Spectacle | SCHOOL OF NO MEDIA: Beyond the Described & the Prescribed

MORE IS MORE?

The Unlearning Specialist — Sat, 28 Nov 2015 20:07:10 +0000

[Ed.: Are words just by themselves the essence of hyperbole?]

Death by Internet Hyperbole: Literally Dying Over This Column
By Jessica Bennett

From the New York Times
The text exchange was unspectacular: a friend explaining a video that had been posted by a classmate to his Snapchat feed. Jordana Narin, my 20-year-old research assistant, was half paying attention, sitting in my living room working on a project, texting between breaks.

“Omg literally dying,” she typed back, not missing a beat. She turned back to her computer.

But Jordana wasn’t literally dying. She wasn’t figuratively dying, either. In fact, she didn’t even crack a smile.

“I don’t even know what she’s talking about,” she told me when I asked. “I want to be like, ‘I don’t care.’”

But instead, she typed what to some may seem like the most dramatic response imaginable. Except that it wasn’t.

“It’s almost like ‘dying’ has become a filler for anytime anyone says anything remotely entertaining,” she said. “Like, if what you’re saying won’t legitimately put me to sleep, I respond with, ‘OMG dying.’”

R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it).

Other examples: THIS (for when a thing is so awesome you are at a loss for how to describe it); feeeeeels (for something that gives you multiple feelings); unreal!!!! (for when a thing is totally believable and only mildly amusing); yassssss (because “yes” will no longer do); -est (greatest, prettiest, cutest, funniest) EVER, which now applies to virtually all things; and “I can’t even,” for when something leaves you so emotive that you simply cannot even explain yourself.

There’s also a;lsdkjfa;lsdkgjs; meaning “I’m so excited/angry/speechless that all I can do is literally slam my hands/head/body against the keyboard” (thus producing a series of gibberish that usually involves the letters a, s, d and k).

“I use ‘I can’t even’ whenever I talk about babies or puppies, or sometimes couples, but not like couples our age, but older couples like my parents,” said Sharon Attia, my other 20-year-old researcher, a photojournalism student at New York University.

Other members of the “I can’t even” advisory system, she said, include: “I can’t,” “I just can’t even,” “I cannot,” “I literally cannot” and “I have lost the ability to even,” each of which can be used interchangeably to express hilarity, excitement, embarrassment, that something’s cute, that something’s hideous, or just that you’re freaking out.

But hyperbolic death is perhaps its own linguistic category, with recent causes that include (at least according to my Facebook feed): Beyonce’s Instagram (“dyyying”); a video of a huskie looking shocked when his owner wouldn’t give him the last bite of his food (“*dead*”); and Hillary Clinton, who was captured in a GIF brushing off the shoulder of her blazer during the 11-hour Benghazi hearings (“This is the best thing to ever have happened”).

Eternal rest can also take the form of “dying” (death in process), “not breathing” (first sign of possible death), “all the way dead,” “actually dead” and “literally dead” (just so you know), as well as “literally bye” (for when you’re about to die), “ded” (when you are dying so fast that typing an “a” would delay the entire process) and “RIP me” (after you’ve had a moment to process it). There’s also kms, or “killing myself,” which, as 15-year-old Ruby Karp, a high school student in Manhattan, explained it, can be used to say something like “ugh so much homework kms!”

In Jordana’s case, “dying” or “dead” had been used in recent conversations to respond to:

A friend drunk-texting.

Seeing a Dane Cook look-alike and his dog on the street.

An unlikely romantic pairing.

A friend live-tweeting “50 Shades of Grey” (so good she was “dying AND dead”).

How good an article was.

Hearing an author she admired speak (“omg actually dying”).

Eating Pringles in bed.

“‘Literally dying’ has become, like, the new LOL,” she said, referring to the acronym for “laugh out loud,” which, of course, if you know literally anything about Internet speech, means precisely the opposite.

The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. Studies have shown that women tend to be more expressive, using more personal pronouns, more emotive words, more abbreviations like LOL, as well as creative punctuation, emoji and even more descriptive hashtags.

But such speech is not limited to them. “I can’t even” has been around for at least a few decades, part of a linguistic concept known as “negative polarity,” when there are two negatives in a sentence. The use of “literally” in situations where “figuratively” would fit perfectly — you know, it was literally 100 degrees just last week — has been in use since at least the 1700s, said Jane Solomon, a lexicographer at Dictionary.com. And hyperbole is in some ways necessary, as the impact of certain words erodes with time. (Think of how “great” used to mean really great, like Catherine the Great great, whereas now it’s hardly better than “good.”)

The Internet has taken all these speech patterns and hit them with a dose of caffeine: the need to express emotion in bite-size, 140-character bits; the fact that we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There’s a performative element, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind.

“I think this may be one of the major parts for social media; you are stepping onto a stage,” said Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language. “Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that.”

And so it is, then, that a member of the boy band One Direction shows off his pecs onstage, and girls on Tumblr coo that their “ovaries are exploding.” That when the pop star Taylor Swift hosts a series of surprise listening parties for a new album, her fans respond that “My poor heart could not keep up,” “call me an ambulance,” “we all died” and “I literally had to plan my funeral arrangements cause I wasn’t going to make it.” Even editors do it, writing headlines that declare “This rapper will restore your faith in humanity” (really? Will he?) or that you “need to drop everything and watch this.” Yes, it’s as if we speak in click-bait now, every response more dramatic than the last.

Yet if a bacon-flavored ice cream sundae gives you all the “feels ever,” or you are “dead” over a cute cat photo, how do you respond if something is actually dramatic?

One idea is to play dead. That’s the concept behind @omgliterallydead, an Instagram account that features a skeleton (“Skellie”) engaging in everyday activities: drinking a pumpkin-spice latte, relaxing in a sauna; out for sushi. Skellie is a play on death, clearly, yet when I mentioned him to a college student I know, she responded: “Skellie is LIFE!!!!” (What’s more dramatic than being six feet under, rolling in your grave, actual skeleton dead? “The afterlife, obviously,” joked Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist.)

Or, if you’re Madison Jones, Ms. Narin’s roommate who recently responded “dead” to a baby picture her father had texted her, you prompt a family-wide panic about the state of your health.

“What?? Dead what??” her dad texted. “Maddy?”

“Dad I’m fine holy cow!” she replied. “Dead at that pic cause it’s rly cute!!!”

Jessica Bennett’s first book, “Feminist Fight Club,” will be published in 2016.
© New York Times 2015

The Vacation by Wendell Berry

The Unlearning Specialist — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 20:44:54 +0000

The Vacation

By Wendell Berry

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation.

He went flying down the river in his boat

with his video camera to his eye, making

a moving picture of the moving river

upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly

toward the end of his vacation. He showed

his vacation to his camera, which pictured it,

preserving it forever: the river, the trees,

the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat

behind which he stood with his camera

preserving his vacation even as he was having it

so that after he had had it he would still

have it. It would be there. With a flick

of a switch, there it would be. But he

would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Poem copyright ©2012 by Wendell Berry, from his most recent book of poems, New Collected Poems, Counterpoint, 2012.
Authorization Pending.

[Thanks to Wendell Berry & to P.F.]

Jon Stewart’s BS Meter

The Unlearning Specialist — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:20:14 +0000

From the last episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart – his goodbye advice:

Uncensored – Three Different Kinds of Bulls**t

“The best defense against bullshit is vigilance.” Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart describes different types of corruption and lies and then calls on the audience to take action. (4:29)

Stock Lives

The Unlearning Specialist — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 13:45:02 +0000

The insights from this video can be extended to any ad.
It is not a question of using stock footage or not.
Every ad appeals to a great variety of clichés.
To plug into you, ads (and most media) tap into what has already been said
– what is taken for granted –
and call it: “communicating with an audience.”

“This Is a Generic Brand Video for Generic Lives”

Original Texy by Kendra Eash published on Timothy Mcsweeneys.Net

We think first
Of vague words that are synonyms for progress
And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.

Science
Is doing lots of stuff
That may or may not have anything to do with us.

See how this guy in a lab coat holds up a beaker?
That means we do research.
Here’s a picture of DNA.

There are a shitload of people in the world
Especially in India
See how we’re part of the global economy?
Look at these farmers in China.

But we also do business in the U.S.A.
Or want you to think we do.
Check out this wind energy thing in Indiana,
And this blue collar guy with dirt on his face.
Phew.

Also, we care about the environment, loosely.
Here’s some powerful, rushing water
And people planting trees.
Our policies could be related to these panoramic views of Costa Rica.

In today’s high speed environment,
Stop motion footage of a city at night
With cars turning quickly
Makes you think about doing things efficiently
And time passing.

Lest you think we’re a faceless entity,
Look at all these attractive people.
Here’s some of them talking and laughing
And close-ups of hands passing canned goods to each other
In a setting that evokes community service.

Equality,
Innovation,
Honesty
And advancement
Are all words we chose from a list.

Our profits
are awe-inspiring.
Like this guy who’s looking up and pointing
At a skyscraper or a kite
While smiling and explaining something to his child.

Using a specific ratio
of Asian people to Black people to Women to White men
We want to make sure we represent your needs and interests
Or at least a version of your skin color
In our ads.

Did we put a baby in here?
What about an ethnic old man whose wrinkled smile represents
the happiness and wisdom of the poor?
Yep.

To time to read again Mythologies by Roland Barthes?

Life is Surprises

The Unlearning Specialist — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 00:54:39 +0000

A remnant of what I used to teach… I would say to my students that their medium is “surprises” – not video, not film, not sound, but surprises.

Just like actual living.

From the New York Times Sunday Review

The Economics of Suspense

APRIL 24, 2015

Gérard Dubois

Suddenly, your spouse pops in and tells you to stay away from Villanova versus Lafayette, which was a blowout, and to watch Baylor versus Georgia State, a nail-biter.

Is this recommendation appreciated? Hardly. Baylor versus Georgia State was exciting because the unexpected happened: It was a back-and-forth affair in which Georgia State, the underdog, clinched the upset only in the final moments. But if you know in advance that it’s a nail-biter, you will expect the unexpected, ruining the surprise.

It’s a lesson that the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, for one, seems to have missed. Once it’s common knowledge that your movie will have a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end, then your movie no longer has a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end.

To be thrilling, you must occasionally be boring.

This is one of several lessons that came out of our recent study of drama-based entertainment using the tools of information economics — the results of which were published in the Journal of Political Economy in February. When we recognize that the capacity to surprise an audience is a scarce resource (“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time”), it becomes natural to use economic theory to optimize that resource.

We began our analysis by noticing a certain similarity. In a number of settings — watching basketball games, reading mystery novels, gambling in a casino — people are invested in learning the outcome (which team will win, who is the murderer, will I walk out flush or broke), but they do not wish to learn the outcome too quickly. In all of these settings, a key aspect of entertainment is the revelation of information over time.

Information revealed over time generates drama in two ways: suspense and surprise. Suspense is experienced before the fact, when something informative is about to happen. Think about a baseball scenario: bases loaded, full count, two men out. We say that a moment has a lot of suspense if there is a lot of uncertainty about what you will soon think about the outcome.

Surprise, on the other hand, is experienced after the fact. We are surprised if something unexpected has just happened. Think about a soccer goalie scoring from a goal kick. We say that a moment has a lot of surprise if your belief about the outcome is very different from what you thought a moment ago.

Once these concepts are formalized in this way, the question of how to maximize entertainment — that is, how to generate the most suspense or the most surprise — becomes a mathematical problem that can be tackled on a whiteboard. The solution yields some simple insights (for example, remember occasionally to be boring) but also many nuanced ones.

For instance, to maximize suspense, a mystery novel should have no more than three major plot twists on average. Of course, that last qualification is crucial: The exact number of plot twists should be unpredictable.

We can also determine how a change in rules (in a card game or a sport) would have an impact on entertainment. In the context of casino gambling, our computations show that eliminating the ability to split and double-down in blackjack would reduce both suspense and surprise.

In sports, elimination tournaments like March Madness are seeded so that the top two teams are expected to meet in the final. But top seeds may be eliminated early on. That’s exciting when it happens, but that excitement comes at the cost of a less dramatic final. Could it be more exciting to have the top seeds play in the first round, then let the other teams compete for a chance to unseat the victor? Our analysis shows that this rule change would increase the overall surprise value of the tournament but would have ambiguous effects on suspense.

Playoff series in baseball feature an intriguing trade-off. The longer the series, the less consequential each individual game is. Imagine the tedium of a best-of-99 series. On the other hand, if the series is too short, then there is too little time for the suspense to build.

We found that the typical five- or seven-game series works well because it allows uncertainty about the eventual winner as well as large swings in the likely outcome with each passing game. In general, the more evenly the teams are matched, the longer is the optimal series.

Academic analysis of the determinants of entertainment is in its infancy. Future work, whether built on information theory or not, should help us better understand why we are moved by certain sports, novels and games. This might help us design better entertainment. More important, it will lead us to better understand the human psyche.

Words and Concepts that Blind Us

The Unlearning Specialist — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 03:46:44 +0000

[Partial translation into English]

Gébé from “Cracher dans l’Eau”

Original in French

Original en français par Gébé dans “Cracher dans l’Eau”

Sports as Spectacle

The Unlearning Specialist — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 18:34:45 +0000

Al doilea joc – The Second Game – Match de Retour by Corneliu Porumboiu

“In the Communist era, you couldn’t show bad sportsmanship.” C. P.

Against Repetition

The Unlearning Specialist — Tue, 01 Jul 2014 17:43:46 +0000

To like something, you must have seen or heard it for a long time, you bunch of idiots.
— Francis Picabia

André Breton, the pope of Surrealism, quoting Francis Picabia, the artist and iconoclast.

Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose, il faut que vous l’ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps, tas d’idiots.
— Francis Picabia

Normalisation/Normalization

The Unlearning Specialist — Sun, 25 May 2014 18:16:04 +0000

On October 8 1976, Michel Foucault described the process of normalization [in French].

Le 8 Octobre 1976, Michel Foucault décrivait le processus de normalisation.

http://schoolofnomedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FoucaultNormalisation.m4a

The transcript of this interview by Philippe Nemo will appear at a later date/Une transcription de cet interview par Philippe Nemo devrait apparaître ici.

Pour écouter l’interview… If the above audio does not load…

Spectacular Virus

The Unlearning Specialist — Thu, 22 May 2014 00:08:27 +0000

Science

Why That Video Went Viral

By NATALIE KITROEFF
MAY 19, 2014

strangers kissing, a woman quitting her job, a Home Depot marriage proposal, and a baby." data-mediaviewer-credit="YouTube" />

YouTube screen shots of, clockwise from top left, viral videos of strangers kissing, a woman quitting her job, a Home Depot marriage proposal, and a baby. YouTube

There it was, virtual gold: a video of a firefighter resuscitating a kitten trapped in a smoky home.

Neetzan Zimmerman, then an editor at Gawker, a news and gossip site, knew it was destined for viral magic. But before he could publish a post about it, his editor made a request. Mr. Zimmerman was to include the epilogue omitted by most every other outlet: The kitten died of smoke inhalation soon after being saved.

For telling the whole story, Mr. Zimmerman paid a price.

“That video did tremendously well for practically everyone who posted it,” he recalled, “except Gawker.”

Fireman resuscitates kitten. Video by GoPro

Why should one sad detail mean the difference between an online megahit and a dud? What makes content go viral?

Social sharing is powerful enough to topple dictatorships and profitable enough to merit multibillion-dollar investments. But scientists are only beginning to explore the psychological motivations that turn a link into “click bait” and propel a piece of content to Internet fame.

Their research may have significant implications for the media and advertising businesses, whose profits hinge on winning the cutthroat race for the attention of Internet users worldwide. Already, some notions of the ingredients in this modern alchemy are beginning to emerge.

If you want to melt the Internet, best to traffic in emotion, researchers have found. The emotional response can be happy or sad, but the more intense it is, the more likely the story is to be passed along.

In a study led by Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Dallas, 256 participants much preferred to forward a funny video than one of a man treating his own spider bite. But they were likely to share any video that evoked an intense emotional response, Dr. Guadagno found.

Similarly, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, professors at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, have found that uplifting articles are more likely than disheartening ones to land on the most-emailed list at The New York Times. But even stories evoking rage or other negative, strong emotions are emailed by readers more often than ones that are simply depressing.

“People share things they have strong emotional reactions to, especially strong positive reactions,” Dr. Guadagno said.

Sharing is not just how information ripples across communities; it’s also how emotions are disseminated. Recently, analysts at Facebook, Yale and the University of California, San Diego, reviewed more than a billion posts by Facebook users, and found that when users vented on a rainy day, their friends in other cities posted bleak status updates more frequently than normal.

But positive status updates were even more contagious, prompting upbeat updates from friends at even greater rates. The conclusion: Online, as in real life, feelings can be caught like the flu.

The most shared post at Upworthy, a site for shareable content, is a video about a boy who died of cancer, but not before producing a hit song and performing sold-out shows. The post has racked up nearly 20 million views, thanks in part to the type of methodically calculated headline that has become the site’s trademark: “This Amazing Kid Got to Enjoy 19 Awesome Years on This Planet. What He Left Behind Is Wondtacular.” My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech Video by SoulPancake

“Even though it was a really sad story, it was a story that gave you something to do with that sadness,” said Upworthy’s analytics czar, Daniel Mintz.

For many people, sharing seems to be a way to process the highs and lows they feel while consuming content online. Mr. Berger, who studied the Times articles, conducted a follow-up study in which he instructed one group of students to jog in place for 60 seconds before going online, while a comparison group rested before logging on.

The runners were more than twice as likely as the sedentary group to email the same article, he found. Why? Because they were already physiologically aroused, Mr. Berger theorizes, and forwarding or liking something serves as a form of release.

“Arousal is an aversive state, so people want to get out of it by sharing,” Mr. Berger said. Misery loves company, and so does any sort of deeply affecting feeling.

But pressing the share button can also be driven by ego. Constructing and refining an online persona has become a daily task for many, experts say; posting a link that evokes laughter or gasps can confer status on the sharer.

No surprise, then, that data recently compiled by Chartbeat, a company that measures online traffic, suggests that people often post articles on Twitter that they haven’t actually read.

“What we found is that there is no relationship whatsoever with the amount that the article is shared and the amount of engaged time and attention given to that article,” said Tony Haile, Chartbeat’s chief executive.

Like a bookshelf stocked with classic tomes that have never been opened, the links that adorn Facebook walls and Twitter accounts are markers of the people we aspire to be. And online media companies are increasingly aware that their role is to package content that will make each member of the masses who disseminates it burnish an online reputation while feeling, oddly, unique.

Mr. Zimmerman, formerly of Gawker, saw it as his job to help the reader feel like “that guy who is always plugged in and tapped into what’s going on.”

“People build their online identities by sharing,” he said. “They want people to think of them a certain way.”