The Day the Texting Died

T-Mobile's services have been failing tonight. I discovered this when someone called me and told me that they were having trouble texting me. I then tried to send a text and it bounced back. Then, I tried to call T-Mobile customer support to find out if the problem was with my network. When I didn't get an answer (all agents busy, don't even bother hanging on, call back later), I knew it wasn't just me. I then googled T-Mobile news and got a story, posted within the previous 30 minutes, that T-Mobile was having massive outages. Kinda neat how I was able to find out how big the problem was so quickly.

Then, I went over to twitter (the news article in pcmag mentioned outraged phone users taking to twitter to register their disgust w/ tmobile). Indeed, it was clogged with complaints about T-Mobile. My first reaction was laughter. There was something that just struck me as funny about how upset people were about losing texting service. It was the kind of exaggerated outrage that pervades online fora (LOTS OF CAPS, EXPLETIVES, AND EXXXCLAMATION POINTS, DAMMITT!!!!!!). Maybe I felt entitled to laugh at this outrage (or self-parodying fake outrage (fauxtrage?)) b/c I was in the same boat as them. For me, it was a comically minor inconvenience, one that, frankly, prevented me from being distracted by getting into a text conversation (though here I am, avoiding my work by blogging, so maybe the outage didn't help my productivity after all).

Then I checked myself. It would be bad to laugh about a total failure of telephone lines. Phone lines are used by emergency units to save people's lives. While I know that it wasn't everyone who lost texting capabilities (I guess some lost voice, some lost both), it got me to thinking about what it would mean for lots of people to lose the ability to text for a night. Would there be anything seriously bad about that?

It got me to thinking about the overall character of texting. Is there really anything serious about it? There's the hyper-coordination, so an outage might mean a bunch of people would get slightly lost or be slightly late, and get ticked off at one another. I suppose it is possible that if someone didn't know about the outage and was waiting for a call or a text, they might think that the other person was ignoring them, causing stress in the relationship (maybe even the end of a (probably already tenuous) relationship?). Imagine that happening to thousands of people at once.

But really, I feel like the overall character (aside from coordination) of texting is joking, flirting, and gossiping. What would it mean to lose that for a night? One could study this in the way that Berelson (1962) studied what it meant to live without the newspaper for awhile back in the day. Maybe it'll be a nice moment of self-reflection for people. That's what its been for me.

What it Means to Like/Hate a TV Show

The question seems simple enough: what TV shows do you like?

This phrasing aims to compare two variables: individuals (you, and other people answering the question) and TV shows. It doesn't take into account certain episodes or aspects of TV shows and certain moods or states or stages in life of an individual, or the intensity of liking or the duration of liking. There's not really a problem with this, as temporary changes in mood can be averaged out, as can the better or worse episodes of a TV show. Indeed, whenever anyone is asked a question such as this, they engage in that kind of averaging.

But there's one particular facet of TV that doesn't get averaged out by a viewer, but rather is ignored, or treated as a separate question: what kind of TV shows do you like when you're around other people. My intuition is that people would answer the first question with shows they like to watch by themselves, more apt to ignore the shows they watch with others (after all, they probably like them less). But the shows people watch with others have just as much of an effect on them. They still spend their time watching them and still pay attention to the ads embedded in the programs. In short, we tend not to think of shows we watch with others but they still have an impact on us. Arguably, this question matters because given the rise of mobile viewing devices, online viewing, more time-shifting, and changing patterns of co-habitation, we're watching more and more TV content by ourselves. As Morley and others have noted, watching TV was a social act, as fraught with domestic power dynamics as cooking or sex. Not any more, perhaps.

Even the definition of "liking" a TV show changes for me depending on whether I'm watching with someone, or even discussing a TV show with someone. I could see myself “liking” Sex & the City, or So You Think You Can Dance, or country music, or Christian music, or 80’s music, if I was watching it/listening to it/discussing with someone who liked those things. More precisely, I could find something to like in each of those things. I don't think I would be lying by saying that I found something to like about those things. They would genuinely lead to some sort of positive affect. If I'm by myself, my standards are much higher (or different). These days, I can barely find any music or TV that I can tolerate for more than a minute that (in the case of music) doesn’t exactly fit my mood or (in the case of TV) isn’t Mad Men or sports without changing the channel or shuffling through my ITunes.

Also, its funny how liking of media, amongst any group, tends not be uniformly hierarchical. That is, many "favorited" shows are also near the top of other people's most hated shows lists. But perhaps this is true with all matters of taste. Let’s say we were ranking any other thing not related to taste (greatest football teams, tallest buildings). It seems odd that someone could hate Citizen Kane or Seinfeld when others have written endless paeans to their objective greatness. People who hated these shows or movies wouldn’t think that those films/shows were just "less great" than whatever they happened to love. They would think they were among the worst.

More Technology in Our Lives = What, exactly?

This morning, I woke, flipped on the radio, stumbled out of be bed, turned off the radio, cracked open my laptop, checked my email, went to digg, and then remembered an article I'd been meaning to read about how people are using more technology (such as laptops and mobile devices) right when they wake up, before breakfast even.

I've had a lot of conversations like this article: we all agree that the internet and cell phones have changed the ways we live. We spend more time staring at these lil' screens that weren't in our lives 10 years ago, which certainly seems weird. But so what? "Weird" and "interesting" just doesn't cut it for me anymore. Before I can give this topic any more thought, I need to think of plausible positive and negative outcomes of networked technology use.

Let's start w/ the assumption that there are three levels of use: no use, light use, and heavy use.

1: Heavy use strengthens bonds with peers (friends & co-workers) but weakens bonds with family or domestic partners. This will lead to domestic dysfunction, resulting in increased rates of depression in all members of the household and will effect young children in the house especially negatively in terms of their cognitive and emotional development.

This seems to be behind the "technology eats into our family time" worries. Most of what people do w/ these devices IS social, so its not the worry that we might have when someone is playing video games by themselves or watching TV by themselves. To put it in Granovetter's terms, we might say that heavy use erodes our few strong ties and replaces them with many weak ties. For light users, weak ties are simply added to our social mix, but heavy users experience a weakening of the strong ties: less time w/ close ones, less sharing of deeply personal feelings, etc.

2: Heavy use cultivates a new kind of social bond, one that has some characteristics of a strong tie (lots of time devoted to a person, intimate knowledge of that person, tendency to share intimate secrets, similar interests and opinions) and some characteristics of a weak tie (not feeling bad if you can't make it to an important event in their lives, shorter in duration, more plentiful, not as many common links between the two). These new kinds of social ties are, on some unconscious level, easily mistaken for strong ties. The heavy user thinks they are creating a secure, lasting bond, but is actually creating a weak link that is as susceptible to dissolution as any other weak link. Over time, this leads to increased life dissatisfaction and decreased domestic harmony which leads to cognitively/emotionally deprived children.

It is important to note that this claim is not based solely on whether these people met online or IRL, or on whether one uses an online identity that is somehow linked to their real world identity (it is assumed that the online identity is linked to real-world identity in some way, as this is far more common a practice than sustained, anonymous relationships). The real question is: does your brain categorize the person as a member of the relatively small, real life community or as a member of the almost endless online community. I think that is determined in part by whether you met online or IRL, but also by the heavy use of networked technologies to maintain an existing bond, especially if that technology is used heavily in the early stages of the relationship. Part of your brain says, "this person is really close to me. They know things about me that no one else knows. We talk all the time. Our relationship is unique." Another part of your brain says, "there are other people whom I could communicate with in similar ways. Search technology is getting better and better. Perhaps I could find someone who is like this person, but without those annoying flaws and incompatibilities." That part of the brain assembles a composite friend or mate from various blogs, videos, articles, and internet detritus, thinking "these super-cool characteristics exist out there, and they're real. They're not just some fabrication of Hollywood screenwriters. Its realistic to think that there's a person with those characteristics."

This leads to a kind of cognitive dissonance, or worse, an inability to see what is creating the dissatisfaction. Heavy users may start to think of themselves as the kinds of people who weren't meant to have many close friends, as transient, somewhat alienated individuals who are a bit unhappy, but are resigned to their fates and have hope of achieving some kind of domestic bliss in the distant future once they "meet the right person." Really, they are different than a person who has achieved that domestic harmony not in terms of who their core selves are, but only in terms of the ways they chose to communicate and form bonds with others. If a link between heavy use of networked technologies and long-term life dissatisfaction (or domestic harmony, in which kidz suffer somehow) could be made apparent, then a heavy users might have something outside of their own flawed abilities to tell the difference between a strong tie and a weak one, who is compatible and who is not.

3. Those who do not use networked technologies will feel an increased sense of alienation and depression. Because they're not in the social loop, they get the feeling that people are talking about them behind their backs (which may or may not be true), they don't get invited to as many social events, and generally are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to forming strong or weak ties. They meet people in real life, but when they refuse to maintain that relationship w/ networked technologies, the relationship withers, as the other person thinks, "this is just too hard to maintain. Its easier to bond with this other person who is more social." I wonder about this possibility every time I hear someone say "I'm not going to let my kid have a cell phone or a facebook account no matter what his or her friends have!"

So, one important project would be to re-examine what is meant by "strong tie" and "weak tie." Lots of sociological work, including everything derived from Robert Putnam's work, makes certain assumptions about the characteristics of these ties that need to be rethought. And then, how the fuck do we go about measuring any of this? I suppose Putnam's and Granovetter's studies lay the groundwork. Is it just a matter of asking how much you use social media, how happy you are, and including the right moderating/mediating variables? How do you teaste out the personality traits and worldviews that result in low life satisfaction from the use variables? Maybe some focus groups with heavy users in which we discuss relationship satisfaction would be a first step. In any case, this will all take years to play out. Part of my claim is that the duration of strong ties will be shorter, maybe 5 years average as opposed to 10 or 20.

Why we hate TV now more than ever

If, indeed, more people feel more hate towards television than ever before (example of said hatred, which is usually directed at reality-based programs), here is a possible explanation that relies on technological and economic factors rather than some general decline of morals, behavior, or taste:

1. Since the rise of reality-based programming (due, in part, to the writers' strike of the late 90's), there is a pipe-line for cheap programming and lots of channels and timeslots to fill.
2. More tastes, desires, and values can be catered to cheaply on TV than ever before. Those varied tastes, desires, and values always existed, but before the rise of cheap-2-produce TV, only certain "elite" tastes could be catered to.
3. There is a new kind of diversity in terms of the desires that are being catered to through TV programming. Because of how deeply synergistic TV is (w/ cross-channel promos, program lead-ins), you can't just get your little bit of tailored content. You have to be exposed to other content not intended for you, unlike the internet where you can go to your favorite sites and generally avoid the variety of sites that cater to other preferences and lifestyles and whatnot. Its not the diversity of values expressed on TV that drives people to hate it: its the fact that you're almost forced to be exposed to those other values.
   

It is, of course, also possible that TV encourages or legitimizes disparate value systems and, thus, ratchets up people's pre-existing knee-jerk distaste for behavior that they can't understand. Reality TV gives people an excuse to hate people who behave differently than they do. What could the other explanation of people's strong hatred of certain programs be? I doubt that its b/c these programs are poorly crafted. I think that when people see something they don't like on TV, they don't just think about the fuckhead that created it, but also think about the audience for the program. They believe in the premise that TV can promote, cultivate, or instill values in an audience, and they fear the erosion of their own values in the face of those of The Hills or Jerry Springer or whatever. But those are real people on those shows. Its not like you're just hating fictional characters if you hate those shows. You're hating (at least semi-)real people. Do people who hate reality based TV shows hate them b/c of the characters' behavior (which is quite different than behavior exhibited in previous fictional TV programs) or is there an added layer to that hatred based on the fact that those are real people that they're hating?

This whole theory of mine may be wrong in that its based on a few people I happen to know and a few blogs I read. Maybe only certain people hate TV more now or feel that hate more strongly (the people who were being catered to during the network era).

Its also possible that some of the people who watch the shows other people hate like the show but hate the people in the show. For instance, you could like The Hills and hate Spencer. In fact, many reality-based shows understand the ways viewers love to hate people by positioning the subjects in each show as simultaneously sympathetic and laughable subjects of derision. In effect, the viewers identify with an invisible narrator who is relaying other people's stupid behavior for their amusement. Is She Really Going Out With Him on MTV is a good example. The men are laughable, but are the women? To some, yes. And the men are, in some sense, successful, in that they're rich, good-looking, and they're getting laid, so a viewer could look up to the them, feel attracted to them, or identify with them. But you can also hate them while liking to watch the show.

When someone says, "I cannot believe people watch Flavor of Love, I hate that show," they may imagine that the show is on the air because other people like or identify with the characters and behavior on the show. That is, after all, why they as viewers watch TV. But maybe other people, particularly younger people, watch shows in order to hate others, and are able to make the distinction between show (which they love) and characters (which they hate). Or maybe its some kind of mixture of love and hate that they get from watching it.

After googling "Most Hated TV," I did get the sense that people hate reality-based TV, as a whole genre or individual shows. They also hate comedies that they don't find funny, and popular shows that they don't understand the appeal of, maybe b/c they're hard to avoid (American Idol).

Mad Moods

When I've been reading a novel a lot or watching a novel-like show a lot, it alters my default thoughts, moods, and my inner dialog. I'll be walking across campus, between appointments, distracted from work for a moment, and my thoughts will drift back to a song from the TV show or a certain moment from the narrative. In some sense, I'm always occupying that world, whether or not I'm reading or watching the story at any given moment.

So it goes w/ Mad Men right now. I'd just re-discovered the first season, watching all of season 1 in a week. Now, I'm making my way through season 2 for the second time in preparation for the beginning of the third season next weekend. The mood of Mad Men is something like the mood of The Sopranos - pretty dark w/ touches of detached, sarcastic levity. Hardly the mood you would choose to be in all the time. Did I choose to watch Mad Men because it had qualities that helped me put my life in perspective in some way, as Mary Beth Oliver hypothesizes in her writings about sad and meaningful media? Maybe. But thinking about it strictly in terms of mood, the show puts me in a somewhat reflective mood but seems to have inoculated me against slipping into very bad moods. If I had watched some comedy like Arrested Development, or some other distraction, I might have experienced a temporary boost in mood that might have even carried over a bit into the rest of my life. But then I would be reminded of some dark thought that would bring my mood way down and nothing about my media experience could help with that. If anything, it might even hurt more given the contrast between the two moods and the two worlds. But w/ Mad Men and similar "bad mood" shows, those unhappy thoughts and the events that trigger them can happen to me (and they will always happen to me - that's life) and I won't be brought as low by them.

We could call shows like Mad Men "reflective media," something that had this carry-over effect on mood after you've stopped watching (but only if you're really into the show), enhancing your ability to deal w/ situations and other bad thoughts and bad moods.

Still, it might be causing me to dwell on unhappier aspects of my life. Or it might just give color and shape to the moods and thoughts that are results of my real life situations and material experience. Maybe I'm pulling the darker moments out of a show full of dark & light moments b/c that's what I need at this time. That's what makes this so fascinating to study: I don't have an intuitive grasp on whether my mood is affecting my interpretation of the show, the show is affecting my mood, or both or neither is affecting each other. Its too glib to say that they both affect each other, though that may be true. I need to know the degree to which they affect each other and the circumstances in which those effects hold up. Not to say that mood is all that matters. I wouldn't want media or anything else to make me a happy idiot, and I wouldn't want people to stop reading Hamlet b/c its too depressing. Still, I'd like to know a bit more about what causes what, especially when it comes to these indirect, lingering effects on my default moods.

Pros and Cons of Road Tripping w/ IPhones

Just got back from a road trip from Ann Arbor to Missoula. I was accompanied by two good friends, one of which had an IPhone, the other of which had a Blackberry. I have neither of these mobile technologies. Due to the sudden and complete immersion into a social atmosphere in a limited physical space (my car) in which the distribution of technology was unequeal, I came away with some thoughts on what the technologies mean/do to us.

First off, its silly to say that the technology is good or bad. It is both. The better questions are: "when do these technologies cause social or emotional tension and when do they provide enjoyable experiences for the group or the individual?"

I pointed out to my friends that the use of these phones was stunting conversation in the car and thus making the trip worse for (at the very least) me and potentially alienating us from one another (we don't hang out very often b/c we live in different cities). I felt doubly alienated b/c I didn't know what they were doing on the phones. Were they playing a video game, reading an article, talking to someone else? I felt like I wasn't entertaining enough to be chosen over these other options, which was annoying. They informed me that they were mostly checking and responding to work email. They acknowledged my concerns, but said they wouldn't be able to take vacations like this unless they had devices on whcih to check in on work. Thus, they viewed the phones as enabling more vacation time, more social flexibility, which would make up for the minimal tension created when they both logged on and I sat there doing nothing.

Other times, the phones were used to answer questions, as kind of an Oracle to defer to, to settle disputes. We would argue over how geographers determined where the exact center of the United States was, or who an actor was in a TV show, and instead of going back and forth, we ventured guesses and then confirmed them using the internet. There's something about always having this technology with you (especially if you're out of the house often) that makes its impact on conversations, disputes, and knowledge that much more profound. Most often, we'd have a conversation about anything, then look up something related on wikipedia, and cite some obscure, amusing, related fact. So it was sort of an augmented conversation. I learned more, but it did seem to suck the spontineity out of the conversation at times. And there's something troubling about people citing jokes from the internet instead of making their own.

But the best/worst thing about them was their abilities to navigate. We had a big road atlas which we used, sometimes as a primary source of navigation and other times as a backup to the IPhone. We were aware of the hazards of using the IPhone or GPS as exclusive navigation device. The interesting thing is that those devices have deficiencies (inability to take into account some things a long term resident might know, like the tendency of a resident to park their car too close to the road, thus blocking us from passing) but every deficiency could be corrected if the technology is sufficietly open. The IPhone led us to a closed-for-repair pizza joint in Chicago and a blocked dirt road in Montana. But if someone had been able to upload their personal knowledge of those places and it had instantly updated and been registered in a program that looks for patterns, then the device could incorporate the "folk wisdom" of local residents and been more effective. It was easy to say "there you go, making a false idol out of technology. Nothing will be as good as good ol' fashion human intuition," but I think that misses the point.

In the end, I don't think that the technological inequality detrimentally affected the social vibe in the car. We talked about as much as I would be happy w/ (a lot, to the point where if we talked any more, I would've lost my voice). If I had to venture one possible effect the technology had on the content of our conversations, it was the promotion of non-personal subjects over personal ones. You can't look on the internet for how you feel about something or something about your personal life, but you can look on it for just about everything else. You can even look up people you know on Facebook while talking about them, but that won't tell you how you feel about them. We never really talked too deeply about our personal lives, but maybe that's b/c we've always tended to joke around and debate various topics instead of getting all touchy-feely. Though maybe the tendencies of guys to use mobile technology around one another in certain ways, e.g. to look up stuff, is different from girls' tendencies to do this and that augments a pre-existing gap between single-gender groups in terms of how touchy-feely they get in conversations.

If nothing else, I wasn't sold on the idea of either of these technologies being worth what they're priced at. When I'm sitting at home by myself, its nice to have TV and internet. They are, in some sense, competing w/ books or me staring into space and being introspective. Mobile technologies like the IPhone, for me, would be competing w/ music, podcasts, NPR, and talking to other people, all of which cost me pretty much nothing and all of which kick ass.

The Pitfalls of Hypothesizing about Film Success

Say we take a film like Transformers 2. The film, like most other films, has a lot going on, in its content and the circumstances under which it was released: grand spectacle, a link to something that is established in a target audience's cultural memory, an extensive marketing campaign, the fact that its a sequel, Shia LeBeouf, its director, its screenwriter, its late-June release not opposite of other big action blockbusters, etc. Which of these elements is most responsible for the film's success? Let's throw in another element of the film: Skids and Mudflap, two robots who (quoting the NYTimes piece) "talk in jive and are portrayed as illiterate; one has a gold tooth." The depictions have been called racist by many. Are these depictions reasons why the film is more successful, or is the film successful in spite of those depictions?

The questions are essentially unanswerable, but its not because film is Art and one cannot theorize about why some people like art and others don't, or why some art is profitabe and other art is not. It is so hard to predict why films, as opposed to other art forms, are successful or not b/c there are so few comparable films made and the circumstances of release (marketing, timing) play such a significant role in their success/failure. In order to determine what aspects of a product are responsible for its success, we need to make comparisons, but there are so few comparisons to be able to make that its harder to predict what will succeed. If you wanted to find out what elements of motion picture content made a certain text successful (e.g. certain choices in pacing, plotting, certain bigoted depictions, certain actors, lighting, etc), then you would look away from film and towards online video. There are simply more comparable texts, and the circumstances under which each video is watched are so varied that the uniqueness of each viewing can be considered to be random error and cancels out. What you're left with is a more pure comparison and better insight as to how motion pictures work on audiences than one you would try to do looking at a successful box office film like Transformers 2 and making generalizations about what aspects of the film resonated with the public. And yet film and cultural theorists have been doing just this, and continue to do just this: identifying certain characteristics of a film that possesses many charateristics, noting that the film was successfull, and then making claims about a culture's preferences.

Its interesting to consider recent advances in two untraditional predictions markets, both linked to the work of Nate Silver: presidential politics and baseball. Frankly, I don't know much about Silver's prediction models, but I'd guess he just takes discrete characteristics of each event (a race for office, a baseball game), takes a data set comprised of past events, and sees which characteristics, when all other characteristics are controlled for, exert the most influence on the outcome. You take those influences, assess the observable characteristics of the upcoming game/election, and make predictions of the outcome. With presidential elections, you have very few comparable events to use, while in baseball, you have many. In the former, I would think that you would have to start incorporating patterns in opinion polls (which fluctuate systematically based on various characteristics of world events and their coverage).

The trouble with film is that there aren't the equivalent of polls. Yes, there's test screenings, but those samples are so small and they're just used for minor recuts, not learning about why certain people like certain characteristics of films under certain circumstances. There's too little comparable data to work with. Perhaps the prevalence of remakes, reboots, adaptations is an attempt by producers to use the "data" of those other properties being successful with their suite of characteristics, and making a bet based on that. Its not very systematic, but in a way, I trust it more than I trust anyone who guesses that a film resonated or failed to resonate with the public b/c it was/wasn't successful at the box office and possessed a certain characteristic. That's just guesswork on their parts.