan for the future, ensuring they advertise together, plan around each other’s needs, and ensure each other steady flows of content and cash.

Another form of synergy comes from what is called horizontal integration. Here, instead of owning companies “upstream” or “downstream” from one another, a conglomerate owns two or more companies operating at the same stage (i.e., both producers, distributors, or exhibitors). The appeal to integrate horizontally is because the conglomerated companies could then negotiate together with companies or individuals upstream or downstream, could stockpile resources, and/or could specialize and divide up the audience between them. Thus, for instance, should Disney’s purchase of Fox go through as planned, it will have a very strong negotiating position with exhibitors (cinemas), and it will further increase its stock of top content (bringing the [Fox-owned] X-Men properties back into the [Disney-owned] Marvel fold, while also adding many other key franchises). Each of the major conglomerates, meanwhile, owns a whole suite of cable channels, each directed at separate demographics: this is also horizontal integration.

Horizontal Integration — when a conglomerate owns two or more companies working on one stage of the media business

Ready to Be Confused? Or, What’s in a Name?

Keeping track of who owns what, and of vertical and horizontal integration, can be hard work, not only because ownership changes, but also because of the replication of company names. In the broadcast television industry, for instance, ABC is the shortened name of a producer (ABC Studios), a distributor (The ABC Network), and any of the channels nationwide that have a content agreement with the ABC Network. However:

- ABC Studios doesn’t just produce for the ABC Network. It also co-produces The Amazing Race and Criminal Minds for CBS, and – because of corporate parent Disney – all of Netflix’s Marvel shows.

- The ABC Network doesn’t just show ABC Studios’ material. Warner Bros TV has long been a powerhouse of production, for example, and in recent years made The Middle for ABC … and 2 Broke Girls for CBS, Blindspot for NBC, and more.

- Not all ABC channels nationwide are owned by Disney/ABC. Madison’s own WKOW27, for instance, is owned by Quincy Media, and only has a content deal with ABC Network.

Making this even more confusing, when companies sell parts of themselves, the purchasing company may wish to keep the name – since that’s what consumers know and like – while the selling company also keeps the name. Disney’s proposed deal with Fox, for instance, won’t include the Fox Network (due to FCC ownership restrictions), so Disney will own Twentieth Century Fox Studios (“Fox”) yet the Fox Network (or what some are calling “The new Fox”) will also keep the Fox name.

A quick joke about cross-promotion in the opening credit sequence of a Simpsons episode

Conglomeration is great for advertising and cross-promotion, too, since each component part can direct consumers to the other parts. Disney has mastered this with its Marvel and Star Wars franchises, but watch a Warner Bros. film, for instance, and when there’s a reporter on-screen, they’re likely from conglomerate family member CNN. Or, if your favorite radio station is an NBC affiliate, you should expect to hear plenty of ads and praise for conglomerate family member Universal Studios’ films. Here, The Simpsons playfully draws attention to conglomerate directives to cross-promote (for then-corporate family member Wall Street Journal).

Conglomeration often aims to squeeze out competition. A vertically-integrated producer can sell for cheaper to a distributor, for instance, making it harder for other distributors to compete. But it would be overly dramatic to see conglomeration as motivated solely by aggressive desires to damage opposition. Rather, it’s important to realize that media is a risky business, and vertical or horizontal integration aim to mitigate and protect against that risk. Audiences can be fickle, and what was successful last year may bomb this year. The business of producing, distributing, or exhibiting media necessarily involves a certain degree of failure, and though ideally one’s successes will balance out against those failures, conglomeration adds more certainty and reliability.

Conglomeration has been the name of the media game since the 90s, partly because the FCC started to allow it. Why? Because of market fragmentation, a concept we’ll learn more about in a future class. In this new era, media companies consider it important to own multiple holdings across multiple media. If this is a bad year for television, you needn’t worry if you have film studios, book publishers, record labels, and more. Or even within television, horizontal integration can help one piece together a huge audience by combining 1 million watching one channel, 2 million watching another, and so forth. And vertical integration can help flatten out a bumpy road, offering a more reliable media economy.

Why Worry?

However, many scholars and everyday citizens worry about conglomeration, and especially about an era of heightened conglomeration, citing several key concerns:

1. Fears of Oligopoly

Whereas a monopoly exists when one company controls a market, effectively ending the possibilities for competition and leaving consumers stuck with whatever they’re being offered, an oligopoly works similarly. If you scroll up to that chart of who owns what, you’ll see joint ownership of Hulu, but in fact many media companies are now joint owned. And thus it’s perhaps inaccurate to see the remaining conglomerates as locked in mortal combat with one another. Their various levels of horizontal and vertical integration effectively kill the chances for new competitors (unless, as with Netflix or Amazon, they rise from entirely new technological soil), but they’re all now so incestuously intertwined with one another that their usual mode of operation is one of collaboration. Hulu is jointly owned by Disney, Fox, Comcast, and WarnerMedia, so each company has a stake not only in Hulu succeeding, but in each component show that goes into Hulu succeeding. Many cable channels, too, are co-owned. And The CW was formed after Time Warner’s upstart Warner Bros. network, and CBS Viacom’s upstart network UPN merged, producing a “netlet” (mini-network) that is now 50% owned by each of Warner Media and Viacom. In such a situation, we should expect companies to work alongside each other not just to keep out new competitors but to keep prices down for creators (remember that FinSyn was created precisely to stop this, but its death removed those protections), its labor, and multiple other subsidiary companies not within the conglomerate.

2. Fears of Inertia and Laziness

In a situation in which new competitors are unlikely to succeed, we can also expect laziness from established companies. New competitors are often risk-takers, as they need to shake up the system to edge their way in. But legacy companies don’t need to take as many risks, which means in turn that they can become lazy at every level, showing no need to innovate, or even to care much about what audiences and consumers think. We’ll elaborate more upon this concern next class, but the gist is offered playfully in this Funny or Die sketch about Comcast:

Funny or Die | A Brief Message from Comcast | 1:51 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=195

3. Fears of Diminished Concerns for Localism

Many of the FCC’s past rules about how huge a media company could be were premised in large part on concerns that local interests be reflected in the media, not just national or “universal” ones. iHeartMedia in particular has regularly come under fire from critics who point to the company’s standardizing of radio broadcasts and favoring of national hosts programming from a distance. Whereas radio was long an intensely local medium, therefore, telling us about the communities we lived in, sharing local news and stories, and programming to specific cities and neighborhoods, through iHeartMedia much of that localism has been lost.

4. Fears of Ideological Bias

At different points in the its history, the FCC has attempted to deal with concerns about media bias, especially with the Fairness Doctrine (1949-1987) that demanded broadcasters give equal time to contrasting political viewpoints. When the Fairness Doctrine was struck down, the rationale given was that a flourishing number of menu venues ensured that balance would occur between these venues. However, the weakness in this rationale lies in its naïve assumption that each political viewpoint enjoys equal “presence” amongst the various available venues. Conglomeration can prove particularly dangerous, then, in offering an amplifier effect – if a huge sprawling media conglomerate is run with one ideology in mind, the nation could suffer. Rupert Murdoch in particular has regularly been accused of running News Corporation with a conservative bias, an accusation that is borne out by the ideological leaning of his newspapers and by Fox News. When Ted Turner was more actively involved in the running of Time Warner, meanwhile, many accused him of infusing his social liberalism into the conglomerate, especially CNN. More recently, too, Sinclair Broadcast Group (a horizontally-integrated company owning a swathe of television stations) has come under heavy fire for its clearly evident bias (see John Oliver’s piece on it here).

5. Fears of Conflict of Interest

A related concern is that conglomerates won’t report on their own activities. First Amendment protections for the press are vital to a functioning democracy – giving people the choice of what kind of government they want only works if they have easy access to accurate information telling them about the nation and world they’re living in, and hence if they have everything they need to make informed choices about how to vote. However, First Amendment protections presumed that power would be governmental, thereby only limiting what actions the government can take to limit free speech. As concerns about ideological bias show, though, power can be corporate too, and information can be limited or skewed by large conglomerates. In particular, we should expect large conglomerates to offer biased accounts of their own activities and interests and activities. Disney, for instance, quite notoriously quashed a story that its ABC reporters were working on about the lack of criminal record checks performed on staff in Disney amusement parks. And media reporting on proposed FCC regulations is often starkly biased in favor of the conglomerate parent’s interests. Or, as we’ll examine in the class on Commercial Models and Biases, when a conglomerate’s many holdings profit considerably from taking ads from the automotive industry, can we expect it to report fairly on the environmental impact of the automotive industry? If the media is supposed to be a democratic society’s watchdog, who watches the watchdog? Such questions are more alarming when discussing news, but we could and should also examine how ownership affects the messages offered, or not, in entertainment.

6. Fears of Standardization

Several of the above concerns point to an overriding one, namely that media conglomerates will standardize their business operations (thereby eschewing innovation to avoid risk, ignoring local concerns, falling in line with a particular ideological bias, or so forth). We’ll discuss this concern next class.

Hilmes, “Media Ownership Debates”

The short reading by Michele Hilmes expands on some of these fears, while also challenging some as over-stated or problematic. Read that now to review some of the above points, and to nuance them.

Who Owns and Who Runs Media?

Before we move on, though, we should note that not all concerns about ownership are about conglomeration and consolidation. Other concerns are about who owns, or at least runs, these corporations. Simply, for instance, the FCC requires that American television networks be owned by Americans, a rule borne of the interwar and post-WWII years when the FCC greatly feared what would happen if German, Russian, or Japanese interests took over NBC, CBS, or ABC. Indeed, this rule led to Rupert Murdoch renouncing his Australian citizenship in 1985 and becoming American: without that move, he wouldn’t have been eligible to own Fox.

Below are the pictures of the CEOs or owners of all the American media conglomerates discussed above. Let’s play a simple game of asking what they all have in common.

America’s leading media owners and CEOS, from the top left: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Fox & News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, Disney’s Bob Iger, Alphabet/Google’s Sergey Brin & Larry Page, CBS & Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes, CBS’ former boss Les Moonves, Comcast’s Brian Roberts, iHeartMedia’s Robert Pittman, NBC Universal’s Stephen Burke, AT&T’s John Stankey, Microsoft’s Bill Gates

They’re all white men. No woman runs a major media conglomerate. No person of color runs a major media conglomerate. (All identify publicly as straight, too. All but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are older. And, of course, all are super, super-rich). And thus, especially as the #metoo and #timesup movements have hit Hollywood, this homogeneity in ownership should invite us to ask about how media companies’ gender and racial politics are structured from the top down … or about how they’d change if their leadership changed. The fear of oligopoly is basically a fear of “old boy networks” being established, and the networks that run American (and much global) media are definitely composed of old boys.

Hollywood’s hiring practices certainly betray a long-running old boys’ network, indicating why it’s important to have diversity in leadership. Consider these recent numbers from Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film on women behind the scenes for film and television; Lauzen and colleagues have been collecting these numbers for two decades.

Statistics on women behind-the-screen in film and television

That chart in the lower right gives a sense of why this matters: when women are in charge of projects, Lauzen and her colleagues’ numbers suggest, they are far less likely to shut out other women from the creative process, and far less likely to tell a story that is predominantly by, for, and about men only. We’ll discuss issues of depictions, portrayals, and on-screen representation in the Representations section of CA 250, but for now it’s worth reminding ourselves that ownership and leadership matter, not just (and because they actively affect) who is on screen.

Key Concepts and Names

- Conglomeration and Consolidation

- The major American and transnational media conglomerates

- News Corporation and 21st Century Fox

- The Walt Disney Company

- Viacom and CBS

- AT&T and Warner Media

- Comcast and NBC-Universal

- iHeartMedia

- Alphabet (Google)

- Facebook

- Microsoft

- Synergy

- Vertical Integration and Horizontal Integration

- The three stages of media: production, distribution, exhibition

- Cross-Promotion

- Concerns and Worries About Conglomeration:

- Oligopoly

- Inertia and Laziness

- Localism

- Ideological Bias

- Conflicts of Interest

- Who owns media?

5

Week 5: Commercial Biases

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Lori Lopez | 1:19 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=49

Introduction video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+4+-+Commercial+Models+%26+Biases/0_kjm9zd6r

Key Questions

- Why does it matter that much media is funded, whether in whole or part, by advertisers?

- What does advertising “do” to the media and the media systems that it funds? What effects should we expect?

- In particular, what are we seeing more of? And what are we seeing less of?

Note that today’s online class is a little shorter, since there’s slightly more reading than usual.

The Profit Motive

Most media that we consume are commercial products.  Almost every mainstream media product, from newspapers to musical recordings to movies to video games therefore needs to make money in order to survive.  So the market or profit motive is obviously one central motivation in shaping content.

Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Disney, explaining his primary objective.

If we think about the financial structure of media, there are three main ways for media as businesses to survive:

- Direct audience payment

- Payment between media companies, and

- Advertising revenue.

Direct Audience Payments

This is when the audience pays for the media, and that money goes directly to the company.  A lot of print media rely upon this kind of payment, with magazines and newspapers selling both subscriptions so they can regularly guarantee that people will buy their product, but also just selling individual copies on newsstands.  This is also the case for items like books, CDs, movie tickets, and video games.  With regard to television, we can add premium cable channels into this list.

Payment Between Media Companies

Another way that media companies make money is through the licensing of their product to other companies.  Media distributors pay content developers for the right to screen or reproduce their content.  For instance, movie theaters pay movie producers for the right to show the film, or television channels pay for the right to screen tv shows, particularly in syndication.

Advertising Revenue

To discuss ad-supported media, here is Professor Lori Kido Lopez again:

Media and Advertisers | Dr. Lori Lopez | 5:34

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=49

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Media+and+Advertisers/0_u1drdftm/75945101

Sandler, “Modern Family: Product Placement”

For a deep dive into how product placement works, and how it regularly complements ad breaks, now read Kevin Sandler’s article on Modern Family‘s deal with Apple.

Consequences for Media Content

When advertisers are the ones wielding so much financial power, contributing so much money to media producers, they also impact the kinds of stories that are told.  Media producers want to maintain good relationships with advertisers, so they will be careful to shape their content in a way that won’t upset corporations, and they want their shows to be “advertiser-friendly” in many ways.

One of the predominant themes within reality television is a focus on high-end consumption.

As a result, what do we see more of?

One of the predominant themes is a focus on consumption.  We can see this theme emerging in the following ways:

- The central role of expensive fashion, gourmet food, design, grooming, and beauty. Advertisers love shows that feature high-end taste and high-end consumption. (Though it’s assigned for next week, if you’re awesomely on top of things, you could read ahead to Michael Newman’s article on Everyday Italian in particular here, for its excellent examination of everything “on sale” in the show).

- Reality shows like Top Chef or Project Runway flatter viewers because they are in a position to judge the taste of professionals.

- Several shows quite explicitly exist to promote other media, such as Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight (see black box below).

- Bravo in particular chases after a demographic of upscale, well-educated trendsetters that they call “Affluencers.” So we get all these stories about extreme luxury consumption.

- The MTV show My Super Sweet 16 is a form of consumer porn, with scene after scene of teenaged girls costing their parents thousands of dollars in extravagance and luxury items.  Their parties are portrayed as laughable, but also can be seen as aspirational.  As viewers we know we won’t ever live a life like them, but we can aspire to it nonetheless and occasionally buy items similar to those featured on the show.

Together these texts reestablish our cultural values around wealth and consumption and fashion.  This kind of content teaches us that “the good life” is something that can be bought and sold.  If only you can buy the right products, then you’ll be happy, popular, accomplished, fulfilled.

Petersen, “Entertainment Tonight: Tabloid News”

Now read Anne Helen Petersen’s account of Entertainment Tonight, which provides an excellent example of how cross-promotion hits hyperdrive in a show whose primary purpose is to advertise the entire media industry, leading to it being dubbed once (as she records) “a big wet kiss in terms of promotion of projects.”

It’s also worth considering that advertising requires, capitalizes upon, and hence is often invested in unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and feelings of insecurity. If you feel great in your skin and are happy with life, you’re immune to pitches to buy products that will make you a better lover, a better friend, a better American, or so forth. Thus, many ads work to convince you that you’re not good enough, as a premise to selling you something to get better. When a culture is saturated with such messages, we see a general selling of depression and anxiety.

McAllister, “Television Advertising as Textual and Economic Systems”

Now read the PDF from Matthew McAllister, who offers seven other “effects” of advertising’s presence in television, in one of this class’ assigned readings: the “don’t bite the hand” effect, the “plugola” effect, the “don’t rock the boat” effect, the “conspicuous consumption” effect, the “that’s entertainment” effect, the “pardon the interruption” effect, and the “youth (and other advertising-friendly groups) will be served” effect. Make sure you know those seven effects.

Quite simply, too, advertisers like spectacle, cliff-hangers, and suspense. Consider, for instance, the style of headlines that are common at sites such as Upworthy, where clicking-through is vital to acquiring ad dollars, and hence where any and all “news” must be hidden behind elaborate pitches to get you to look further. Clickbait and lists that roll out over 30 pages abound on the Internet, due to ads. Television and radio regularly lure you on, too, rather than get to the point, and/or over-hype rather banal stories, whether fictional (“you won’t believe what she says … this Thursday at 7 central”) or nonfictional (where everything seems to be “breaking news”).

“Clickbait” is rampant across media, as advertising-based media hopes to hang on to its audiences for as long as possible

What do we see less of?

If some television, radio, or other media are especially “advertiser-friendly,” we should also consider what isn’t especially “advertiser-friendly.” First and foremost, advertisers want us to be in the mood to be advertised to. It’s no wonder, then, that darker shows struggle on commercial television, and had to turn to non-advertiser-supported venues to survive: how inappropriate would it seem to cut from “The Red Wedding” in Game of Thrones or a heart-wrenching conversation about loss and a sense of meaninglessness in TheLeftovers, to a perky ad for toothpaste or better life insurance?

But we should also think about the kinds of advertisers that exist, what they’re selling, and who they’re more or less interested in addressing ads to. Some advertisers are keen to talk to us all: a bar of soap or a can of soda could be bought by almost anyone. But if you’re Lexus, Viking River Cruises, Dior, or Apple, you’d much rather advertise with a show that will deliver more of your likely customers.

Working class life

Thus, one example of a lifestyle that is less visible in mainstream media is working-class life.  The show Roseanne was groundbreaking because it showed a working-class family that often talked about economic struggle and talks with disdain about middle class cultural forms.  Viewers are much more familiar, though, with families like the Banks family on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where the dad is a judge and the family has a butler.  Or the group of friends on Friends who wouldn’t actually be able to afford their nice apartment if they really worked as a barista or an unemployed actor. Or families pitched as “middle class” yet clearly much richer, like the Dunphys in Modern Family, whose house is probably worth about $3 Million alone.

The show “Roseanne” was groundbreaking when it hit the air in 1988 because it showed a working-class family that often talked about economic struggles.

There are so few depictions of workers and working-class life, it seems pretty impossible to forge a working-class identity.  In many ways, the media denies working-class existence.

The Rural Purge, 1969-1972

In the early 1970s networks decided they would rather attract a young urban demographic, so they cancelled rural-themed shows like “The Andy Griffith Show.”

We can also see this shift in values exemplified in what is known as “The Rural Purge.” This purge was a series of cancellations of rural-themed shows in the early 1970s when networks decided they would rather attract a young urban demographic.  Shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Mister Ed, The Andy Griffith Show, and other shows about the American “heartland” and rural life were cancelled. One of the actors from Green Acres stated, “It was the year CBS cancelled everything with a tree.”

The reasoning behind the purge was that the networks decided they wanted to put more attention toward attracting a younger demographic, and executives were worried about remaining relevant.  It was assumed (based on really iffy studies) that rural and older audiences weren’t interested in spending money on things like fashion and fancy products.  This would make them bad consumers and thus a bad audience.

They replaced these shows that took place in the countryside with shows that took place in urban centers.  They were also looking for shows with more social relevance, like All in the Family, with its focus on how a family deals with racism, homosexuality, women’s issues, the Vietnam war, and other controversial issues.

“Grandma, You’re Fired!”

The Golden Girls was a rare addition to ad-supported television, given its focus on older characters

Another absence in a lot of commercially-supported or -bankrolled media is old people. Shows like The Golden Girls or Grace and Frankie stick out as rarities. Why? Market research from the 60s and 70s led advertisers to think that older Americans (a) had low disposable incomes, (b) had already worked out their brand preferences, and (c) were less likely to replace older products or respond to contemporary trends. Changing demographics have led some researchers to challenge the supposed truism that older people are bad for media business, and some media pitch themselves almost exclusively to older viewers (the number of ads for life insurance, pills for erectile dysfunction, heart medicine, etc. on 24 hr news channels make their own ideal audience clear, for instance), but others hold fast to the notion that advertising is best directed at the young … and hence older Americans remain radically underrepresented on most television channels. Indeed, Nielsen Company ratings (about which we’ll learn more next class) now regularly just quote ratings for 18-49 year-olds, meaning that most television channels don’t even care if you’re watching once you’re fifty.

Self-Censorship and Chilling Effects

Some of the effects of such values are fairly explicit, like the stated intentions of Bravo to go after people who make more than $100,000 a year by having shows about rich people who become more happy by buying things.  But the effects that we might not notice are when media censor themselves by simply not developing programs on topics that they think advertisers won’t support. These are called chilling effects, a phrase that refers to censorship that ostensibly is self-imposed yet done to avoid trouble.

Reflection

Can you think of a topic that we might not see talked about in the media, because we’re afraid advertisers won’t like it?

- For example, discussions about climate change are often something that big companies (and especially the oil or auto industries) don’t want to hear.

- What other issues can you think of that are not portrayed in the media?

One example of a perspective that we almost never see talked about seriously in the media is critiques of capitalism or alternatives to capitalism, such as socialism.  The relationship between advertisers and media is so deeply embedded within capitalism that we never really get an opportunity to hear about or consider any alternatives.  We can also look at the issue of stifling certain messages because of the influence of advertisers.

Example: Criticizing Tobacco

“Physicians say “LUCKIES are less irritating”

Tobacco companies have been major advertisers since the 1950s, which is coincidentally when we started to learn that tobacco was extremely unhealthy and lead to higher mortality rates.  This reality about the harmful effects of tobacco had already been proven in 1954, but this information was often not reported on. Magazines that carried tobacco advertisements were far less likely to report news on the hazards of smoking.  If they did report a story, tobacco companies would pull their advertising dollars and the publication would suffer financially.

We can think about this relationship today with big pharmaceuticals and issues like climate change.  But we can also think about how this happens still today, and particularly due to the shrinking ownership of media companies.  With so few voices controlling what we see, there is even more opportunity to silence alternative perspectives.

Conclusion

Ads don’t just “broadcast,” though: they also come after us as individuals. Next class we’ll consider the business of big data that has led to some of the wealthiest media companies, such as Google and Facebook, offering services in ways that record our every use of them, so that ads can be “personalized” and redirected our way. Then next week we’ll examine how television, radio, and other legacy media have similarly been moving towards “narrowcasting” instead of broadcasting.

Key Concepts

- Profit motive

- Direct audience payment

- Payment between media companies

- Advertising revenue model

- Ears and eyeballs for sale

- Product placement

- Hypercommercialization

- “Advertising-friendly” media

- Affluencers

- Focus on consumption

- Selling unhappiness

- McAllister’s seven effects of advertising

- Clickbait and spectacle

- Working class life in the media

- The Rural Purge, 1969-1972

- Self-censorship and Chilling Effects

- Tobacco effects

6

Week 6: Market Fragmentation and Narrowcasting

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Lori Lopez | 1:06 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=71

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+5+-+Market+Fragmentation+%26+Narrowcasting/0_4an1goyu

Key Questions

- What is market fragmentation?

- What factors lead to it?

- How does it impact how we study the media?

The Mass Audience

LIFE magazine and USA TODAY – mass media for everyone, about everyone

When we think about publications like LIFE or USA TODAY, there isn’t much specificity to who it’s trying to target—it’s for everyone, about everyone.  The reality is that these goals might be unachievable, but we can nevertheless recognize the ethos of these publications. They seek to reach out to everyone and please everyone.

The Big 3 Networks dominated the market from the early years of television until the 1970s.

The same was once true for television, in the era of “the Big 3″ networks.  ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated the market from the early years of television until the 1980s.  Advertisers could buy out their prime-time spots and be confident that millions of viewers would see their ads.  For instance, at its peak in 1952, I Love Lucy reached 67 million viewers (almost 43% of the country’s population at that point!).  Up to 71% of all  households with televisions would tune in to view the program. And even by the end of the 1970s, 90% of Americans watching prime-time TV were watching one of the big 3 networks, so advertisers really only needed to focus on those channels and their programs.

Connecting to Adorno & Horkheimer: “Least Objectionable Programming”

Adorno and Horkheimer describe a world filled with sameness and standardization, where there is no need for innovation because novelty or creativity could actually jeopardize dominance.  They complain that media producers are only interested in churning out the same products so that audiences would continue to maintain interest and loyalty.  The era of “the Big 3” constantly risked realizing these fears and justifying these criticisms, as each network favored what was called least objectionable programming.  We can think about audiences settling in to just “watch television” without knowing in advance what they wanted to watch, just turning on the set and watching whatever happened to be on.  If they weren’t offended or annoyed by what they saw, they’d stay there; if they hated it or it offended them, they’d change the channel.  The theory of least objectionable programming is therefore that you just have to make programs that won’t cause people to change the channel, and you’ve got yourself an audience.

Market Fragmentation

Marketing to parents

Marketing to women

These understandings of how to be a successful television programmer began to change in the 1980s and 1990s.  When we talk about how advertisers support media industries by buying advertisements, there are a number of different strategies that can undergird this system.  Originally, advertisers were interested in the mass audience—the big undifferentiated whole, where they went broad with their message and targeted the general market.  But advertisers soon realized that there was a way to segment the audience into market categories and actually play to their specific differences, engaging in what’s called targeted marketing.

Targeted marketing wasn’t invented in the 1970s; we have long had ads such as these that were targeted to women, or to the parents of children.  But in the 1970s there started to be a real emphasis in dividing the mass audience into specific market categories and thinking about their specific needs and desires.  Content was produced with only certain people in mind, instead of having “everyone” in mind.

Fordism

We can think about this different orientation within advertising as being related to shifts in larger systems of production in the U.S.  From the 1940s to the 1960s we characterize the U.S. as being shaped by Fordism (named after Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company).  Fordism is an economic system that is based on industrialized and standardized modes of production.

Henry Ford created the idea of an assembly line

A key reason why Ford Motors was so successful was because its factories were extremely efficient in producing the exact same car over and over again.  Ford created the idea of the assembly line where the whole system was standardized, and you just have to make sure the system runs smoothly, that each part goes where it belongs.  Ford’s assembly lines were able to produce mass quantities of the Model T, which brought down the prices and increased profitability.

“You can have any color as long as it’s black.”
– Henry Ford

Henry Ford’s central idea was that you should produce one thing really efficiently, and then convince everyone that they want it.

If we move beyond the world of cars and into the world of media, we can think about how in the 1950s there was a fairly uniform sense of audience—the nuclear family who all watched the same thing. And thus shows “rolled off the assembly line” in similar ways, with countless family sitcoms looking almost identical, many cop shows or westerns aping each other, and so forth. And this was also the case in radio, in popular cinema, and other media.

Post-Fordism

So we can see the strengths of Fordism and its assembly line mode of production.  But in the early 1970s a new way of thinking started to prevail—one that was based on flexibility and customization.  We call this kind of thinking Post-Fordism.  As technology became more advanced, factories didn’t need to rely on the exact same processes.  Computers could be used to add different options and produce products that felt like they were made just for you.  There seemed to be limitless options for consumers—products would come in all sorts of variations in color, size, materials. Think of the wealth of options presented to someone buying things like toothpaste, t-shirts at Target, or chips.

Multiple flavors of chips from a post-Fordist production line

If we look at how this shift is echoed in people’s lives, we can think about different factions of society splitting off in the 60s.  We had hippies and the birth of a counterculture.  We had the civil rights movement and black power and the feminist movement.  In the 70s and 80s, family structures changed.  There was more divorce, less focus on marriage and the nuclear family, more varieties in family types.  Instead of wanting to be like everyone else, people wanted to split into factions of people like themselves.  So with post-Fordism and these shifts in American society, television networks begin to produce shows that reflect these changes.

Market Research

This interest in the specificities of their audiences coincided with a rise in market research as well.  Advertisers needed to know things about their audience in order to tailor their message to them.  Let’s look at some of the tools that are used for market research.

The Nielsen Company has long had a monopoly on measuring TV ratings in the USA.

In our previous class on the business of big data, we considered some such forms. The AC Nielsen Company began its life relying upon viewing journals that it mailed to would-be respondents, hoping they’d fill them out accurately, but they soon started to develop set-top “people meters” that recorded what was actually watched. They also started recording viewer demographics with greater care, and hence could tell advertisers not just how many people watched a show, but how many affluent young white women, older African-American men, or so forth.

As was also discussed in our class on the Business of Big Data, the development of computers was important here too. Sitting down with viewer journals to tabulate who watched what and when must already have been a remarkably arduous (and boring!) task, but when people meters could feed their data into computers that could not just tabulate quickly who watched but also work out percentages of different types of viewers watching, Nielsen could offer fine-grained statistical reports that allowed advertisers and producers to look at audiences in terms of many different demographics, rather than as one big mass. Advertisers, meanwhile, were gaining more and more information from data mining at other sites (via in-store credit cards and “rewards” programs, via sales numbers, etc.), and were starting to work out which consumers they wanted and which they didn’t, who they thought would buy their products and who wouldn’t.

Data from the American Veterinary Medical Association suggests cats are more popular in the North, dogs in the South

Over time, the amount of data that has become available to advertisers has, of course, only increased. And with this data has come the chance to create all sorts of psychographic profiles ( profiles of people’s behaviors and preferences that tend to create connections and correlations between these behaviors and preferences) based on correlations of data about consumers’ other activities. Take, for instance, this study that claimed to find a correlation between pet preference and political beliefs — Republicans tend to love dogs over cats, we’re told, while Democrats flip that. New media platforms harvest data to create all sorts of correlations and “information” like this, feeding it to media creators and the advertisers behind them to determine how to create media that captures the interests of their most desired consumers, and/or how to exclude unwanted consumers.

Armed with all this “information” (even the information gained through poorly-designed studies or methods), media creators in the past four decades have become increasingly interested in addressing specific audiences, not just “everyone.”

Technological Competition & Regulation

Another change in the media landscape that led to market fragmentation was the growth and development of cable television.  The number of channels the average American receives in their TV has gradually been increasing as cable proliferates.

The average American has access to more channels as cable proliferates

In cable’s early days, channels couldn’t go after large audiences, partly because not enough people had cable, partly because they weren’t wealthy enough to compete with the Big 3. Over time, therefore, this became standard practice (aided by market research and market profiling), meaning that cable channels instead have targeted specific audiences by offering specific programming designed to appeal to them.  This can be seen in the way that cable structures its content, where you are now able to choose a specific channel to fulfill your desires for specific content.  There are channels for just sports, just movies, just news, just weather, just home shopping.

But the channels themselves also target more specific demographics and brand identities.

- One of the first hugely successful cable channels, MTV focused on affluent youth, from their teens to their 20s

- Nickelodeon goes after preschoolers, children, pre-teens, and teenagers

- Nick at Nite targets their parents with nostalgic programming

- As we learned previously, Bravo coined the term “Affluencers” to describe its preferred audience of upper class, white, trend-setting, well-educated taste makers.

Cable channels target specific audiences

Since cable television largely developed after significant deregulation, we already know that regulatory bodies were interested more in opening up possibilities for media growth than in censoring content at that time.  But cable television was also brought into the home via private contract with a cable company, not “over the air,” and hence it wasn’t subjected to the same regulatory scrutiny as were the networks and broadcast television.  This is why you can see more adult content on cable channels than on the networks.  You can see some pretty edgy comedy on Comedy Central that might be complained about or protested if it were on network TV.

The FCC hasn’t regulated cable channels as strictly as network TV

But we can also go one step further with premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime that charge a monthly subscription fee.  Because of this financial structure, they don’t need to rely on advertisements to interrupt their programming.  They can have complete artistic control over their programming, and often demonstrate this freedom by having graphic sexual and violent content.  It’s more like an R-rated movie. This is definitely not “least objectionable programming,” as most channels now don’t care about angering or offending some audiences.

We can see the impact of all these new choices on viewership numbers through the decades. The idea of a mass audience is no longer as relevant as it once was.

Viewership numbers through the decades, in millions

Other technologies besides cable have also divided up the audience even more. Since the 1980s, we’ve seen a proliferating stream of new technologies, each of which now competes with television, radio, film, and other “older” media. VCRs allowed audiences to save television for later, buy, rent, or tape films, and hence to watch something other than live television. Video game systems have become remarkably popular. First satellite radio and then podcasting has rejuvenated radio and captured millions of listeners. The Internet offers endless text, video, and audio to enjoy. And mobile media and their apps claim more and more of our time and attention.

Media producers have thus on one hand been forced to pursue smaller audiences, since the market has fragmented considerably. Indeed, even the networks now have their own brands — following Fox’s successful addition to their lineup with its strategy of pursuing a younger, edgier audience (with shows like The Simpsons, Married … with Children, and In Living Color), gradually the Big 3 responded, and ABC specializes in younger women, CBS in older audiences, while NBC long tried to cling to the mantle of upscale 18-49 year-olds (though none pursue these audiences exclusively, it should be noted). On the other hand, producers have regularly steered into this skid gleefully, happy to seek out just a small fragment of the audience.

“Brand” + Newman, “Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste”

For more on the concept of the “brand” and how it has developed over time, now read the keyword entry by Sarah Banet-Weiser. Then read Michael Newman’s chapter on Everyday Italian, which on one hand provides yet more evidence of the commercial biases discussed last week, but for our purposes this week, read it to see how both Food Network and Giada De Laurentiis herself use the show to create brand identity for the network and for Giada’s respective brands.

Market Franchising

To explain how horizontally-integrated conglomeration fits into this picture, and how media franchises have become a particularly important tool for conglomerates to address a fragmented market and audience, here is the Department of Communication Arts Professor Derek Johnson:

Media Franchising | Dr. Derek Johnson | 6.12 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=71

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Media+Franchising/0_ulvhvcrz

Narrowcasting and Studying the Media

Together these forces helped lead to narrowcasting, or a more customized version of broadcasting that targets information to a specific, narrowly defined group of recipients—or, at the extreme (and as in the case of numerous new media platforms), to a specific individual—at a particular time and place.

So what have been the results of this move toward narrowcasting and niche cultures?  How does it change the way we study the media?  Here are some of the implications we can think about:

Programming possibilities—Now networks can be less worried about ostracizing certain viewers.  Instead of thinking about the least objectionable content, they can think about using content to speak to a certain demographic.  Shows like The Daily Show or Fox and Friends, or even the really risqué programming on Adult Swim can only cater to one specific audience, but in our new era of narrowcasting this is a successful model.

Brand loyalty and fandom—Instead of reaching everyone, they want to reach a target audience who is loyal.  That loyal audience is actually a better audience for advertisements than high numbers.

Viewing habits—We start hearing the phrase “appointment TV,” where instead of just turning the TV on and flipping through the channels, people tune in for specific programs.  With DVRs we sometimes bypass the idea that we need to tune in at a certain time.  This does still happen for some shows; for instance, if you don’t watch So You Think You Can Dance live, you can’t participate in voting.  Or there are shows where the stars of the shows will be live-tweeting, which entices viewers to tune in while the show is live and simultaneously enter the Twitter livestream as they watch.

“Personalization”

Connecting our previous class on The Business of Big Data to processes of narrowcasting, in his keyword entry, Joseph Turow discusses how narrowcasting to a group turned to outright personalization. Recall Sandvig’s blog post about “corrupt personalization,” though, to consider how this process isn’t as simple (or benign) as it sounds.

The Long Tail

Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail; there are a small number of products that are extremely popular/ in high demand. And then a long tail of other products with smaller demand.

Another phenomenon that we can take note of is the long tail.  Chris Anderson developed the theory of the long tail (described in brief by Anderson here) after looking into how a variety of new media distributors made their money. Many distributors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Rhapsody, and Netflix boast huge catalogues of content, he notes, and within these are a small number of “hits” (blockbusters, New York Times bestsellers, Platinum-selling albums) that are extremely popular and in high demand.  And then there is the long tail of all of the other products that exist — the obscure indy songs that only you and three other people seem to know about, the lesser-known films, the book your mom told you to read but you’ve never heard of, etc. What struck Anderson in his analysis of leading online distributors, though, was that most of them made a majority of their profit from the combined profits of the long tail. The hits may be important to give reliable peaks of sales, and to grab the attention and trust of consumers, but the obscure titles were, in aggregate, actually out-selling the hits.

Anderson’s theory is one of market fragmentation and of the diverse interests of audiences, and it’s also been used by some as a sign that narrowcasting, and catering to niche interests, is where the money’s at (even though, strictly speaking, his theory allows for the importance and endurance of hits too). It’s been contested in recent years, and some distributors have veered back towards hits, hits, and more hits (Netflix’s catalogue/”tail” has been shrinking, for instance). But part of Anderson’s point was that online distributors can afford to keep a large back catalogue, thereby feeding all sorts of subcultures, niche markets, and specific taste communities, and a look at the wide range of online providers and what they offer certainly makes that central point hard to argue with.

Does Netflix have “something for everyone”?

Something for everyone?

So with all this niche marketing and focusing on specific segments of the population, does that mean that there’s “something for everyone”?  Does this remedy the problem of underrepresentation and make it so everyone can see themselves reflected in the media?  In many ways we do get a much more interesting cross-section of society now that everything isn’t focused on the same demographic.

But we still need to remember the focus on consumption and consumer markets.  If a group isn’t considered a strong consumer market, they still might be left out.  We still don’t see a lot of stories told about rural communities, about poor people, about many minorities or other groups who are otherwise seen as less desirable consumer markets.

Although we see that identities are being turned into consumer groups all the time, like kids as consumers, or gays and lesbians as consumers, or Latino/as as consumers, there are still plenty of groups who have yet to be recognized as a target market.

Key Concepts

- The Big Three and “least objectionable programming”

- Market fragmentation

- Targeted marketing

- Fordism and Post-Fordism

- Market research

- Demographics

- Psychographics

- Brand identities

- Cable channels

- Regulating cable

- Media franchising

- Narrowcasting

- Brand loyalty

- Appointment TV

- Personalization

- The long tail

- “Something for everyone”

7

Week 7: Formal Analysis

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 1:35 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=89

Introduction video: click to launch or to access from PDF version, copy and paste this URL into your browser:https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+7+-+Formal+Analysis/0_l4yt89za/32607362

Key Questions

- What is formal analysis?

- How can we apply formal analysis to the movie Gravity?

- How do structures contribute to layers of meaning?

- How can we apply formal analysis to television opening sequences

Formal Analysis

This lesson will continue to develop your skills for analyzing media texts by introducing the concept of formal analysis.  Formal analysis sees a work of art as a bundle of components organized into structures, and tries to understand how these components work together to impact the audience.  We have already started to identify some formal elements such as mise-en-scène and all of the different components that are placed within the frame.

But formal analysis also includes other aspects that we can analyze in order to consider how a work is constructed to produce effects on us.  These include:

- Mise-en-scène

- Structure of the text

- Materials and techniques of the medium

- The producers and their interventions into the text

We will be applying formal analysis to Gravity, so you should have screened this film before completing the rest of the lesson.  This was a popular film from 2013 that won Oscars for acting, directing, cinematography, visual effects, editing, score, production design, sound editing, and sound mixing.  Its unique form and setting are now part of a larger set of films within its genre that take place in space and use similar formal elements (such as Interstellar and The Martian), which is why it can be helpful to try to understand it more deeply.

Camera Shots, Angles, and Movement

One of the ways that we can improve our ability to analyze what is happening in a media text is through developing our vocabulary for describing how an image is shot.  In this short video, you will be introduced to a number of different names for camera shots, angles, and movement, as well as what feelings and meanings those choices might convey to a viewer.

Shot Scale & Shot Angle  |  6:23 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=89

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Shot+Scale/0_4sbj2zb6/32607362

Here is a partial list of some of the most important terms that were mentioned in this video.  You may want to use them to describe the use of the camera when you analyze media texts:

- Close-Up, Extreme Close-Up, Medium Close-Up

- Long Shot, Extreme Long Shot

- Medium Shot, Medium Long Shot

- Low Angle

- High Angle

- Dutch / Canted Angle

This language helps us to understand particular shots and scenes in film or television (or even their computer-generated equivalents in video games, apps, and other digital media), but we can use it to make sense of patterns or developments across entire texts. It’s helpful to ask whether we see a director heavily favor one visual technique, for instance, and if so why that might be. Or, alternately, you start from the result and ask how it was created: if a text has a sad feel to it, for example, how did it create that feeling through formal means? Formal analysis requires that you forever be asking what (what do I see? what techniques are being used? what is my eye being drawn to or away from?) and why (why am I being shown the action this way? why is that technique being used? why does the director want me to look that way?).

Lewis, “Camera Placement”

To learn more about camera placement in film, now read Jon Lewis, who offers a deeper dive into the concept.

Techniques can be observed across visual media, of course. But to focus on one text’s use of one technique, below is Communication Arts Professor Jeff Smith discussing camera movement in the film Rouge (Red) by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Rouge is an excellent film, and well worth watching, but his (illustrated) analysis doesn’t require you to have seen the film, as it’s self-explanatory. Professor Smith made this video for the Criterion Collection, who very kindly gave permission for us to use it here.

Three Colors: Red – Formal Analysis | Dr. Jeff Smith | 10:09 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=89

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Jeff+Smith+on+Red/0_sv7lftal/32607362

Gravity – Formal Analysis | Dr. Maria Belodubrovskaya | 9:11 mins.

Gravity

If you haven’t watched Gravity yet, stop, go watch it (and watch for filming and formal techniques while you do), then resume.

Now, let’s consider Gravity. In a future class, we’ll engage in some ideological analysis of the same film, but here is Communication Arts Professor Maria Belodubrovskaya discussing formal analysis and applying it to Gravity.

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=89

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Gravity+-+Formal+Analysis/0_omd2f8ok

Key Questions to Ask

In last week’s reading from Bordwell and Thompson, they helped us to think about the choices that filmmakers make with regard to form.  They emphasize that form and content work alongside one another in order to produce meaning for the viewer, setting up expectations through delivery of certain patterns.  These are the key questions that we can ask in order to consider these choices:

- For any element in the film, what are its functions in the overall form? How is it motivated?

- Are elements or patterns repeated throughout the film? If so, how and at what points? Are motifs and parallelisms asking us to compare elements?

- How are elements contrasted and differentiated from one another? How are different elements opposed to one another?

- What principles of progression or development are at work through the form of the film? Does a comparison of the beginning and ending point toward the film’s overall form?

“Realism” + Haggins,  “Homicide: Realism“

Above, we’ve (1) looked at techniques across various texts, and (2) probed specific texts for their use of technique and film form, but another helpful way of analyzing film form is (3) to consider how specific effects are created in one or more texts using varying strategies. The Greg Smith and Bambi Haggins readings do this, noting how “realism” is something that must be constructed through form, or as Smith states, “It is more productive to think about realism as an effect that occurs when our assumptions about what is ‘realistic’ intersect with the techniques that media makers use to portray the world” (p. 166). Read them now.

Layers of Meaning

We should also  be attuned to the different levels of meaning that a text can have.  While some meanings are very surface-level and obvious, we can find ways to interpret meanings that are much deeper, or that connect to ideas beyond the film itself.

Here are some of the terms we use to describe these levels:

- Referential—Refers to things or places that already have significance in the real world so that the viewer can readily make sense of them.

- Explicit—This is the obvious “point” that the film is trying to make, the more overt, obvious levels of meaning.

- Implicit—But we can also dig for meanings that are not stated directly, but instead the viewer needs to work to produce an interpretation of the film’s meaning. These meanings may rely upon the explicit or referential, but are more below the surface.

- Symptomatic—These meanings are more abstract and general, getting at the film’s deeper, even involuntary meaning.

So these are the meanings where you have to peel back some of the layers, and see what’s underneath.

Layers of Meaning: Gravity

The reading from Bordwell and Thompson give an example of how this works with the meanings of Wizard of Oz, but to practice these terms further we can also use the example of Gravity:

- Referential—A woman is left stranded alone in space after her shuttle is destroyed, and she must fight to survive and journey back to Earth.

- Explicit—A woman must find the strength within herself to survive on her own in the isolation of space.

- Implicit—A mother who is broken from having lost a child and her male companion is left without purpose and spinning out of control until she can start all over on her own.

- Symptomatic—If we go even deeper, we might argue that the film is really about how women rely on the rationality and logic of men to solve problems, even when they actually have the strength to do so on their own.

Each of these levels is not necessarily completely separate from the other levels, as each layer of meaning builds upon and can become inextricably connected to the other meanings.  But the fact that there is a clear difference between explicit meanings and implicit meanings will be important as you write your textual analysis paper, because you will be crafting your argument around an implicit meaning.

Formal Analysis of Television Openings

Television intros and opening sequences can be a helpful place to start thinking about formal analysis, because they are often densely packed with meaning. They usually need to do a lot of work introducing everything from characters, genre, tone, and style to prospective or new viewers, while also getting returning viewers back in the mood.

The sequence that opened the Showtime series Dexter offers us an example.  Even if (or perhaps especially if) you are unfamiliar with this show, watch it and think about how it is setting up expectations through tone, visuals, sound, and music.  There is no text or title cards, but hopefully through analysis of form we can still begin to decode a lot about what the show is about.

Dexter – Opening Sequence | 1:36 mins.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=89

https://youtu.be/QhGMGjs3DSs

What do we see?  First, the sequence uses a lot of extreme close-up shots, which immediately promises us greater access, or literally a closer look at this character. These close-ups include a man engaged in his morning routine as he performs simple, everyday tasks like flossing or putting on a t-shirt. But each act also resembles an act of violence—the floss, for instance, looking more like a garrote, the t-shirt like a sheet placed over a corpse. And thus this character is surrounded by violence and aggression, and these qualities are already a part of him—all we needed to do is look up close to see it.

We can also note that numerous shots point to his enthusiasm for this violence, such as the relishing of killing a mosquito and the voracious cutting of flesh in the preparation of breakfast.  Images of a shaving accident remind us that drops of blood are a part of everyday routines, but also help to reveal the dual nature of the gruesome acts that we can become comfortable with.  Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the fact that this program follows a serial killer, this opening conveys a great deal about Dexter as show and Dexter as character: we know to expect violence from him, and to expect his enjoyment of it. We know that we’re going to get uncomfortably close to him, to be spared no detail. And we know it’s primarily about him, as there are no other characters depicted or hinted at.

But of course turning all these everyday things into violent acts is an act of visual play, albeit dark, and thus the show signals its often dominant mode of dark humor. The music helps here too, as it’s both eerie and somewhat whimsical. There’s a carnival aspect to it that suggests Dexter is our carnival figure, vacillating between more jaunty, playful parts and more raw aggressive parts (as when the saxophone roars alongside the pushing down of his French press coffee plunger). Capping that dark humor is his final wink at the camera and the musical “ding” that accompanies it, as this is both somewhat threatening and somewhat playful.

The Formal Analysis of Anything

Above, we’ve applied formal analysis to some celebrated texts — Rouge, Gravity, and Dexter. Formal analysis, though, can be applied to any visual text. Granted, some directors, cinematographers, and writers are especially intentional in their art or craft, thereby giving us much more to analyze and appreciate. But all visual texts are rich with visual meanings: why, for instance, are the lights so bright on daytime talk shows or game shows? what is the effect of the soap opera’s fondness of close-ups? Or why do various video game designers place “the camera” in certain places not others? We’ve also talked only of visual cues, but you could also ask a whole slew of questions about how sound is used.

Key Concepts

- Formal analysis

- Shot sizes:

- Close-up, Extreme close-up, Medium close-up

- Long shot, Extreme long shot

- Medium shot, Medium long shot

- Camera angle:

- low angle

- high angle

- Dutch/canted angle

- eye-level shot

- Phases of the story, film structure

- Realism

- Forms of meaning:

- Referential meaning

- Explicit meaning

- Implicit meaning

- Symptomatic meaning

8

Week 8 (Online 1): How Meaning is Created - Semiotics

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 2:17mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=199

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+8+-+Semiotics/1_9a6vzmcj

Key Questions

- How does hegemony work at the level of the individual text?

- What is semiotics, and how does it help us study texts and their meanings systematically?

- How can we use semiotics to decode and interpret ads?

- How do signs work together to create stronger meanings: “syntagmatically” and “paradigmatically,” and as “myths”?

- How can signs be manipulated to change meaning and to offer counter-hegemonic meanings

How meaning is created: Semiotics

Digging into a text can help us make sense of its aesthetics, but it can also help us analyze a text’s deeper, ideological meanings. Central to ideas of hegemony are that ideology and ideological meanings aren’t just present in obvious sources like political speeches or ads, issue-based documentaries, or news pundits’ screeds. Rather, most ideology works subtly. And if that’s the case, we should expect to see ideological meanings all over the place. Some people resist this notion, insisting, for instance, that something is “just entertainment” and that its meanings exist completely at the surface. It would indeed be extravagant and outlandish to think that everything is a soldier in a protracted political war, but we should always be open to the idea that any text, no matter how seemingly banal or simple, may be doing ideological work. Why and how? Because language (not just words, but visual language, the language of sounds, etc.) is slippery. Today’s class will examine how it’s slippery, and will direct this observation towards an understanding of what all sorts of texts might be doing to further various ideolgies. We do this by engaging with semiotics, or the “science” of meaning.

Let’s start by considering this quote from Chris Barker:

Language is not a neutral medium for the formation and transfer of values, meanings and forms of knowledge that exist independently beyond its boundaries. Rather, language is constitutive of those very values, meanings and knowledges. That is, language gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought into view and made intelligible to us in terms which language delimits. Language is not best understood as an innocent reflection of non-linguistic meaning.

In short, Barker is saying that language is never just a clear window through which we see meaning; it plays a key role in determining what we see on the other side. For some extreme examples, consider word choice on whether to call someone a “terrorist” or a “freedom-fighter.” for example, or whether to call a friend who asks for money “down on their luck” or “a free-loader.” But Barker’s not just saying word choice matters; he’s saying all language is slippery.

Ferdinand de Saussure & Arbitrary Signifiers

Ferdinand de Saussure

Semiotics, and this notion of language being “arbitrary” comes from Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguistics professor whose lectures were collected by his students and published after his death in the early 20th century, and from Charles Sanders Peirce. Let’s consider some of de Saussure’s basic points:

De Saussure noted that language works through signs, where each sign has a signifier (the word, visual, sound, or action we use to reference the concept) and a signified (the concept that’s being signified). So, with the word “tree,” the letters t, r, e, and e combine to create the signifier, whereas the signified is the concept of “treeness.” Or if we see a red light at an intersection, the illuminated red circle is the signifier, whereas the signified is the concept “stop / don’t go.” Or if we see and hear hands clapping, we tend to understand the signified “approval / appreciation.”

Different words for “tree” around the world. Translation by Google; apologies for all mess-ups

However, de Saussure argues that all language is, to some degree or other, “arbitrary.” On one hand, after, all, there is absolutely no reason why we need to use the letters “t, r, e, e” to signify “treeness”, nor why “stop / don’t go” needs to be signified by a red light. There are many other words for tree in the world, indeed, and we could imagine a world in which, say, a blue triangle at an intersection signifies “stop / don’t go,” or in which flicking one’s knee signified approval and appreciation.

Various icons. What do they each mean?

Admittedly, some signs are less purely arbitrary than others. Thus, for instance, onomatopeia aims to approximate a specific sound, and a photo of a tree could signify treeness more “naturally” than the letters “t, r, e, e.” But even then, different languages have different onomatopeiac words for the same thing (to purr in French is “ronronner,” for example), and even if you’ve decided to use a photo of a tree to signify treeness, you could use any one of a million or more specific tree photos to do that job.

Arbitrary Signifieds

On the other hand, though, by saying language was “arbitrary,” de Saussure didn’t just mean we could use different signifiers — words, pictures, sounds, or actions — to signify “the same thing.” He meant that language is somewhat arbitrary in how it decides what is “the thing” / the signified in the first place. English has the word “tree,” which signifies a specific collection of plants, but we could just as easily imagine a language that combines what we regard as trees with other plants, or that subdivides and refuses to group what we regard as different types of trees as “the same thing.”  In short, to even say that there is a concept of treeness in the first place is somewhat arbitrary. This is not to say that trees as physical objects are a figment of our imagination (of course they’re real!), but that the signifier “t, r, e, e” and the signified “treeness” are constructed in language, culturally, and are not natural. Stuart Hall writes:

The meaning is not in the object or person or thing, nor is it in the word. It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. [… Meaning] is not given by nature or fixed by the gods. It is the result of a set of social conventions. (pp. 175-6)

Why it’s hard to translate

If you speak another language fluently, what concept either exists in that language that doesn’t in English, or is subdivided into multiple terms in that language? Or if you don’t speak two (or more) languages, ask a friend who does. For example, “silly” cannot easily be translated into Spanish — Google suggests “tonto” (which Google itself translates back as “fool”), while a Spanish-English dictionary suggests “imbecil” (which has its English cognate, “imbecile”), both of which are pointed and barbed, lacking the playfulness of the English word. Translation is an exercise fraught with problems precisely because language is arbitrary, and because it’s cultural — different languages and cultures regularly divide up the world into not just different words but different concepts.

Think here too of words that apply to things we know exist on spectrums, such as color or temperatures. Look at the picture below and decide where “green” begins and ends, and you’ll likely find others who disagree. Or what temperate counts as “cold”? or “hot”? Now ask a friend from Southern California or Texas, if you’re from the Midwest, or vice versa.

Where does “green” begin and end?

Why all this matters is because the social, cultural world relies upon language. Obviously, we can only communicate about the social, cultural world through language, and thus the words we choose to us or not use matter. Take the following maps, for instance, both found in Google Images when looking for a map of “the Arab world.” How do they invite us to think differently about what it means to be “Arab”?

Two maps of “The Arab World”, one of which makes no distinctions, one of which makes many. How might each affect our understanding of what it means to be “Arab”?

The one on the right situates “the Arab world” as diverse, as containing many different parts and groups within it, whereas the one on the left takes a “one size fits all” approach and sees no relevant difference. Depending on which map you’re using — or, in other words, depending upon what sign or signs you use to make sense of people from this region of the world, you are either left thinking of them as “all the same” or as diverse. This matters considerably to how one then processes information about Arabs, or hears such terms as “Arab beliefs” or “Arab values.”

All Meaning is Contingent

If words and signs matter for “boring” words like “tree” or for seemingly objective descriptors such as “green,” “cold,” or “Arabic,” we should expect them to matter all the more for abstract concepts. What is honor? patriotism? love? marriage? good or evil? citizenship? bravery? justice? freedom? masculinity or femininity? These and any / every other abstract concept are ones that matter deeply to many people. De Saussure would point out, though, that none of them have an objective, universally-shared meaning. How do they come to take on specific meanings, therefore?

All signs become “fixed” only temporarily. As a good dictionary will tell you, all sorts of words — from “gay” to “awful” — have changed or added meanings considerably over time. But within a moment of time, if a word (or image, sound, or action) has a shared meaning, this is because it has been repeated enough times to seem “natural.” And at this point we can answer the question — “why are we talking about all of this in a course about media?” — because media plays a key role in that act of repetition. If a large number of people share (or almost share) a definition of “masculinity” or of “love,” for instance, this is because the world around them is constantly, hegemonically offering them similar signs for “masculinity” and for “love.”

If, by contrast, enough signs offered us different concepts of “masculinity” or of “love,” those signs would be destabilized, since they might no longer seem natural. And this is one reason why the meanings in media matter to so many people, because they are especially “loud,” can circulate especially far, and hence may play especially important roles either in maintaining a hegemonic meaning and understanding of a sign, or destabilizing it. We’ll now look at both situations, and add some more vocabulary along the way.

Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Connections

Signs rarely work alone. Indeed, almost any signifier can have a different signified, depending upon where you find it, and upon the other signs around it. An image of a tree may signify nature or environmentalism in some contexts, on a road sign it may signify a forest or a national park, or even family (as in, a family tree) elsewhere. So the interesting work in semiotics comes in seeing how signs work with each other.

One thing to look for is how signs are connected syntagmatically, meaning alongside each other in a sequence or combination of sorts. A sentence is a syntagmatic grouping of words, for instance. Or consider what you’re wearing right now, where the entire outfit is a syntagmatic grouping of footwear, pants/skirt/etc., shirt/top, maybe a hat, maybe glasses, and other accessories. Any one of those things may signify something by itself, but they then combine to signify something in particular. Jeans have a particular meaning, for example, but put them alongside other clothing items and they’ll do different things, as in the following photos:

Jeans take on different meanings depending on what else is part of the syntagm: a cowboy hat, Jeff Bezos, adornment, a university building and many others wearing similar jeans

Paradigmatic connections, meanwhile, exist between things that are perceived to be similar in kind. Jeans may be syntagmatically connected to a shirt, since you can wear both together, but they’re paradigmatically connected to shorts since it’s most likely you’ll need to wear just one. Thinking of fashion again, you can therefore think about how paradigmatic shifts can radically alter a syntagmatic grouping … or not. What would be the effect, for instance, of the Queen substituting her crown for a (paradigmatically-connected) baseball cap? We use fashion as an example to show that although the terminology may sound confusing, you’re already an expert on paradigmatic and syntagmatic connections: every morning you ask yourself “what goes together?”, consider what kind of image you want to present to the world and how to construct that syntagmatically, perhaps are forced into paradigmatic changes when something’s in the laundry or later in the day when you need to change for a different purpose but don’t care to change everything.

The Semiotics of the Hipster Beard

In 2014, Buzzfeed published an article that helpfully and playfully explains semiotics (and post-structuralism more generally, though you don’t need to worry about that term here) through discussing hipster beards. It’s a quick and fun read, so if you want a little more help “getting” semiotics, go check it out here.

Hyundai’s Surfing Toddler Ad

Beyond clothes, though, we can also think of all media texts as presenting countless different syntagmatic and paradigmatic connections. Watch the following ad and we’ll then analyze it semiotically:

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=199

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Hyundai-Baby/0_wp92gok2/32607362

Let’s start by describing the toddler denotatively (ie: just descriptively): he’s got curly blond hair, he’s home alone, he lives in a tidy, presumably middle class home, he can jump out of his crib, he wears only a diaper, he can drive and surf, he picks up a toddler girl roadside. Each one of these is its own sign:

Blond curly hair — think of the line that “blonds have more fun.” It’s also a bit straggly, suggesting he’s kind of carefree. Or maybe it just tells us that he’s in the sun a lot (maybe this isn’t the first time he’s performed this stunt?).

Home alone in a middle-class home — on one hand, this suggests naughtiness, since he’s doing all of this without seeming permission; on the other hand, it suggests safety — his parents trust him, he’s well cared-for financially.

Physical abilities — these all suggest that he’s precocious, they give him an air of additional masculinity, and they pose him as edgy, cool, free-spirited, anti-authoritarian, and in charge of himself.

Picking up the toddler girl — this act labels him as a player. Note, too, that she just watches him while he surfs, enthralled by the spectacle. So he’s suggested to be impressive, and (oddly, since he’s a toddler) attractive.

Putting these signs together syntagmatically, and we have a kid who is connotatively suggested to be autonomous, free-spirited, a player, fun-loving, precocious, a bit naughty, wealthy or at least financially well-off, edgy, cool, and carefree yet ultimately entirely safe. These are, of course, all attributes that Hyundai wants to suggest you will be if you purchase the car. They chose these thoughtfully to create that image.

To further appreciate how Hyundai have crafted this message, we only need make some paradigmatic shifts. What if the kid had straight black hair and never smiled? What if his parents put him in the car themselves? What if he began in a run-down old house? What if he picked up a male friend instead of the toddler girl? What if he went to play golf instead of surf? Each shift would change meaning considerably.

Or we can quickly do the same with the car. Denotatively, it’s driven by a toddler, it holds a surfboard, it drives on the beach and off-road, it passes other cars on the highway, it goes a long distance (“to West Coast” suggests as much, at least), and it’s greyish silver. These choices connote ease (a baby can drive it!), sportiness, endurance, toughness, an ability to carry a lot (another reason Hyundai chose surfing instead of, say, golf), and sleekness.

“Myths”

Roland Barthes

Next to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes is one of the most famous scholars to have developed semiotics. Barthes’ particular use of it is highly relevant for us here, since he noted that the ways in which we use signs regularly rely upon, and hence further circulate, what he called “myths” — strong, pervasive, ideological messages about what the world is like. (He wasn’t saying they were “false” — as some people mean the word “myth” — as much as purely ideological).

The above Hyundai ad perpetuates and feeds into a particular “myth” of masculinity and of patriarchy. Paradigmatically, after all, we can and should compare our central toddler to his counterpart, the toddler girl. Where he is active and in charge (taking to the open road, going surfing), she is passive and waiting for someone else to guide her (holding a hitch-hiker’s sign, watching him while he surfs instead of participating). He needs validation, she provides it. The ad isn’t trying to make a statement about gender per se — it’s just trying to sell cars — but in doing so, it mobilizes a bunch of signs that contribute to a patriarchal norm by which men act, do, lead and women follow, wait, watch, and applaud.

“Myth” + and Dyer, from Advertising as Communication

To get a better grasp of semiotics, some of its terminology, and how to “do” semiotic analysis, now read first the PDF from Gillian Dyer, then Jonathan Bignell’s keyword entry on “Myth.”

Volkswagen’s Little Darth Vader Ad

Before we move on, let’s try another one, also for a car, but this time from Volkswagen:

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=199

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/VW+-+Darth+Vader/0_nq2odp6l/32607362

Denotatively, we once again see an upper middle-class kid living in a clean and organized house. The child (and their sibling?) has lots of toys. The house has a contemporary design, decked with modern appliances. It exists on a large plot of land. Everything in an ad is attached to the product syntagmatically, so these suggest that a Volkswagen driver is wealthy, lacks little, is modern and sophisticated, appreciates gadgets and the latest designs, and is living the middle class American Dream.

The presence of StarWars here, through the Vader costume, the music, and the invocation of The Force, mobilizes another powerful sign. Star Wars, after all, is considered a much-beloved classic, a family film for parents and kids, it’s regularly been associated especially with boys, it’s science fiction and hence exists in the world of tech and advanced gadgetry, The Force itself is a form of magic, and Vader himself is a figure in absolute control, while also being one part of a famed father/son tale. Once again, then, Volkswagen connects itself to all of these, connoting that this car is almost from the world of Star Wars in both gadgetry, technological advancement, and pure magic, that the driver is given a heightened level of control, and all the while it’s suggesting that driving and owning the car might allow a man to feel like a kid playing again. (Imagine how much the ad would [paradigmatically] shift if the kid was playing at being a Disney Princess, instead, and if the Dad’s or Mom’s powers were that of Elsa).

And there are strong myths at play, here. Gendered myths are once again present — note that the mother is restricted to the kitchen while the father is suggested to be the worker, on his way home; it’s the dad, too, who has the power of The Force / the Volkswagen. But there are also myths about the glories of technology, and there are myths about class and about heteronormativity — each time an ad uses a straight middle class family to suggest success, happiness, and arrival at the Dream, it implies (even if wholly unintentionally) that not being straight and/or middle class puts one in a position of lack.

Changing meanings

Semiotic analysis allows us to pull texts apart into their constituent signs, and then to see how they combine with each other to create messages (whether intentional or not). But not all of these messages will be those of repetition, maintenance, and hegemony. Rather, semiotics also allows us to see precisely how some texts destabilize particular syntagmatic connections, unfix particular signs, and hence work to change the meanings around us. As Stuart Hall noted:

if meaning is the result, not of something fixed out there, in nature, but of our social, cultural, and linguistic conventions, then meaning can never be finally fixed. (p. 176)

Hegemony is a remarkably powerful form of power, precisely because it usually goes unseen, and can be regarded as “common sense.” But it also takes work to maintain, and is thus always prone to attack, vulnerable to semiotic warfare.

Kids, Reconsidered

For a playful example, consider the following ad. Both of the above ads we’ve considered rely upon another myth, that of children as special, magical, wonderful beings, and of childhood as a special time of play, wonder, and all-encompassing goodness. Consider, by contrast, how this ad provides a very different signified for childhood, in order to sell something else:

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Spoilt+Kid+Ad/0_hpjt0sgd/32607362

Signifying Love and Marriage

Differing signifiers for “love” and “marriage”

Admittedly, the above ad is hardly trying to destabilize the myth of childhood; it’s just playing round. But other semiotic warfare can be more decidedly pointed. Consider, for instance, how the movement for marriage equality has regularly relied not just upon political statements and rhetoric, but upon imagery that poses new associations. For hundreds of years, the signifier that went with “love” or “marriage” could often look something like the leftmost picture . So the movement for marriage equality needed to tackle those signs, and hence needed to circulate images of same-sex marriages such as the rightmost picture. Note, too, how they’ve often been savvy to challenge the critiques of same-sex marriage as somehow “unnatural” or dangerous to society by regularly privileging images of old women marrying, thereby drawing on the cultural association (sign) of old women as safe, harmless, lovely people who we need to take good care of.

Volkswagen, Revisited

Another smart instance of an ad that explicitly challenges the above Volkswagen ad on very semiotic grounds is this one from the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace:

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/VW+Ad+-+Darth+Vader/0_nq2odp6l/32607362

I like this ad because it illustrates quite brilliantly how arbitrary signs can be, and hence how easy it can be to destabilize them. Whereas Volkswagen relied on Darth Vader as a sign of youthful play, a desire for more power, and engagement with magic, Greenpeace effectively say, “wait, Darth Vader is a bad guy!” Their ad therefore aims to flesh out the syntagm of Darth Vader, to suggest, yes, he has power, but he must be resisted by “the good guys,” here represented by a bunch of kids in Rebel Alliance costumes. And they note that Vader is associated with a space station that quite literally destroys planets, which cues up an easy association for Greenpeace to make with Volkswagen by suggesting that the car company’s environmental record is leading to the imminent destruction of our own planet.

Adbusting and Other Semiotic Warfare

Regardless of what you think of the point of the Greenpeace ad, semiotically it’s very strong, since it doesn’t just mobilize a new set of signs to make its point — it tries to de-stabilize and hence (ironically) “pollute” Volkswagen’s own signs. In this respect, it’s engaging in a process sometimes called adbusting, wherein groups reconfigure and play with the signs of an advertiser to undercut their point. Below are a few other examples:

Three examples of “adbusting” or semiotic warfare

The Nexus 7 & Hoodies

Ads can also engage in semiotic warfare themselves. Consider this ad, for instance:

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=199

https://https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Nexus+7+Ad/0_pbldgj28/32607362

This ad is doing some pretty noble work at attacking a myth of African American male criminality. It was released not too long after George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, and this case in part relied upon the presumption that a young African-American man out at night alone wearing a hoodie is a signifier of danger. This ad challenges that. We’re introduced to our central character and everything around him starts to scream middle class respectability — he plays video games (a jet ski racing game, at that, not anything violent), he’s tech savvy, he’s away at college (in Boston, no less, suggesting he might be at MIT or Harvard?), he has money to fly home at speed if he needs to — and an average, safe kid (he has a pet dog, he lives with the dog’s favorite stuffed toy). And so when we see him sitting at a bus stop at night in his hoodie, that signifier has now been reassigned, signifying a young man who loves his (dying) pet and just wants to get home to him.

(For another interesting semiotic repositioning and redefinition of black men in hoodies, if you’ve seen Marvel’s Luke Cage, you can read this article about how the decision for the show’s titular African-American hero to wear a hoodie was very deliberate, and intended to redefine the syntagm of “black man in hoodie.”)

Or, of course, we needn’t just look at ads (they’re great for our purposes here, because they’re short and quick to watch or discuss). Think about parodies and satire, and how they mess with particular signs, offering new signifieds, creating new syntagmatic or paradigmatic associations, and such. Or any time you see or hear a message that strikes you as fresh or different, ask how it was constructed, not just what it says.

What About “Bigger” Texts?

Think about the last film, television show, podcast, radio program, video game, comic, or such that you engaged with closely. See if you can apply the language and process of semiotics to thinking about the deeper meanings within it.

Conclusion

Semiotics is a toolkit for making sense of how meanings are created, progressing from denotations (what do you see descriptively?) to connotations (what is suggested by these?) to paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations (how do all the signs work together?), to myths (what, if any, larger ideological meanings are supported by these signs and associations?). If used well, semiotics can offer a more systematic approach to studying meaning, rather than a loose “meh, I see what I see” approach. All texts can be worth studying for their signs, myths, and ideologies, precisely because, first, any text can contribute to hegemonic or counter-hegemonic meanings (many may not, but they can), and, second, no texts meanings are natural, all assigned culturally, and hence all open to scrutiny.

Key Concepts

- Semiotics

- The Sign, The Signifier, The Signified

- Ferdinand de Saussure

- Denotation and Connotation

- Language is Arbitrary

- Syntagmatic connections

- Paradigmatic connections

- Myths

- Roland Barthes

- Semiotic Warfare

- Adbusting

9

Week 8 (Online 2): Formal, Ideological, and Semiotic Analysis in Action

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Key Concepts

No new concepts are introduced in this online class. Rather, the point is to show you further examples of how to “do” formal and ideological analysis, and how to use semiotics. We’ve taken different approaches to several texts below.

Assigned Readings

Each of this class’ assigned readings also offers another example of analysis. Pick at least two to read, depending on your interests:

- Amanda Lotz’s reading of House focuses on plot analysis

- Roberta Pearson’s reading of Star Trek inquires into the show’s ideological meanings, but warns against trying to work these out based on watching only single episodes

- Jeremy Butler’s reading of Mad Men offers a formal analysis of the show’s much-lauded style

- Ben Aslinger’s reading of Nip/Tuck adds an important element we haven’t discussed, namely analysis of sound, specifically of a show’s music

Formal, Ideological, and Semiotic Analysis in Action

Below are 4 examples of textual analysis. In order:

1. Maureen Mauk presents a video essay with formal analysis insight from the Director of a recent TRAVEL channel episode of Bizarre Foods.

2. Jennifer Smith has recorded voice commentary over an episode of the hit 50s sitcom, Father Knows Best, to illustrate ideological analysis.

3. Daphne Gershon offers analysis of some implicit meanings of Monsters, Inc., with special attention to genre.

4. Jonathan Gray shows semiotics in action, applying the previous online lesson to one Coke ad.

1. FORMAL ANALYSIS OF A DOCU-FOLLOW REALITY SERIES

Maureen Mauk presents a video essay and interview with Director & Producer, Hayden Mauk, offering insight and formal analysis into the making of The Pony Express episode of TRAVEL channel’s Bizarre Foods. Hayden Mauk presents several aspects of visual storytelling, including camera techniques, slow motion photography and adaptations of the Western genre to communicate this episode’s narrative.

Bizarre Foods – Formal Analysis with Hayden Mauk  |  7:19 mins.

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=891

https://https:https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Bizarre+Foods+-+Formal+Analysis+%7C+Maureen+Mauk/0_crzws64a

2. Ideological Analysis of a sitcom

In the following video, Jennifer Smith records commentary on “Betty, Girl Engineer,” an episode of Father Knows Best, a very successful, iconic sitcom from the 1950s. The episode drips sexism at every turn, but the commentary delves beyond just the explicit sexism in the written dialogue to examine how formal techniques are used to underline that sexism with implicit support.

Father Knows Best:  “Betty, Girl Engineer” – Formal Analysis | 21:17 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=891

https:https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/%22Father+Knows+Best%22+-+Formal+Analysis+%7C+Jennifer+Smith/0_1o2gdhi4

3. genre and implicit meanings in Monsters, inc.

Below, Daphne Gershon offers more analysis of implicit meanings, while also involving genre analysis:

The following clip, from the animated comedy film Monsters Inc., offers a clever and amusing play on genre. The opening sequence aims to surprise viewers and enhance laughter by going back and forth from formal elements commonly associated with horror, to ones associated with comedy. In the opening credit scene, the lighthearted and upbeat music, the bright colors of the various doors, and the fast tempo of the scene, are some of the key elements that initially signal to us that this is a comedy. Yet then the mood quickly changes; the doors passing the screen are in dark shades of blue and then reveal a black screen with an open blue door through which we see even more darkness.

Monsters, Inc. | clip 1 | 10 secs

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Monsters%2C+Inc.+%7C+clip+1/0_ufkqr8wt

When watching the rest of the scene, try to identify which formal elements are used, and how they signal a darker, frightening tone associated more with horror than comedy:

Monsters, Inc. | clip 2 | 1:15 mins

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Monsters%2C+Inc.+%7C+clip+2/0_b1umzlpy

The scene skillfully uses color, music, camera angles, camera shots, camera movement, props, and facial expressions to indicate a shift in genre. First, we are introduced to a familiar scene: parents saying goodnight to their child as he goes to sleep. There are some quick cuts to shots that show us different parts of the child’s room from different angles, demonstrating this is a “normal” child’s bedroom, filled with various toys (a toy train, skateboard, model boat, etc.), and showing that the child is all alone … or is he? As the music turns slow and eerie, we hear a subtle and slow creak, the child then opens his eyes and lifts his head. His eyes move rapidly from side to side and the camera pans across the room assuming the child’s POV. As the child gasps, the camera then focuses on the closet door slowly opening with a pink tentacle-like figure slithering out. The child quickly shuts his eyes tightly indicating fear, then when he slowly and carefully opens his eyes again, he is relieved to find that what he saw was only a sweater. Yet as we can probably assume, just like with most horror films, this is a misdirection and there is in fact a real monster approaching.

Indeed, as soon as the child returns to sleep, a dark shadow is seen moving across the bed. The camera then pans under the bed for a close shot revealing the two big pink/ reddish eyes that open, glowing in the darkness. The eyes seem menacing and unnatural, not only due to their color that evoke references to the underworld (red-devil), but also due to their angular shape and the fact they have no pupils, which make them look even more inhuman. As the tentacled creature rises from the bed, he is shot from below in order to appear even more intimidating, we then see the sleeping boy shot from a high angle to highlight his helplessness, and to showcase the long shadow the monster casts. As the music intensifies and crescendos, the supposed climax occurs: the child awakens and screams at the sight of the monster. This seems like a normal response. Yet, what happens after indicates to us that we have been tricked all along and that the story is not what we thought it was, as you will see in the next clip.

When watching, try to think of how we as the audience have been invited to realize that this is in fact a comedy.

Monsters, Inc. | clip 3 | 36 secs

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Monsters%2C+Inc.+%7C+clip+3/0_6pzukcfk

First, comedy relies on countering and breaking expected patterns. We are used to having monsters terrify children, so having a monster be terrified of a child creates humor, since this is the opposite of what we would expect. In addition, tension is released in the form of laughter when we realize that there is no longer any danger. Then there is a lot of slapstick humor, as the monster is hit in the face by a ball he slipped on, he slips on the skateboard only to fall on his behind, and lands on some sharp metal toys, actions that are accompanied by extra loud sound effects. The pace of the scene also shifts, becoming much quicker, the lights are also turned on, thereby eliminating the darkness, and there is no more menacing music.

Now that we know what is really going on, the child isn’t real, and the monster is going through some kind of training, try to think of how formal elements were used to initially fool you.

1. Sound effects – we hear the parents and the child say good night and the door closing (remember though that we never see this or the parents). We hear the sound of the wind and the hooting of the owl, indicating it’s night time and that the scene takes place in a room that is part of a private home, likely in the suburbs.
2. Facial expressions and camera movements – the mechanical doll that looks like a boy is able to have facial movements that express human emotions. Furthermore, the camera, when it pans across the room, seemingly assumes the perspective of the child, which makes us think that this machine has a perspective.
3. Camera shots – we only see that this is a simulation when the camera moves to a long shot, suddenly allowing us to realize this is merely a set, exposing the lights, cables, and the absence of any additional rooms.

What other formal elements did you notice?

Now let’s watch the rest of the clip:

Monsters, Inc. | clip 4 |  55 secs

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Monsters%2C+Inc.+%7C+clip+4/0_gx10l4dc

In the scene, we learn monsters are very similar to humans. They can be clueless, awkward, and vulnerable. They have jobs, go through job training, and wear suits just like people. We also learn that they are actually terrified of children and have all sorts of misconceptions about them. This is conveyed verbally, but also through body language. For example, we see this when a monster screams and jumps frantically even when just thinking of going into a child’s room, or when Bile, the first monster we are introduced to, backs away from the mechanical child in disgust.

So here we see a convention turned on its head. Monsters, who seem terrifying and disgusting to humans are the ones terrified, not just of people, but of the most vulnerable and innocent segment of people- children. Since we the audience know that children pose no real threat, the monsters’ reaction seems ridiculous to us, making the scene humorous.

Yet aside from making the scene funny, how might this unexpected turn express a deeper truth about the world and human nature? How might this role reversal work to challenge a harmful ideology?

The scene (and the film) send the message that fear of and hatred towards the other is foolish and often based in ignorance. Thus, you can think of how the scene works to challenge ideologies and beliefs such as xenophobia and racism that are based on hatred and fear of the other.

At the very end of the scene we learn that despite fearing children, monsters must also interact with them in order to scare them. This is because children’s screams produce energy that the monsters need for their world to survive. This is exhibited by the prop carried by Mr. Waternoose, which looks similar to a Nitrogen Gas Tank. In the scene, Mr. Waternoose promotes exploitative behaviors and views them as necessary. He argues that monsters must enter a foreign realm (the world of humans) and repeatedly inflict harm on children by scaring them, just so monsters can get more of their power source and take control of valuable resources. Furthermore, we can see that monsters are being taught to fear children and view them as different from monsters, thereby making this exploitation easier. Connecting this to larger and broader themes, we can think of how exploitative behavior is central to all sorts of damaging ideologies and concepts, such as slavery and colonialism, which were implemented to gain control over valuable resources and labor. While we might initially assume that the film condones the idea that exploiting and inflicting pain on others is necessary for economic prosperity, the use of formal elements already indicates to us that the film intends to reach quite a different conclusion. The character in the scene that supports exploitation and intimidation, Mr. Waternoose, is also positioned as scary, angry, and unsympathetic. The character literally emerges from the shadows and has a menacing and threatening tone, as well as a very dower expression. Given this, along with everything else we learned from the scene, we can see how the scene gestures towards the film having a different conclusion than what Mr. Waternoose believes, eventually challenging the idea that we must use hate, fear, pain, and exploitation to have economic stability. Consequently, you can see how an animated comedy film aimed at children can express profound ideological concepts, that can be uncovered through a formal analysis.

4. semiotic (& formal & ideological) Analysis of a coke ad

This week’s prior online class introduced you to semiotics, and offered some semiotic analysis in action, but let’s slow down and walk you through a semiotic analysis. Consider the following ad, from Coke:

Coca-Cola GTA Ad | 1:00 min

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=891

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Coca-Cola+GTA+Ad/0_hh7c3s36/32607362

This ad presents two worlds, with the bottle of Coke serving as hinge or portal joining them. One is gestured at, as a potential world, and hence as one that the Coke either ushers away or cures, the second is brought into being, it seems, by the Coke.

To analyze the ad semiotically, then, let’s look at each of these two worlds.

We begin in a grimy, dark urban world. Rolling through the things we see and hear in that world and what they signify, we encounter:

- What sounds like blaring sirens in the background, signifying the (ever-) presence of police or other emergency services

- Tall buildings and either a subway or highway overpass in the distance, signifying a large city

- A fire in a recycling dumpster that nobody seems to care about or even notice, signifying an uncared-for, crime-ridden neighborhood

- Abandoned lots, signifying a neighborhood in decay, uncared-for

- Dangerous, reckless driving that doesn’t obey traffic laws, signifying a place where (in spite of the sirens) people don’t respect the law

- A colorless grey sky, signifying a foreboding, cold environment

- Older car models, signifying poorer inhabitants, or perhaps even the setting is back in the 70s or 80s, decades known for “urban blight” and crime problems in inner cities

- A biker gang, signifying criminality and a dangerous lawless presence

- Two women on a corner, one in a short red dress with blond hair, one in a backless bright purple top, signifying prostitutes (especially since they’re on a corner), which in turn signifies a “bad” area of town

- An abundance of trash out on the sidewalk, signifying a dirty neighborhood (and perhaps one that’s been neglected, as the trash hasn’t been picked up for a while?)

- Many of the buildings are covered in dirt, signifying they’re rundown, uncared for, grimy

- Three young Black men hanging out in similar colors and jean shorts (at least two of whom have tattoos), signifying they’re members of the same gang

- One of them has a dog on a chain who has a huge snarl and teeth, signifying danger, and that the men themselves are dangerous, perhaps even looking to cause danger with the dog as a weapon

- An Asian grocer, a stereotype from especially New York or LA, signifying we might be in one of these two cities

- The grocer’s place has gates up on its windows even though it’s daytime, signifying a continual threat and risk

- Next to the grocer’s is a Cash and Carry where the “a” is missing from “Cash” and the h is falling, signifying that the store can’t pay to fix it and is poor. Cash and Carry further signifies a low-end, low-price grocer

- Since the Cash and Carry is pulling down security screening, again we get the signification of a dangerous neighborhood, especially since it’s daytime, so it seems too early to be closing up shop

- When he gets out of the car, our central character’s black leather jacket and sunglasses signify a tough guy. Indeed, the Asian grocer reads him this way too, clearly thinking he’s being robbed, further signifying a lawless, bad neighborhood

- Then our central character stops a car and seems to be committing grand theft auto. As with the grocer, the guy in the car clearly thinks he’s in trouble.

- Two people on the street carry “The End is Nigh” signs, signifying a sense of nihilism and hopelessness that this world has clearly brought out in them

- There’s a fire in a trash can, yet another sign of danger and criminality

- A hunched-over guy with a scraggly beard and pants that are too small for him is pushing a full supermarket trolley along the sidewalk, suggesting he’s homeless and that the neighborhood is one in which poor people live

- An old lady gets her purse stolen by a guy in a hoodie, yet another crime

Each one of these is its own sign. Many would be read as signifying what they do in and of themselves, but combined, they form a powerful syntagm of a dangerous, crime-ridden, dark, foreboding inner city. By working syntagmatically, they amplify one another’s messages, and seemingly confirm suspicions we might have from the others (are those prostitutes or just women going for a scroll? Probably the former, since it seems like “that kind of neighborhood”).

Meanwhile, though, this is all animated. More specifically, it reads as a video game. If you don’t know your video games very well, the map in the bottom right and the third person camera poised above and behind the car as it drives makes it seem gamelike.

Clockwise from top left: LA Noire, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, The Simpsons Hit and Run, Mad Max — all share the onscreen map and the camera above and behind the car

But video games are known to be very violent, and often to be fond of gangs, inner cities, reckless driving, and urban stereotypes (the prostitutes, the Black gang members, the biker gang, etc.). Seeing this world as taking place in a video game thereby further amplifies what everything else has suggested to us, and it contributes to the syntagm.

Grand Theft Auto IV

If you do know your video games, even only in passing, you know this isn’t just any video game. It’s meant to look like Grand Theft Auto. Indeed, from the very first frame, that camera placement, the map, its darker color scheme, its representational style, its mise-en-scène in general is very GTA. As the ad runs, the reckless driving, perpetually at risk of hitting someone or something is very GTA, the prostitutes and gang members seem drawn from it.

Tommy Vercetti, from GTA: Vice City, and Niko Bellic, from GTA IV

Our central character looks like a cross between GTA Vice City’s hero Tommy Vercetti and GTA IV’s hero Niko Bellic. GTA characters inexplicably pull out a wide assortment of weapons or pseudo weapons from thin air, nodded to when our central character summons a fire extinguisher. And the GTA series is infamous for allowing players to do horrible things, most notably rob and hurt prostitutes, and attack gay characters on the street,

so when we see the car splash the prostitutes, and when our central character pulls a guy wearing a pink shirt (potentially signifying that he’s gay, especially in this already stereotypical world) out of his car in what appears to be grand theft auto, these allude very closely to the world of GTA, offering yet more signification of a broken, dangerous urban nightmare seething with crime. (That’s not all that GTA or a video game signifies, so we’ll come back to this).

Now let’s consider the second world, the one that our central character and the bottle of Coke usher in. Again, here are individual signs within it:

- Amidst this dark world, where the only really bold colors in the first few seconds are on the clothes the prostitutes are wearing, the Coke machine’s bright red is stark, as is its aura, signifying something that doesn’t belong, that is better than its surroundings

- The grocer expects to be robbed, but is paid, signifying a pleasant surprise

- The man in the car who looks like he’s about to be assaulted is instead given a Coke, signifying an act of surprising kindness and friendliness

- That sharing of the Coke also cues the end of the soundscape being one of sirens, screaming, and car wheels screeching to “Give a Little Love,” a song about being good to other people, and about how that rewards you. It’s a “feel good” song, and signifies happiness, charity, community

- The Coke sharing also cues another lightning-quick transformation, as the grey skies turn to pink, signifying a more warm, peaceful, welcoming environment

- The busker is given wads of cash, signifying extravagant generosity (and a love of music?)

- The fire extinguisher is used to put out the trash can fire, signifying caring about the community, and an individual do-gooder

- Then our character finds a dropped bag of cash and could make off with it; instead, quite artfully flips it back to its caretaker, signifying lawfulness and looking out for one another

- Upon encountering the homeless guy, first our character gives him his jacket – the clothing item that has to this point defined him, signifying immense generosity and selflessness

- And then he seems to use his raw charisma to usher the guy into a pink convertible (itself signifying “girlyness”) filled with women with well-brushed hair, a fancy floral dress, and a low-cut top (signifying both wealth and “sexiness”), signifying that he’s “hooking up” the homeless guy. As they drive off, they embrace him, no less, signifying it’s worked

- The purse snatcher is tripped and the purse is quickly returned to its owner, an old woman, signifying care for the elderly, respect for law, and protecting his fellow neighbors and citizens

- Note that many of these above acts, no less, are performed in quick succession, almost choreographed in a continuous flow, signifying a dance of forms. Selflessness and helping people is, it seems, his art form

- As he walks past the hot dog vendors, we shoots his hands at them, signifying a friendly interaction with people around him

- And then the camera scopes up, eventually giving us a topshot. A conspicuous bit of camerawork, topshots are most commonly associated (especially with colorful umbrellas!) with musicals, and so the music and dancing have now segued into a bona fide musical. Musicals in turn, of course, signify happiness, play, good times, an upbeat outlook on life, and we associate them with happy endings, romance, love, and community

- Note, too, that the sky is getting clearer and clearer, signifying yet more warmth, less trouble

- He flips the “The End is Nigh” signs, so that they become “Give a Little Love,” signifying a love of life and a need to announce this to the world

- And then the entire street scene becomes one big dance number, everyone having fun. Police jump around and shimmy, people leap from cars in loud outfits, water erupts from fire hydrants, and much of this is – in good musical, choreographed style, mirrored from one side of the screen to the other

- Underlining the transformation to a musical is the arrival of dancing mice, something we associate with a Disney film. They’re then joined by dancing horses, no less

- Even our earlier characters – the purse snatcher, the gang members, the grocer – return to join in the fun. What’s signified, in short, is one grand big party that brings everyone together, unites them, makes them forget their worries, move past their sordid past, celebrate life

- Then the sun comes out, as does a rainbow through the water from the fire hydrants, signifying divine approval, peace, camaraderie, resolution

- For “the big finish,” balloons are released, the biker gang and cops team up to create two pyramids, and we’re in full-on musical mode.

The above list, like the earlier list, on one hand works syntagmatically with each other, each amplifying the other to give a sense of a wonderful, playful city musical in which everyone is happy and full of life and good will for one another. On the other hand, though, it’s worth thinking how the transformation happens bit by bit, so each one of those signs either involves swapping out something from the first list paradigmatically (the grey sky becomes pink, the frailty of the homeless man becomes virility between two “hot” women, a street filled with cars becomes one filled with people, etc.), or involves adding itself syntagmatically to the whole picture until this new collection of signs of happiness, fun, and charity take over and wholly replace the earlier syntagm.

It doesn’t take a semiotician to work out the basic message of the ad, namely that Coke turns a bad day into a good one, brings life, happiness, community, and care for one’s fellow humans into your soul. A semiotic analysis helps us see the mechanics of that message, though. Coke becomes a vital part of that second world/syntagmatic grouping, while also being a paradigm-shifting agent.

It’s also worth noting, though, that anything that happens in an ad is attached syntagmatically to its product. And thus the ad is actually pretty savvy since it has its cake and eats it too. Yes, it suggests that Coke makes the world a better place, but it’s so over-the-top (dancing mice!) that it’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek. And there’s still that first half of the ad. This is still a company that almost showed us a GTA-style assault, splashing prostitutes, etc. What the ad seeks to do, in short, is attach itself as much to the second syntagmatic world as to the style of the former one. Above I said we’d return to GTA, and here we can note that it’s a hugely successful game franchise. Whether you know that franchise or not, video games also signify fun and play, while GTA signifies edginess, impropriety, and breaking rules. Coke gets to align itself to that too.

Okay, but what about myths? Because it’s over-the-top, I don’t think we’re honestly meant to believe this ad literally – we know that Coke doesn’t make mice dance, purse snatchers recant so that they can join the dance, grey skies into rainbows. But this ad is worth analyzing for what myths it relies upon. In its speed to set up everything we note above, after all, it has a bunch of worrying myths that never truly get challenged. Namely:

The place of women in the ad is pretty crap. They’re prostitutes, they’re (sexual?) rewards to a homeless man, and they’re helpless old ladies. Men, meanwhile, are the prime actors, and indeed our key character performs all sorts of traditional masculinity – he’s tough, he commands the environment around him, he helps and saves people, he is the centerpiece. So myths of gender roles are relied upon throughout, and not really challenged at any point.

We should also be concerned to see how race works in this ad. The three gang members are wearing similar colors, yes, but they’re also suggested to be gang members by being Black. Indeed, until the moment of transformation, our only white characters are one of the two prostitutes and our hero, whereas the urban blight is signified as much by its people of color as by other factors. By contrast, after the world shifts for the better, it’s a world full of white people, not exclusively (there is a black cop, for instance), but largely. Racial myths are therefore relied upon, and reinforced, by setting up the Black gang members, the helpless Asian grocer, the all-powerful white man at the center, and the streetscape full of dancing white people.

And albeit in very quick fashion, the ad rests on hetero norms. The homeless guy is put in a car with young women (how does our hero know he’s into women, though? or that they’ll be into him?), who quickly embrace him. The suggested-to-be-gay guy in the red convertible also appears as preppy (with the sweater around his neck) and a victim, wincing as he thinks he’s about to be assaulted.

A semiotic reading, in short, allows us to “slow down” how each little choice adds up to create meanings, both aesthetically but also ideologically. And it helps us see “unintended” or unnecessary myths in play, no less – Coke doesn’t need to sell traditional straight white masculinity to sell cola. As much as it’s a very smart, very well-done ad on one level, therefore, at a mythic level it’s cringeworthy.

10

Week 9: Meaning Outside the Text

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 3:18mins

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+9+-+Meaning+Beyond+the+Text/0_ho3q91q7/32607362

Key Questions

- How are texts in conversation with other texts?

- What counts as a “text”? Where does meaning come from other than the text?

- How do we build stories across different texts, media, and platforms?

(Note that you will not be quizzed on this material this week since Paper #1 is due. However, this material is “fair game” for next week’s quiz)

When we look at any media text, the reality is that we don’t see it in a vacuum—swirling around in our minds are connections between this text and all the other texts we’ve read or seen.  This of course impacts how we understand that single text.

Texts are always in conversation with other texts.

Intertextuality is the idea that texts are always in conversation with other texts, and that meaning will therefore always rely not just on the given text in front of one but on other texts that came before (or, in time, that come after it).  It’s the idea that no text creates meaning in and of itself, but instead is always gaining meaning from other texts we have consumed.

An immediate challenge presents itself, though, in how to study this. If the way in which you make sense of the song you’re listening to right now rests upon countless other textual experiences you’ve had in your life, how can we study that? Some (many?) analysts chicken out at the prospect, reverting back to the relative simplicity of analyzing a text as though it works alone, but we needn’t follow them: there are definite ways to study intertextuality not just as chaotic, but as an ordered process.

We’ll do so by considering first allusion, homage, and reference, then remixes, mash-ups and parodies. Then we’ll consider how celebrities are intertextual beings by nature. Then we’ll turn to “paratexts” (a word we’ll explain later) to stories and messages that are deliberately composed across media, which in turn will open us up to considering what’s called convergence and transmedia storytelling.

Allusion

A simple, yet remarkably common form of intertextuality is allusion, homage, or references. Here, we can think about intertextuality capturing the idea of textual indebtedness.  An artist is indebted to artists that have gone before and created interesting forms.  When you then imitate that form, a relationship is created between your own work and the work that precedes it. Allusions, as such, make reference to other texts directly or through implication.  Let’s consider some examples:

Community | (brief clip) | .29 seconds

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/id/0_zelkon94?width=1298&height=802&playerId=25717641

The TV show Community often built its humor around making allusions to other media.  In the above clip, the whole college is at war with each other in a giant paintball competition.  Instead of looking like an ordinary sitcom, for this brief scene, the show has Ken Jeong’s character Señor Chang enter the room in a way that alludes to a famous scene from the film Scarface, while also generally referencing Hong Kong action films, complete with slow motion and musical backdrop. The pleasure of watching moments such as this in Community come from making those connections.  The references are meant to be recognized by the viewer, so the intertextuality serves as an exchange of knowledge between the producer and the consumer.

Ken Jeong’s character Señor Chang enters the room in a direct reference to the film Scarface (right), or as if he is in the middle of a Hong Kong action film (left).

Intertextual meaning

Riverdale “adapts” Archie Comics, but also refers to many character types common to high school dramas in general

Aside from specific allusions, though, all texts rely at least to some degree on expectations that have been set by previous viewing. A show such as Riverdale, for instance, not only references specific characters from Archie Comics, often playing with them and working against expectations, but more generally it relies upon viewers being familiar with the kinds of narratives that exist in high school dramas, the kinds of plots, and the kinds of issues that get explored. Sometimes it hews closely to those expectations, whereas at other times it veers away from them, and those times will be more striking precisely because they aren’t what intertextually-constructed expectations led us to believe would happen. Thus, when Betty proves to be more than just “the girl next door,” that expectation was created not only by Archie Comic’s Betty, but by the repetition of such characters in countless high school dramas, novels, and films.

Once Upon a Time repeats and revises many famous Disney characters, while also playing with the fairy tale as genre more broadly

Similarly, ABC’s Once Upon a Time on one hand referenced specific characters from the world of Disney, creating meaning precisely by playing around with what we expect of Snow White, the Evil Queen, or of Peter Pan, for instance. But on the other hand, the show relied more generally upon us having certain expectations of a fairy tale, of princesses, of magical villains, and so forth. (If this sounds like we’re talking about genre and genre expectations, by the way, that’s because we are: genre is an intrinsically intertextual process, as our understanding of the norms of any genre can only be created intertextually as we watch or listen to more and more examples of that genre).

Mashups, Remixes, & Parodies

Mashups and remixes also make use of this kind of intertextuality, creating something that is both new and reliant upon other styles or creative works that have been thrown  into a new context.  For instance, there are many remixed versions of Drake’s song “Hotline Bling.”

Here’s a clip from the original music video:

Drake  | .55 seconds

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Here are some of the remixes that people have made:

Drake Parodies (compilation) | 1:50 mins

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We can think about how the meaning of the image changes based on what song he seems to be dancing to.  While the original song might be striving for coolness and sexuality, the remixed versions portray the artist quite differently—as silly, juvenile, awkward, sporty, or even racialized differently as Latino.

Many of these are just for fun, but parody can also have a point, as in the following example from The Colbert Report.

The Colbert Report | Gravitas | 3.48 mins

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It’s worth stopping to think about what a scene like this is doing. It relies upon our intertextual knowledge and experience of being thoroughly familiar with “gravitas” and with how news anchors speak, but also with news’ pretensions to seriousness, authority, and importance. Without that background, little about the scene would be funny. But once you’ve seen this, it might “attack” future news shows you watch, as you might remember this competition and laugh at the absurdity of this mode of speaking, thereby undercutting the tone and authority the newscaster to which the newscaster is laying claim.

The Text is Alive

Intertextual meaning goes in two directions – we bring understandings from media culture to our understanding of the text (as when our past encounters with “Snow White” tell us what to expect from Once Upon a Time‘s Snow), but we also bring texts with us as we encounter new versions of media culture (after seeing Once Upon a Time, we now have a new understanding of Snow White that will flavor all future encounters of the character).

This quote from the great theorist of intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin, further helps to explain how to conceptualize the text:

“There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue [….] Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.” – Mikhail Bakhtin

The text, in other words, is always alive.  It’s not finished when we stop reading/viewing/listening to it, because, first, it then becomes part of your memories, and, second, future parodies, remixes, adaptations, etc. could always make us re-interpret it.

Celebrities

Celebrities exist as their own form of intertexts, because we encounter them, and form an understanding of them, across multiple texts.

When we encounter Kowalski and Stone, they’re not truly new characters, as we (likely) already have expectations and affective relations built with Clooney and Bullock

Think back to Gravity here, where the early scenes work to set up the characters of Ryan and Kowalski, yes, but those scenes are assisted significantly by our intertextual knowledge of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, respectively. Bullock was regularly referred to as “America’s sweetheart,” becoming famous through romantic comedies and some dramatic roles that regularly posited her as a charming, thoroughly “down to Earth” person. She’d therefore won much of her audience’s empathy and goodwill before any words or images are associated with her in the actual film. Clooney, too, has a history of roles that posit him as a calm, composed, affable leader, and thus his Kowalski similarly benefits from our past interactions with Clooney.

Alternatively, the Law and Order franchise has regularly been fond of casting actors with endearing star images to play bad guys (including Whoopi Goldberg, Henry Winkler, Martin Short, Hilary Duff, Robin Williams, Melissa Joan Hart, Bradley Cooper, and Carol Burnett), so that their villainy seems even more shocking.

From Disney’s Lizzie McGuire and one of the world’s more beloved comedians to pathological villains, Hilary Duff and Robin Williams were both cast as bad guys in Law and Order precisely to swim upcurrent against their intertextual star images

studying intertexts

Just as we’ve learned to study individual texts, therefore, we can also extend our abilities with syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses to look beyond the text and study intertextual clusters. One way of doing so, as introduced in the course already, is to think about genre. Another is to ask about parodies, remixes, and mash-ups. And another is to study celebrity or star images and how they’re crafted. Or we can turn to paratexts.

Paratexts

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Paratext/0_bz0khdza/32607362

Transmedia Storytelling

Another form of paratextual meaning can be seen in transmedia storytelling.  This is a strategy where media creators tell a story through systematically dispersing the content across multiple delivery channels.  It is still one cohesive story, but that story must be pieced together across different forms of media (which is why the term convergence is also used to describe such texts) — such as a TV show, a website, a series of animated shorts, and a comic book that each contain elements of the narrative.

Importantly, this is not the practice of telling one story in a lot of different places, like when a novel gets adapted into a movie. That’s just adaptation.  Transmedia storytelling is a unified and coordinated entertainment experience where each medium makes its own unique contribution to the narrative.

The Matrix

When the Wachowskis set out to make the second and third Matrix movies, they started to take advantage of transmedia storytelling.  Here is a video about the making of the video game:

Enter the Matrix | 1:30 mins

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We can see that to fully experience the world of the Matrix, there are many different media you would need to consume—the movies, the video game, comic books, web sites. We can see how each element doesn’t tell the exact same story. They make their own unique contributions to a single unfolding narrative.  As they say, the video game is seen as a “third movie” with its own narrative, not just a lunchbox promoting the movie.

So we can see that transmedia storytelling allows creators to extend narratives, offer backstory, map the world to give richer depth, or offer additional character perspectives. This can be exciting and enticing for audiences who are hungry for additional details and enjoy the process of consuming different media.  It can also draw in new audiences who might be more comfortable with one medium over another. But it can also backfire at times, causing audience members to feel like they are always missing something or have to do too much work to keep up.

Transmedia stories are most successful when they’re connected to a complex fictional world that has a lot of interesting characters to explore.  If we look at the kinds of stories that often attract deep fandoms, they often have these expansive worlds where you can dig deeply into a lot of different aspects of the story (things like Harry Potter or Star Wars).  These worlds are complicated and richly developed, so it becomes possible to flesh out aspects of their world across different media platforms.

The possibilities for transmedia storytelling are obviously opened up because of media consolidation, where media companies are horizontally integrated and can spread their franchises across all sorts of different media platforms.  But transmedia storytelling and convergence culture are also deeply connected to consumer practices and the ways that viewers interact with media.

Transmedia documentary, Inheritance

Not all transmedia or paratextuality is simply about making a buck, though, as we can see several instances of paratexts and transmedia designed to extend the power of a story. Children’s media is often notorious for its paratexts (think of how many things in the world have Frozen characters on them), but Sesame Street, for instance, has used a healthy collection of apps, websites, games, and other media to extend its educational mission. Or you might check out this website, that extends the PBS-broadcast documentary My Brother’s Bomber: the documentary charts the filmmaker’s attempt to get answers about a terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a bombing that killed the filmmaker’s brother, yet the website extends this narrative in its own moving ways, allowing viewer-users a more intimate, pseudo-tactile experience of the filmmaker’s experience of loss, having little more than a box of his brother’s belongings.

Today’s Readings

Today’s Keywords readings — on Convergence and Text — should help flesh those specific terms out more, while Ethan Thompson’s piece on “Flow” in The Onion News Network introduces another form of intertextuality that can be studied, and Louisa Stein offers further detail on transmedia storytelling by examining its use with Gossip Girl.

Conclusion

In our examination of textual meanings and interpretations, we now can see that it’s important to expand our idea of what a text is to include some of the text outside the text.  We’ve thought about how texts are always referencing other texts in order to create meaning, how paratexts impact our understanding of a text and how it will be received by audiences, and how narratives can move from one medium to another.  Together we can question what it is that we are studying and consider that our idea of the text can never remain stable; it’s always being impacted by other texts and by the audiences who do things with texts.

Key Concepts

- Intertexts

- Allusion, homage, and references

- Mashup, remix, and parody

- The text is alive

- Mikhail Bakhtin

- Celebrities

- Paratexts

- Trailers and Posters

- Transmedia storytelling and convergence

11

Week 10: Representation and Stereotypes

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Lori Lopez | 1:06 mins

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+9+-+Representation+and+Stereotypes/0_3g6xzz2a

Key Questions

- Consider the way that groups of people are represented in the media and what it means

- Learn how stereotypes work

- Explore the way that images of minorities evolve

- Understand the cycle of oppression

What is Representation?

Mimesis – images imitate or mimic real life

One way of understanding representation is through mimesis, or the idea that images mimic or imitate real life — such as when an artist tries to represent an object when they paint it.  Another way of understanding representation is the idea that one thing stands in for a lot of things, such as when our representative government works by having one person represent an entire district or state full of people.

The House of Representatives – one person represents a district or state

This can then be connected to media representations as well — media images represent people, events, situations, and other real things by standing in for them.  We believe that media representations have a connection to real life. Today we want to think about the consequences of this kind of representation.

“Representation”

Now read Lisa Henderson’s description of Representation and why and how it matters, in Keywords.

In particular, we want to consider the consequence of representing difference.  This can include categories such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, socioeconomic class, or others.  When certain differences are represented using the same pattern over and over again, there are social consequences that we will learn to recognize.

What are Stereotypes?

“Stereotype”

Start by reading Ellen Seiter’s brief definition of Stereotype in Keywords.

In some ways, stereotypes are simply a natural psychological impulse to categorize the world into recognizable groups.  We all subconsciously create and rely upon stereotypes.  But we should also pay attention to the way that these categorizations and generalizations made about groups of people are unevenly applied and can lead to social inequalities.

First, consider these common stereotypes:

- Women are better at cooking and nurturing children than men

- Asians are good at math

- Gay men are effeminate

- Latinos in the U.S. work in service jobs

Attributes of Stereotypes

Some attributes of stereotypes described here will help us to better understand their effects:

Stereotypes contribute to essentialism, or the idea that there exists an innate essence or quality of a person that makes them who they are.  Essentialism operates on an all-or-nothing logic, where you think that you know something about somebody because of only one attribute (race, gender, nationality, etc.).  Some aspects of essentialism are even tied to biology, such as the belief that a woman’s hormones lead her to be more nurturing.  But this way of thinking is problematic because it leads to gross generalizations that disregard how all social groups are complex, multifaceted, and impossible to reduce to one common characteristic or inherent quality.  It flattens difference and denies the reality that every identity category is comprised of a diverse group of individuals.

Stereotypes rely on essentialism, which is premised on all-or-nothing logic connecting an inherent quality to a larger characterization of a person.

Stereotypes are repeated over and over, which contributes to normalization. When we see the same ideas repeated so often, there is a risk that we will stop questioning if they are true. Sometimes stereotypes are even based on true evidence, and you may have encountered many individuals who see to align perfectly with the way that you stereotyped them.

Why Do You Think Stereotypes Are True? | Franchesca Ramsey | 6:23 mins

For more discussion of how stereotypes are connected to reality, check out this video.  It explains the different ways that media contribute to people starting to believe stereotypes, wrongly assuming that there are no exceptions when our world is filled with exceptions.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-aSIUP4wM” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”

Stereotypes are believed.  No matter how much you may tell yourself that you are immune to the power of stereotypes, the reality is that we all start to unconsciously believe stereotypes because we see them so often.  Studies have shown that we implicitly trust white people over black people, straight people over gay people, etc. (Don’t believe it?  Take a quiz! – provided by Project Implicit)  Resisting stereotypes takes much more effort than passively accepting them — but it can be done.

Stereotypes are made by in-groups about out-groups.  You don’t create stereotypes about yourself and people like you; stereotypes are created to help you understand people who are different from you.

Stereotypes exist for every member of society, from the most powerful to the most marginalized and disenfranchised.  But their impact is unequal –they harm less powerful groups more.  If you belong to a privileged or dominant group, the stereotype may bother you, but it will not do as much active, real harm to you:

“While all negative stereotypes are hurtful, they do not all exercise the same power in the world [….] Stereotypes of some communities merely make them uncomfortable, but the community has the social power to combat and resist them; stereotypes of other communities participate in a continuum of prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered people, placing the very body of the accused in jeopardy” (Shohat & Stam, 208)

For all of these reasons, even “positive” stereotypes can still be harmful.  This is because of the all-or-nothing logic and lack of power, but additionally, because all stereotypes produce complicated repercussions.  For instance, the stereotype that “all Black men are natural athletes” can be another way of saying that Black men are only valued for their bodies, not their minds.  The stereotype that “all Asians are good at math” means that many struggling students go unnoticed or do not ask for help when they need it, which can lead to underperformance and depression.  Further, it creates a rift between Asians as “the model minority” and other minorities, when the reality is that people of color actually gain more from joining together than being in competition for resources.

Evolutionary Stages of Minorities in the Media

Minorities in Media | Dr. Lori Lopez | 5:19 mins

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the problem in the script

Data visualization site The Pudding has done some fascinating analysis of Hollywood scripts, plugging in thousands of pages of scripts and studying who speaks and what they say. This graphic is from one of their articles, “She Giggles, He Gallops,” in which they studied 2000 scripts for screen direction, to see what men or women actors are asked to do:

What screen directions are offered to men or women actors by scripts? The Pudding investigated

Or, the following is a screen grab of an interactive graphic in another article (go play with it!) that examined 2000 scripts to see gender parity — or lack thereof — in dialogue:

The Pudding looked at parity in dialogue by gender and age in 2000 Hollywood films

Casting Issues

Beyond scripts, another key factor that leads to under-representation is inequity in casting.  If we look at who has been chosen to play certain roles, we can unearth a long history of people with majority identities being cast to play minority characters.  This practice began as blackface, with white actors wearing black makeup to play caricatures of African Americans since the 19th century.  In the 1820s, theater performers would cover their faces with blackened burnt cork and bright red lipstick, and then take on exaggerated performance styles for comedic effect.  Many white audiences loved these raucous performances, but of course they shored up the idea that actual African Americans didn’t belong on stage and that their lives existed only to be mocked and denigrated.  The practice of “blacking up” then extended into filmmaking, where white actors could simply paint their skin darker in order to play Black roles.

The same practice has also applied to Asians (yellowface), Native Americans (redface), and other people of color such as Middle Easterners and Indians (brownface).

How is This Still a Thing? | John Oliver | 4:36 mins

John Oliver tackled this in Last Week Tonight. Watch the video (below) to learn more.  As you watch, consider these questions:

- What are some of the reasons filmmakers use to justify the use of white actors for characters of color?

- What might be wrong with their reasoning?

- What kinds of backlash do actors of color face?

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https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Last+Week+Tonight+with+John+Oliver+-+WhitewashingA+How+is+This+Still+a+ThingF/1_i6pjyn15

Outside of race, there are many different minority identities that are often played by people who do not really embody those identities — including gay characters played by straight actors, and peoople with disabilities played by able-bodied actors.

These casting decisions can be harmful for many reasons.  They take away roles from minority actors, and imply (if not directly state) that minorities are not talented enough to play themselves.  Together, this practice maintains a small stable of actors rather than diversifying the opportunities available.  Racial minorities are often discouraged from becoming actors because there are so few parts available for them, and the ones that do exist are often terribly stereotypical and offensive.

Evelyn Alsutany, “24: Challenging Stereotypes”

Now read Alsutany’s account of the television show 24, for a nuanced discussion of the show’s ups and downs of representing Arab-Americans.

Cycle of Oppression

These problems in representations are connected to larger problems in society more broadly. This is called the Cycle of Oppression, where each problem contributes to the next in a never-ending cycle:

Cycle of Oppression

Stereotypes

We now know what stereotypes are — the generalizations that are made about a group of people that can serve to limit them.

Prejudice

Prejudice is when you meet someone and make a judgment before you really know them. You simply create a judgment about them (usually negative) based on how they look, or what single attributes you can easily identify about them.

Discrimination

Discrimination is when you act on your prejudice, taking a harmful action toward a member of a group because of your prejudice.

Oppression

Oppression is the systematic subjugation of a group of people.  All the “isms” are forms of oppression — racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, colorism, sizeism, ageism, colonialism, etc.

Internalized Oppression

Internalized Oppression is when minorities “buy into” the system of oppression by starting to believe that the stereotypes are true.

Let’s see how this cycle works in a story:

There is a stereotype that men are better leaders than women.  A talented woman applies for a job as a manager, and before knowing anything about her, the person who interviews her is prejudiced and assumes she probably doesn’t have leadership capabilities.  That person then discriminates against her by deciding to hire a man instead of her.  Besides, she might cost the company a lot of money if she decides to have a baby.

When this happens over and over and women are systematically subjugated by these routine forms of discrimination, it feeds into the larger problem of patriarchy, which is a form of oppression against women.  The woman, having been denied a job, decides that maybe she is better off just staying home to take care of her children and gives up on applying to other managerial positions.

She has internalizedthe oppression by believing that she is not suitable for a leadership position.  Other people meet her, and when she tells them she is happier staying home with her children than working as a manager, it feeds into the stereotype that men are better leaders than women.

Key Concepts

- Representation

- Evolutionary Stages of Minorities in the Media

- Non-recognition

- Ridicule

- Regulation

- Respect

- Stereotypes

- Essentialism

- Burden of representation

- Inequality in scripting and in casting

- Blackface/yellowface/redface/brownface

- Cycle of Oppression

- Stereotypes

- Prejudice

- Discrimination

- Oppression

- Internalization

12

Week 11: Gazing at the Other & The Politics of Watching

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 2:10 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+10+-+The+Gaze+and+Othering/0_h3dqlhmo

Key Questions

- What do we know about practices of looking, or spectatorship?

- How does “the gaze” work?

- What is Othering?

Theorizing Spectatorship

Spectatorship is the practice of looking, or thinking about the ways that we all participate in becoming spectators.  In this lesson we will be asking about the key features of the way that we look, as well as why it is important to think about looking.

Spectatorship is the practice of looking

Think back to the Panopticon in the class on The Business of Big Data. There, we focused on what it meant to be under constant surveillance, whether as a prisoner in Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, being watched from a central watchtower, or as a user of Google or Facebook (or Canvas, for that matter!). As Foucault noted, the Panopticon was a design for power, precisely because generally the power to watch and look at is a distinct power, to be contrasted to the subjugated position of being the one who is watched over. If you’ve ever felt someone staring at you, or, for that matter, if you’ve ever stared someone down, you know the power of the look. But looking can also be a more interactive process where the power dynamics are not always unidirectional.  Sometimes pleasure is involved in both looking and being looked at.  The concept of scopophilia can help us to understand some of the nuances of looking.

Scopophilia

One aspect of scopophilia is the idea that it’s pleasurable to look at things.  Think of all of the pleasurable activities in which we partake simply by looking—going to the zoo, people-watching on busy streets, old-fashioned freak shows, art museums.  Another side of scopophilia is the reverse, or the pleasure of being looked at.  This is when we take pleasure from presenting ourselves to be the object of looking, whether it’s through self-presentation via social media, or taking a selfie, or maybe even  the way that some people plan their weddings so carefully because they’re preparing to have everyone look at them.

We can connect this to media through that idea that cinema in particular is often theorized as being centered on the pleasure of looking.  In the darkened theater, we enjoy the feeling of looking in on a private world.  But there are many other ways that the pleasures of looking are invoked through media images and discourses.

This HP advertisement for a camera is all about looking—the man and his camera see eye to eye, and then the camera and the man both look at the woman.

In this fashion editorial, this woman is casually walking down the street but we can see her amidst everyone. She doesn’t even seem to know it, but she stands out. She catches our eye, everyone else is blurry.

She catches our eye, everyone else is blurry.

These ads focus specifically on looking and the pleasure of looking, but they also start to reveal a common patter in terms of gender—men are given particular powers and opportunities to do the looking, while women are often being looked at.

Visual Power Dynamics

When we consider the way that gender intersects with the power dynamics of looking, we can start to see that men and women are positioned differently in relation to practices of looking.

“Men act, women appear.  Men look at women.  Women watch themselves being looked at.” – John Berger, from his important book Ways of Seeing

In our traditional visual culture, men are the lookers, and women are the ones who we look at. This goes back hundreds of years, as a trip through any major art gallery with centuries-old holdings will confirm.

A traditional girl’s room from a furniture catalogue.

If we look at these advertisements for children’s furniture, we can clearly see this dynamic in how we decorate bedrooms for boys and girls. In girl’s bedrooms we see pretty objects—flowers, dolls, books, pink decorations.

An array of traditional boy’s rooms from a furniture catalogue.

But in boy’s bedrooms we see a focus on being active and exploring the world around them—an airplane, a ball, binoculars, a treehouse, skates, wild animals, a surfboard. Boys take flight and go on field trips, while girls just stay indoors and look pretty. This mirrors and feeds into the idea that men are active and women are passive.

Beyond gender differences, these discourses also shape notions of sexuality. Women are consistently reduced to being an object of desire for men, who are presumed to be heterosexual. We can see this in the art world very clearly, where painters and other artists have traditionally explored the female nude form. We can see from the way she positions her body that she is available to, and accepting of, the gaze of both the person who is painting her, and of the people who are viewing the painting. Naked women in paintings really love being looked at.

Venus of Urbino by Titian, dated to 1538.

“Her body is arranged in the way it is, to display it to the man looking at the picture. This picture is made to appeal to his sexuality. It has nothing to do with her sexuality [….] Women are there to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own” – John Berger, p. 200

An ad for Dolce & Gabbana clothing reveals a gendered power dynamic.

In contemporary advertising, this power dynamic can become even more explicit and frightening with the implication that this woman lies lifeless on the ground, while clothed men stand authoritatively over her.

An ad for Givenchy clothing reveals a gendered and sexualized power dynamic.

If women do act, it’s too often for men’s pleasure, for their gaze. In the above image, for instance, the two women are focused on one another, but the two men flanking the group of women remind us that they do so as a performance for the men who look on.

Gendering the Gaze

Throughout the history of cinema and of advertising, we can see that women have been the ones on display, connoting what is called “to-be-looked-at-ness.” She is the one you are supposed to look at, an object we are invited to stare at. As we mentioned with scopophilia, there can be a pleasure that comes from being looked at.

An ad for Gucci perfume displays “to-be-looked-at-ness,” where we are supposed to look at her.

Women are often captured in images like this, therefore, where they clearly know that they are being watched and where the idea is that they are performing for the viewer, inviting us to look at them.  This woman encourages it.

Women’s Entrances | 2:11 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Womens+Entrances/1_excyxmuv

Magazine or billboard ads may allow the luxuriousness of staring simply by being static images. But in media with moving images, it’s therefore important to notice how time is often frozen by slow motion so that we can take time to look at a woman who enters the scene.  The woman is incredibly eroticized by such camerawork, allowing the man or men in the scene and the viewer at home or in the theater to “slow it down”, and often to scan the woman up and down.  And just as centuries of naked women in paintings invite, encourage, and allow the viewer’s and painter’s gaze, it’s common for women entering in such a manner to stare at the camera or otherwise signal not just acceptance of being looked at, but pleasure in the fact. Even in movies that centrally focus around men, women will regularly appear as eye candy, sometimes literally just serving to be looked at, and the way that such scenes are shot remind us of their roles. In such moments, the camera assumes the man’s POV (indeed, if you’re looking for POV shots, an easy way to find them is to look for a woman’s first entrance).

We can also look at some trends in movie posters that remind us how many times we have seen images that are just close-ups on body parts.  Just looking through their legs.  Just looking at their chest, their head and face don’t matter.

This is called dismemberment—when just one part of the body stands in for the whole body.

These serve to remind us that women aren’t central characters with thoughts and feelings and actions to take.  Women are just there to be looked at, in such instances, even if it’s just one body part that we’re looking at.  This is called dismemberment—when just one part of the body stands in for the whole body.  This is obviously dehumanizing, since the woman’s body becomes an object without a real person attached to it.

Another set of movie posters showing how women’s bodies are always contorted into a sexualized pose.

Here’s another pose that women’s bodies are regularly contorted into—the pose that somehow manages to show the curve of the breasts AND the butt.  We know that this is a pose only women are expected to take on, because when we see men do it, it looks ridiculous and nonsensical, as below.

Here’s how men usually look in the Avengers.

Here is a version where the men’s bodies are positioned in a way that we never see.

Once again we’re reminded that the way women are portrayed is so often with men’s desires in mind, and men are very rarely subject to the same visual demands — a point made clearly and humorously in this segment of a video from Feminist Frequency that shows how shot-choice regularly treats women and men differently.

What if the camera was used to introduce male bodies the same way it introduces female bodies?

Perfect Dark | Feminist Frequency | 1:40 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/PerfectDark/0_43zn0y1m

There’s an inequality there. Even exceptions regularly turn on themselves: in Casino Royale, for instance, one scene quite famously seems to reverse the James Bond franchise’s fondness of the male gaze by showing us Daniel Craig’s Bond wading through the water in his little swimming trunks (see below) … but then the camera swings around and we’re once more given Bond’s eye view as he scopes out a woman at the beach.

Casino Royale offers a rare flip of the gaze … until Bond reasserts control

Or consider this video that considers how female athletes are regularly framed as objects of desire in ways that quite literally anger or perplex male athletes if — as here — applied to them. Here, it’s not just visual strategies of the camera, therefore, but also what questions are asked of them.

Cover the Athlete | 1:22 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

Voyeurism

Another term that can help us understand this position is Voyeurism, or taking pleasure from secretly looking, not being seen looking. Voyeurism is when the person who’s being looked at has not given permission to the looker.

Voyeurism is the pleasure that comes from secretly looking.

Think about what it feels like to have someone voyeuristically look at you—it feels creepy and uncomfortable, because the hidden person has all the power.  The voyeur controls what they look at and gets to look freely, while the person who is being watched has no clue what is going on.  Then consider how common it is for women especially to be stalked with a POV shot in horror films (or in procedurals like Law and Order SVU) in a way that allows the viewer the experience of being the voyeur.

Laura Mulvey is an important theorist who also thought about visual pleasure and the way that gender plays a role in visual pleasure.  Like Berger, she thinks that the pleasure we get from film has to do with “the unconscious of patriarchal society,” so that films subconsciously uphold patriarchy.

But there is something else that Mulvey believes happens when we watch movies—as we watch what is happening, we take on the position of the characters and the film as well as the film’s overall ideology.  So we are getting pleasure from looking and we are taking on the filmic identity.  Together, she theorizes that there are really three different kinds of looking that are going on at the same time.

Three looks:
1. Camera records the event

2. The audience watches the movie

3. The characters look at each other within the world of the movie

So we in the audience are getting pleasure from looking and the men in the film are getting pleasure from looking.  Together, these constitute what she calls the male gaze, where all of these kinds of looking are gendered and sexualized, as we have seen demonstrated throughout this lesson.

13 Reasons Why on The Male Gaze | 0:23 secs

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

The Male Gaze

Within the context of patriarchy, films use the male gaze to maintain men’s power over women.  Let’s look at how this works, using Mulvey’s arguments:

- Men control the direction of the film because they are regularly the active characters. They have traditionally been films’ leaders, doers, and the protagonists who forward the story and make things happen.

- Audiences are therefore invited to identify with the man, becoming omnipotent with him. The camera is male and the audience is (presumed to be) male, so everything is seen through the male perspective.

- Women are the object of the gaze, the ones who are looked at. Women also often serve as the obstacles, where they are the love interest who slows down the narrative.  But this still makes them the passive ones that things happen to.

- Together, Mulvey says, this is how men control women through the male gaze.

Mulvey invites us to realize why a lot of men therefore get angry when films, especially their beloved franchises, center women, since traditionally so many of those films presumed and normalized a male viewer. If they felt the film was “theirs,” the film was active in convincing them that.

Can Women Have the Male Gaze?

As much as the male gaze is, well, male, it’s also taught to women

But what about women in the audience? What Berger, Mulvey, and other theorists of the gaze have suggested is that over centuries of media that normalizes men as lookers, women as that which is looked upon, women too have been told to enjoy looking at one another. Think about The Bachelor‘s rose ceremony here, where part of the presumed pleasure for the presumed female audience is to adopt the man’s POV, seeing which of the women are worthy of a rose, which are not. Pageants, fashion magazines, and more can similarly encourage women to look at each other — and to evaluate each other — as men might, whereas it’s remarkably rare to see the opposite, to see straight men encouraged to check each other out, or comment on each other’s appearances.

“Gaze” & “Feminism”

Now read Michele White’s Keywords entry on “Gaze” for an overview of the concept. Then read Susan J. Douglas’ entry on “Feminism,” which situates the gaze within a broader trajectory of research, and shows how it connects to other analytical tools used by feminist media studies analysts.

Othering

Othering | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 9:17 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Othering/1_uf1t1wul

As this video shows, there are other ways that the gaze is used to communicate power differences beyond just gender, such as Othering.  At a very basic level, Othering is about the idea of Us versus Them.  You put you and your culture at the center of your framework, and see other societies and groups as different.  Of course this isn’t a neutral categorization—as we talked about with stereotyping, this distinction between self and Other is about translating difference into inferiority.  There might not even be significant cultural differences between the two communities: Othering is about constructing an imaginary referent that helps you to define who you are by what you are not.  It helps you define yourself through a relationship with the Other.

United 93’s depiction of the flight’s lone German passenger offers a sad example of Othering

Othering tends to pop up even and precisely when you wouldn’t expect it too, not just in movies set in other countries, but when a filmmaker wants to “wheel in” a foreigner or another type of Other simply to serve as reflection to the main character or characters. Take, for example, the case of United 93. A film about the plane on 9/11 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after its passengers rose up to thwart their hijackers’ plan, we should expect (and can 100% justify!) its depiction of the hijackers as villains. However, there’s also a German character, Christian Adams, who is the only character who counsels appeasement: as the American characters all wish to rise up, he tries to hold them back, clearly scared of what will happen. United 93 very understandably and very nobly wishes to tell a tale of American courage … but to do so, regrettably its creators found it necessary to have someone who was a coward, so that the courage could be reflected back off that coward. There was no evidence of the real Christian Adams being a coward, or of him getting in the way of the rebellion; instead, his widow and other loved ones had to watch the film turn him into one, simply because he wasn’t American and hence could be turned most easily into a projection of cowardice that reflected American courage off it.

“Othering” + Kini, “The Problem with Aladdin” + Gray, “The Amazing Race: Global Othering”

For a quick overview of Othering, see Angharad Valdivia’s Keywords entry.

Then read Aditi Natasha Kini’s short piece on Aladdin and (optionally, if you wish) my own piece on The Amazing Race. Kini sees little more than Othering in Disney’s Aladdin, whereas my analysis of the CBS reality show The Amazing Race suggests that it’s a more complex, slippery text, sometimes falling into classic traps of Othering, while at other times resisting Othering by actually listening to some of the locals the show and its racers encounter.

the gaze meets othering

We’ve presented the male gaze and Othering as distinct, but this video from Feminist Frequency about exoticization of “tribal” women in video games shows how they can easily overlap with and amplify each other.

Not Your Exotic Fantasy | Feminist Frequency | 12:13 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=119

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Not+Your+Exotic+Fantasy+-+Tropes+vs.+Women+in+Video+Games.mov/0_ccy856gb

conclusion

Any group or culture can engage in Othering to some extent or other (certainly, if you dig into German media, you’ll find outrageous caricatures of Americans too), but it’s more egregious and problematic when those groups have vastly different levels of access to media that circulates.  This is why American Othering comes under closer global scrutiny and greater critique, because American media companies circulate their media far and wide, sharing their images with others. Or, to circle back to where this class began, that’s how the gaze became a problem, when men had overwhelmingly more access to multiple modes of media production. As more women are given the director’s chair and control of the camera, we can hope to see more variation and difference, leading some to talk of the rise of a “female gaze” that is not just a reverse of the male gaze and not just more Othering: see here for more.

Hopefully, too, if you go into media production, you’ll consider carefully the politics of looking in the projects you work on, and work harder to ensure those projects don’t end up in future versions of a class on the gaze and on Othering.

Key Concepts

- Spectatorship

- Panopticon

- Power and looking

- Scopophilia

- The Male Gaze

- Laura Mulvey

- To-be-looked-at-ness

- Dismemberment

- Voyeurism

- Three looks

- Othering

13

Week 12: Examining the Audience

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Lori Lopez | 1:02 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=142

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+13+-+Examining+the+Audience/1_lkcr0ehi

Key Questions

- How has our understanding of audiences changed over time?

- What are common quantitative and qualitative methods for research audiences?

- What are the strengths and weaknesses of these methods?

(Note that you will not be quizzed on this material this week since Paper #2 is due. However, this material is “fair game” for next week’s quiz)

What is media without an audience, or without users? We’ve looked at technologies, industries, and texts in this course, but we now shift to examining audiences. Some analysts lazily think of the audience as a predetermined end of the road, assuming that if they know the technology, industry, and/or text, they know what the audience will do. But audiences aren’t that simple. Indeed, as we’ll explore in this section of the course, they can be volatile, playful, devious, active, resistant, and engaged, sometimes in ways that radically change the story of whichever item of media we’re talking about, sometimes in small and subtle ways. Our task in this section will be to consider the audience not as the receptacle and endpoint of the story of media, but as an alternative starting point, as people who decide to go and watch/listen/use. Why? Does it matter what mood they’re in? How might they consume as groups, not just individuals? What do they do to and with media? These and more questions lie ahead.

First, in this online class we’ll consider a range of ways in which audiences have been studied, and we’ll chart the history of audience analysis.

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The hypodermic needle theory was was one of the earliest ways of thinking about the impact of the media on audiences, developed around the 1920s and 1930s.  This theory suggests that media messages are “injected” directly into the brains of audiences.

Media message are “injected” directly into the brains of audiences

The message goes directly from the sender to the receiver in a linear way.  It is premised on the assumption that all audience members are the same and will respond in the same way to the media.  It also indicates that the audience is a passive receptacle for media messages.

War of the Worlds | Orson Welles | 3:45 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=142

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/War+of+the+Worlds+doc/0_dqztcamp

We can think about the famous Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938.  This was a fictional radio program about an alien invasion.  It made the news when some people actually believed it was true and started freaking out.  At first, the panic that the show caused was thought to demonstrate the powerful effects of the media on the public.

But we also heard at the end of the video about what researchers discovered in the time since then.  It turned out that not everyone listening to radio that night actually believed it.  People were aware it was a fictional play because they had tuned in from the beginning, or because they could just figure it out from context. Along with the panic surrounding The War of The Worlds, the hypodermic needle theory soon became debunked.  Now we realize that people don’t just mindlessly believe everything they see and hear.

Media Effects

One way of studying the way that media impacts audiences is through media effects research.  This is an empirical way of studying social, behavioral, and psychological responses to media and technology use.  Research in media effects is usually thought of as quantitative empirical investigations of measurable attributes conducted on a large scale.  They look to see whether significant correlations exist between levels of exposure and variations in behavior or beliefs.

TV and Research | Dr. Marie-Louise Mares | 7:43 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=142

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/TV+and+Research/0_6zfpfe86/75945101

Media effects research has commonly included topics such as the effects of political campaigns on voting outcomes, the relationship between violent media and aggressive behavior, and the learning achieved through educational media.  Although it is understood that the impacts of the media are complex and it may not be a simple one-to-one correlation between the intended message and the received message, media effect theorists still believe that the media exert a significant and substantial influence on us.  This kind of research is important in helping us to understand our relationship to media.

We can also consider some potential difficulties with conducting media effects research.  For instance, there could be many interfering variables that make it difficult to tell if it is media exposure or something else that caused a certain change or behavior.  One solution might be to use an experimental setting.  This could be something like putting a test subject in a room and making them watch a violent media text, and then measuring their physiological response such as their heartrate or blood pressure.

In this kind of controlled environment, researchers can eliminate other potential variables and make sure the impact comes from the media, and not from something else.

In a controlled environment researchers can eliminate potential variables

But one of the limits of experimental settings is that real people don’t normally consume media in this kind of setting, and it does not accurately reflect the way that we engage with media in our own lives — including the way we consume media socially as part of a group, the way we multitask and incorporate media into a multimedia environment, or the way that we watch media amidst distractions and interruptions.  Because of this, it may not be realistic to say that watching media in an experimental setting mirrors our real lives, or has the same impact as it does in everyday experience.

“Mass”

Read Jack Bratich’s short Keyword entry on “Mass” and consider how often audiences are considered precisely as a single-celled organism, a mass.

Uses and Gratifications

Studies of uses and gratifications have also examined audiences, looking at what it is that draws people to specific media.  This kind of research looks at what social and psychological needs are satisfied through media consumption and produce gratification.  It assumes that people are goal-oriented in seeking out media, and that people use media to satisfy specific needs.  We can notice that it suggests that media users play an active role in choosing the media.

For example, this helps us to see how people seek out entertainment media for a variety of purposes, including:

- To learn things

- To feel emotions like sadness or fear or excitement

- To escape real life

- Mood management

Instead of asking, “What does media do to people?” this kind of research helps us to answer questions like, “What do people do with media?  Why do they use media in certain ways?”

Active Audience

Now we’re going to turn to some qualitative methods that rely upon a different sense of evidence, or a different sense of what it would mean to really understand audiences.  Like Uses and Gratifications, the theory of “active audiences” assumes that audiences are made up of individual people who play an active role in making sense of the media.  It’s a “bottom up” approach where audience members play an important role in interpreting meaning, rather than a “top down” approach where media producers are assumed to play the most important role.

This serves to counter the Hypodermic Needle Model, where audiences were assumed to be passively receiving whatever message is intended for them.  It somewhat counters the assumptions behind Media Effects research, although the idea of an active audience doesn’t mean that it would be impossible for media to influence people, just that people can resist those effects.  It is similar to Uses and Gratifications research, where we assume audiences have a reason for seeking out the media that they do, that they’re not just blind dupes.

Ethnographic Tradition

One way of researching the way that audiences understand media in their everyday lives is to do an ethnography of media consumption.  Ethnography is a method that comes from anthropology, where in order to learn about a culture, researchers would fully immerse themselves in the lifeworld of a people.  Rather than setting out to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis, they would just spend time observing people in their real lives and take notes on what they saw.  Then later they would analyze what they had encountered in order to arrive at theories or conclusions.  This method depends upon taking the time to hang out and observe people in their natural setting, rather than using a laboratory or university environment.

The historical tradition of ethnography centered on learning about “natives” and often came from a colonial perspective. This framework that relies heavily on othering is a problematic part of the history of ethnography, and demands stronger ethical frameworks for engaging in research.

One way to shift these power dynamics is to do ethnographic research on people who are like you, or are even from your own community.

Research can also take place on people who are like you, or who are from your own community.

To do a media ethnography, this would mean spending time with audiences and observing how they interact with media in their everyday lives.  This can also be supplemented with a number of other methods, such as:

- Interviews, where people are asked about their experiences of consuming media

- Diaries, where people are asked to regularly reflect upon and write about media use

- Focus groups, where a group of people are collected and they talk with one another about the media

Reading the Romance

We might think that women are oppressed by romance novels.

One of the most famous ethnographic works of trying to understand the way that people actually engage with a text is Janice Radway’s study of the readers of romance novels.  If we just think about the textual content of romance novels, we might think that women are oppressed by them because they tell stories emphasizing the idea that all a woman needs is a good man to come and save her, or for women to be subordinate to men.

But Radway actually asked women how they understood the novels.  She didn’t make any assumptions based on how she understood the meaning as a scholar or feminist.  She spent hours and hours just hanging out in a store that sold romance novels and talking to the women who worked there and shopped there.

What she found was that romance novels played a really important role in the lives of the readers.  They saw them as an important escape from all of the responsibilities that they felt as mothers and wives.  They wanted to learn about the world and take a break sometimes, so they saw reading as something that was deserving of their time.  Their everyday lives were exhausting and draining and unsatisfying, so they turned to the romance novels to fill that void in their life.  They got pleasure out of the fact that the stories always ended on a happy note, and didn’t see these kinds of endings as being anti-women.  They loved that about them!  They also really liked reading about plucky heroines who were independent and well taken care of by the men in their lives.

She spent time hanging out in a store that sold romance novels and talking to the women who worked there and shopped there.

So in some ways readers of romance novels used the books to criticize their own conditions, and some could even find ways of bringing feminism into their readings of the novels.  We can see that it was only through immersing herself in the culture of these readers that Radway was able to understand how these books were making sense to these readers.  This is one example of how doing a media ethnography allowed this researcher to put forward theories about what consumers are doing with media and why, on their own terms.

Encoding/Decoding

Stuart Hall also provides a way of thinking about how we really interact with media as audiences.  His model is called Encoding/Decoding.  Encoding and decoding are two processes for making meaning.

- Encoding is the message that is put into a text by producers, or their intended meaning.

- Decoding is the message that is taken from a text by readers, or how audiences make sense of the message.

We can see from this model that we understand that readers don’t always get the intended meaning.  There is a process in the middle, between encoding and decoding, where the meaning can change and get reworked.  In fact we can’t even assume that every reader is going to get the exact same meaning.  Readers are free to interpret texts in any number of ways.

We discussed this when we talked about semiotics and the idea of polysemy, or the idea that texts can be read for multiple meanings.  But exactly what kinds of readings are possible?  Hall lays out three ways that we classify audience readings of a text:

- Dominant—This is the preferred reading of the text, where the encoding matches with the decoding.

- Oppositional—This is the opposite, where the reader actively resists the dominant reading and instead takes away a resistant reading of the text. They dismiss the dominant reading entirely because it doesn’t accord with their own beliefs, or they feel like they can see right through it.

- Negotiated—This is somewhere in the middle, where some dominant ideas are accepted and some are rejected.

Is the company doing something good for the environment?

A dominant reading of this ad would be that the company is doing something good for the environment by creating bottles with less plastic in them.  That is the message that the ad was created to convey.  The intent was for audiences to think that their company cares about the environment.

But we have the power as readers to read this in an oppositional way.  An alternate reading might identify this as “greenwashing,” which is when corporations pretend to engage in environmentalism when they are really not doing so at all.  Obviously continuing to make plastic bottles is not good for the environment at all.  Perhaps a negotiated reading would admit that it is slightly better to have less plastic in these bottles.

The dominant or intended message for this ad is that women should celebrate themselves by buying a “right hand ring.” In fact, buying a ring for yourself is a sort of female empowerment.

An oppositional reading would recognize that they are trying to create a new market for diamonds and sell more rings, and that there is nothing empowering about buying yourself a ring.  A negotiated reading might acknowledge that there are ways in which buying power and circumscribing traditional gender roles can be meaningful, but probably not when that message is created entirely by diamond companies.

“Audience”

Now read Matt Hills’ Keywords entry on “Audience,” in which he tries to offer a nuanced account of what audiences are and how to study them.

Resistant Audiences

Beyond methods for reading texts in different ways, audiences can also be active through production practices and creating media messages themselves.  Particularly in our era of digital media and media convergence, it becomes easier than ever for audiences to become producers, and to talk back to media industries.

A few years ago, General Motors decided to take advantage of the productivity of audiences and asked the public to create their own commercials for the Chevy Tahoe using their website.  This is a strategy that can be used to build brand attachment, make advertising more entertaining, engage the customer, and take advantage of free labor.  They provided stock footage clips and music, and consumers were invited to add their own text.

Chevy Tahoe Commercials | Consumer-Generated | 0:31 & 0:33

Let’s look at some of the messages that they created:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=142

https://youtu.be/4oNedC3j0e4

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=142

https://youtu.be/XA6dLFrAFlI

With this kind of message creation, the audience actually gets to participate.  In some cases maybe it is effective for the company to have audiences help contribute media, but here we also see it opens up the possibility for distorting the intended message and allowing oppositional messages to be spread.

Key Concepts

- Hypodermic needle theory

- War of the Worlds broadcast

- Media effects

- Experimental settings

- Uses and gratifications

- Quantitative vs qualitative studies

- Ethnographic tradition

- Active audiences

- Romance novels (Janice Radway)

- The Encoding/Decoding Model (Stuart Hall)

- Dominant/oppositional/negotiated

- Resistant audiences

14

Week 13: Fans & Participatory Cultures

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 1:22 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=162

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+14+-+Fan+Cultures/1_tf6i2ffd

Key Questions

- What does fan productivity look like?

- How do fans trouble the distinction between high and low culture?

- What does or should participatory culture look like?

Fandom, Part 1

Today’s online class is intended to work hand in hand with Thursday’s whole class session. On Thursday we’ll cover some of the theories of what fans are doing, but here in this space we can take advantage of this platform to show you some more examples of fan productivity and behavior. We’ll also set up fan productivity as part of a broader process of participatory culture more generally, wherein users become “co-creators” in multiple ways.

In the whole class session, we’ll noted further how fans have often been crudely pathologized, considered to be “losers” unaware of the difference between reality and fiction, slavishly following popular culture. Fans have regularly been Othered, in short, often in stark gendered terms too, with stereotypes, variously, of screaming, weeping groupies of boy bands; violent, slovenly sports fans; or the “failed” adults living in grandma’s basement, as in this playful video from Weird Al Yankovic:

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=162

Fan Film

But we’ll also considered the various ways in which fans are often (as with Weird Al himself) playing, and we’ll consider various forms of fan activity, from cosplay and other role-playing to fan film and fan fiction, as playful engagements with texts. Play can range from the banal and silly to the very serious and critically engaged, and can be motivated by a similarly wide range of impulses, including intellectual, social, creative, ludic, and humorous.

Here’s an example of a vid, from Adam White, called “The Unconscious Sith,” which on one level is a rather sweet gift to White’s son, putting him in a StarWars comic, yet also clearly shows White honing various production skills.

Star Wars: The Unconscious Sith | 3:12 mins.

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=162

Link to https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Star+WarsA+The+Unconscious+Sith/1_46l69660

A more sweeping, large-scale fan project is Star Wars Uncut. Casey Pugh divided Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope into 473 15-second segments, and invited fans to film a segment, then stitching them together. If you spend a little time with it, you’ll see very sincere renderings, parodies, low-budget work and glossy animation, and in general you’ll get a sense of the many different types of fannish motivations that existed even to contribute to this one very specific project.

Machinima and Video Games

Another way of telling fannish stories is through machinima, wherein one can use a video game engine to create one’s actors, scenery, etc. One of the earliest, most lauded instances of this came from the series Red vs. Blue, created using the game Halo. The game is a multi-player first-person shooter set in a futuristic other world, but the creators Burnie Burns and Rooster Teeth offered characters, motivations, and long philosophic discussion in voiceover, as here:

Red vs. Blue | 2:40 mins.

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=162

Link to https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Star+WarsA+The+Unconscious+Sith/1_46l69660

This technique has since become far more common, as first other “massive world” games such as Grand Theft Auto or life-building games like The Sims allowed for a host of video game actors ranging from the goofy to the very serious, and then games like Minecraft led to thousands upon thousands of recordings, and platforms such as Twitch allowed for player-commentators to become famous for and with their fandoms. All along, though, we might consider sports commentating an especially “old” form of fan engagement, as color commentators in particular have long been hired to churn out fannish stats, theories, and opinions.

Minecraft machinima and videos cover a broad range of styles and types

Musical Mash-Ups

Music provides another realm rich with fan mash-ups, remixes, and cover songs, in ways that should again challenge us to consider how far back some of these practices go. Most bands perform covers of others’ work in concert, and many musical performers around the world make a living playing only other people’s hits. The best DJs don’t simply play songs but know which songs connect to each other, or work on top of and with one another. But even “new” music can often sample or remix work we already know. We needn’t link to any in particular, as the Internet is full of them: just Google your favorite musician + “mash-up”, “remix”, or “cover” to find a few. Nor is this practice particularly new: if you start to read about Mozart or Beethoven, for instance, you’ll read about how much they were admired for playing others’ work. On one hand (as we discussed in the Industries section when talking about art and cultural industries), this challenges our established notions of what truly is “original,” “art,” or “innovation.” But it also proves the feedback loop between production and reception, wherein all media producers are at one level or another a “fan” of other producers, whose work will wear the clear finger-prints of that fandom. Listen to any “great” artist discuss where they got their inspiration from, and you’ll hear a fan talking about the artists they in turn adored and modeled to one degree or another.

High Culture vs. Low Culture

Sometimes, we or others can be very resistant to the idea that “our” artists are engaging in fannish practices, seeing a million miles between the media we like, love, and admire, and the media that other people like, love, and admire. This dynamic, and the avowal of “fandom” and of fannish practices of creation, is worth considering in and of itself, but it’s another reason why studying fandom can be helpful, inasmuch as it encourages us to stop and think about culture and how we interact with it in general.

In our society we have clear distinctions between what we would call “high culture” and what we would call “low culture.”

In the category of high culture, we might place opera, art museums, wine, classical music.

In the category of high culture we have opera, art museums, wine, classical music.  In the category of low culture we have Nascar, BBQ, reality TV, fast food, Top 40 music. It’s important to question why it is that we think one thing belongs to one category instead of another, how it got into those categories, and what are the consequences of having this distinction.

In the category of low culture, we might place monster trucks, sports bars, and reality television shows.

The French theorist Pierre Bourdieu argued that concepts of “good taste” and “bad taste” are not natural.  These are culturally-constructed categories.  And we need to recognize how they are related to hierarchies of socioeconomic class.

Cultural Capital

Cultural capital is made up of things like having a good education, knowing how to talk and how to dress, having “good taste.”

These distinctions have real consequences. Bourdieu also distinguishes between economic capital and other kinds of capital like social and cultural capital.  If you have money, you have economic capital.  But cultural capital is made up of the things that benefit you that are outside of just money—things like having a good education, knowing how to talk and how to dress, having “good taste.”  Being connected to objects of high culture does have social benefits—it causes you to gain cultural capital.  Being connected to low culture, or being thought of as having bad taste, can cause social punishment.

Fan objects often fall into this category of “bad taste”—people are fans of tv shows, pop music, celebrities, sports teams.  In fact (as noted previously), when people are fans of high culture objects, we don’t really use the word “fan” to describe them, and instead use words like aficionado or connoisseur, or even expert.  So in some sense, we can think about stereotypical conceptions of the fan as being based on cultural binaries, and the anxiety about the violation of dominant cultural hierarchies, the fear of bad taste taking over.

“Taste”

Read Elana Levine and Michael Z. Newman’s Keywords entry on “Taste” for more here.

Race, Gender, Sexuality, Fandom, & Taste

Beyond class, identities such as race, gender, and sexuality also contribute to the belittling of fandom.  In terms of gender, texts for women are often scorned and belittled.  They’re rarely seen as worthy of respect or serious attention.

Women’s media—soap operas, daytime talk shows, romantic comedies, magazines, book of the month clubs—all carry extremely low social status.  They’re seen as less important, less intellectual, less interesting, more emotional, more superficial, more trivial.

Texts for women, such as talk shows and melodramatic romances, are often scorned and belittled.

Media made for racial minorities are also often not taken seriously, and fans of these kinds of media are disparaged.

Media made for racial minorities is often not taken seriously, and fans of these kinds of media are disparaged.

The same is true for gay icons—specifically those whose theatricality or emotionality are what makes them famous in the first place.

Gay icons and pop divas who are beloved for their powerful emotions are also not taken seriously.

Now we are starting to get a better picture of how taste preferences are part of cultural hierarchies that have as much to do with who it is that likes them as their actual value. Of course cultural capital and taste are both moving targets, where sometimes a cultural object will shift in value depending on the context and social situation. Nothing is concrete when it comes to cultural capital and taste, but it’s important to stop and think about how often the critiques of all sorts of media are more actually critiques of the kinds of people who (are most likely to) consume them; this in turn means that asking that key question of why fans actually engage with a text can be a good way of avoiding knee-jerk snobbery and looking deeper for actual meaning in both text and audience.

Participatory Culture

One reason that numerous researchers got excited by studying fans leads us to another way to think of fans, as particular examples of participatory cultures.

Poachers

In the online class on Examining the Audience, you learned about “active audiences,” and the theory that some audiences don’t just sit passively and let media inject their messages hypodermically into them. And in our whole class session, you learned about Henry Jenkins and his interest in textual poachers. Jenkins (who studied here at UW-Madison, by the way!) countered the common sense proposition of fans as passive by suggesting that, on the contrary, many fans saw some things they liked in their fan objects, but often used their productivity to challenge, resist, and speak back to the fan object. Jenkins called this a form of participatory culture.

We’ll discuss his work more on Thursday, but his basic point was one about ownership. Yes, fans of any text do not officially control it, and so in some ways they may be seen as “merely” its consumers. But they can participate in the meanings it has at large amongst other viewers. Fan productivity, to Jenkins, was exciting because it showed audiences talking back to established texts and franchises, demanding that their own interests and issues became part of the story.

“Slash” fan fiction that brings together two same sex characters from a media world into a loving and/or sexual relationships — as with the very common Draco/Harry pairing in a lot of fanfic — is a classic example of poaching upon a text to offer new and/or more meaning

Participatory Cultures and the Internet

In the intervening years (Textual Poachers was published in 1992), Jenkins has become interested in how the participatory culture that at first he saw in fan conventions, fan fiction, and fanzines became so much more possible — and so much more available to all — via the Internet and via first blogs and discussion boards, then file-sharing and streaming sites, social media sites, etc. Thus, by 2006, when Jenkins wrote Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and then in the years after when he wrote of “spreadable media” (as in one of today’s readings), he noted that almost all of us now belong to participatory cultures.

Jenkins and Green, “Spreadable Media”

Now read Jenkins and Green’s PDF article on “Spreadable Media” (a term that aims to replace “viral” media by arguing that someone always needs to decide to spread something — nothing truly spreads “virally,” as there must always be some form of actual participation in mass popularity).

We can look at five characteristics of a participatory culture:

1. Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. Strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others

3. Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices

4. Members believe that their contributions matter

5. Members feel some degree of social connection with one another (they care what other people think about what they have created)

Participatory cultures can happen in all sorts of settings. Maybe you have an organization or club on campus right now where you feel like you see all of these values. But once you have a participatory culture, there’s opportunities for all sorts of things—for learning and education, for mobilization, for social support networks, for developing skills.

Numerous political movements have tried to learn from and create participatory cultures. Indeed, some fan groups have themselves become outwardly and expressly political, as with The Harry Potter Alliance, a group that aims to direct Harry Potter fans towards progressive political action. Jenkins also argues that as niche marketing, narrowcasting, and market fragmentation became the new media realities, producers have needed to care more about cultivating fans, forcing them to open up doors to participation, and to let audiences have more of a say.

The Co-Opting of Participation

However, Jenkins’ more admittedly optimistic account of audiences as participating in the story of media as more than just passive receivers has come under heavy attack by other scholars. Jenkins’ critics contend that while the media landscape is indeed full of offers to participate, the nature of much of this “participation” is strictly contained and limited at best, outright exploitative at worst.

On one hand, after all, we might study what kinds of participation are allowed. So, for instance, for many years George Lucas outwardly encouraged the production of StarWars fan film, and even judged competitions … but these competitions always featured only the most flattering or non-challenging work (“Unconscious Sith” won, for instance, but nothing that queered the franchise, or questioned its politics, or so forth, ever stood a chance). Sites that promise to include user or fan commentary regularly edit out the bad stuff.

Suzanne Scott on Battlestar Galactica

For another example of this critique of “participation” being full or meaningful, now read Suzanne Scott’s chapter on the limited offers for participation with Battlestar Galactica.

When does participatory culture amount to participatory advertising?

On the other hand, therefore, we should consider that sometimes offers to participate are savvy offers for fans and users to be one’s laborers. Brand gurus regularly talk about the power of getting your fans to be your advertisers, and carefully framed and edited “participatory cultures” risk being easily appropriated by producers. Social media sites often perfect this system, wherein any participation works for the company at some level or other: you might link to a New York Times article about Facebook’s latest shenanigans in a Facebook post, with critical intent, but Facebook uses everything you type or post to create more money and to build more ad revenue.

An open question, then, and one with no easy answer is to what degree participatory cultures do indeed exist in their ideal form, or whether they need to work in ideal form in order to “count.” Worded differently, can fans resist media, or is all engagement already acquiescence?

Key Concepts

- Fan productivity and play

- Fan film and vids

- Machinima and video games

- Musical mash-ups

- High culture/low culture

- Pierre Bourdieu

- Cultural capital

- Taste

- Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Taste

- Participatory cultures

- Henry Jenkins

- Fans as poachers

- Slash

- Spreadable Media

- The co-opting/exploitation of participatory cultures

15

Week 14: Global Media Cultures

(Go to the Online Lessons Home page to access a PDF version.)

Introduction Video | Dr. Jonathan Gray | 2:09 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=211

https://https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Week+15+-+Global+Media/0_tohdgi3w/32607362

Key Questions

- What are some of the media industries that succeed on a global scale?

- How and why does global piracy matter?

- How does our understanding of media shift in different cultural contexts?

global media industries and texts

As noted in the above video, we can only scratch the surface of global media in one online class, but from the outset we should note that the Department of Communication Arts also offers classes on Global Media Cultures (CA 458), Italian Film (CA 350), French Film (CA 455), Russian and Soviet Film (CA 456), German Film (CA 655), Japanese Film (sometimes as a CA 613 topics class). Other departments, too, offer classes on media from multiple other countries.

But one way we can think about global media as global, not just as a collection of national film, tv, music, or game cultures, for instance, is to think particularly about industries and texts that move globally, not just staying in one country.

“Globalization”

Related to this question of what is “global” is the bigger question of what globalization is, and why and how it matters to the study of media. Read Aswin Punathambekar’s keyword entry on this word.

Thursday’s class on cultural imperialism will focus specifically on and assume American media’s global travels, but the US is joined by Mexico and Brazil (and to a lesser degree, for telenovelas, Venezuela) as power houses of media production that succeed across the Americas; by the UK, France, and Germany as key media producers in Europe; by Turkey as key to the Middle Eastern market; by South Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana for sub-Saharan Africa; and by India for South Asia and Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea for East Asia.

Many of these countries are known for signature genres or types of production, each inviting close examination. So we might think of Korean dramas or K-Pop with Korea; anime, gaming, and classic film with Japan; telenovelas and melodrama with Mexico and Nigeria; period dramas and witty comedies with England; cerebral, highly artistic film with France; high-paced action film with Hong Kong; and big budget, lavish musicals with India. Each of these countries produces more than just their signature products (just as the US produces more than glossy pop musicians, sitcoms, and blockbuster films), which can be overshadowed by their global successes. But everything we might think we know about US media can be challenged by the different realities in each country.

Bollywood

Some recent Bollywood hits

Take “Bollywood,” for example (the gigantic Indian film industry based in Mumbai [spelled Bombay by Brit colonizes, from which the industry gets the “B” in Bollywood]), where celluloid was regulated by the colonial British government until independence, for fear of the medium’s power to unite and mobilize, and where the newly formed independent government was similarly deeply suspicious of film. Yet film was wildly popular from an early date. Film production was thus pushed “underground” and for many years was often financed by organized crime. Gradually, it was then invested in heavily both by overseas Indians and by business people seeking to tap into the relatively wealthy diasporic Indian community in countries like England, Canada, the US, and Australia. This is one of the reasons why our class on hybridity could feature a film like Salaam Namaste, as the industry cared as much about creating films for overseas (“hybridized”) Indians as for locals. Meanwhile, India had a mercantile class and low wage laborers who moved across the Middle East and Africa, taking their love of Bollywood with them and exposing it to locals in those countries. And thus if one wishes to tell the story of Indian film, one needs to shift to a very different industrial model, considering the roles of organized crime, of transnational investment, and of the rampant piracy that resulted from its moves both in India and across the Middle East and Africa by people unwilling and perhaps unable to pay full price.

Classically, too, musicals could do especially well because the film financing system worked in stages, with creators looking for funding to produce a central, lavish musical dance number, which was then used as a “trailer” of sorts to secure the funding and investment for the rest of the film. And stars have been even more important in Bollywood, meaning that whatever we think we know about celebrity and stardom from a US context has a lot to learn from India. In many ways, indeed, if we wish to apply US industrial and textual norms to an understanding of Bollywood, we hit numerous walls.

Hong Kong Action Cinema

Or, for another example, consider Hong Kong action cinema, especially martial arts films. Here’s famed film professor (“retired” from UW, but still in town, still writing up a storm, and still dropping by to teach at times) David Bordwell on some of the history, industrial organization, aesthetics, and impact of Hong Kong film.

Rising in the East: Hong Kong Action Cinema | Dr. David Bordwell | 15:30 mins

A UW-Madison Kaltura MediaSpace element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/commarts250jg/?p=211

https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Rising+in+the+EastA+Hong+Kong+Action+Cinema/0_b89k2cr6/32607362

global piracy

To consider media that moves around the world, we must also consider piracy more seriously than we have to date. Hollywood and the Recording Industry of America regularly announce huge sums that they claim to be losing due to piracy, and while one should always be skeptical of those sums (they regularly assume, in highly problematic fashion, that every single item of media that’s been pirated would otherwise have been paid for, for instance), even more conservative figures gesture to how very much media moves through piracy.

Anti-piracy firm Muso, for example, estimated that 2017 alone saw 300 billion visits to internet piracy sites, with television accounting for more than one third of reported global piracy activity with 106.9 billion visits (music garnered 73.9 billion visits, film 53.2 billion visits). Here’s another chart estimating visits per country for the leading pirate nations:

Estimated visits to piracy sites per country

And the above numbers focus solely on streaming and/or file-sharing piracy, without even mentioning the still pervasive, super-trade in and of pirated DVDs and CDs around the world. Below is a photo from one of the many piracy stalls that exist across Malawi, which like many poorer countries has relatively limited Internet access for the bulk of the population. Malawi produces next to no film or television of its own, and Hollywood and the big music labels have largely foregone any interest in legitimate sales in the poor country, yet media consumption is high, meaning that almost all film and television are via a “black market” economy … because there is no alternative.

A piracy stall in Malawi

Piracy challenges all sorts of received wisdom about media. For one, it should remind us that box office, Nielsen, and album sale numbers only tell us part of the picture. But because it’s illegal trade, and hence not recorded well, it also makes it very hard to work out exactly what the rest of that “picture” looks like. Whatever else, then, we can never truly measure “popularity,” just revenue. We also must contend with another host of media companies that aren’t talked about as much because they’re doing illegal work. Chinese pirates in particular are the fear of the content industry worldwide, and almost all of those DVDs pictured above in a stall in Malawi had Chinese symbols on their backs and/or on the DVD menus, since they came from Chinese pirate networks, from China to Johannesburg in South Africa, then up to Malawi. We know so little about the “business” of piracy.

The business of piracy

Studies of piracy also regularly run aground if we simply adopt the moralizing framework that Hollywood asks us to use. For sure, piracy has resulted in billions of lost revenues. But it also regularly exists in countries, like Malawi, where people couldn’t afford regular prices, and where Hollywood isn’t even selling anything. Piracy might even be seen, in a global frame, as helping Hollywood and major recording labels, since it creates an audience and fandoms for many American (and Bollywood and K-Pop and Hong Kong, etc.) stars, directors, and styles. China is illustrative here, since for many years the state limited strictly how many American films could enter, but Hollywood rose to popularity through piracy, such that as the Chinese government gradually began to allow more American movies in, they can now make significant profit in China, given the already built-up fandom.

And while piracy makes foreign media available, it also has massive and crippling impacts on local industries, thereby limiting any would-be competitor’s chances to take on the big media conglomerates and win. In countries in which piracy is ubiquitous, after all, any upstart producer needs to find ways to make money without being able to charge fair market value. Some NGOs occasionally go around the world with good intentions to teach people in poorer countries how to make movies, in particular, and they at times bring and leave the tech, but how would one make money as a film-maker in a country in which people get films for a few cents?

Global Audiences and Media Cultures

This gets us back to audiences, and invites us to think once more about audiences as complicating factors, not “just” because they can be “active” “poachers,” but because cultures surrounding media consumption vary considerably from country to country.

The Case of Malawi

If we go back to the case of Malawi, for instance, we find a country with no real “cinemas” in the US understanding of that word. If people are watching film or television, they are either doing so:

- at home on their own television, watching either the country’s lone broadcast channel, TV Malawi (TVM), watching a DVD (pirated DVDs are sold ubiquitously across the country), or if they are especially wealthy, they may have a satellite dish, through which they can access South African-based DStv and a wide range of channels and content; or

- at a wealthy neighbor’s house, as it’s common for those with satellites to allow neighbors and even others in one’s town or village to drop by and watch, occasionally charging during a big event like a Premiership football match to recoup some costs; or

- in a bar, which (as in the US) is more likely playing the news or sports, but can quite often play soap operas instead; or

- at what’s called a “video show,” a room that plays movies (off DVD) continuously, and which one pays the equivalent of a few cents to enter, staying as long as one wants. More often, video shows play American (or occasionally Hong Kong) action movies, though Nigerian melodramas feature prominently too.

Inside a Malawian video show. Note the small television screen at the front

This situation changes, quite radically, the cultures of consumption. In particular, there is very little reverence or privileging of new content. DStv plays reasonably contemporary movies, but the DVD market is characterized by a lot of older material. Look again at that picture of the DVD stall above, in the Global Piracy section, and note Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and Stallone feature — all for their 80s and early 90s fare. This is because, on one hand, bigger piracy companies tend to find Malawi too poor to bother with too, only offering their back catalog, using the  country in effect to clear off their shelves. On the other hand, though, it’s because — again, due to lack of foreign media company investment — the country has stunningly few paratexts: no billboards advertising new films, no ads in the newspaper announcing a new television show, no media advertising on the local TV station, etc.

This situation extends to music, where although there is a more vibrant local music scene, and whereas radio stations do play new music, a lot of music still circulates through old cassette tapes and CDs. Rap, hip hop, and R&B are reasonably “up to date” in the country, but one also sees significant popularity for country and easy listening stars of the 80s (Dolly Parton is hugely popular, for instance, and Michael Bolton and Phil Collins are both doing well). Many of these fandoms took root when US missionaries from places like Alabama and Tennessee arrived in the 80s, and though the missionaries left, their music never did, creating an interesting soundscape wherein it’s common to hear mix tapes consisting of Beyonce, 50 Cent, and Dolly Parton. The de-privileging of newness extends, too, to norms of playing music, so it’s common to sit on a four hour bus-ride and hear nothing but the same song by Trisha Yearwood play 20 times over till you finally hear something else.

A Malawian (pirate) CD store

Differences in technology, and available technology, are key as well. Most Malawians have never had a phone landline, yet cell phones are becoming ubiquitous, meaning the nation is “leapfrogging” over landlines. The Internet is sluggish throughout the country, due to poor and overworked servers, effectively limiting the capacities for online culture to affect the country too much. “Film,” as noted above, always plays through a television (and usually a very small, old, and qualitatively bad television), offering little of the AV spectacle one expects from a trip to an AMC in the US. Television and film are also prone to the nation’s regular blackouts, as a poor electrical infrastructure is buckling under its usage, so anytime you sit down to watch, you need to be prepared for a 1-6 hour blackout to interrupt viewing. As one might imagine, any study of media audiences here (and Malawi is quite representative of many countries in the world) would need to work very differently. “Fandom” works differently here, as does almost every seeming “norm” of media delivery and reception.

Ahn, “Samurai Champloo: Transnational Viewing”

As media moves around the world, this also raises questions of transnational viewing contexts, raised in the article on SamuraiChamploo by Jiwon Ahn. Read that now.

Conclusion

Throughout this course, given its survey nature, we’ve moved from one topic to the next, but since we’ve often assumed the US as the cultural context, each building block we’ve offered has regularly been placed on top of previous ones (e.g., the context for understanding Hollywood’s representations is an understanding of Hollywood production and industrial cultures and norms). But when we start to move around the world, we regularly find that a whole new set of building blocks are required, or — to shift metaphors — that the ripple effects of one change are profound. Many extra questions exist out there to answer about world and global media; we hope you’ll ask and answer some of them as you continue to study the media.

Key Concepts

- What is global media?

- Globalization

- Other global media centers

- Bollywood

- Hong Kong action cinema

- Global piracy

- What piracy does, pro and con

- Malawian media environment

- Video shows

- Transnational Viewing