COMM 150: Postmodernism and media

There's a concept borrowed from 20th-century French philosophy that will make some of the implications of mass communications easier to understand. It's called postmodernism, and it's all over American popular culture. Sometimes it's abbreviated "PoMo" (which must irritate the Pomo Indians of northern California because they had the name first). It's hard to pin down a meaning, but in general it refers to a feeling that modern culture is falling apart. That it's gone so far, it's no longer modern anymore. Hence the word "postmodern."

You see the word used a lot in media studies. In fact, you're likely to see it just about anywhere. I just did a keyword search in Google on "postmodernism," and got 5,740,000 hits in 0.07 seconds. Joseph Straubhaar and Robert LaRose, authors of our textbook "Media Now," say the way we understand the world around us has changed:

We have moved from [a modern] era of universal laws and truths based in rational science to one in which local, particularistic, subjective understandings are more important and more valid. The postmodern view is that there is no universal truth, that what you think depends on your own experience, which depends on what groups you belong to, what media you pay attention to, what your family taught you. ... (41)

Straubhaar and LaRose go on to say what each of us thinks "is just as valid as what anyone else thinks." I think that's going too far. And they go on to suggest "instead of fragmenting into minicultures, the world is reorganizing itself for a titanic 'clash of civilizations,' pitting the United States and its allies against Islam." I certainly think that's going too far. But, hey, it's a postmodern world -- you don't have to agree with me. Or with Straubhaar and Rose.

Postmodernist philosophy can be really hard to read. A famous definition of postmodernism is by Jean-François Lyotard (pron. Lee-o-TAR), who said, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives."

Got that?

OK. Let's try to translate it, then.

"Increduility" means you don't believe something. And "metanarratives" (which Lyotard also called "grand narratives") are the kind of myths or stories people told to try to explain the world. Lyotard said the world is such a mess, we don't believe those kinds of stories anymore. One of the most important was a belief in progress, that Western civilization was a steady series of improvements from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present, from Plato and Aristotle to -- what? -- Donald Trump? O.J.? Britney Spears? Another "grand narrative" was the belief that science and technology will always make things better and better. Hard to believe after science brought us World War II, the threat of nuclear warfare, reality TV and really annoying automated telemarketing calls.

Dino Felluga, an English prof at Purdue who has an "General Introduction to Postmodernism" that's actually clearly written, suggests the modern era began with the Renaissance and lasted at least until World War I. In many ways, it lasted until after WWII. The modern era was a age of reason, of science and -- most important for out purposes in COMM 150 -- of printing presses and printed discourse. Some critics, says Felluga, find in the chaos of the postmodern era "a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (expecially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer."

One big problem with postmodernism is that it's written by academics. Not only academics but French academics. Most people find their writing difficult. Some of us find it pretentious. Andrew Sullivan, a columnist and blogger for Atlantic magazine, says the postmodernists are "impenetrable bullshit artists." But I think they're b.s. artists who have something important to say, even though I wish they'd say it more clearly.

One of the most important postmodernists for media studies is Jean Baudrillard, a sociologist and philosopher who wrote a kind of travelog called "America." (That's pronounced jahn Bo-dri-AR.) He said Americans -- and everyone else in the 21st century -- is overwhelmed with information. We're so overwhelmed, he says, we've lost sight of what's real and what isn't. I think he's got some very good insights. But I think at best, his stuff reads like a string of one-liners. I got the following from a page of selected quotes:

• Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
  
  
• We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
  
  
• Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
  
  
• Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void [the space between the stars].
  

Doug Mann, who teaches a course in pop culture at the University of Western Ontario, has the best short introduction to Baudrillard that I've found on the Internet. Mann says the Fremchman "concluded that in the postmodern media-laden condition, we experience something called 'the death of the real': we live our lives in the realm of hyperreality, connecting more and more deeply to things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games, or Disneyland, things that merely simulate reality."

COMM 150: Online books, platforms and the future

A thought-provoking story in The Chicago Tribune this morning on the future for electronic books. Steve Johnson, the Trib's internet reporter, says he tried reading the classic "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen downloaded to his cell phone, and to his surprise he liked it.

"Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word," said Johnson, playing on the words in the title, "I liked it." He added:

I liked holding it in one hand, having it always with me, and customizing my fonts and screen color. I liked reading it on the train without advertising my tastes; I could have been reading "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Firm."

I really liked reading it in bed without the encumbrance of a book light.

I liked it all so much, I've moved on to Austen's "Persuasion" and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

There's something important going on here. It's subtle, and it involves a lot more than English major-y talk about a 19th-century English novelist. I think the people who understand it (and I don't claim to understand it all) are going to be the ones who flourish as the communications industry goes through the most radical changes we've seen since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1457.

Johnson catches the essence of it when he says:

The experience taught me that a book is not what I had thought it to be. It is not, in any important sense, typeface, paper stock or cover art. A book is, foremost, the arrangement of words in sequence, and they are, to borrow a buzz-phrase from the digital folk, platform agnostic.

In other words, the content of a book doesn't depend on its platform. You could carve "Pride and Prejudice" into the side of a pumpkin, and it would still be "Pride and Prejudice." (You'd have to use a lot of pumpkins, though.) What's tricky is to know what media -- platform -- to use for what message, and how to use it to the best advantage.

Cookies make the World (Wide Web) go round

Please read for COMM 150 --

When you were a little kid, did you leave out milk and cookies for Santa Claus? Well, you still do. Every time you visit a website. But these cookies are electronic, and they make the World Wide Web a powerful medium for advertisers and sales people.

Here's how Wikipedia defines the term:

HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

So they're still sort of like the milk and cookies you left out for Santa Claus. But these cookies, so goes the argument, help Santa Claus know what all the good little boys and girls want for Christmas. At least they help Santa know what the boys and girls ordered on the Internet.

Civil libertarians fear tracking internet purchases can lead to violations of privacy. But David Whalen, an internet pioneer who has written a website called Cookie Central, argues, "The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread. ... If you're going to single-out cookies as your sole vulnerability to personal privacy, you should re-examine how you live your daily life."

Because the cookies allow websites to track where you've been, their owners can make an educated guess what your tastes are. If you read ESPN every day, for example, they can guess you like sports. Or, more accurately, that someone who uses your computer likes sports. If you buy books from Amazon.com, you'll leave tracks.

For example, when I visit Amazon.com on my home computer, there's a message at the top of the page: "Hello, Peter Ellertsen. We have recommendations for you." If I click on "recommendations" (an active link on my page), I get a list of 15 books on journalism, mass media law, hymns and gospel music, subjects of books I've bought from Amazon. So cookies allow Amazon.com to do a more effective job of marketing when it recognizes my computer.

Similar technology allows website owners to track the effectiveness of ads on the internet, even to get a hard figure on how many people click onto a webpage with their ad. John Wanamaker, a department store magnate of the 1800s and early 1900s in Philadelphia, once famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half." If he were alive today, and using the Internet, he could at least get a handle on it.

Argues the Marketing.fm Blog, a good website to read if you're thinking of a career in communications: "The advent of interactive media and online measurement has allowed marketers to target advertising messages much more precisely. Morover, it is possible to access comprehensive data on the viewers of your campagin: page views, geographic location, clicks, links, etc." Is it time to throw away Wanamaker's quote? Probably not quite yet, according to an unscientific poll of Marketing.fm readers. But the Internet is still a powerful tool for advertisers.

COMM 150: The 'Long Tail' and e-commerce

Friday we started talking about something called the "Long Tail." It's an important concept for understanding the Internet. Basically, as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia explains, it describes online businesses like Amazon.com that "can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes." Wikipedia also has a graph that shows what it looks like -- a mathematical distribution with a steeply descending curve along the Y axis and, well, a long tail along the X axis.

Here's how it applies to CDs, videos, books ... practically anything you can buy and sell on the World Wide Web.

Open another window and go to the Wikipedia article (linked above). Look at the graph. The number of sales on a hit go up the Y axis. For example, let's see where Britney Spears' new single would go on the graph. She's moving lots of product (I'm not going to call it music), so her sales go way up on the Y axis. But there are also little niche markets for all kinds of different specialty genres. For example, I'm ordering a CD of medieval ballads that Norwegian pilgrims sang when they made their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Olav. Not many people in the market for that kind of stuff, so we'd better plot it way out along the X axis. But I can get it on the Internet. Direct from Norway. In fact, the Norwegian record company's website is even set up to convert from U.S. dollars to Norwegian kroner.

The same is true for all kinds of music. Bulgarian folk songs? Out on the X axis, but somewhere in the wide world there's a market for them. Vintage CDs of Stevie Ray Vaughan or 80s punk rock? X axis. Sister Rosetta Tharpe? Sound tracks from Bollywood movies shot in India? Very popular in India, but still out the X axis worldwide. Especially for an American distributor.

Here's what makes the Long Tail so powerful for marketing on the World Wide Web. There are more people out there buying niche products on the Long Tail along the X axis than there are buying the hits up the Y axis. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, came up with the concept in an article called -- what else? -- "The Long Tail." Anderson says:

Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

What Anderson calls "misses" in the old economy he calls "sales" on the Internet.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

What makes it work, says Anderson, is the fact the World Wide Web is worldwide. It's huge, and you can find willing buyers out there somewhere that you couldn't reach if you had a record store, say, at 6th and Monroe in downtown Springfield. But you can reach them by electronic commerce. Anderson says:

You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.

Oh sure, there's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. ...

COMM 150: Important article on TV, hypertext ...

Here's an article I want us to read and be familiar with as we move on from studying television to the World Wide Web. It's called "Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy," and it's by Doug Brent of the Faculty (or college) of General Studies at Canada's University of Calgary. It's a little hard to follow: It's about something called hypertext, which is the kind of coding that allows us to surf from one website to the next. And Brent not only talks about hypertext, he uses it.

Hypertext allows us multiple entry points into a document. Typically we get into it through a search engine, and we follow the links around. But we don't have to read through a website page by page. In fact, we seldom do. We follow the links till we find what we're looking for. And that's different for every one of us.

COMM 150: Federal regs, media ownership

Imagine. On Wednesday, I lecture on how the Federal Communications Commission regulates mass communications media. And the next day, the lede story in The New York Times is on an FCC proposal to relax the rules on media ownership. While deregulation became federal law with passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it is an ongoing trend.

The Times reports:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 — The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

A proposal from Kevin J. Martin could change media ownership rules in two months.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

You can read all about it by following the link to the Times' website (it will be up for several days before it goes into the archive and you have to pay to see it). Here's the nut graf (actually two or three grafs), tho':

Officials said the commission would consider loosening the restrictions on the number of radio and television stations a company could own in the same city.

Currently, a company can own two television stations in the larger markets only if at least one is not among the four largest stations and if there are at least eight local stations. The rules also limit the number of radio stations that a company can own to no more than eight in each of the largest markets.

The deregulatory proposal is likely to put the agency once again at the center of a debate between the media companies, which view the restrictions as anachronistic, and civil rights, labor, religious and other groups that maintain the government has let media conglomerates grow too large.

This story relates directly to what we've been talking about in class. Let's follow it.

COMM 150, 207, 337: Obit for 'reporter's reporter'

This morning's Washington Post carries the obituary of a reporter who was shot to death Sunday in Baghdad, apparently by "soldiers from the Iraqi army, believed to be infiltrated by the militia." A sidebar collects appreciations by his colleagues at the Post. "He was a reporter's reporter," says one. "And we all admired his courage."

John Ward Anderson said the reporter Salih Saif Aldin, 32, was tenacious:

Salih loved a scoop, and he reeled in a whopper in the spring of 2005. Like many Iraqis, Salih was deeply committed to justice and democratic reforms. One afternoon, he collared me in the living room of the bureau and, through an interpreter, told an amazing tale of a 37-year-old man in Tikrit who had been arrested by Iraqi police, was brutally tortured and died in police custody.

I was skeptical and told him so. Most important, we needed evidence. He would have to go to Tikrit, hunt down the relatives, confront the police, find the U.S. military officials and get some documentation. There had to be a paper trail, I said. Find it.

Most reporters would hang their shoulders at such instructions. Not Salih. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. He left for Tikrit the next day.

A few days later, he came back with the story.

And Ellen Knickmeyer recalled he had a reporter's gift for accuracy:

He could be very sweet, deferential, polite and kindly . . . he always called me "Miss," in English. On a trip out of Baghdad last year, he got me past a lot of checkpoints by telling the insurgents I was his mother.

"You couldn't say sister?" I asked him.

"Sorry, Miss, sorry," he said.

xxx

yyy

COMM 207: New blog; as we learn to use HTML tags

By now you should be receiving email messages from Blogger.com inviting you to join a new blog called "comm207fall07." Catchy, huh? Blogger allows you to use simple HTML tags (short for hypertext markup language), and we'll all be posting to the class blog. It can be a frustrating experience at first, because HTML is full of picky little codes. But it's also a good way to get your feet wet in the computer language that makes the Internet such a powerful communications medium. And as you get used to it, you'll discover there's a very simple, elegant logic to the tags and the way they work.

I'll also keep posting messages and links of interest to The Mackerel Wrapper, but some of our assignments will move to Comm207fall07. The link above will take you there.

COMM 207: Where the jobs are (add 1)

A postscript to last Thursday's discussion of jobs in government affairs, lobbying and legislative liaison ... one of the home industries in Springfield ... and a link to a Web page put up by the American League of Lobbyists on how to break into a career in lobbying. An overview:

Most lobbyists are college graduates, and many have advanced degrees. Of these advanced degrees, the most prevalent is legal training, with other common backgrounds being communications, teaching, public relations and journalism. Lobbyists must be able to understand their clients' interests as well as the laws and policies they hope to influence. They must be able to communicate effectively with their audience, both orally and in writing. It is also necessary for them to understand the legislative and political process.

* * *
... The best suggestion we can make is for individuals [wanting to break into the field] to use the contacts they have through previous work or studies, seeking informational interviews and networking as much as possible. As indicated in the paragraph above, political or government contacts are particularly helpful in entering the field.

In short, it helps to know someone. But the way to get to know someone is to take an interest in the political process, volunteer for campaigns and network with people whose politics and philosophies match your own. We have had several students from Springfield College line up internships with local members of Congress, and that is probably the best way to get a feel for the legislative process. The key: Network, network, network.

In class today I will hand out photocopies of the "Illinois" pages in a Springfield telephone book. Most of the listings there, from the Illinois Conference of Churches and the Illinois Conference of Teamsters at the top of the first page to the Illinois Press Association and Illinois Primary Health Care Association at the bottom of the second, are associations that maintain a legislative liaison office in Springfield. Many of them have a full- or part-time communications director on staff. Those that don't sometimes contract out for help with fliers, brochures or other media. You can get a similar list of associations in Springfield, as government affairs offices are often called, by searching in Yahoo! for "Springfield" and "associations."

COMM 150, 207, 337, 393: News or Fark?

Midterm content advisory. This post contains subject matter that relates to the midterm exam in Communications 150 (see post below dated Oct. 6.

I wish I'd seen this before COMM 150 met today!

Jack Shafer, who writes the Press Box media criticism column for Slate.com, has a review of Drew Curtis' new book, It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off Crap As News. Intriguing title? I picked up a copy a couple of weeks ago at Springfield's friendly local neighborhood big box book store, and the book's worth reading. Or at least knowing about.

But what the f--- is fark?

Shafer says it's "[a]ll the garbage the press publishes and broadcasts when it runs out of genuine news." He provides a link to the first chapter of Curtis' book,where Curtis explains the origin of the term in more detail. Fark is also a website at www.fark.com. It's an aggregator, which means it consists mostly of links to other websites, most of them mass media sites. It's hard to classify. Tonight's for example, links to stories about a British teenager who ran "up £1,175 bill by text-messaging votes for herself in online beauty contest in order to win £100 in makeup"; a governor in Brazil who banned "use of the present participle. Yep, you read that right"; and an Episcopal church that "bestow[ed] blessings on cats and dogs" on Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, in Bangor, Maine.

If you're really, really into cat pictures, be sure to check out the blessing of the pets in The Bangor Daily News. Otherwise you can safely ignore all this stuff. That's Curtis' point. And Shafer's.

Says Shafer, in terms that remind me of Neil Postman's take on television news:

... High-octane blends of fark contain celebrity news, press coverage of itself, and news served in the context of no context. When Shepard Smith screens, say, five seconds of a burning skyscraper in Brazil, followed by five seconds of a cat rescue in Montana, followed by five seconds of a flood in Thailand on the Fox News Report, you're sucking his fark.

Curtis is irreverent, and sometimes he isn't above taking cheap shots. But he has some dead-serious points to make:

... Whenever Mass Media is really fulfilling its intended purpose, generally something bad is going on. Wars, blown elections, bad weather, you name it -- when people need to know something, it's probably because it's likely to kill them. We'd be much better off living in non-interesting times.

This presents a problem for Mass Media, however, when we are not living in interesting times. This has been further compounded by the advent of twenty-four hour news channels and the Internet as a news source. Back in the days when TV news concentrated most of its resources on one half-hour blocks of news, finding material to fill the time slot wasn't difficult. Nowadays cable news networks have to scramble to have something to talk about for twenty-four hours a day, even when nothing of important is going on. Sales departments are still selling advertisements, after all. Mass Media can't just run content made entirely of ads (with the possible exception of the Home Shopping Network). Something has to fill the space.

Over the years Mass Media has developed several methods of filling this space. No one teaches this in journalism school; odds are Mass Media itself hasn't given much thought to the process. It's a practice honed over the years by editors and publishers, verbally passed down from one generation to the next. They're not entirely aware they're doing it, although the media folks who read advance copies of this manuscript all had the same reaction: "I've been saying we should stop doing this for YEARS."

Some media people even feed him copy, anonymously, of course, if they want to keep their jobs. Says Curtis:

One interesting thing about Fark is how many Mass Media people comb Fark for story ideas, not just for radio but for television, newspapers, and Internet media outfits. Once we switched to Google Analytics for Web traffic tracking we discovered that the number one highest-traffic corporate Internet hitting our servers was CNN. Number two was Fox News. Mass Media even submits a lot of their own articles to Fark, sometimes with taglines so outrageous it's hard to believe these are the same people who run Mass Media. I can't even give any examples; it would be too easy to track back to the source and get people in trouble. The most I can tell you is that it happens multiple times every day. And we really appreciate it.

But also notice that some of the media people who hit the Fark website seem to be looking for material ... for, yep, fark they can fill their newscasts with too. How does all this relate to the social responsbility theory of the press?

COMM 150: Network TV anchors and Iraq

Important story in The Washington Post today. It's by Howard Kurtz, the paper's media critic, and it tellls how ABC, CBS and NBC news anchors have felt about covering the Iraq war. Kurtz tries hard, and I think successfully, to keep his opinion out of the story. But the headline catches its overall tone: "As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors."

(I'll try not to think about the cheesy pun there. Remember the old Navy song, "Anchors Aweigh?" I recommend you do too.)

Network TV news has been accused of hyping coverage of the war, both "for" and "against" U.S. policy in Iraq. But the reality is more complex than that. Here's what Kurtz said about it in a live discussion forum at noon (Eastern time) today on the Post's website:

It's crucial, because they are far more than newsreaders. As "Reality Show" demonstrates, Brian, Charlie and Katie -- like Dan, Tom and Peter before them -- play a crucial role in shaping their broadcasts. How do they decide when to lead with Iraq and when the news is too incremental? How do they balance the continuing violence with other kinds of reporting from Baghdad? How do they deal with criticism from the administration? How do they press Bush about the war when they have a chance to interview the president? Plus, both Williams and Couric have reported from Iraq this year. So what they think matters big time.

Note (if you're interested in media convergence, or even if you're not and want to know all about it before it appears, as is likely, on the final exam in COMM 150): Kurtz will be blogging about the book at http://anchorwars.blogspot.com/. So here's a newspaper guy (one medium) using a blog (another medium) to plug a book (a third medium). That's what we call convergence.

COMM 150: Midterm study questions

COMM 150: Introduction to Mass Communications
Springfield College in Illinois/Benedictine University

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/com150syl

[Television] is not a tool by which the networks conspire to dumb us down. TV is a tool by which the networks give us exactly what we want. That's a far more depressing thought. -- "The Vent," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 19, 1999.

Midterm · Fall Semester 2007
Below are three essay questions – one worth fifty (50) points out of a hundred, and two shorter essays worth 25 points each. Please write at least two pages (500 words) on the 50-point essay and page (250 words) on each of the 25-point short essays. Use plenty of detail from your reading in the textbook, the internet and handouts I have given you, as well as class discussion, to back up the points you make. Your grade will depend both on your analysis of the broad trends I ask about, and on the specific detail you cite in support of the points you make. I am more interested in the specific factual arguments you make to support your points than in whether you like or dislike a particular piece of music. So be specific. Remember: An unsupported generalization is sudden death in college-level writing.

1. Essay (50 points). Neil Postman, media critic at New York University, once said “Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.” Postman was talking about television, but his critique can be applied to newspapers as well. How do newspapers attempt to strike a balance between entertainment and their duty to give citizens the information they need to function effectively in a democracy? How successful are they? How could they do better? Or can they? How can a mass market communications medium balance entertainment and information without losing customers.

2A. Self-reflective essay (25 points). What have you learned about mass communications in this class so far that you didn’t know before? Consider what you knew at the beginning of the course and what you know now. What point or points stand out most clearly to you? What points are still confusing? In answering this question, please feel free to look at the “Tip Sheet on Writing a Reflective Essay” linked to my faculty webpage. In grading the essay, I will evaluate the relevance of your discussion to the main goals and objectives of the course; the detail you cite to support or illustrate your points; and the connections you make.

2B. Short essay (25 points). How do independent record labels allow creative artists (like musicians and songwriters) to do an end run around the “suits” who often act as gatekeepers in the music industry. What freedom does an independent record label have that the major labels don’t? What limitations does an “indie” have? What is the relationship, generally speaking, between indies and major labels?

COMM 150: Class discussion question

For Friday's class --

Post as a comment to this message your answer to the following questions: Philo Farnsworth was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century. What was his main claim to fame, and how much TV did he allow his children to watch as they were growing up? Why? What does that say about the quality of TV programming? Publish your responses as comments to this blogpost, and we'll talk about them in class. Here's how:

How to Publish Your Responses
Scroll down to the bottom of this post. On the right side of the last line, there will be a link that says "Posted by Pete # 9:33 AM ___ comments" (with a number filled in where I've left a blank, depending on how many comments have been posted). Click on that " ___ comments" link and fill in the comment field on the right. Sign in. You'll have to do something to register for Blogger. Do it. Make a note of the username and password you choose because we'll keep on posting to the blog, and if you don't make a note you'll forget it. Please believe me. This is something we have learned by experience! When you've reviewed your comment, publish it by clicking on "Publish Your Comment." And that's how you publish your comment. Logical, isn't it?

COMM 150, 207, 337 etc.: Where the jobs are

Cross-posted to my mass comm. blogs. -- pe

In Communications 207 (editing for publication) this afternoon, we got off on a tangent about lobbying ... mostly because of a front-page picture in today's State Journal-Register showing people leaning on the third-floor rail of the state Capitol rotunda where lobbyists often gather.

Most comments from COMM 207 students were neutral and process-oriented. "I don't really know much about lobbying." Or a general sense lobbyists influence the government to take action on things. But some reflected a negative attitude often heard about lobbying, one that's described by the American League of Lobbyists as a "caricature" of "portly, cigar-smoking men who wine and dine lawmakers while slipping money into their pockets."

Even more than most stereotypes, the caricature is unfair. In fact, adds the ALL:

Simply put, lobbying is advocacy of a point of view, either by groups or individuals. A special interest is nothing more than an identified group expressing a point of view — be it colleges and universities, churches, charities, public interest or environmental groups, senior citizens organizations, even state, local or foreign governments. While most people think of lobbyists only as paid professionals, there are also many independent, volunteer lobbyists — all of whom are protected by the same First Amendment.

Lobbying involves much more than persuading legislators. Its principal elements include researching and analyzing legislation or regulatory proposals; monitoring and reporting on developments; attending congressional or regulatory hearings; working with coalitions interested in the same issues; and then educating not only government officials but also employees and corporate officers as to the implications of various changes. What most lay people regard as lobbying — the actual communication with government officials — represents the smallest portion of a lobbyist's time; a far greater proportion is devoted to the other aspects of preparation, information and communication.

What's more, the Lobbyists' league has a code of ethics. Linked at the top of the ribbon at the left of its webpage, no less.

The main thing to know about lobbying, especially for those of us who have or plan careers in Springfield, is the associations that lobby the Illinois Legislature are one of the important employers of communications professionals in town.

COMM 207: Beginning to use HTML tags

If you already know how to use Hypertext Markup Language, here's a review. If you don't yet, you will soon enough. Here's a first exercise. Basically, I want you to find a website and write a link to it. You can start by posting a comment to this blogpost. That's right. Now. Today. Blogger lets you do that.

Next step: We'll create a class blog. We had one last year. Follow this link to last year's COMM 207 blog if you want to see it. Students liked it pretty well, once they got used to HTML. And it's a good skill to have. For a pretty good tutorial or to review what you already know, go to the W3 Schools tutorial.

But for now, let's just get started. I learned it monkey-see, monkey-do, and I think that's the best way. And we can look at the theory later. So here goes ...

To create a link, go to the comments field at the bottom of this post and open it. Decide what you want to link to, and type something like: "Here's a link to ..." that introduces the hypertext. The hypertext is just the part you click on that takes you where you want to go. By typing in an address (URL) and putting a code around the text, using angle brackets and letters, you tell your browser to find the indicated address. Confused yet? Let's just do it.

How to Post a Link
I like to do this with two windows open, one to the page I'm posting the link to and the other to the comment (or create post) field in Blogspot. Here are the steps:

1. In the address field in the header, highlight the address (or URL). Copy it.
   
2. Go to the comment field. Type in Here's a link to <a href="
   
3. Paste in the address with no space between the "less than" and the address.
   
4. Type "> with no space between the address and the quote mark.
   
5. Type in whatever words you want in the link, for example where you want to go
   
6. Immediately after those words, type </a>
   
7. Your link should look this this <a href="address">where you want to do</a>

One last step: Be patient. It takes forever to get all the details right, and even then I get little red-and-yellow error messages all the time in Blogger. If you don't yet know what I mean by that, you will very soon!