Can We Survive Entertainment?

Here's my last guest post for the Hannah Arendt Center's blog, dated August 12th, which you can read over there by clicking here, or read over here by, well, reading on...

"The state of affairs, which indeed is equaled nowhere else in the world, can properly be called mass culture; its promoters are neither the masses nor their entertainers, but are those who try to entertain the masses with what once was an authentic object of culture, or to persuade them that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and educational as well. The danger of mass education is precisely that it may become very entertaining indeed; there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. "

-Hannah Arendt, "Mass Culture and Mass Media"

I recently completed work on a book entitled Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited, to be published by Peter Lang. And as the title implies, the book takes up the arguments made by Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, published nearly three decades ago, and considers them in light of the contemporary media environment, and the kind of culture that it has given rise to.  I bring this up because the passage from Hannah Arendt's essay, "Mass Culture and Mass Media," is a quote that I first read in Amusing Ourselves to Death.  Interestingly, Postman used it not in his chapter on education, but in one focusing on religion, one that placed particular emphasis on the phenomenon of televangelism that exploded into prominence back in the eighties.  To put the quote into the context that Postman had earlier placed it in, he prefaced the passage with the following:

There is a final argument that whatever criticisms may be made of televised religion, there remains the inescapable fact that it attracts viewers by the millions. This would appear to be the meaning of the statements, quoted earlier by Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, that there is a need for it among the multitude. To which the best reply I know was made by Hannah Arendt, who, in reflecting on the products of mass culture, wrote:

And this is where Arendt's quote appears, after which Postman provides the following commentary:

If we substitute the word "religion" for Hamlet, and the phrase "great religious traditions" for "great authors of the past," this question may stand as the decisive critique of televised religion. There is no doubt, in other words, that religion can be made entertaining. The question is, by doing so, do we destroy it as an "authentic object of culture"? And does the popularity of a religion that employs the full resources of vaudeville drive more traditional religious conceptions into manic and trivial displays?

In returning to Postman's critique of the age of television, I decided to use this same quote in my own book, noting how Postman had used it earlier, but this time placing it in a chapter on education.  In particular, I brought it up following a brief discussion of the latest fad in higher education, massive open online courses, abbreviated as MOOCs.



A MOOC can contain as many as 100,000 students, which raises the question of, in what sense is a MOOC a course, and in what sense is the instructor actually teaching?  It is perhaps revealing that the acronym MOOC is a new variation on other terms associated with new media, such as MMO, which stands for massive multiplayer online (used to describe certain types of games), and the more specific MMORPG, which stands for massive multiplayer online role-playing game.  These terms are in turn derived from older ones such as MUD, multi-user dungeon, and MUSH, multi-user shared hallucination, and also MOO, multi-user dungeon, object oriented.  In other words, the primary connotation is with gaming, not education.  Holding this genealogy aside, it is clear that offering MOOCs is presently seen as a means to lend prestige to universities, and they may well be a means to bring education to masses of people who could not otherwise afford a college course, and also to individuals who are not interested in pursuing traditional forms of education, but then again, there is nothing new about the phenomenon of the autodidact, which was made possible by the spread of literacy and easy availability of books. There is no question that much can be learned from reading books, or listening to lectures via iTunes, or watching presentations on YouTube, but is that what we mean by education? By teaching?

Regarding Arendt's comments on the dangers of mass education, we might look to the preferences of the most affluent members of our society? What do people with the means to afford any type of education available tend to choose for their children, and for themselves? The answer, of course, is traditional classrooms with very favorable teacher-student ratios, if not private, one-on-one tutoring (the same is true for children with special needs, such as autism).  There should be no question as to what constitutes the best form of education, and it may be that we do not have the resources to provide it, but still we can ask whether money should be spent on equipping classrooms with the latest in educational technology, when the same limited resources could be used to hire more teachers?  It is a question of judgment, of the ability to decide on priorities based on objective assessment, rather than automatically jumping on the new technology bandwagon time and time again.

The broader question that concerns both Arendt and Postman is whether serious discourse, be it educational, religious, or political, can survive the imperative to make everything as entertaining as possible.  For Arendt, this was a feature of mass media and their content, mass culture. Postman argues that of the mass media, print media retains a measure of seriousness, insofar as the written word is a relatively abstract form of communication, one that provides some degree of objective distance from its subject matter, and that requires relatively coherent forms of organization. Television, on the other hand, is an image-centered medium that places a premium on attracting and keeping audiences, not to mention the fact that of all the mass media, it is the most massive.  The bias of the television medium is towards showing, rather than telling, towards displaying exciting visuals, and therefore towards entertaining content.  Of course, it's possible to run counter to the medium's bias, in which case you get something like C-SPAN, whose audience is miniscule.



The expansion of television via cable and satellite has given us better quality entertainment, via the original series appearing on HBO, Showtime, Starz, and AMC, but the same is not true about the quality of journalism.  Cable news on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX does not provide much in the way of in-depth reporting or thoughtful analysis. Rather, what we get is confrontation and conflict, which of course is dramatic, and above all entertaining, but contributes little to the democratic political process.  Consider that at the time of the founding of the American republic, the freedom to express opinions via speech and press was associated with the free marketplace of ideas, that is, with the understanding that different views can be subject to relatively objective evaluation, different descriptions can be examined in order to determine which one best matches with reality, different proposals can be analyzed in order to determine which one might be the best course of action.  The exchange of opinions was intended to open up discussion, and eventually lead to some form of resolution. Today, as can be seen best on cable news networks, when pundits express opinions, it's to close down dialogue, the priority being to score points, to have the last word if possible, and at minimum to get across a carefully prepared message, rather than to listen to what the other person has to say, and find common ground.  And this is reflected in Congress, as our elected representatives are unwilling to talk to each other, work with each other, negotiate settlements, and actually be productive as legislators.

Once upon a time, the CBS network news anchor Walter Cronkite was dubbed "the most trusted man in American." And while his version of the news conformed to the biases of the television medium, still he tried to engage in serious journalism as much as he was able to within those constraints. Today, we would be hard put to identify anyone as our most trusted source of information, certainly none of the network news anchors would qualify, but if anyone deserves the title, at least for a large segment of American society, it would be Jon Stewart of The Daily Show.  And while there is something to be said for the kind of critique that he and his compatriot Stephen Colbert provide, what they provide us with, after all, are comedy programs, and at best we can say that they do not pretend to be providing anything other than entertainment.  But we are left with the question, when so many Americans get their news from late night comedians, does that mean that journalism has become a joke?

Cable television has also given us specialized educational programming via the National Geographic Channel, the History Channel, and the Discovery Channel, and while this has provided an avenue for the dissemination of documentaries, audiences are especially drawn to programs such as Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan, Moonshiners, Ancient Aliens, UFO Files, and The Nostradamus Effect.  On the Animal Planet channel, two specials entitled Mermaids: The Body Found and Mermaids: The New Evidence, broadcast in 2012 and 2013 respectively, gave the cable outlet its highest ratings in its seventeen-year history. These fake documentaries were assumed to be real by many viewers, prompting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to issue a statement stating that mermaids do not actually exist.  And it is almost to easy to mention that The Learning Channel, aka TLC, has achieved its highest ratings by turning to reality programs, such as Toddlers & Tiaras, and its notorious spin-off, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.



Many more examples come to mind, but it is also worth asking whether Facebook status updates and tweets on Twitter provide any kind of alternative to serious, reasoned discourse?  In the foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman wrote, "As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.'"  Does the constant barrage of stimuli that we receive today via new media, and the electronic media in general, make it easier or harder for us to think, and to think about thinking, as Arendt would have us do? Huxley's final words in Brave New World Revisited are worth recalling:

Meanwhile, there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom.  But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them. (1958, pp. 122-123)

It's not that distractions and entertainment are inherently evil, or enslaving, but what Huxley, Postman, and Arendt all argue for is the need for placing limits on our amusements, maintaining a separation between contexts, based on what content is most appropriate. Or as was so famously expressed in Ecclesiastes: "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." The problem is that now the time is always 24/7/365, and the boundaries between contexts dissolve within the electronic media environment.  Without a context, there is no balance, the key ecological value that relates to the survival, and sustainability of any given culture.  For Postman, whose emphasis was on the prospects for democratic culture, we have become a culture dangerously out of balance.  For Arendt, in "Mass Culture and Mass Media," the emphasis was somewhat different, but the conclusion quite similar, as can be seen in her final comments:

An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; this durability is the very opposite of its functionality, which is the quality which makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up. The "thingness" of an object appears in its shape and appearance, the proper criterion of which is beauty. If we wanted to judge an object by its use value alone, and not also by its appearance… we would first have to pluck out our eyes. Thus, the functionalization of the world which occurs in both society and mass society deprives the world of culture as well as beauty.  Culture can be safe only with those who love the world for its own sake, who know that without the beauty of man-made, worldly things which we call works of art, without the radiant glory in which potential imperishability is made manifest to the world and in the world, all human life would be futile and no greatness could endure.

Our constant stream of technological innovation continues to contribute to the functionalization of the world, and the dominance of what Jacques Ellul called "la technique," the drive toward efficiency as the only value that can be effectively invoked in the kind of society that Postman termed a technopoly, a society in which culture is completed dominated by this technological imperative.  The futility of human life that Arendt warns us about is masked by our never-ending parade of distractions and amusements; the substitution of the trivial for greatness is disguised by the quality and quantity of our entertainment.  We experience the extremes of the hyperrational and the hyperreal, both of which focus our attention on the ephemeral, rather than the eternal that Arendt upholds.  She argues for the importance of loving the world for its own sake, which requires us to be truly ecological in our orientation, balanced in our approach, clear and true in our minds and our hearts.  Is there any question that this is what is desperately needed today? Is there any question that this is what seems to elude us time and time again, as all of our innovations carry us further and further away from the human lifeworld?


Thanks, as always, to Bridget Hollenback of Bard College's Hannah Arendt Center for her blogemeister work over there, and providing the illustrations that I have borrowed for this repost.

I BiT Newsweek

So, I know it's been a while again, but in my last two posts, Boston Globe Sox and The Amazon Post, I shared articles in which I was quoted on the purchases of two major newspapers this past summer. 

As the third part of this series, here is a television news report from the program Biz Asia America, described as "a daily global business news program aims to combine reporting of economic and financial issues in North and South America with those from China and the Asian region" that is shown on CCTV, which stands for China Central Television. This report was broadcast back in early August, and uploaded to YouTube soon after on August 9th.

The piece is about IBT Media buying Newsweek, which once upon a time was Time magazine's main competition in the popular weekly news magazine market. Here's the write-up from YouTube:

CCTV America correspondent Nick Harper reports: IBT buys the Newsweek and re-tool the print media to make money online. IBT person talks about the two companies will complement each other.

My quote is a very short one that comes close to the end of the segment, at 2 minutes, 45 seconds in, in case you just want to fast forward. But here is the report in its entirety:





I'll just add to this that the sales of Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe are just the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. We'll be seeing more of this sort of consumption of print media as publishing becomes a mostly electronic endeavor, with print reserved for special occasions.

As for IBT, in this moment it stands for I BiT Newsweek, and they may not have bit off more than they can chew, but it may have given the digital news company a bit of indigestion later, or maybe they just got hungry again an hour or so later...

The Amazon Post

Related to my previous post, Boston Globe Sox, I was also quoted in an August 6th article in the E-Commerce Times entitled, Mr. Bezos Goes to Washington, on the purchase of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. The piece, by Erika Morphy, begins with the following teaser in large type:

Jeff Bezos has done something that could prove to have far greater influence than being elected to Congress. He has bought The Washington Post. "This will enable him to manage the communication of the inevitable regulation and restrictions Congress will place on digital copyrights, online taxation practices, antitrust, etc.," noted KD+E's Erik Dochtermann. And that's just for starters.

The article then begins in earnest:

News that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is acquiring The Washington Post, one of the top newspapers in the United States, shook the publishing world on Monday. Bezos is buying the paper for US$250 million in cash, a transaction that will include affiliated publications. Bezos is making the acquisition as an individual -- the Post is not to be part of Amazon's vast array of products and services.

Much is being said about this sale epitomizing the demise of print journalism's golden era. The Washington Post has carved an indelible mark in U.S. history, with its fight to publish the Pentagon Papers and its reporting on Watergate -- events that occurred decades ago but still resonate.

Today, though, the Post is being picked up for a song by a digital entrepreneur, a turn of events that is astounding to many, even though the newspaper industry has been struggling for a number of years -- in large part due to the encroachment of online media and the Internet. There is no reason to assume that a paper like The Washington Post could remain immune to these trends.

Time for me to chime in with my two pence of pensé (not that I get even one cent out of it):

"The age of the daily newspaper is coming to an end, and print news organizations have been scrambling for some time now to make the transition to the Web, with very mixed results," noted Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham.

Because this is a purchase made by Bezos the individual -- not Amazon -- it may not shed much light on the future of print journalism. However, it can be expected that there will be some synergies along the way. Certainly the acquisition speaks volumes about how dominant tech money has become in the U.S. economy, but there are only hints of what the deal could mean for digital content, journalism and e-commerce in general.

And as I have done so before, here's the full text of what I provided via e-mail to Erika, so you can get more of my take on the matter, along with the context of my quote, not to mention a sense of how reporters abstract quotes out of larger commentary:

Marshall McLuhan said that print is dead back in the sixties, and most people scoffed at the remark, but he was simply observing the direction in which we were headed, and in this as in many other things, he proved to be correct.

While there will always be a market for high end books, as art objects as much as reading material, it's the cheap, throwaway print media, the pulp fiction and nonfiction, that is being replaced by the even cheaper and more ephemeral medium of electronic text. The age of the daily newspaper is coming to an end, and print news organizations have been scrambling for some time now to make the transition to the web, with very mixed results.

As news reporting continues to go digital, what newspapers have to offer is their organizations, which continue to be downgraded due to the evaporation of profits, and their brand. And there are a few brands that stand out nationally and internationally, such as The New York TImes, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. With a relatively strong news organization still in place, and one of the best brands in the business, the Washington Post is a worthwhile purchase for Amazon. This provides Amazon with a new form of content to go with their Kindle ereaders and tablets, one that is renewed on a regular basis. In the long run, content is king in the world of media, as the hardware is sold only on occasion, but the software is purchased, or accessed in the case of advertising media, continually.

Bezos started out in print, as a bookseller, and has a special attachment to the medium, and periodical sales are exactly what Amazon needs to supplement books sales as they try to establish themselves as the pre-eminent purveyor of the written word, in contrast to Apple's domination of recorded music, and as they both fight it out over video sales. There may also be a sense of noblesse oblige on the part of Bezos, in trying to preserve a remnant of the print media that Amazon helped to undermine, and maybe even a bit of guilt.

Now, back to the article, and a new section entitled "Bezos' Long Runway":

For starters, Bezos does not need the paper to turn a profit -- at least, not immediately -- which will give him more room to experiment, noted Rich Hanley, associate professor of journalism and graduate journalism director at Quinnipiac University.

"He may see it as a platform for his other personal ambitions that may include revolutionizing the way news is gathered, assembled and delivered," Hanley told the E-Commerce Times.

"He will certainly bring the same blend of curiosity and analysis to solving the crisis of journalism as he did when he selected books as the ideal product for launching an online store," he predicted. "The Internet is, after all, nothing more than interfaces connected to databases, which is the foundation of Bezos' original insight as applied to online commerce."

Bezos probably will experiment with smart reporting through the Kindle Publishing platform, suggested N. Venkat Venkatraman, a business professor at Boston University, which is located in a city that also saw its flagship paper trade recently.

"I see it as an opportunistic buy for him -- one that may have a longer-term connection to Amazon, but in the short term, it is about Bezos," he told the E-Commerce Times.

The last part of the article comes after the heading "Influencing Politics":

The acquisition is also an example of how tech executives are increasingly seeking to influence the power center that is official Washington -- a role that in previous years they disregarded as unimportant.

Bezos now has control of the most powerful medium in D.C. in terms of governmental influence, Erik Dochtermann, CEO of media agency KD+E, told the E-Commerce Times.

"This will enable him to manage the communication of the inevitable regulation and restrictions Congress will place on digital copyrights, online taxation practices, antitrust, etc.," he noted.

It is a move straight out of the Murdoch playbook, Dochtermann said. "How he chooses to wield this new power will likely take years to reveal itself."

I find it hard to imagine Bezos as the next Murdoch, and I suspect owning the newspaper may be more of a hobby for him, rather than a significant financial move. Or maybe it will be a creative outlet. After all, McLuhan did suggest that when a medium becomes obsolesced, it often is transformed from a mode of communication into an art form. While the electronic media turn journalism into entertainment, as Neil Postman noted in Amusing Ourselves to Death, print media are transforming the news into a type of artistic expression, giving new meaning to Ezra Pound's remark that the artist is the antenna of the race.

Boston Globe Sox

I know it's been a while, I apologize for being a bad blogger lately, it's not that I haven't been writing, it's just been that a bunch of other writing commitments have kept me occupied. I'll fill you in on some of that later on, but for now let me start to play catch up.

So, back in August, August 6 to be specific, I was quoted in the International Business Times, in an article entitled Red Sox Owner Buys Boston Globe Newspaper: Five Things You Should Know, written by Palash Ghosh.

Here's how the piece begins:

John W. Henry, the private equity billionaire businessman and principal owner of The Boston Red Sox baseball club, has agreed to purchase the Boston Globe newspaper (as well as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and some other assets) for $70 million.

Here are some things you should know about this deal:

And this is where the five things you should know come up.  Number one:

*John Henry Bought In Very, Very Cheap

Henry purchased the venerable 141-year-old newspaper (which has won 21 Pulitzer Prizes) at a bargain basement price. Twenty years ago, the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) bought the Globe from the Taylor family for whopping $1.1 billion (or about $1.78 billion in 2013 dollars). That amounts to a 96 percent discount. Lou Ureneck, a Boston University journalism professor, told Reuters that Henry paid more for his second baseman (Dustin Pedroia who recently signed a contract extension valued at a minimum of $100 million) than he did for the Globe.

And number two (no pun intended here):

*The Globe Is In Deep Trouble

Like most newspapers, the Globe is facing serious issues -- overall revenues are declining by 7 percent annually, while revenues from print advertising plunged by 10 percent every year. “Newspapers are bleeding, losing much of their advertising revenue,” Dr. Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies at Fordham University, told IB Times. “At this point, the most valuable thing about the Globe is its distinctive brand, more so that the publication itself. Every newspaper is struggling in making the transition to the internet.”

Strate suggested that he’s not even sure the Globe is worth $70 million price tag, but added that Boston is more of a print-oriented city than most. “The Globe does have a distinctive image that most newspapers lack, so I think it may turn out to be a good deal for Henry,” he added.

And yes, there was my two cents about the seventy million dollars, quite the bargain, don't you think? Well, let's hear from someone else on thing number three:

*This Deal Raises Some Serious Conflicts of Interest

John Henry’s acquisition of the region’s biggest paper could raise some serious issues with conflicts of interest and journalistic integrity. If the boss of the newspaper owns the baseball team that its sportswriters are supposed to cover, will they be forced to limit their criticism of the team, its players, its coaches and, particularly, its front office? Keep in mind, Henry also owns a majority share in local sports television network, New England Sports Network, which broadcasts Red Sox games.

Bob Ryan, the Globe’s most well known sports columnist, told the New York Times: “This was the last circumstance anyone would want. It’s nothing anyone would wish. It’s scary, to say the least, for all involved.” The Globe’s sports editor Joe Sullivan similarly groused: “We don’t know what the new situation is going to be in terms of hierarchy, but I would hope to be able to continue to cover the Red Sox the way we always have.” Sullivan conceded that the mere appearance of conflicts of interest will be hard to deal with. “It will be there, hanging in the air,” he said.

The Globe's most prominent baseball voice, Dan Shaughnessy, finds himself in a particularly uncomfortable position since he had criticized Henry in his columns over the years. “There’s an inherent conflict of interest which no one can do anything about,” Shaughnessy said. “All we can hope for is that everyone is allowed to do his job professionally and that we are able to keep our independence.”

And back to me to straighten things out (no pun intended here either) for number four:

*But This Has Happened Before

Indeed, The Globe’s former parent, New York Times Co., once held as much as an 18 percent stake in the parent corporation of the Red Sox club, which it finally sold off in 2012 after ten years of ownership. Other pro sports clubs in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles and elseshere have owned shares in local newspaper as well, so the Globe-Red Sox deal is hardly unprecedented. Indeed, between 1964 and 1972, the most storied franchise in all of baseball (and Red Sox rival), the New York Yankees, were owned by the CBS television network. Similarly, the Chicago Cubs baseball club was once owned by the Tribune Company.

Strate noted that television stations used to cover the games independently, with sportscasters who were calling the games employed by the station, not the team itself. “Now they tend to be employed by the team, and this changes the nature of the coverage significantly,” he said, “What once was sports journalism becomes sports public relations instead.”

And one more thing, which makes for thing number five:

*Boston Globe Has Strong Brand, Reputation

Strate also said that in the past, news organizations have had sufficient journalistic integrity to be able to report objectively despite being owned by the same individuals or companies. “Whether that is still the case, given the overall decline in professional journalism remains to be seen, but the Boston Globe, like many major newspapers, has a solid tradition of professionalism to fall back on,” he said. Nowadays blogs and social media outlets will call out any appearance of conflict of interest, another motivation for keeping to the straight and narrow.”

Nice to be given the last word here. And one thing I'd add to this report is that one of the main attractions of the Boston Globe is its sports coverage, both in paper form, and especially online, which makes the paper an especially attractive addition for a professional sports organization.

And finally, I just want to say that, speaking as a Mets fan, please note that I did not make any reference to 1986 and Bill Buckner in this discussion relating to Red Sox baseball. Really, I would never stoop so low as to remind my Bostonian friends of such a painful moment in their sports history, no matter how much pleasure the memory brings me...

Dialogue M for Media Ecology

So, my friend Corey Anton is a big time YouTuber, with over 600 videos on his channel!  And recently, we decided to record a Skype dialogue, which he then posted to YouTube:





The video is over an hour long, starting out to be a discussion of what we mean by media ecology, but soon wandering all over the place. Whether it's worth watching in its entirety or in part I leave up to you, but I can just hear Neil Postman saying, Lance, don't you have better things to do with your time? 

And even if having an intellectual conversation with a colleague isn't a bad way to spend an hour of my time, listening to it may not be the best use of your own time. I guess you'll have to decide for yourself. I should add that time is a topic that comes up, and we also bring up whether the video has any value towards the end of the dialogue.

If you look at it over on YouTube, you'll see a whole bunch of comments.  I like Mike Plugh's remark that if nothing else, it gives you a sense of media ecology as a language in its own right, about how to talk media ecology, and do so fluently.  ¿Habla ecología de los medios?

My Walter Ong Award

As I mentioned in my previous post, At MEA 2013, I received the Media Ecology Association's 2013 Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship at this year's MEA convention hosted by Grand Valley State University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan last month.  And in case you were curious, and you probably weren't, but just in case you were curious as to what it looks like, I decided to have it scanned, so I could share it here on Blog Time Passing with my vast readership:

And indeed, I am very grateful for the honor, and more importantly the friendship of my fellow media ecologists! 

By the way, if you want to see another cool award I received once upon a time, circa 2002, take a look at his post from 2007: My Day!

My MEA Keynote (If Not A Then E)

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, At MEA 2013, I gave a keynote address at the 14th Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, hosted by Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 20-23, 2013. My talk was on Thursday evening, June 20, and as it turns out, my friends at Grand Valley, the MEA convention coordinators Corey Anton and Valerie Peterson, had all of the featured presentations videotaped, so I was able to upload a copy to my YouTube channel (all of them can also be found on the MEA's channel).

My talk begins with some extended opening remarks, including my dedication of the address to my old undergraduate professor, Jack Barwind, who passed away just recently. Jack introduced me to much of what I later came to know under the heading of media ecology, including general semantics and systems theory.

Once I get into the address itself, the focus shifts to the PowerPoint presentation, thankfully I would think, because how long can you just look at my talking head?  But once it's over, it's back to me for the Q&A.






Anyway, this is a live presentation, complete with interruption from a Skype alert from Valerie Peterson's mom, as I was using her computer for the presentation.  So it's a bit on the rough side. 

At some point in the not too distant future, and hopefully with a little help from my friends, I would like to create a polished, direct to video version of "If Not A Then E" to put out there. But for now, I suppose that this will do.

At MEA 2013

This year's annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association was held at Grand Valley State University, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, June 20-23, 2013, hosted and coordinated by my good friends Corey Anton and Valerie Peterson.  Here they are welcoming us:

 















And Blog Time Passing being my official blog of record, I thought I'd share a few photos of my activities there, taken by Robert Francos.

First and foremost was my Keynote Address delivered on Thursday evening, June 20th.  Here's current MEA president Thom Gencarelli introducing me:





And a couple of shots of me providing some opening remarks before the lights turned down for my PowerPoint presentation (more on this in another post):

And now into the presention:

And just after the conclusion:

I rather like that one, don't you? 

 And here's a shot of the audience during the question and answer session that followed the address:

Anyway, this was the year for PowerPoint, at least as far as I was concerned, as here I am at a breakout session on Sat. June 22nd, doing the Pecha Kucha.

 You may recall that I have previously prepared two presentations, originally presented at the New York State Communication Association's annual conferences for the last two years, and that I later recorded them as YouTube videos, and posted about them here under the titles of The Word (A Pecha Kucha on the Walter Ong Centenary) and The Medium Is....  I repeated both of them at our session.


Finally, this was the first year that I was not the coordinator of the MEA's awards, and the sneaks went behind my back and presented me with the Walter Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship.  Here I am accepting the award from Brian Cogan, who took over as coordinator this year:

And then saying some thanks yous:

And that about sums up what was another outstanding event, and certainly an especially memorable one for me!

S'more Reading Listed

So, last year Roy Christopher invited me to be one of several scholars and intellectuals to provide him with a Summer Reading List for his website, which I did, and subsequently reposted here under the heading of Some More Reading List. He asked again this year, and my new list was posted on his site last month. 

You can go take a look over there, particularly if you want to see what other respondents, such as Janet Murray, danah boyd, Rick Moody, Steve Jones,  Benjamin Bratton, Howard Rheingold, Mark Amerika, and Peter Lunenfeld have to say.  Here's the link: Summer Reading List 2013.

But as for my own list, you can stay right here, because here it is:

It’s summertime, and the readin’ comes easy, and time itself is a topic of great interest for me. I was thrilled to learn of the recent publication of Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by physicist Lee Smolin, where he argues for a position I’ve long held to be true, that time is more fundamental than space. On a similar theme, but coming from a very different angle, I also plan to read Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (ACLS Humanities) by our greatest living world historian, William McNeil.

On the subject of media and culture, I have lined up Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (University of Illinois Press) by the late John Miles Foley; I saw him give a talk on this topic a few years ago at an annual meeting of the Media Ecology Association, and know that he makes an important contribution to our understanding of media environments. I am very interested in how the electronic media undermine print-based concepts of identity, which is why The Digital Evolution of an American Identity by C. Waite (Routledge) is a must read as far as I’m concerned. Returning to the theme of time, Douglas Rushkoff‘s latest, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current) is high up on my list of priorities. And looking back to an earlier time, the origin of monotheism, related as it is to the introduction of the Semitic alphabet, is another subject of significance for me, which is why my list includes From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends (Jewish Publication Society) by Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch.

Having been absolutely blown away by the new Hannah Arendt film by Margarethe von Trotta, which I highly recommend as an excellent audiovisual supplement to any summer reading list, I want to return to her final work, The Life of the Mind (Mariner Books), which was edited by her best friend, the novelist Mary McCarthy (who plays a significant role in the film). I’m also planning on digging into The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound by Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Harvard University Press).

Last year, at the Players Club in New York, I heard the late M. Z. Ribalow do a reading from his outstanding novel, Redheaded Blues (NeoPoiesis Press), and I have been looking forward to sitting down with the book for a long time now. Back on the subject of time, I know I’ll be enjoying Paul Levinson’s latest time travel novel, Unburning Alexandria, (JoSara MeDia). And when it comes to graphic novels, there is no question that I am going to devour Vol. 18 of The Walking Dead (Image Comics). I have grown increasingly more fascinated at the way the plot of the television series diverges from the story told in the comics.

One of the great summertime pleasures is picking up a book of good poetry, and This Poem by Adeena Karasick (Talonbooks) promises to be a literary, aesthetic, and intellectual delight, judging by all of the rave reviews that it’s received. And finally, I’m not making any promises, but I have this copy of John Milton’s The Complete English Poems (Knopf) waiting to be read…

Cable vs. Internet

It's no secret that the introduction of a new medium can be threatening to those whose interests are tied to an older medium. Harold Innis explained that groups that control in some way access to a medium or its content can gain a monopoly of knowledge, and that monopoly may only be broken when other, marginalized groups develop or adopt an alternate form of communication.  The well known example is how that the printing press, in making texts and information more widely available to individuals, broke the monopoly of knowledge of the Church of Rome, leading to the Protestant Reformation, and the monopoly of knowledge of monarchies, leading to democratic revolutions.

So, as more and more people are getting their video entertainment from the internet, older media such as cable television are threatened, and look for ways to respond. This came up in a news item last month that appeared in the E-Commerce Times, in an article entitled Time Warner May Erect a Walled Content Garden by Erikia Brophy. The article appeared on June 13 and, yeah, you guessed it, I've got a quoted in it.

It begins with the following blurb:

There may be insurmountable challenges to the idea of keeping certain entertainment content off the Internet permanently, but that's apparently how Time Warner intends to fight cord-cutting, which has become a growing scourge for the pay-TV industry. For one thing, "television programming is simply not valuable enough to restrict it to a single screen," said journalism prof Rich Hanley.

Brophy then goes on to provide the basic background information:

Time Warner Cable appears to have come up with a strategy to help stem the flow of cord-cutters -- that is, people abandoning pay-TV for the free or lower-price content available on the Internet. The company is offering incentives to content providers to withhold certain properties from online entertainment platforms, according to a Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources.

Other pay-TV operators are offering similar incentives, according to the report.

Time Warner Cable reportedly has since acknowledged the incentives, noting that exclusivity is a regular practice in the entertainment industry.

Limited distribution is clearly an entrenched practice in the entertainment industry, but TWC appears to be trying to keep some content off the Internet permanently.

This is followed by a section entitled Delaying the Inevitable: 

TWC's tactic may succeed in delaying the inevitable -- at best.

This initiative is reminiscent of Kodak's attempts to stave off the digitization of photography, said Paul Schneider, chairman of the Boston University Department of Film and Television.

TWC "needs to find the best business model possible that accepts the fact that most, if not all, content will eventually end up on the Internet," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"Time Warner is swimming against the tide of television history and demographics with this move to wall off content from Internet distribution," said Rich Hanley, associate professor and director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University.

"Television programming is simply not valuable enough to restrict it to a single screen that limits viewership," he told the E-Commerce Times.

The rumored TNW plan doesn't appear to be a winning idea from a practical perspective, either.

The incentives Time Warner provides would have to be greater than what the content producer could get on its own through broad, free distribution via YouTube, iTunes and Amazon, noted Brad Morehead, CEO of LiveWatch.

"Distribution alone from Time Warner isn't enough anymore to entice a content provider into a deal," he told the E-Commerce Times. "Even with Time Warner's distribution as the second largest cable provider in the country, you are still only accessing a small portion of the market."

Content providers face a serious disadvantage when considering an exclusive deal with a cable company, continued Morehead. The content provider will get access to fewer eyeballs and may even anger potential audiences. Also, there are some areas where Time Warner just isn't available.

"That makes it challenging to develop a passionate national audience and the viral, word-of-mouth buzz that content producers want," he pointed out. "The only options then for people out of the Time Warner market are to either illegally pirate the content online or find something else to consume."

And at last we come to my little bit, in a new section entitled A Dying Model:

TWC may have bigger concerns than media providers reluctant to grab its incentives.

The pay-TV business model in general is in trouble -- and not just because of content on the Internet, observed Lance Strate professor of communication and media studies at Fordham.

"Packaging a variety of unrelated programs together on one channel has been a matter of convenience for broadcast television, and packaging a variety of unrelated channels together has also been a matter of convenience for cable companies," he told the E-Commerce Times.

"Now that alternatives exist in the form of a la carte services and on-demand programming, it is only a matter of time before a big shakeup occurs in the cable industry," predicted Strate.

That's not to say it's the end of days for the industry or TWC. There is content that people will still pay cable providers for -- starting with sports.

"Live sporting events have always been a key driver for the adoption and retention of programming services," said Chet Fenster, managing partner at MEC Entertainment.

"Sunday Ticket on DirecTV was a huge differentiator when it came into the market," he told the E-Commerce Times. "Original comedies and dramas have been important for HBO and Showtime in driving loyalty, but it's nothing compared to sports."

Time Warner Cable did not respond to our request to comment for this story.

And now, here's the entirety of the comments I provided on this topic, so you can see what was excerpted as a quote, and so that they won't entirely go to waste:

Packaging a variety of unrelated programs together on one channel has been a matter of convenience for broadcast television, and packaging a variety of unrelated channels together has also been a matter of convenience for cable companies. Now that alternatives exist in the form of a la carte services and on demand programming, especially via the internet, it is only a matter of time before a big shake-up occurs in the cable industry. TimeWarner Cable knows that the days are numbered for the subscription-based model that it has been operating on, and is seeking to delay the inevitable. Providing exclusive content is a time-honored strategy, movie theaters still use it via delayed video releases, for example. The kinds of programming that will help to retain subscribers will include live events, especially sports, and the kinds of quality television series that HBO and Showtime have become known for.

Making original cable series available on the internet, for example through Netflix and Hulu, did provide a temporary boost to cable viewership, as individuals who missed earlier episodes or seasons could get caught up and then watch the newest season on cable. But ultimately, the practice proved harmful, in that many found it a more satisfying experience to watch an entire season or series in a concentrated manner, over a shorter period of time, not losing the continuity of episodes as they are spread out over a longer period of time. TimeWarner can provide its customers the best of both worlds if they can get an exclusive deal, and grant their customers exclusive access to the programming online as well as through their cable system. Content producers may be willing to go along with this for the time being, in the interest of short term profits, but in the end I believe there will be too much to be gained from making their content available to larger audiences, and eventually we may all be watching programming through Amazon and iTunes, rather than TimeWarner and Comcast.

One thing is for certain, and that's that our media environment continues to change and evolve, and the full potential of the electronic media remains to be realized.