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Media Crit Spr2010 Session13

Mini-lecture: Production-Oriented Criticism

Production Approaches to Media Criticism

Production-Context Criticism

• All mass media content is produced by ensembles
  • Newspapers
  • Magazines
  • Records
  • Radio
  • Television
  • Commercial Web Sites
• Through the efforts of many routine participants in media (Foulger, 2002)
  1. Creators
  2. Publisher/producers
  3. Financial management
  4. Investors
  5. Content Integrators
  6. Production support
  7. Content Editing
  8. Advertisers
  9. Reproducers
  10. Directors
  11. Performers
  12. Selector/gatekeepers
  13. Critics
  14. Representatives
  15. Collectors
  16. Retailers
  17. Distributor/Carriers
  18. Transcriber/Recorders
  19. Regulators
  20. Consumers
• Most of the above can be directly associated with Turow's (1997) "power roles"
  1. Producer Power Rule, which covers Publisher/Producers and, to some extent, distributors
  2. Authority Power Role, which covers Regulators
  3. Investor Power Role
  4. Client Power Role, which covers Advertisers
  5. Creator Power Role, which also covers directors, performers, content editors, and others who can influence the final product
  6. Distributor and Exhibitor power role, which covers Retailers, Collectors, and to some extent, Distributors
  7. Auxiliary Power Role, which covers Financial Management, Reproducers and, to some extent, Production Support
  8. The Union, Linking-Pin, and Facilitator Power Roles, which cover different kinds of Representatives
  9. Public and Public Advocacy Roles, which covers Consumers, Critics, and to some extent, Regulators, Representatives, and Selector/gatekeepers
  • Note that a number of the generalized participants in media don't have power in Turow's model
    • But of course they do, within limits
    • Anyone who works as an employee is subject to allocative control
    • But anyone who touches he content has at least some level of operational control
• Production-context analysis is often concerned with the balance (or imbalance) of these forms of power and control
• how content is shaped through the varied influence of varied participants
  • This covers a lot of ground
    • Macro-level criticism looks at how media ownership, regulation, and social trends affect content
      • At this level, production-context criticism often takes becomes ideological:
        • Monopoly power and free market capitalism
        • Public Interest and Individual Rights
        • Federal Rights versus State Rights
        • Limited Government versus Regulation of Harms
        • Censorship and Gatekeeping
        • Allocative Control: the ability to set an organization's agenda, goals, and resources
    • Midrange criticism looks at how the organizational structure of the medium affects content
      • At this level, organizational communication and industrial relations perspectives are common
      • Operational Control
        • the ability of units of the organization to
          • set and implement policy
          • set and modify goals
          • allocate resources
    • Micro-level criticism looks at how the constraints associated with specific roles (time and other pressures) affects content
      • how much power does each player in the production process really have?
• Most production-context analysis doesn't fit the general paradigm of analysis (e.g. body of content) we're using in this course
  • It may be very difficult to look at a body of content and infer anything about power expressed at the macro-level, midrange, or micro-level
  • How can you tell if a 1990 California license plate on a 1960's car in New York City reflects:
    • a micro-level problem with attention to detail in a time and resource
    • a midrange organizational issue
    • a macro level regulatory issue relating to location shooting
    • an intentional choice by the director
  • You can't. We're back to the intentional fallacy
• Hence the usual methods of production-context are usually grounded in observation of production
  • Case Studies
  • Ethnographys
  • Critiques of institutions and practices
• And in any case, this is a very summary view
  • We haven't talked at all about
    • actional analysis of production-context
    • structural analysis of production-context
    • the political economy critical perspective
    • the or their intersection with each other and the industrial relations critical perspective (which we barely mentioned)
• It remains, however, that bloopers give us a window to production-context
  • It is probably reasonable to ask
  • given a set of clear errors in an episode from your body of content
  • who could have prevented those errors
  • and why didn't they
  • You could, given your production knowledge, potentially do this within this classes general paradigm of analysis

Everyone a publisher

• The assumptions of the context-centered approach may be challenged by new Internet-based media
  • when anyone can produce content
  • power becomes an interaction between creators and consumers
  • and intermediaries become less important
    • censors
    • gatekeepers
    • the whole mechanism of intermediaries
• an auteur with a DV camera, a computer, and a web site really can do it all to some extent
  • and the web site is the cheap part. You can run one for as little as $60 a year.
  • One whacked piece of video: http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php
    • Notable here primarily as an example of how anyone might reach a mass audience using web technology
    • There are questions here:
      • is this video a hoax; an effective piece of propaganda?
        • is the eye-witness testimony credible?
        • are the pictures real and correct?
      • or are there legitimate questions here?
        • That is for you, and people who double check the facts, to decide
      • For our purposes it is enough to note that anyone can create content on the Internet that has wide reach.
• I get real conflicted about that
  • I'm writing a book
  • It was accepted by a publisher but I didn't like the contract
  • Now I own the book title as a URL
  • I'll probably still publish, but I'm a lot pickier about terms now. I don't need them to reach an audience.
• So the content production industry is fighting back
  • Led by the music industry and RIAA
  • In the name of preventing piracy
  • they are now preventing distribution from private individuals
  • They have allies who are using the opportunity
    • Universities who are reducing bandwidth costs by turning off ports
    • ISPs who are turning music download into a value added business
  • But the small end to end producer is the loser in this
    • the garage band
    • the artist who has a niche audience that's too small for the big producers
• Here we get to a strength of production-context analysis
  • It gives us a vocabulary for talking about how the structure of the medium affects the message
  • And the ways in which that structure is negotiated by participants

Distributed Control in the Global Village

• This power to self-publish is consistent with McLuhan's "decline of the center" (see Levinson, Chapter 7)
  • The idea that we are moving from centralized control of content to decentralized control
  • And there are unresolved problems
    • Big media is bigger than ever
    • Wide distribution of Internet content creation doesn't necessarily resolve cost issues
• We have, in this, a dialectic
  • centralization versus decentralization
  • centralized control versus distributed control
  • government versus anarchy
  • nations versus villages
  • monopoly versus competition
• Orwell worries about one direction - control - in 1984
• McLuhan proposes that the other direction is ascendant - distribution of power
• These are powerful dialectics that aren't readily resolved except in finding balance
• Persig's "Metaphysics of Quality" tries to do this
• Rokeach's value scales give us a way to look at it.
  • http://davis.foulger.info/oswego/Fall2002/CommunicationEthics/valuesScale.htm
  • http://davis.foulger.info/presentations/measuringFractalDecisionSpaces/index.htm
  • There are fundamental values that most of us agree are important
  • but there are no perfect decisions
  • We are frequently required, in our ethical decision making, to make forced choices between values that we might believe to be equally important.
  • Hence people with essentially the same values can make very different choices under the same circumstances.

Light On versus Light Through

• Right concept, wrong metaphor
• A better metaphor is the difference between a photograph and an x-ray
  • A photograph only shows surfaces
  • An x-ray, which records on the same film, reveals what is hidden
• Hence television and movies are "light on", but can be light through
• Books, with their enhanced ability to talk to state of mind, are more often light through
• In truth, McLuhan has the right idea, but applies it at the wrong level
  • Light on versus light through is mostly about what we do with a medium
    • reveal surface
    • reveal hidden depth
  • But some media are better adapted to revealing hidden detail and others are better adapted to hiding that detail

Media Hot and Cool

• Hot and Cool is McLuhan's most famous distinction
  • It is a way in which the medium is the message
• The metaphor is rooted in music
  • The "hot" brassy big band jazz that overwhelms the senses
  • The "cool" and breezy jazz combo sound that pulls you into the conversation
• It is easy to make too much of the distinction
  • It works better as a relative gauge for comparing media that share the same mix of modalities
    • Telephone and radio
    • Face-to-face conversation and persuasive speech making
    • Television and movies
    • Poems and prose description
  • it confuses things by operationalizing a production characteristic using a psychological effect
    • Hot, high definition, media are recognized by their ability to overwhelm a passive participant
    • Cool, low definition, media are recognized by their ability to turn the consumer into an active participant
• It can be confusing
• But it also works
  • Movies really are "hotter" on the big screen than on a television (even a big screen TV)
    • Effects that overwhelm on the screen aren't fully visible on TV
    • Scenic detail disappears
    • Signs disappear
  • Novels really are "hotter" than poems
    • Poems are far more likely to have endless interpretive possibilities
    • They invite extended conversations where novels end as a good read
  • But by other measures all are hot
    • Novels and poems both fix words to paper
    • Television and movies are both recorded and reproduced
  • And by other measures their temperature changes over time
    • Media "evolve under pressure of human usage and invention"
    • Today's cool medium may be tomorrow's hot medium
• In the end, Hot and Cool are better applied to content
  • You can create
    • Cool movies or hot television
    • Cool radio (easy listening and some talk radio) or hot telephone (telemarketing)
    • Cool novels or hot poems
    • Hot conversation (yelling) or cool epideictic speeches
  • But hot media encourage hot content
  • And cool media encourage cool content
• Hot and cool may be most interesting as a way of thinking about how a medium becomes the message
  • What is the interaction between the participants in a medium, its organization, and its content?
  • Here's one answer to that question (Foulger, 2004):

Emergent Role Structure in Media

• The roles from Foulger, 2002 are analyzed here for 167 media
• Seven clusters emerge
• In an interaction effect created by:
  • The number of roles associated with the medium
  • The presence of a director
• A facet structure organized around three kinds of complexity
  • Parallel complexity, in which many parallel roles require both production skills and direction skills
  • Serial complexity, which may or may not require subassemblies but which certainly requires some measure of production
  • Contention, in which a director provides floor control for many individuals who may or may not form subassemblies