Urbane Sprawl

Continuing the trend of major publications echoing the ideas discussed here, Gawker’s Brian Moylan last Thursday traced the same narrative in reality TV that I described in my last post from artless, captivating beginnings to streamlined, artificial ends. His recapitulation (which doesn’t appeal to the concept of Weberian rationalization) was conducted, though, in support of a pointed overarching argument: MTV Must Cancel The Real World.

In his polemic against the documentary series, which just concluded its 23rd season, Moylan picked up on the adverse effects reality TV’s rationalization has had on its ability to say something authentic about human experience:

I remember the excitement, the magazine covers, and the buzz surrounding the original sociological experiment. This was the first time a bunch of strangers had been throw together and the results taped. They fought, they loved, the hooked up, they went on vacation. It was just like the program is now (minus the vacation, which D.C. skimped out on) except it seemed that the people had real lives.

Sure, we never heard much from Heather B’s rap career or Andre’s band Reigndance after the show, but these people seemed less like characters or types and more like actual people. There were ambitious twentysomethings already involved in finding their way in their chosen field. They also had some sort of life in the city where it was being filmed, so outside friends and interests filtered onto the show, much in the same way that sharing a house with a bunch of roommates really does. Over time, the characters calcified into “types”—the angry black man, the gay one, the slut, the conservative, the sheltered zealot—and people were cast less as individuals, but as stock characters who would create conflict.

The serious sociological aspect of the show quickly started to diminish after the San Francisco season, perhaps the shows most poignant and famous thanks to the death of AIDS activist Pedro Zamora and the ouster of his nemesis Puck, who was so nasty the roommates kicked him out of the house. Remember on that season that Pam was in med school while it was being filmed? That was some serious stuff. Now we’re lucky if one of the kids works one day a week at something other than exhibitionism and self-promotion. In later seasons, the show started giving the cast projects, like starting a business or working a job, to give the show some cohesion, but even those shortly fell by the wayside.

What do we get now? The people on the show don’t seem to be actually doing anything outside of the house. They have silly internships that don’t involve much work and seem more like pre-arranged camera dates than documented work experience. Either that or they have little hobbies that the producers try to blow up into a huge thing. Callie is a photographer! Andrew is an artist! Emily is a (really bad) poet! Erika the quitter and Josh are musicians! Ashley is…well, just whiny!

No, they are practically forbidden to do anything outside other than get drunk, go to the gym, party, and hook up with people. Otherwise, they are trapped within the confines of their messy, faux Ikea domicile to claw each others eyes out, sob on the phone, and have petty squabbles and heavy petting. Thanks to the rule-breaking Las Vegas season, which was the start of The Real World’s descent into trash for trash’s sake, there is only a thin patina of social relevance to the entire enterprise. Ironically, it is that earnestness that makes it seem stodgy and outdated.

From casts of participants whose interpersonal interactions were authentic and dramatic, we have “types” cast only for their predisposition to engage in explosive and pathetic behavior. From a show structured to document real life, we have contrivances designed to maximize conflict.

But Moylan blames audiences as much as producers and participants for wanting to be fed only the fat of the reality animal, arguing that it is our hunger for disembodied discord that spurred the rationalization of reality. We have forced the devolution of documentary, from representational of real experience to manipulated, empty interactions between easy-to-cast types. And, he claims, it was the early seasons of The Real World that served to whet our appetites:

Thanks to The Real World itself, we have catapulted ourselves headfirst into the reality television black hole. Now seven eight strangers followed by cameras is no longer a novelty now that every two-bit celebrity will mug for the camera and countless shows pit strangers against each other in much more extreme and exotic locations. The audience no longer demands low brow entertainment disguised as high brow documentary. We want to wallow in the muck. Give us the Kardashians. Give us Tinsley Mortimer and her fake racist socialites. Give us the Bad Girl’s Club. Shockingly, MTV mastered this art form quickly with Jersey Shore, the crown jewel of the reality treasure chest. If you’re going to lock a bunch of people in a house and make them drink, fight, and fuck their way to fame and salvation, that this is the way to do it. No Real World cast ever will be able to top Snooki, The Situation, and crew in unabashed trashiness. With its continued innovation, MTV made their old innovation obsolete.

He and I agree that shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Bad Girl’s Club are the product of rationalized reality — the food of early reality processed to extract the basest bits — but I can’t get on board with the assertion that Jersey Shore is this trend’s apotheosis (or nadir, depending on how you look at it).

No Real World season to come can top Snooki and The Situation, but not because the latter are more trashy. Unlike the current seasons of The Real World, The Jersey Shore and its participants are compelling because they are untrained and artless. As fake as they are, we watch them because they are real.

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?

A train is barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a fat man in front of a train to save the passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that some things — like selling photos of your child or pushing a man in front of a train — are simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is the net good done by an action — saving a trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to be popular.

What stands out most, though, is the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.