Objectives:

• Although some of the readings (and concomitant lessons) during the ProjectFive unit may not have aged as well as some others, the strategy behind their selection is, I assure you, timeless. In addition to the focus on inventional topoi (place, events, practices), each lesson also concentrated on different components of, and strategies for, composing cultural analyses: using tone (Davis' polemical tone vs. Herron's notalgia/cynicism); inserting a topic into a longer history (Sontag), using transitions and restatement techniques to make a complicated argument accessible (Zizek); deploying a "journalistic" style in gathering interviews and responses form individuals participating in pop culture practice (Dibbell); using narrative arguments (Johnson and Dibbell); and creating "tropes" to organize the argument of a cultural analysis (Johnson)

 

Writing About Practices: Watching Television

 

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Everything Bad is Good for You

 

 

Foreword:

 

• This Book: This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to convince you of one thing: that popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years.

 

• Postive Brainwashing: Think of it as a kind of positive brainwashing: the popular media steadily, but almost imperceptibly, making our minds shaper, as we soak in entertainment usually dismissed as so much lowbrow fluff.

 

• Thesis: The Sleeper Curve

 

 

• Audience Address: I hope for many of you the argument here will resonate with a feeling you've had in the past, even if you may have suppressed it at the time -- a feeling that the popular culture isn't locked in a spiral dive of deteriorating standards. Next time you hear someone complaining about violent TV mobsters, or accidental onscreen nudity, or the inanity of of reality programming, or the dull stares of the Nintendo addicts, you should think of the Sleeper Curve rising steadily beneath all that superficial chaos.

 

• Parabola
  (the media is like the weather): The sky is not falling. In many ways, the weather has never been better. It just takes a new kind of barometer to tell the difference. (p. xiv) Sometimes, for the sake of argument, I find it helpful to imagine culture as a kind of man-made weather system. ...The cultural object - the film or the video game - is not a metaphor for that system; it's more like an output or result. (pp. 10-11)

 

Introduction: The Sleeper Curve

 

 

Strategies: Exemplary [anecdote, "minority" viewpoint: demarcation from other arguments, inversion (real/fake; mass culture as "dumb"/critics of mass culture as shortsighted; narrative/capacity)

 

• Narrative from Johnson's childhood (pp. 1-9): The APBA, Dungeons & Dragons

 

• Restatement of Thesis: This book is, ultimately, the story of how the kind of thinking that I was doing on my bedroom floor became an everday component of mass entertainment. ...For decades we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward the lowest-common denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less. (p. 9)

 

 

• Johnson's approach vs. standard approaches: Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. ...My argument for the existence of the Sleeper Curve comes out of an assumption that the landscape of popular culture involves the clash of competing forces: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economies of the culture industry, changing technological platform. ...The work of the critic, in this instance, is to diagram those forces, not decode them. (pp. 9-10)

 

• Contrasting viewpoints: Steve Allen, Parents Television Council, Suzanne Fields: ...the dominant motif is one of decline and atrophy: we're a nation of reality program addicts and Nintendo freaks. Lost in that account is the more interesting trend of all: that the popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades, exercising our minds in powerful new ways. (pp 12-13)

 

Part One: Television

 

• Minority Viewpoint, Again: For someone loosely following the debate over the medium's cultural impact, the idea that television is actually improving our minds will sound like apostasy. (p. 62)

 

 

• "Filling-in" In "classic" shows (Mary Tyler Moore, Murphey Brown) the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters onscreen whereas in more contemporary shows, the viewer must fill-in to make sense of the information provided and perhaps the most surprising thing is this: that the shows that have made the most demands on their audience have also turned out to be among the most lucrative in television history. (p. 64; p. 65)

 

 

• Trope One: Multiple-Threading: A Hill Street Blues episode complicates this picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands -- sometimes as many as ten, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters -- and not just bit parts -- swells dramatically. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset, and leaving one or two threads open at the end. (p. 67)

 

 

• Trope Two: Flashing Arrows: Viewers of The West Wing or Lost or The Sopranos no longer require those training wheels, because twenty-five years of increasingly complex television has honed their analytic skills. Like those video games that force you to learn the rules whil playing, part of the pleasure in these modern television narratives comes from the cognitive labor you're forced to do filling in the details. (p. 77)

 

 

 

 

 

• Inversion of Common Comparison: It's not a headline you often see - "Pop TV More Subtle and Discreet Than Ever Before!" - but ignoring these properties means overlooking one of the most vital developments in modern popular narrative. You'll sometimes here people refer fondly to the "simpler" era of television's alleged heyday, the days of Dragnet and I Love Lucy. They mean "simpler" in an ethical sense: there were no sympathetic mob bosses on Dragnet, no custody battles on Lucy. But when you watch these shows next to today's television, the other sense of "simpler" applies as well: they require less mental labor to make sense of what's going on. (p. 83)

 

• Third Trope: Layering (Extension of Reference Beyond Single Episodes or Series): Television comedy once worked on the scale of thirty seconds: you'd have a setup line, and then a punch line, and then the process would start all over again. With Seinfeld the gap between setup and punch line could sometimes last five years. ...The show gets funnier the more you study it -- precisely because the jokes point outside the immediate context of the episode, and because the creators refuse to supply flashing arrows to translate the gags for the uninitiated. Earlier sitcoms merely demanded that you kept he basic terms of the situatino clear on your end; beyond that information you could be an amnesiac and you were'nt likely to miss anything. Shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons offered a more challenging premise to the viewers: You'll enjoy this more if you're capable of remembering a throwaway line from an episode that aired three years ago, or if you notice that we've framed this one scene so that it echoes the end of Double Indemnity. (p. 86; p. 87)

 

Key Example: "The Betrayal"

 

• Stiff-Arming the Joe Millionaire Argument: The relevant comparison is not between Joe Millionaire and M*A*S*H; it's between Joe Millionaire and The Price is Right, or between Survivor and The Love Boat. ...This is the ultimate test of the Sleeper Curve theory: even the crap has improved. (p. 91)

 

• Reality Television and Video Games: Perhaps the most important thing that should be said about reality programming is that the format is reliably structured like a video game. Reality television provides the ultimate testimony to the cultural dominance of games in this moment of pop culture history. Early television took its cues from the stage: three-act dramas, or vaudeville-like acts with rotating skits and musical numbers. In the Nintendo age, we expect our televised entertainment to take a new form: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. (p. 92).

 

Fourth Trope: Social Networks: To Succeed in a show like The Apprentice or Survivor, you need social intelligence, not just a mastery of trivia. When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us -- the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly, and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narrative aren't explicitly about strategy. (p. 96)

 

 

AQ, EI, and Politics: So what we're getting out of the much maligned Oprahization of politics is not boxers-or-briefs personal trivia - it's crucial information about the emotional IQ of a potential president, information we had almost no access to until television came along and gave us that tight focus. (p. 102)

 

 

• Social Networks & Emotional Intelligence in Fictional Programming: The map of 24's social network actually understates the cognitive work involved in parsing the shows. As a conspiracy narrative - and one that features several prominent "moles" - each episode invariably suggests what we might call phantom relationships between characters, a social connection that is deliberately not show onscreen, but that viewers inevitably ponder in their own minds. ...The content of the show may be about revenge killings and terrorist attacks, but the collateral learning involves something altogether different, and more nourishing. It's about relationships. (p. 114; p. 115)