Cyber-Wrongdoers

A comment on a previous post by my dear friend, Mr. S:
"I may have shown this thing [pdf] to you before, but it's an 'educational curriculum' put out by the good people at the Business Softwared Alliance. Very scary, and it's an excellent example of how businesses frame downloading as simply 'wrong' (and of the more general conflation of legality and morality)."

Art for The People

While I'm on this topic, I wanted to add one more thing. Recently, at a conference, I saw a University of New Mexico, American Studies grad student, Elizabeth Swift present a paper entitled, "Class, consumption, and cultural authority: museum shop merchandising at national museums.”

Swift discussed the proliferation of art museum gift shops during the early to mid-20th century. Aside from wanting to add another revenue source, many of the rich, industrialist families who owned the art in the museums (e.g., Vanderbilts, Mellons, Rockefellers) believed in selling prints of the famous works of art because it would allow ordinary people to appreciate them on a regular basis. Others in the art world, particularly people at the National Gallery, viewed the reproduction of art as crass and long resisted developing a gift shop.

Regardless of the intentions, today, the top sellers are not reprints of Van Gogh paintings, but Rothko-inspired silk scarves and Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired necklaces sold primarily to middle-class aspirational buyers. And the top revenue source at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the parking garage.

"Gotta have my tunes, man"

I think it's fascinating how the record companies have constructed online music downloading to be an immoral -- not simply illegal --- act on par with illegal drug use. Don't believe it? Check out this video clip put together by some group obviously backed by record companies. It's hilarious because it would be a perfect parody of the War On Drugs PSAs of the late 1980s if they weren't completely serious. Of course, it awkwardly attempts to connect with youth culture, using cool college kids with iPods and host that tries to be "with it," but ends up acting really NARCish. Incredibly, Penn State President Graham Spanier is on the video talking about how illegal downloading costs universities and threatens that it raises tuition costs. He never mentions that it wouldn't cost anything if the corporations didn't viciously pursue a profit.

Forget the bloodless corporations who have constructed the "right" to profit off art; that much is patently absurd. However, there needs to be a more serious debate about art ownership and artists' rights here. On the one hand, it fundamentally enriches our culture to have full-time artists and that is only possible if people pay for their music (that rock and pop stars make much, much more than they should almost goes without saying).

On the other hand, from my perspective, inexpensive or free public access to art of all kinds is essential to healthy democratic society. Unlike visual art, the idea of owning music is still relatively new and has been a completely American in its design. Music ownership has only existed since the 1880s when the phonograph cylinder was introduced. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, purchasing records was very inexpensive and music ownership proliferated. Of course, during this period, prior to deregulation and the Clear Channel revolution, radio also served the function of providing more or less public access to music (to a lesser extent, internet radio is now doing the same today). During the 1980s and 1990s, buying music became far more expensive and less welcoming to young buyers and music sales began to go down. Naturally, with the birth of the internet and the free availability of music, young people widely resisted (although not as a political conscious act) the pricing structure.

Predictably, the corporations' response is to cast those resisting as immoral and destructive. Similarly, as with the war on drugs, this has not stopped the activity. I predict we will be at this impasse until there is a new solution that makes music inexpensively available with a larger portion of the profit going to artists. I know that this is already happening with some of the exclusive music on the iTunes store, but it is certainly not widespread yet.

Low Expectations

Here's a friend's perspective on this blog's chance of surviving:
"Blog mortality article here (PDF). Take away: over 1% of all blogs die every WEEK, and about 6% of the community (at least on LJ) turns over every month."

Why is this blog called "Media Outrage"?

Google the phrase "media outrage" and you will find many versions of the sentence "where is the media outrage?" (one among many). Usually, the questioner is someone on the Left astounded that traditional media have not become more indignant over or gotten more aggressive in their questioning of some horrible the Bush administration has done. The question implies that the mode response of the traditional media is outrage. It's easy to see how one might believe that. A quick look at Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly (a.k.a. Papa Bear), Coulter, John "War on Christmas" Gibson, etc. would have us believing that members of the media are a furious folk.

In fact, most journalists are far more tame, tentative, and skeptical. Given the insistent accusations of liberal bias from the Right, most journalists shy away from lines of questioning that might indicate left-leaning outrage. Aside from this ideological prohibition, only in particular moments do they ever become outraged or aggressive. Steve Clayman at UCLA has a NSF grant to "the social factors that explain variations in the aggressiveness with which journalists question the president". One of his interesting findings is that controlling for economic indicators, presidential approval poll ratings have no effect on aggressiveness of questioning. This suggests that journalistic aggressiveness is less reflective of public outrage more a reflection of their own concerns.

This blog is so named because the traditional media is no longer (was it ever?) adequately outraged over issues on the Left and is not responsive to the outrage of the public at large. Anything that fails to properly stir the traditional media is worth raising here.

Why I hate blogs

I have been resistant to the idea of having a blog for a very long time. I've disliked blogs in several incarnations. When they started out as online diaries in the mid-1990s, I felt that one would have to be deeply narcissistic to believe that others would care to read your journal. Later, in the early 2000s, when the political blog emerged (e.g., Daily Kos, Andrew Sullivan), I disliked the glorification of mainstream political figures. Isn't Howard Dean so great? God, I hate Dick Cheney!

Of course, I like the democratic nature of blogs, but too often the Bush-era blogs focus on the individual ups-and-downs of politicians and less on the institutions that actually assert power. That is to say, too much talk about Bush choking on a pretzel or Cindy Sheehan's God-like/Devil-like characteristics and not enough on The Media's construction of the pretzel-choking incident as a news story or how America's deep and abiding anti-intellectualism has stunted resistance to the war. Or when was the last time one of those blogs discussed something like, let's say, structural inequality. That's not to say that blogs have to be a heavy, sociological mope-fest. The only two blogs I currently read and like (Bighead and Le Blog Bérubé) are often most enjoyable when they take on light topics. But in addressing serious issues, I think most of the later type of blog have approached them in unoriginal, unthinking ways.

Briefly, we heard a lot about how blogs would supplant traditional media. I think (or I hope) blogs have passed their peak and people have recognized that bloggers can never serve the same function as investigative journalists. The power of blogs lies in their ability to (occasionally) shift the agenda of the traditional media to unexamined problems.

So, given my aversion to blogs, why would I set one up now? Well, it's at least in part out of the narcissistic belief that other people might be interested in what I think about things. More importantly, however, I would like to help point out issues/questions/problems that aren't being raised in the traditional media and among politicians (or aren't be addressed well). I think the "Comments" feature is the best part of blogs and I hope that I will have readers who engage with my observations or tell me that I'm missing the more important question. Of course, who knows what, if anything, I'll end up writing about.