Media Effects

          There’s a tradition in the study of mass communications called the “effects tradtion” which seeks to answer to question of “who says what to whom, and to what effect?” Some academics in the field call this the “effects paradigm” rather than "effects tradition" because they want it to sound more sciencey. The word “paradigm” is an allusion to physicist and scientific historian Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 1962; this famous book made the word paradigm one of the most widely used words in Academic English (AE),  sort of like what Gramsci did for the word "hegemony." Kuhn’s use of the word paradigm was the term for an overarching framework that delimits a mode of scientific investigation. In other words, a paradigm determines directions for inquiry, core assumptions, methodology, and issues of verisimilitude.  Kuhn’s book deals mostly with physics, and when mass commincations schalors  use the term “effects paradigm” they are implying that what they are engaged in is also a science.

            It is not. At least that is my thesis. What mass communications scholars do cannot justly be called science regardless of the fact that they have had modeled their methodologies after those used in the natural sciences (aka naturalism). The study of the "effect" a message has on a receiver - that is, a self conscious human being - has no coherent theory able to break down human communication to a set of causal or behavioral laws. This failure is due to the fact that too little is known about the how the physical processes of the brain produce what we call a consciousness -- this is the classic mind/body dilemma that's been around since Descartes. In fact, scientists like N. Chomsky and R.C. Lewontin  say that there is a good possibility that we will never know how the brain gives us the "mind" ("As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice or actions arise, human science is at a loss." - N. Chomsky). Nevertheless, "effects" practitioners in mass comm. will bore you to death with their intricate descriptions of their empirical methods (which usually involves a survey) and their theories about "media effects" on human cognition. Although, after thousands of studies researchers remain vexed on the question of how portrayals of violence effect children and many other questions like it.
            One of the major debates within the media effects "paradigm" is whether media have strong or weak  effects; which is to say, there is no agreement at all within the field on even the degree to which the media affects someone's  behavior after almost 60+ years of investigation. This is not surprising given what I have outlined above, but there are reasons that such investigations will continue to persist regardless of their lack of success. First, such "effects" research tends to focus its attention exclusively on the receiver of messages -- the audience -- and  these questions conveniently sidestep any questions about the institutions creating the messages in the first place. Most effects researchers essentially do not care about institutions and politics even though one might think such issues would be central to a study of the media. This avoidance of integral political questions allows these scholars to point to their professional detachment and objectivity. Second, to say that "we don't know" anything conclusive about media effects is frankly unacceptable. The history of the study of mass communications is tied intimately to the study of ways to conduct successful propaganda campaigns after all, and saying that it is impossible to measure scientifically "media effects" to interests --like advertisers or political candidates --  that believe that these questions can be answered and have a vested interest in them being so answered would effectively discredit the whole enterprise. People believe that science should be able to answer these questions and so scientific language and methods are used to try and answer them -- but this is just mere scientism, it has no explanatory ability.
          Thus, one need not be afraid of the absolute power of propaganda; it has no such power. Of course, mendacity is always a problem in public life, and I think that it is the special responsibility of educators to teach their students to detect the massive amounts of bullshit that will be thrown their way for much of their lives. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy to believe that advertising and other forms of propaganda are a kind of hypothermic needle injecting desires/ideology into an unwitting public. Are modern forms of advertising and propaganda sophisticated and well-funded? Yes. Has propaganda been used to successfully confuse the public on a complicated scientific issue like global warming? Yes. But one need not attribute these to any special scientific powers of corporate bullshittery. People can be credulous, short-sighted and easily confused, but this has always been true and there have always been those in positions of authority who have taken advantage of these human downfalls. But that does not mean that reason and active minds cannot prevail in the end. Try as they might, corporate and national interests cannot control people's minds, even if they think that they can -- the powerful are never as powerful as they believe they are.
   

Final Draft: A Review of the comedy album "A Great Stillness" by Eddie Pepitone, or, "Despair is Funny."

 

Eddie Pepitone is not for the faint of heart. His brand of hyper-self-loathing belted out relentlessly with his signature eardrum shattering vocal cords––while hilarious––is not the type of standup act that a mass audience is going to find suitable for their entertainment-as-escapism needs. In his album “A Great Stillness,” E.P. pretty much shatters that already weak boundary between comedy and tragedy, and then he invites you to laugh along with him as he stomps angrily on the pieces. Which is to say, Pepitone is fucking brutal. Not everyone is going to appreciate his self-deprecation and madman outbursts that don’t let you forget for one second how absurd and horrific life in the post-industrial American wasteland can be. The album is a barrage of road tested bits and gags that show off his talent for producing material designed precisely to tread uncomfortably between the lines of the persona/clown onstage and the vulnerable man behind the crying clown make-up. Pepitone is a master at revealing just enough of the actual man behind the persona to make you uncomfortable, and that’s exactly what good comedy is supposed to do, make you squirm just a little.

I have had conversations with friends who totally disagree with me on Pepitone’s effectiveness, though. They just don’t get why Pepitone is funny. I posit to them that the reason they just don’t “get it" is because Americans have been conditioned to see the main purpose of comedy as entertainment/amusement. The typical comedy in American media culture is a type of existential pain-killer designed to wink at the audience with hip-fatigue and irony and reassure them that everything is OK, "the world is as it should be." But of course, Pepitone’s brand of humor is a totally different animal. Pepitone uses comedy in the way that L. Wittgenstein understood it, as a way to speak of things so terrible that the only way to address them is through a joke. Pepitone’s comedy is a sledge hammer of angst and darkness that is both personal and political. His act has this almost a religious quality to it in that he is able to deal with despair in a communal setting that is both powerful and hilarious.

In his book “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche used the voice of a madman to announce to the world that “God is Dead,” but his point was that the world just didn’t realize it yet. Nietzsche’s madman was screaming to his audience a truth they were not yet ready to hear: God was dead and his blood was on their hands. Pepitone’s madman is similarly designed truth teller but with a different message. Pepitone invokes his audience to “be still and know your God” because yet another deity has risen from the ashes of the old one, the celebrity. Pepitone’s madman is telling us something that is difficult to admit, that no matter what God passes away we will still worship, and now we worship amusements and irrelevance. Our new Gods are the talking heads on our TV screens; the names and faces we all know and are disconnected from but wish to be near. Celebrities derive their power from their ability to nurture our ennui not with meaning but with amusement. They are the ultimate empty spectacle.

Pepitone knows this, that at the heart of corporate entertainment there isn't a soul, or an implicit belief system, or a telos, or anything like that––there's just another bottom line. And the angst Pepitone oozes on stage is partly due to the fact that he is conscious of these things and, at the same time, can't help but want himself to be worshiped too, as it were; he is in the entertainment "business" after all. But Pepitone is an authentic artist; he has a refreshing lack of the contemporary bad faith that plagues most mass entertainment in corporate media culture. In his act, beneath all the laughs and giggles, one can feel a real person driving at, and dealing with, some of the most basic themes of the human condition: things like pain, sadness, death, personal failure, and political powerlessness. Indeed, Pepitone is screaming about some of the most absurd and horrific things imaginable, and he is there to help us laugh in the face of them. If you want a stand up album that is going to make you acknowledge a little despair in order to get the joke, then Eddie Pepitone has some things to say to you.

Brutish and Short

I’ve been watching atomic bombs explode on YouTube. Taking trips to Wikipedia to read about the “Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle” (MIRV) which is a missile with multiple warheads capable of destroying numerous targets (E.g. the LGM-118 Peacekeeper missilc carries 10 warheads)—missiles that (b/t/w) place a premium on first strikes. I’ve been reading about all the times the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, has lost a thermonuclear weapon. They’re called broken arrows, and yes it has happened  enough times for there to be a term for it-- as I recall, the government has officially owned up to misplacing about 11 nukes.  SNAFUs will happened, one will fall off a transporting boat or plane and whoops, "we can’t find it." All of this is frighteningly true. Just a Google search away, go ahead and knock yourself out. And it gets much, much worse from there. 

All of the nukes in Russia pointed at the U.S. during the Cold War are still there and vice versa. Both Russia and the U.S. have each almost launched a full-scale nuclear attack on the other country by accident. Aerial defense systems are to some degree automated after all and sometimes wires get crossed, "what the hell are you gonna do?" The point is that the very existence of these weapons systems involves risk, a priori. So as more countries join the atomic death club, there will be even more opportunities for a government to screw the proverbial pooch in a supreme way: for a safety system to fail, for a bomb to just get lost, or for a broken arrow to find its way to someone with enough madness and want to use it.  And that’s putting aside an actual conflict. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday clock now incorporates global warming in its warning of the threat of widespread destruction, for good reasons. Global warming, the other major threat to human survival, increases the risk of nuclear proliferation. Let me explain. The increasing extreme weather events due to global warming are straining vital resources like food and water in areas across the globe. Naturally, tensions between countries will increase because of these strains. Resource scarcity is not the only cause of armed conflict, no doubt, but it will inflame existing tensions if not creating new ones.  As tensions between governments increase, countries have an increased desire to arm themselves and this can spark arms races. More bombs means more inherent risk. As of January, the atomic scientists have moved their clock up to 5 minutes to midnight. 

All of this is madness but no one seems to notice. We have our expensive elections and the party keeps going on nicely. Yet threats to human survival are real. So far, since the invention of atomic weapons and discovery of anthropogenic climate change, governments have taken little action. Our modern forms of State Capitalism have been unable to confront the crises we face. At this point, it’s not hyperbole to say that finding some alternative is a question of life or death. To observe such problems as a individuals is pretty despair inducing I will admit. A single person can do nothing to confront an issue like nukes or global warming. These are issues that will take large numbers of highly organized and motivated people to confront—which means building communities and alternative institutions. Old-fashioned political organizing. I know these comments about organizing are clichés, and I apologize, but it's really the only way. Otherwise, the world is going to become a pretty nasty place to live.