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In last week's episode, we talked
about how the media may or may not influence your opinion,
and talked about three different media theories,
the hypodermic needle, two-step flow,
and uses and gratifications.
Let's see what you had to say.
DevFRus gets to a really interesting subtext
of this episode, which is the metaphor of treating media
as a consumable good as opposed to a thing
that you constitute and interact with.
And we talked about this actually
in depth in the Hot and Cold Media episode,
that this is another way to look at media.
Is it something that you consume,
the way that we treated it in last week's episode,
or is it something that you interact
with and through the interaction,
you allow that thing to become what it intends to be?
And I think that this is maybe just the subject of another
But Wait episode, is what are the metaphors that allow us
to think and talk about media?
And I think media as consumable good, which
is the metaphor that all three of those theories rely on,
is probably-- it's a very common one and a very, very
powerful one.
Nicholas Ladendorf and Amy Dentata
get to another subtext of these three theories, which
is how the people who control the media
or make the editorial decisions that comprise the media decide
what does and does not actually get
put in front of their audience.
And this does have a name.
It's called gatekeeper, the gatekeeper theory,
those people would be called, you know, gatekeepers, and is,
yeah, another part of the way that you are sort of appraised
of the state of the world, that if something doesn't get
through a gatekeeper, then you don't know that it's even
a thing worth knowing about.
I mean, that's-- and that, again,
like these three theories, the gatekeeper theory also sort
of really changes when you start talking about how the internet
works.
Oh, cripes.
I'm just wearing sunglasses inside.
Harry T. Dyer asks a really good question
about cultivation theory, which is the theory that the more
people watch television is sort of where this theory starts.
The more people watch basically narratives,
fictional narratives that look sort of like the real world,
the more that they think that is what the world is like
and the more that they accept those depictions of reality
as truth, sort of unquestioningly.
And I think that I'm along the same lines
that you are, Harry, that this is a thing that I think
holds sway in certain places and with certain people,
but of course doesn't have, you know--
doesn't have perfect effectiveness across all media
messages and all audiences.
I do think that it is incredibly effective when
it comes to the news.
And I think that we often forget that the news is
a sort of real-time narrativization of history.
It's just we don't normally think of those things
as history, because it's current events, things
that are happening right now.
But I do think that there is maybe an amount of acceptance
for news media as a direct reflection of what is real
and sort of a portrait of how the world is that we should
question-- we, so the unclear we should question more often.
Harry also gets into some sort of like mere exposure effect
territory, talking about how maybe Minions are
as popular as they are because you see them so often that you
kind of have to like them a little bit in order
to deal with their ubiquity.
And I think that this is-- I always
think about this when there's a new summer blockbuster coming
out, that there is this very fine line for advertising
presence, that when something is present but not ever-present,
I think that you can guess that it's a good movie.
But as soon as it becomes ever-present,
I think that you can pretty safely assume it's a bad movie.
And I felt this way about "X-Men Apocalypse,"
that I was excited to go see.
But then every time I went outside,
it felt like every billboard, every bus, every subway,
every cab, every bus stop, there was an "X-Men Apocalypse"
advertisement.
And I thought, well, now I'm not going to go see it,
because you have convinced me that you
need to convince me so badly it must be a poorly made film.
Vincisomething, you, the person who is irritated by them,
are the target audience.
That's why car commercials are so loud.
They want you to be irritated, because then you're
going to remember to go to Clay Chevrolet.
Bryn Nieboer and a few other people
ask a really good question, which is whether or not
it is actually true and fair to say
that most people don't really know why they like things.
And that is an especially funny thing
to ask on a channel that often talks
about why things are so popular, why
people identify with things.
And you know, what Idea Channel tries
to do a lot of the time is to talk about what about things is
appealing and why the surprising appeal of many pop culture
properties is in fact deep and complicated and important
to understand, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think that this is a really fair
and a really good question.
I guess maybe the thing that I'm trying
to get at is not that people don't know why they like
something, but more that why we like things is
very, very complicated and super hard to grasp and involves
I think a kind of self-knowledge that many of us don't possess.
So I think you're right.
It is unfair to say that all people in all cases
have absolutely no idea why it is
they are a part of the fandom that they're
a part of, that they are interested in self-identifying
by the music or TV shows or movies that they like,
that they don't understand why they
like Harry Potter or the Dark Tower series,
or et cetera, et cetera.
I think that it is fair to say that there
are lots of people who understand
why they're like those things.
But I do think that insofar as media
is a part of everyone's lives, it is difficult,
I think-- it strikes me as a difficult claim
to say that most people understand
what about the media they enjoy makes them enjoy it.
So that's like everybody from you
and me, who may be sort of highly self-literate and highly
media-literate, but then also like,
you know, my parents, your parents, your aunts and uncles,
your cousins, your younger cousins, your college roommate,
all of your ex-significant-others,
that there is I think a kind of internal investigation
that is required to find that kind of knowledge,
and I think, this is maybe still controversial,
that most people don't engage in that.
And you know, I would encourage them to.
Sarah Blake, we can absolutely do that.
I'm going to walk away from the microphone,
so I might hard to hear, but maybe I'll shout.
OK.
Morgan, are you going to follow me?
OK.
So starting up here we have "The Analysis of Tonal Music,"
which is my actual textbook from college; "Grace's Guide"
by Grace Helbig; "Where Mathematics Comes From,"
Lakoff and Nunes; Finn Brunton's "Spam," which is very good,
highly recommended; Don Knuth's "The Art of Computer
Programming, Volume 1;" Thomas Moore's "Open Utopia,"
which was edited by Stephen Duncombe;
Parmy Olson's "We Are Anonymous,"
which is about Anonymous; Ian Bogost's "Alien Phenomenology,"
Lakoff and Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By"--
that's the same Lakoff who did "Where Mathematics Comes
From"-- "Metaphors We Live By," also very good; "Weird Realism,
Lovecraft and Philosophy" by Graham Harman;
two pamphlets from Semiotexte, one by John Baudrillard and one
by-- actually, I don't know.
I don't know who this one's by.
Christian Marazzi, which is about how language is like
money.
A "Downton Abbey" box set; "The Last Exit to Brooklyn;"
"The Stranger;" some Beckett novels, "Molloy,"
"Malone Dies," and "The Unnamable;"
the collected poems of Malarme; "This is Why We Can't Have Nice
Things" by my friend Whitney Phillips; two Edward--
actually three Edward Tufte books, "Beautiful Evidence,"
"Visual Display of Quantitative Information,"
and "Envisioning Information;" "Asterios Polyp,"
which is a great comic book if you haven't read it;
"Tonal Harmony," also an actual textbook of mine from college
that I've managed to not lose; "House of Leaves;"
a book about Guy Debord; "The Big Test" by Nicholas Lemann,
which is the book that we used as the main source for our SAT
episode;
Lorin's "Sorting and Sort Systems,"
a computer science book, also another textbook from college.
Eugene Chadbourne's "Dreamory," Eugene Chadbourne is like this
experimental banjo and guitar player who recorded all of his
dreams and put them into a giant book.
It's crazy.
It's mind-blowingly strange.
"Attack on Titan, Volume 2;" Sandifer's "Tardis Eruditorum,"
Volume 1, 2, and 3; a weird Shadowrun novelization;
Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method,"
which you may remember from our "Rick and Morty" episode;
Paul Pope's "Battling Boy;" Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home;"
Umberto Eco's "The Name of The Rose,"
which is my favorite piece of fiction;
Mary Douglas' "Purity and Danger,"
which we used as a source here in the organic food episode;
and The Oatmeal's, "How to Tell If Your Cat is Plotting to Kill
You."
I think that's all of them.
Let me check.
That's everything.
We will also put a list of all of those books
in the description.
Lexman893 is upset that we didn't talk about Slavoj Zizek
in this episode, or any critical theory,
or the idea that media made within an ideology furthers
or advertises that ideology.
And if you are interested in that kind of thing,
I would point you towards most other Idea Channel episodes.
And last but certainly not least,
Gabe Berry wanted us to talk about Chomsky
and Herman's propaganda model, which is explained
in their really famous book, "Manufacturing Consent,"
and I think really kind of just deserves its own episode.
These three theories from last week are ones that normally
come together and sort of follow one right after the other.
But man, the propaganda model is like, you know, it's its own-
its very much its own thing.
And who knows, maybe a future episode.
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