Media Shifting Culture

"A new halo of prestige now floats over serialized dramas. Recently the Paris Review, the 60-year-old literary journal whose "Writers at Work" feature has included Capote, Hemingway and Nabokov, commissioned the first-ever interview in that series with a television writer: Matthew Weiner, creator of "Mad Men."

"The stuff is art," says editor Lorin Stein. He still doesn't own a TV set. ("The day is short. I love to read.") But the 40-year-old has polished off a select group of series on his computer or with friends. To discuss, say, the themes of masculinity in the moody FX comedy "Louie" is an instinctive part of the experience, he says.

"Social TV" is the term for the real-time conversations happening online, and that's a major force keeping serial shows at the forefront. According to Trendrr, a company that tracks social-media activity around TV, the top 10 most-discussed dramas include young, soapy fare like "Pretty Little Liars" (ABC Family) and "The Vampire Diaries" (the CW). Topping the pack so far this year is HBO's epic fantasy series "Game of Thrones," with an average 777,000 social-media interactions on days an episode first airs. By comparison, the Daytona 500 broadcast on Feb. 24 had 704,000."

Three years after “Avatar’s” Quito premiere, declarations of martial readiness are multiplying and gaining volume throughout the tribal territories of Ecuador’s mountainous southeast. The warnings bare sharpest teeth in the Shuar country of the Cordillera del Condor, the rain forest mountain range targeted by President Rafael Correa for the introduction of mega-mining.

In recent years, the quickening arrival of drills and trenchers from China and Canada has provoked a militant resistance that unites the local indigenous and campesino populations. The stakes declared and the violence endured by this battle-scarred coalition is little-known even in Ecuador, where Correa has made muscular use of state security forces in arresting activists and intimidating journalists who threaten his image as an ecologically minded man-of-the-people. This repression has only intensified in the run-up to Correa’s expected reelection on Feb. 17.

Rushkoff presents 5 basic concepts (symptoms) of the 'Presentism' in which we live in 2013 and suggestions for a personal practice to overcome them:

1. Narrative Collapse - the end of patience for linear narrative

2. Digiphrenia - fragmented attention to digital distractions

3. Overwinding - time we 'springload' into the present

4. Fractalnoia - incorrectly applying patterns to mutliple contexts

5. Apocalypto - fascination with grand finales, from zombies to the Mayan calendar.

"Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere".

Musings on the demise and future of the book and narrative storytelling between Nicholas Carr ( The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains; Is Google Making Us Stupid?) and Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody; Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age). 

"Digital Immigrants" (as opposed to "digital natives") have an advantage of being more aware of the inherent biases of digital technology.

"Users do not know how to program their computers, nor do they care. They spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another, instead. And this is a potentially grave mistake. Just as the invention of text utterly transformed human society, disconnecting us from much of what we held sacred, our migration to the digital realm will also require a new template for maintaining our humanity. In this talk, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff — author of Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and the upcoming Present Shock, shares the biases of digital media, and what that means for how we should use and make them".

"The less weighty and permanent and stickily complex a social networking experience, the less it feels like it's the province of marketers, too. Every keystroke, recommendation, follow, like and update is recorded and stored. Kids are becoming aware that the more involved the data footprint they create somewhere, the more it will be used against them by big data researchers looking to predict their future activities and then market to them the things they don't yet know they're about to desire. Which is just creepy".

Game of Thrones brings analog narrative form into the digital landscape.

R.U. Sirius: So how can analog narratives negotiate a digital landscape?

Douglas Rushkoff: Think Game of Thrones. In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn’t really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it’s structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.

Yet it really does capture the qualities of a fantasy role-playing game or massive multiplayer online world. Even the opening titles sequence conveys this presentist style: we move over a map, as if exploring the various worlds on the game board. Almost all the families have good justifications for “winning” the throne, and I don’t think anyone wants a particular family to totally win and end the story. (Though if anyone wins, I hope it’s the Khaleesi.)

The audience is voluntarily surrendering authority to the storyteller as long as he isn’t abusing it. Really, we just want the narrative to keep going. In a small way perhaps, it’s suggesting a new shape of narrative that can respond to the need for sustainable solutions instead of finalizing victories. These open-ended narratives are much more consonant with the open-ended, fantasy-role-playing-like sensibility of presentism.

Facebook is in a way our current target for our worries about privacy in exactly the same way the music industry obsessed about Napster, newspapers obsessed about Craig’s List... Which is to say the logic that Facebook is exposing is in many ways logic that’s implicit in the Internet itself—Facebook just happens to be its current corporate avatar. 

Some brilliant observations from a recent Ohio graduate.

"But consuming media critically is a skill, and in an age where media is more prevalent than ever before, it’s a skill worth having. It’s a skill worth having because you are going to continue to be exposed to media, and it is going to continue to attempt to manipulate you. It’s a skill worth having because it makes itless difficult to see people talking shit about things you like, not more. It’s a skill worth having because some of the shit being taught en masse by media is horrible scary damaging shit, and maybe you don’t think you’ve learned that horrible scary damaging shit, and maybe you don’t think you’re susceptible to that horrible scary damaging shit, and honestly? Maybe you haven’t. Maybe you’re not. I don’t know you. But I know that a classroom full of average southern Ohio state school students went silent in horror at the full realization of what Beauty and the Beast teaches kids too young to know better. I know that as someone who has spent years being taught to analyze media, as someone who has actively worked to develop the skill of understanding what a given film is attempting to wring from me, I still want to see Hugh Grant kiss Martine McCutcheon. I know that the real trick to the continued, pervasive prevalence of shit like rape culture is that it’s everywhere all the time, slipped in under the radar and riding on the fact that it’s the status quo, hidden in plain goddamn sight".

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