A final paper I wrote for Media Studies: Ideas course with Peter Asaro  at The New School. It is a rambling flood of ideas but I am posting it since it touches, on just about everything I want to address in my further study in grad skool. 

“Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.”   Tom Peters, 1997

This quote appeared in Fast Company magazine in an article by Peters entitled, The Brand Called You
The basic premise laid out by Peters is that, for individuals to be successful in the contemporary business environment, they must look to prominent billion dollar brands like Nike or Pepsi for inspiration.

 Peters' message goes beyond pointing to corporate branding strategy for inspiration. It calls for individuals to actually act as corporate entities in creating an identity for themselves. In the decade since the piece was originally printed, the idea of “Personal Branding” has only become more relevant as tools for identity distribution through the internet are changing the way individuals and corporations approach mediated communication. The Internet provides a unique venue where individuals can gain agency amongst the corporate giants and this has necessitated that formerly monolithic corporate brands  borrow the identities of individuals for authenticity, one of the greatest currencies online. However, this notion that individuals can and should brand themselves in the same way that corporations are branded brings with it a very complex set of issues, that have greater implications for how we understand and develop personal identity.
    While Peters and many others like him, have been coaching individuals to brand their identities as corporations are branded, those very same corporations have been learning to behave online in a manner which mimics the way individuals use the internet for personal interactions.  This is where my personal experience comes into play: my job, for a billion dollar company, is essentially to ensure that our interactions with consumers online are authentically human. As more and more personal relationships have some element of computer mediation, the internet grows increasingly personal. For brands looking to be perceived as more human, the opportunity to communicate to potential consumers  where they engage publicly and emotionally with each other is irresistible.

    On the Internet, it was once clear, what was of the individual and of a brand, it was easy to differentiate because the kinds of communication each used in this space were different. Typically, a brand had a website, it was similar to a brochure, it had slick images or animations, it was a series of a pages with a menu of options for further information. It was static. In contrast, individuals' activity online was not. Whether through message boards and forums, MUDs and other games or online diaries and blogs, individuals represented themselves online in conversation with others. Online today, the identity of an individual and the identity of a brand can superficially be exactly the same. Individuals can easily create slick websites complete with logo and tagline and brands regularly interact with consumers on blogs and message boards. There no special font or aesthetic refinement that a can be applied to a collection of images, words and links to clearly delineate the personal from the corporate identity online. However, if I stood on any street corner and asked people passing by to tell me the difference between an individual person and a commercial brand no one would have trouble differentiating. Offline, it is easy to tell the two apart: brands are big corporate suits in the sky, brands are billboards with clever phrases and attractive faces, brands are concrete and glass edifices. We are accustomed to public space as a domain of commercial brands. The airwaves are largely commercial, the visual landscape is covered in advertisements, we think nothing of it. Our personal lives are enacted with this as a backdrop, we can easily foreground our personal relationships with other individuals in this space.
    The special properties of the Internet as a public forum create a blurring of distinctions between individuals identity and corporate brands. Danah Boyd aptly, describes the social networking sites, which have come to dominate internet communication, as ‘networked publics’,  environments where people can gather publicly through mediating technology. And although similar in some ways to the traditionally, unmediated publics, cafes, malls, etc. and mediated publics like broadcast media, she notes four properties unique to the networked publics: persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences. These technical properties are key to understanding how both the commercial and personal branded identity functions in this space.  The activities of both individuals and brands actions are published online and therefor recorded for posterity, the frequency and consistency of the message coming from one source is what creates the feeling of a personality.  Online, neither brand nor individual have physical bodies, we only have persistence of messaging to create an outline of an identifiable being, the illusion of a human presence.  The persistence is crucial to identity building online because the networked environment is a distributed and fragmented space. If messaging is inconsistent or infrequent it is lost. If frequent and consistent messaging is how one creates identity in the a networked public sphere, search is how your identity is made visible to others. Search is the process of gathering all the fragmented pieces together to manifest the conceptual whole of an identity. Internet identities are made of images and text that are immediately and simply replicable. Since there is no difference between an original and the copy, any misinterpretation is likely to reflect more  an inability on the part of the creator of the message than the ability of the receiver to comprehend it.  The fourth property, that of invisible audiences is of particular interest to the discussion of branded identity. A branded identity is engaged in a public performance. The fact that the networked identity is  performed in front of innumerable invisible audiences at anytime, has an effect similar to that of the camera, in Sontag's words, to create both create a spectacle and an opportunity for surveillance depending on the audience.
    As personal profiles created on proprietary social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, become an essential layer to our internet interactions, crafting an online identity as a brand could be beneficial to both individuals and owners of social networks. Identities in the form of public profiles allows brands to track interests and affinities and choices made online in real time. The social networking platform Facebook is positioning itself to become the dominant personal profile engine, the central location for individuals to maintain their online identities. Facebook is linking with an increasing number of major destination sites to allow users to access 'member' content and behaviors by linking their Facebook profile to each outside site they visit.  This data portability is currently a way to make mutually beneficial relationship between individuals and brands online. The individual does not have to hassle with filling out a profile page or logging in to each site they visit and the brand can collect information from users in a seamless almost invisible process, where user clicks on one box which allows a new site to collect their data in trade for unlocking some information, tool or service. 
    Making use of the internet as a tool can be very effective for individuals looking to build a small business but creating a brand of oneself also has the effect of denigrating identities into shallow demographics. The Internet allows individuals to constantly compare themselves to others publicly. Tools like Google search and the personal profiles we create on any social network like Facebook or LinkedIn are information flatteners where numbers of friends or professional connections are public and can be easily measured up against others. Any words we use to describe ourselves and to find information online or to communicate with others online is recorded and trackable. As more activities are required online, from bill paying, shopping, interacting with friends far and near become par for the course we become more comfortable expressing ourselves and sharing information with invisible audiences. Obviously beneficial to marketers eager to funnel the communications of individuals online into ad placements it could work against diversity online which, in theory, would be what is important for growth and survival of any living organism. The practice of creating a personal brand of ones identity could, be defended as a way for individuals to maintain some control of ones information and image in this environment, however the more crafted a personal identity appears the less authentic it becomes.
    Around the same time Peters' article on personal branding hit the shelves for the business minded masses, Sherry Turkle's research on the relationship between computational technologies and images of the self was published for the academic community in the New School's Social Research quarterly. It is far too great a task for me to come up with any definitive connection between these two treatise on identity, written for disparate audiences and published around the same time. But I do believe there is a significance to making at least some alignment here.  In her writing, Turkle is concerned with the “change in the cultural identity of the computer and consequently in the kind of mirror that computers offer for thinking about self. Computational theories of intelligence now support decentered and emergent views of mind; experience with today's computational objects encourages rethinking identity in terms of multiplicity and flexibility.”   Peters' personal branding strategy only  points directly to the influence of technology on his thinking, when remarking that the reason one can navigate the internet or our email inboxes is due to some form of branding. What more clearly reflects  Turkle's idea of a flexible and distributed identity is his assertion that “all kinds of products and services -- from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants -- are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.”  Peters sees that this ability to transcend boundaries will be crucial to the commercial success of any businesses. As members of a capitalist society, an individuals value to the culture is as a producer and consumer of capital and as such, individuals will also need to follow suit.
    Saatchi + Saatchi advertising agency coined the term 'Lovemarks' for brands which manage to consistently permeate these boundaries. “Lovemarks transcend brands. They deliver beyond your expectations of great performance. Like great brands, they sit on top of high levels of respect - but there the similarities end. Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever. Take a brand away and people will find a replacement. Take a Lovemark away and people will protest its absence. Lovemarks are a relationship, not a mere transaction. You don’t just buy Lovemarks, you embrace them passionately. That’s why you never want to let go. Put simply, Lovemarks inspire "Loyalty Beyond Reason"” Brands seeking to create loyalty beyond reason by inspiring consumers to literally love them is certainly an impressive goal and it is similar rhetoric that is echoed by every ad agency today when they describe value of interactions with consumers online. However, when I read it I immediately brought to mind an image of a sad wooden Pinocchio hoping that by emulating human activity they will one day be worthy of the human love and respect. There is something desperate and telling about brands needing to working so hard to inspire such loyalty. Conversely, a similar desperation can be felt in the communications of individuals with who subscribe to the idea of branding their personal identity.
       Turkle believes that our interactions with technologies create useful metaphors, which shape the way we think of ourselves, regardless of our understanding of actually how it works.  “ Appropriable theories, ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, tend to be those which people can become actively involved. They tent to be theories than can be “played” with. So one way to think about social appropriablity of a given theory is to ask whether it is accompanied by its own objects-to-think-with that can help it move beyond intellectual circles.”  The Internet public sphere serves as an “object-to-think-with” where we can engage in a mediated identity play, experimenting not only with relationships to each other but also in our role as individuals within a capitalist society. Corporate brands are developed specifically to interact and survive within the capitalist system, today's brands experiment with personal relationships online only to maintain a status within this system.  Individuals who are 'good' at personal branding are only successful at interacting with an apparatus and manipulating a system in the same way a corporate brand does. This in no way transfers to the individuals worth in any other system, which is where the Pinocchio effect comes in.  Both brands and individuals are striving to craft identities which are simultaneously fragmented and distributable yet recognizable and consistent in order to gain agency in this system.  If either tips too far into the other's domain they risk revealing that unless magic fairies exist, they will never truly become a real individual or real brand.
    Through mediated identity play we are creating digital extensions of our identities. Crafting  personal identities in this space, as a brand can be helpful for potentially controlling information about ourselves and  it can allow for experimentation with relationship to capitalist socialization but it can also create hollow representations online of what it means to be an individual and the blurring lines between individual identity and branding could possibly inspire unfortunate loyalties beyond reason.
In the Future of Internet III, a study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Foundation, Nicholas Carr predicts this inevitable convergence with disturbing consequences. “By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy—consciously or unconsciously—for consumer benefits  such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared.”  Carr's may sounds like the doomsday warning but for better or worse, it is already becoming a reality. The populace online engages in millions of tiny negotiations with businesses and governments on a daily basis as we maintain our personal identities through public profiles, dispersing pieces our expressions of self across proprietary platforms, transversing boundaries unaware of invisible audiences. The more practiced we become at social interactions in internet public sphere, the more comfortable we are sharing information and developing personal relationships through these media. The more we do this the more intimate and emotional our relationship to the experience of mediated self representation itself becomes. If it is more beneficial for individuals to differentiate themselves from the behaviors of brands online or to align themselves remains to be seen, but close attention should be paid to any places where boundaries overlap for they are be key to understanding the meaning of identity in the internet public sphere.

References

Janna Anderson, Lee Rainie “The Future of The Internet III”, Pew Internet and American Life Project; December 2008 <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp>

Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility," in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008: 19-55.

danah boyd,  “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?”
Knowledge Tree 13, May  2007. http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28

danah boyd  “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.”  MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital  Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2007

danah boyd and Judith Donath  "Public displays of connection." BT Technology Journal, 22 (4) October, 2004: 71-82.

danah boyd and Jeffrey Heer.  “Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster.”  In Proceedings of the Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-39), Persistent Conversation Track. Kauai, HI: IEEE Computer Society. January 4 - 7, 2006.

Guy Debord, "The Commodity as Spectacle," reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, Eds., Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, Rev. Ed., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001: 139-143.

Torben Grodal, "Stories for the Eye, Ear, and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experiences," in The Video Game Theory Reader, Mark J. P. Wolf, and Bernard Perron (eds.), New York: Routledge, 2003: 129-155.

Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article," reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, Eds., Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, Rev. Ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001: 102-107.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York, NY: Routledge, 1991: 149-181.

Hari Kunzru, "You Are Cyborg: Interview with Donna Haraway", Wired Issue 5.02, Feb 1997

Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You”, Fast Company Issue 10,  August 1997

Susan Sontag,"The Image-World," On Photography, New York: Picador, 1973: 153-180.

Michael Taussig, "Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds," in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, New York and London: Routledge, 1994: 205-213.

Sherry Turkle, “Computational technologies and images of the self “ Social Research; Fall 1997; 64, 3; ABI/INFORM Global pg. 1093

"Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands". Lovemarks.com, Saatchi & Saatchi 12/12/08 <http://www.lovemarks.com/index.php?pageID=20020 >.

                                                            Sir Winston Churchill

This project stems from a series of interviews I have filmed with women who are burlesque dancers as well as conversations I have had with women working professionally in standup, improv, sketch comedy and comedy writing. There is something very specific to the kind of agency these women are creating for themselves through the intentional use of burlesque to lampoon established images of femininity in western popular culture. They are intentionally using their own bodies to be confrontational and at the same time charm their audiences with a coquettish sexuality.  Using the reemergence of burlesque as a spring board to look at the idea of comedy and sexuality as the emergent mode for female dominance via media.  Through interviews and textual analysis of performances, of women who write and perform their own material as investigation of the possibilities for women to assume control in the larger narratives and representation of women within popular culture. There is a wealth of writing on topics related to this idea including historical documentation of women performing comedy, theoretical texts on sexualized self representation by women and explorations of humor and feminism.  I selected a cross-section for this review as a touchstone for beginning my own research. Some very relevant books have been omitted from this review but only because I was not able to access them in the timeline for this assignment.

Feminist Theory

The subject of women and humor is clearly present but ultimately as a side note in feminist theory. However, it seems like an obvious way to engage with younger generation of women who do not feel they are part of a specifically feminist history.  I am interested in foregrounding the burlesque combination of humor and sexuality as a mode of critique for  women writer/performers working within the contemporary media environment. By using a sophisticated combination of humor and sexuality women can burlesque centuries worth of feminine representations. In this way, they craft hybrid identities for themselves within the heavily mediated contemporary cultural environment. This could be prescribed as a feminist mode of media critique, which can be highly visible and thus effective in influencing new perceptions of femininity. Much of the writing around feminist theory and humor is often about  a lack of humor in feminist theory due to feelings that the subject was too serious to make light of.  Helen Cioux's 1975, Laugh of Medussa, provides an excellent text for exploring the feminist theory aspect of this for several reasons.  It advocates that women must write and I think women today would especially appreciate that Cioux does not specify content or form – which opens a door for many types of female authority to emerge. She also writes that women must use their bodies to tell their stories since they cannot escape the meaning of its presence – so, women must write from their perspective and they must acknowledge their physicality in order for their writing to assert power in a larger cultural dialog.  The inversion of the medusa myth from screaming to laughter is the perfect parallel for looking at how women are writing/performing themselves, today.

Women's Humor

There have been many attempts to identify a sense of humor specific to the female experience. In the book, They Used to Call me Snow White, Regina Berreca points to the fact that women have used double entendre to provide coded messages in comedy (performed on a stage or personal life) out of necessity because showing outright wit was not socially acceptable. Berreca looks at female characters in classic and contemporary texts and even the actors who portrayed them on screen. She mentions the formidable Lorelie of Anita Loo's Gentlemen Prefer Blonds a story itself that burlesques a type of woman which Loo's felt was the type men  desire. A coded message that would " have no trouble getting by the censors despite the fact that the hidden message could easily be understood by the audience." (p17) A woman who purrs to men cloyingly with a wink to women watching that this man is clearly a fool. She describes a 'double-voiced dialog' in which women, aware of the humor in a situation are trained by societal conditioning not to confront it directly.

The many ways that humor is used to gain power in social situations is a predominant theme of writing about women and comedy. Women of a certain generation have been made to feel uncomfortable women using humor as a tool because it implies sexual experience, as is asserted by many examples from film, television and social conventions which  align use of humor with 'bad girls'. The message from such portrayals is that we are to look negatively upon those women who do use humor.  It could be useful to bring  contemporary insight to this area, by observing and interviewing women of the next generation, those who grew up with a different set of images of femininity. Is there Such a Thing As Women's Humor by Sevda Caliskan addresses directly the idea of a specifically female sense of humor. The  combination of the perspective of women in general from a position of  “other “ and that humor has publicly belonged to men, creates a situation where women in comedy is inherently subversive because it is seen as an exception to the rule rather than for its own independent relevance. Out of necessity, women writers/performers have learned to rely on subtext and double entendre in order to make a place for themselves, without uprooting the existing hierarchy of male dominance in comedy.  Many examples of women as in performance or social context, using a strategy of subversive humor to  satirize and call out double standards, are provided in existing writing on women and humor.

A Popular Discussion

The subject of funny, sexy women was brought into the public sphere recently when Vanity Fair published an essay from Cristopher Hitchens entitled “Why Women Aren't Funny.” The essay is essentially an anthology of  all the historical mythology around women and humor, subtract a few contemporary references and it could easily be mistaken for something written in the 1950's.  The article generated a good deal of discussion online between women writers and comedians and  served as a build up to a cover story in the magazine about a recent trend of funny and (not so coincidentally, beautiful) women making names for themselves in mainstream comedy television and film today, including Tina Fey former head writer and cast members from Saturday Night Live. Vanity Fair continued the dialog with a rebuttal from Hitchens in a video interview online where he reiterates his real provocation which is that women don't need to be funny evolutionarily.

History and Revival of Burlesque Performance

One of the few pieces I found investigating use by women of a specific distribution mechanism for creation of this type of self image, in this case the photo promotional cards, carte visite etc.e, . The early self representation by women actors and proto-burlesque performers, in the mid 1800s on and how they used photography to create and mass disseminate a simultaneously sexy and comedic image of themselves. This was the beginning of the modern the pin-up, a sexually self aware yet charmingly coy, promotional image meant for mass distribution. Even in the earliest form these images played with feminine stereotypes and shamelessly blurred the boundaries of a character and the performer.  This sets up a historic president for women to use combination of sexuality and comedic parody of sexuality to create a powerful hybrid identity for themselves.  The feminist theory approach these images of women has been addressed in her book The Happy Stripper.  It profiles several eras of burlesque through the work of performers and looks at what modern burlesque reveals about the contemporary condition of post-feminism. There is something empowering to the women performing and observing this burlesque with its bold, smart, tounge-in-cheek humor. "The burlesque performer looks back, smiles and questions her audience, as well as her performance, a performance that is comic outlandish and saucy, a highly camp mostly vintage spectacle. Burlesque is the low invading the high it cheekishly and brashly moved into the mainstream, adopting its forms, performance art, comedy, circus, modern dance, but without taking any one too seriously." The burlesque body is a place where all kinds of issues are called into light, class, agency, economics, gender etc. all the while, it a light entertainment that can appeal to a cross section of male and female audiences. It can be used to address a public indifference which she sees in many young women  have to calling themselves feminists. Walker is a bit uncomfortable with too quickly aligning this new-burlesque with female empowerment but, in my own research interviewing performers and women who are active as producers and educators, it is clear to that their work is on the whole, very intentional and intellectually inspired.

Summary

Since my own area of expertise is neither women's literature or feminist theory,  comedy or sociology  but rather the study of digital media and the new modes distribution and social interactions that it allows for, I propose to study how the  burlesquing female fits in this context. Women have used burlesque as a way to reassert control over the eroticism of female body and to create a complex self-image not available in the traditional female archetypes offered by the mainstream media.  A study of the self-made funny, sexy female as an alternative archetype throughout history could construct a feminist theory of interest to young women, today which encourages them to own burlesquing of culture as a right and responsibility.

References

Barreca, Regina. They Used to Call Me Snow White. New York: Viking, 1991

Buszek, Maria-Elena, “Representing "Awarishness":Burlesque, Feminist Transgression, and the 19th-    Century” The Drama Review 43.4 (1999) 141-162

Caliskan, Sevda. “Is There Such a Thing as Women's Humor?”, American Studies International v33     (1994) p49-59 O

Cioux, Helene. “The Laugh of The Medusa.” SIGNS 1:4 1976: 875-881. University of Chicago Press. Rpt. In The Essential Feminist Reader. Ed. Estelle Freedman. New York: Random House, 2007. 318-324.

Dresner, Zita and Walker, Nancy, eds.  Redressing the Balance: American Women's Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s.  Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1988

Fraiberg, Alison. “Between the Laughter: Bridging Feminist Studies through Women's Stand-Up Comedy.” Look Who's Laughing: Gender And Comedy. Ed. Gail Finney. Amsterdam: Gordon And Breach, 1994. 315-333

Gray, Frances. Women And Laughter. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1994

Hitchens, Cristopher. “Why Women Aren't Funny.”  Vanity Fair January. 2007

Hitchens, Cristopher. “Why Women Still Aren't Funny.” Vanity Fair Magazine  YouTube Channel April. 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7izJggqCoA

Stanley, Alessandra. “Who Says Women Aren't Funny.” Vanity Fair April. 2008

Wilson, Jackie. The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque.

-Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon

I have so many notes from the Futures of Entertainment Conference that I figured I should just start throwing some of them up here in posts for archival purposes. They are fairly raw because, at this point, I am more interested in crafting interesting questions for further exploration than coming up with any definitive answers.

Opening comments from Henry Jenkins:

Viral Media model traps us and doesn't allow for important questions of Consumer Agency to be asked.
The term meme has really fallen into this unfortunate usage as well, and it puts an excessive importance on preservation of original and less on changes tha occur as something gets passed around. These changes, mutations are how content is now developed and given meaning.

Hybrid Spaces where new alliances and collaborations arise between unlikely partners   - Great term, it describes very well the kinds of media I am interested in.

New active children - while much of media wants to focus on male fanboys, social media is clearly showing us that women are just as relevant as an audience, Twilight as example.

Also mentioned was the obsession in the industry with problem of loyalty in a dispersed media landscape. This is something I am confronted with working for a television network. When the entire business model is built around driving to one place to access the content, it is hard to understand the notion that content, to be succesfully distributed in this new media landscape, it needs to be fireworks exploding outward rather than a black hole pulling inward.

Lewis Hyde:  Gift Economy v. Commodity Culture
The difference between these types of exchange, is in the motivation.
Emotional, social, economic properties
Gift Economy = esteem takes place of cash, social transaction - worth more as it circulates?
Commodity Culture =monitary value - worth less as it circulates?
Antiques Road show served as a great example this back and forth between worth and value, money and sentiment and our obsession with it.

Wires are getting crossed because individuals want to participate in CC and corporations using GE to gain esteem of individuals. This is pretty much exactly what I have proposed as a topic for a paper. I think about it a lot in light of the time I spend examining marketing in this space for my job. And as well, it ties into the issues around authenticity which fascinated me in my early online video experiences. 

What happens when worth becomes value and value becomes worth?
Is it possible to create value and generate worth at the same time, how? 

Some general notes for Media Studies: Ideas Final

I would like to address the recent trend, calling for individuals to craft their identities online as if they were a brand. On the one hand, learning to use the internet as a tool can be very effective for individuals with a specific goal. On the other, creating a brand of oneself denigrates identities into shallow demographics. This may be great for marketers eager to figure out how to funnel the communications of individuals online into ad placements but is it good for the internet as a public sphere and the individuals that make it up? This trend works against diversity which, in theory, would be what is important for growth and survival of any living organism.

Individuals identities online are also useful to brands right now, because they offer authenticity. When individuals online have effectively branded themselves are their identities less authentic=less valuable. In effect this makes the individual a competitive brand or a potential business partner with corporate identities online. With individuals are seeking to function like brands online and brands looking to be perceived more like individuals, what are the implications of this mediated relationship between corporations and individuals online? What are the ramifications for personal identity and what an identity is vs. a public profile?

Does defining oneself as a brand and acting as such in online interactions, disempower or empower individuals? What is the opposite of this? Online, what really separates individual identities from corporate brands, anyway?

I welcome any suggestions for reading along these lines. I will post whatever I end up using in my research here, as well.

-Donna Haraway

I just returned from a weekend of convergence culture convening at MIT's Future's of Entertainment Conference. I am still reeling from all the amazing people and potent conversations. Although a relatively small group attends this event, the variety and level of engagement is remarkable. Just sifting through the pile of business cards I collected over the weekend, from experienced thinkers and do-ers, producers and PHDs alike, I am reminded the importance of this very rare, much needed, opportunity for exchange.

The conference started on a pitch perfect note when Henry Jenkins called out the Myth of Viral media, which got a hearty Amen! from those gathered before him. The point is, we know that the injection theory, is just not true. Consumers are not simply impregnated with ideas, people have agency and contexts as well, are dynamic, and especially so in todays media environment. 'Viral' is clearly the wrong metaphor to rely on, if we really want to understand the complicated things that the internet is teaching us about media and how people (have always) connected to each other through it. Avoiding use of the word became an excellent test for all the panelists, keeping everyone on their feet and avoiding falling back on BS industry terminology.

This conscientiousness with language is one of the important aspects of this conference. Having a dialog about the industry that takes place in an academic context forces more specific articulation, guiding the discussion to the real issue by not overly simplifying with some non-dairy whipped topping buzzwords.

Last year, the overall sentiment that moved me the most was a sincere desire we all shared to make (promote, distribute etc.) meaningful experiences for people through entertainment.  The this year I would say, the word empathy struck me as a defining theme. In the closing panel Maurício Mota of New Content (Brazil), created a nice bookend when he so passionately advocated for empathizing with audiences - seems so obvious but is the first the to get lost in the frenzy over new technologies and money making schemes around media.

Entertainment which is attempting to broadcast with generic broad stroke demographic information is no longer working (and I think many would agree, has always sucked.) The key is to remember that an audience is still made up of individuals with varying interests and changing needs from moment to moment.

I'll be posting more specific thoughts from various panels in the next few days. I noticed Mike Arauz is also thinking about audiences and fans in particular and I am sure he'll be posting more from FOE3 as are many others. The official Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of conference notes posted, as well.

(image credit - Factoryjoe )

-Stephen Colbert

Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Stephen Johnson

Johnson's book is an argument against a common assumption that contemporary popular culture makes its consumers dumber over time. He advocates for a new set of standards to assess the value of the popular media culture object based on what types of neurological functions video game or television program is allows it’s audience to exercise rather than the moralistic view of what the content of a storyline teaches. "looking at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not a series of life lessons" (p.14)

Through a formal analysis of the narrative structures of television shows, films and video games he quoting such diverse sources as mathematicians, game theory scholars and screenplay writers. Although he includes a personal narrative and perspective to make it more rateable, Johnson primarily takes a systematic approach to investigating the subject. He culls data from many sciences including specific Sociological studies and citing Neuroscience research into how the brain works. He points to several specific studies on game theory and supports his statements with a variety of texts from the established Media Studies and Cultural Theory cannon.

Johnson coins the term Sleeper Curve for thesis that mass culture is altering the cognitive development of young people in a positive rather than negative manner. Because today's popular cultural objects are more complex in narrative structure and form than that of preceding eras the cognitive skills developed by playing a video game or watching The Simpsons, are as valuable as those developed by reading classic literature or other older forms of popular media. He identifies two forms of intellectual labor which occur when playing modern video games: Probing – essentially learning the scientific method via exploring and poking around to builds knowledge with which to make educated guesses about how something works.  Telescoping –  prioritizing and managing sets of tasks that are nested one within the next, building up complete the larger task at hand. These are important skills in today's world that are quite difficult to teach in a linear way. Similarly, modern TV also develops certain skills set in our brains for example, the prominence of nonlinear narratives and multi-character storylines which require viewers to keep track of many ideas at once and do not allow for neatly packaged conclusions.

Thus:

Audiences expectations are changing and so is the type of media they are consuming. We should not underestimate the "work" that the brain is doing when engaged with these films/tv shows/video games. Being merely a spectator in modern culture is becoming the less dominant experience. What seems passive is actually focus.

Yes, there is a lot of junk out there but in comparison to the junk 20 years ago today's junk ain't so bad and the good stuff now is really quite good.

This book admittedly does not have sufficient data to support its precepts properly in a scientific environment and Johnson hopes that the book will actually inspire more empirical research in this area. Regardless, it is a helpful starting point for thinking about what is unique to today's popular media and how to assess its value in a practical way, for example, to serve as a guide for concerned parents. Ultimately, a well informed and open minded  exploration, I really enjoyed it  - will post more personal thoughts when I have time.