Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

The Signal-to-Noise Journey of American Media

The 20th Century represented a Golden Age of Institutional Journalism. The Yellow Journalism wars of the late 19th Century gave way to a more responsible mode of reporting built on ethical and professional codes that encouraged fairness and “objectivity.” (Granted, these concepts, like their bastard cousin “balance,” are not wholly unproblematic. Still, they represented a far better way of conducting journalism than we had seen before.) It’s probably not idealizing too much to assert that reporting in the Cronkite Era, for instance, was characterized by a commitment to rise above partisanship and manipulation. The journalist was expected to hold him/herself to a higher standard and to serve the public interest. These professionals – and I have met a few who are more than worthy of the title – believed they had a duty to search for the facts and to present them in a fashion that was as free of bias as possible.

In other words, their careers, like that of Claude Shannon, were devoted to maximizing the signal in the system – the system here being the “marketplace of ideas.”

By now the critical reader has probably noticed that I haven’t mentioned money. Said reader might suggest that I wax a little too starry-eyed, that journalism was always about ratings, circulation and profit. The really cynical response might say – as I myself have said – that even our greatest reporters were doing nothing more than selling product. True enough.

However, the issue here is about the assumptions involved regarding the path to profit. In Cronkite World, the reporter (and editor and publisher) assumed that success had something to do with what I’m here calling signal. You attracted a larger audience and sold more soap if you did a better job investigating, digging, presenting the public with facts. When you did a better job than your competitor at providing the audience with relevant, meaningful, accurate information that helped them understand and interact with their environment, then you and your employer would be more successful.

That is, your success in the marketplace was intimately tied to your professional ability. Success was a function of signal.

Somewhere along the way that changed, though. Here’s what I think happened.

First, in Uncle Walter’s day you had three channels (networks plus local affiliates), you had a couple local newspapers and a local radio station or two. If you grew up in a place like I did (Winston-Salem, NC), you likely had no more than six sources of information available to you on a given day. If there were a major story to be discovered at the national level, the competition to break it was going to include CBS, NBC, ABC, UPI, AP, Reuters maybe, and that’s about it. If the story was local it was down to a couple local papers and the three local affiliates.

That’s a comparatively small field of competitors, and given the number of things that happen in a given week there were usually enough scoops to go around. So to a significant degree, it was possible to make a living off of signal.

What about today? How many potential sources for news are available to you? Legacy networks; national papers; cable news channels (and cable “news” channels); ubiquitous access not only to your local paper and TV affiliates, but to all local affiliates and papers; online alt.news outlets; blogs – millions and millions of blogs; advocacy group sites; and a plethora of other channels, including e-mail (and lists), newsgroups and forums, mobile (like Twitter), and on and on we go. Even if we assume that there’s 10 times as much interesting news to be scooped than their used to be, the competition for those scoops has grown at an insane pace. If you’re in the news business, you probably find that the ratio of news to competitors is dozens of times worse than it was when Cronkite sat in Katie Couric’s chair. Yes, several outlets are still trying – a couple national papers, AP, Reuters, etc. But that’s about it. Everybody else (Scholars & Rogues included) is trying to attract the attention of the public, and very few of the models in use rely on what we might see as a traditional approach to news and reporting.

So. The pursuit of signal ain’t cheap or easy. The return rate on that investment is hardly guaranteed. And even if you are doing pretty well at old-style reporting, competition for eyeballs is simply ridiculous. A news agency, therefore, that insists on the old signal-based model is fighting an uphill battle.

Welcome to the Jungle

As with the problem faced by the academy, described by Katherine Hayles in part 1, media businesses had (have, and always will have) an institutional need to make a profit. Whether there’s actually enough signal to go around is momentarily beside the point, because it’s easy to see how the perception might evolve in a corporate boardroom that the traditional approach is a losing game. (And in a market-driven society, “perception is everything” is literally true.) In this brave new world of 500 channels and seemingly infinite numbers of Internet-delivered information (and disinformation) sites, it’s harder than ever to attract necessary revenues the old-fashioned way.

The conclusion: if there’s 10,000 guys stomping all around Signal Lake, hundreds of boats jockeying for position on every square inch of surface, a million more casting off the bridge, all fighting over two or three half-assed little fish, then maybe we ought to wander over to the River of Noise. Something is always biting there.

If my theory is right, then, our media institutions are behaving the way they are out of a certain logic. Not an admirable or productive logic, but something that makes sense if you’re looking for cause and effect. To wit: at the moment, there’s a prevailing perception (likely accurate) that there’s a greater return – a massively greater return – to be had on noise generation than there is signal hunting. Putting a hard-nosed investigative reporter on the trail of an important story for a few weeks or months, that’s an iffy investment. Employing enough reporters to reliably fill up the 24/7/4ever news cycle, that’s expensive. How much easier it is to simply trot Matt Lauer and Ann Curry out there to primp and blather over the latest “development” in the Michael Jackson “story.”

The results? Well, the networks are making money, aren’t they?

So, if I can try and pull all this together:

• Once upon a time both academia and the news media were structured in a way that aligned personal and institutional success with activities that we might call signal.
• The landscape changed in ways that made it hard for the institutions (and the individuals within them) to continue succeeding using the established strategies. Specifically, these environments evolved in ways that made signal a scarce commodity at the same time the systems were expanding.
• Both environments adapted by cultivating new structures and processes that were able to survive on noise.

How Can We Return American Media to the Promised Land of Signal?

Maybe we can’t. The media genie running amok in America is a big, powerful one, and you can rest assured it ain’t going back in the bottle without the mother of all throwdowns.

Still, the damage that the Noise Media is wreaking on our society is intolerable – worse in nearly every respect than what has happened in the world of LitCrit, and I think I made clear how bad that is in part 1 – and we’d be advised to contemplate how we can at least boost our signal-to-noise ratio in the right direction. To this end, there are two things that need to happen.

First, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (because this seems to be my answer to everything), we have to dramatically increase our emphasis on education. Specifically, we need to cultivate stronger critical thinking skills. The reason is simple. An enlightened mind has a much lower tolerance for foolishness. The reason that media have been able to profit off of inane programming is because our culture has so aggressively pursued the anti-intellectual. While I’m not attempting to let the pimps who program our media outlets off the hook here, it is not untrue to suggest that their actions are a logical response to what the marketplace has become.

Second, we revive the public interest standard and make it the centerpiece for every deliberation that happens regarding media in the US. The public interest, not the corporate interest. Fowler and Brenner said, in the early ’80s, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” It was self-evidently stupid when they said it then, and the only thing that has changed in the intervening years is that now we have even more evidence to prove it. But thanks to their efforts on behalf of Reagan’s anti-public communications policy, we now live in a nation where “journalism” and “pandering to the lowest common denominator” mean fundamentally the same thing.

Perhaps the system has evolved in precisely the way we should have expected. But it has evolved into something that does not serve our society or its future best interest. The sooner we understand why it has spun out of control, the sooner we can begin taking action to transform it once again, this time into something worthy of a culture that regards itself as the most advanced on Earth.

Part one of a two-part series.

From Cronkite to Couric: the Kingdom of Signal is swallowed by the Empire of Noise

The recent death of Walter Cronkite spurred the predictable outpouring of tributes, each reverencing in its own way a man who was the face and voice of journalism in America for a generation or more. The irony of all these accolades is that we live in an age where “broadcast journalist” is such a cruel oxymoron, and we seem to speeding headlong into an era where the word “journalist” itself threatens to become a freestanding joke. Why, against this backdrop, would so many people who are so involved in the daily repudiation of everything that Cronkite stood for make such a show memorializing the standard by which they so abjectly fail?

As I read what people had to say about Cronkite, I realized that something I studied and wrote about over a decade ago helps explain why our contemporary media has gone so deeply, tragically wrong.

First, let’s state the simple part: Cronkite was about signal. Contemporary media is about noise.

When you flipped on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, you were engaged by a program where every attempt was made to sift through the static, to filter away the disinformation, and to present in a direct, clear, calm voice the essence of what was happening. More importantly, what was happening mattered, tangibly, in the lives of the audience. The emphasis was on the substance of what was needed instead of the shallow style of what was wanted.

At the end of the broadcast he’d close with his trademark signoff: “And that’s the way it is.” When he did, the assertion was credible because the news hadn’t relied on smoke and mirrors, dog and pony shows, cyniacally choreographed screaming matches (in order to assure “balance”) or artful PR-mongering. It was, instead, the proud product of professionals whose ethics stressed getting at the facts of the day. To be sure, other luminaries like Hunter Thompson warned us about confusing fact with truth, but what Cronkite and his colleagues wrought in 30 minutes was, on the whole, pretty useful at maximizing clarity and minimizing clutter.

The next question follow logically: why have media operations (sorry, but when people like Katie Couric are at the helm, I just can’t make myself use terms like “press” and “journalism”) abandoned the sacred quest for signal in favor of a decadent wallow in noise? How did this happen?

The answer, I fear, gets a little wonkish. If you’ll bear with me, though, I think I can lead us to some signal about noise.

Shannon vs. Barthes

In 1990, UCLA professor and scholar Katherine Hayles published Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.* One chapter of the book, in particular, fascinated me. It looked at two of the 20th Century’s more prominent intellectual figures (prominent within their respective research communities, anyway) and contrasted them on how their work dealt with signal and noise. The first luminary was engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, and the other was Roland Barthes, the French post-structuralist “theorist, philosopher, critic and semiotician.”

Dr. Hayles parallels the development of Shannon’s information theory** with the radical post-structuralism of Barthes, explaining that both were concerned with the same issues in their respective communications systems. Varying institutional dynamics, however, led them to widely divergent approaches in addressing “noise” in the system.

Shannon, working at Bell Labs, was directly concerned with message clarity – it was his job to minimize noise in the system, thereby enabling as high a degree of communication between points as possible. In Shannon’s formulation, unwanted noise was defined as the “equivocation,” and one of his most important theorems posits that equivocation is reducible to zero if the proper code is employed (Hayles 188).

Barthes, on the other hand, argued that “literatures are in fact arts of ‘noise’,” and that this equivocation is what readers “consume.” As such, noise in the system is to be encouraged and maximized as much as possible (Hayles 188). In other words, what Barthes suggests as the optimal goal of criticism is the absolute negation of what most would see as the essence of communication. In a very real sense, it is the role of criticism not to facilitate communication, but to actively prevent it.

With equivocation thus maximized, the reader is encouraged to partake of this massive new body of noise which, Barthes suggests, is more interesting than the original intent anyway. This position, while stated “in a risqué fashion,” nonetheless represents the mainstream belief of the critical community (Hayles 189).

So far, so good. But why would anyone – even a French intellectual – want to destroy the possibility of communication (and in doing so, annihilate the possibility of shared meaning)?

Noise as the Servant of Institutional Demand

Here we get to the part that’s so important to understanding the sorry state of 21st Century media. As Hayles explains, Shannon’s attempts to decrease noise in the system were spurred by the well-defined institutional needs of the country’s growing telephone industry. Those of us old enough to remember the static in the average long distance call will immediately appreciate the value of Shannon’s work.

The deconstructionist desire to increase noise in the field of literary criticism, Hayles argues, was also driven by institutional demands. Before post-structuralism, she says, literary critics were relatively limited in the number of acceptable texts available for analysis. Aside from the new texts introduced by living writers, this body of subject texts remained relatively constant for decades. At the same time, however, the literary establishment experienced enormous growth, resulting in a comparative shortage of canonized texts for scholars to critique. “Too many critics, too few texts” ( Hayles 189):

Post-structuralism, especially deconstruction, overcomes this scarcity by showing how each text can be made into an infinite number of texts. Moreover, it actually converts scarcity to excess by proclaiming that theory’s proper subject is not only literature, but theory itself.
…
Thus the increasing number of theoretical texts in literary criticism, as well as their tendency to organize themselves in increasingly complex ways, can be understood as responses to the discipline’s systemic economy (189-190).

In other words, post-structuralism’s war on communication and meaning do not serve society’s need to better understand art or what art can reveal about the nature of culture; it is not driven by any evolution towards greater enlightenment in society; it is not about helping society overcome its “false consciousness” or moving us toward a more equitable form of self-governance; it is not even, as its proponents often suggest, designed to give voice to previously unempowered demographics: these are merely rationalizations.

Instead, the rage for noise was quite simply a response to the research university’s need to find tenure-track assistant professors something to do. It is, in the terminology of Complexity Theory, an adaptive response aimed at enabling the survival and growth of an evolving system. It is not about students, communities, meaning, authenticity, art, knowledge, or any of the other things scholars might use to justify their work.

Those who knew me in grad school can probably recall my indignation at what I termed the “DeMeaning Project.” As I put it in a paper I once presented at a conference (to a room full of Barthes devotées, I should note):

The De-meaning Project is, purely and simply, about the value-free perpetuation of academia’s ideology of research. It is about the exaltation and empowerment of the scholar, and if this comes at the expense of those the university is alleged to serve, so far nobody seems much concerned.

From the systemic demands fueling deconstruction, it is a small step to further envision the need the academy has for self-validation in a world increasingly obsessed with celebrity. Each step of the project I have here outlined finds the academic engaged in the deprivileging of someone or something non-academic. We must ask ourselves – once the individual is gone, once the artist is discredited, once the text is infinitely imprisoned within a bottomless pit of signification, once literary texts are replaced at the center of scholarship by critical texts – once this project is completed, what remains? What remains, and more particularly, who benefits? The academy has sought in the insecurity of the De-meaning Project to discredit all except for itself, and if it should succeed, then its stars become the only stars.

To sum it up: once upon a time scholars and critics were engaged in what we might call a process of signal, where they studied canonized literary texts and sought a communication and meaning-making connection with both the original text, the author and the audience. In time, the canon ran out of accepted books and things to say about them, which was a problem for all the young scholars who needed something to establish their records and justify their cases for tenure. The result was a new kind of scholarship that dynamited the canon, the idea of the great author, and even the very possibility of communication or meaning.

The institution had given up on discovering or cultivating signal, and so it shifted its focus to noise – which is exactly what happened to the American press.

Tomorrow: The Media Empire of Noise

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* Hayles, N.K. (1990). Chaos bound: orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

** I link to Wikipedia in multiple places above because it provides quick, accessible overviews of the people and topics referenced. Please, forgive my slothfulness – I know that Wikipedia isn’t always the best of resources. Those interested in a more detailed explanation of the concepts are encouraged to check the links at the bottom of each entry, many of which will take you as deep into the subject as you’d like to go (and farther than I’m probably capable of going).

In any public communication system where access is generally open, noise tends to expand at an exponential rate while the expansion of signal is merely additive.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine why this would occur to me…