Comparisons • Criticism of a TV mind vs. a typographic mind (Postman)• TV as a way to communicate context and complexity when

print journalism no longer can (The Wire) • Radio program that seems like long-form journalism, but is

actually crime storytelling. (Serial)

• Serious Television is a contradiction of terms • Transforms culture into show business• Attacks literate culture • Makes entertainment itself the natural format for the

representation of all experience

Postman’s view on TV

Peek-A-Boo World

• “one neighborhood of the whole country”

Samuel Finley Breese Morse

co-developer of the Morse code, and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy

• “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate…”

• --Henry David Thoreau

Information from a Telegraph • Irrelevance• Impotence• incoherence

non-functional Information• All about novelty, interest and curiosity

Partnership of Press and the Telegraph• Papers invested in the

Magnetic Telegraph Company• Fortunes of newspapers

depended on distance rather than the quality or utility of the news

• James Bennett, New York Herald, boasted his paper contained 79,000 words of telegraphic content (1848)

Does info from the media cause you to…

• Alter your plans for the day?• Take some action you would not

otherwise have taken?• Provide insight into some

problem you are required to solve?

• News (of the day) gives us something to talk about, but doesn’t lead to any meaningful action (according to Postman)

• The telegraph lowered the information-action ratio

• Limited historical perspective• Context• Implications• Background• Connections

Photography

• A world of fact, not of dispute• “A world of photography implies that we know about the world

if we accept it as the camera records it” • “all borders seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated. Can be

made discontinuous from anything else: All that is necessary is to frame the subject differently”

• --Susan Sontag

Ferguson

Ferguson

Baltimore

Baltimore

Photograph and telegraphy

• Language that denies interconnectedness• Proceeds without context• Argues the irrelevance of history• Explained nothing • Offers fascination in place of complexity and coherence • The world created by these media is self contained and like peek-a-

boo, endlessly entertaining

TV • Has achieved the status of myth (Roland Barthes)• We view it and it helps us understand the world in ways that

are not considered “problematic” • The way TV communicates seems natural • A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded on our

consciousness that it is invisible • The peek-a-boo world that TV has constructed does not seem

strange to us

Results (according to Postman)• Adjustment to the epistemology of TV • Irrelevance seems important and incoherence sane• TV speaks in one consistent voice (entertainment)• Transforming our culture into one vast arena for show

business• Attacks literate culture

•Postman claims: Television has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience

Are Meet the Press, Charlie Rose or Bill Moyers callbacks to literate culture?

• These shows do not compete well with entertaining and visual forms

The World is staged like TV

• Religion (Rock-and-Roll Priests)• Politics (Debates have to utilize one-liners—page 97) • Education (Professors who have teaching gimmicks or maybe who

show TV in class?)

• Age of Exposition" that defined Typographic America has been replaced by a spectacle that prizes flash and entertainment over substance. Entertainment has become the content of all of our discourse, so that the message itself is less important than the entertainment value of its delivery.

Does the news leave Viewers more confused?

• Fragments of tragedy and barbarism

• Good looks and amiability of the cast

• Exciting music • Attractive commercials

Shouldn’t we be weeping?

• Not necessarily when TV news is a format of entertainment and not one of education, reflection, or catharsis

TV News • Has no suggestion that a story has any implication • “Now this” the most horrible news will be followed by commercials

If you do not receive news on TV--• What is your current experience of “Now This”?

Consistency of Tone• Books and films maintain consistency of tone• Consistency of Content• TV presents Discontinuity• Ex. A newscaster reports that we are on the brink of nuclear

disaster and then they cut to a commercial from Burger King • Does the internet do the same?

• Aesthetics=Dadaism• Philosophy=Nihilism• Psychology=Schizophrenia

Dis-information• If the lies of a president could be dramatized like a film, then

there would be outrage• Lie = Contradiction • Understanding a contradiction requires context

Debates • Debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln

took place on August 21 1858. Douglas spoke first (for three hours) and Lincoln needed at least that long for a rebuttal.

Current Debates: • Quick one-liners• Talking Points• Nothing too dry, intellectual, or contextual

Subversion/Social Critique • The Hollywood Blacklist lasted until 1960• Sirk could not critique American Culture in the

same way that Simon can today• That critique had to exist within the framework

of a women’s weepy

Imitation of Life 1959

• Subversive—performances• How the story unfolds• Return to domesticity• Annie and Sarah Jane

fill the film’s emotional void

• The irony is that Turner’s “real problems” are the concerns of the comfortable, recycled from the imitation-of-life movie melodramas of the 1940s. The problems of soap opera are individual, personal, and capable of resolution by individual moral choice. (Dee can be made to see that her crush on Gavin will not be reciprocated.) The problems of Moore and Kohner are those of survival and identity; they are collective, racial, social, and open-ended — incapable of resolution within the conventions of the woman’s picture.

Crime Story vs. Melodrama • Controls knowledge

• The genre aims to create curiosity about past story events

• Suspense about upcoming story events

• Surprise with respect to unexpected disclosures about either story or plot detail

• We learn what the detective learns when he or she learns it

• Focus tends to be on finding out who committed a crime

• Closure—leading towards full knowledge

• Story can rely on broad emotional impact

• Evokes pity, sometimes irony or distanciation. Sirk and Bertholdt Brecht

• Maximizes the viewer’s urge to know what will happen next—and, especially, how any given character will react to what has happened

•  The emotional expressiveness of the film issues partly from the narration’s tendency to be omni--communicative

•  To wring every emotional drop out of the narration employs omniscience

• Plot will inform us of initiation of a chain of action and then skip over some time or move to another line of action

Melodrama (continued)• Various characters discover what viewers already know

•  Unrestricted knowledge: of multiple storylines

•  Crosscutting different plotlines

•  Following several characters from one locale to another

• Expanded range of knowledge

Conventions• Conventions are the generally accepted ways of doing

something. There are general conventions in any medium, such as the use of interviewee quotes in a print article, but conventions are also genre specific.

Story ConventionsClosure, Safety, DiscourseStructure of CSIStructure of Law and Order What do those shows mean?What are they saying?

Causal Connections • People are less likely to keep events straight if a story is not

causal and merely sequential • Many times when causality is not part of a sequence of events

—it will be supplied by the viewer/reader

Canonical Story Format • Introduction or Exposition: Explanation of setting, basic

character attributes, equilibrium • Complication Action: Introduction of conflict,

obstacles, • Ensuing Events dealing with conflict • Conclusion, outcome, ending.

Primacy Effect• Initial information establishes a frame of reference to which

subsequent information is subordinated as far as possible • Ex: When a character is presented as virtuous they will tend to

be considered so even in the face of some contrary evidence • Ex: When we are hearing the state/prosecution’s story as the

truth—we are led to believe that’s how things really happened

Delayed Gratification (Retardation)

• Essential to narrative structure • Expository interruptions• Blocked expectations balanced with immediate ones • Delay in satisfying hypothesis can be exploited to trigger new

expectations • A viewer’s hypothesis can be clearly validated, invalidated, or

left dangling • Perceptual hypotheses tend to be vague and open ended and

they are seldom disconfirmed

SIN MURDER AND NARRATION

• Transtextual motivation is a strong factor in determining a story’s narrational options.

• The Detective film (Serial) • The Melodrama (The Wire)

Crime

• Cause of Crime• Commission of Crime • Concealment of Crime • Discovery of Crime

Investigation

• Beginning of investigation • Phases of investigation • Elucidation of crime• Identification of criminal • Consequences of identification

The detective story justifies its gaps and retardations (delayed story development)

• Controls knowledge • The genre aims to create curiosity about past story

events • Suspense about upcoming story events• Surprise with respect to unexpected disclosures about

the story• We learn what the detective learns when he or she

learns it

• We are not allowed access to the detective’s inferences until he or she voices them

• The activity of piecing together cause and effect in the crime plot constitutes the central formal convention of the detective tale

• Romance becomes another factor. The detective is attracted to the Femme Fatale even if he suspects them of deception, betrayal or even worse (Could be why listeners interpret Sarah as “in love” with Adnan.)

Ethnography • A method of nuanced qualitative social research “in which fine

grained daily interactions constitute the life blood of the data being produced

• Simon’s work from back to the Baltimore Sun could be described as ethnographic from the beginning

Methodology for The Corner • Long-term, one year stay in the field where a particular set of

social relations can be observed • The observer learns the visuals and the habits of the culture

by following selected individuals in their work and daily lives • Police culture and drug culture • Stand-around-and-watch-journalism

George Marcus • Inherent problem with the ethnographic method • Concentrates on a specific location of study • “single site” ethnographers have recourse to a larger whole

that has not been studied in so deep a systematic fashion • Researchers do not have data for the whole • This amounts to an abstraction: “the state, capitalism and so

on.• Enables some sort of closure • He and others developed an ambition to undertake a multi-

sited ethnography • One that can approach the system as a whole

The problem…• No single ethnographer has enough knowledge of enough

worlds or enough time to map this constantly evolving world system

“ethnographic imaginary”• World enough and time

• 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 to the city’s problems• 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.”