Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker presenting a deal to finance a new Milwaukee Bucks arena with public funds.

Post by Michael Z. Newman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The pending deal to keep the Milwaukee Bucks in Milwaukee is only the most recent instance of local and state governments in the U.S. agreeing to subsidize major league sports facilities. The NBA team’s owners, who are richer than God, bought the team pledging to keep it in town. The league has made clear that the Bucks can’t stay without a new arena, so the owners threatened to move them absent public financing for a portion of the costs. This has followed a standard script in American sports: the politicians who hold the purse strings submit to this extortion lest their constituents blame them for the loss of a beloved team. The elected leaders stage the political theater of touting the economic benefits of new sports facilities to local economies (anyone well informed knows better). Those with an interest in keeping the team–fans serious and casual, civic pride boosters, local media who benefit from having a team to cover–publicly support saving the team.

Others point out the shameless corporate welfare. As it is playing out in Milwaukee, the deal to finance the arena involves the state diverting $4 million annually until 2035 from payments to Milwaukee County to pay construction costs. Milwaukee is one of the poorest and most racially segregated cities in America, with a myriad of problems that several million dollars a year could help address. That money is going instead to a project that will be certain to further enrich the team’s owners and the league, and to return little more economically to Milwaukee than a small number of jobs to last only as long as the building’s construction. Supporters of the deal are excited that the new arena will be part of an urban revitalization, developing currently vacant downtown property. It’s certainly telling that hundreds of millions of public funds for urban revitalization somehow materializes when the economic beneficiaries are out-of-town fat cats threatening to take away your basketball team.

As a matter of economic policy, it’s easy to see that these deals stink. Owners of major league sports teams can afford to build new facilities, but local governments are willing to pay so it would be foolish for owners to pass on that. Governments pony up because of competition among cities: in each league, there are fewer teams than there are cities that could support them. Public funding is a subsidy to a thriving private business that doesn’t need it.

But what if we see these subsidies as a matter of cultural policy? The issue isn’t usually framed that way, maybe because sports doesn’t seem like a culture industry, but these handouts effectively function to promote a form of local culture, and thinking of this is a matter of cultural rather than economic policy might help us appreciate what is at stake in these political debates.

Actually what these lavish handouts promote and protect is the experience of watching a local sports team and following them day by day, season by season. This involves mainly viewing them on TV and talking about it, and participating in the activities of fandom: dressing up in fan apparel, debating with other fans, and sometimes coming together at a public event where the team competes. This event, the game, is where the pricey new arena or stadium comes in: it’s essentially a TV studio with a big paying live audience where the show is produced. Watching the show requires a subscription to a special cable channel (a regional sports network), going to the event requires buying a typically expensive ticket, and participating in this fandom often winds up costing fans some money; it’s a consumer experience, like so much of our cultural life. Live sports is a big reason why many cable subscribers keep paying that monthly bill. That’s what makes sports so powerful: the product has a huge devoted media audience willing to spend its money. All of this is deeply shaped by collective public affect, as fans together experience the highs and lows, the anticipation and disappointment, of the drama of sports. “Save our team” is also “save our show.” It’s “save our culture.”

Cultural policy is usually associated with the arts and with national identity. For instance, Canadian cultural policy protects the Canadian culture industries against competition from American products through quotas, subsidies, and other means. Its logic is to maintain the nation’s distinct identity by representing Canada to Canadians, protecting local cultural industries in the process. To the extent that sports teams are a crucial component of local identities–and talk of Red Sox Nation, Packers Nation, etc., suggest they are very crucial–public support for sports teams protects these identities by supporting the consumer culture at their center. The idea that sports facilities help the economy is a veil of justification giving legitimacy to this cultural agenda. The real importance of the deal is its support for a form of patriotism to a team and investment in allegiance to it. That’s what the people refuse to give up.

As a cultural policy, there are some things to cheer and others to jeer about local sports teams getting huge handouts from the public. On the positive side of the ledger, sports really is central to a great many people’s identities and to the identities of modern places. It would be a loss to see the basketball team depart. No one is ushering them out. But this is a thin reed on which to hang such massive investment, and there is a downside too.

If hundreds of millions in state funding is going to support a cultural policy during this age of austerity, when there is plenty of need to go around, when schools are underfunded and poverty limits so many people’s opportunities, we ought to consider pretty carefully what kind of culture the public should support. Major league sports is lots of fun to watch and follow as a fan, but it’s also deeply flawed ideologically. Spectator sports of the kind that draws big ratings week after week has many appeals, and one appeal central to its values and meanings is hegemonic masculinity.

There is an audience for women’s sports, but the fact that ordinary usage modifies any sports played by women as women’s sports speaks loudly about the gender politics involved. In a society of changing gender roles and continual crises of masculinity, sports is a bastion of traditional gender performance in which men are celebrated for their physical strength, endurance, agility, and skill, their stoicism and toughness, their adherence to a blue-collar code of hard work. Major league sports is one of the last institutions in society in which overt gender segregation goes totally unquestioned. All of the culture surrounding sports, from the conventions of media coverage to the sanctioned activities of fandom, are masculinized. In major league sports in America, women are seldom even permitted to narrate the action as play-by-play voices or sit behind the desk on a pre-game or halftime broadcast trading observations. Women participate in major league fandom but on terms set by men. The value of sports as a media genre, and thus as an economic juggernaut, is largely its ability to command men’s attention, though leagues have recognized that appealing to women helps them as well.

I’m not so naive as to imagine a public deliberation about the cultural policy of supporting sports teams in which hegemonic masculinity is the key term. What seems more possible is that by recognizing these subsidies as following a cultural rather than an economic logic, the people and their elected representatives might weigh the real benefits of supporting such expenditures against the enormous, and I would say unacceptable, costs. I doubt it, though. “Save our team” investments may be too deeply affective, and too much tied up in matters of identity, to be a subject for rational debate.

Michael Z. Newman has lived in Milwaukee for 13 years and has yet to attend a Bucks game, but enjoys the occasional summer afternoon at the publicly-financed Miller Park.

A conference like SCMS reminds me in some ways of the high holidays of my childhood, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which I experienced as crowded shul (synagogue) services of long duration when everyday life stopped and the days had a higher purpose and their own rhythm and temporality. While SCMS is missing the participatory chanting and call-and-response liturgical song, we do have what feels like the special gathering of a whole community and a cyclical sense of another year’s passage. It’s a break from our ordinary surroundings and duties, and we feel (or wish to feel) that we are among fellow adherents. We often leave feeling at once energized by new ideas and exhausted by the intensity of the experience.

Just as Katz’s media events were first real-world events, even if they become substantially shaped through mediation, the academic conference existed before we began to treat it as a media event, or should I say, a social media event. It’s obviously not a mass media event like the Olympics. To the extent that the mass media give any attention at all to our conferences, it’s as dismissive mockery. But through Twitter and other social media we do represent the conference as it is unfolding and attend to it as a live audience. The conference is also shaping itself to suit this representation.

One reason why old people seem to never stop telling young people about life before the internet is that things really were quite a bit different! At the first conferences I attended there were VHS decks with TV sets on metal carts, and occasionally someone projected photographic slides. It was not uncommon for a paper to be read to the audience without any pauses for illustration and without visual aids. Word of an impressive (or terrible) paper might trickle out and spread by word of mouth. Perhaps a few months after the event a conference report would be published in a journal.

Now the temporality of the conference includes mediated liveness through the twitterstream, along with some video livestreams. As I write this from the airport departure lounge on Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m., I am also following a number of panels via Twitter as the conference still rolls on. Someone is analyzing Jon Jost’s films, while in another room someone is discussing the cable network Bravo. There’s a paper on computers in education, and another on Minecraft, all simultaneously in my feed this minute. Someone just tweeted a photo of a presenter’s PowerPoint slide. It has a quote from Jonathan Sterne’s book MP3 alongside a cat, naturally, holding a tin can to his ear as if to listen. And meanwhile 20 other panels are underway, from which no one seems to be tweeting.

At some panels I attended last weekend I tweeted from my phone, trying to capture key insights and hot phrases. Typing by thumb is slow for me, and I frequently stop to correct errors. I see only the tweet I am composing on the screen while I’m typing. But using your phone all day drains the battery, so for a couple of panels I switched to using a laptop with a big display and a full keyboard. In the Chrome Tweetdeck app, you can track multiple constantly refreshing columns at once. I kept open the usual “home” column of my regular timeline of tweets from the accounts I follow, as well as a #SCMS15 column of all tweets posted with that hashtag next to it on the right. I also kept open columns of my mentions and notifications, so that I could see if others were engaging with my tweets and could participate in backchannel conversations. During one paper I heard about US imports on UK TV, this conversation included at least one person joining in from the UK.

During the panels I was tweeting from, the #SCMS15 column was a perpetually cascading torrent of updates from multiple other panels. It can feel like perpetual information overload. I was usually accompanied by only one or two others tweeting from my panels, but some concurrent sessions were being tweeted by several participants, and some people tweet practically every point a speaker makes. Every time I picked up my eyes to look at the scholar giving the paper in my panel, the movement on the screen of fresh tweets arriving brought my eyes back down to Tweetdeck. In the backchannel, I often noticed people who were not present in the room, or not even in Montreal, participating in the conference by replying or even just by retweeting or favoriting tweets.

I know from my own account’s Twitter analytics that someone with more than 1,000 followers may expect a tweet to be seen by 100-200 others, which is a bigger audience than at any panel I attended at SCMS. If retweeted a few times, that audience can increase to 1,000 or more. (I’m just a humble media scholar; celebrities and commercial media institutions like CNN of course command much greater attention.)

Clearly the social media coverage is bringing awareness and participation to SCMS and to our work that cannot be compared with the old-fashioned in-person attendance. I think we should see this as open-access publishing. It also provides for distant participation by Society members and scholars in cinema and media studies who for various reasons do not attend the conference. Twitter isn’t always a great substitute for being there, and the live-tweeting sometimes feels fragmentary and confusing. Sometimes tweets seems to amplify and even glorify the ideas expressed in a presentation, and sometimes they seem to simplify or trivialize them. But when done well, live-tweeting can bridge distances and expand the conference’s reach in very productive and satisfying ways. It’s not the conference itself, but a remediation of it, projecting SCMS to broader communities.* One tweet I saw in my feeds and retweeted during the conference said, “I’ve never heard of #SCMS15, but the tweets I’m seeing from it pop up are fascinating.”

The ritual functions of the social media event extend well beyond the content of the panels. For days and weeks and even months before the conference, some of my Twitter friends were premediating** #SCMS15 by sharing details of submissions, acceptances and rejections, travel plans, outfit plans, karaoke plans, poutine plans, etc. I saw tweets of people’s passports ready for travel. At the conference, on the main concourse level, a red carpet was set up with a backdrop suitable for photography, a poster nearby encouraging sharing photos online. I heard both positive and negative reactions to this and I wondered if anyone was using it as intended, but eventually the pics of conference participants posing as if to appear in the pages of US Weekly appeared in some friends’ Faceboook feeds.

Sometimes the tweeting felt overwhelming, and I think I prefer the phone over the laptop despite my clumsy thumbs. The heightened interactivity provides a buzz, but I can’t imagine sustaining it for a whole day or two or five. I also don’t like the distorted impression you get from keeping your eyes on the hashtag twitterstream as a conference news ticker. Each session of the conference has 24 concurrent panels. At any given time, most of the papers being presented were not being covered at all. The TV studies and fan studies contingents, who already have robust Twitter networks firing every day of the year, tweeted the hell out of panels on topics of interest to them. Some film historians I spoke with were intrigued and impressed by a video screen in the main conference concourse, near the red carpet, displaying recent tweets including the #SCMS15 hashtag. But they found the content a bit puzzling, not entirely certain what exactly the tweets were.

This may be a problem of Twitter, which is notoriously hard for many non-users to “get.” I told one accomplished scholar who doesn’t use Twitter about the many admiring tweets from his panel, one of which I sent to him via email. I thought he’d be excited to have made such a strong impression. Although grateful for the positive response to his paper, he is ambivalent about actually reading any more tweets broadcasting his work. He told me, “I wouldn’t even know how to get on Twitter.” So whether because of how communities of interest have formed online, or how unevenly Twitter has been adopted, SCMS as social media event is functioning to include and exclude.

While this may be just one person’s subjective impression, there seemed to be much less tweeting about film than other topics. (I hope that analysis of the conference Twitter data will help us understand more.) I often think the name “cinema and media studies” is illogical in its implication that cinema isn’t media, or that media studies and film studies are necessarily separate — if related — fields. But in this instance, I think it’s fair to say that the social media event is really a media event more than a cinema event. One thing distinguishing this social media event from a mass media event is how fragmentary and narrow its community can be. It has the mass media event’s qualities of liveness and drama and communal ritual. The dimension of common experience is much more fractured and tribal, though. At least for now, it doesn’t appear to bring us together as one scholarly Society. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it is a thing worth thinking about.

*Thanks to Christopher Cwynar for suggesting this point.
**Remediation is from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin; premediation is Grusin’s concept.

Michael Z. Newman is on Twitter.

More generally, and less publicized, the masculinist character of the sport and its media representation is troubling to anyone with an interest in gender equality. As with many of the very popular spectator sports, heroized men play while sexualized women cheer. The sport itself is violently militaristic. The centrality of football every autumn and winter in American society gives many straight men an opportunity to shirk domestic responsibilities in the name of their fandom and their fantasy standings (perhaps the deep fantasy of this endeavor is that you can stop attending to anything else). Of course millions of women watch. The league has been courting them aggressively, as during the pinkwashing of Breast Cancer Awareness season. I wouldn’t question the authenticity of anyone’s fandom but they must often recognize that the game they love makes little place for them.

Football is not just a cultural fixture, but the most popular and profitable media content in America. While not very much studied by TV scholars, football games on TV get Nielsen ratings that are staggering in an age of niche audiences and narrowcasting. While a hit sitcom today might have ratings numbers that would have led to quick cancellation in previous generations, football games continue to draw a mass audience. Thus the expansion of the football schedule in prime time from one game a week on Mondays to additional games on Thursdays and Sundays. TV money is the golden ticket for the league and the people who get rich from it.

It’s hard to see how the NFL might change as long as it remains the most popular show on television in a big rich country like this one. Some suggest that the most likely outcome for football is that parents will forbid their children from playing out of brain injury fears. But depriving the league of a next generation of players through this kind of cultural change would be a slow process. A class system would likely emerge as less well off communities continue to support football even after cultural elites shun the sport. The prospects for near-term reform don’t look very good. America isn’t about to replace our bad kind of football with the appealing sport called football by the rest of the world, even with the World Cup enthusiasm we saw over the summer. If the World Cup had been programmed against even early season NFL matchups, it’s hard to imagine a similar level of interest in America.

I’m not a huge NFL fan, but I support my home team (Green Bay), and I love pro football as a TV show. It looks really pretty in HD. It has great spectacle value when the broadcast comes from a noisy stadium filled with fans in their home colors. The game itself, despite the irritating frequency of commercial interruption and video replay delays, has a compelling dramatic quality. There are personalities and backstories, rivalries and nemeses, reversals of fortune, a sense of a narrative arc and natural suspense. Many football plays have beauty and grace, surprise and excitement, and the physical skill and stature of the players is simply awesome. The broadcasts increase the sport’s appeal with digital enhancements like the first down line and wild camera angles from overhead. Unlike a lot of TV now, you can peek in on a football game and watch 10 or 20 minutes. It doesn’t demand your total attention. And it’s fun to watch in a group. It gives us something to talk about and sustains many bonds on regional, community, and familial levels.

But the game and the league are so offensive, it’s becoming a guilty pleasure and not in the way we often use that phrase. My guilt has nothing to do with aesthetics, but everything to do with ethics. Is it right to give my attention to this brutal, exploitative, retrograde amusement? Should I turn off the game in the name of doing good? I sometimes wonder. I wouldn’t be the first — others have lately declared that they are giving up the NFL. People refuse media they object to in all kinds of ways, as political protest or articulations of identity.

No one has to watch a show they dislike, but I sense that fans who give up football don’t dislike it. They disapprove of it, and are denying themselves a pleasure out of conscience. I admire this to an extent, but also wonder what it all adds up to. Anyone with a critical sensibility and some media literacy knows how to appreciate popular culture that is on some level offensive. Hollywood movies are full of racist, sexist, heteronormative, classist, and other kinds of not very progressive representations. If you are so offended, you can stay away from the movies. But it’s not that hard to accept that the pleasures they offer are in balance with the offenses they give. It’s good to call out these problems of representation, as it is to call out the dominance of rich white men in the media industries. We should talk about it. At the very least, we need to engage with these representations in order to function as their critics. As long as football is a popular television show, I will probably keep on taking pleasure from it. I don’t think I, personally, am doing any harm. I don’t think football is my fault.

In other forms of ethically contested media, such as pornography, it is sometimes argued that the audience’s attention amounts to complicity in exploitation. During the aftermath of the circulation of stolen photos of young female celebrities last month, some people I follow on twitter suggested (or retweeted) that looking at the images means participating in the crime. Probably the most extreme formulation of this stance would be the statutes that make it a crime to possess child pornography. I wouldn’t want to make too close a comparison between the exploitation of football players by the NFL and the exploitation of children by pornographers. But the juxtaposition here is meant to reveal that we can and do think of paying attention to media having the potential to carry a strong ethical charge. Maybe we should feel guilty for watching football. But this doesn’t make it the audience’s responsibility to change the league and the game. As individual viewers we can’t really effect a meaningful change in the culture of football. We can’t change football by turning it off any more than we can end global warming by turning down our thermostats. Major political-economic and regulatory and cultural changes would have to occur for football to be effectively reformed. (Of course we can work toward those goals if we want to, but individuals not watching and proclaiming their refusal won’t do the trick.) Massive advertiser boycotts would be a good start. Perhaps the best we can do in our own private lives as fans of the game is to watch in our conflicted state, acknowledging at once our pleasure and our displeasure, and hoping for better. Maybe even, one of these days, for the league’s demise. After all, every show on TV gets canceled eventually.

So what’s good is, first of all, that Facebook connects us meaningfully to one another. It allows for people to keep in touch even when they are no longer seeing each other face to face. It gives us ways of overcoming isolation and loneliness. It gives shy people an outlet that might be more comfortable than communication in person. Its asynchronicity makes it possible to be in touch without being synced on one schedule. All this in a world where people live far from friends and family and have too little time for leisure.

Facebook is gratifying to the active, sharing user who gets positive feedback even from minor notes about everyday life. Like Twitter and many other forms of social media, one of basic functions of the network is to reassert our identity and existence. One subtext and function of many messages is, here I am speaking, this is me. When someone clicks “like” they are affirming you, recognizing you, giving you a wink or pat on the arm. The thumbs up like button icon is a token of the body, and clicking on it is a gesture of affection. There is no question we experience the gratification of likes and comments affectively. We know, as well, that like doesn’t mean you like it. I don’t like it that my friend’s mother is sick, that my friend’s pet died, that my friend is recovering from addiction in a rehab facility. But I am touching my friends when I click like and they are touched.

Facebook is also a creative endeavor. Its ordinary uses are writing, photography, video, and sharing links. Facebook users are vernacular artists making and sharing objects of meaning for their community. Of course much of what one finds in the news feed is ordinary and banal. It can be obnoxious or trivial. Some of it is more pictures of babies or exclamations over a football team’s loss or win than you like to see. But this is life in all of its mystery and boredom and frustration and glory. And it is only against the backdrop of life’s quotidian rhythms that the dramatic Facebook status updates have their impact. Births and deaths, triumphant PhD dissertation defenses and new jobs, collective upheavals over elections and disasters, make Facebook into a magnet for our attention and feeling. Facebook’s literary, visual, and affective impacts are expressions of the traumas and pleasures of life, making them not just into documents of reality but artefacts in communal rites of passage.

Like everyone else, I have misgivings about investing too much of myself in this web space which, ultimately, will serve corporate interests ahead of the people’s. I care about privacy, about the unforgiving permanence of online culture, about context collapse when everyone from your whole life span converge at once in your social networks. I’m also annoyed by Facebook’s news feed algorithm, which chooses for me to see some items and not others. Perhaps the social web would have been better if we had all just gotten our own blogs and RSS readers. We can’t do it over, though. One reason Facebook is succeeding as a mass medium and blogs and RSS readers didn’t is that users found Facebook easier and more secure. They felt comfortable in its environment. Now the people are on Facebook, and if you want to be with them online, that is where you go. You can, theoretically, opt out. You can refuse social media, or can be a Twitter snob. You can lament that as soon as Facebook let in users outside of the early college-only restrictions, it lost its mojo. Probably true. But it gained something aside from the scale that leads to economic success. It became society, and you can’t really opt out of that.

As with many new technologies, the identity of an ideal user is central to the cultural status and widely shared meanings that define the object. When the ideal Facebook user was young and upscale (Harvard, then college), Facebook had cachet. Now that your mom, your aunts and uncles, your grammar school teachers and parents’ friends are liking your status and leaving comments, it’s not so cool any more. But note my choice of “you” in these characterizations. Who is this imaginary person? The assumption is that a normative user is young, and that older folks are marked as different if not unwelcome. The age and gender connotations of Facebook’s waning cool are hardly surprising. Fashions of all kinds tend to rise up from youth culture, while the kids move on when their elders catch wind of emerging trends. But if Facebook is to endure as a social hub of value, a force for community and sociability, we will need to think of it inclusively and not be tempted to put it down it on the basis of a distaste associated with technologies used by moms and aunts. We need to see it in a more egalitarian fashion, and recognize the value in this.

What’s good about Facebook, finally, is that it gives us, all of us, a place to give and receive of ourselves, and that we have taken it up in this way. (A network with better architecture and policies will not ultimately be better if the people don’t take it up). My wish for social media’s future is that we will keep on extracting this value from Facebook, or something like it, without the dark side of the digital overcoming us.

Michael Z. Newman is on Facebook and Twitter.

Another thing the Auden syllabus provoked was astonishment at the quantity of assigned reading, thousands of pages of classics ancient and modern. But who knows what the Michigan undergrads actually read that semester? Auden’s syllabus is merely a list of readings, without specific assignments. What intrigued me most wasn’t the edufantasy element but the occasion to compare the form of a syllabus of the 1940s with that of our own time. As someone whose job includes writing syllabi, I wondered what the changes in their form tell us.

Some changes are technological. The syllabus of today can be very long. One syllabus of a course taught in my department runs 5500 words, and I have heard of instructors giving syllabus quizzes as incentive to students to read them carefully all the way through. Auden’s was a single page. The tools mostly likely used for producing this kind of document in the ’40s were a typewriter and a mimeograph. Photocopiers would not appear in academic offices before the later 1960s, and computer word processors would not be standard before the 1980s. College instructors often gave syllabi, exams, and other documents needing to be printed to a secretary to type and run off, which would have required more planning ahead than we need today. We might be more likely to make and run off longer documents when it is so much easier to create, duplicate, and distribute them. Technology affords this, but I wonder if we necessarily benefit from the syllabus bloat that is in part a product of our ease of making and publishing documents.

Another change in the syllabus is toward a more legalistic format setting out policies and rewards and punishments that follow from adhering or failing to adhere to them. Auden’s syllabus takes the form of a list, which is consistent with the term’s etymology as a word meaning “table of contents.” Syllabus used to refer not just to documents listing course readings, but more generally to plans of study, in some ways overlapping with the term curriculum. But now a syllabus is considered a kind of contract, and this way of thinking has been promoted in education advice at least since the 1990s. The standard syllabus today contains far more legalistic content than it does bibliographic. It breaks down the course grade and specifies expectations for attendance and penalties for absence and late submissions. It tells you to check your email and to turn off your phone. My university expects a syllabus to state policies for such things as students missing class for a religious observance, receiving accommodation for a disability, and being suspected of academic misconduct. My employer also expects a syllabus to state learning goals, and depending on the class and the requirements it satisfies, these might need to to adhere to specific formulae. The syllabus today is a terms of service agreement, and it should not surprise us if our students skip over many of these boilerplate terms. Do you usually read a ToS or do you just click “agree”?

Some of the legalistic content of today’s syllabus is foisted upon us by university admins, to be sure. I don’t like listing objectives and goals. Can’t the purpose of any course in the humanities and social sciences be assumed to be as obvious as: read the books and articles on the syllabus and try to understand them? But some of this policy-heavy format also is a product of our everyday experiences in the contemporary culture of higher ed. The consumerist character of the university today demands a clear quid pro quo. Students and their families are assuming substantial debt to pay for their degrees, which are seen as essential credentials for the good life. In exchange for their compliance with our expectations, they receive credits toward their degrees.But as instructors, we fashion the syllabus not just to be a clear and binding formula for earning credits. We also use the syllabus to produce our fantasy image of an ideal student, and to hold this up as a standard next to the vast majority of undergrads who fail to live up to all of our expectations in their pursuit of a degree, if not an education. (Maybe Auden was also projecting his ideal student: one with the time and intellectual curiosity to read as much as him.) It sometimes seems that the point of writing a policy into the syllabus is to wave it in the face of the student who fails to follow the ToS. This makes our work petty and bureaucratic as much as enlightening and pedagogical.

So perhaps the biggest fantasy of the Auden (and DFW, Obama, Barry) syllabi isn’t the idea of learning at the feet of the great man or woman. It’s the idea of education unencumbered by the contractual logic of the consumerist college campus. It’s about school being an opportunity to explore exciting ideas rather than merely showing up at the proper place and time, following all of the instructor’s detailed directions, and resisting the urge to text in class.

One common complaint about sitcom laughter is that it insults intelligence: “I don’t need to be told when to laugh.” But single-camera shows like Scrubs and Parks and Recreation replace the audience laughter with other cues: musical phrases like scene-ending drum fills, conspiratorial glances at the camera. The deeper problem people have with laugh tracks might not be cuing, but undue persuasion and even manipulation. What if stupid TV shows succeed in making us feel we have been entertained by sweetening the audience laughter or adding laughs where none existed? A clip of The Big Bang Theory with the laughter left out circulated awhile back on YouTube, with pauses interrupting the dramatic pace, and the less charitable view was that it showed that sans laughter, the show isn’t any good. Such suspicions tap into longstanding fears about television’s fraudulent nature, part of a wider mass society critique that holds television in contempt for its ill effects on people’s ability to think freely.

These feelings led, in the late 1950s, to a short-lived ban on the laugh track by CBS. The quiz show scandals focused public scrutiny on TV’s deceptive practices, and the use of canned laughter was part of a wider sense that television would do anything to hold onto an audience to be served up to advertisers. The commercial imperative would trump any aesthetic consideration, and creative types were known to loathe the canned laughter. But the laughter — real or canned — persisted, becoming one of the sitcom’s most identifying and durable conventions. Some of television’s most beloved classics, from I Love Lucy to Seinfeld, have been laugh track comedies. Performers might bemoan the device, but networks and producers stuck with a format that was proven to work.

Psychologists offer the laugh track as evidence of “social proof,” a “tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are doing it” (Cialdini, 116). Social proof is one kind of influence or persuasion, and the laugh track is effectively an appeal to audiences at home to respond as audiences in the studio (or for canned laughter, simulated audiences) have already done. TV hardly invented the practice of encouraging an audience’s responses this way. 19th Century French theaters had hired claques and rieurs whose jobs were to clap and laugh. Unlike theater audiences, however, the TV audience is typically in a private, domestic space and the presence of audience sounds can serve not only to coax a positive response, but also to provide a sense of a surrogate or virtual public experience. The contradictory status of television as a private view of public events (see Spigel’s “Home Theater” chapter of Make Room for TV) is massaged by audience sounds.

One reason laugh tracks might seem even more passé and dispensable today than in the past (though I don’t know that they ever have been well received) is that our ideas of television aesthetics have shifted. We have moved far beyond the time when liveness was taken as TV’s essence. Live here means events broadcast as they unfold, but also programs shot live and broadcast later, and performances filmed or taped before a live audience, like many sitcoms. Sitcom laughter may not always be authentic but is generally plausible as the response of an audience present at the performance. But as TV is legitimated, its aesthetics are moving away from liveness and performance and toward textuality. This makes TV seem more like cinema, especially the more legitimated forms of TV like prime time dramas and single-camera sitcoms. DVDs, DVRs, and BitTorrent or iTunes downloads offer us an experience of television not as ephemeral flow, but as a textual object we can possess, can slow down for analysis, can rewatch at will, can treat as a thing rather than the fleeting experience of a moment. TV was once imagined as a medium for transmitting performances to a national audience viewing alone but together. Despite the continued relevance of Super Bowls and similar events, and despite the function of social media to return us to shared moments, TV’s identity has moved away from this ideal. Textuality — the materiality of television shows as objects to to be read and reread, to be studied and preserved — is opposed to liveness. The laugh track perseveres as the product of an old aesthetic of live performance transmitted to the home, but its presence seems to violate our current sense of decorum, and it reads as a product of another time, an earlier era of electronic popular culture.

References:

Cialdini, Robert. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (William Morrow, 1993).

Newman, Michael Z. and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Routledge, 2012).

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (U of Chicago P, 1992).

iPhone as TV remote by flickr user nettsu (CC)

New media technologies introduce new temporalities of experience. Most recently, I am finding that the temporalities of two of my favorite new TV technologies are at odds with one another. The DVR is an anytime technology, dispersing the television audience by letting each of us plan our own schedule according to individual needs and desires. Twitter is a now technology, uniting us in a common media moment.

New technologies promising us increased agency in choosing what to experience and when and how to experience it have all nudged television away from “flow.” Remote control devices, cable and satellite, VCRs, DVDs, VOD, and Hulu, in addition to DVRs, have brought about a new kind of TV temporality cut loose from the broadcast schedule. In place of the old way of watching what’s on, when it’s on, we timeshift and binge. We watch our shows on trains and airplanes and at office desks while breaking for lunch. Technologies of agency have disrupted the collective experience of television by making our consumption more like that of movies and books: private, asynchronous, on our schedule. (Of course, “we” is a privileged minority. A sizable portion of the television audience still watches the old way.)

Twitter and other forms of online social media might not seem at first blush like new television technologies alongside iPods and Rokus. But if you have ever watched TV with a web-connected gizmo on your lap, checking in on real-time reactions and conversations, you probably know that watching among a network of online acquaintances adds value and interest, and enhances the communal experience of broadcast media. Even if, like me, you aren’t really into posting frequent messages with your own thoughts, keeping up with others’ conversations can be pretty fun — especially for “event” television like an election, Olympics, awards show, or Survivor finale. (I’m @mznewman on Twitter, btw.) But unlike technologies of agency, Twitter and other online networks bring everyone together at once and return us to the synchronous network-era temporality of a communal now. (Maybe in this sense — pardon the pun! — we can think of our current predicament as a new network era?)

I find myself more eager to watch “live” TV these days and one big reason why is the social experience of watching along with everyone else on the internet. But I also feel compelled to watch on the broadcasters’ schedule — TVittering certainly serves the interests of the broadcasters whose business model is threatened by technologies of agency — because I can’t stand to be spoiled. Now it seems the only way to safely keep yourself from being spoiled is just to stay off the internet, or at least the social web.

As an assistant professor and parent of two young children, I can’t find more than an hour or two most nights for watching TV, and TVitter has done nothing to make commercials more appealing, so some timeshifting will always be desirable. But if you don’t watch #glee when it’s on, it’s hard to avoid hearing all about the numbers. I find myself staying away from the internet for hours while timeshifting, thus denying myself all of the non-TV info I might have read about during that time.  Increasingly I’m wondering if I can live with both the DVR and Twitter, or if ultimately these rival new TV technologies will be simply incompatible. What do you think?

The VC is one way the Wii, like much about video game culture, is profoundly nostalgic.  New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a current blockbuster, is another.  In some ways NSMB Wii is just another in the long line of Mario games stretching back almost thirty years to Donkey Kong.  Mario must rescue the princess from evil creatures.  While overcoming obstacles and enemies he finds powerups and hidden secrets to help him along.  In an era of spectacular computer-generated 3D image-making, NSMB Wii is cheerfully 2D.  Compared with the earlier Wii game Super Mario Galaxy, with its clever use of spherical settings, it’s refreshingly, retro flat.   But some innovations mark this game off from vintage Super Mario.

One is the “super guide,” which becomes available in single-player mode after a number of failed attempts to finish a level.   When activated, the super guide screens a movie of Luigi completing the level in expert style, modeling the right way for struggling novices much as a more experienced and proficient sibling or friend might have done in the old days.  This feature allows frustrated noobs like me to figure out a fairly challenging game.

Another new feature is a multi-player mode, where up to four people work together — or at odds with each other — as Mario, Luigi, and Yellow or Blue Toad.  You can boost higher jumping off another player’s head, throw each other across chasms, nudge each other off ledges, or hog the powerups that spring from the question-mark blocks.  Shigeru Miyamoto, the auteur of the Marioverse, has said he noticed contrasting demeanors in players of the different modes.  The player going alone has on the focused game face, evidently absorbed in beating the game.  Those playing in a group, by contrast, are social — talking, laughing, encouraging or competing.   The way NSMB Wii combines these two modes has positioned the game as a hybrid of so-called casual and hard-core, appealing at once to the Wii bowling party crowds seeking communal diversion and to those for whom play is serious business.  It also makes the game a ideal multi-generational experience, with a more proficient parent guiding a child — or vice versa.   (Marketing to the whole family is evidently on the agenda of game companies as this ad for Walmart and the PS3 clearly shows.)

But even as the game offers this new format, it exploits the nostalgia factor in the way it lets expert adult gamers relive their years of initiation into gaming by playing with novice kids, in a way that lets the grownups’ skills carry the youngsters along.

Nostalgia is potent because it promises to return to us the lost time we yearn to recapture.  For adults who grew up with Nintendo, or even those like me who wish they had, games like NSMB are powerful throwbacks, at once pushing old concepts in new directions and reviving the spirit of past adventures.

***

For more on video games and nostalgia see Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor (eds.), Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games (Vanderbilt, 2008).

I have previously written in more personal terms about my own history of playing and not playing video games at my blog zigzigger.