The Rule Against Drinking on TV

Did you know that little Doogie Howser, MD is old enough to drink? Well, of course, it's been many years since that sitcom first aired, back in September of 1989, and many years since it last went off the air, over two decades ago, in July of 1993. Since then, the star of the show, Neil Patrick Harris, has gone on to bigger and better things, and emerged as a major comedic talent.

But, it seems, he's not too big to shill out for the advertising industry, and in particular for beer commercials.  Perhaps you've seen his recent starring role as a pitchman for Heineken Light beer?







Hey, there's no question that beer commercials have a long history of being some of the most amusing forms of advertising you can find on American television. But that doesn't change the fact that the product they're selling, alcoholic beverages, is associated with negative effects that are far from funny or entertaining. 

And as you may know, back in 1987 I co-authored a research report based on an analysis of the myths and cultural meanings of beer commercials: Myths, Men & Beer: An Analysis of Beer Commercials on Broadcast Television, 1987, by Neil Postman, Christine Nystrom, Lance Strate, Charles Weingartner. You can download a scanned PDF of the publication from ERIC, just click here.  I'm not sure exactly how many print copies were distributed and sold by the research sponsor, the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety, but I know it numbers in the tens of thousands, at least. I also published several articles and chapters on the subject as a follow-up, one of the lesser known ones can be found online here.

Anyway, getting back to this particular commercial, let me put aside the way that the ad associates beer with a disregard for rules, and how that relates to the American cultural myth of masculinity, with rules seen as a challenge to be overcome rather than a structure to honor and work within, and how the romantic notion of being a rule-breaker may be a staple of hero narratives, but is particularly problematic when it comes to concerns such as underage drinking, and drinking and driving. Instead, I want to focus on the fact that this ad brings up the question of why is it that you never see anyone actually drinking beer in television commercials? The ad seems to suggest that it is due to regulations, which implies federal legislation passed by Congress, or policy adopted by the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Trade Commission. Many people out there seem to believe this is the case, and see it as another case of unwarranted and unwanted government intrusion on the private sector.

And they're wrong! The government has nothing to do with it, neither the executive or legislative branches. As it turns out, the rule originates with the broadcasting industry. Now, let me note that this question was brought to my attention by Jon Greenberg, a staff writer for PunditFact, which according to their website,

is a project of the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute, dedicated to checking the accuracy of claims by pundits, columnists, bloggers, political analysts, the hosts and guests of talk shows, and other members of the media.

We define a pundit as someone who offers analysis or opinions on the news, particularly politics and public policy. One can engage in punditry by writing, blogging or appearing on radio or TV. A pundit is not an elected official, not a declared candidate nor anyone in an official capacity with a political party, campaign or government.

PunditFact is funded in part by $625,000 in grants over two years from the Ford Foundation and the Democracy Fund. Seed money for the project was provided by craigconnects.

So, anyway, I was one of many sources that Jon contacted to check up on the claim made in the beer ad, which was evaluated as being "mostly true" (meaning not entirely): A "regulatory thing" means you can’t show someone drinking beer on camera.  You can click on the link to see the article in its entirety (no, I'm not quoted in it, but it's still worth a look). It begins with a discussion of the Heineken ad, and then poses the question:

But we wondered about the director’s claim that a "regulatory thing" stops people from drinking beer in commercials. We’ve seen plenty of beer commercials and just always assumed that someone was drinking at some point.

The fact is, however, ad makers successfully are getting us to see more than is on screen.

In case you were wondering, it’s not the long arm of government that’s stopping people from a sip of sudsy brew. A press officer at the Federal Communications Commission, the body in charge of decency and other rules for broadcasters, said FCC rules are silent on drinking on camera.

"Congress has not enacted any law prohibiting broadcast advertising of any kind of alcoholic beverage, and the FCC does not have a rule or policy regulating such advertisements," she said, citing the agency’s website.

If there’s an iron fist, it belongs to the broadcasters.

Tara Rush, senior director of corporate communications at Heineken USA, said the rules come from TV networks.

"This is a regulation with the actual TV networks," Rush said. "It’s a long-standing rule."

The broadcasters’ trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters, has no policy itself, but a spokesman sent us articles that describe how each network is free to set its own standards and, as it stands, when it comes to beer, they frown on public displays of ingestion.

The Heineken ad alludes to this. Near the end, the director talks about network execs getting in a room to agree on a set of rules.

Now, speaking of the NAB, what I did find in response to Jon's query was an article entitled Ad of the Day: Neil Patrick Harris Doesn't Get Why He Can't Drink Heineken Light on TV But here's the explanation, if you're interested, by David Griner, which appeared in Adweek magazine. And Griner provides a somewhat different explanation of the NAB's role in the matter:

While it's not really explained in the ad, there's no law keeping Harris—or anyone else—from drinking a beer on camera. The United States government doesn't actually limit alcohol marketing at all, or as the FCC notes, "Congress has not enacted any law prohibiting broadcast advertising of any kind of alcoholic beverage, and the FCC does not have a rule or policy regulating such advertisements."

The brewing industry's Beer Institute has its own voluntary guidelines, and they're generally OK with showing beer drinking, too: "Although beer advertising and marketing materials may show beer being consumed (where permitted by media standards), advertising and marketing materials should not depict situations where beer is being consumed rapidly, excessively, involuntarily, as part of a drinking game, or as a result of a dare."

However, several broadcast networks continue to stick to a long-expired portion of the Television Code that prohibited showing alcohol being consumed. (Thus the ad's reference to "network execs in a room somewhere.")

Also, Canada has a bevy of beverage restrictions, including a rule against showing "scenes in which any such product is consumed, or that give the impression, visually or in sound, that it is being or has been consumed." As you can imagine, other countries have their own rules, too, making a beer ad with global reach a truly hamstrung affair.

So in short, yeah, it's complicated. And it's not too likely to change anytime soon.

So, there is a historical connection to the NAB, and specifically to its Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters, one that continues to influence industry policy. Unfortunately, the link provided by the Adweek article is to a Wikipedia entry that does not specifically reference the policy on showing people consuming alcohol on camera, and I was not able to find a copy of the Code itself through a cursory search online. But I do find Griner's explanation to be reasonable and persuasive, and kudos as well to Canada for its contribution towards keeping the advertisers in check. 

I should add that Griner also suggests that, "we can probably expect a similar gag to come around every few decades," reminding us that back in the 80s a similar commercial aired, featuring Paul Hogan, aka Crocodile Dundee, hawking Foster's:







Returning to the PunditFact piece, here's the response from the beer industry's spokesperson: 

A spokeswoman for The Beer Institute, the voice of brewers and distributors, told us their members are loath to take chances with network policy.

"If you’re putting an ad together, you will be as conservative as possible so you know it will get past all the networks," said Megan Kirkpatrick, director of communications at the Institute.

Kirkpatrick said the brewers have no desire to stir things up and risk stirring a cry for a new law.

"The fact that it is self-regulated now, that’s not something brewers would want to put in jeopardy," Kirkpatrick said. "It’s the way they have operated for decades. You show a lot of people enjoying a football game or enjoying a baseball game but you don’t show any consumption. I don't think you’re going to see that change."

Perhaps.

Rush left us with this tantalizing thought about the long-standing rule.

"Some networks are now beginning to change it," Rush said.

Note that Kirkpatrick's assurances are not backed up by the official guidelines of the Beer Institute, as noted in the Adweek article. And while the PunditFact piece ends on a lighthearted note—"We doubt Heineken is hoping for a quick shift. If commercials start showing people sipping away, that Heineken ad will be about as enticing as, well, old beer."—based on past history I think we can assume that the beer industry would love to see the broadcasting industry's policy altered, and eradicated. 


And maybe you're saying, what's the big deal, anyway? My response is that alcohol is a special kind of product, which is why the United States Department of Justice has a special Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. There are laws regulating drinking age and prohibiting drunk driving. We expect individuals to refrain from drinking while on the job in most occupations, and in a variety of other situations that require a measure of seriousness and decorum, not to mention concentration and coordination.

And we impose few limits on communication in the United States, in keeping with our First Amendment, but we do impose some on commercial speech, such as truth in advertising, and the ban on tobacco commercials. There are very few limits imposed on alcohol advertising, however, too few in my opinion. This isn't about bringing back Prohibition, it's simply about asking for a reasonable amount of restraint. In holding to this one truly modest rule that says you can't show someone drinking on camera, broadcasters are acknowledging the fact that there is a significant difference between alcohol and toothpaste, between alcohol and smart phones, between alcohol and bottled water. I for one hope that our broadcasters will be able to not only hold their liquor, but also hold the line.

And I don't know about Neil Patrick Harris, but I am pretty confident that a certain Doogie Howser, MD, would agree...

Twitter Goes Native

So, last month Twitter purchased Namo Media, which is described as a native ad specialist. What that means is that they make it possible for "native ads" to run in the apps designed for mobile devices. Their pitch to app makers is, "Turn your content stream into a revenue stream." The possibility of running ads within an app make not have occurred to many of the designers and distributors of games, utilities, and applications that run on smart phones, pads, and tablets. But perhaps it has. 

More to the point, sites and services that started up on the web and became platforms for advertising, for example Google and Facebook, have faced certain challenges in the mobile environment, because mobile displays either shrink the ads appearing on websites or cut them off entirely. Their answer to the problem parallels product placement in film and television, as it involves the web-based services injecting sponsored items into search results, or  status update streams.

The challenge posed by monetizing mobile devices is the reason that Facebook's stock value dropped significantly right after they went public. And this is especially a problem for new media businesses because more and more we all are accessing our social media and websites via our smart phones and iPads, not our computers.

Anyway, to get a quick update on the facts surrounding Twitter's acquisition, here's a Wall Street Journal article entitled, Twitter Buys Native Ad Specialist Namo Media.

So, I was invited to comment on this story for the "Today's Burning Question" feature run by Mike Daly for the Adotas.com website. Here is my response:

Launched in 2006, Twitter once led the way in integrating cell phones into its service, this well before most of us were sporting smart phones, so they have a particular interest in staying on top in the increasingly competitive arena of mobile applications. For a long time, there were questions about how they could monetize their service, and the answer they eventually arrived at, sponsored tweets, was not an unmitigated success. What we see happening today is a move away from single platform networks like Facebook and Twitter, and towards more specialized apps that are themselves networked together. Google has led the way on this, and with the purchase of Namo Media, Twitter can provide the equivalent of Google AdWords for mobile apps. Running ads in apps has become one of the main answers to the question of how to monetize apps for mobile devices, but nothing is more annoying to users than ads that appear to be entirely inappropriate, so using algorithms to determine ads that fit in with the content of the app is essential to its success. Whether Namo’s algorithms can compete with Google’s remains to be seen, but Twitter also needs to be concerned with Facebook’s aggressive moves into mobile territory through its purchase of Instagram and WhatApp. The one thing that is certain in the new media industry is that if you stand on your laurels, you will quickly fall behind.

You can read the responses of six others, all of whom are industry types and not academics like me, over on the Adotas site: Today’s Burning Question: Reaction to Twitter’s Native Ad Move.  The results were posted on June 9th. And maybe today's burning question should be, are you reading this on a mobile device?

On Jewish Characters in American Television Series

 In my previous post, A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, I discussed the Jewish Standard, an award-winning weekly periodical serving northern New Jersey and Rockland County, New York, and shared with you the piece they published on Amazing Ourselves to Death, based on an interview with me conducted by the paper's editor, Joanne Palmer.

The interview ranged across some very interesting territory, and as a result, Joanne invited me to write an occasional op-ed piece for the paper, and I was quite happy to agree. And since one of my areas of interest is media and popular culture, I decided to use the the awarding-winning AMC cable television series Mad Men as a jumping off point for getting into a pet peeve of mine, concerning Jewish stereotypes. 

I should add that the focus is on Jewish males because that's what I am, and of course there are stereotypes of Jewish women as well. But it hits me on a personal level when I see a stereotype of a group I belong to and say to myself, I'm nothing like that. And what really brought it all home for me was the similarities and the differences between Mad Men and another series about an advertising agency that included a Jewish character in a secondary role, The Crazy Ones. That was the foundation on which the rest of this essay is built.

The op-ed piece was published on May 16, under the title of Advertisements for Ourselves, with the subtitle, "Jews in Mad Men and Beyond" (and I am identified as a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, and president of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia). I should add that at the time I started writing the piece, we were only into the first couple of episodes from the first half of the final season of Mad Men, and I actually had to rewrite and add a bit after I  had competed it and sent it over to editor, due to a major plot development involving the series' Jewish character.

Anyway, here's how the piece begins:

Mad Men is back.

Don Draper

The AMC series created by Jewish writer, producer, and director Matthew Weiner has returned for its final season, having taken us through that most transformative of decades, the 1960s. And while the main character, Don Draper, isn’t Jewish, there is something hauntingly familiar about the story of a man who adopts a different name and identity to hide his true background, and then works his way up from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. Reflecting the experience common to all European immigrants during the first half of the 20th century, Draper personifies the belief that in America it is possible to shape and fashion your own individual identity, to recreate yourself in your own desired image.

In some ways he seems to echo the Jewish-American novelist Norman Mailer, who was known for his media savvy and penchant for self-promotion. In fact, he called his 1959 anthology of short pieces Advertisements for Myself.

Speaking of advertisements, in case you're interested in the book, here's a quick way to get a hold of it:

Returning now to the article:

The message of commercial advertising, taken as a whole, is that we can become whoever and whatever we want to be simply by buying the right products. And the title of the series is a pun based on the fact that New York City-based advertising firms all used to be located on Madison Avenue. Much like Hollywood, it was an industry in which Jews were quite prominent. In fact, Thomas Cahill included advertising in his celebratory book, The Gifts of the Jews, a remark that generated some criticism among reviewers.

And once again, for your convenience, in case you're interested:

And back again to the opinion piece:

Michael Ginsberg

But Mad Men avoids this association. Draper and his partners are WASPs, and it’s not until season five that they hire a Jewish copywriter, Michael Ginsberg. Much like the famous beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Michael is quite talented and creative, although his gifts are not given the respect that they deserve by Draper and his partners. There even are instances where he is used simply as a token Jew—for example in an attempt to secure an account from Manischewitz. Still, the character is given a compelling background—he was born in a concentration camp. And like Draper, Ginsberg tries to disguise his origins. His ethnicity, however, makes it impossible for him to construct an entirely new identity as Draper did.

HAL Reading Their Lips from 2001

In the most recent episode, “The Runaways,” Ginsberg again parallels Draper in suffering a nervous breakdown, but in much more extreme fashion. He succumbs to paranoid delusions and engages in self-mutilation; the catalyst for his action was the agency’s addition of a mainframe computer. The episode includes an homage to the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the homicidal computer HAL reads the lips of the two astronauts he is supposed to be aiding, thereby learning of their decision to shut him down.

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001

Presumably Ginsberg had recently seen this movie, which was released on New Year’s Day 1968. It is worth noting that 2001 is considered one of the greatest films ever made, and its director, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most important film directors of all time. Kubrick was one of many prominent Jewish-Americans who grew up in the Bronx during the early and mid-20th century, and the strong distrust of authority evident in his films would have struck a resonant chord with any child of the Holocaust. Moreover, the Nazis, being meticulous record keepers, were quite fond of the technological forerunner of the computer, tabulating machines of the sort produced by IBM, the company that became the pre-eminent computer manufacturer of the postwar era. (It often has been noted that moving each letter of IBM back one step in the alphabet yields HAL, the name of the computer).

While Michael Ginsberg is a minor character on Mad Men, he remains a major example of Jewish stereotypes. He is clever and funny, but also awkward and often inappropriate in social situations, and otherwise nervous and neurotic. (In his case, his neurosis intensified into psychosis.) It was probably the influence of all of those immensely popular Woody Allen movies of the ‘60s, but for a long time it seemed as if any Jewish-American male character who appeared on a TV sitcom or dramatic series was cut from the same cloth: whiny, nervous, short, unattractive, not handy or athletic, smart and intellectual, but not exactly leadership material. After all, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy may have been Jewish, but Captain James Tiberius Kirk was just another WASP, and his first officer, Mr. Spock, was an alien from the planet Vulcan—albeit one who incorporated some Jewish influences. While the Enterprise was populated with a veritable melting pot of crew members, there never seemed to be a Shapiro or Levine out there on the final frontier.

Gabe Kotter

Josh Lyman

Of course there have been exceptions, like Gabe Kotter on Welcome Back, Kotter, Barney Miller on Barney Miller, Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld, and Josh Lyman on The West Wing, but these characters’ ethnicity—and especially their religion—was rarely mentioned or acknowledged.

Barney Miller

Jerry Seinfeld

Speaking of Barney Miller, you might want to check out my previous post on that series, A Sitcom to Remember, in case you missed it. The subject of stereotypes comes up in the course of a wide-ranging interview with me on that series from the 70s.

Miles Silverberg

At the same time, the Jewish identities of stereotypical characters, such as Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown, Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure, and Ross Geller on Friends, were continually on display, and very much an integral part of their characters.

Joel Fleischman

Ross Geller

This fall, a new sitcom was introduced, a vehicle for Robin Williams, called The Crazy Ones. Clearly inspired by Mad Men, the series is set in a Chicago-based advertising firm and features several Jewish actors, including Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame), Amanda Setton, Brad Garrett, and James Wolk. What is remarkable about Wolk’s character, a copy writer named Zach Cropper, is that he is extremely confident, likeable (he is the favorite of the agency head, Robin Williams’ character Simon Roberts), handsome (he is a veritable ladies’ man), and maybe a little bit shallow, although certainly a talented and innovative professional. And he is Jewish. In fact, in an episode called “Zach Mitzvah,” it turns out that he once was a very successful bar mitzvah DJ, and he reprises that role in order to please a client.

The Crazy Ones (left to right: Gellar, Williams, Garrett, Setton, & Wolk)

Not only does the Cropper character counter the typical stereotype of the Jewish male, but another character, art director Andrew Keanelly, embodies many of those stereotypical attributes. He is intelligent—but also insecure, awkward, and jealous of the favor shown to Zach. You might expect his character to be Jewish—but he is identified as not Jewish.

For this reason, I believe that The Crazy Ones merits our respect and recognition. Unfortunately, however, the series failed to catch on with television audiences and garner the kinds of ratings its creators had hoped for, and so CBS has cancelled it. And truth be told, it’s no Mad Men. But as far as Jewish characters go, Zach Cropper has been altogether refreshing. Series creator David E. Kelley has a track record of creating interesting and unique Jewish characters in programs such as Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Boston Public, and now The Crazy Ones. For that he deserves our kudos.

And that is where the column ends. As an opinion piece, it is meant to provoke further thought and discussion on the topic, not to close it off. 

Stereotypes are a tricky subject, and this is an area where general semantics makes a major contribution, in reminding us that any generalization, about any group or category, is bound to be selective and subjective, more a projection of the individuals invoking the stereotype than a reflection of those being stereotyped. Stereotypes are a by-product of the process of abstracting, a process that takes us away from concrete reality, and in this case a focus on the individual person. 

While we do need to be able to make generalizations, we have to remember to ground them in factual evidence, to keep them open to testing and to continue to test them over time. Popular culture makes use of stereotypes because they are easier than trying to create unique characters and convey them to audiences, and because audiences recognize stereotypical characters without much effort. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate them entirely from our popular narratives, so if they are being used, they need to be used in a careful, thoughtful manner. 

We need to keep in mind that every stereotype is, indeed, an advertisement for some portion of humanity, and therefore, an advertisement for all of humanity.

A Commercial View on Alien Invasion

So, today I got a notification that an article that includes a quote from me, Today’s Burning Question: Marketing Implications Of Google Glass, originally posted on Adotas on February 25th, made it into their top 20 articles of the year, coming in at number 17. As is the custom here on Blog Time Passing, that became the impetus for a post, this one entitled Google Glass iMenagerie, which was published here on April 12th.

So, while checking this out on Adotas, I noticed a post from December 20th entitled, 5 New Video Ads You Should Watch Right Now!, so I did. Watch them right now, that is. Or not right now, but right now back then, when I was watching them right now. Well, you know what I mean.

So yeah, they're all good, and illustrate the point made by McLuhan long ago, that advertising is an art form, and in the future when the commercial connections are long forgotten, they will be regarded as some of our period's finest creative efforts.

Anyway, of the five, two particularly caught my eye, being a science fiction buff, so I wanted to share them with you here. The first one is entitled, simply enough, Beans, and it is described over on YouTube as follows:

Written and directed by Animator Alvise Avati and produced by Animation Director Eamonn Butler. Beans, a short film with an unexpected ending, showcases Cinesite's creature animation skills.

And here it is:



And they also have this to say:

We hope you have fun watching and sharing it! Find out more on our website: http://www.cinesite.com/shorts

And the second commercial represents the start of a series promoting Samsung Mobile devices, entitled simply enough, #GALAXY11: The Beginning (Galaxy being the brand name of Samsung's cell phone, no relation to Gutenberg, although McLuhan did make a reference to a new Marconi Galaxy that would fit in quite well in this connection). Anyway, the write-up over on YouTube just states:

Our best, our bravest, our team. The world's greatest football players have joined together to fight for Earth.

So here it is, the first chapter of what promises to be an intriguing series:



Now, unless you're not from North America, you were probably surprised by the fact that by football, they meant soccer (can't these people get the names of the sports right?), but given the global theme, using the sport that most of the rest of the world obsesses over make sense, even though North American football is much more of a gladiatorial type contest. So this seems to be a novel turn on the classic science fiction film theme, one invoked more than once quite seriously by President Ronald Reagan, that the nations of the world would stop fighting with one another and unite if faced by a common threat of invasion by aliens from another planet. I should add that there is one other note regarding this ad over on YouTube:

Get the full story: http://www.thegalaxy11.com

So, there's a little more of a back story over there, if you feel like you need one. Now, I admit to not being much of a sports fan, and to the extent that I follow sports, soccer falls into the category of almost entirely not at all. So, rather than comment on what is being presented here as a dream team, I'll quote from the write-up over on the Adotas pageL

A crack football squad had been assembled to fight our cause. Lionel Messi, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo had been signed up. Phew!

OK, Iker Casillas in goal. Bit past his best, but still very capable. Mario Gotze, Radamel Falcao and Oscar - again, they would not be my first choices, but not bad.

Then I realise there are no defenders among the 11 players selected and I start to worry. Then the name Victor Moses is mentioned and my pulse starts to go into overdrive. Is the fate of Earth really going to be settled by a guy who can barely make the Liverpool team?

Who could let this happen? Who else is in this team? Lee Chun-Soo – the Bolton player? We’re doomed!

So, are we doomed? You tell me.

Now, before signing off, I can't help but note that what Sam seems to have sung here is a tune I've heard before, albeit the earlier version was a bit more looney:






So, I don't know if the Samsung aliens will look anything like Marvin the Martian or any of the Looney Tunes outer space invaders, but I suspect that the footballers are taking themselves a bit more seriously. And that they won't have anyone on their team at all like Lola Bunny. So maybe we are doomed...

Not Quite Paperless

Media ecology scholars such as Marshall McLuhan spoke about how the electronic media environment brought about the end of the print era, and back in the sixties and seventies when McLuhan was sharing such observations there was a great deal of doubt, because television seemed to be co-existing relatively well with print media. Sure, the introduction of television resulted in the demise of the general interest magazine, but that medium found a new niche in specialized topics, just as radio had readjusted to the new media ecosystem by focusing on playing recorded music, or news and talk formats. And yes, the number of newspapers did decline to the point that most towns and cities only had one daily, but the newspaper medium itself remained well entrenched. And the medium of the book retained its high status and general popularity, although bestsellers were pushing other titles out, and the pocket book format was gradually declining (replaced to a large extent by the trade paperback).

But holding aside the very significant questions regarding whether we have become a postliterate culture, whether people are reading as much or as deeply as they were before, it is certainly clear that to the extent that we all are still reading, we are spending much less time on print media, and spending much less money on print media. Print media industries were coasting along in slow decline up until the financial collapse of 2008, and it was that disruption that revealed the vulnerabilities in the print business model, and led to a much more drastic shakeout than what was going on before.

The financial downturn was followed by the introduction of the iPad in 2010, which may well have been the final nail in the coffin for print media. Of course, this was preceded by the introduction of the Kindle in 2007, which led off the revolution. But the iPad knocked the ball out of the park (sorry but it is baseball season so please forgive my metaphoria). Simply put, when we read documents, we hold them much closer to our eyes than when we look at a desktop computer screen, which is why we may still have trouble reading off of a computer even with the high quality of contemporary screen technology, and the same is true of the laptop computer, unless you were to awkwardly hold it up to your face. The key element was the removal of the keys, the keyboard that is, making the tablet a medium we can read while keeping it about the same distance from our eyes as we would a print medium.

Of course, publishers have been scrambling to convert their publications to electronic form, and this has met with some success. As McLuhan observed, one medium can become the content of another, and print media are, in part, the content of computer media, meaning that the material qualities of print disappear, and its non-material form becomes part of the content of digital media, as a potential stylistic element.

So, years ago folks started to talk about a paperless society, and others pointed out that with computers and printers, we were actually generating more paper documents than ever before. And this was true for a time, but in the big picture it was a brief transitional period I would venture, and now we are genuinely reaching the point where pulp is becoming little more than fiction.

But there still are limits to this transition. A French television commercial posted on YouTube last month makes for a humorous comment on the one aspect of life where going paperless can be problematic:





So, beyond the humor, there is the larger point that toilet paper is a cultural convention, admittedly one we don't like to talk about too much, at least not past the age of 8.  But it is worth noting that for most of human history, there was no such product, and people used alternative methods, and it is not entirely clear that our own practice is the best that anyone's come up with, or the last word in human hygiene (I wonder what they use on the Starship Enterprise?). You can read a bit about it in the Wikipedia entry on toilet paper, or the History of Toilet Paper website. 

The only point I want to make is that, from these sources we can learn that toilet paper was introduced in 1880. And this follows a major revolution in the manufacture of paper itself in the mid-19th century. From the time paper was invented in China in the 2nd century up to this point, the writing surface was made from linen, making it more expensive and more difficult to manufacture than today's product. It was during the 19th century, spurred on by a shortage of linen, that the alternative method of producing paper from wood pulp was introduced, and widely adopted by the end of the century, resulting in a revolution in publishing. And while paper was sometimes used for toileting purposes going back to ancient China (according to Wikipedia), the specialized product sold in rolls (a retrieval of the scroll from antiquity?) did not exist until the late 19th century.

It is perhaps worth adding in this context that both McLuhan and Walter Ong noted the parallel between Freud's psychosexual stages of oral, anal, and genital, and the media ages of orality, literacy, and electricity. And there are some characteristics common to both the literate mindset and the anal personality type.

In any event, all this is a connection worth noting, at least in passing, as we know that whether it's paper, print, or even electronic media, this too shall pass...

Secondhand Gun Smoke

It's time again for me to share one of my guest posts written for the Hannah Arendt Center's blog, as part of the Quote of the Week feature, this one appearing on February 11th, and thanks again to Bridget Hollenback for providing the illustrations. My previous contributions, in reverse chronological order, are The Deprivations of Privacy, History and Freedom, We Create the Conditions that Condition Us, Charlie Chaplin and Hannah Arendt, and see also an earlier post entitled  Arendt Come Due.

And as you no doubt gather from the title of this post, this builds on previous posts here on Blog Time Passing on the issue of gun control, such as On Guns and More and Human Sacrifice and the False Idol of Firearms, as well as Machine Gun Moloch.  

"The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is never possible without instruments."

Hannah Arendt, On Violence

The instruments that Hannah Arendt refers to in this quote are instruments of violence, that is to say, weapons.  Weapons, which in the main, translates to firearms, make it possible for One to commit acts of violence against All. And this fact has been brought into sharp focus in light of the devastating tragedy of this past December 14th, 2012:  the massacre of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut by a 20-year-old man using a semi-automatic assault rifle that belonged to his mother, the first victim of a killing spree that ended when he turned his weapon on himself and took his own life. The extreme depravity of this incident sent shockwaves throughout the nation, and reports of subsequent shootings of a more commonplace variety have been picked up by the news media, whereas previously they have more often than not been ignored. Fulfilling their function as agenda-setters, journalists have placed gun violence high on the list of national debates, reflecting the outrage of many citizens, as well as the genuine concern of a significant number of leaders and officials in government and organized religion.

Despite the fact that many citizens find the status quo intolerable, and favor legislation that would increase the limitations on the types of weaponry citizens can legally purchase and own, and on the requirements for sale and ownership of firearms, there has been considerable opposition to any form of what is commonly referred to as gun control. That pushback had come from what is sometimes referred to as the gun lobby, the National Rifle Association being the primary organization representing the firearms industry, and citizens who insist that our constitution's second amendment guarantees them the freedom to arm themselves as they see fit. And whereas one side mostly speaks in the language of moderation, arguing for reasonable restrictions on firearms sales, the other tends to speak in an extremist language of absolutes, arguing against any abridgement of rights and freedom, maintaining that gun control legislation is completely ineffective, and that, in the words of NRA Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

Fighting fire with fire is not a method favored by firefighters, except in the most extreme of circumstances, and likewise fighting firearms with firearms is a tactic of last resort for putting an end to gun violence. Firefighters stress the importance of prevention, and we certainly are entitled to ask, how can we prevent a bad guy from getting hold of a gun in the first place? When prevention is ineffective, and violence ensues, it may be necessary to engage in further violence as a countermeasure. But even if the result is cessation rather than escalation, the situation already represents a failure and breakdown of the community. As Arendt explains,

the danger of violence, even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.

LaPierre's insistence that the only way to stop violence is with violence is not only simplistic in his childish morality of good guys vs. bad guys, but in his view of the situation as being One against One. Again, it would certainly be reasonable to concede the point that violent action on the part of one individual is sometimes required to put an end to violent action on the part of another individual, and such action is authorized on the part of duly appointed representatives of the law, e.g., police. But in acting in the role of police, such individuals are acting as representatives of the All, so that what appears to be One against One is in fact a case of All against One.  But LaPierre's notion of a good guy with a gun is not a police officer—indeed police departments typically favor stricter gun control—but an armed private citizen. In other words, his One against One would exist in a larger context of All against All, everyone armed in defense against everyone else, everyone prepared to engage in violence against everyone else.

That guns are instruments of violence ought to be clear. You cannot cut a steak with a gun. You cannot chop wood with a gun. You cannot excavate a mine with a gun. Unlike knives, axes, and even explosives, firearms have no practical use other than to harm and kill living things. There are recreational applications, granted, but there is nothing new about violence in recreational activities, boxing, wrestling, and fencing all have their origins in antiquity, while eastern martial arts disciplines have grown quite popular in the United States over the past half century, and football has become our most popular sport. It follows that hunting is simply another violent recreational activity, as we are now 10,000 years past the agricultural revolution, and few if any of us live in the wilderness as nomadic hunter-gatherers.  And target ranges, skeet shooting, and the like, all of which use obvious surrogates for human and animal bodies, are essentially recreational activities, apart from their function in training individuals  how to use firearms.

Instruments of violence, like all tools, are made to be used, and their violence cannot be confined to prescribed targets and situations. So with All against All, everyone lives under the shadow of violence, the possibility of being fired upon serving as a guarantee against bad behavior. From the individual's point of view, everyone is suspect, everyone is a potential menace that must be guarded against. And of course the danger they pose is greatly amplified if they are bearing arms. So peace is achieved through mutual intimidation, and at best a respect based on threat and fear. Under these circumstances, there is no solid foundation for political action based on consensus and cooperation, let alone social cohesion. With All against All, the potential for action taken by All against One is minimized.

Reducing if not eliminating the potential for All against One is central to the ideology of the NRA, for whom the All is not so much everyone else as it is our representatives in positions of authority. Armed private citizens are the good guys with guns, and it is not only the "criminals and crazies" who are bad guys, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the government. Ignoring the fact that historically, the second amendment was understood as granting individual states in the union the right to create militias in the absence of a standing federal army, gun advocates invoke "the right to bear arms" as a check against government tyranny, insisting that they are entitled to the same right to revolution that was claimed by the founders of our nation in the Declaration of Independence. That the Confederate states invoked the same right in seceding from the Union, igniting a debate settled by the most violent of means, is of little import it seems. The Civil War apparently did not end with Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox, but merely underwent a transformation into a subtle insurgency movement that continues to this day. This no doubt comes as a surprise to the vast majority of American citizens, including the multitudes that flocked to movie theaters in recent months to see Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

Arendt drives home the point that violence exists in inverse relationship to power.  Power is derived from the All, from the consent and agreement of the governed, the source of political legitimacy. Power is the ability to achieve goals without the use of violence. When governments are forced to resort to violence, it reflects a loss of power, one that is difficult to reclaim, and may ultimately result in that governments demise. Violence can destroy power, that is the lesson of revolution, but it cannot create power, only political action can. It follows that gun advocates see the second amendment as curbing the power of government, thereby empowering the individual. That sense of power is something of a chimera, however, for as soon as firearms are used, their power dissipates. If they are used against another private citizen, even a so-called bad guy, the user will have to answer to the legal system, and may be found guilty of unlawful action, or subject to civil liability. If they are used against a government official, the user will sooner or later discover that he (or she, but almost always it is a he) is outgunned, that One against All may only succeed in the short-term but will eventually fall to the vastly superior firepower of organized authorities.

American society, like all societies, looks to a set of values that, upon close inspection, holds logical contradictions, values that, from a distance, appear to be psychologically consistent with each other. We value the individual, and adhere to the most extreme form of individualism of any western society, but we also value the community. We seek a balance between the two, but ultimately they come in conflict with one another, the One vs. the All.  And we value freedom, but we also value equality. Both seem fundamental, but freedom includes the freedom to excel, to dominate, to gain an advantage, enforce and reinforce inequity, while any effort to be truly egalitarian requires restrictions on those freedoms. Moreover, we believe in capitalism, free enterprise as it were, but also in democracy, the American way, politically-speaking, and we assume the two can co-exist without discord. But capitalism is inherently undemocratic, favoring oligarchies and the absence of government regulation and oversight, whereas the exercise of democracy extends to policies that affect and constrain economic and financial activities, and the organization and conduct of business.
In the past, Americans have slightly favored the individual, freedom, and capitalism, all of which are aligned with one another, over the community, equality, and democracy, although the emphasis has shifted somewhat depending on circumstances (for example, during wartime, we become increasingly more likely to rally around the values of community and equality, and belief in democracy). To put it into Arendt's more succinct terms, we try to find a balance between the One and the All, but to the extent that the two are in conflict, we lean a bit towards the One.

In favoring the One, we tolerate the One against All, the result being that we are scarred by gun violence to a degree vastly out of proportion with other western societies. For gun advocates, gun ownership is an individual right and an essential freedom that must not be abridged. Never mind the fact that "the right to bear arms" is rarely found on any listing of basic human rights, as opposed to the right to live in safety and security, free from fear and threat, a right that gun ownership jeopardizes at least as much as it protects. And never mind the fact that our first amendment freedoms are subject to significant limitations and governed by legislation, and those freedoms are listed in a clear and unequivocal manner, in contrast to the second amendment's convoluted and confused diction ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"). It is also interesting to note that gun advocates like LaPierre do not hesitate to try to shift the focus onto the first amendment, blaming violence in film, television programming, and videogames for incidents like the Newtown shooting. And what is often downplayed is that the gun lobby, in resisting all attempts at gun control, are defending the interests of the gun industry, the businesses that manufacture, distribute, and sell firearms. Of course, it is hard to play up the importance of free enterprise in the wake of the murder of elementary school children.
In their radical views on the second amendment, and their absolute embrace of individual freedom and capitalism against the interests of community, equality, and democracy, gun ideologues like LaPierre insist on the supremacy of One against All, and it is not surprising that the result is an extreme form of violence.  And, as I noted earlier, leaders representing the interests of the All against the One tend to speak, naturally enough, in the language of practical politics operating within a democratic form of government, the language of negotiation and compromise, but find themselves confronted on the other side with the abstract absolutes characteristic of the language of ideology. You might say, what we got here is a failure to communicate, in the words of Cool Hand Luke, although the two sides probably understand each other better than they let on.

The ideologues know that if they refuse to blink first, the compromisers will most likely give up and move on to more pressing matters. And the compromisers know that the ideologues refusal to negotiate gives them an excuse to turn away from a divisive issue that may cost them a measure of support in the next election, and deal with more pressing matters with a greater probability of reaching a successful conclusion. Only now, after Newtown, is there talk of having reached a tipping point in public opinion, one that may pressure the compromisers to insist upon a settlement, and may force the ideologues to accept the pragmatic need for negotiation. The likely outcome is that the ideologues will make some minor concessions, allowing for some small progress on gun control, a step in the right direction to be sure, but a far cry from the measures needed to curb the high incidence of gun violence in the United States.

Change will come, because the alternative is intolerable. To the extent that we live in increasingly denser populated areas, in urban sprawl rather than rural isolation, so that the consequences of violent action become increasingly more catastrophic, we require more civilized, more civil living conditions, the insurance against violence that can only come from the power of organized authority subject to political oversight, not private citizens responsible only to themselves. To live in a society of All against All is ultimately regressive, and can only make sense if the social system disintegrates, a remote possibility that cannot be balanced against the actuality of incident after incident of gun violence.

Change will come, but it may only come gradually, given our cultural bias towards the One against All, and it may only come generationally.  Over the past half century, Americans have become increasingly more risk aversive, as more information about potential risks to health and safety have been made available through the electronic media. However, as Henry Perkinson argues in No Safety in Numbers, it is the risks that we have no control over that we are particularly averse to. When the risk is perceived as a matter of individual choice, an expression of personal freedom, we are less averse to it than when it is understood to fall outside of our locus of control. Prohibition is often invoked as the archetype of failed measures to eliminate harmful behavior, and the word prohibition is often thrown into discussions on gun control and similar measures in order to summon up those negative connotations. Despite the potential risks to health and safety from alcoholic inebriation, over-consumption, and addiction, drinking was seen as an exercise of free will, and therefore acceptable. It was only with the campaign against drinking and driving that the locus of risk was shifted from the individual consuming intoxicating beverages to the innocent victims of drunk driving, accident victims who had no choice in the matter, whose freedom was in fact curtailed by the drinker. The same is true of tobacco.

Once medical research established that smoking causes emphysema, heart disease, and cancer, modest change in American smoking habits ensued. It was not until the findings about secondhand smoke were established that real cultural change took place, a truly extraordinary shift in attitudes and behavior about smoking. The key was that secondhand smoke exposed individuals to risks that they had no control over, risks that they were subjected to against their own volition.

While this form of risk-aversion is relatively recent, a more basic understanding that permeates American society is that individuals can exercise their freedoms as long as those freedoms do not jeopardize others. The early assertion of a right to own slaves could only persist insofar as individuals were willing to view the enslaved as somehow less than fully human; otherwise the freedom to enslave clearly cannot justify the denial of another individual's freedom. Similarly, free enterprise and free markets, the freedom of individuals to engage in any kind of business and labor practices they might chose to, eventually was understood to conflict with the rights of labor, of workers and employees, as well as the rights of consumers, so that the freedom of capitalism is subject to constraints imposed in the interests of the community and democracy.

In the face of the violence of One against All, what is needed is the power, in the positive sense of democratic political action, of All against One. The power of public opinion and a growing consensus will serve as a bulletproof vest to protect the body politic from assault by the weapons industry and gun ideologues. And the best place to begin is by talking about the dangers that uncontrolled access to firearms pose to citizens who do not choose to live with these instruments of violence, citizens whose freedoms and rights and very lives are put at risk without their consent, citizens who all are victims of secondhand gun smoke.