Scott Timberg

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“The Digital Media Environment Is So Different In The Way It’s Structured And Biased”

July 8, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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“We are flummoxed by today’s nationalist, regressively anti-global sentiments only because we are interpreting politics through that now-obsolete television screen,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in an excellent Fast Company essay about the factious nature of the Digital Age. The post-TV landscape is a narrowcasted one littered with an infinite number of granular choices and niches. It’s empowering in a sense, an opportunity to vote “Leave” to everything, even a future that’s arriving regardless of popular consensus. It’s a far cry from not that long ago when an entire world sat transfixed by Neil Armstrong’s giant leap. Now everyone is trying to land on the moon at the same time–and no one can agree where it is. It’s more democratic this way, but maybe to an untenable degree, perhaps to the point where it’s a new form of anarchy.

Two excerpts follow from: 1) Rushkoff’s FC piece, and 2) Scott Timberg’s smart Salon Q&A with the media theorist.

From Rushkoff:

A media environment is really just the kind of culture engendered by a particular medium. The invention of text encouraged written history, contracts, the Bible, and monotheism. The clock tower in medieval Europe led to hourly wages and the time-is-money ethos of the industrial age. Different media environments encourage us to play different roles and to see, think, or act in particular ways.

The television era was about globalism, international cooperation, and the open society. TV let people see for the first time what was happening in other places, often live, as it happened. We watched the Olympics, together, by satellite. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Even 9-11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event.

Television connected us all and broke down national boundaries. Whether it was the British Beatles playing on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York or the California beach bodies of Baywatch broadcast in Pakistan, television images penetrated national divisions. I interviewed Nelson Mandela in 1994, and he told me that MTV and CNN had more to do with ending the divisions of apartheid than any other force.

But today’s digital media environment is different. At the height of his media era, a telegenic Ronald Reagan could broadcast a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demand that Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Today’s ultimate digi-genic candidate Donald Trump demands that we build a wall to protect us from Mexicans.

This is because the primary bias of the digital media environment is for distinction.•

Timberg’s opening question:

Salon:

You argue that the support for Donald Trump and the puzzling Brexit vote both have to do, in important ways, with the dominance of the Internet. Not with anything political, but in the ways we communicate. How do you see these things related?

Douglas Rushkoff:

I don’t know if I’d blame the Internet as much as the idea that we’re in a digital media environment. The idea of being in a media environment, a technological environment, is really old – this guy [Lewis] Mumford is the one who came up with it…. And the beauty of that analysis is not that it says that one thing causes another – that the printing press led to the mechanization of world culture — but it sort of went hand in hand. We developed mechanical abilities, we made machines, then we took on some of the qualities of those machines. Because they’re around us, they’re part of the world we live in.

The thing I’ve been interested in is the shift from the television media environment, which we all grew up in, which was so globalist in spirit, and in funding — it promoted a global view and global markets and global simultaneity.

The digital media environment is so different in the way it’s structured and biased. We know that the algorithms in our social-media feeds tend to isolate us in our highly individuated factions or filter bubble — so we don’t interact with people with different ideas.

What are the biases of these technologies? All of these revolutions have been very discrete — we’re going to restore Egypt, we’re going to restore the caliphate — there’s this sense of nationalism and segmentation and difference.•

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“There’s A Certain Chaos In The World And People Need Something That Has Very Clear Moral Boundaries”

March 23, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In scary times, superheroes and fascists hold appeal. Both are built on a childish desire for easy answers to thorny problems. Never mind that Batman is a disturbed vigilante and Mussolini was only tolerable when hanging upside down from an Esso gas station. Just give us the appearance of strength.

In a really good Salon interview conducted by Scott Timberg, the great writer and artist Daniel Clowes discusses the current adult fascination with Superman and such. An excerpt:

Question:

There’s so much to keep up with. Along with comics, underground and otherwise, there are more superhero movies all the time. You’ve been vocal about your frustration with superheroes.

Daniel Clowes:

I am laughing at the fact that for years, when we were doing “Eightball” and “Hate” and “Love & Rockets” and stuff, we thought, “What we’re doing is really the mainstream stuff. It’s like comics for adults, that a general audience could read… and only the tiniest niche audience of emotional defectives care about superhero comics.”

Question:

Superhero comics seemed to you like some old-world ’50s thing that was dying out.

Daniel Clowes:

Right. And yet they’re dominating our industry. I remember an artist, Bob Burden, saying, “It’s so random. It would be like if all comics were about pilgrims and then we did comics about normal people and we were looked at as the weirdoes.”

So that was our thesis, and then to see with the advent of technology where they could actually make these realistic superhero movies, to see that: No, the entire culture is what the comics shop was in 1985. It repudiates our lofty claims. It says more about our culture than anything else. I’m always kind of saddened when 45-year-old parents of my son’s friends can’t wait to go see “The Avengers.” That shouldn’t be for you. [Laughs]

Question:

The sense that it’s a guilty pleasure or something for kids seems to have disappeared.

Daniel Clowes:

That’s long gone.

Question:

How much does that shift have to do with technology?

Daniel Clowes:

I think there’s a certain chaos in the world and people need something that has very clear moral boundaries, I guess.

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“Conspiracy Theories Are Really For Losers”

February 24, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Wasn’t information supposed to set us free? I guess it did, but perhaps not in the way we expected.

The decentralization of the media was to make us all “citizen reporters,” to gift each of us with our own personal printing press. We would finally get to the truth, with crazy conspiracy theories no longer able to run amok. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Clearly, we still see what we want to see despite what’s in plain sight, and the new normal may actually be better suited to Alex Jones than Edward R. Murrow.

On hearing about the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, an obese 79-year-old smoker who suffered from coronary artery disease, diabetes, sleep apnea, degenerative joint disease, COPD and high blood pressure, some Americans were immediately convinced there was a conspiracy, a cover-up, perhaps murder. File this cockamamie story with the ones about President Obama invading Texas and the regular stream of fictions from 9/11 Truthers, anti-Vaxxers and Sandy Hook deniers. 

Scott Timberg has conducted a Salon Q&A with political scientist Joseph Uscinski on the topic. The subject says conspiracies are prevalent among those who are powerless, but I’ll argue it extends to people who feel powerless even when they’re really not. An exchange about the psychological underpinnings of conspiracists:

Question:

To what extent is conspiracy a personal thing — having to do with individual psychology — and to what extent is it social and political conditions priming people to see patterns?

Joseph Uscinski:

Those are two very good and separate questions.

There are a lot of psychologists working on this right now, trying to find what are the correlates to belief in conspiracy theories. The things we find are that people who are powerless tend to believe in conspiracy theories, people who feel animosity, people who have a lack of interpersonal trust … There clearly is an underlying psychological link – a worldview.

As far as the second question, things will drive conspiracy theorizing. When Obama was elected, all of a sudden 9/11 conspiracy theories effectively disappeared from our vernacular. And theories about Democrats and Obama and Communists overtook them. And we see that over time.

One of the things we did in the book was look at letters to the editor of the New York Times over 120 years. And we read about 120,000 letters and picked out the ones that talked about conspiracy theories. Over time, whoever was in the presidency, it was them, their party, their coalition that got all the accusations made at them. Usually by the out party.

And then when power switches hands, when a new president from a new party comes in, all of a sudden the conspiracy theories switch. So for the last seven years everything is, “Obama did this, to get something. He shot the kids in Sandy Hook to get gun control. He blew up the oil well in Deep Horizon to get green energy policy. He faked his birth certificate.”

Conspiracy theories almost always talk about the person with the most power. So when there’s a new president, it will be that person accused of all the bad stuff.

So conspiracy theories are really for losers – for people who are on the losing end of the election, people who are out of power …•

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“In The Long Run We Needed A Broader Safety Net”

May 24, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not that I’ve learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, but I’m not nearly as concerned about the future of books as I was only a couple of years ago. 

I certainly don’t think Amazon should be setting online book prices, and if it reaches monopoly level (and it may have already), that should be addressed on a federal level. I say that as someone who isn’t an Amazon hater. No company has made reading such a full and diverse experience.

There are so many great books being published now that I can’t even begin to keep up with them. That wasn’t supposed to happen as screens shrunk, publishers were pummeled, bricks and mortars were dismantled and libraries cut hours. 

I grew up in a neighborhood without a bookstore, and if I had then had a Kindle and an Amazon Prime membership, I would have had access to the most amazing collection of volumes in the history of the world. That was never possible before the Internet.

While books are more widely available than ever before, they’re certainly less visible offline. That could be remedied on a local level if small shops were incentivized with government funds, the way NYC does with supermarkets that sell sections of healthy food in poorer neighborhoods which don’t already have easy access to fresh produce. (Of course, these markets haven’t changed eating habits.)

So, I suppose I’m much more sanguine about the present and future of reading in the U.S. (or at least the opportunity to read) than Scott Timberg of Salon, who feels there must be serious intervention to save our literary culture. From Timberg:

It’s always good news when a bookstore opens, and when it’s an indie backed with significant amounts of cash, and run by someone who really cares, it’s even better. So like everyone else, we smiled when we saw the New York Times story about Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney — whose series “has spawned three feature films that have earned more than $225 million worldwide” — opening a bookstore in Plainville, Mass. Like Parnassus, the shop novelist Ann Patchett co-owns in Nashville, this will allow people to stumble upon books they’d never thought of looking at, it will employ booklovers behind the counter, and will hold events that allow authors to reach readers. All good things.

But it also makes us wonder: In the Age of Amazon, are the only people who can open bookstores celebrity authors? And aren’t these cheery stories about these mostly anomalous events kind of distracting us from the big picture? …

But isn’t this a bit like the benefit concerts that we threw for ailing and dying musicians back in the days before national medical insurance? The fact that Victoria Williams, Vic Chetnutt and Alejandro Escovedo came close to dying because they lived in a country that denied people basic health coverage was the original sin – and larger context — there. Musicians and fans worked hard to apply a (much needed) band-aid with Sweet Relief concerts and the like. But in the long run we needed a broader safety net, not more passing of the hat.

So what’s the larger context here? Well, if you follow the conversation as it’s expressed by bookstore organizations and the Times story, everything is fine: Indies are bouncing back, and some really cool authors are opening new stores! But somehow the Times piece neglects to use the term “online bookselling” or name Amazon even once, or to mention that there are approximately half the number of indies now than there were in the ‘90s, even as we’ve added more than 60 million people to U.S. population since then.•

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“TV Would Trivialize What The Book Jacket Calls ‘Politics, Education, Religion, And Journalism'”

January 4, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even before binge-viewing and such media gorging became a thing, before it was technologically convenient to watch a season in a sitting, social critic Neil Postman believed we were amusing ourselves to death, though he didn’t live long enough to watch us kick dirt on our graves. The opening of Scott Timberg’s new Salon piece about Postman, “Meet the Man who Predicted Fox News, the Internet, Stephen Colbert and Reality TV“:

“These days, even the kind of educated person who might have once disdained TV and scorned electronic gadgets debates plot turns from Game of Thrones and carries an app-laden iPhone. The few left concerned about the effects of the Internet are dismissed as Luddites or killjoys who are on the wrong side of history. A new kind of consensus has shaped up as Steve Jobs becomes the new John Lennon, Amanda Palmer the new Liz Phair, and Elon Musk’s rebel cool graces magazines covers. Conservatives praise Silicon Valley for its entrepreneurial energy; a Democratic president steers millions of dollars of funding to Amazon.

It seems like a funny era for the work of a cautionary social critic, one often dubious about the wonders of technology – including television — whose most famous book came out three decades ago. But the neoliberal post-industrial world now looks chillingly like the one Neil Postman foresaw in books like Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. And the people asking the important questions about where American society is going are taking a page from him.

Amusing Ourselves didn’t argue that regular TV shows were bad or dangerous. It insisted instead that the medium would reshape every other sphere with which it engaged: By using the methods of entertainment, TV would trivialize what the book jacket calls ‘politics, education, religion, and journalism.’

‘It just blew me away,’ says D.C.-based politics writer Matt Bai, who read the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death while trying to figure out how the press and media became obsessed with superficiality beginning in the ‘80s. ‘So much of what I’d been thinking about was pioneered so many years before,” says Bai – whose recent book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, looks at the 1987 Gary Hart sex scandal that effectively ended the politician’s career. ‘It struck me as incredibly relevant … And the more I reported the book, the more relevant it became.'”

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“He Loves Fakes And Simulacra As Much As He Fears Them”

August 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of Disneyland, it is kind of perfect that Philip K. Dick spent the last leg of his life in Orange County in close proximity to the surreal theme park. From Scott Timberg’s 2010 Los Angeles Times article about the scanner in suburbia:

While in Orange County, Dick often fell back on the reflexes of Bay Area types who move to Southern California. He joked often about the artificiality of it all, the local slang. “He kept comparing Southern California to Disneyland,” remembered wife Tessa Dick, “and said it was plastic, wasn’t real. He was used to real cities like Berkeley and San Francisco and Vancouver.”

To a writer whose primary subject was the slippage between the real and constructed, the place surely also fascinated him as well. ‘He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them,’ novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote in the introduction to Dick’s selected stories. He calls Dick very much a man of the 1950s, holding “a perfectly typical 1950s obsession with the images, the consumer, the bureaucrat, and with the plight of small men struggling under the imperatives of capitalism.” …

Of course, being far from any urban center or major attraction suited Dick just fine during this last decade. ‘He was home 24/7,’ Tessa said. “He didn’t go out very much.” Besides Big John’s, his favorite pizza place, the nearest spot of interest was the Cal State Fullerton campus, where the author’s papers were held. (Some of them have recently been relocated, perhaps temporarily, to San Francisco.) Today the area is dominated by low-slung, pale stucco buildings and fast food chains, and back then it wasn’t much different.

The couple wasn’t lonely, though. “People came to us,” Tessa recalled. “Nearly every day we had visitors. One night for dinner we had two men from France, one from Germany, and one woman from Sweden. One of them was writing a PhD thesis on Phil.” Dick flirted with the Swede, saying, “You are a pretty lady” in rough German.

During his last few years, when he became financially stable for one of the rare times in his life, his daughters visited him at the Santa Ana apartment he moved to after the implosion of his marriage. Dick’s oldest child, daughter Laura, born in 1960, recalls his place full of Bibles, encyclopedias – Dick was a ferocious autodidact – and recordings of Wagner operas.

Phil’s second daughter Isolde, now 42, visited enough during this period to get to know her father for the first time. She recalls him as working hard to be a good father and struggling to overcome his limitations, both with and without success.

During one visit, he got Isa excited about a trip to Disneyland, then open past midnight. He said, “We’re gonna go and stay ’til it closes!” But in my mind we were there for only 20 or 30 minutes before he said, ‘Honey, my back’s really hurting.’ I think he was just overwhelmed by all the crowds. I knew him, and knew he was uncomfortable moving outside his comfort zone.”

He spent more of his time walking from the apartment to a nearby Trader Joe’s to get sandwiches, a park where he and Isa tried awkwardly to play kickball, and an Episcopalian church where he had running theological discussions with the clergy.•

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