I was recently watching cable TV and saw Verizon's new commercial for 2009, which announces Verizon's take-over of Alltel. I was surprised and displeased by the content of the ad, which features a large Italian-American "family" at a barbecue and is full of familiar stereotypes against Americans of Italian heritage. It portrays an entire ethnic group as fat, lazy, violent gangsters who are crude, rude, and frankly embarassing. After scouring the internet, I was unable to find the ad itself, but there is a fair amount of public backlash. I am of Italian descent, and I live under one roof with family members that are Italian immigrants, first generation Italian-Americans, second generation Italian-Americans, and third-generation as well. Naturally, this ad made me sit up and take notice. It isn't anything we, as a public, haven't seen before, but it made me think how race and gender play out in American commercials. There is an "othering" in these commericals that portray Italian-American as a group to be feared or ridculed. Anti-Italianism, to me, is extremely strange since it is so mainstream and tolerated, a non-issue outside of the Italian-American community. And it is also striking, in my opinion, since it is not against Italian nationals, but instead, it is pointedly Italian-Americans who are assumed to be gangsters or killers. 

After talking about complex narrative, I've been thinking quite a bit about soap operas lately. I found an entry on media scholar Jason Mittell's blog pertaining to the subject of complex narrative and soaps, and enjoyed reading someone else's thoughts on the matter. It just seems to me that the soap opera is the grandaddy (grandmama?) of complex narrative. Honestly, could there be anything more complex than a program like All My Children, which has been going strong since 1970 and a cast of over 50 characters? It seems that soap operas have been largely ignored (although I did find Love and Ideology in the Afternoon by Laura Stempel Mumford to be an interesting read) because of the division between "high" and "low" culture. The fact that it is "women's tv" also stigmatizes the genre and makes it superfluous and beyond recognition. 

But I found soap operas absolutely fascinating in their blending of traditional and modern. I am reminded of our class discussion on Dickens' characters and the archetypes that often starred in serialized novels, characters who were caricaturized in order to jog the reader's memory. Erika Kane, the matriarch bitch supreme of All My Children, is instantly recognizable for her leopard print dresses and fierce attitude.

Erica has even sparked a transmedia cottage industry, with bands B5, Urge Overkill, and Aaliyah paying homage to her in music. 

At my parents house tonight there is a gender division in our television watching. Downstairs, the men watch the Super Bowl on the high-def TV with the surround sound. Upstairs, the women gather around watching the Hallmark Channel, FX, TBS, and Oxygen.

 I hate sports, but ignoring the cultural event of Super Bowl Sunday makes me feel as if I am missing out on a vital, yearly experience. Luckily, tonight's television scheduling is designed to assuage my guilty conscious. FX is featuring a marathon of chick-flicks: Maid in Manhattan, 13 Going On 30, The Devil Wears Prada. TBS is offering What Women Want and My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding. There is also an America's Next Top Model marathon (aptly called "Supermodel Sunday") on Oxygen and I Love Lucy is on all night on the Hallmark channel. My distaste for football does not mean I must miss out on this media event. Television geared towards women is offered in the 6:00-11:00 time slot, coinciding with the game. These alternative programs become an event in themselves, and their commercials are also geared towards their viewers- baby wipes, Tampax, Revlon.

While this marketing is fairly straight forward, Animal Planet's tactics are less clear. "Puppy Bowl V: This annual alternative to the Super Bowl recruits its players from local animal shelters. Puppies romp on the field, but it's the kittens that steal the show when they step onto the stage at halftime."

This two hour trainwreck begs the questions: Why? And for whom?

"However, we need to remember at this point that the technologist is a social being and that all this is taking place within the social sphere. The social has obviously informed the model thus far. The scientist conceptualizing necessary fundamental understandings are as much social beings, exponents of and prisons of the culture that produced them, as are the technologists who have ideas for devices and build prototypes".

-Brian Winston: Media Technology and Society  

Technology is often pictured as a scientific march to the sea- the conquering power of digitalization enacting a scorched earth policy that wipes out older developments. Yet Jenkins and Winston both point to the powerful social factor that determines the need, use, and proliferation of any new technology. To use music as an example, a simple model would show vinyl, the switch to CDs, and then mp3. Always better, easier, more convenient, but there there are additional social factors to the equation. Vinyl is regaining popularity, and contemporary artists such as The Killers and Ryan Adams are offering new releases on vinyl. For artists, records are a deterrent to technologically savvy individuals who may illegally download music. For older generations it harkens back to nostalgia, but young people (the prime culprits for pirating music) also find something compelling about the ritual of listening to albums. 

I wonder if it is not somehow linked to the ground breaking ideas set forth by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Vinyl seems to retain it's "aura"- it creates a sense of magic and ritual that mp3's lack. The record is culturally signifigant and in that simple disk there is an encoded message which speaks to rebellion, youth, and freedom. The mp3, on the other hand, has no physicality and therefore feels as if it belongs to the cultural collective- a disembodied reproduction. 

Interestingly, media producers that post videos to youtube combine the speed and universiality of the digital age with the humble charms of vinyl. From Elvis to Iron Maiden, there is a flood of users mixing these two medias, creating an interesting convergent form of visual/audio, high tech/low tech.

You're Ireland!

Mystical and rain-soaked, you remain mysterious to many people, and this
makes you intriguing.  You also like a good night at the pub, though many are just as
worried that you will blow up the pub as drink your beverage of choice.  You're good
with words, remarkably lucky, and know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of eating a potato.
 You really don't like snakes.


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid