Owning one's own culture
May. 15th, 2007 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatI've just been reading a Radio Times feature in which various people give their opinion on which is the "greatest age of rock." Malcolm McLaren (svengali of the Sex Pistols) chooses the punk era, on the grounds that it was music by the people, and thus helped usher in interactive computer games, blogs and file sharing. For the first time in history, he said, we now have a generation that owns its own culture.
Really?
I have to admit that I don't know an awful lot about modern popular culture. My ignorant outsider's impression, though, is of a generation that is being conned – or is conning itself – into thinking that it owns its own culture, but is still largely paying money to enjoy a culture created by others. Yes, perhaps there are some examples of people owning at least parts of their own culture. Fan creations, such as fanfic, are arguably an example of this, and the internet has seen an explosion of such activities. However, they have existed for decades, and, besides, only involve a small minority of the population, anyway.
When it comes to wider popular culture, a lot of the so-called interactivity seems very cosmetic. You can press the red button to get "interactive" elements to a TV programme, but this is just a tiny little extra to the fact that you are still watching a programme created by others. You can phone some premium rate number to evict someone from Big Brother, but you are hardly creating your own culture. You are having a very small say in the details of someone else's concept, according to someone else's rules.
On the BBC news website, you can "have your say" on any news item, and you can express your opinion on it on your own personal blog. However, this doesn't seem to me to be much different from sitting in the pub with your friends chatting about it. All it offers is a potentially larger audience. The medium has changed, but the process is the same. Chatting to a friend is chatting to a friend, whether you do it face to face, over the phone, or through instant messaging.
When it comes to popular music, does this generation own their own culture? People can select which tracks to download, and create their own playlists, but someone else has still created the music, and it's been issued and marketed in a commercial fashion. Putting your favourite band's latest pop video up on YouTube is not creating your own culture. People still pay massive prices to go to concerts and festivals, where they are the audience, and the band is on stage, and never the twain shall meet. Some young people still form bands and create their own music, but that's nothing new – e.g. the skiffle culture in the 50s.
But enough of that. McLaren doesn't just assert that this generation owns its own culture; he also implies that no previous generation has done so. This doesn't really match what I know of folk culture in pre-Victorian Britain. It seems fair to say that these people, in part, at least, owned their own culture. At a local level, there was a huge repertoire of customs, celebrations and festivals that went on completely independent of the ruling elite – and, frequently, very much disapproved of by them.
The common people were, of course, had to go to Church, and had quite a lot of Christianity-related culture imposed on them from above. However, most people seem to have been very good at interpreting religion in their own way. Religious themes crop up in folk song in interesting ways, that bear little resemblance to anything preached in the pulpit. You just have to look at any book on calendar customs to see the vast difference between the common man's celebrations of a religious feast, and the way the establishment wanted to celebrated. Even the theology was often rather different from anything preached in the pulpit.
Each village had their own local stories, and their own local heroes and villains and superstitions. There was no television, radio or recorded music, so they would gather in the fields or the pubs to sing their own songs.
Of course, not all folk songs were written by peasants, and transmitted orally. Many songs were transmitted through writing, through broadside ballad sheets that were bought and sold. However, the broadsides were hardly an example of the elite imposing their songs on the masses. Provincial printers often wrote their own songs – murder ballads etc. – but they also collected songs from the common people, printed them, and passed them on to wandering chapmen to sell at fair. The common people who learnt songs from printed broadsides went on to interpret them in their own way. Cecil Sharp and co. often collected dozens and dozens of very different versions of a song. Although the song was traceable back to a printed ballad popular a few generations before, each community, and each singer, had made it their own.
There was, of course, a fair amount of culture imposed by above. One of the reasons given for the rapid decline of folk song in the late nineteenth century was that mass communication was improving, so the youth were singing the "new songs" from London, and no longer wanting the old-fashioned stuff their grandfather sang. Education Acts meant that more people went to school and absorbed the sort of culture that the ruling classes wanted them to absorb. Victorian middle classes didn't like the common folk's drunken revels, and "primitive" folk song, so set up community choirs to direct their musical leaning into more respectable channels.
It may well be that today's generation "own their own culture" more than people did 20 years ago. However, I find it hard to accept that they "own their own culture" more than people did back in the days before television, recorded music and mass communication, when people made their own entertainment in their own houses and pubs.
Really?
I have to admit that I don't know an awful lot about modern popular culture. My ignorant outsider's impression, though, is of a generation that is being conned – or is conning itself – into thinking that it owns its own culture, but is still largely paying money to enjoy a culture created by others. Yes, perhaps there are some examples of people owning at least parts of their own culture. Fan creations, such as fanfic, are arguably an example of this, and the internet has seen an explosion of such activities. However, they have existed for decades, and, besides, only involve a small minority of the population, anyway.
When it comes to wider popular culture, a lot of the so-called interactivity seems very cosmetic. You can press the red button to get "interactive" elements to a TV programme, but this is just a tiny little extra to the fact that you are still watching a programme created by others. You can phone some premium rate number to evict someone from Big Brother, but you are hardly creating your own culture. You are having a very small say in the details of someone else's concept, according to someone else's rules.
On the BBC news website, you can "have your say" on any news item, and you can express your opinion on it on your own personal blog. However, this doesn't seem to me to be much different from sitting in the pub with your friends chatting about it. All it offers is a potentially larger audience. The medium has changed, but the process is the same. Chatting to a friend is chatting to a friend, whether you do it face to face, over the phone, or through instant messaging.
When it comes to popular music, does this generation own their own culture? People can select which tracks to download, and create their own playlists, but someone else has still created the music, and it's been issued and marketed in a commercial fashion. Putting your favourite band's latest pop video up on YouTube is not creating your own culture. People still pay massive prices to go to concerts and festivals, where they are the audience, and the band is on stage, and never the twain shall meet. Some young people still form bands and create their own music, but that's nothing new – e.g. the skiffle culture in the 50s.
But enough of that. McLaren doesn't just assert that this generation owns its own culture; he also implies that no previous generation has done so. This doesn't really match what I know of folk culture in pre-Victorian Britain. It seems fair to say that these people, in part, at least, owned their own culture. At a local level, there was a huge repertoire of customs, celebrations and festivals that went on completely independent of the ruling elite – and, frequently, very much disapproved of by them.
The common people were, of course, had to go to Church, and had quite a lot of Christianity-related culture imposed on them from above. However, most people seem to have been very good at interpreting religion in their own way. Religious themes crop up in folk song in interesting ways, that bear little resemblance to anything preached in the pulpit. You just have to look at any book on calendar customs to see the vast difference between the common man's celebrations of a religious feast, and the way the establishment wanted to celebrated. Even the theology was often rather different from anything preached in the pulpit.
Each village had their own local stories, and their own local heroes and villains and superstitions. There was no television, radio or recorded music, so they would gather in the fields or the pubs to sing their own songs.
Of course, not all folk songs were written by peasants, and transmitted orally. Many songs were transmitted through writing, through broadside ballad sheets that were bought and sold. However, the broadsides were hardly an example of the elite imposing their songs on the masses. Provincial printers often wrote their own songs – murder ballads etc. – but they also collected songs from the common people, printed them, and passed them on to wandering chapmen to sell at fair. The common people who learnt songs from printed broadsides went on to interpret them in their own way. Cecil Sharp and co. often collected dozens and dozens of very different versions of a song. Although the song was traceable back to a printed ballad popular a few generations before, each community, and each singer, had made it their own.
There was, of course, a fair amount of culture imposed by above. One of the reasons given for the rapid decline of folk song in the late nineteenth century was that mass communication was improving, so the youth were singing the "new songs" from London, and no longer wanting the old-fashioned stuff their grandfather sang. Education Acts meant that more people went to school and absorbed the sort of culture that the ruling classes wanted them to absorb. Victorian middle classes didn't like the common folk's drunken revels, and "primitive" folk song, so set up community choirs to direct their musical leaning into more respectable channels.
It may well be that today's generation "own their own culture" more than people did 20 years ago. However, I find it hard to accept that they "own their own culture" more than people did back in the days before television, recorded music and mass communication, when people made their own entertainment in their own houses and pubs.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 04:55 pm (UTC)You tell 'em,
Seriously, I agree very strongly with all that you've said here. Thank you for posting this.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:06 pm (UTC)I think the state of the music industry is simply a reflection of the way the rest of the culture world goes about things, that focuses on consumerism rather than participation. e.g. As John Carey has pointed out, massive arts grants go to theatres and to opera, while things like painting and drama courses in, for instance, prisons - courses that encourage their participants own creativity, let it express itself - are starved of cash. Though this whole paragraph seems rather superfluous, since it's critcising high rather than pop culture, which is the subject of your post. Oops, again!
I can't remember who it was - someone with rather Marxist leanings, I expect - who thought that all culture derives from the proletariat.
Of course, McLaren is perfectly right if he says that this generation 'owns' its own culture - which it does, in the sense that it forks out large amounts of money for it! - as you say.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 07:10 pm (UTC)Not that I think that one form is superior to the other. I just wish both sides got recognition.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:11 pm (UTC)But what I mean is that it's all an illusion, now and in the past. Nobody has ever owned folklore, at least not longer than the act itself lasts, and be it in what ever form, nobody owns popular culture still, and to state that is either pure stupidity or misguided acceptance of this illusion of control.
(I could've just said "Hear, hear!" to everything you said, couldn't I?:)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 05:35 pm (UTC)Musings on culture
Date: 2007-05-15 06:03 pm (UTC)One thing that annoys me about the cultural 'ownership' thing is the modern (in particular political) insistence that everyone has a say because there is a consultation about everything. The responses to these 'consultations' are inevitably analysed in house, often by extremely dubious methods* and at the end of the day it seems what happens is whatever suits that day's political whim or headline opportunity rather than a true reflection of the consultees' opinions.
*As an example, a recent consultation by a govt department (I probably better not say which one!) counted the local authority responses as 'many' because they counted each individual authority, and the police response as 'one' because it had been collated and submitted to them by ACPO.
Everything costs money - the internet is not exactly free! We have to pay for new computers every couple of years because they become obsolete so fast - this one, which I bought last year, even WITH a faster graphics card, still can't handle moving pictures on the intranet very well - and new software, which is never compatible with anything you already have. And then there's the cost of the broadband connection ...
As you rightly note, fandom has been writing fic for years - it's just more visible now, and more easily accessible, and there's zero quality control - we were much fussier about what got printed when it involved using a manual typewriter (bought when I was 18 and still works fine over 30 years later!), a stencil and a Gestetner duplicator. My writing improved hugely when subjected to rigorous editing (not that this was difficult!). Peer review of bad writing by bad writers seems to = a morass of cr*p! making it extremely difficult to find anything readable!
Blogging isn't new, either - it's just the private hobby of diary-writing made instantly public - instead of being published years later (usually posthumously) in book form, again with careful editing.
The more people who use the modern technology, the more money the corporations make. I don't think there's any question about who stands to gain from this so-called 'ownership'!
Re: Musings on culture
Date: 2007-05-15 07:09 pm (UTC)Re: Musings on culture
Date: 2007-05-15 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 06:58 pm (UTC)ON a slight side issue, if there is any increased ownership of culture now compared with 20 years ago, it is likely to be because, for example, it is at least possible for a band to self publish their music on the net and become well known and widely listened to as a result.
I think Linux, with which I am currently trying conclusions, may be a significant, if small, part of any marginally increased cultural ownership that might be happening. It is a step towards making the basic infrastructure of digital communication freely available, and not so easily able to be locked down "from above".
Why am I now trying to find a way to move towards using Linux? Partly because I want to have some say over what my computer does - though in learning a little about Linux I find it has some really nice features :-).
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 07:37 pm (UTC)I agree with you about the issue of bands self publishing. Though how widespread is it? Has any band become really huge this way? Or is it that they aim to get just enough publicity this way for a record label to come forward, offer them a deal, and let them make "real" music - i.e. commerically released?
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 08:20 pm (UTC)Seriously, I read what you wrote expecting to find points to debate and ended up thinking "Yes, that all makes perfect sense".
Here is a slightly off topic comment: At the 2006 world SF con, I went to a panel on the subject of intellectual property. The least agreed-with panelist was arguing that the extension of copyright to 70 years after author's death is barely adequate and she couldn't really see why it should ever expire.
People in the audience debated with her whether it would be better if Shakespeare's copyright was owned by a company somewhere and everyone had to pay them to make movies, put on plays and so on, and she maintained that it would be better because then there would be a commercial incentive to commercialise Shakespeare.
Later I suggested to her that if real property were to be treated the way she wanted intellectual property to be treated, a very few people would own almost everything, and most people would be bulldozed off the private land into the sea. She replied saying she didn't see why intellectual property should not be treated the same as real property.
Attitudes like this and legal departments like rottweilers possibly works against the chance for any real ownership of culture by most people.
intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-15 09:43 pm (UTC)I'm looking at it from the other end to "Shakespeare's copyright was owned by X'; instead, my house will continue to benefit my heirs in some way after I'm dead, and their heirs, and so on. So why shouldn't my heirs get a similar benefit if I were to write, draw, compose, etc. something similarly valuable.
Yes, it would be the most significant change to inheritance since copywrite was thought of, but is that a bad thing? I don't know.
*playing devil's advocate*
As an aside I don't think that it would be possible to put the escaped IP back in the bag, so to speak. So if the change were implemented those creators whose IP had already expired it would remain expired, but those whose hadn't it would continue indefinately.
Back to the discussion: I'm not convinced that . All the existing houses are largely in private ownership, rather than having been bought up by mega rich investment companies, so I don't see that it would be any different with IP. Indeed, it would actually put more money in the hands of the creator's heirs. Consequently the film companies (the wealthy of the organisations that use expired IP) would have to shell out some of their finances to pay the private inviduals who owned the IP. I would think that this would actully put more money in the hands of private people: the opposite of what you suggested.
Convince me otherwise. :-)
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-15 11:27 pm (UTC)Heirs who might inherit IP will lose much of it to death taxes, while corporations do not have that limitation, so if a corporation does not go bust, and if it does not sell a particular item of IP, then it will own it for as long as the IP is valid. If that is for as long as the legal systems that support IP last, that could be a very long time.
In parallel, look at the not very munificent deals that writers get - except the very highest selling ones. Look at the fight that the NUJ has had to carry out so that writers of, say, technical articles that are first printed in a magazine, then later in a compilation and a book, get some royalties from later publication. I never did, but the company that published it did.
Remember what the Garlands said about publishers wanting to own all rights in return for a sniveling payment? Unless you are fairly high on the scale, your choice is take that deal or sell nothing and earn nothing. Do you really feel that the correct ethical situation is then for the corporation to own the IP forever? For the record, I don't!
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 07:27 pm (UTC)No, and that was not what I was arguing for. Any further comments I make on this topic for the time being will be in
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 09:01 am (UTC)"I'm looking at it from the other end to "Shakespeare's copyright was owned by X'; instead, my house will continue to benefit my heirs in some way after I'm dead, and their heirs, and so on. So why shouldn't my heirs get a similar benefit if I were to write, draw, compose, etc. something similarly valuable."
The crucial difference is that if I make use if your house I deny it to you. My gain is your loss. If I sing a song you wrote, you may never know: my gain does nothing to you.
The only conflict comes in opportunity cost: if I release a song on CD at the same time as you do, then I quite possibly deprive you of some sales.
So I think the creator of a work should be allowed to reap the financial rewards, or at least the bulk of them, and I think the system of granting an exclusive right to the creator does this well.
Then again, after a while a creative work seeps into society's culture. New works are inspired by or refer to older ones, and having that public domain is very important.
So if on the one hand the pubic domain is important to keep creativity going, and for the artistic healh of society, and on the other restriction of rights is important if individual people are going to be able to make a living out of being creative, a balance needs to be struck.
The system of giving the creator an exclusive licence to exploit his creation for a limited time does that. The key for me is that it should be for a limited time. Why should an old author be able to be paid for work he did as a young man? I get this year's salary for this year's work, next year I have to work again. Giving the author ten or twenty years to turn his work into cash seems entirely reasonable to me - any more is excessive.
You notice that in the more tangible world, patents last a lot less time than copyrights do.
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 11:47 am (UTC)What about someone who sets up a business at 20, sees it do really really well, and sells it at 25 for £100 million? Should the government come along after 20 years and say that he can no longer benefit from that money? You have to work each year to get each year's salary, but not everyone does. A lot of people are living off the fruits of work they did years ago. A lot of people are living off the fruits of the work their great-great-grandfather did.
(I'm not arguing for or against your general point, but I think your analogy has holes.)
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 12:17 pm (UTC)In particualr, I think there's a big difference between living off money you received years ago on the one hand, and continuing to earn money for work you finished years ago on the other. If you create something and sell it you should get to keep the money, but copyright has a large element of having your cake and eating it.
In your example, one could say that the work he did in setting up the business was presumably (ignoring bubble effects etc) to create something worth £100m. But he's clear of it now, it's done and dusted. The government can't reasonably take the money back, but equally he can't jump back in 10 years later and say "I set this business up, you should be running it like this and give me the profits".
Actually, thinking about it this chap has probably created IP: most of the £100m profit is probably goodwill and brand value. What he's doing is saying "I have IP that I could make a profit out of licensing out, but actually I think I'll sell the rights now for a lump sum". Much like recording artists seem to do - sell the rights over their songs to a record company.
What is normally recognised in business is that such IP doesn't last long. Amortising it over 25 years is quite a long time to do it (and in fact new accounting principles are suggesting that you shouldn't assume any life at all, you should revalue it every year to see if it's still worth anything). To keep the value you need to keep pumping new effort in: marketing campaigns to keep the brand value going, new research and development to keep products worth buying, and so on.
With copyright, though, you don't have to do a thing. You can sit on your rights and collect royalties automatically through PRS and so on, or you can deny anyone the right to use your IP even though you've no use for it (compare trademarks, where you have to actively use them or lose them). The right to do so currently lasts far longer than normal business IP would be expected to last.
I don't think limiting the term of copyright to a few years is like taking back money from people, it's more saying "Right, what you've created is worth something. What it's worth to you is what you can do with it in the next X years. After that, it's open to everyone".
Ideally perhaps society would say to creative people "Well done for making that, here's what it's worth. What are you going to do next?" As no-one can tell in advance what a work is worth, though, we have to approximate.
[/ramble]
Re: intellectual property
Date: 2007-05-16 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 07:06 am (UTC)Anyway, re. bands getting known on the Net... I seem to remember reading about some girl who'd got into the charts after doing music broadcasts from her own bedroom, or something. It got into a lot of papers. But then it was revealed that she already had a record deal, and this was all the record label's idea of a publicity campaign. Something like that. I could be misremembering it, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 08:19 pm (UTC)I suspect he may be using a rather different definition of generation, not everybody in the last 30 years or so, but rather the contemporary group of teenagers/young people. The one thing that does seem to have changed in the last thirty/forty years or so is that popular culture is so much more aimed at young people than in the past.
It's not that the population as a whole has more control over their culture, but that young people own (or at least are the intended market for) popular culture. Instead of popular music being the kind that appeals to the largest number of people, it's actually a genre aimed at a specific age group. Are the latest chart topping "pop" songs actually more popular with the population as a whole than many traditional songs? I doubt it, but because young people "own" the output of the mass media, those songs are the ones to get the recognition.
It's highly debatable that the current generation of young people actually owns their own culture, for all the reasons you've already explained, but it does seem as if the mass media's idea of "what young people want" is a very strong influence on popular culture - young people making music for other young people.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 07:00 am (UTC)I thought that pop music was aimed mostly at young people ever since the 50s. Maybe one thing that's changed is that the technology for transmitting it is constantly changing, and the young are the quickest to adopt these. 30 years ago, teenagers and their parents were listening to different music, but were listening to them in the same way - i.e. on records. Now the young people are using MySpace and YouTube and iPods and mobile phones and all these things that a lot of older people feel baffled by. It increases the impression that popular culture is a whole new world owned by young people.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-15 09:29 pm (UTC)Well I agree with you and I know you find all this agreement slightly surprising given comments above but when what you've done (in my reading) is to ask a question ie "Well how can you, or anyone, say that when there are all these examples that indicate otherwise?" So how can anyone really disagree with the posing of a reasonable question? Especially when it is posed so well.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 08:03 am (UTC)Television again, as you say, I don't think really offers much real interactivity, and is all about spectating.
However, I do agree with the concept of internet as offering empowerment to those who are prepared to make the effort, allowing them to shape their world and culture.
The Open Source movement I think IS new and different. The technologies that shape the Livejournal site we are using to discuss this have been created not by commercial forces, but by people with ideas, using forums to discuss and develop their concepts and test them.
And the sheer power of really open communications among people who have shared interests is something I think we are going to see more of. I really think that is more than just 'chat'.
20 years ago, I could see an old dog in my local rescue centre not being adopted, and think 'that is sad'. I could maybe do something to help that one old dog, with the consent of the 'powers that be' (local press, radio, the 'official' rescue centre.
Today I help run a small charity (the Oldies Club) that I really think has made a genuine difference to that problem in many areas of the UK, and continues to do so. All the people who run it live all over the place, and meet perhaps twice a year. It's a virtual organisation. It arose from just chatting about shared interests.
There are lots of other examples in the area of 'dog culture' with which I am familiar. DeednotBreed. Sighthounds Online. The Dogstar Foundation. Hope. Sighthound Welfare Trust. All set up by groups of people who came together on various forums and decided that there was a problem, and they could work to fix it. That's the 'dog world' - I know little of the fanfic world, but I am aware of many other 'worlds' where people are getting up and doing stuff, and I think you underrate that.
Although it may be true that only a small percentage of the population works to shape their own world in this way, I am fairly sure this is nothing new. The majority of people might sing a song, but will probably not set out to write a new one, and I don't think that has changed. What I think is new is that we should now have fewer and fewer 'mute, inglorious Miltons' as technology decreases social isolation.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 11:44 am (UTC)I think McLaren was talking about music, which was why I was emphasising that. Your dog examples make a good point. Maybe it's not "culture", but it is an example of normal people making a difference in a cause they believe in. (Though weren't most existing big charities originally set up because just one person noticed that someone had to be done, and set about doing it? Such things aren't confined to the internet age, though they are certainly made easier by it.)
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 12:36 pm (UTC)We have all these little worlds that are socially more or less selfcontained, that have their own rituals and artifacts and words and events and accepted modes of behaviour. I know the fanfic world has these: so does the online dog rescue world, the UK online gardening world (which isn't the same as the US online gardening world and don't risk suggesting it might be or you will be flamed back into the corn carrying your raccoons with you...) , the website accessibility world, and the php development world, and the search engine optimisation world (the last three less so as they are less self-contained, being largely 'work worlds').
If dog people are not just coming together to form a charity, but meeting up for social events and holidays, writing poetry, making images and even paintings and sculpture for consumption by their community, if they have their own shops, auctions, their own 'laws' the breaking of which results in expulsion, I would argue that they are genuinely forming a culture of their own. There isn't much 'dog people' music in it yet, but I suspect there might be in a few years when it's easier to share information that requires a lot of bandwidth and people are that much more familiar with the tools they would need to make recordings. There are even dog people seers and what might almost be described as dog people Books of Lore.
Weird, isn't it. I think there are cultures like this one breaking out all over the internet, and that they are going to get stronger.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 04:27 pm (UTC)Intrigued by the dog seers, though...
no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-17 06:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-17 09:29 am (UTC)I think that football fans are extremely tribal. You do get genuine enthusiasts of 'the beautiful game', but not that many of them. On the whole, people watch their own team, plus England games, plus (sometimes) other people's games that might impact indirectly on their own team's fortunes.
Therefore, if you are going to broadcast football, you really have to show a lot of it, because most of the audience is only going to be interested in a small chunk of what you show and the rest will be irrelevant to them.
I don't think you can compare it to computer gaming, because computer gaming is a participation sport, not one that is specifically designed for small numbers of people to play and large number of people to watch. Furthermore, football is a long-established hobby which has traditionally been covered by traditional media: I suspect that in new media, the amount of coverage is reversed.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-17 11:43 am (UTC)You could be right. I do have a fair amount of defensiveness about such things. I seem to have interests that are not only "minority", but are derided by the "majority." Morris dancing, for example, is hardly ever mentioned on the radio, on TV or in the papers without a snide little joke about how sad it is. The dog-loving community you describe is perhaps a thriving minority culture, but it's probably not laughed at in the press the same way Morris dancing is. Being laughed at all the time by "them" does tend to create a sense that you are part of a tiny, valiant minority, swimming against the bland current of the mainstream.
I'm thinking now of the "guest publication" thing on Have I Got News For You, that every week mocks mercilessly someone's own minority enthusiasm. (Folk music got the treatment a few weeks ago.) Some interests are fair game for mockery on television, because it's assumed that "everyone" knows they're silly. Other interests aren't, since it's assumed that "everyone" knows they're "cool" or socially acceptable. From this, I get "minority" and "mainstream."
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Date: 2007-05-17 01:20 pm (UTC)What a nice chap he seems to be. He did The Underdog Show with a rescue dog and adopted it, too.
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Date: 2007-05-17 04:47 pm (UTC)I've been wondering what you thought about the Underdog Show. I have to admit that I never watched it, not even a few minutes of it, but the description of it made it sound a bit... questionable.
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Date: 2007-05-18 09:54 am (UTC)A major problem for dog rescue is that people don't want a rescue dog because they think the sort of dog they want will not be in rescue, or that rescue dogs will be broken, so they buy a puppy from a breeder (not realising that looking after a pup is often much more difficult!) It was a very good program from that point of view.
It was sad that some of the dogs bonded with their celebrity trainers, but not all the celebrities were in a position to adopt a dog, so that bond was broken at the end of the filming. But this is something that happens to a rescue dog if it goes into foster anyway. And several of the celebrities did end up adopting the dogs, which is a nice role model to have on the telly, and all the other dogs were adopted by an eager public: the Dogs Trust will be doing followup checks and I am sure they interviewed all applicants pretty stringently too.
Of of the dogs involved, one (Casper) I think was a poor choice to go on the show, as the poor beast had quite a lot of issues and looked a bit stressed, but the rest of them seemed to be having a whale of a time.
Perhaps the most questionable thing about it was that all the cash raised went to Children in Need, not the Dogs Trust, which supplied the dogs, or any other dog charity. Apparently the original plan had been for each celebrity to name a charity, which would have been mostly dog charities, but then there was the big fuss about phone-in corruption, and the BBC for mysterious reasons decided that the only way to avoid more scandal was to give everything to CIN.
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Date: 2007-05-18 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-16 09:40 pm (UTC)I like to blame it on Ronald Reagan, who basically set the stage for the corporations to take over the world. :)
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Date: 2007-05-17 06:59 am (UTC)Though perhaps it's getting that way. We still have two non-commercial mainsteam TV channels, and they used to show all sorts of creative things, aimed at minority interests. They've now got just as obsessed with ratings as the commerical channels. We have a diet of bland, dumbed-down stuff created according to someone's pre-conceived idea of "what will sell." No risks are taken.
I seem to have moved away from books to television. Oh well...