Forwarding address
Having emerged unscathed from grad school some time ago, I’ve moved this content over to the mock-up. Hit me up there for very occasional posts on digital culture, code, and design. Also: robots!
New Media Bias | Thoughts on digital culture from an accidental academic.
Branding fail
Understandable that everyone is talking about the iPad. But why, pray tell, is no one talking about the less desirable connotations of the name?
From a friend: “Apparently the 600 block of Tech Blvd is just devoid of women.”
Where in the world (part 2)
I just spent another hour poring over updates to Wired’s Vanish contest. Still fascinating.
The game has only been running for a few days but it’s evolving quickly. Wired created a dedicated page for posting tips and leads — but no one has touched it. A few blogs run by individuals have popped up, but they all look more or less the same; Blogger Minima Template, 3-5 posts, and very few comments. People are instead flocking to two places for sharing information:
The Twitter page is a gold mine of information, but it’s quickly becoming unwieldy and tough to filter through. I can envision the Facebook group, with it’s top-down controls and threaded discussions, becoming a more popular go-to. Indeed, it nearly doubled in size today.
It begs the question: How will this fast-growing group adapt its ways of processing information? And will anything get lost in the shuffle?
Where in the world…
I’m following Wired’s Vanish contest; you should be too. And not just because it’s fun to channel your inner Nancy Drew.
Compared to your typical ARG, this is delightfully simple. Evan Ratliff hides. If he’s found, a chunk of the prize money comes out of his pocket. If he’s not, it doesn’t. Assuming that his motivation is authentic — and that Ratliff doesn’t plan to intentionally drop clues — this game has a nice, open, uncontrolled environment. The players aren’t following breadcrumbs to a destination that the game designers want them to eventually find. Failure on the players’ part spells the success of the game.
Follow #vanish on twitter and see if crowdsourcing wins the day. And keep your eyes peeled. (I don’t have much of a strategy myself, beyond hoping I bump into him accidentally at a pick up Ultimate game.)
Dispatch from office hours
If I had a quarter for every time I apologized for not blogging, I’d have at least enough to go to the vending machine and get some peanut M&Ms right now.
I’ll spare you the usual excuses. Suffice it to say that I was vaguely crazed for the last six months, undergoing some kind of post-thesis/pre-career mental block, and writing ephemera here was the last thing on my mind. Fortunately, I seem to be settling into a life in higher ed. I’m an adjunct professor at one college for about 15 hours a week, and I work for a research center at an an entirely different college for the other 20 or so. It’s not at all where I pictured I’d be right now, but it’s working out relatively well.
Anyway. At the moment I’m sitting in my sad, lonely, largely undecorated cube at Campus #1. I share it with three other part-time faculty, none of whom I’ve ever met — they all teach evening classes and I try never to be here after 4:30pm. (The dinner options in this part of town are shady at best.) I tacked up some ads for film screenings and a Dunkin’ Donuts calendar, but my cubemates seem uninterested in contributing to the design scheme. Best I can tell they breeze in just long enough to leave crumbs in the top drawer and dash out to teach.
Thirty-three minutes left in office hours today. Still no students.
The department chair is waiting for the elevator and singing “Off to see the dean…” in a gloriously deadpan voice.
Call the exterminator
Over at Observations on Film Art, David Bordwell just posted a neat little piece on the origin of the bug in film and TV.
No, not that kind of bug. The kind that takes the form of a network logo, floating in the bottom corner of the screen.
Transatlantic translations
I’m in the middle of watching the Life on Mars premiere — I’ve been anticipating this show like crazy, and was prepared to be let down hard. But so far, so good. The excellent cast is holding up like I hoped they would, and the writers aren’t completely overdoing the nudge-nudge, wink-wink references to a pre-2008 world. I haven’t spotted any major anachronisms yet (although I’m not watching too attentively, as evidenced by the fact that I’m blogging at the same time). Of course, Mad Men has set a nearly impossible bar for period detail. It’s tempting to ask that of any show that pegs itself so deliberately to a different era.
Much like The (American) Office, this pilot is almost a line-for-line remake of the British pilot. That’s okay. It seems like relatively few people stateside have caught the BBC show, and it’s a whale of a pilot. However, before the first commercial break, there’s a brief, but huge, diversion from the original.
In both versions, Sam gets hit by a car sometime in the modern era and wakes up in 1973. In his first scene after regaining consciousness, he stumbles around a vacant lot for a little bit, then talks to a cop, and finally sees something that cues him into the fact that he’s in some very different place. In the BBC version, it’s a “Coming Soon” sign for the Mancunian Way.
In the American version, it’s the still-standing Twin Towers.
It’s an odd moment, one akin to nothing I’ve seen on television recently. Emotions about 9/11 aside, though, it strikes me an extremely aggressive Americanization of the show. I don’t know too much about British cultural considerations of particular motorways but I doubt that the image of a world without the Mancunian Way has the same kind of punch. The writers could have stayed closer to the original, picking something in New York that didn’t exist in 1973, and revealing its absence. Instead, they chose an image that brings up very strong emotions. It immediately paints Sam’s new world as pre-9/11, as opposed to just pre-2008. The lack of the A57 is a nod to ancient technology. The existence of the Towers suggests a lot more.
As I type this, Sam is walking down a New York sidewalk, muttering, “I’m going to walk until my brain can’t think up any more streets… or arguments… or details. There are only so many details.” Let’s see how tongue-in-cheek that line ends up being.
Blog abandonment
I am in the midst of my thesis at the moment, which is a multimedia project tentatively titled “Beyond Cult Media: A Model for Television-Based Transmedia Storytelling”. I’m building four (!) websites designed to extend a mainstream television show (namely, the spectacular Friday Night Lights) in an effort to prove that transmedia storytelling doesn’t just work for cult and sci-fi programming. It is, effectively, an intensive response to this.
At first glance, my thesis appears to be an excuse to (a) build splashy, colorful websites (b) muck around with WordPress and (c) watch and rewatch and rewatch an excellent television show. However, the more I write and the more I think about the model I’m building, I’m starting to think there’s a “there” there. When I have a draft in reasonably polished form I’ll post it here; I’m going to publish it using CommentPress and I beg you for feedback.
Also, the title desperately needs work.
Narrative credibility vs. television realism
Ed note: Another post for Jane Shattuc’s television class.
Though the posted topic asks us to consider our television show in light of David Lavery’s 2006 Flow piece on narrative credibility in 24, there isn’t much to discuss when it comes to Friday Night Lights. The show follows a classic, linear plotline and takes pains to ground its story in realistic detail. The only real “leap of narrative faith” viewers are asked to take is the fact that the fictional Dillon Panthers play a 13-game season; An actual championship season in Texas high school football is 16 games long.
Instead, I would like to briefly consider where 24 fits into television realism. On the subject of unbelievable moments in the show, such as Jack Bauer’s increasing super-human-ness and characters’ ability to travel across huge expanses of California in impossibly short amounts of time, Lavery shrugs: “But once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity.” This comment recalls Fiske’s conception of television realism, where fantastic elements can be considered realistic if they logically fit into a show’s universe. However, the universe of 24 is Los Angeles, a place with a verifiable geography (and very heavy traffic). Were Jack Bauer presented as some kind of literal superhero with a flying car, it would be easier for us to accept these kinds of scenes as logical parts of the narrative. Instead, they chafe against the physical and realistic world as we know it, and as the series indulges in these incredible storylines more and more often, the disconnect grows increasingly frustrating.
Devlish details and copyright law
Ed note: Another blog entry for my television studies class.
As far as content goes, copyright law can most strongly be felt in the details — television shows tend to shy away from mentioning or showing copyrighted and/or trademarked brands. This can be a distracting presence when generic brands are too prominently featured. At the very least, it detracts from a program’s level of realism. (In Season 2 DVD commentary, the producer of Arrested Development laments that a joke surrounding “Glisten” toothpaste would have been funnier had they been allowed to use the brand name Gleam.) This standard also applies to the use of copyrighted music or video, as including it in a television broadcast amounts to distribution.
This poses a particular hurdle for sports-focused television shows, which often need to show realistic game footage. Luckily, Friday Night Lights focuses on high school football. While game play is often seen on screen, usually in the form of opponent game film studied by coaches, FNL doesn’t have to clear rights to obtain professional or semi-pro game footage; instead, they use footage of actual Texas high school football games and practices (including those of the Periman Panthers, the Odessa team that inspired the story of Friday Night Lights).