JasonMorrison.net

3D and Sculpture Work, 2000-2001

Here are a few things I made in a 3D Design course and Sculpture I at OWU, including a couple of cast bronze pieces.

This thesis paper was originally written for a journalism course at Ohio Wesleyan University in 2001.

Introduction

Discussions about the Internet are dominated by colorful and often ill-defined metaphors.  One is expected to surf the information superhighway over to the infobahn, on the way to the digital town hall in the global village to peruse the marketplace of ideas.  This last metaphor, the market where ideas are offered, considered and either accepted or rejected like so much fruit, is more than just a colorful image.  Media and cultural studies often examine the marketplace of ideas theory and the public sphere when examining how mass media work in a democracy.  The Internet seems a natural place to look for both.

Often discussions about the marketplace of ideas and the public sphere are confined the question to whether or not they are worthwhile goals- many critics see them as impossible or rife with flaws.  The marketplace of ideas notion of traditional mass media seems out of sync with reality.  High entry costs into the mass media, central ownership by large corporations, the popular media’s tendency to marginalize radical and little-known ideas, etc., all act as barriers to a free flow of ideas.

The Internet, however, could theoretically create or function as a public forum.  Every media consumer can become a media producer on the Internet, and in some ways (newsgroups and mailing lists, for example) the line between consumers and producers of media are blurred.  Unlike other media, the cost of making a web site viewed by millions is not necessarily larger than a web site viewed by only a handful.  Communication is instantaneous and choice is not limited to what is provided by a few large companies.  Radical groups in every subject from terrorism to literary theory are able to publish as easily as mainstream political parties.

But is the Internet the true public forum, or even a real marketplace of ideas?  A quick look at Internet usage statistics shows relatively few large producers dominating traffic.  According to Nielsen/Netratings, for example, AOL Time Warner recorded 65,954,683 unique visitors in March, out of an estimated 101,965,365

active Internet users that month.¹ With well over one billion web sites on the web to visit and the average user only visiting 10 unique sites a month, most of the traffic is going to a limited number of places-just as most readership goes to a limited number of magazines, newspapers, television stations, etc.

But why are web sites with less money and fewer corporate ties having a harder time getting viewers?  What barriers have arisen to make it hard to get a large audience, and why has the Internet followed the lead of central corporate ownership like the rest of the mass media?  How is the Internet like a public forum and how is it not?

Thesis

The Internet does not function as a de facto public sphere or marketplace of ideas but it does have enormous potential.  Barriers such as the Digital Divide and website funding problems keep the Internet from being a completely free forum while most users most of the time seem to have no interest in entering the public sphere at all.  A few notable examples, however, prove that the Internet has the power to allow public communication, debate, and opinion formation to flourish when users take advantage of it.

(more…)

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society – Issue 15

This chapter’s debate is over the internet as a free trade of information (specifically via Napster).  Writing for the affirmative, Andrew Sullivan argues that file trading over the net is not stealing and might just make communism possible.  The lawyers for the recording industry, on the other had, argue that those who own the rights to the files traded need protection and deserve damages.

Sullivan is almost entirely optimistic about the ability of the net to act as a public space open to everyone.  Even the few sites which required payment are now becoming free, and people can copy the pay site’s content and send it outside anyway.  This, for him is a way to get around Marx’s dislike of the way capitalism values people only by monetary worth.  It also abolishes property in some ways, which Sullivan sees as helping to eliminate greed and profit motive in human interaction.  Soon musicians, journalists and others will remember their love for their professions and not mind going without a paycheck.

The recording industry lawyers, however, are not so cheery.  They point out that Napster facilitates music copying without paying copyright holders, that sales in Napster-saturated markets are down, and that Napster does so knowingly and at an enormous scale.  They argue that Napster was designed for the sole purpose of piracy and that it is their current business model as well.  Although Napster has yet to make any revenues, the lawyers argue they have gotten a financial benefit through piracy via venture capital, stock price and audience acquisition.

Sullivan, I think, has missed the point almost entirely.  I could go on for pages (and will in my paper), but basically his notion that the web is divorced from money is ridiculous.  Newspapers don’t charge because they make money off advertising-so they, along with the rest of the net, try to track you, market to you, sell data about you, etc., and if they don’t they fold.  Web traffic is going increasingly to those with money and power.  Also, so long as food and rent cost money, no writer or musician will forgo paychecks.  Sullivan seems to think you can live off MP3s alone.  My paper is about the internet’s function as a public space, it has more limitations than he recognizes-for example, not everyone can afford a computer or a net connection, which leaves a lot of people out of the public debate.

The Napster lawyers are also full of crap in a lot of ways.  These two essays really are at opposite ends of the spectrum-Sullivan is a naïve Marxist and the lawyers are cunning corporate-capitalists.  Note that in their public statements and in much of the press coverage, the recording industry represented this as a case of taking money from Metallica or the Rolling Stones or whoever, but in the brief copyright ownership is the key concept.  Most musicians get pennies for each CD sold, and some get nothing-with giant corporations, who control the entire distribution network, fixing prices at $17 each.  Napster, in fact, does little to nothing to hurt the average musician, but it’s possible (the lawyers’ proof is not rock solid) it hurts the corporate music oligarchy.  So it hurts non-human entities which create nothing but take all the wealth by dominating and controlling the market-excuse me if I’m not crying.  When the lawyers mention that Napster intends to make CD stores and the RIAA obsolete, it becomes pretty clear-since when has it been illegal to make an outdated system obsolete through technological innovation?

If the court is really interested in serving the public interest, it would pursue antitrust action against the RIAA and rewrite the copyright laws.  It is becoming harder and harder for a person who actually creates something, whether it’s an album, photograph, novel or article, to retain ownership to it.  Corporations, via concentration of ownership and agreements, are now demanding perpetual copyright ownership even from freelance workers who are traditionally protected.  Copyright law was intended to encourage creative and inventive people by giving them ownership of their work, but that rarely happens anymore.

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society – Issue 16

Although this chapter asks if public relations practitioners provide a service to the public, James Lukaszewski’s essay does not address the topic but instead gives tips about how to do PR better.  Stuart Ewen’s essay says that PR has swung between responding to public demands and trying to control the public and is now a tool used by those with wealth to keep it.

Lukaszewski’s essay, originally a speech to end a two-week seminar on PR, could just as easily apply to a seminar of secretaries or dentists.  It’s just a list of platitudes to make one more effective at what one is doing.  His seven are: be constructive, be positive, be prompt, be outcome-focused, be reflective, and be pragmatic.  He says this will help one become transformational but I’m not sure that necessarily applies to transforming public opinion through mass media but rather transforming your own business or job performance.

Ewen begins with a short history of PR, beginning around 1900 when large companies had to face an informed public and build up confidence in free market business.  It later changed to a matter of convincing or tricking the masses into doing what corporations wanted, though after World War II it went back and forth between these two goals.  Because of the social movements of the 1960s, PR moved away from toeing the party line and began advocating companies encourage different perspectives and groups, targeting African Americans, for example.  This has shifted now from advocating participatory democracy to studying and targeting special demographics.  Ewen says this can be divisive and that PR has helped corporations dismantle welfare capitalism.  Lately PR has become much more pervasive and demographics have identified and cordoned off minorities.  Ewen’s closing section points out that PR is most often used by those with all the wealth to perpetuate themselves.

These essays were a pretty weak look at the issue.  The first one was nothing but an inspirational speaker who could have been talking to any profession and the second only got to a real point near the end.  Also, this seems like a silly question.  Does PR provide a service?  Of course-to the company who hired the PR people.  Does it provide a service to the public or boost democracy?  Probably not, but it was never meant to.  Ewen touches on part of the problem right at the end of his essay-PR serves those with mass media access and money to hire them with, i.e. the elites and large corporations.  The only place a public service could enter into this is if the PR is for a non-profit or other group working for the public interest.

A response to Taking Sides – Clashing Views in Mass Media and Society – Issue 7

Examining issue 7, Is Advertising Ethical, John Calfree argues advertising has important and far reaching benefits while Russ Baker counters that advertisers exert unwelcome pressure on media outlets.

Calfree’s argument, though broken into several sections, is basically that ads provide the audience with more information and that competition will force companies into disclosing accurate and beneficial information (usually in the form of less-bad advertising).  His first main example is fiber-most Amercians were unaware of the health benefits of fiber until Kellogg’s started advertising about it.  Soon many food brands were advertising about their own health benefits and consumers soon knew about a slew of nutrients to watch for.  The second major example he uses is the way in which cigarette companies highlighted problems with smoking in order to boost confidence in their brand.  This ended up scaring away customers.

Calfee keeps on referring to the benefits of unregulated market forces and how the market itself necessarily marches toward more and better information for the consumer.  Unfortunately, all he gives are examples of highly regulated forces.  Without the Surgeon General, the FDA and the FTC, those pro-fiber ads would have shared the air with the same flim-flam snake oil ads that filled magazines in the 1800s.  Market forces themselves only drive advertisers to make incredible claims; government oversight and outside reporting is what forces those claims to be scientific.  Calfree acknowledges this in a way when he says effective advertising uses information people have from outside the ad-so how is the ad itself then informing anyone?

Baker provides ample evidence for his thesis that advertisers try-often successfully-to influence the content of what is printed in publications.  The letter from Chrysler demanding editorial review of anything socially provocative was specially chilling.  The automaker, the fifth-largest advertiser in the country, was more or less demanding a seat on the editorial board.  And many magazines gave it to them.  The more successful a publication is and the more advertisers it has the less powerful one advertiser becomes, of course, but not all magazines have this luxury.  Baker says the biggest danger is self-censorship by editors and publishers who do not want to risk alienating the people who pay the bills.

Personally I agree with Calfree only to the point that things like price competition really do benefit the consumer.  Baker is right about advertisers wanting to influence editorial copy, and though I think many publications can stand to lose a few big sponsors over and important story, many won’t simply because they’re more concerned with higher profit rather than independence.  And special advertising sections and advertorials I find especially disturbing; when I was in Naples the print paper did a special advertising section on plastic surgery filled with wire stories about the benefits with no other point of view represented at all.  There are definite downsides and risks to plastic surgery, but you wouldn’t know it from the very hard-news looking section in the paper that day.

I know I’m supposed to write about Chasing Amy from the standpoint of media images of lesbians and lesbianism, but this particular film is hard to extend in that way.  Writer and director Kevin Smith is hardly part of the mainstream media.  He gained notoriety with his first film, Clerks, which was completely independent and was noteworthy in a large part because he bucked mainstream film trends.  Smith never shies away from subject matter major studios shun (Chasing Amy is a case in point), uses frank, sometimes offensive dialogue, and refuses to adopt a visual directing style, instead letting the script carry the movie.  If we wanted to look at media images of lesbianism, it would be more valuable to seek out a mainstream Hollywood movie.

One of the benefits to looking at this movie, though, is that it’s so much better than your average Hollywood movie and Smith’s outsider status allows him to examine issues everyone else would be afraid of.  One great example is near the beginning when Banky starts a fight with a seemingly militant black member of a panel on minority comics.  After the panelist shoots Binky screaming “Black rage!” it turns out the whole deal was planned to drum up controversy for his book and that the panelist is flamboyantly gay.  This is one of the few times you’ll ever see a gay character satirizing a straight (and racial) stereotype, although movies and TV are rife with straight characters mockingly mimicking gay stereotypes.

The scene in the bar where Holden learns Alyssa is a lesbian is another striking image.  After singing a seductive song he thought was aimed at him, she makes out with another woman, with no hedging about it-the camera doesn’t cut away or leave anything to the imagination.  This is hardly Hollywood.  What’s most interesting, though, is the way in which Holden deals with this.  He’s not disgusted but reacts rather like he would had she started making out with a boyfriend.  Throughout the rest of the film the other characters react to his dilemma in a similar fashion-fell in love with a lesbian?  Poor guy.  It’s almost as if he fell in love with a nun or a married woman-there’s no real mention of turning her, or how someday she’ll see the light and go straight, or whatever, except maybe by Banky, who has his own issues to work through.  Throughout lesbianism and bisexuality are accepted rather matter-of-factly by almost everyone.

Despite this, Chasing Amy opened to a great deal of criticism from gays and lesbians.  The main issue what the fact that Alyssa fell in love with a man at all-the complaint was that by treating lesbians so seriously on the one hand and having one fall in love with a man on the other, they cheapened it and strengthened the old notion of lesbians as just chicks who haven’t met the right guy yet.  Personally, I don’t see that at all.  I find no indication that Alyssa was just waiting for the right guy to some along and show her the way.  Rather, their romance seems an illustration of how love can appear in places never sought and how difficult relationships can be in the supposedly open and honest 90s.  The scene where Alyssa tells her friends about Holden is telling.  As soon as they find out she’s met a guy, they’re shocked, offended and hurt.  They react as if she’s doing this to hurt them, and they skip out on her pretty quickly once they find out she’s not exactly like them.  Smith is not attempting to show lesbians the light and lead them to the godly path or anything.  He is merely using the oldest theme in the book-two accidental lovers separated by cultural barrier, with guys and lesbians filling in for Capulets and Montegues.

It’s unfortunate that this can’t be extended to a general discussion on media portrayals of lesbians.  The fact the Chasing Amy was a small commercial success may be an indication of things changing, but for the most part except for indie film and very rare notable exceptions (Boys Don’t Cry, for example), lesbians are either stereotyped or ignored.

A response to Mass Media and Society (James Curran and Michael Gurevitch), Chapter 13

In “Dead Trees to Live Wires,” Colin Sparks argues that the rise of online media poses commercial challenges to traditional print media.  Sparks does not say that print is dead or dying, or that publishing print material online is some kind of bonanza.  Instead he says there are four ways in which the internet has changed business for the news.

The first change is in terms of competition.  Newspapers historically do not have to compete with broadcast and magazine news because other media do not balance timeliness with depth the way daily papers do.  Online, however, everyone is publishing 24 hours a day, so the local paper now has to directly compete with the local ABC affiliate and whoever else.  Also, the net gets rid of geographical boundaries to competition and lowers the price of entry into publishing.  Second, it allows advertisers to potentially bypass newspapers and talk directly to consumers and allows people looking for in depth news to go straight to the sources.  Third, this will lead to division between large national/international news sites and small locally-concentrated news sites, with the local sites becoming much more involved in their communities.  Finally, newspapers may respond to these pressures by breaking down the barriers between news/editorial and advertising in order to compete.

Sparks is right on, although he fails to consider a few key facets in how online news is going to develop.  One is the cooperation of different media in online ventures.  Few newspaper sites now compete with all the local network sites-most have one or two networks affiliated with them and many run joint news sites.  This may have something to do with the concentration of ownership of different media even within the same city or it may just provide a competitive edge to both parties in a partnership.  Another conflict he doesn’t touch on enough is the struggle between journalists and business people within online departments.  Some papers have given it over to the business people, some have kept them separate, and others have let them duke it out.  At Naples, we barely had contact with the business side of our department except to talk about new technologies coming in.  All our people were journalists and the content and editorial decisions reflected that.  Still, I’ve talked to people at other publications who feel controlled either by advertising interests or crap handed down from the corporate office.  It seems, though, that individual editors and reporters can often make a big difference in how online news is produced and the corporate centralizing, advertising-based trend seems to be balanced by readers being more interested in real local news.