I saw a commercial today that normally would have set me off like a bomb, but I must be getting resigned because I just watched and sighed. It was for Verizon and featured a teenage boy, his dad, and the boy’s friend on a hike in the woods. The boy is schooling his dad on the use of his phone and explaining how he can still access the web even though they are in the wilderness. Meanwhile, the friend is taking video of the trees and sending it straight to his web page. In the back of my head I felt the vague urge to throw something at the TV, but inertia kept me slumped on the couch waiting to see which cell provider was responsible for this latest assault on our ability to indulge in an unplugged pursuit. I have to admit that I was less aggravated by Verizon’s ad than I am by the AT&T ads that tout “faster is better.” I know this is the world we live in now; I know the cell providers must compete with one another for our increasingly short attention spans; I know that I risk hypocrisy by ranting about media, TV, commercials, the internet, social media, et al when I use those technologies myself. Yet, I continue to be angered and saddened by what these things herald for the future. I find myself both attracted and repelled by tonight’s Oscar telecast blow-by-blow that I can read either on my friends’ Facebook feeds or on sites such as E! Online, or even on NPR of all places. And, I know that this new world of instant technological communicative semi-social gratification is not a harbinger of a complete societal breakdown; but I am sad for the quiet moments that seem to be losing ground. If a phone rings in the woods, no one should answer it.
Category: Media & Communication
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The Power of Negative Thinking
In spite of the multiple posts I have made expressing reservations about social media, it should come as a surprise to no one that I do waste a fair amount of time noodling around on Facebook. Part of it is sheer laziness – I come home from work, eat, and just want to unplug my brain for a while, and the internet makes it easy – too easy. But part if it is also fascination with what other people decide to post. I am just as guilty as the next person of posting my exercise habits, what I eat, where I’ve been, etc. I’m also guilty of sharing articles, political opinions, stuff I think is funny, and things I find compelling or inspirational. So I will refrain from pointing the finger at others who do the same thing, but with whose views I may disagree.
That disclaimer aside, I’m going to rant about a type of post that I sometimes find particularly galling: the “inspirational” post. These are the pictures/quotes that say sunny things about keeping a positive attitude, being thankful for each day, appreciating friends and family, not letting negative situations get you down, etc. This is all well and good, but I am finding that an excess of platitudes tends to drain them of any impact. I also find that these little bon mots seem to dumb down or gloss over the reality of complex emotions and situations. In particular, I often see posts about how you are in control of how you feel in any given situation. That is, if you feel bad about something, it’s because you are allowing yourself to feel bad. To a large degree, I think this is bullshit. Self-blame does not help in a negative situation. It’s bad enough that something is bringing you down; do you have to also point the finger at yourself and feel even worse because you are “allowing” yourself to feel negative emotions? This is part and parcel of the same bullshit idea behind books like The Secret, which trick you into buying them with New Age wishful thinking crapola about how if you just believe something, it will happen.
I’m not saying that positive thinking isn’t a powerful tool in a person’s emotional arsenal. What I think is important is to acknowledge that we aren’t always in control. People do bad things to each other, and it hurts. We make bad decisions that lead to painful emotions or situations, and it hurts. We judge and ridicule and put others down, and yes, it hurts – them and us. But it’s too simple, too general, to say that when we criticize someone or something, we are secretly, unconsciously, criticizing something in ourselves. It’s too simple to say that we can choose not to feel pain when something external to us – something outside our control – makes us feel bad. In fact, I argue that it’s not just okay, it’s essential to allow ourselves to feel negative emotions. Stuffing them down, not genuinely feeling those negative feelings of pain, sadness, judgement, helplessness, loss, embarrassment, humiliation – that does not help, and I think it makes things worse when the platitudes tell us we shouldn’t feel those feelings.
Negative emotions, feelings, experiences exist. We should acknowledge them. We should try to mitigate them and deal with them as best we can. I don’t think we should wallow or allow the negative thoughts to be an excuse for treating other people poorly. There is room for learning and introspection in every situation, and some people learn faster than others. Just don’t tell yourself that you shouldn’t feel those negative feelings. Heed the platitudes, but recognize them for what they are: feeble, if well-intentioned, attempts to apply general solutions to specific and often complex situations.
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Follow Your Dreams?
I was just sitting and mindlessly watching television, and a commercial for a health insurance company came on. It showed adults walking around the streets of a city dressed in costumes – astronaut, doctor, ballerina. The tagline of the commercial was a variation of “Be YOU. Be what you want to be.” It occurred to me as I watched the commercial, and the costumes representing the childhood dreams of people who end up actually becoming waitresses, construction workers, receptionists, and day laborers, that this is an enormous line of bullshit that we are being fed. This commercial reflects the middle-class ambitions of modern Americans, and promotes the idea that the only thing holding us back from realizing our childhood dreams is ourselves. What a load of crap! I had the same reaction when I heard a snippet of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech to Stanford in 2005, in amongst all the news stories about Jobs’ death. This is what he said: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” I mean no disrespect to Steve Jobs, but he is spouting the same line of hegemonic hypnosis as the health insurance commercial (though I am willing to give him a partial pass, since this kind of cliched spew is exactly what is expected from a commencement speech). Steve Jobs did amazing things that changed the way we interact with our world today, and in many ways I am grateful for that. But Steve Jobs’ amazing success is the exception. It is the plane crash, not the safe landing. It is the thing that makes the news because it is unusual. It is the kind of success that allows the hegemony to be perpetuated, because it gives us an example to point to and say, “That could be me!” Really? Could it really be you? I’m not sure I agree. Hegemony means believing that you can achieve the same pinnacle of success as the richest people in the United States, but it just isn’t true. Yet, here we all are, listening to the “follow your heart, follow your dream” message, and somehow feeling a little empty or inadequate because we are the waitress, or the mid-level manager, or the hair stylist, and chances are we will never be more than that, no matter how hard we work, no matter how much we study or train or dream, because there just are not that many seats at the head table. The people participating now in the Occupy Wall Street and related protests are, I think, finally understanding this reality. It’s not just about working hard. Believe me, immigrants to this country, illegal or not, work really fucking hard. Working class parents with the food service and delivery driver and labor jobs work really fucking hard. Will they ever occupy a position like Steve Jobs did? Probably not. Should they believe the easily digestible pablum about following your dream, or should we finally just be realistic and tell people, “This is as good as it will ever get for most of us.” Our dreams should be about more than what we do to make money… shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t we work on making sure that, even if you aren’t an astronaut or a doctor or a ballerina, you are compensated well enough for what you do that you don’t have to worry about feeding your kids or paying your mortgage or going to school? Shouldn’t we have a system that supports the reality of life for most people in America? Isn’t that what the protestors want? So let’s stop listening to the platitudes, and start sharing a dream about making sure the needs of all the people are met instead of lying and making people think that it is their fault that they aren’t in the one percent at the top of the economic pyramid.
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The Tyranny of Advertising
In my last post, I talked about how I had been living without television for months. Well, it’s back now, and aside from a few guilty pleasures such as “Hoarders” and “Pawn Stars,” it hasn’t made much of a difference. However, I do think that my months without television caused a bit of culture shock for me, kind of like a person who visits an impoverished village and then returns to the superabundance of the United States. As it happens, during the time I was living without television I was also neglecting to read my magazine subscriptions (Health, Runner’s World, and Real Simple were casualties of my busy life; I managed to keep up with Mother Jones and The Nation). But now the dissertation is done and I can watch TV and read my lighter magazines without guilt, and I have noticed something: the subtle tyranny of advertising.
A big part of my dissertation discusses the concept of hegemony, which is basically the underlying structures of power that serve to perpetuate economic and social inequality. In the case of advertising, economic hegemony is served by convincing us in barely noticeable ways that we need things that we really don’t. On television and radio, advertising attempts to trick us by using labels that make things sound more important than they really are. These are usually phrases that describe self-evident things in ways that make them sound special or unique. For some reason I tend to notice them in relation to food advertising. Carl’s Jr. touts its “hand-breaded” chicken sandwich as something more desirable than a sandwich breaded by a machine. This is similar to “hand-leafed lettuce” or “hand-crafted coffee.” But when you stop to consciously think about that, you realize it’s meaningless. Let’s assume the breading used is the same regardless of whether the labor is done by man or machine, and that it is applied to a fresh chicken breast that is then frozen to be cooked later. Okay. If I put both a hand-breaded piece of chicken and a machine-breaded piece of chicken in front of you and ask you to taste them, will you be able to tell the difference? I’d wager not. Is there something about a piece of iceberg lettuce pulled from the head by hand that makes it taste better than a piece handled (pun intended!) by a machine? No – iceberg lettuce still tastes like iceberg lettuce. Yet this is used as a persuasive piece of advertising that implies a human touch improves the quality and taste of the food, even when the food itself has not been altered in any way. In all truth it probably does make the consumer more likely to want the hand-breaded or hand-crafted food. It sounds like higher quality, and more care, is going into the product. But the bottom line is that Carl’s Jr. is only using that description to increase its market share and not to give the consumer a better product, and the advertising agency that created the campaign is banking on it. We are being fooled and we don’t even know it. And that, my friends, is hegemony.
Magazines are another story altogether. The actual advertisements are usually pretty obvious, although women’s magazines (and probably men’s) often employ advertisements that look very similar to articles, and you may even start reading them before you notice the tiny-print “ADVERTISEMENT” label at the top of the page. But what’s much more insidious is the advertising in the articles. To wit: you read an article about this summer’s new hairstyle trends. There are a few puffy paragraphs about ponytails or hairclips or what have you, accompanied by product suggestions and pretty pictures. “To get this look, try Revlon Silky Shine Spray, $4 at drugstores.” Or “Get the perfect glossy lip with Lancome Pout Perfection, $18, Macy’s.” These are commercials. IN the article. Try an experiment: grab your favorite light magazine and go through it page by page, and count how many pages do not have a single advertisement or product suggestion. I would bet that you will find maybe 10 percent of the pages are product-placement free.
This is hegemony. This is what we are led to believe. This is what we think we have to have, and we don’t even know why. This, we are told, is what keeps the capitalist machinery operating – and that part of it is actually true. I’m not saying we’re all automatons without free will, but I am saying that advertising can easily fool even the most skeptical of us. Try a week or two without your TV or magazines, then go back, like I did. I’m sure you’ll see it too, if you haven’t already; and if you’ve noticed it before, it will be even more obvious after you choose to ignore it for a while.
Now excuse me while I go shine my hair, perfect my pout, and eat my hand-breaded chicken – after all, there’s an economy to grow!
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It’s Never Sunny on Nancy Grace
I canceled my cable TV in July 2009. Since then, my only access to television has been at the gym or at other people’s houses. Now that I am getting close to finishing my dissertation, I am thinking about getting TV again. In some ways I have missed it; there are shows I like that I miss, such as Mythbusters, that I look forward to watching again. But at the same time, I have enjoyed the sense of freedom I have at not being a slave to the television schedule. Granted, I realize that plenty of people use TV the way it is intended; that is, as entertainment and not as a lifestyle. But thinking about reintroducing TV to my life has made me ponder the many things I do not like about modern media programming. So let the rant commence!
When I am at the gym, there are three TVs overhead that can be viewed from the treadmills. One is usually showing a sports channel, one is cable news, and the other is often tuned to the Food Network (aside: who the hell thinks it is a good idea to have cooking shows playing while people are working out? I really don’t want to see frigging Paula Deen making pies while I am trying to burn calories!) My beef is with the cable news channel, usually HLN (Headline News – CNN). What they show is not news. Okay, okay, yes, each half-hour starts with a run down of actual news, but I need to define my terms here. Let me distinguish in this way: News, with a capital N, is information that is important for people to know. This includes weather events, political issues, international affairs… the serious stuff. The other news, with a little n, is junk food. Entertainment stories, human interest, even stuff like crime news… these are informational Twinkies.
I concede that my definitions of News and news are very broad, but I don’t want to get bogged down in the details. The point is, it seems that producers don’t think viewers want to hear the News. The News tells people what is going on in the world so they can be informed about what their leaders are doing, what their country’s relationship is with other parts of the world, what critical events (e.g. a hurricane, a demonstration, an election, food recalls, illness outbreaks) may be affecting their portion of the country. The news, on the other hand, gets people fired up about things that are, in the big scheme of things, much less important than the News. This is obvious when it comes to entertainment and sports, but less so when it comes to things like crime. But herein lies the real crux of my beef: WHY is it considered newsworthy when a child is abducted? Or when a husband murders his wife? Or even when there is a big car wreck? I’m not saying these things aren’t important to the communities where they occur, and obviously they are important to the people directly involved. But what does it say about us as News/news consumers that cable news shows spend an inordinate amount of time on a child abduction? I’m talking to you, Nancy Grace. I mean, really, WTF? The sensationalization of crime is out of control on these shows. But the sad thing is that it’s much easier to find a talking helmet head like Nancy Grace blathering about a child murder or what have you than it is to find rational, substantive, and objective commentary about the ongoing war in Afghanistan, or the significance of the recent election, or the impact of joblessness on America’s cities. Why are there no one hour talking head shows about that? Yes, yes, there are political shows, but I’m talking about News, not a Roman theater of arguments and insults that do nothing to reveal the true nature of the debate.
So I guess if I do get TV again, I’ll just stick to watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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Communication Pandemic
As an anthropologist, I have been trained to ask, and attempt to answer, questions about human behavior. As a cultural anthropologist, my methods involve participant observation to gather the data needed to start formulating an analysis. This all sounds very dry, but in layman’s terms all it really boils down to is that I am a professional people-watcher. I became an anthropologist because I thought it would be bitchin’ to make a career out of finding answers to the questions that fascinate me. Even better, I get to teach others how to answer their own questions about why people do what they do, and open their eyes to new ways of trying to answer those questions.
So, this week the musings of the skeptical anthropologist are focused on communicative strategies and how they are changing. Or, to put it in a more entertaining way, what the hell are people thinking sometimes when they open their mouths? Or, even more so these days, when they e-mail/post/Twitter/link/YouTube/Flickr? What are we really trying to accomplish with all these new ways of communicating?
I find that there is a fascinating blend of potential motivations in what people do with the new instant-communication technologies at our fingertips. The cell phone camera/video/e-mail/upload capabilities have given us the ability to reveal ourselves and our lives in some shockingly exhibitionist ways… and some coma-inducingly boring ways, too. And, the variety of emotions we can express! I know I’m not saying anything new here, but the anonymity the internet can afford (but that actually seems less and less anonymous each day) allows people to be astonishingly raw.
So what’s my hypothesis? I haven’t settled on anything concrete yet, but I am attempting to formulate some ideas based on status-seeking behavior, and ultimately (as always with me) evolutionarily adaptive behaviors. To wit: on a venue such as Facebook, there seems to be a great deal of “look at how clever/cool/witty/educated I am” sorts of posts. There are also many “look at how virtuous/healthy/creative/thoughtful I am” posts. These posts, I need not remind, are not anonymous. Who wouldn’t want to take credit for “Just made a delicious risotto with truffle oil and chanterelle mushrooms”? Who, exactly, are we trying to impress? Facebook is also a simple way to keep friends up to date on your life, and most people seem to use it that way, but for how many is this an opportunity, however unconscious, to simply brag? And, how much of what we post is actually reflective of the life we are trying to project?
On the opposite side of that coin are anonymous posters, such as those who lurk at the San Diego Union-Tribune website. The amount of vitriol that drips from some of these posts is simply boggling. And along with the vitriol is just plain ol’ racism, sexism, and one of my favorites, stupidity. But the point is that, for the most part, people won’t flame each other on Facebook, but they will easily descend to the level of playground bullies on anonymous comment boards. No surprise there, but I can’t help wondering how many of these folks are the same as the ones posting about the truffle risotto.
Yet another area of fascination is the YouTube phenomenon. This came disgustingly home for me when my little cousin linked to a graphic video of… wait for it… a guy letting his girlfriend LANCE A BOIL on his back. There is no attempt to disguise the face of said guy, and he knows he is being filmed, and I assume he approved of having the video posted online. And yes, I watched it, in all its blood- and pus-spurting glory (which brings up another topic of fascination for me, which is our primate urge to groom each other… but I’ll save that for another post!).
What does all this new technology, these novel (but not for long) communicative strategies, mean for us and our behavior? How do we know what to trust? How do we know what to say? What will be the limits, if any, on what we will reveal? How long will it be before all this availability, visibility, and downright exhibitionism festers into its own cultural boil and pops? Or will we simply adapt, as we have for so long?
An even better question, for me personally: what makes me think anybody is interested in what I have to say in this blog (besides my mom – awww, thanks Ma!)? Hmmm… the musings continue.