roachboy

source: Product placement advertising makes its way into US news programmes | World news | guardian.co.uk

threads about the---um----non-neutral character of televisual infotainment have been placed in a variety of spots around here, but if you think about it there's really nothing more political than the way information is mediated first, then shaped ideologically second.

up to this point, a typical television infotainment broadcast has featured a talking head intoning transitions between clips of "action" much of which, in the end, amounts to images of people you recognize entering or leaving buildings. these entrances are of course of great significance, being in the general vicinity of another sequence of activities, which the all important voice-over tells you about as the entrance or departure unfolds before your eyes. these sequences--talking head, clip, talking head--are sandwiched between blocks of advertisements. presumably there is a clear distinction between advertisement and infotainment. i think that distinction is an illusion and that is why i wholeheartedly endorse product placement on the desks behind which talking heads are positioned while they deliver the evening's infotainment.

i think this is great. it would of course be even better were the talking heads to wear hats bearing corporate logos or loudly colored t-shirts emblazoned with advertising materials, but the effect will be much the same.

everything about television news is an advertisement for the legitimacy of the existing order. that continuity is assured by the stream of images is an advertisement for the existing order. the only change here really is that the advertising status of television infotainment is now being made explicit.

what do you make of this?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

The news is a big entertainment apparatus; advertising must continue to vie for our attention in an increasingly loud world....this was only a matter of time.

What do I make of it? It reminds me I cannot take the news seriously, which I haven't for years anyway.

The news teaches us two things: 1) What issues, events, people, etc., shock us the most, 2) We will never grow bored of these things.

We can interpret much more from the news than these two items, but that is another issue--the analysis/deconstruction of the news. What makes the news interesting to me is that is speaks volumes about our society, and this advertising, now that it has creeped in, is a fascinating little bit of hyperreality.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

kutulu

This is sick, and unsurprising.

It is precisely the reason that I watch very little news these days. I definitely can't watch local news, they are just bimbos that read teleprompters.

jorgelito

You have to scrutinize your sources more carefully.

Roach, if you are confused or having trouble, I suggest the BBC, NPR as good credible news sources (at the moment).

Perhaps Shakran can weigh inhere and give us an insider's perspective.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

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Willravel

I'd prefer the commercials be subtle. I don't like 1/4 of the screen taken up to let me know that American Dad is on Sunday at 9/8c, especially when they move and make noise. I recall a few baseball adds that were much louder than the show they were featured during. And there was dialogue.

I also look forward to Shakran's thoughts.

roachboy

you're implying something about the guardian, jorgelito?

why would that be?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

He's suggesting that it's really well done, albeit liberal.

JumpinJesus

My initial reaction was: it's wrong, wrong, wrong, but then I read your opinion, roachboy, and I have to agree with you. Product placement in the news (entermation instead of infotainment?) only solidifies news' place as advertising filler, now with eroding filler.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

jorgelito

Actually, no Roachie. Whose guardian? You mean the guardian of the press? They are the 4 estate which I assume makes us, the public, the guardian, so we are indirectly responsible in one sense for allowing them to get away from us. They are supposed to serve the public good, not whore themselves out to the corporate interest.

I was merely giving you some suggestions of some news sources I thought you may find useful. Am I missing something here?

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

Charlatan

Here's the thing... the news, whether it is on paper, television or radio, has always been about selling advertising space. Even the earliest broadsheets sold ad space.

Yes, the editorial department likes to imagine it is the driving force of any news team but the thing that let's them do what they do is ad sales.

I work in television. I can tell you that generating revenue influences just about every decision I make when it comes to the content I place on my channel. I have to be aware of the number of eyeballs I am going to capture with a show we might acquire (as this is important to our potential advertisers). We also have to get creative with how ads are placed on the channel. Ad revenue is a finite thing and there are many channels that want this finite resource. If we do not come up with new ways to bring a client's product to our viewers, someone else will.

Back in the day, when it was on Free Terrestrial TV that was available, a broadcaster could capture 10s of millions of viewers by putting up just about any old drek (does anyone really think Ed Sullivan was all that exciting?). Advertisers paid big money for this. Today, the television universe has splintered into a myriad of channels on Terrerstrial, Cable, Satellite, IPTV, Internet, etc. (not to mention advances such as TIVO that allow people to skip ads). The ad dollars are still there but they are divided up. Each channel or broadcaster has a smaller share of the audience and they are feeling this on the bottom line.

Ultimately someone has to pay for this entertainment.

Is the US ready to go the route of the UK and impose annual television licenses on their populace? These license fees go to fund the BBC. The BBC has no ads.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

telekinetic

Is this proper English, or did someone just right click on 'emphasis' and do 'find synonyms'? I know emphasis and accent CAN have the same meaning, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

girldetective

Doesnt surprise me. I could see it coming. Didnt you?

I read various papers and subscribe to magazines. I can scan out what doesnt interest me.

I also listen the to radio, but for some reason I can never quite see their visuals.

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Cynthetiq

News has been doing this for long time. Press releases get put into packages and then aired. Newspapers get junkets for movies to review them. Automotive gets press day test drives. That new medical breakthrough? Press release...

It's not news most of the time.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

shakran

Soooo. You want an insider perspective eh? Fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen

(shit. . .with an intro like that I've gotta make this good )

I started my career in a tiny little station built from an old radio church (that looked like an old fallout shelter, of all things) way back in the days of steam powered television. Lugging cameras that, by the end of the day especially, seemed to weigh more than me. Shooting upwards of 5 stories per day, and having them all ready for the 5pm news.

Beginning photogs and reporters used to start their careers in tiny little markets and I was no different. We probably had 80,000 viewers all told. Often it felt more like 5. We'd charge around in our little news vehicles with the station logos on the door going to this "kids make macaroni pictures" event or that "hey it's spring and therefore the farmers are planting corn" story. We knew it was mostly bullshit, but we also knew that we were just perfecting the craft until we were good enough to move on to a station located in a market with real news. Even then, some things worried Rookie Shakran. Why do I keep getting sent out to this same car dealership every time there's a hailstorm to do a story on how many of their cars got dinged and oh by the way they're for sale real cheap? Why do I always interview this same guy at the farmers market selling sweet corn? And then I started noticing - - the dealership and the farmers market guy both bought advertising with us. Hmmm.
Well, OK, it's a small market, these people are dipshits, they dont' know what they're doing, it'll be better when I find my next job. So I did.

This was a lot more fun! All the gear worked, we had a satellite truck and even a helicopter to play with, and shit actually HAPPENED here. Murder, political corruption, the controversy over gay pride parades (Yes, I'm that old. Shaddup) The whole nine yards. And we had 3, count 'em 3 live trucks in addition to our satellite truck. Four live shots a night, and by god we used 'em! We went live from every damned thing. Someone calls with a story idea, the assignment editor's first question in the morning meeting was, "Can we get a live signal out of there?" Not "How can we best tell this story so that the viewers find out what they need to know - " Oh no, that's not important at all. What's important is how many times we can tell the viewers that we're LIVE, because supposedly viewers think that matters (they don't, but management never gets that).

Throughout my career i've watched news programs become more and more shrill in their "look at me!" tricks (including several years ago some idiot reporter getting naked for some nude group photograph an artist was taking. The station promoted the holy hell out of that one - needless to say the reporter was young and cute.)

Fast forward to a few years ago, a former intern of mine called me up. He'd gotten a job at my first station, which I thought was cool despite the fact that I didn't know anyone there anymore. But it was still in the fallout shelter and so it was kinda neat. I asked him how he liked it and he said it really sucks. Asked him if the macaroni decorating parties were getting to him and he said no, nothing like that. It was ethanol.

Ethanol?

Turns out he'd glommed upon the same research that I've posted here in various places. I won't go into the dirty details here but suffice to say ethanol is crap, and it's one of the largest scams ever foisted on the American public.

He had the info. He wanted to put it in a story on an ethanol plant that was being built as balance. They told him he couldn't, because it might make the corn farmers around him angry.

He left the business, as have scores of talanted reporters and photographers because the business simply isn't what it should be. We are willling to accept crap pay (starting salary for a photographer today is between $17,000 and $19,000) if we are allowed to tell stories that make a difference, but we aren't, and so we are gradually, one by one, getting the hell outa dodge.

This of course has an even more detrimental effect on the news business because the old pros and the promising newbies leave instead of bringing their considerable talents to journalism.

And this is showing in the reporting.

I've another friend that works in Milwaukee. About. . Oh, 7 months or so ago a cop in Crandon, WI went crazy and opened fire at a slumber party. He killed 6 kids, including his ex girlfriend. Big news. Everyone went. Stations from hundreds of miles around descended upon the town. Later that day, they finally found the cop north of town. there was a standoff. Shots were fired, and the murderer lay dead with three gunshot wounds to the head and one to the arm. In their press conference, the police and the Wisconsin attorney general said "We shot him in the arm - he then shot himself in the head three times."

In a stunning display of journalistic awfulness, not ONE reporter from any of the dozens of radio and tv stations and newspapers asked the obvious question. Namely, "How the hell do you shoot yourself in the head three times?" No one even thought to ask it. It simply did not cross their minds because the number of trained, competent journalists in this country is dwindling nearly every day, and unfortunately for the markets represented in this story, there were none left.

So, that, folks, is the state of the news business. It is a business. It is as has already been mentioned, here to sell advertisements. It's a lot easier to get people to watch if you have mildly blurred out video of Britney Spears without panties or Paris Hilton getting arrested, than it is if you have a serious discussion on the issues that effect us all every day.

Is all lost? No. PBS still has some excellent journalism, including Frontline and anything that Bill Moyers touches. NPR still digs for the stories instead of blindly trusting what the government or the corporation's PR flack tells them. but the audience for those programs is small. It's much more fun to watch Survivor than it is to watch a depressing story about the economy that forces you to think about the world around you, and so more people tune in to CBS to catch the reality shows.

The frightening part is that a true democracy cannot exist without governmental transparency. The government must be open to scrutiny by those whom it governs, otherwise corruption is possible and, in fact, inevitable given sufficient time. With a news media that doesn't care enough to report on what needs to be reported on, and to be that government watchdog, we are guaranteed to have a troubled democracy if in fact we have one at all.

Look at Clinton. When bin Laden attacked the WTC the first time, Clinton lobbed a couple of cruise missles in bin Laden's general direction and then yawned and said he'd had enough.

Did the media harp on him for that? Nope. Not at all. They were too busy worrying about a semen stain on a blue dress. that was sexy and risque and scandalous. . . and completely irrelevant to the administration of the country. I don't care if you have sex with horses as long as you bolster our economy and our security. Plenty of presidents have been bad eggs while only having sex with their wives. See Nixon.

There was a big fat juicy issue right there that actually mattered (as we now see) - - and instead of saying "hey America - the President isn't bothering to try and get the guy that committed an act of war against us," they said "hey America, the president's found a new use for a cigar."

It's sickening, it's disgusting, and it has even me, possibly the most die-hard journo you will ever meet, considering another career.

I can get paid four times as much and make no less difference than I'm making now.

Willravel

Slight threadjack - what do you think of indy news? Bloggers and grassroots types of things? Democracy Now and such?

JumpinJesus

Holy Christ, you're Ted Baxter!


On a more serious note that directs what you're posting here. Why do we, as the public, demand better when the reality is that we don't practice what we preach? It's obvious that if our viewing demanded more in-depth, substantive news, we'd get it.

__________________
"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

Charlatan

I suppose the key, as with anything, is balance.

You can't have journalism without ad revenue. But you don't have journalism when your editorial starts to chase revenue.

Editorial has always seen itself as separate and aloof from ad sales... from what Shakran says, this is no longer the case. I would suggest that this is a direct result of the splintering of the mediascape that I mentioned above.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Willravel

I don't think this is always the case. The revenue from PBS and other independent media come from donations, though the donors could still theoretically represent a possible reason for bias.

shakran

As a general concept I dislike it. These, also, are untrained journalists. Just because Ford sucks doesn't mean I can run out in my back yard and cobble together a Lexus. It's not enough to have untrained people with desire to do better - they have to have the education and experience to do better.

As it is, most of the blogs out there actually grab stories from the big-boys (AP, Reuters, CNN Newssource) anyway and then render an opinion on it or point out where the journalist may or may not have gone wrong in his reporting.



WHO TOLD YOU!

1) you can demand all you want, but if you keep watching survivor, and you keep getting seduced by the trash-television, then that, is what the media companies are going to give you.

2) the media companies are owned by megacorporations who do not want a robust media to be questioning the government that gives them scads of breaks with which they can make trillions more dollars. They would much /rather/ you not have access to what's really happening.

3) news management and general station management tends to be clueless. They're convinced you guys are still bowled over by the fact that we can go live from the field. How can you expect them to give you what you really want?
-----Added 22/7/2008 at 11 : 31 : 29-----
just noticed this.

Yes, there's ad revenue. Watch the beginning and the end. "Major funding by a grant from Sombra Corporation" or whatever.

Cynthetiq

AND getting the grants are a huge pain in the ass. Corporation for Public Broadcasting has strict guidelines that they must follow because of the origins of their funding, mostly government given. I've read the grant requests at Scholastic and it is a pain in the ass, and it's not even for a lot of money.

The money for PBS has dwindled over the years, not to mention the fact that before when Siskel and Ebert, Julia Child, and Nova were the only way to see that kind of programming. Now there are whole channels devoted to the kind of programming further eroding their niche.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Charlatan

Exactly.

The more channels, the more content, the more splintered the audience and the harder it becomes to capture the eyeballs that are required to generate revenue.

And yes, there are other models outside of the US. Just about every nation (other than the US) has a state run broadcaster (British Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corp., Danmarks Radiotelevision, Television France, etc.) While many of them still run ads, some do not (i.e. BBC). It should be noted that most of these are arms length from their respective governments, some are just mouth pieces for their governments (usually in nations that have more centralized governments, such as China)

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

guyy

PBS shows mini commercials for all sorts of crap.

I'd like to see them doing the product placement ads, especially on their news. Their style is to be a more "serious" version of what's on the other stations. Fundamentally, they agree on what's "news".

Willravel

Democracy Now is my favorite news source. They don't accept any corporate funding and still remain an active and capable news program. Amy Goodman, the host, is one of the better journalists (and well trained at Harvard).

jorgelito

Wow! Great post Shakran. Thanks for taking the time to give us all a little insider perspective.

By the way, PBS is still the roxxorz and they have not yet succumbed to the ad machine. Yet.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

telekinetic

This post brought to you buy Juicy Juice! 100% Juice for 100% Kids!

/only knows that slogan from watching PBS as a child

roachboy

very interesting stuff, shakran and charlatan...nice.

when i saw the mcnews story, there were a couple options that presented themselves right away as to how to pitch it. one was: this is a murdoch station, the other this is a creeping of advertisement into information, which would de facto have set up information as otherwise separate. emphasizing the first would have lead into setting up fox as a departure in kind from tendencies in television news--which i don't think it is. murdoch represents an extension of tendencies already present. the blur of the time infotainment/advertising and the blur of the line information/conservative ideological filter simply make explicit tensions that are continually at play. emphasizing the second would have lead into a kind of naive position that would separate information from the capitalist context within which it circulates, which it condenses and expresses and, at times, works against as a form of immanent critique, when it seems to me the relation information/markets is more complicated because the two are of a piece.

on this last point---these days i work manage academic databases in the context of a for-profit--one of my functions is to figure out information to "target"--the company would buy rights to host a particular set of contents from a publisher, typically an academic journal---given that these journals operate in a gift economy insofar as the writers are concerned, but in a lucrative relation insofar as libraries are concerned....
if you are within the population of a university that pays tuition in general, then you have access to the particular open system of information circulation....


one of the things i have been doing is working out how to extend french-language contents (notice this horrifying rhetorical migration)---i think that it's silly that there's so little in the way of french stuff on these databases---the company seems to react to extending this as indicating that they should try to move into france as a market---which resulted in my being dispatched into the aether to work out parameters.

in general, information is framed as a public good, an element of the commons, in france. you see the same thing in the european union plans to integrate information collection across europe--what this means really is that the institution that pays shifts---in the american model, libraries pay to enable open access for the population that pays to acquire access. in the euro-model the state pays to enable open access to libraries which enable open access for the citizenry.

the mass dissemination of information is itself a captialist creation and it's preconditions and logic reflect those of the dominant economic ideologies--the american model is more classically liberal, information as a market element; the european union (for simplicity's sake) is a more social-democratic approach to information.

so one way of thinking about what's at issue here is whether information as a market element or information as an element of the commons is preferable.

personally (this is not a shock) i think that information should be a public good, an element of the commons. if large-scale democratic process presupposes that the citizenry has access to information that enables it to relativize the existing order as an aspect of being able to pass judgment on the actions of the state, and on the people who animate the leviathan, then it follows that information as a public good ensures a more democratic situation and does information that is a market element.

but neither abstracts information from the circulation of capital, from the cash-money environment.
it's more a matter of different types of relations within that environment.

in the american model, information is a commodity like any other.
it is a problematic commodity (it isn't obvious how to determine exchange value) so ends up being a bit atavistic in its internal logic (reputation---branding---is key, but as an end in itself, rather than as a means) but it is a commodity nonetheless.
in a more social-democratic context, there is at least a torsion introduced into the information-commodity relation by placing information into the commons, by framing it as a public good.

it is early in the morning and this is what i am thinking about---but i've run out of time so will leave this here.

i think there are conclusions this is heading toward, but given that neither model for thinking about what information is amounts to anything magical, it's also may ok to leave this dangling in mid-air...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

shakran

This will sound. . Odd. . But information dissemination cannot be a public good. It was a public good in the USSR. . . and in Germany in the 30's and 40's.. . And look where it got them.

Public good media inevitably leads to state-influenced or state-controlled media, at which point you may as well not have any media at all.

The only way for media to really work is to have people who care more about the news, than about lining their pocketbooks. These people exist - reporters, photogs, editors, etc. . . But they're bossed around by idiots who think money is all that matters.

It used to be different. TV news used to be a prestige-gaining loss-leader for the networks. It was supported by the profits made on the entertainment shows. But then someone figured out you can make money at news, too, and so now that's what's expected.

roachboy

but you have that as an operative conception all over western europe now as well. the results are hardly repeats of stalinism or the nazi period.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

...and Canada....

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

guyy

The American public library system is comparatively good -- even compared to Europe -- and it's based on the idea of information as a public good. It has more to do with Ben Franklin than Stalin or Hitler.

hiredgun

It's an interesting question in itself. How does one best ensure a press establishment that is not beholden to particular political interests rather than the public interest? One can assume that funding is key, but what is the operational difference between Fox's funding (private interests associated with conservative politics) and that of PBS (corporate donors and state funding)? Does it come down to the quality of individual journalists or some intangible organizational culture?

roachboy

there's a difference between state-supported and state-run---another way to say the same thing is that the bbc is not pravda.

in the former, you can imagine a media apparatus set up as a kind of external feedback loop, which would require that it be and remain independent at the level of content---one argument for it might be that this relation helps shape a more democratic political context (this assuming that there's a mixed or multi-center context, not a monopoly---it just works better)--another would be that the distance built into information gathering and assemblage from state policy/politics would also benefit those who animated the state apparatus itself, just as reliable statistics make the formulation of rational policy easier (another thing that the american state hasn't really bothered with since the reagan period explicitly is ideologically neutral statistics--think inflation rate---but there have long been problems with indices---think structural unemployment numbers in the states).

in the latter, information is an extension or expression of state ideology---which makes it useless as a feedback loop.

there's nothing about the american model that prevents a version of the same situation from taking shape, obviously. same problems arise, too: just a different way to get to it. there's no particular reason to have the slightest faith that "markets" *do* or *cause* anything in this regard. that of course works both ways, in that the reverse could also be the case and the ideological frame that is dominant amongst the major media could be in opposition to the state ideology---but that would be an accident, or a result of a history, and not a function of the presence or absence of market relations, whatever that means.

i'm not a huge fan of npr at this point. it was once a more interesting outlet for news, but since the reagan era, it's drifted more and more into the same grid as everything else.

there's more, but my brain hurts at the moment.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

jorgelito

Oh roachie, how you wound me! Do you not like it because it is too conservative? NPR is still good, really. Take some time and browse around when you get a chance. Still lots of good stuff on there.

__________________
"The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong, but
to the one that endures to the end."

"Demand more from yourself, more than anyone else could ever ask!"

- My recruiter

roachboy

npr news is slow.
it operates in a slow audio context, littered with human interest stories, taken with the artificial audio markers of realism--you are "there" here's an "authentic sound"---and trades those again providing context.
television is in general an even slower audio medium. seemingly concerned that a viewer might go all renegade and interpret imagery independently, television is a voice medium. what makes it slow is that space has to be created for the imagery to cement the illusion of immediacy, or there-ness, which substitutes for context.
everything shown is equivalent in its there-ness.
so everything shown is integrated into the same control grid.
you, passive, are presented the world as continuity.
you, passive, integrate all information into a stationary viewpoint.
you, passive, reduce all information to accounts of actions which unfold against a horizon of self-contained, self-explanatory, self-referential objects. now you are in a desert. now you are in a hotel. now you are in baltimore. now you are on a yacht.
watching, you integrate the already integrated; discontinuities are reduced to transitions. now you are in cairo, now you are on your sofa.

so while npr radio may choose to erase the space for context or complexity in the interest of providing markers of there-ness in order to heighten the radio-ness of the experience, and may for marketing reasons also choose to focus systematically on the united states to the exclusion of the rest of the planet (proportionally speaking, as over against, say, bbc's news hour), television effectively operates on the assumption that a picture of an environment IS context.

i wonder sometimes about the linkages between the assumption that information is a public good, part of the commons, and the artificiality of much european television as over against the very different characteristics the assumption that information is a commodity and american television programming, which seems more intrusive because more part of an environment, a mobile sector of wallpaper, a constant companion, a portal through which streams surface features of a "world.."

the main general distinction seems to be the the presence or absence of an assumed fourth wall.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

roachboy

let's say that the meaning of information comes from the content mediated by rules as to use, which you can think about as following from the social status assigned it.
assigned seems too anthropomorphic.
the social status it acquires.
acquires because one way of thinking about concepts is that they are little theories.
these theories we develop as we swim through our various environments and information is an environment.
information in this case is material that refers to a world beyond your immediate experience and which positions you in a particular kind of relation to that world in the process.
but the relation to information is not the same as the way in which information positions you through your interaction with it.
that positioning is a result of a processing or reading-off of features, an organization, an act.
this processing presupposes rules. these rules are condensed into the concept, which then is not exactly the word "information" in this case, but something more like the word "information" embedded in particular patterns of reception and activation, if you know what i mean. you recieve information--it arrives--you activate it--you unzip it, and enter into the sets of relations which are structured in or through it. so information about a "riot" in a parisian "banlieu" is both a collection of factoids that order and "refer to" a sequence of signifieds (the images you see as you read or listen) that substitute for the referent (the events)---what a "riot" refers to, the singular status of the term as over against the multiplicities that it groups or orders.

these processes seem to be shaped by more general assumptions or rules.
if information is a commodity, maybe one set of relations shapes the performance of the actions of reception/activation.
if information is a public good, maybe a slightly different set of relations.

that feels overly formal.
what do you think?
do these assumptions that seem to operate at a high level of generality (information as commodity, information as public good) shape how you imagine interpretation would work? not so much at the level of content, but at the level of relation to what is interpreted? in other words, do you think that information-as-commodity and information-as-public good result in basically different types of relations to information and by extension to the world?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite