Urbane Sprawl

And while I’m on the topic of rationalization and its discontents, I must mention another darling of the zeitgeist — another phenomenon notable for its sharp break from a rationalized narrative: ChatRoulette.

Like reality TV, online communication has become rationalized over the past decade. We used to sign on, unfettered, to loosely categoritzed AOL chatrooms, for no other purpose but to converse with strangers about whatever came to mind.

Within the world of public online discourse, new structures popped up to help us find more quickly and accurately what — or, I should say, whom — we were looking for. Special interest message board sites for new parents, golf enthusiasts, and arthritis sufferers appeared. Surfers created sites for posing questions in deeply nested categories (Yahoo! Answers), while other sites for listing goods to buy and sell staked claim to their own turf (Craigslist, eBay).

For those of us who just wanted to talk, we got new tools to weed out the weirdos and promote interaction with our friends (or friends of friends): from a/s/l, there were Friendster and Facebook; from chatrooms, there were Google docs and groups and waves.

We gave ourselves better tools to find the right people and talk to them about the right things, but in the process we walled our communities in — and walled in ourselves.

That all changed (for the moment, at least) with ChatRoulette, a website that provides each user a complettely unfiltered video chat connection to another, randomly-selected user. One can stay to chat or click through to the next stranger out in the world of the webcams — an unmediated, unrationalized communication landscape. Like an early, almost empty AOL chatroom — with cameras.

Millions of users’ curiosity has been piqued enough to sign onto the site and see what they might find (even though they often find a close-up and uncensored view of some other user’s genitalia), and it’s easy to see why: ChatRoulette breaks down the barriers we’ve spent a decade erecting, and it unmasks us from the usual anonimity of blog comments and user reviews. It takes us from a bureaucratized present to a wild west past.

But, as is natural with all human processes, we may soon find ChatRoulette fall victim to a self-undermining rationalization that we saw befall reality TV. We will be moved to carve it up into interest-based rooms, we will “like” some users and “friend” others, and soon we will be building a city on what is now an empty landscape.

Sam Anderson described this rationalizing impulse in a piece on ChatRoulette in New York Magazine, at once predicting ChatRoulette’s fragmented future and exalting its unbridled present:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

But that site would also lose a lot of what makes ChatRoulette, for now, so weirdly magnetic. If I’d been able to curate my experience, I might never have had what ended up being my favorite interaction: a half-hour chat with a twentysomething, vaguely Kurt Cobain–ish guy in Pittsburgh. We started with the obligatory ganja jokes, but suddenly he turned serious. “Actually,” he typed, “I’m a mystic.” When he offered me a tarot-card reading, I considered clicking “next” in search of more dancing Koreans. I’ve never had a psychic reading—in fact I’ve actively refused them on many occasions—but something about the strangeness of the context made me accept. Although I only vaguely remember the content of the reading itself (I like nature, have been thinking about taking a big trip, etc.), the experience was surprisingly powerful. It felt generous and deep and oddly very human.

Contemplating the filtered, statistically-tracked, rationalized version of ChatRoulette that Anderson fantasizes about  — while considering the losses that would come with an inhibited version of this paragon of inhibition — we realize that, even when we discuss a website built 90 years after his death, Max Weber was right.

The End of Reality: Part II.

This is what happens in the blogosphere: I vow to post more persistently, then go five months without an update. No more vows — just a futile hope that I can muster the energy and wherewithal to actually record my thoughts for you, my faithful(?) audience.

So where was I?

***

Yes, even reality shows can jump the shark, because even reality shows can have artistic integrity and grounding assertions. In the case of Project Runway, it had continually cast itself as the high-brow reality show (embracing the implied contradiction), insisting it is meritocratic even within its convoluted constraints.

During its last season, Heidi went so far as to verbalize its internal logic: “three strikes, and you’re out.” But in Christopher’s survival past three egregiously heinous strikes, the foundational arguments of the show were thrown over and the series — or, at least, the season (for each new batch of contestants provides its own potentially-redemptive slate-wiping) — jumped the shark.

Where does this leave us? With the realization that we are nearing, at, or just past a critical inflection point in the genre.

***

It’s taken for granted these days that “reality shows” no longer represent anything “real.” Shows that, at their launch, trained their cameras on non-camera-trained individuals in unfamiliar settings and constructs (The Real World, The Bachelor, Survivor, American Idol) have become repetitive and clichéd. New reality shows have eschewed the goals of their antecedents entirely, uninterested in gleaning insight about real people in microcosm (The Hills, the entire VH1 reality line-up).

When Court TV distanced itself from trial coverage, moving towards documentary shows about true crime and dangerous jobs, it renamed itself “TruTV” and worked our disenchantment with reality TV right into its motto: “Not Reality. Actuality.” “Reality” as a TV genre has become meaningless, a codeword for nothing more than non-fiction (not necessarily unscripted) starring individuals playing themselves, or versions of themselves (not necessarily non-actors).

But the meaninglessness of “Reality” and the inescapable cliché of contemporary reality shows are merely symptoms of culture — they are not the ding an sich (the thing in itself).

Of what are they symptoms? The Rationalization of Reality.

***

Father of sociology Max Weber described “rationalization” as the unavoidable progression of systems (both physical systems and systems of thought) from inefficient abstraction to cold logic that occurs as we gain better understanding of means and ends, cause and effect, and adapt accordingly. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to understand, and I’m doing it no favors with my abstruse attempts at definition. Examples are the best way to get at it — metonymically.

Bureaucratization is a great example: From early governments and companies that deal with issues ad hoc, with messy delegating and overlapping domains, we develop bureaucracies, with clearly delineated institutions and internal hierarchies for each carefully differentiated issue. So we get the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Canada, Mexico and NAFTA Issues in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Health has also been extremely rationalized over the last few centuries: from a vague understanding of illness tied into conceptions of sin and virtue, we’ve developed keen observations of patterns of sickness and of the world on a microscopic level — we now understand how germs are disseminated, and we’ve developed highly organized systems of treatments for every conceivable array of symptoms.

Even something as simple as our usage of a park can become rationalized. From an open field, we develop well-trod paths where the most people have found the most amenable routes. From free and spontaneous play all around, we designate an area for picnics and an area for baseball. From inconsistent self-policing, we develop rules and guidelines and post them on big green signs forbidding cell phone usage from 11am to 4pm.

While rationalization makes these systems and our lives more efficient, we become constrained by the rigidity of the structures we’ve made for ourselves. We become, as Weber wrote a bit melodramatically, trapped in an “iron cage” and our world devolves into a “polar night of icy darkness.”

But we can see where Weber’s coming from. In a hyper-rationalized landscape of, for instance, mental health, every possible deviation from “normalcy” becomes its own syndrome. As Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker (paraphrasing David Healy in “The Antidepressant Era”), “if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.” As we are constantly hone in on more taut relationships between causes and effects, we can become blinded to the bigger picture.

***

From a brief survey of reality programming over the last decade, we can clearly see the bigger picture of authenticity being lost as shows become rationalized to milk drama from ultimately inauthentic characters and conventions. But before we can perform that survey, we have to understand the shows and the goals of their subjects and producers.

To generalize, there are two main sub-genres of reality TV: the documentary series (The Real World, The Hills, Jersey Shore) and the game show (Survivor, Project Runway, The Bachelor). Though the lines are blurry — there’s not much fundamental difference between I Love New York and New York Goes to Work — there is an essential distinction. While contestants on game shows are competing for a prize (be it a million dollars or the love of an over-the-hill 80s hip hop artist), with individuals often voted off each week, the subjects of documentary series need only exist within the contrived situations mapped out for them (New York works at a farm! Eight strangers stop being polite and start getting real!).

The goals of the early contestants on game shows was to win. Now, contestants want to win, but they also hope to gain some moderate level of fame and future opportunity through participation. Tabatha Coffey parlayed her appearance on the reality game show Shear Genius into her own reality documentary series, Tabatha’s Salon Takeover; Big Brother’s Jeff and Jordan won $500,000 and $25,000, respectively, and won enough of America’s affection to land them on The Amazing Race; myriad former contestants on American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway have leveraged their fifteen minutes of fame into much longer periods of moderate success in their chosen fields.

The goal of the subjects of reality’s documentary series was, at one point, simply to participate (think the early Real Worlders). Now, it seems their goals are primarily focused toward the attention they can earn by being interesting “characters” on their shows.

In both cases, the goals of the shows’ producers is viewership, achieved by making their programs interesting. Interesting can take many forms — cloyingly romantic (The Bachelor), cringingly pathetic (Celebrity Rehab), explosively charged (The Bad Girls Club) — but, in all cases, producers hope that their programs’ drama will translate into throngs of dedicated viewers.

Understanding the goals of the constituent individuals, we can see how reality TV can become rationalized: participants and producers better understand the means and ends of achieving success however defined (a million dollars, future opportunities, high ratings) and acting accordingly.

***

Let’s consider game shows first. Like people walking in a well-trod park looking for the best routes, early participants in reality contests found themselves more or less successful depending on different strategies of behavior, leading to the carving out of conventional types. From the complete blank slate of the first season of Survivor — in which Sue Hawk and Rudy Boesch had no touchstone against which to judge Richard Hatch, no model for suggesting they should suspect his scheming and double-dealing — there is now the season of “Heros” and “Villains,” with contestants from past seasons so neatly fitting into the types pioneered by their reality forbears that the subtextual “types” have become the text itself.

Every kind of game show — from talent to matchmaking to social experiment — has gone through enough iterations to develop these same conventions, these same paths through the park, and now contestants cannot help but retread the same steps. Reality game shows now have such clearly articulated narratives of success and failure that contemporary seasons cannot feel like anything more than variations on a theme.

And what about documentary shows? At the beginning, producers plumbed drama from the conflict between individuals from disparate backgrounds in contrived social situations. Untrained and unfamiliar with what patterns of behavior would lead to post-participitory fame — and unfamiliar with the notion that participation could lead to fame at all — the individuals on whom the cameras were focused acted authentically, and to the fascination of viewing audiences. But once producers noticed what moments were most likely to lead to the camera’s and audience’s attention — fights, sex, sloppy drunkenness leading to fights and sex — they began casting participants most likely to slap each other, sleep with each other, and drink to excess. The first season of the Real World becomes every subsequent season, with the frat-boy jock, the Mormon, the gay guy, the alcoholic — characters who were at one time simply compelling real people — cast to foster the contrived drama the producers think will attract audiences and that now-savvy participants think will attract future job opportunities.

In some cases, like The Hills, the producers have gone so far as to hire writers to ensure that each episode has the drama that unscripted reality shows cannot guarantee will arise on a regular schedule. Whole shows like Celebrity Rehab are built around premises designed for maximum pathos with little regard for documenting relatable human experience. Reality documentary shows are so manipulated to foster the drama that authenticity once provided that they have become scripted echoes of their true-to-life ancestors.

The problem with this rationalization is that any value reality TV once had as a genre inhered in its represnetation of authentic human experience. Settings like Survivor’s deserted island or American Idol’s big stage or the Real World apartment were contrived, but there was no behavioral model to follow for the early participants — no conventions of “successful” participation. Their behaviors and conflicts were thus authentic and engaging: Pedro on The Real World, Richard Hatch on Survivor, Jay McCarroll on Project Runway, and Omarosa on The Apprentice were compelling because they had not yet learned they were performing.

***

But there is hope for the genre; or, there was at least a glimmer of hope during the fall of 2009, when MTV assembled a group of youngsters who wanted no more than to participate in the opportunity provided: a summer at the Jersey Shore.

What made Jersey Shore so compelling to viewers was that it was authentic in a way reality TV hasn’t been in years. Snooki, Sammi, JWow, The Situation, Ronnie, Pauly D, and Vinny were not there to perform — and, indeed, they seemed unaware of the promise of recognition and fame (unaware even of the cameras) until after the show had begun airing. They were there only for a swank house on the Shore and like-minded guidos and guidettes with whom to party. Indeed, Angelina’s early departure is evidence of the fact that her goal was not to be the focus of a reality camera; when she dragged her trash-bag of belongings into the house, one sensed she was there for no more than a good time. When she failed to have that good time, she left.

Though some of the conflicts on the show may have been prompted by the producers (one can’t believe that Vinny really seduced the girlfriend of his boss and landlord unwittingly), the interactions between the characters — and between them and the other people at the shore — was strikingly, unsettlingly realistic.

The phenomenon was fostered by the guido/guidette-framed nature of the grouping. Unlike The Real World, whose social experiment was once premised on people from diverse backgrounds coming into conflict, Jersey Shore had no such pretensions of diversity — a shallowness that in fact bolstered its representational success. When one goes from a community of like-minded people to a setting in which one is a minority (think The Mormon on The Real World), one must be as much a representative of one’s group as a normal version of oneself. Snooki and her kin did not need to be “the guido” in an unsympathetic group — they needed only be themselves.

But the magical moment of Jersey Shore season 1 is not replicable. Copycat shows (the as-yet-unnamed-Brighton-Beach-based spinoff, Jerseylicious) now have an implicit script to follow, characters to cast. Even the cast of Jersey Shore season 1 will be camera-trained and ratings-minded when they shoot season 2 this summer.

Still, there is a lesson here: Rather than manipulating reality shows to wring compelling television out of known-to-be-dramatic characters and conventions, we must find the last batch of people who are not yet characters and the last batch of contrivances that are not yet conventions. Any show with an existing script for success and drama, a script written by the last decade of the genre, will be fated to staleness. Only by a renewed commitment to authenticity can we break out of the “iron cage” of rationalization — only with a jettisoning of characters and conventions can reality TV be real again.

The End of Reality: Part I.

On Thursday, October 25, 2009, at 9:57 PM, Project Runway jumped the shark.

I know ‘jumping the shark’ is a loaded concept that’s now bordering on the cliché. And it’s easy to indict a show that’s having a lackluster season — especially a reality competition that’s suffering from inconsistent and frustrating judging — of having debased itself in some core way. But I think ‘jumping the shark’ is a very particular kind of invalidation, one perpetrated by PR in its last episode.

First, the facts. Spoiler alert.

In the bottom two on Thursday night: feather prince Nicolas Putvinski, with his malproportioned Grecian fantasy; and fragile autodidact Christopher Straub, with his indescribably bad “Sante Fe”-”inspired” “outfit” to match his unfortunate, hairline-thin, jawline-hugging facial hair.

Christopher, an earnest if overconfident soul from Shakopee, Minnesota, was making his fourth appearance in the bottom in just as many weeks. After a strong showing early in the competition, Christopher continued to display an utter lack of taste; it was his third time in bottom two, a perch from which he outlasted better competitors Louise and Shirin.

Somehow, Christopher had continued to squeak by on something — remembered potential? Simple favoritism?

This week, though, the there was simply no way he could get another reprieve after running so long on fabric fumes. Michael Kors described his Sante Fe garment as “costume.” Heidi was more frank: “unwearable,” she said; and, later, “just ugly.”

It was thus with the collective gasp of a million viewers that Heidi announced, “Christopher… you’re in.”

***

This season of Project Runway was problematic far before last week. After relocating to Lifetime and Los Angeles, the show has been unmoored by innumerable absences from New York-based judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors.

Consistent judging is essential for a show like Project Runway, where contestants prove their mettle and articulate their point-of-view over a season’s worth of wacky challenges. If I had missed school as many times as either judge has abandoned their post (or, more accurately, their runway-side stool) this season, I would’ve never made it past the seventh grade.

There have been other problems, too.

None of the contestants has impressed audiences with innovative design. Each week, the winning designs seem to be the ones conceived and executed with the most competence, not originality.

And none of the personalities has proven exceptionally engaging, leaving an absence of interesting interpersonal dynamics. Yes, Irina is a bitch and Carol Hannah thinks Logan is attractive. But it’s hard to summon hatred for Irina, as she is the most consistently successful of the designers; it’s harder to empathize with Carol Hannah, as Logan is criminally devoid of personality.

So why was Christopher’s third bottom-two survival the moment that marked the jumping of the shark?

***

Let’s take a step back. What does it mean to jump the shark?

Wikipedia defines the term as “a colloquialism coined by Jon Hein and used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations. This usually corresponds to the point where a show with falling ratings apparently becomes more desperate to draw in viewers.”

This definition approaches the phenomenon by metonymy: yes, jumping the shark is often found in conjunction with declining ratings, and it often occurs vis-a-vis absurdity or inconsistency. But these are not the ding an sich.

What these associations hint at is the core of shark-jumping: a cultural object’s forfeiture of artistic integrity. A TV show jumps the shark when it ceases playing by its internally-established rules or abandons its foundational premises.

Happy Days jumped the shark when Fonzie literally jumped a shark on water skies (still in his trademark leather jacket), but it jumped the shark because in that moment it gave up the pretense that it was a naturalistic representation of the lives of Richie Cunningham and his 50s teenage friends.

Cousin Oliver came to stay with the Brady Bunch because of their declining ratings, but the show jumped the shark because his arrival fundamentally altered its premise as a sitcom built on the foibles of what happened after a lovely lady bringing up three very lovely girls married a man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own — this was a show with its premises built right into the theme song!

When Christopher lived to sew another day after first taking up residence in the bottom and then living their comfortably for a month, it wasn’t just an opportunity to scream at the screen — it marked Project Runway’s loss of artistic integrity.

***

Much of the best cultural criticism being written today can be found on a blog called FourFour, where Rick Juzwiak meditates on music, web culture, and, most prominently, reality TV. (His recaps of America’s Next Top Model offer enough motivation in themselves to continue watching.)

On the occasion of Project Runway’s sixth season premiere, he wrote about the show he once recapped but never fell in love with:

Project Runway has a reputation for being a high-brow reality show, probably because of its supposed investment in talent, its tempered contestants and its consistent pacing. I think assigning high- and low-culture status within the genre of reality TV is like assigning a hierarchy of pork products, from, say, belly to scrapple. In the end, it’s all fucking pig…

I don’t mean to hold its hype against it, and it’s not like Project Runway ultimately does that great of a job in avoiding being what it is, anyway. People are not there to make friends, they throw each other under the bus, this isn’t the last you’ve heard of them when they’re bounced. As though sniffing out truffles, the casting agents fill the show with types…

There is an androgynous, aggressively coiffed pseudo-intellect who described his design as “ineffable,” but was unfortunately incorrect as he didn’t then shut up.

In response to the task of designing for the red carpet, this one also said “I don’t differentiate between different colored carpets,” which, uh, yeah you do because you just called them “different.” It was here that I was reminded of maybe the main reason I stopped watching this show: I find humorless snobs too excruciating to even laugh at, and as a fashion-design competition, pretension runs thick on Project Runway. It’s not the show’s fault, per se, it’s just how it works out.

Juzwiak has never been able to sign onto Project Runway’s premises — that it is a cut above the typical reality competition, a true search for the best that rewards the excellent and dismisses the dilettantes — but these are its premises indeed. These are the reasons discerning viewers, who would never deign to watch Top Model, have fawned over Daniel Vosovic and Jeffrey Sebelia and Christian Siriano and Korto Momolu for years.

But Juzwiak is right: Project Runway was never perfect, and it has always had more base reality conventions sewn into the muslin core beneath its silk exterior. Yes, contestants who make for good TV might outlast their less interesting competitors. Yes, the challenges with their money- and time-limits are contrived.

Still, the internal logic of the competition demands that continued ineptitude be punished. The show is built on its premise of pretension, of being the highbrow reality competition that may give a second and third chance, but never a fourth.

***

At the beginning of this season, there was a contestant named Mitchell, whose last name I forget. Technically talentless, he seemed constitutionally incapable of assembling a wearable garment by the time of the runway show.

He was in the bottom two in week one, but was kept over the otherworldly Ari Fish. He was in the bottom two in week two, but was kept over the ineffable Malvin Vein. Viewers were frustrated, seeing admittedly eccentric designers leave before the bungling Mitchell.

But, then, justice.

In week three, Mitchell found himself in the bottom two for the third time — and this was after a challenge in which his team had won!

It was unprecedented, but clearly required by the logic of the show — his continued failure could not be countenanced.

Heidi made the awaited pronouncement: “Never in Project Runway history has a team member for a winning design been eliminated. Three strikes and you’re out.”

Flash forward to October 22. Christopher sews together fabric that leaves fellow designer Althea dumbstruck: “If Christopher can put that garment down the runway and not get eliminated, then I don’t know what’s going on.” We all agree.

He lands in the bottom two for the third time. The logic of the competition, the internal rules of the show articulated by Heidi herself, demand his expulsion.

But he survives. And he’s not even good TV.

The rules are broken. The premises are thrown over. The foundation collapses.

Project Runway jumps the shark.

***

In my next post, I’ll explore what Project Runway’s shark-jumping says about the state of reality TV — a genre built on the premise of representing “reality” that may be increasingly incapable of fulfilling its foundational requirement.

Note that this series is also being posted on Tears and Jeers, a pop culture blog written with Sachi Ezura. It was relevant to both blogs’ interests, and I couldn’t choose just one place to post. And some cross-blog promotion never hurts.

I was in Los Angeles for the first time last week, and, obviously, parking is a major aspect of LA life, given the necessity of cars to get anywhere.

My brother and I parked one day at a little lot catty-corner from his office, and I was amazed at what a wonderful business parking lot ownership must be.

We paid an attendant $7 to drive in and park the car, and that was it. Scores of other cars did the same that day, for varying lengths of time, and the feat had surely been replicated for years before and will be for years to come. All the lot owner has to do is pay the wage of one attendant to sit at the entrance and collect cash. Lot owners must be minting money all over town!

As I was relaying this thought to my brother, Judd, as we walked to the office, he noted that (a) the pricing schemes aren’t as simple as $7/car, since lots do crazy things like charge different amounts at different times of day, for different durations, etc. and (b) that there are many lots and — pun intended — lots of competition.

So, my thought: what if complicated pricing systems are a mechanism to hedge competition’s effect on price?

If two lots were next to each other and charged straight-forwardly — say, $7/car — then price competition would occur. One would charge $6.50, the other would counter with $6, etc., till both suffered.

Unlike, say, Coke and Pepsi, which build powerful brands and add new flavors, etc., to move their competition away from price wars, parking lots can’t do that.

Instead, they can exhaust drivers with nonsensical pricing schemes to distract them from actually comparing lots’ cost-effectiveness. One lot may be cheaper from 2:53 to 3:17, the other from 3:17 to 4:42. Drivers just won’t bother to do the math each time, and they’ll just park wherever their impulses take them — acting on the knowledge that prices are generally in the same range. This way, the lots can keep their prices up; they’re committing collusion by confusion.

It’s counterintuitive because we’d expect one lot to decide to make their prices very simple and straightforward in order to attract drivers — much like phone companies are simplifying their pricing plans (no more allowance of minutes per month: just one low price no matter how much you talk) — which would make other lots do the same.

Simplicity, in other words, would be a dominant strategy, and would lead to a price war. But somehow these lots have achieved a nice (for them) equilibrium of higher prices by making price calculations not worth the effort for Los Angeles drivers (who might not be the brightest, anyway).

The dearth of female hip-hop artists is not often in the forefront of my mind, considering my musical tastes veer more towards American Idol castoffs than any genre that lacks the belting of hypnotically catchy but artistically impoverished melodies.

Still, it’s a topic that keeps popping up in publications I’m reading. Just this week, Jonah Weiner asked in Slate “Where did all the female rappers go?” His conclusions generally center on a sociological-consumerist analysis of rap; after discussing most of the prominent female hip-hop acts of the last thirty years, he asks why they’ve made “so few lasting inroads” and answers:

For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female rap seem second class, occurring outside the “real,” “primary” work of hip-hop canon building, even as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they’re what feminists would call hip-hop’s unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it’s meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss’ gangsta bitch, Kim’s badass nympho, or, recently, Lil’ Mama’s lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it’s the Beastie Boys’ nerdy boogie or Eminem’s white-trash horror-core.)

Female rap artists fall outside the prevalent narrative of the genre, and so their musical identities are necessarily sub-par — and, one must assume, in less demand by the hip-hop CD buyer. This is necessarily a demand-side explanation: female hip-hop artists are less popular to consumers of the genre because their product is less “authentic.”

But there might be a more basic economic supply-side explanation, too.

In September, Entertainment Weekly’s Margeaux Wilson wrote an article called “BET and VH1 Present…Awards Shows Without Women”:

Next month, VH1 and BET will air lavish awards shows celebrating hip-hop’s finest, including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. But here’s the catch: Neither the Hip-Hop Honors (airing Oct. 6) nor the BET Hip-Hop Awards (airing Oct. 23) nominated a single female rapper. Next year’s Grammys may also follow suit, since the Recording Academy nixed its category for Best Female Rap Solo Performance in 2005. Why aren’t hip-hop’s leading ladies getting their props? ”Quite frankly, it’s a numbers thing,” says Stephen Hill, BET’s executive VP of entertainment, music, and programming. ”There were fewer than five videos submitted for the awards by female artists this year. None of them made the cut.’

But why are there so few? One source quoted in the article offered a very interesting perspective on the question:

Hair and makeup is killing female hip-hop…The grooming cost to break a female rapper versus a male rapper is 10 times as much per appearance. That tends to have an adverse effect on a record company’s willingness to even entertain a female rapper.

Could it really be as simple as this? If what the source says is true, then there’s a supply-side economic argument to be made for the dearth of female rappers. If rappers are generally launched by record companies, then — all else being equal re: the potential success of an act — the cheaper act to launch will be preferable.

One could point to popular female pop acts to refute this assertion, but it seems that the sex appeal and vocal range of female pop stars makes them better financial bets than their male equivalents; female rap artists don’t seem to have any comparative advantages over male rappers when it comes to factors that will drive sales of their records.

In this case, it wouldn’t have to be a fact that consumers are less interested in female rap artists than male ones — they would only have to be equally interested in the two. Then, given equal chances at profitability, the record companies would be incentivized to launch acts with fewer associated launch costs.

It’s hard to know how profound the Hair and Makeup Effect might actually be for aspiring female hip-hop artists, but it could offer profound and simple insight into the under-representation of women in the hip-hop world.

Yom Kippur is always an introspective time for me, however lacking I may be in observance. (Most Jews go to services and fast; I generally do one or the other, figuring either way I’ve got my atonement covered.)
 
As I ruminate on my moral failings from the preceding year, I’m always fascinated by how much more inclusive of sin is my religious moral sense than is my secular moral sense: behaviors that I wouldn’t normally think of as wrongdoing still set off my religious alarm as atonement-worthy.
 
Take gossip. During the year, my borderline-unhealthy obsession with ethics and etiquette keep me pretty primed to speech and actions I find objectionable. Still, I generally don’t have any qualms about talking about people behind their backs.
 
I’m of course more comfortable gossiping about people I don’t like than people I do, and I don’t like rumor-mongering or judging people too harshly without thinking deeply about their perspectives and circumstances. But, I think trading insights with friends about other friends and acquaintances is anthropologically interesting, socially bonding (and entertaining), and important for staying apprised of our friends’ emotional states and for strategizing collectively about how to help each other out.
 
At Yom Kippur, though, palpable guilt washes over me. Judaism strictly forbids gossip — in a prohibition called lashon hara — and though my secular ethics alarms aren’t set off by gossip, I’m always sure during atonement that G-d doesn’t want me to be talking about anyone behind their backs.
 
This dissonance raises an interesting point: is it morally okay to gossip? If not, why not?
 

Lying and Our Negative View of Gossip
 
The knee-jerk reaction is to say that, though we all do it all the time, gossip’s a vice we should try to curb — something to make resolutions about come New Year’s. For support of this position, we can see religious proscriptions like lashon hara.
 
The proscription is supported by our sensible distaste for lying, often tied up in gossip that entails propagating rumors we’re not sure are true. We are commanded religiously against bearing false witness; lying ranks as a top-ten sin, showing its select place as a more blameworthy subset of gossip more generally.
 
It’s clear even from a secularly ethical standpoint that slander is blameworthy. One’s good name is an essential part of his social identity — to sully someone’s name without giving him the opportunity to defend himself could be a violation of his sovereignty, just as scarring as a physical violation of his person. Both will cause pain and impair the victim’s ability to function successfully in the world.
 
We’ve institutionalized this idea in the law by requiring that defendants in civil and criminal trials be able to face their accusers (or, as the sixth amendment reads, the right
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him”). And we see it in reality shows every day when Hannah or Sheena demand that if you have something to say about them, you should say it to their face.
 
From an evolutionary standpoint, scientists have highlighted the importance of reputation for group cooperation. From a Times article describing Harvard studies of cooperation:
 
“People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.”
 
We’ve evolved to help each other out rather than to only fend for ourselves — cooperation is essential to building complex societies; we can achieve more collectively than we ever could each on his own. And when working collectively, we need mechanisms to demonstrate to the community that we will not screw others over for personal gain when given the opportunity. It’s dangerous to have bad things said about you behind your back.

 
The Instrumental Importance of Gossip
 
 So, slandering someone’s reputation, lying about them, or generally charging them with fault without giving them the opportunity for rebuttal is bad — atonement-worthy. But, as I said above, slander is just a small slice of gossip. When my friends and I talk about a third party, we’re not spreading lies — we’re doing analysis. What do we think of this person? Are our judgments just? Why does he behave in a certain way? How should he behave?
 
In a sense, exchanging ideas about a person is the way we determine whether our personal conceptions about him or her hold up to scrutiny. It makes me think of a wonderful Louise Glück poem called “Birthday.” The key stanza reads:

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

When we don’t share our ideas about people with others, when we keep our conceptions and judgments to ourselves, they are untested — we have to gossip to know whether or not to revise our opinions and to reach better ones.
 
Think of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Gossip is instrumental in Elizabeth’s learning more about why Darcy behaves with such stoic coldness, and in her discovering why Wickham’s ostensible charm is not proof of an unblemished character.
 
Think also of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the public sphere — where we discuss ideas and challenge each other’s ethical and political views — is essential to the maintenance of a successful society, because the testing of one paradigm against others (through communication) is how those paradigms are refined and brought closer to the truth.
 
If I have one opinion about X based on my interactions with her, and my friends A, B, an C have other opinions about X — each, of course, influenced by A, B, and C’s own prejudices and epistemological immodesties — coming together around a coffee shop table and talking about X is how we realize that our individual opinions are not monolithic.
 
Discussing this question earlier today with my good friend Kara, I was struck by a good point she made: usually, when we’re talking about X, we’re not just talking about X — we’re talking about our relationships with X. Whether X is a friend, family member, or significant other, we are implicated in this relationship ourselves. Isn’t it unreasonable to expect us not to openly discuss relationships of which we are a part? Are we violating X’s right to privacy in doing so?

And this begs the question, is talking about X a violation of his or her right to privacy? Or some other right? Let’s say John is talking to his friend Tom about his other friend Mary. Mary overhears and becomes offended — does she have grounding to be? Yes, Mary is being discussed behind her back, but in essence John is seeking advice from Tom about his own life, and naturally his life is bound up in his relationships with people like Mary.
 

 Gossip and Etiquette
 
Let’s step back from ethics. Is it rude to talk about someone, i.e. Mary, behind her back?
 
Etiquette, like religion, is more inclusive of wrongdoing than is a humanist ethics. It’s rude to ask an acquaintance his salary, but it’s not a moral wrong. It might be rude not to send a thank-you note after receiving a gift, but it’s not grounds for sanction.
 
The function of etiquette is indeed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable. Though we lack a moral obligation to prevent discomfort — such an obligation would be impossible to uphold and would be unfairly contingent on each person’s idiosyncrasies of sensitivity — it’s nice and socially lubricating to prevent discomfort and to show each other respect, thus not asking about salaries and sending thank-you notes.
 
Indeed, etiquette is not about what forks to use — it’s Hippocratic: First do no harm. A gentleman, as Cardinal Newman said, is one who never inflicts pain. And, as Slate’s review of Laura Claridge’s new Emily Post biography reminds us said, Emily Post “often said etiquette had much more to do with ‘instinctive considerations for the feelings of others’ than with using the right fork, and she herself was famous for putting her elbows on the table.”
  
But talking about a friend behind her back doesn’t inflict pain or hurt anyone’s feelings. Indeed, the problem with John being overheard by Mary is not the speech — it’s the being heard. Being aware of being talked about makes Mary uncomfortable. It’s not ungentlemanly to talk about someone behind her back; it’s ungentlemanly to get caught.
 
Yes, it’s unpleasant to think of your friends or girlfriends/boyfriends talking about you behind your back, but can you blame them? Do you want them to leave their own lives unexamined? The unexamined life, we know, is not worth living.
 
Still, it’s a foggy question that leaves us ambivalent. Kathy Griffin says she’s uncomfortable when the subjects of her comedy tell her to say it to their faces. “I was raised right,” she says. “I talk about people behind their back. It’s called manners.” We laugh because we think she’s copping out, but a deeper analysis suggests that maybe she was raised right after all.

The English have an unhealthy obsession with celebrity (and, in their case, royal) gossip that shames even our American fascination with the private lives of Britney, LiLo and Sam, Katie and Tom, Madonna and ARod. TMZ, Page Six, and Perez pale in comparison with the British broadsheets that carry gossip as news — Paris Hilton is no Princess Di. At the same time, though, the English have an uncommon (in our brutish American eyes) preoccupation with politeness and reserve.

There’s a fascinating book called “Watching the English” by anthropologist Kate Fox, a book that in essence is an anthropology of Englishness for the lay reader. It’s a bestseller in England and highly entertaining to American readers who like to laugh at those different from them. (And don’t we all?) I encountered it yesterday while browsing for books, and it got me thinking about the social importance of gossip.

Fox highlights how reserved the English are: at a party, for instance, it’s considered highly inappropriate to go up to a stranger and introduce yourself — names are too intimate for a first encounter. Instead, one must drift into conversation and, at the end, say, “So sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” Indeed, talking about oneself or expecting to hear details about someone else is strictly out-of-bounds.

As a result, neutral “grooming-talk,” as Fox calls it (referencing monkeys that groom each other as a form of social interaction even when grooming is unnecessary), takes center stage in English social life. It’s why conversations about the weather are so central to English interaction; weather is an easy, uncontroversial, shared topic that allows for the kinship of agreement (”Yes, it is cold!”) and thus social lubrication.

Fox points to two possible explanations for the English national obsession with gossip that relate to the phenomenon of English reserve. First, she says that English reserve makes indulging in gossip illicitly thrilling. Second, she says that private information is highly valued because it is generally so scarce.

But, skimming through Fox’s book, I was surprised that she left out the most obvious reason why celebrity and royal gossip is so important to society. It’s not because English reserve makes it illicit or highly valued — it’s because English reserve keeps almost all other possible topics of conversation off the table.

Gossip serves the same purpose as weather talk. Unlike talking about one’s personal life (off limits) or, say, politics and world affairs (too contentious), mentioning the latest tidbit or scandal from the royal family will be familiar to everyone with whom you’re interacting and will let you reach an easy agreement: “Shocking, isn’t it?” “Indeed.”

Americans, too, need common cultural currency with which to interact, so we can start a conversation by saying, “Did you hear that Lindsay and Sam had a big fight on an Acela?” But, importantly, we have fewer problems with crossing social boundaries and engaging in possibly contentious conversation, so we’re just as likely to start a conversation with, “Did you see Sarah Palin on SNL?” even though that path will definitely lead to a political, possibly controversial place.

We’re also content to talk about ourselves. The other day, a cashier asked me what I did for a living. When I said I didn’t have a job, she asked how I paid the rent. Gauche for sure, but not out of the realm of American conversation you’ll encounter every day.

Just walking the streets of New York, my mother makes half-a-dozen new friends every day. This weekend she chatted with the girl behind the counter at the cupcake shop about how business is great but exhausting because she works seven days, well two days here and classes five days a week, yep she’s studying at Manhattan Marymount, etc., then she left the shop and stated chatting with a woman on the street about her beautiful flowers, but they’re heavy, and yes it is hard to find a cab at this hour…

Bottom line: in America, our penchant for celebrity gossip is kept in check because of our readiness to talk about anything from our personal lives to politics. We demand celebrity gossip stories from our news media, but we also demand more contentious news; and our demand for all news is checked by our primary fascination: ourselves.

But no matter the culture, celebrity gossip serves as an essential social lubricant. I can meet someone from across the country who shares none of my political, religious, or social views, but we can still talk about Madonna and ARod.

Yesterday evening, I went into my favorite Starbucks for a drink and got to chatting with one of my favorite baristas. She was exhausted; there had been Oktoberfest festivities all day around Harvard Square, and so Starbucks was packed all day. (As my barista put it, the endless alcohol consumption was making people tired, so they’d come in for coffee then go back to their drinking.)

I was a bit puzzled and asked whether increased store activity didn’t have any upside for them — after all, it’s the baristas who have to stay cheerful and diligent while ringing up long lines of customers and making drink after drink.

Nope. Their salary stays the same no matter how busy the store is. And, though at one point an all-day rush would’ve left the baristas flush with tips, these days almost everyone pays with a credit card; there’s little change changing hands — and even less being dropped into the tip jar.

Long gone are the days when “Kristina Doran, who works behind the counter at a Starbucks in SoHo, said she has been known to take home an extra $160 a week in tips.” That was 2002, when the New York Times reported on the rising trend of ubiquitous tip jars.

And Starbucks has been having a lot of tip-related trouble recently. In March, as described by columnist Connie Schultz (no relation to Howard),

A California judge has ordered Starbucks to pay more than $100 million to its low-wage coffee servers, called “baristas,” after ruling that the company violated state law in allowing supervisors to share in the tip pool. The decision applies only to California but could influence tip jar policies across the country….

Starbucks called the decision “fundamentally unfair and beyond all common sense and reason.” Interestingly, many Starbucks employees — including baristas — agree, which is why this is more complicated than the typical management tip-skimming maneuver. Baristas insisted to journalists, including me, that their supervisors often brew coffee and wait on customers just like they do.

“I can’t hire or fire anybody,” one supervisor in the Cleveland area told me. “The only difference between me and a barista is that I count the money and I have keys.” Supervisors also reportedly make $1 to $2 more an hour. I don’t know for sure because no one at Starbucks’ corporate headquarters would talk to me.

My barista and I agreed that without substantial tips, the baristas’ incentives suggest they should want fewer customers: they’ll make the same income and won’t be overwhelmed with long lines and piles of drinks to be made.

As I sipped my mocha, I got to thinking about why this struck me as strange, and about what the possible alternatives are.

First off, it’s plain odd, with Starbucks refocusing its corporate energies on the quality of their coffee and of each drink made — with promises that if your drink isn’t perfect, your barista should gladly make it again — that its payment structure shouldn’t align with this goal.

Think about it: when making a drink, the barista has an incentive to make it satisfactory, so that the customer doesn’t ask him to make it again. But, unless he has an incentive to make sure his location is packed with customers, he doesn’t have any extrinsically-motivated reason to make the drink great enough that the customer will definitely keep coming back.

The same is true for the customer’s general experience. A barista has an incentive not to make the customer have an unpleasant experience, because that could reflect negatively on her job performance and could lead to disciplinary action; but, she doesn’t have an incentive to make the customer experience so positive that people flood the store. (I’m assuming, as my barista suggested, that tips won’t increase markedly enough to justify this extra effort.)

(Sidenote: I’m talking pure economic incentives. I know firsthand that most baristas are wonderful people who want to make each customer thrilled with being at Starbucks even though they don’t necessarily benefit financially from that extra effort.)

The bottom line is that the corporation does nothing to make baristas excited rather than grumbly about a crowded store. That can’t be good for business.

As I reached the middle of my mocha, I started to wonder about how this payment scheme jibed (or didn’t) with similar service industries — a thought experiment that served to highlight how unique the Starbucks barista job description is.

On one hand, we could compare being a barista to being a cashier at a grocery store, perhaps someone who also walks the floor restocking shelves. There’s no incentive for this person to have a busy store, but his actions generally don’t reflect powerfully on the customer experience. And it doesn’t take much skill or training to ring up customers.

At Starbucks, the customer experience is almost completely determined by the baristas: how friendly they are, how well they make the drinks, how much they make you want to come back. This importance is reflected in the training baristas get and in their being called “partners” by the company — I don’t think Food Emporium feels so strongly about its employees.

It makes sense for the former that their pay isn’t tied to store activity, but it doesn’t make sense for Starbucks baristas.

On the other hand, we could compare being a barista to working at a clothing store. They spend some time simply ringing up customers, but they also spend time doing more skill-and-time intensive work: finding clothes for customers, ensuring that sure store is in order, making the customer happy and ready to purchase. This extra effort — akin, it seems, to the skill and time needed to make drinks to customer satisfaction — is rewarded with a commission on clothing sales for which there is no analogue in the Starbucks world.

Moreover, Food Emporium can see when it’s going to be busiest and simply employ more cashiers during those shifts. Same for Banana Republic and its staff. But there’s only so much room behind the counter and at the espresso machines at a Starbucks, and so the variance in employees from shift to shift is necessarily small. When the store is especially busy, then, the brunt of the extra work falls directly on those baristas’ shoulders.

It seems pretty obvious that given the kind of work baristas are doing and the close relationship of that work to customer experience — and thus to store activity — the baristas should be incentivized to want the store busy by more than the skimpy possibility of tips.

As I reached the last few sips of my mocha, I wondered: how can this be done?

Above the base rate salary for baristas, there should be performance bonuses that come with increased store activity. If Starbucks has data on the revenue from each location, it can presumably see when a given location sees its activity increasing (perhaps above predictable seasonal changes in activity) and then reward the baristas accordingly.

And workers on shifts that face especially overwhelming crowds should be compensated for bearing that burden with grace and discipline. This salary bump would show that the corporation really does care about the effort of its partners.

In general, Starbucks is a good employer. As Shultz wrote in March:

Starbucks was the first major U.S. company to offer health care coverage to some part-timers. It also offers tuition reimbursements and a 401(k) program. That’s a high standard I wish more companies would meet.

But Starbucks has its problems with workers, too. Earlier this month, the company agreed to pay an undisclosed benefit to about 350 managers in Texas who claimed they were forced to work off the clock.

And now there’s this business with the tip jars.

Starbucks supervisors work hard, and they should be paid for their efforts. The company should stop relying on customers’ generosity to compensate them adequately. (emphasis mine)

No matter how uniform and involved corporate policies are, the personality of each Starbucks location is resolutely in the hands of its baristas.

As such, baristas should be rewarded financially for making their locations especially fun, welcoming, delicious places to be.

Imagine you have ten friends. They all have interesting lives, go on adventures, think deep thoughts. You love to get together with each one and hear everything they have to say.

But then the friends slowly start to change. They realize that it’s expensive and tiring to go on adventures and think deep thoughts.

Let’s say two become story filters. They’ve heard everything that the remaining eight friends are doing, and they tell you the coolest stories and deepest thoughts. You don’t have to talk to those eight people anymore — you can just talk to these two!

But then three more convert. They become commentators. There are five people left still doing stuff; the commentators look at the stories the filters are talking about and reflect on them — snidely or thoughtfully. It’s easier for them to talk about what the OTHER friends are doing than to actually DO stuff themselves.

Indeed, filtering and commentating is so easy that more and more of your friends convert. Five, four, three… now only a fraction of your friends are doing or thinking anything! But, the few things left being done and thought are getting a lot more organization and dissection.

What’ll happen? Eventually, perhaps, there won’t be ANY original adventures or thoughts.

Of course, this is what’s happening with online media.

This week saw the launch of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new web venture. (Which, incidentally, is already having some problems.) The site’s tag-line is “Read This Skip That,” and it’s premise is that it “curates” the web into what is “provocative and essential,” according to managing editor Edward Felsenthal.

The Beast has very little original content, instead offering a “cheat sheet,” which highlights the big stories on the web each day, and a “big fat story” section, which attempts to illuminate all angles of the day’s biggest story with links to a dozen or so links from different sources.

The Daily Beast is just more evidence that, increasingly, the A’s and B’s of the web are outweighing the C’s. Here’s what I mean.

A is for Aggregators:
Aggregators like The Daily Beast or Digg or Real Clear Politics just compile and “curate” the articles on the web and/or organize them in new ways. For instance, Digg is all user-based: readers vote articles up or down, and so the most popular articles are at the top. Real Clear Politics is all editor-based: the website presents the most interesting (in their eyes) political stories of the day. The Daily Beast does a little of both: its cheat sheet sums up the biggest stories of the day, then lets readers vote them up or down on the cheat sheet page. These are your filter friends.

B is for Blogs
Blogs are all about linking to other stories, and so they are in a way aggregators themselves. But they produce more original content. This content, though, is just reflection on, jokes about, judgments of, etc., other sources’ original reportage or rumination. Paradigmatic example: Gawker links to a New York Times article and then says something snarky about it. These are your commentator friends.

C is for Content
Original content. Like a New York Times article. Or a conventional-wisdom-challenging opinion piece on Slate. These outlets require paying reporters or writers and then editing their work. Much harder than aggregating or commentating. These are your remaining doers and thinkers.

So, the apparent trend of C’s to A’s and B’s: Good or Bad thing?

The Slate article about The Beast’s launch said, in response to Brown’s claim that the site isn’t just an aggregator:

Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge’s page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. …

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they’ve already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, “Does the world need another aggregator?” is as silly a question as “Does the world need another map?” The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we’re only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

So this view of web media says that you’re not losing your doing and thinking friends to aggregation; you’re just making NEW friends who are commenting on the adventures and meditations of your original ten. And since The Daily Beast is a brand new site, it does seem that we’re just making a new friend, getting a new map, or [insert your metaphor of choice].

But this optimism ignores our sneaking suspicion that there is only a finite amount of media out there to be distributed amongst aggregation, professional blogging, and content creation — there are only so many readers, so there is only so much money with which to pay a finite amount of writers, editors, etc. Put simply: you only have ten friends.

Instead, the conversion hypothesis is supported by other recent events. Take this story from Gawker about a prominent group of Alt Weeklies switching from doing original criticism to blogging and aggregation:

Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don’t need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Which is it? Will we, someday soon, lose our original content altogether?

Blogging and aggregation are obviously the dominant strategy for new and existing publications. They’re cheaper, easier, and very popular. Original reportage and criticism are harder and more expensive.

But I’d argue that it’s impossible for this trend to continue to its logical conclusion. Instead, there will have to be an equilibrium. If there’s nothing to blog about and aggregate, it will become worthwhile to shift (back) to original content creation, to fill the vacuum.

Still, this equilibrium might leave us with many fewer content creators than would be optimal for how collectively informed and thoughtful we are.

But we need content: it wouldn’t make sense just to have the “AB’s of Web Media,” would it?

For the third week in a row, Saturday Night Live opened with a sketch featuring the brilliant Tina Fey as the less-than-brilliant Sarah Palin.

It’s getting to the point that we all wait breathlessly for Saturday night to see how they’ll lampoon the events of the week, so we’ll finally know exactly how to feel about them. It can be a difficult wait. Of all the emotions I felt watching the sketch — mostly mirth peppered with pangs of depression — the most palpable emotion was relief.

I was relieved to see the SNL sketch just like I was relieved to read the New York Times editorial waking us up to the reality of Palin’s poor performance — both gave voice to exactly what I was feeling about the debate, showing that not everyone was watching the win/win event the pundits saw.

Before that, I was frustrated by the media’s reflecting a reality that I wasn’t subscribing to, but I had no outlet for that unarticulated frustration until reading the Times editorial and then, come Saturday, watching SNL.

I bet a lot of other people were feeling the same frustration I was. But many more of those people probably saw the SNL sketch than read the Times editorial.

I think people are turning on SNL in record numbers not just because the sketches are funny, but because they fulfill an essential social role: The Fey-as-Palin phenomenon — now Palin wants to appear on SNL impersonating Tina Fey! — has me reminded just how powerful pop culture can be as our collective voice — in this case, establishing by Sunday morning the accepted narrative of the preceding week’s events; and, in general, reifying to society as a whole what each of us might be feeling and thinking.

Indeed, SNL was so powerful in shaping the narrative of media’s biased coverage of Obama during the primaries that Hillary Clinton actually started sounding like Amy Poehler’s parody.

I talked about this phenomenon already in one my Crimson columns, here, and identified it — with the help of Steven Pinker — as akin to the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. When he laughs at the naked emperor, he is vocalizing the unarticulated knowledge of everyone too shocked and nervous to speak up about their leader. As Pinker writes in “The Stuff of Thought”:

Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.

SNL is speaking up, laughing, telling the emperor she has no clothes — and telling all of us that it’s okay to laugh along.