The Medium is the Metaphor Las Vegas is the metaphor for our national character (1984) In the eighteenth century, Boston was the center of political.

The Medium is the Metaphor

Las Vegas is the metaphor for our national character (1984)

In the eighteenth century, Boston was the center of political radicalism

Donald Trump Tweet 52:15

Vegas Public discourse takes the

form of entertainment

Politics, religion, news, athletics, education, are all show business now

In America preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers and journalists are all expected to entertain

“Conversation” Used metaphorically to refer to all techniques

and technologies that permit people of a certain culture to exchange messages

All culture is a conversation or a corporation of conversations

Postman talks about how different forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can come from these forms

William Howard Taft (27th President)Neil Postman questions whether a 300 pound man could be president today

Television Gives us a conversation in images and not words

Metaphor Suggests what a thing is like by

comparing it to something else

Now metaphors are far more complex (other aspects come in to play)

Symbolic forms (the form contributes to the symbol)

The context in which their information is experienced

The quantity and speed of their information

Epistemology the study of the nature, origin, and

limits of human knowledge. How do we know things? How do we understand something to be

the truth?

Medium as Metaphor Message: denotes a specific, concrete

statement about the world

Our current forms of media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements.

They are more like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality

Media and Truth There is no one way to know truth A civilization’s media will determine that

culture’s understanding of truth Primitive oral cultures will value

someone who has the ability to remember proverbs

A written culture may find proverbs quaint and value written word as the way to truth

“Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.”

“Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.”

TV Postman speaks highly of

TV as a form of entertainment

His concern is that entertainment has become a dominant form of communication

Television influences: politics, education, religion, and journalism

Typographic Mind Colonial mid nineteenth century Early Americans were a literate culture Written word is rational discourse A written argument provides, exposition

and makes points that are explained The reader makes a judgment about

whether the statements are true or false (based on supporting evidence)

The news of the day

Comes from the telegraph

And is continued through the news media

Made it possible to move decontextualized information across vast distances

Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist

Postman agrees with McLuhan about his aphorism: the medium is the message

Postman agrees that the clearest way to see through a culture is to look at its tools of conversation (TV, Advertising, Telegraph)

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's electric telegraph ("needle telegraph") from 1837

The Telegraph and the News of the Day “Peek a boo world”

The telegraph (and later forms of media) bring instantaneous information that was no longer limited by geographic distance

Society became less driven by the understanding of context

The news of the day brings us irrelevant information divorced from its context.

The deliberate process of rational discourse began to break down

Media as Epistemology “the content of much of our public

discourse has become dangerous nonsense” according to Postman

This is due to entertainment becoming necessary in all forms of communication

Epistemology is concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge

Entertainment/Communication is a part of that origin--nature

There is no universal way to know truth, but rather that a civilization will identify truth largely based on its forms of communication.

primitive oral culture great stock in a man who

remembers proverbs, since truth is passed on through such stories

culture of the written word Will find oral proverbs quaint The rationality of written arguments

would be considered superior to a proverb

Television limited our discourse to where all of our

serious forms of discussion have turned into entertainment. Television has influenced the way we live off the screen.

His examples: Religion, politics, journalism

Metaphors that Resonate Athens=intellectual excellence Hamlet=brooding indecisiveness

Every medium of communication has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large”

--A medium has the power to fly beyond that context into new and unexpected ones, because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world

The medium of TV and also of Twitter can lead us to believe that Donald Trump should be consulted on issues that are not in keeping with his qualifications

Medium of TV Creates new forms of truth-telling The epistemology of TV is inferior to a

print based one (according to Postman) Amusement (and pleasure) is how TV

communicates (contrast to Linda Williams and David

Simon)

Emotional Power of TV Emotional power so great that it could

arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against Racism

We must be careful in praising or condemning a medium because the future may hold surprises for us

Enter Linda Williams and her writing in “On the Wire” and the use of emotion to point to injustice

Literate Culture Common Sense by Thomas Paine

published 1776 Popularity of that book close to an event

like the Superbowl today Different classes were all interested in

reading about a variety of subjects Printed matter was all that was available American was founded by intellectuals

Literate Culture Approaches the world from a rational

perspective based around a series of rational propositions

that challenge a reader or audience to judge them as true or false, the entire society was founded around the idea of rational discourse.

This not to say that rational arguments made in print can’t be false—he is talking about how communication is structured in this format

“The Age of Exposition" defined Typographic America Exposition: a comprehensive description

and explanation of an idea or theory. replaced by a spectacle that prizes flash

and entertainment over substance. The message itself is less important

than the entertainment value of its delivery.

TV Demands rapid-fire editing, non-stop

stimulation, and quick decisions rather than rational deliberation (not in the case of The Wire)

Also, the pleasure of an ending that ties everything up into a bow

No spoilers either! The pleasure of a surprise ending that ties everything up.

The Corner(Simon’s Editorializing) To look backward across thirty years on the

Fayette streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology, as the inevitable consequences of forces stronger and more profound than the cities themselves. Cursed are we with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, at the millennium, to have found a limit.

Wealth In neighborhoods where no other wealth

exists An economic engine so powerful they

will sacrifice everything to it A “wealth generating structure” “Lives without any obvious justification

are given definition through simple, self-sustaining capitalism”

Purpose They all do it not so much for the cash-

which they will piss away anyhow-but for a brief sense of self

The disaster of the American rust belt Shut down the assembly lines, devalued

physical labor, and undercut the union pay scale

Some of the current addicts used to “make steel”

Wealth neighborhoods where no other wealth

exists (aside from the drug trade) An economic engine so powerful “they”

will sacrifice everything to it A “wealth generating structure” “Lives without any obvious justification

are given definition through simple, self-sustaining capitalism”

Purpose They all do it not so much for the cash-

which they will piss away anyhow-but for a brief sense of self

The disaster of the American rust belt Shut down the assembly lines, devalued

physical labor, and undercut the union pay scale

Some of the current addicts used to “make steel”

The Bag 1960’s” prohibition of public drinking Paper bags allowed police to ignore

public drinking Hiding the alcohol gave police respect Allowed the government to ignore petty

offenses

War on Drugs With nothing like “the bag” on the

corners, then there can’t be the same type of equilibrium of priorities

Creates alienation of underclass from the government

“rather than focus on the truly dangerous—the murders and the shootings we have indulged our furies”

“Statistical Charade” Placates public 20,000 prison beds (at the time of the

book) in Maryland In Baltimore 15,000-20,000 drug arrests Build more prisons? “You could bankrupt the state

government—and still not have enough prisons”

Federal vs. State Budget Federal prisons can be built by running up

the deficit States have to balance their budgets and

they carry 90% of the burden of incarcerations

For all of the arrests only a small percentage will go to jail

State budgets devote a great deal of resources to the arrests, courts, legal aids etc

Current Numbers 2,418,352 70 Billion spent on prisons annually

California numbers: 2006 Oakland spends 8,000 per student

annually CA spends 216,000 on one juvenile

inmate

War on Drugs Hasn’t taken back a single corner Community folks (who vote) complain about drugs Local government reacts Fed and State government can’t be honest about how

ineffectual the war on drugs is Arrests and convictions for violent crimes, rapes,

burglaries, and armed robbery goes down So many resources go to generating stats about drug

crime Leads to police brutality

Bad morale: hate between police and corner kids Leads to meaningless arrests for things like loitering

Serial vs. The Wire What are the similarities? What are the differences? Is one more informative than the other? What information is the most relevant to

you? Which one is the most like traditional

storytelling/entertainment?

Serial: The Alibi (Exposition) Jay recounts the entire day of the

murder the entire case hinges on just 21

minutes the window of time in which Hae is killed About those 21 minutes, precious little

is known.  "The Alibi," lays out the day of the

murder and Adnan's alibi that would clear him of killing Hae.

Serial What is the exposition? Character exposition? What does it say about the case?

Linda Williams (On the Wire) Considers it the most serious and

ambitious fictional narrative of the 21st Century

The Wire, 2002 On the Wire, 2014

Praise for The Wire Greek Tragedy (according to Simon) Williams says this description isn’t

accurate, but corresponds to the series’ excellence

First is a form of journalism and second as conventional

Conventions: seriality, televisuality, and melodrama (not necessarily the soapy kind)

Simon For 12 years Simon worked as a journalist Digging increasingly deeper for social

context When he could not deliver that context in

the Baltimore Sun’s current form he wrote fictional stories based on fact

The Wire, breaks with the editorializing journalism that shows up in The Corner

Instead of telling—he shows

Melodrama Melodrama doesn’t necessarily mean

corny Demands justice while tragedy

reconciles us to its lack Justice does not (in the show) consist of

catching dope dealers or solving homicides or thwarting surveillance

Larger questions of what might be an equitable and just society

Simon vs. Williams Simon calls The Wire a modern tragedy Williams calls it superior serial

melodrama Tragic heroes rail against injustice but in

the end they accept their fate Melodramatic heroes suffer injustice,

sometimes they overcome it by brave deeds, sometimes they show their virtue by continuing to suffer

The Wire Reveals interconnected truths of many

institutional failures Drug trade Devaluation of work Cynical city government Failure of education Media that can’t report the truth on any

of this

The Wire’s Melodrama Operates at both the personal and

institutional level The meshing of the two allows it to

picture the political and social totality of what ails contemporary urban America

It “imagines” what justice can be (From Williams text) “No other television

series or film “franchise” has accomplished this feat

Real Justice We are allowed to imagine what would

consist of genuine, creative work, democratic governance, education with “soft eyes”

The interest of the audience tends to lie with those who suffer the failures of justice (that use of emotions to create interest is a technique of melodrama)

Character Digs deep into character without making

any characters simply virtuous or evil

Race Isn’t simply about racism ..and the drug trade Decline of work Class Education Media

“Soft Eyes” Best police work done not with the hard

surveillance, but with “soft eyes” An alternative to prying “hard eyes” Can take in subtle, seemingly peripheral

forms of information and creatively process them to successful effect

Understanding comes from the perceptive intimate experience of a given situation

Ethnography Defined as a method of nuanced

qualitative research “in which fine grained daily interactions constitute the life blood of the data produced,”

In that sense Simon’s journalism at the Baltimore Sun can be described as ethnographic

The Corner, 1997 Employs basic methodologies of ethnography long-term stay in the field Observation of social relations Observer learns rituals and habits of the

culture by following selected individuals in their work and daily lives

Stayed long enough to become “fixtures on the scene”

“stand around and watch journalism”

Ethnography Is a more systematic extension of stand

around and watch journalism

Ethnographic Imaginary Limitation of “single-site” according to George Marcus

How do you indicate the existence of the larger system that affects the micro-level of the community studied?

Ethnographers of a “single site” have recourse to a larger whole that has not been studied in so deep or systematic a fashion

The whole is more assumed than observed

Marcus calls this recourse “the fiction of the whole”

This usually amounts to some abstraction like:

• “the state”

• “the economy”

• “capitalism”

• The “fiction of the whole” controls the narrative in which an ethnographer frames a local world

• Solution: undertake a “multisited” ethnography

• The problem: no single ethnographer has enough knowledge of enough worlds or enough time to map this constantly evolving world system

• Multisited ethnography may be an ideal more than a reality

• Imaginary “world enough and time”

• Ethnographer George Marcus holds out hope for an Ethnographic Imaginary

“I am looking for a different, less stereotyped and more significantplace for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledgein a variety of academic and non-academic forms…Tracingand describing the connections and relationships among sitespreviously thought incommensurate is ethnography’s way of making arguments and providing its own contexts of significance”

--George Marcus

“different, less stereotyped and more significant place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledge”

Simon’s unique fabrication of ethnographically informed serial television melodrama speaks to this according to Williams

Makes arguments, sets up contexts that could not be managed in journalism alone

Serial television melodrama, according to Williams, makes possible the larger canvas of the ethnographic imaginary

Combined factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world

With the exception of Spike Lee’s 1995 adaption of Richard Price’s novel Clockers there had never been a film that had given equal time to both sides of the law

Season 1 Breaks crime story conventions Introduces a crime A cop who pursues solving the crime Higher ups who have no interest in solving

the crime Doesn’t stay with the cop, but moves to the

complex world of the committer of the crime Humanizes that character as well Equally important procedures of cops and

dealers are introduced

Comparison between two microsites Cops who want to be good and cops

who just want to bust heads Competent drug dealers vs. ones who

lack the discipline to avoid capture

Complexity of the Series’ microsites (plotlines) Politics Different police details Education Co-ops War on drugs and “Hamsterdam” Etc.

The vivid and interlocking stories from so many concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords, what ethnography aspires to, and what newspaper journalism can rarely achieve

Multi-sited ethnographic imaginary that no longer needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of “the state,” “the economy”, or “capitalism” as its “fiction of the whole”

The many sites reveal a vivid picture of that “whole”

Simon had to quit the business he loved and turn to television

Hasn’t fully embraced the form Hence the comparison to Greek

Tragedy?

John Carroll and Bill Marimow From Baltimore Sun (criticized “The

Metal Men—1995” Said it was too much like “The Corner”

and that it wasn’t hard enough on the thieves

Simon believed that newspapers should adopt a wide sociological approach

His editors thought he should be more clear and focused on right and wrong

Rifle-Shot Journalism

One story is small and self-contained and has good guys and bad guys

The other is about why we are where we are About who is being left behind Harder to report Carroll and Marimow saw them as

performing a public service that can’t reach for the larger ethnographic complexities

Rifle-Shot vs. Multi-Site Rifle shot is like a half hour of episodic

television whose world is necessarily narrow and whose time is limited to a half hour or hour

In contrast, Simon’s reporting presented an expanded world view

Transforms a social “type” to a human being

White Middle Class Editorializing In The Corner, his editorializing has an

identity In The Wire he shows instead of telling (Which is more truthful?)

In place of the five-paragraph rifle-shot story he would eventually create a five- season cumulative serial whose primary outrage-a futile war on drugs-encompasses myriad others

Serial melodrama can show us, in a way sociologists and ethnographers cannot, how much as Detective Lester Freamon puts it, “all the pieces matter.”