schrockmedia

Long Beach is a highly heterogeneous community. According to the 2000 census, 36% of the population was Latino or Hispanic, 15% were African-American, 12% were Asian, and 45% were White/Caucasian. Since that point, Latinos have edged out non-Latino "Caucasians" for the majority. For a recent paper that will be presented at IAMCR 2010, I sought to locate several communication hotspots where residents of various ethnicities congregate and share neighborhood stories. My study looks at the communication ecologies and motivations of the two dominant ethnic groups in Long Beach (Hispanic and Anglo) for vaccinating (or not) against the recent H1N1 flu. Following from Holley Wilkin’s upcoming ICA paper, I decided that this was a good example of a time when participants who are difficult to locate through the storytelling network can be found by looking at the communication action context, or CAC. Therefore, my goal was to find communication hotspots of activity where these two groups would be present.

I started at the Healthy City website, which has a useful feature for mapping demographic data over geographic area, such as zip code or city. Latino populations are most prevalent in central Long Beach in an area to the southwest of Signal Hill, but also throughout the city with the exception of the southeast and northeast. Next, I considered the how green spaces and other features of Long Beach created places where people congregate. I started with parks, because they are easily visible on a map, and I found them to be areas where residents don’t mind being approached (as compared with bus stops or stores, which have more specific purposes, as residents are en route from one place to another).

It’s important to consider how much of a role time played in the type of activity occurring at communication hotspots. A few hours (or the same time on a Sunday vs. a Saturday) can be the difference between a quiet, subdued atmosphere and one that is packed with families grilling, playing sports, and celebrating cultural milestones (e.g. birthdays, quinceañeras). For instance, the Veteran’s Pier is quiet during the week, but on the weekends it becomes a hub of activity for athletes, beach-goers, families, fishermen, and tourists. A similar type of transformation can be seen when late at night, an open, friendly area can turn into a place that elicits fear of residents because it’s where gang tensions are played out. One surprise to me about the pier was the sheer variety of residents of differing ethnicities that use it, even ones that are not dominant in the immediate area.

There's been a lot of talk in my cohort about technologies for academia, so I thought I'd post up my experiences. At the beginning of the semester, my iBook was dying. I could splurge on another iBook, which didn't hold much appeal because it was pretty heavy and expensive. I had just purchased a powerful home machine, a large-screen iMac, so had no desire to buy another one. Instead, I was interested in a smaller and cheaper netbook that could be used independently of the mac, and was full-featured but light. My requirements were:

1. A light netbook I can take with me. Operating system was not important, but I wanted a large screen, bluetooth, battery life, and keyboard.
2. Nothing of consequence will be stored on the netbook.
3. Must be able to run office and do in-text citations (linked between netbook and iMac)
4. All files, notes, and references from the laptop should be seamlessly shared with the iMac
The netbook I chose was the Aspire One with a 11.6" screen, because it was cheap ($329) and had bluetooth (can't deal with trackpads), a nice big screen, moderate battery life (a "6-cell" that lasts around 7 hours), and a full-sized keyboard. At about 2 1/2 pounds, it's still half the weight of an iBook and about a third the price.

Initially I installed Ubuntu on it, which ended up being a mistake. The video card wasn't supported, meaning anything graphical was sluggish. Videos were unplayable. I couldn't get Zotero (a references program based in Firefox) to sync with Open Office. Ubuntu has no reliable software for marking up (highlighting) PDFs. The Evernote client was buggy, both the web-based version and the Windows version run through Wine. Audio would drop out every 5-10 minutes when watching a movie.

I slogged through for a semester before breaking down and installing Windows XP. It ended up being a good move, because everything runs just fine. The video card runs accelerated, which makes the 11.6" screen usable. I'm not thrilled about running Windows, but Ubuntu was getting torturous. All class notes and bits of information are dumped into Evernote, and all other class files are sync'd with Dropbox. So my netbook can get run over by a truck (or dropped in a storm drain) and I've lost no data. All Dropbox data are backed up with Time Machine on the iMac side. For software, I'm running:

• Openoffice
• Zotero (for citations)
• Firefox (for Zotero)
• Evernote (for note-taking and organization)
• Dropbox (for sync'ing class PDFs and anything not in Zotero)
• Dia (for diagrams and wireframes)
• VLC (for videos)

The new year started out with fallout from the (contested) merger between Comcast, the largest cable service provider, and NBC-Universal. Their new product is called "TV Everywhere," which will deliver streaming cable service over the Internet to subscribers. Much as the entertainment industry has previously, these companies spun the removing the access of millions to television as benefiting consumers. The argument goes something like: choice is king, and subscriptions improve the quality of content. This frames seismic shifts in control, which have consistently eroded public access and utility, as being beneficial to the average citizen. This attitude is pervasive even among those who ostensibly police broadcasters.

"The consumer will be king," said Colin Crowell, senior counselor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. "You'll be able to get your own set-top box that does all the whiz-bang things you want it to do, and you'll be in control."

Unfortunately, it's not a good situation for consumers. The goal of companies, of course, is to maximize revenue. They seek mergers to add value to existing properties, and this one may open up entirely new ways to monetize content. The Internet is a goldmine of contextual subscriber information, which can inform advertisements directed to consumer tastes. Most importantly, "TV Everywhere," which would forbid cable channels to stream for free online, would add to the cable companies existing empires, while attempting to tame the Internet by restricting free content. As Josh Silver points out, cable companies are terrified of subscribers canceling their subscriptions in light of widely available online content.

NBC and Comcast are set to appear at a Senate hearing later this month, but don't expect the deal to be blocked. They never are. At most, Kerry & co. will demand minor provisions and make several bold statements. As McChesney points out, questioning the commercial nature of the established media system is verboten. Making demands of them, such as ensuring a reasonable amount of educational programming or universal access, is out of the question.

The other more ominous threats are that this merger would make it easier for Warner to prosecute those sharing their content online, or even throttle connection speeds for connections to competitors to NBC on Comcast. If "TV Everywhere" spreads, well, everywhere, there would be little incentive to continue providing broadcast signals to non-cable-users. They are generally lower on the socio-economic ladder, and have the least amount of disposable income. Network broadcasters who broadcast through television frequencies are already trying to extract retransmission fees from cable companies, to get the same double-dipping revenue (ads + retransmission fees) that cable networks currently enjoy.

On the lighter side, two buddies in Florida went through Morgan & Morgan (who notoriously run late-night commercials to dredge up injury claims) to file a petition against News Corp, who was negotiating with Time Warner Cable, who were threatening to cut off access to Fox stations. Suffice to say that when Americans are filing lawsuites about a football game rather than vocally complaining about the sorry state of our fourth estate, we are in a very bad place.

Their complaint, filed by Morgan & Morgan law firm, claims that the two men "can never be made whole" if they miss the New Year's Day game.

According to the filing, Thomas Moore and Richard Anderson "have alleged and will demonstrate that [News Corp.'s] actions are immoral, unethical, oppressive, and unscrupulous."

It’s the first day of the New Year. I woke up, ate some of the almond cake I baked for last night, put my daughter down for her first nap, and looked again at world to see what has changed. My resolutions are to ditch certain trappings I’ve been locked into for the last few years. This break is a necessary one, part of the shift I must go through to re-focus my energies on topics of importance and interest.

1. “Social media” research that focuses on adoption and interface questions on advertising-driven websites. Generally, social media have been adopted by various players – advertising, media, and entertainment – as a tool. It is part of the picture in online media use, but by no means the entire one. Much of my repulsion derives from my moving away from business-related topics - been there, done that, tired of the same old Los Angeles rhetoric. On its own, social media just doesn’t raise very interesting questions in 2010. This year there was an abundance of conference papers on SNSs, which I believe mostly stems from young researchers arriving who have a familiarity in the area. My inclination is that researchers in industry and academia will thoroughly cover questions surrounding social media.

2. Denying the intensely conflicting (and highly moralistic) effects transparency has. Online shaming is seen as a solution to various problems, such as social inequality and government accountability. I’ve come to believe that this is intensely problematic, but most, including some very sharp thinkers, aren’t yet considering the ways that general transparency will serve to level power. Much of this is because examples are case studies. Still, there’s at least as much evidence to suggest that transparency is, at best, limited in benefits and problematic - see: publicizing information on women seeking abortions in Texas, and the intensely ironic lack of transparency exhibited by online companies that are part of this latest wave.

3. Being a “technology guy”... enough said. I’ll likely always integrate technologies with my thinking, but the context will be richer and quite different.

4. A focus on individual characteristics. From my work with media system dependency, demographics and individual psychology have limited effects on the relationships individuals develop with media. Much of the action in media research is at the meso level, in communities and organizations. Here there are also rich connections with political science and cultural studies, the import of which is lost if we isolate our focus to, say, individual psychology.

5. Demanding immediate reactions. We really can’t keep this up, people. The media do not need to cover news contemporaneously, and I don’t need to email you back within 5 minutes. It takes much effort to keep up, and there are so few items that are truly important.

Posting from a class reaction paper.

For a change, I thought I’d take a different tack for this week’s paper, and discuss film. I feel that Baudrillard’s observation that Los Angeles is fed by Disneyland, like a power station, is reversed. The media coming out this city feeds on its own decentralized power, through writers and producers in love with their own perceptions. I saw Thom Andersen’s obsessive Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately before I moved here, which addresses how we have encountered this city before we arrived here, through characters and scenes floating in fictional movies that have become our reality. I knew Los Angeles through Michael Douglas in Falling Down, navigating south central Los Angeles, in all its supposedly foreign glory; Charlton Henston rocketing through the streets in Omega Man; the starkly-lit Bradbury Building in Bladerunner; and the LA river chase scene in the cult punk flick Repo Man, which paints the city as a wasteland of mundanity, full of, as Harry Dean Stanton (as Bud) put it, “ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate em,” as they pursued drug dealers, aliens, and money. I learned that Los Angeles in films was an urban wasteland: unearthly, dangerous, and complex.

Anderson shows us how much reality has dissolved behind a veil of simulacra, and there is indeed no underlying ground left. Polanski’s Chinatown in 1974 set Los Angeles remains among LA’s most memorable film appearances, despite that it is a fiction, woven from various myths and personalities that resonate with the audience. The antagonist is frequently ephemeral, as the plot revolves around a water dispute. The plot was even built on a myth of the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens river valley. The gritty film noir Los Angeles films might refer to corruption and greed in the city’s past, but are merely dealing in symbolic touchstones. As Andersen narrates, “there once was a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” The Los Angeles that has been propagated is gone, replaced by a false edifice, while the city itself has shifted and grown beneath it. The city has been defined by its rapid growth, and recent immigrants change the city before it has time to be illustrated.

Still, entertainment needs fodder, and the mill is always churning, squeezing every last location in Los Angeles County. Dexter, ostensibly taking place in Miami, is shot on-site in southern California, particularly in my city of Long Beach, which despite its size (500,000 people), is typically acknowledged only as being part of Los Angeles… Long-Beach-plays-Los-Angeles-plays-Miami. Visible throughout the series are the marina, El Dorado park, and the beach next to Shoreline Drive with the building in the opening scene of Die Hard. Even though my hair stylist came home to find a note on her door from Dexter producers to see about renting her house out for a shoot, there is no way to, as Baudrillard posits, “inject the real” (p. 22) to battle amorphous media entities. Michael Bay quite literally destroys downtown Los Angeles in Transformers, which is strangely treated with no irony. “The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power” (p. 21), and with our Governator, how could we? Our state is literally run by a media creation.

Unlike the comparatively united front of Disney, which has a location in southern California, Los Angeles is playing shades of itself, fractured narratives of truths, myth, and complete fictions rooted in geographic locations that have only the pretense of reality. There is nothing to inject, because nothing can be injected – truth has been subsumed by the entertainment mill in an ongoing hegemonic process.

The most affecting film I’ve seen on the effects of post-modernism and globalism is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Shot on a low budget and using stock footage alongside hand-held shots taken worldwide (particularly in Asia), he does not so much peel away the layers of the post-modern onion vainly in search of that “ground” that Andersen does, so much as examine the way globalism and media collapse space and time. Sans Soleil follows on themes raised by La Jetée: time as a cause of history is questioned through image series. Here he goes further, searching for a way to disembed (as Giddens would have it) imagery from their political and social meanings. He here takes inspiration from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, referring to The Zone. In Marker’s interpretation of The Zone, here a digital video filtering system, authorship is disembedded , released to be appropriated in art. Marker demonstrates the new meaning footage can have when processed and deployed in a different space or time, although his conclusions are elusive. Certainly, according to Marker, using images of a past as a history presents a dangerous over-simplification (Montero, 2007). As Butler observes, released from concerns of the subject, “agency is always and only a political prerogative” (p. 163). Perhaps in Marker’s Zone, images are searching for a context, reversing the typically causal connection of context determining images, much as La Jetée plays with narrative by questioning time. This raises similar questions as Butler’s example of critiquing Powell’s euphemisms for bombing in Kuwait, removing the subject to open up questions of victimization and meaning in an intensely communication-based context.
Ironically, given Baudrillard’s concept of “museumification,” the most real place I’ve been in Los Angeles presents myth as scientific fact alongside historical iconoclasts and oddities. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, housed in an unmarked building in Culver City a stone’s throw from Sony Pictures, is positively sincere in its desire to inject reality back into its subjects. Here, bats can fly through walls, you can cure stammering by eating mice on toast, and horns can grow from human heads. Yet, there is also a rather comprehensive set of dioramas on the history of trailer parks, and upstairs, the rather intense (and complete[!]) collection of paintings of dogs from the Russian space program can be found next to the tearoom. Even the bathroom has real flowers, which I can’t help but feel is a gesture to the real. Authorship is here revered, but it is also inconsequential, likely a lie you must critique to be part of the experience. You begin to question everything. Is that machine that has been out of order for two years deliberately presented as broken? You are permitted to discover and evaluate, to pick up and touch, as the space is “to be traversed, not penetrated,” as Barthes puts it. It’s refreshingly not entertainment, edu-tainment, or a game – these are genuine exhibits that play with the idea of museumification and interrogate the real, ostensibly just outside the door in the city of Los Angeles.

Montero, D. (2007). Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. Studies in French Cinema, 6(2), 107-115.

I'll be a student again tomorrow, starting a Ph.D at USC. This shift has been a long time in coming; I've been thinking about doctoral programs since I received my MA and moved to California some three years ago. On one hand, I'm completely thrilled. I have a big list of research topics that I am dying to crack open. The lifestyle will probably agree with me, as I've been known to be a huge geek. (I'm brushing up on my APA style as I draft this by reading the 6th edition manual) On another, it's a proclamation that I have much to learn. In that, I can't help but feel humble. The state of communication research is highly fractured, fast-paced, and high-stakes. My past research interests seem like they need more focus and specificity to fully mature. Expect this blog to turn into an area where I'll draft new ideas and proposals over the next few years.

Labels: annenberg, personal, school

There is no other post possible right now than one on the Iranian elections, where Ahmadinejad’s claimed victory over Moussavi has resulted in continued fallout. In western perceptions, this is going to be a watershed moment for Twitter, the moment where it proves its worth. Communication coming out of Iran is at a crawl due to lack of cell and Internet connectivity, and journalists have been officially banned from the streets. The number of videos coming out of Iran since the elections has lessened in recent days. So, when the world cannot be watching (as the 60s cry goes), it is certainly tweeting.

Twitter hasn’t so much filled in the communication gaps to get messages out of Iran (creaky old email appears to be the primary method) but it has served as a valuable mode of propagating grassroots information. #Iranelection is still a top-trending topic and will likely be so for some time. The fact that CNN is now examining Twitter feeds live (which Jon Stewart recently lampooned on the Daily Show) makes a case for the downsides of the new agenda-setting role of the technology: our desire for a constant stream of news may simply not be possible, and by using unreliable or unverified sources, we risk entirely changing the role of news.

The Neda video (warning: very graphic content) in particular is extremely affecting. It's a short film of the last moments on this earth of a woman who has been shot in the chest. This small moment has been extrapolated from its surroundings and presented as symbolic of a movement. The moment of death can be replayed over and over. This is both extremely problematic (basically a snuff film, and a private moment that arguably shouldn’t be seen by millions of strangers) and gives agency to an important meme (hopefully provoking discussion and thought on the Iranian election). #Neda has emerged on Twitter as an important tag of its own.

The end result of the protests is unclear, but will certainly be referenced as a pivotal moment in history. As of today, the numbers of protesters has dwindled due to the government crackdown. Although it has been painted as only a middle-class affair, there is dissent
about how true this is.

Mirrored at Annenberg Online Communities.