Quality brands as moribund middlebrow propaganda (22 March 2010)

In a recent New Yorker column, James Surowiecki argues that retailers are succeeding by eschewing the middlebrow and either making luxury goods or cheap, "good enough" stuff. I had trouble following some of his logic (I didn't really understand what he was getting at in his point about economies of scale) but I thought this was interesting:

In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of reasonable quality and reliability. Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately. The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.

It seems like a good thing if people aren't mistakenly equating brands with merchandise quality. But I wonder whether that has anything to do with information access. It seems like it could reflect an ideological shift, or a shift in the significance of branding.

Surowiecki depicts middlebrow shoppers as dupes who mistook brands for indicators of quality while they bumbled in the marketplace, with no inner resources to draw on to tell what's what. The brand reassured them they weren't making a mistake, even if the quality wasn't there. Paradoxically, the wealth of new information available makes the possibility of making a mistake much higher; there's more we should have and could have known, and we can quickly confirm our disappointment online if something goes wrong with something we purchase. A form of decisional paralysis may set in as brands are devalued, or at least come to signify qualities other than quality.

But brands have more work to do besides signal quality. They need to be more flexible in what they can mean, what sort of fantasies they can evoke. They need to have richer personalities (ugh). What is precisely middlebrow is the idea that a brand signals only quality, and that idea is perhaps dead. (Surowiecki's muted nostalgia for it altogether befits the middlebrow magazine he writes for, its own brand an increasingly irrelevant signal of quality as magazines founder.) Instead, the ways in which products denote class distinctions have become more complex; the grammar which retailers and consumers alike must use with products more sophisticated.

A "tyranny" of hits (7 Jan 2010)

Yesterday I was lamenting about having too much choice in cultural product, and how that has made me take a skeptical attitude toward anything new --I'm too busy keeping up with what I already allegedly like to start liking more and more. (That is, I have a finite amount of desire to invest.) This Economist article from a few months ago brings up a related issue: it looks at how culture industries have become even more dependent on huge-selling hits, which have paradoxically become more prominent as consumer choice has proliferated.

Offer music fans a virtually infinite choice of songs free of charge, and they will still gravitate to hits. That has been the experience of We7, a music-streaming service based in London which has 2.5m users. Only 22% of We7’s 4m songs are streamed in any given week, says Steve Purdham, who founded the company. The top 100 artists account for more than half of all streams. Users of Spotify, another ad-supported music service, are similarly unadventurous. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties for British songwriters, calculates that the most popular 5% of tracks on Spotify account for 80% of all streams. He is counting only the 3m tracks that were streamed at least once between February and July. Another 1.5m were not touched at all.

Industry people explain this by pointing to the social nature of media consumption; though we tend to hide from this truth, what we like has more to do with what everyone else likes than with the qualities of the product itself. In a sense, though the theoretical range of our choices in culture has become nearly infinite, the real range of options we experience is delimited by who we know and what we read and what we pick up from the zeitgeist. That range may be contracting as the mass media contracts and rallies around the hit products that can still produce profits. That may offset whatever broadening could come from social networking tools that allow people to share their preferences easier. (I'd suspect that such sharing -- the uncompensated brand-building labor I've whined about elsewhere -- also contributes to hit-making.

At the end of yesterday's post I posited the possibility of just loving whatever is hot at the moment and nothing else as a way of evading the trap of having to hate everything in order to protect oneself from becoming overwhelmed. I was sort of joking about that -- seems more like repressive desublimation to me -- but maybe that is what people generally do: Accept hype as a rational solution to questions of taste and search efficiency. If we consume less, and only what is popular, we don't have enough breadth of experience to become disgruntled the products we are consuming and we are popular at the watercooler too. Consider this:

Tom Tan and Serguei Netessine of Wharton Business School have analysed reviews on Netflix.... They find that blockbusters get better ratings from the people who have watched them than more obscure ones do. Even the critically loathed “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is awarded four stars out of five.... Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type.... A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

These people tell other people about their experience, and "the hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill."

This analysis side-steps the question of objective merit, which I think is more or less impossible to determine and is ultimately a red herring in understanding popularity. Objective taste is a myth; those who want to distinguish themselves as cultural connoisseurs merely use the idea of objectivity to differentiate themselves from the masses of Lost Symbol readers. Embracing hits can be a way to opt out of the cultural-capital-accumulation game, which is what seems to be behind the "popist" trend in music criticism. These critics are trying a new approach to objectivity by signaling indifference to the cultural capital embodied in certain tastes, but that signal inevitably becomes its own class marker, becomes a gesture that feels forced, or positional. They don't take it far enough -- to the point of ceasing to be critics altogether and keeping their opinions to themselves and to their word-of-mouth-range friends. Perhaps the only sure way to authentic taste is to abdicate it entirely.

Avatar and Invisible Republic (29 Dec 2009)

I had no particular interest in seeing Avatar, but ended up seeing it the day after Christmas with my family. It seemed futile to resist. I even saw it in gimmicky 3-D, which added nothing to my enjoyment but did cause me to fidget ceaselessly with the glasses that I had to wear over my regular glasses. The film seemed primarily an exercise in glow-in-the-dark crypto-zoology, with little in the way of plausible plotting or character development. (We know Sigorney Weaver's character is cantankerous and outside-the-lines because they have her smoke a cigarette when she gets out of her cryo-travel pod.) It has a half-baked, programmatic but effective sentimentality that elicits emotional responses to the rite-of-passage cues. It kept me engaged by and large, though much of it reminded me of watching my roommate play Final Fantasy 9 (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one) on PlayStation while I was in college.

Only later did its trite politics annoy me. At first, I found it a little bothersome that I had to watch a bunch of humans get slaughtered by cartoons. Humans as a species haven't looked this bad in a sci-fi film since Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (which I strongly endorse). We are given no explanation why the resource the greedy humans are after is so important other than the tautology that it's worth a lot of money. Weaver's character tries to counter the already confusing insistence on resource extraction with a non sequitur about how the "real value" of the planet the humans are pillaging lies in the fact that the trees are networked together to form a giant bio-Internet. (Great. The last thing we need is metaphors that glorify and naturalize digital, mediatized interconnectedness.) What is valuable about that? It's regarded as unimportant by the film's producers.

What is important to them is the quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo about the native race on the planet, which seems modeled mainly on American Indian tribes and is represented in an extremely patronizing fashion as a bunch of simple primitives who understand their environment only in supernatural terms. It takes a human outsider, naturally, to teach them the significance of their ways and rally them to defend themselves, since they are helpless against aggression and superior military technology.

The Sociological Images blog sums up the racial politics this way:

Avatar is a fantasy in which the history of colonization is rewritten, but it a fantasy specifically for white people living with a heavy dose of liberal guilt. And it is one that, ultimately, marginalizes indigenous peoples and affirms white supremacy.

I don't see how anybody can contest that analysis. I feel a bit ashamed, actually, that I was sitting in suburban Bucks County with all my white, middle-class compadres, complacently consuming the spectacle without becoming disgusted as it unfolded. At the time it seemed curmudgeonly and cliched for me to reject the high-imperialist homilies the film was lazily built on and the blithe righteousness I was expected to share with the "good" humans. I didn't resist being constructed as viewer in that way because it felt good and flattering. It reaffirmed my sense of belonging to a group of wise and morally pure Westerners who would have done colonizing right -- that is, it played to the ingrained sense of superiority that being white and middle class in America provides. I should have been nauseated; instead I was verklempt as the hero claimed his squaw.

By coincidence, I began reading Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic, which in part is about the demise of the 1960s folk movement and Bob Dylan's role in destroying it after having come to exemplify it. The folkies, in Marcus's depiction, had the same patronizing attitude toward Appalachian poverty and civil-rights injustices (the Other America, as Michael Harrington dubbed it) that the makers of Avatar seem to evince about colonization. Capitalism sullied and exploited the pure rural people, as clear-headed bourgeois liberals can best recognize. To adherents, folk music (and Avatar) offers us glimpses of pre-capitalist America, a "democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed" in which art seems "the product of no ego but of the inherent genius of a people." The Avatar planet is such a product, for the race occupying it and the film-industry execs who made it.

The substance of this fantasy about indigenous people at harmony with their appropriate environment is the denial of individual subjectivity (the overriding value of the folk revival, according to Marcus), which is rendered unnecessary and impossible. Everyone is at one and merged with one another. Just look at the blue people in the movie sway to the unsounded rhythm as they worship their special tree. Marcus: "As they live in an organic community ... any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular." This is an attractive fantasy to have about other people, as it leaves oneself as the last unique individual standing -- like the hero of Avatar. Folk music tends to make a virtue out of a subject people's lack of autonomy because its adherents can't see a way to ameliorate those people's powerlessness without surrendering some of their own comfort. Avatar offers a fantasy solution, in which one vicariously becomes one of the subject people without losing one's distinctive identity, and then helps that group achieve autonomy. The story conveniently ends there, before the logic of communal unity eradicates the hero's sense of self.

But the faceless masses are most likely not so keen on being turned into a contemplative object for someone else, not psyched to have their identity and destiny predetermined by historical circumstances. We generally want someone else to be living by that pure code of acceptance of "authentic identity"; we are always tempted to try to reserve for ourselves the power to shape our own destiny and be anything we want. No one seems to volunteer to become the folk if the condition of that is disappearing into holistic anonymity. Instead we impose our notion of authenticity on others, and let their being trapped in it serve to limn the terms of our own private freedom.

Complicated television (26 Jan 2009)

The increased complexity of TV shows is sometimes offered as evidence of an increasing sophisticated audience who has come to appreciate greater complexity in their entertainment. Look at shows like Lost and The Sopranos with their ambiguity and their multiple, interweaving plot lines and so on. Presumably, the implication seems to be, people have adapted to the conventions of television and require greater amount of complexity to hold their now-mammoth capacity for attention, for holding complicated details suspended in their minds.

But this argument, as flattering as it is to us and despite how pleasant its justification of our couch-potatodom may be, doesn't seem quite right. The shows aren't more complex so much as they eschew unnecessary reiteration of what is going on and what the conflicts and tensions are supposed to be. In reminiscing with a friend about Twin Peaks we recalled how the integrity of the show was compromised by the efforts it had to make to bring in and acclimate new viewers who arrived at the show late -- perhaps after the avalanche of hype that greeted its first few episodes. New shows don't confront that problem. Writers and producers don't have to worry about incorporating inane exposition (like you see on daily soaps -- the convention that most makes them seem sort of dense to non-viewers) or introducing new plot lines to hook new viewers. They know that when people hear hype, they will start from the beginning, not tune in in medias res. The writers can therefore plot accordingly, comfortable in the knowledge that new and potentially confused viewers can (a) see episodes on demand or during one of HBO's frequent re-runs, (b) catch up online, (c) rent the DVDs, which come out almost immediately after a season first airs, or (d) download episodes from pirate sites. Considering (c), it almost behooves producers to insist on a certain complexity that would require viewers to pony up for the DVDs.

So I would argue that the apparent increase in complexity in TV shows is a consequence of the new technologies in delivering content as opposed to the advancing tastes of the viewing public. Lost, for instance, would be unthinkable without those technologies. The audience would have necessarily dwindled as it went on (because new viewers would be hopelessly confused) or the show would have had to solve many more of its mysteries more expediently, to make space for entry points for latecomers. So lamentably, Twin Peaks was ahead of its time in this sense; if it were being made now, there probably wouldn't have ever been that awful Miss Twin Peaks side plot.

Opera for the masses (6 Sept 2007)

I have had so little time to read lately that I'm blogging on consecutive days about material I heard on the radio in my morning wake-up stupor. Today, the BBC news hour on WNYC spent an eternity covering the death of Pavarotti, one of the famed three tenors. In the middle of the segment, I shut my eyes for what I thought was only a moment, because they were still yammering on about him when I drifted back into consciousness. Then I realized nearly 15 minutes had passed and I was going to be late for work.

The interminable segment was something I was trying very hard to block out, but one comment made by one of the newsreaders nonetheless stuck with me: She noted that though Pavarotti was often criticized for his limited repertoire and refusal to take risks and test the limits of his ability, he should be praised for having done as much as any other singer to bring opera to the masses. Not to be too elitist (or perhaps too philistine) but why is that particularly praiseworthy? What difference does it make whether or not the masses are exposed to opera, an aristocratic indulgence held over from previous periods of opulence and saturated with the mores of a rigid caste system? Is it some great favor to the masses that Pavarotti can make it appeal to them by apparently simplifying it? It seems somewhat condescending for one -- "He was so great, even the masses could appreciate it" -- and it implies that what the masses were already preoccupying themselves with was vulgar. Thank God they at least got to hear a little Pavarotti in their time. I've got nothing against Pavarotti's singing, which I'm sure is impeccable. Reaching a mass audience is an achievement of a sort, but it's not automatically an important or laudable one. It seems more a symptom of what media makes possible and the extent to which we as a society all feel obliged to pretend to care about high art.

The expanded coverage for Pavarotti's death and the condescension in the reportage seem to be part of some cultural instinct to kowtow to certain recondite art forms that have little broad cultural significance other than serving as class boundary markers. We're supposed to revere Pavarotti for having transcended those boundaries, but all he really did was remind us that they persist.

Difficult poetry (25 April 2007)

The other day I was complaining about the way we tend to promote the notion that entertainment's main function is to facilitate self-absorption as a kind of escape. Pop culture often offers vicarious entertainments that are rather undemanding and that flatter us for our limitations, seeming to efface them as we give ourselves over to the entertainment product. In other words, they congratulate us for not thinking.

Having just floated that argument, I found this recent Slate piece by poet Robert Pinsky (a former U.S. poet laureate, if that means anything) serendipitous. He celebrates difficulty, almost for its own sake:

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Difficulty, in short, makes accomplishments meaningful and require us to focus our energies rather than dissipate them. But the problem with difficult poetry is not just that it's hard to understand after a casual breezy read. It's proudly elitist, in that it rewards those who bring the necessary intellectual capital (the result of time and money investments in education as well as what is inherited from literary-minded parents). Pinsky tries to circumvent this by suggesting that poetry can be enjoyed even if you don't really understand what the author may have intended (after all, you wouldn't want to be found guilty of committing the intentional fallacy) and that's almost seems like claiming you can still enjoy chess just by moving the pieces around the board any which way. But it's more that he advocates reading poetry as a rewarding process regardless of the end result, provided it's undertaken with the proper seriousness of intent.

But again we confront a habitus problem -- the necessary attitude for the interpretive process is a learned skill, and its rewards are learned rewards -- we learn to feel rewarded by certain sorts of insights and conclusions, and what they signal about our intelligence and perceptiveness. Reading difficult poetry is no different from listening to difficult music; it opens one to the accusation of pretentious showing off. The question is whether it is possible to separate the enjoyment one gets from reading the poem from the pleasure given by being recognized for reading it. Can you read poetry without consuming it like a lifestyle product, and if so, does the difficulty of the work have anything, really, to do with the distinction?

The demise of niche marketing (20 October 2006)

Via Mark Thoma comes this essay by economist and frequent NY Times contributor Hal Varian about the effects the ease of video production and distribution will have on entrenched old-media interests. Obviously YouTube makes it easy to distribute videos, made with increasingly cheap DV technology, to anyone who might be interested, and the fact that Google now owns YouTube implies that searching the morass of clips will only become easier. Such clips are at the far, far end of the long tail, sometimes produced and distributed for an audience of friends and family. Those who make these clips of themselves lip synching or of family birthday parties or what have you probably don't expect to make a living doing it, so the practice wouldn't seem to have any impact on commercial video producers.

But Varian explains the impact in terms of Ricardo's notion of economic rents: He points out that the salary of such stars as Tom Cruise "depend on the fact that large numbers of people will pay to see his movies. If, in the future, these people spend more time on YouTube and less time going to movies, Mr. Cruise’s compensation will probably fall." In other words, Cruise's salary doesn't determine the cost of producing movies any more than land rent determines the cost of producing agricultural products; it's vice versa. And what YouTube does is provide an easily accessed alternative that redirects some of our attention away from Hollywood and toward (for better or worse) videos of our friends' children and pets, or toward amateur filmmakers doing things so outrageous or clever that our friends forward them to us. Writes Varian: "Economic rent comes from scarcity. It is true that there is only one Tom Cruise, but it is equally true that there are only 24 hours in a day. The more time young people spend watching Lonelygirl15, the less time they will have to watch Mr. Cruise."

The same seems to apply to music -- the easier it is to make music with computer recording and editing software and distribute it via social networking tools like MySpace, the less pressing it is to consume Vivendi Universal's product. Social networks among youth are often knit by shared tastes in mass-media product, but the technological infrastructure is falling into place to permit them to become self-sustaining communities in terms of culture, to become virtual equivalents of what you used to see with small-town hardcore scenes (the kind of thing Maximum Rock and Roll once chronicled).

That's not likely to happen, however, since participation in mass events seems to provide a vicarious satisfaction of the yearning for massive amounts of attention -- the same function that network reality TV seems to serve. (We also seem to want to belong to a zeitgeist that transcends our small communities; perhaps this could change.) Varian suggests something similar when he echoes the prediction that the effects long-tail distribution will ultimately squeeze semipopular, middling culture: "Those actors, writers and directors who do not command the big audiences may well find it hard to compete for attention with the video blogs. True, the videos available there are often sophomoric. But there will always be sophomores to watch them."

What this may indicate is that the middlebrow, not-quite-popular stuff had been serving a placeholder function, it served to replace the community feeling that was decimated with the spread of television and the atomization of suburban America. In other words, semicommercial indie rock, independent film, literary fiction, little magazines and the bookstores and concert halls and coffee shops which supported and distributed such materials were the product of alienation within a specific sociohistorical formation. The niche such stuff served may be vanishing, as niches themselves become so specific as to dissolve into wholly sui generis idiosyncratic scenes made up of friends connected technologically.

The Internet (perhaps only in my Utopian fantasies, and in the face of the reality that in consigns individuals to sit alone facing a screen) is militating against that isolation, offering people sophisticated means to connect and to produce the kind of cultural material with which to facilitate bonds unique to the group they are in the process of creating with one another. Bands, writers, directors who might have broken out to small-time success may now never escape from the small group of personal friends they work to please, unless they manage to convince mass marketers that they can take their productions to that level, and make the sacrifices and compromises of impersonality and ideological conformity that such a leap requires.