E0027 The Old Man and The River

The parable of the Old Man and the River tells us it isn't now deep the water is, but how swift the water flows when it comes to looking at pop culture.  There's magic in how crystal clear those swift waters flow.   Join us for a review of the theories underpining the value of studying pop culture for academic analysis, what that means for the future of the Implausipod, and hints at who the old man might be.

Contact us at drimplausible  at implausipod dot com

Bibliography:
Benjamin, W. (2008). _The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media_. Hippo. https://www.abebooks.com/9780674024458/Work-Art-Age-Technological-Reproducibility-0674024451/plp

Bourdieu, P. (1999). _On Television_. The New Press.

Daub, A. (2020). _What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley_. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Flew, T., & Smith, R. (2018). _New Media: An Introduction, Third Canadian Edition_. Oxford University Press.

Griffin, E. (2003). _A First Look at Communication Theory_ (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill. https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/first-look-communication-theory-griffin-sparks/M9781264296101.html

Katz, E., Haas, H., & Gurevitch, M. (1973). On the Use of the Mass Media for Important Things. _American Sociological Review_, _38_(2), 164–181. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094393

McLuhan, M. (1964). _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_. The New American Library.

Williams, R. (1974). _Television: Technology and cultural form_. Fontana.

Transcript

 The word's gold rush conjures a particular image in everyone's mind's eye. Images of the old west, and boomtowns where dusty prospectors would stake a claim and take their chances. Near where I grew up, the heyday was 1895, where dredges funded by Europeans and Americans would lift up the riverbed by the bucketful, trying to sift up that glittering metal, but by 1907 they were mostly gone.
Abandoning their tools on the riverbed to rust away, but that didn't stop the smaller prospectors. They continued on. Legend tells of one prospector who's still tending his claim to this very day. Every morning he gets up and tends the hearth in his tiny cabin, makes himself some coffee and porridge, maybe adds a little salt pork and a biscuit if it's been a good month, and then packs up his gear and heads up the mountain.
It's a two hour hike to get to where the waters run clear. And you gotta get there for dawn, so that when you reach down with your pan and give it a shake in the stream, you can hold it up just right against the morning light, and if you're lucky, real lucky, you'll see that glittering gold sparkling in the pan.
You see, the secret that the prospector knows is it isn't how deep the water is, it's how fast it's going. And those mountain streams are very fast indeed. No one knows exactly what keeps that Prospector going, as I'm sure you can do the math and you can tell he's been at it for over a century. Some say he's a ghost, or maybe a revenant.
They seem to be popular around these parts. Maybe it's a curse, and whenever he finds what he seeks, his soul will be released. I've got an inkling, but I'll keep my hunch to myself a little bit longer, and maybe Tell you at the end of this episode of The Implazapod, while we explore the old man and the river.
Welcome to The Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and this episode we'll pick up almost directly where our last episode left off, where as Silicon Dreams talked about how literature inspired the mythic imagination that led to the development of virtual reality and our new AI tools, here we're going to talk about pop culture more generally.
At the beginning of every episode, I talk about how this podcast sits at the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture, but maybe it's not so clear as we've bounced around a whole lot. We've talked about television shows and cyberpunk novels, we've talked about Doctor Who episodes, ancient science fiction, Warhammer 40, 000, and a few episodes on some technology too, and it might not seem how they're connected, but I assure you they're all interrelated.
So, in order to lay that all out, I'm going to break this episode into a couple chunks. We're going to look at the philosophical background, and then we're going to look at some of the theoretical approaches about how this is actually happening. So yeah, philosophy and theory. Exciting. Before we really get started, I want to take a moment to pique your interest and discuss why we want to look at philosophy.
Outwardly, it may not make sense to analyze the lyrical content of Taylor Swift's songs, or look at the political economy of video games, or what they represent, to look at the commercials that air during the Super Bowl and not just the Super Bowl itself, to take a recent example. But that's exactly why we need to look at it, because all those elements that are there in our pop culture are those elements that reflect and represent So if we want to know what's really going on in our culture, it makes sense to look at what we're making and sharing with each other, as we talked about in our spreadable media episode.
Because it turns out, once you get skilled at looking at pop culture, it's really good at reflecting what our motivations are. That pan that our old man is holding. And let me share with you my favorite quote on it. Quote, The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture. Not because pop culture is deep, but because it's so shallow.
It's where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident. End quote. This is from the science fiction author Bruce Sterling in 2002, and I've I've used it as a touchstone ever since, and it doesn't matter whether it's pro wrestling or superhero movies or stand up comedy or miniature games, I've found it to hold true.
So let's get into the philosophy of why we're doing this, and for that we're going to have to take a trip down the mountain. Now,
depending on your academic background, you may have heard of the Frankfurt School before. It was founded at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Natch. It was called the Institute for Social Research, and they critiqued society from a Marxist lens and founded what is now called Critical Theory. Prior to World War II, the director was Max Horkheimer, who wrote some of the foundational documents and worked with Theodor Adorno and also Herbert Marcuse.
Also associated with the school was Walter Benjamin, who we'll get to in a bit. They were critical of the cultural industry, as tools used to promote, repeat, and sustain capitalism, but also like, just power imbalances of the dominant ideology. The Frankfurt School coined the term the cultural industry, and this included film, television, radio, music, print media, and By modern extension, video games and social media would count too, and where Marx was focused on the means of production, the Frankfurt School extended that to mean the means of production of culture, as they observed that those who owned those cultural forms were able to have an outsized say in the political discourse.
They were able to reproduce the ideology. And for the Frankfurt School, we can see this in the ownership of media in their time, with the William Randolph Hearst's of the world, and in ours with, say, Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post, and Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg and his advertising company Facebook, building media outlets for their customers, and the purchase of Instagram, WhatsApp, and the like.
And while the Frankfurt School were some of our first explorers who identified that river, the flood of material that we get from the cultural industries, they also had some rather negative thoughts about it as well. I'm referring here mostly to Theodore Adorno, who was a musicologist and was critical of Popular music, and in his time that included jazz, but for him popular culture was something that rationalized the arts, that took off all the rough edges to make it palatable for consumption.
And by that it made the consumers, the listeners or viewers or readers, that much more passive and just accepting of the information that they were getting. If the art doesn't challenge you, it doesn't make you think. But here I think we need to make a bit of a distinction between mass culture and popular culture.
If mass culture is a big lake or the ocean that's available to everybody, then popular culture is that fast flowing river that joins the sea at some point. The critical point here is that only some material from mass culture enters the popular culture. to quote John Fiske. But if we want to understand how that happens, we need to start moving on from the Frankfurt School to one of their associates, Walter Benjamin.
Now, he's perhaps best known for his writing on art and aesthetics, but for us, the work that's most relevant is the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. This is a foundational text about how the very nature of art changes when you no longer need an artist doing each and every piece, and it can be mass copied and reproduced.
And it's even more relevant now in the age of AI tools, so we'll have to return to this in a few weeks. Now, Benjamin, writing in 1935, is talking a lot about film at this point in time, as different from painting and other composition, and being something much more than just photography itself, and it's the unfinished nature of it that it cannot be completed with a single stroke, but rather requires much in the way of what we now call post production, the work of editors and colorists and visual effects and sound design, and all these things together.
Film has a capacity for improvement, end quote, in that all these things can be done after the shot, and these are One of the things that make film so magical, that capacity in turn is what Benjamin quotes from Franz Werfel, quote Film has not yet realized its true purpose, its real possibilities. These consist in its unique ability to use natural means to give incomparably convincing expression to the fairy like, the marvelous.
The supernatural. Of course here Werfel, and Benjamin, is talking about A Midsummer Night's Dream, but we can see how film can be used to create and develop the mythic imagination in its audience as well, as we discussed last episode. So film is about getting us used to new ideas. Also, propaganda, he's still affiliated with the Frankfurt School.
But the idea of new ideas more generally. Earlier in the text, Benjamin writes, the function of film is to train human beings in the appreciation and reactions needed to deal with the vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily, end quote. This is using film as a referent, well before television and the role that advertising on television would come to play.
and is so much more prophetic for that. We can see here the threads of the development of the idea of the audience as being there for reception of ideas. And these ideas can also be seen in the work of McLuhan. Now, we've mentioned Marshall McLuhan in earlier episodes, and we will be returning to him again.
McLuhan talked about a lot of things when it comes to media, but his biggest idea relative to what we're talking about here is the idea of content, for if the medium is the message, this means that the way in which radios, TVs, or phones address us is more important than what they say when they do. End quote.
That was from Adrian Daub's Critical Review of Silicon Valley Thought. Daub goes into depth on how McLuhan was the media theorist beloved by the 60s counterculture, which ended up turning into the Silicon Valley culture during the 70s, 80s, and beyond. And for them, McLuhan was all about the vibe. He passed the vibe check if you were hit.
You got it. McLuhan's idea of media, content, and audience became pervasive in the Silicon Valley. And we'll come back to both him and Daub's book in a future episode. But then, as per the old Heritage Minute that aired on Canadian television, the content is the audience. We've gone into depth about how the cultural industries commodify audiences and sell them back to companies, whether they are advertisers, direct marketers, or through other means.
From McLuhan, each successive medium was built on the material output of another, older medium. Television would incorporate film, and theatre, and radio, and In that way surpassed them all, and we saw again similar effects with what social media like TikTok or YouTube Shorts now does. The contrast to McLuhan of course is the British critic Raymond Williams.
He rejected McLuhan's more technologically deterministic leanings and focused on the cultural form of television by looking at what was actually reproduced and shown on it. In his 1974 book, Television, Williams looked at how earlier forms like the News Bulletin or the Roundtable Discussion were presented on television.
And there's always a much more direct, personal, immediate, intimate relationship that the television broadcast had with its audience. We can see here that the stream is flowing much faster, becoming closer, more personal as we skip through the decades to what we have now. And as we glance back into those waters and see how it reflects our society around us, we realize that television is really about perception.
And this is what Pierre Bourdieu notices as well. Bourdieu is not really big on television. He says that the invisible structures therein, the ones that operate around and behind it, determine what appears on screen. These are all driven by ratings, and what they end up Doing is perpetuating symbolic violence.
Now, that violence was the focus of much research. And we'll look at the theories behind that research in the second half of our episode, next.
So, up till now, we've been looking at some of the philosophy about why we need to peer deep into the river. But let's see if we can learn a little something by taking a look at the way that that research has been operationalized, the techniques for panning for gold in that stream. And as we saw with Bourdieu, one of the main concerns was the violence, symbolic or otherwise, that was shown.
But that actually goes back further. Quoting Em Griffin, he noted that one of the early theories that TV's powers comes from the symbolic content of the real life drama shown hour after hour. And this comes from Cultivation Theory, proposed by George Gerbner in 1973. Now, as Griffin notes, television's function was as society's institutional storyteller.
lines up with what we've discussed earlier, but for Gerbner, the story being told was violence. As part of his 20 years cultural indicators project, there was a lot of research done into the amount of television violence that was being shown. And it was more than just the overt acts of violence, it was also who the violence was directed to, often minorities or marginal populations.
There was a lot of symbolic vulnerability that was displayed on television. And this continual repetition of violence contributed a lot to what people call the Mean World Syndrome. The people thought the world was a lot more violent and scary than it actually might be. That there was a high chance of involvement within violence, there was a fear of walking alone at night.
the perceived activity of police, what they were actually doing, and a general mistrust of people all kind of came out of this. For Gerbner, this all is encapsulated in what he calls cultivation theory, where he studies the differential between light and heavy TV viewers and sees the difference in their opinions.
Cultivation theory differs from other things like media effects because in the modern landscape, there is no non TV environment, no anti environment to it, as we discussed with McLuhan in our Dumpshock episode back in episode number 14. MediaEffects is predicated on the idea that there's a before and after exposure to measure, but because television exposure happens at such a young age, there's no meaningful way to test it.
So Gerbner and others who use it are trying to figure out if the damage is in the dosage. When viewers see repeated instances of violence, they may find that it resonates with their own experiences. People relate the constant portrayal on television, what they see, to their own experience, even if it only happened once.
But if you're seeing constant acts of violence, mugging, robbery, etc, and it happens to you on one occasion, you're going to think, that yeah this is what's happening all the time. But the constantly flowing river doesn't just have violence in it. Obviously that's one thing that's there, that's observable, that's testable, that you can get grant money for for a 20 year study.
But there's other things going on flowing through the river. The question is, how does it all get there? This is where the agenda setting function of the media comes in. Recognized by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972, they state that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our attention.
Paraphrasing Bernard Cohen, they note that the media might not be successful in telling the audience what to think, but they are very successful in telling the audience what to think about. about. The challenge is that, as oft repeated, correlation is not causation. Maybe the audience is driving the agenda.
In some instances, this may definitely happen, as with modern news organizations hopping on TikTok trends or whatever. But on substantive matters, the media drives the agenda. And Em Griffin points out that several studies have confirmed McCombs and Shaw's hypothesis since it was originally published. So, who sets the media's agenda?
Ownership, gatekeepers, PR firms, interest aggregations, and lobbyists, the invisible structures that Bourdieu talked about earlier, and this dovetails all the way back to the Frankfurt School when they're talking about the ownership of the means of the production of culture. And I want to be clear here that not everybody reciting here is like a Marxist or a left wing academic.
This is just from observing what's going on. So, if these invisible structures are setting the agenda, are deciding which rivers flow into the lake of mass culture, what's the role of the audience? Well, people are not mindless in this, they have agency. They can choose what they like and what they want.
And as we follow that stream back into the mountains, we're getting a little bit closer to the source. And we find ourselves ultimately asking, what does the Audience use media for this is probably best addressed by the field of study that looks at uses and gratifications. The primary source we're using here is the work of Elihu Katz in 1973.
Although we notes the idea of studying the audiences gratification goes back to Cantrel in 1942. What Katz and his collaborators were arguing is that quote, people bend the media to their needs more readily than the media overpower them. The media gratify individuals by satisfying those needs, whether these are social, like in the terms of connection or standing, or psychological, like in terms of belonging or reinforcement.
And it's these needs to which media is most often used for, that use as part of the equation. These needs can be about knowledge, emotional experience, credibility, or simply connection. And there's a whole host more. They did come up with quite a large matrix to populate their survey with. But the point is, is that the audience is not a monolith.
They have agency and there's a wide degree of different uses that they might put the media towards. And some of those may aligned with the agenda setting that's set in place by the major media companies, but some of it may not. It would be used for more. Personal purposes. And there's a continual cybernetic feedback loop going back and forth between the agenda setting and the uses of the audience themselves.
And somehow the audience always find new things that they end up using the media for. Which brings us back to where we started. That high mountain stream running so very, very fast indeed. You see, it's in our imagination, both individual and collective, where we get those ideas from. The jokes we tell with our friends, the wild stories that we might come up with, and as those get repeated and shared, they take on a life of their own.
And sometimes when they're laid down in a book or a movie, comic book, video game, wherever, they become aspirational. And it's something we can set our goals towards. It's like, hey, check out that moon up there, do you think we can get there? And a hundred years later, maybe it'll just happen. And I think that brings us full circle with our Silicon Dreams of last episode as well.
As we look back over a hundred years of communication, media, psychology studies, audience research, and the hundred years of development that have happened while that old man has been up that mountain, I think you understand now that. Perhaps that old man is me. This has been a bit of a summary of the academic upbringing that I've had over the last 30 years.
The stuff that I was exposed to and how I learned to formulate some of the questions that I did. in my research. But I have one more secret to tell you about the stream, too. Because, while I might look and sound the part of the old man, there's a secret hidden within those swiftly flowing waters. It keeps you young.
Or young at heart, at least. It might not be comfortable, and it continually forces you to re examine the world around you. You have to climb back up that mountain every day. The water can be cold and uncomfortable, but if you peer within it, you can see what's going on. So, by engaging where the waters run swift and deep, wherever they're fresh and clear, whether it's a TikTok or Mastodon or Snapchat, wherever the youth might be gathering, that's where you'll find a good look at what the future might hold.
Thanks for joining us here on the Implausipod. In the next episode, we might find exactly what that future holds, when we open up the black box labeled AI that we found during all this dredging in the river, and see what those fast running waters can tell us about our expectations, the uses and gratifications from that most recent of our technologies.
But we may have to wait a few episodes to find out how that's all connected to a guy named Samuel Butler. And then after that, we'll soon return to Appendix W to look at Dune before the second movie's release. Stay tuned. It's going to be a busy month. Once again, I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. The research, writing, editing, mixing, and music is all done by me.
I can be reached at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and this episode is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 sharer like license. Thanks for joining us, and I hope to talk with you again real soon. Take care, and have fun.