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francescafriio · 4 years

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Blog Post #2 Media Assessment Of Issue

Left:

How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives

https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/how-abortion-changed-the-arc-of-womens-lives

Subject-

This article titled “How the Right to Legal Abortion Changed the Arc of All Women’s Lives” speaks about the benefits of the leganziarion of abortion and why it is important to keep it legal. The center point of this article is why legalizing abortion does more good than harm.

Author-

The author of this article is Katha Pollitt, she is the author of many left leaning books that focus on social and political issues. She has writen a book that was pro-abortion titled, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. She graduated from Columbia university and started her writing career in 1995 doing poetry and has articles in the New Yorker dating back to 2002. Her work with the New Yorker started as poetry, but has been writing strictly political articles for them since 2016.

Context-

This article was posted in May 2019, during this time period some states were attempting to place bans on abortion, this may have impacted the urgency of this artical

Audience-

This article can be targeted by two differnent audiences, it can be targeted to women who are in support of abortion and are trying to get additional facts for lets say, a debate with someone else, on why it is beneficiary to keep it legalized. Another group of people who this article can be targeted to is people who believe there is more harm in having abortion being legalized then if it was not. This article highlights benefits of abortion that can benfits that are appealing to conservitves. For example, stating how due to the legalization of abortion, teen pregnacy has significatly decreased. This articlel can possibly be eye opening for the side opposing abortion, due the fact that it is designed to allow the reader to fully grasp its importance.

Perspective-

I believe this article is subjective because it only highlights the positives of one side. It is pushing for one side for the article and is pro-abortion. It lacks listing the cons and inherently is a one sided article.

Significance-

In this article to push the pro-abortion side,there are multiple case studies and statistics used in this article from different sources. All the facts are verifiable. Some opinions are also included in the article.

Right:

No, Catholics Should Not Embrace ‘Reproductive Justice’ Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-catholics-should-not-embrace-reproductive-justice-like-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

Subject-

This Article titled, “No, Catholics Should Not Embrace ‘Reproductive Justice’ Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”, speaks about how Christans do not believe in abortion as health care for the women but rather ending a life of an innocent child. This aritcal states the opinion that people who defend abortion and our catholics ignore their own religon. The center point of this article is that you are not following all values as a christan when defending abortion.

Author-

The author of this article is Alexandra Desancti, her credentials are hard to find. Her history of articles on the Nation Review are skewed to the right. Her articles vary from support for president trump to critizing abortion. She has also gone on a few small talk shows to criticize Planned Parenthood and their work.

Context-

This article was posted on August 29th,2020. The impact of the time this article was posted was due to the upcoming presidential election. In the title, the author criticized a democrat christan politician for not being a “real christan”. This author focuses her writing style on judging a politician on the left to push her right wing ideas.

Audience-

The audience of this article is geared towards right wing conservatives with strong christan values. This article paints christans who support abortion as less than, considering that this is strictly opinion writing, it is writen for a very niche audience. It does not contain any type of persuasive writing.

Perspective-

This article is subjective, but more so than others considering the strict criticism on this article.The authors claim is that a christans who believe anything in support of abortion wouldnt be a true christan because if they were, they would just plainly see it as life being taken away and it wouldnt be acceptable.

Significance-

There are no verifiable or facts presented in this article.

Neutral:

New Report Concludes Abortions Are Safe in the U.S

https://time.com/5203698/report-abortion-safety/

Subject-

The main point of this article is that studies have proven the saftey of abortion. As well as expaling that this new report by the National Academy of Sciences had debunked myths abortion have lasting effects on your body such as infertility and breast cancer.

Author-

The author of this article is Jamie Ducharme. Jamie is a medical writer for the Time, and she has written articles that focus on facts over opinions. She has written about all sorts of stuff that does not have any association with politics. Her political affiliation is unknown.

Context -

This article was written in March 2018. I believe the date has little to with any type of political climate, but rather believe it is a on a (at the time) recently published report.

Audience -

In this article though it may appeal to people for abortion considering all the facts presented shed psotive light on abortion, the oringinal purpose of this article did not speficllcily have an audience in mind. Though she did address misconceptions mainly repeated by the right. It does not have an opinionated writing it, causing me to believe that this article was not written for a specific audience.

Perspective- This article is objective because it has no opinionated writing. As well as it being mainly fact based. The author is reporting of a case that shows that abortion is safer than thought by the right. Leading me to belive the only important bias in this article is that she may be for abortion herslef. But due to her lack of emotions, this article stays neutral and fact based.

Significance- All facts presented in this article were verifiable and supported the authors claim that abortion is safe.

3) The similarity that these 3 articles all share is that they were all written by women. The differences was how some used all facts, others all feelings and another one a combination of both.

4) I identify most with New Yorker article due to the fact that I believe the benefits of abortion outway the cons by far.

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chfaiq5k-blog · 4 years

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The Power and Influence of Digital Content Marketing

The Power and Influence of Digital Content Marketing

As brands seek effective ways to engage with customers and attract new business, they are choosing to use some form of digital content marketing. Digital content marketing is, in many ways, more effective than paid advertising, though the two can complement one another. What makes quality content so valuable is that it’s not overtly promotional. Rather, it’s made to actually serve readers/viewers/listeners. And, in so doing, it helps to build your credibility and authority. Let’s look at some of the best ways to leverage the power and influence of digital content marketing.

What Makes Content Compelling?

Digital content includes a wide variety of items from blog posts to videos. If you’re creating content to promote your business, though, you need a strategy. Here are some of the main guidelines to make your digital content effective and compelling.

• Identify your goals. While all businesses want more customers and to increase profits, you need a specific content marketing strategy. For example, are you trying to build an email list, increase brand awareness, get people to come to your storefront business, or sell products from your website? You may have one or more of these goals or others but it’s important to clarify your objectives.

• Target your audience. Before you can create effective content, you need to identify your target audience. A buyer persona helps you create the kind of content your customers appreciate. What are your customers’ interests, needs, problems, and preferences? The answers to these questions determine the kind of content you create for them. It also lets you know where your buyers hang out. For example, are they more likely to use Snapchat, LinkedIn, or Instagram?

• Connecting and tracking. Once you identify your audience, you need to create the kind of content that appeals to them. This includes subject matter, format, and style. Tools such as Google Analytics help you track engagement for your content so you can refine your approach over time.

• Branding. While it’s commonly noted that you need “quality content,” which is true as far as it goes. If you’re publishing blog posts or articles, they should be well written and accurate. Quality photos are always better than stock images. However, it’s equally important that your content is distinctive and helps you brand yourself. Branding includes your style, voice, layout, colors, and using your logo.

• Shareable Content. One often-successful method of marketing is being able to create content that people are willing to share and promote. With an endless stream of digital content, making yours stand out from the crowd will only help your brand in the long run. Whether it is a beautiful video, enticing offer, or eye-catching photo, a shareable piece of content can engage current customers and attract new ones as well.

• Consistency. One of the major components of successful content marketing campaigns is consistency. It’s essential to create content regularly so that your readers and followers get accustomed to seeing you on their favorite platforms. Finding the right schedule for publishing content requires you to research and test your results.

Examples of Successful Digital Content Marketing

While content marketing is everywhere today, not all of it produces the desired results. With so many websites, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, Instagram accounts and other types of content, the competition for customers’ attention is fierce. In order to break through and get noticed, you have to make a strong impression. Let’s look at some brands that are especially effective at creating compelling content.

• Whole Foods – As interest in natural foods and healthy lifestyles builds, Whole Foods Market has attracted millions of loyal customers. Now that Amazon bought Whole Foods, it’s likely to grow even faster. Whole Foods focuses on its customers in its content strategy, publishing recipes, nutritional information, great images of dishes, and the latest foodie trends. Of course, all of this helps them sell more products, but the approach makes their popular social media accounts helpful and engaging. Their YouTube channel, for example, which currently has more than 74,000 followers, releases engaging new videos every week.

• Airbnb – This company is famous for disrupting the hospitality industry by matching homeowners with extra rooms with travelers. Airbnb, however, is moving beyond rooms and expanding into other areas of the travel industry. Their website now lists experiences and events as well as accommodations. One of the major ways that this company reaches its customers is through social media. With over 1 million Instagram followers, travel guidebooks, and even a print magazine, Airbnb creates informative content for travelers. They also encourage their customers to not simply buy and sell services but to build a global community of people who form friendships and help one another out.

• Geico – The Geico Gecko has long been one of the most recognizable advertising icons. That’s just one example of how this insurance company successfully brands itself. Today, Geico has gone far beyond TV commercials and billboards and produces extremely engaging social media content. As with many successful content marketing brands, Geico publishes lots of useful content on its blog and social media pages. Homeowners, drivers, renters, and others who need insurance policies are a very broad potential audience yet Geico manages to create helpful content for these and other demographics. Rather than promote insurance directly, they’ll publish articles on driver safety, home improvement, travel tips, and other relevant topics.

• Warby Parker – This innovative company revolutionized the eyewear industry by offering reasonably priced eyeglasses online. Their products, however, are only one reason for their success. They’ve also succeeded in the content marketing department. Social responsibility, which is especially important to millennials, is a strong part of Warby Parker’s brand identity. For every pair of glasses sold, Warby Parker donates one pair. They have a dedicated social media team that responds to all Facebook posts left on their page. They also create an engaging blog that covers all kinds of topics that appeal to their hip and worldly customers.

These are just a few examples of brands that effectively leverage the power of digital content marketing. Everyone from small startups to multinational corporations now employ some type of content marketing every day. Naturally, when you create your own strategy you need to tailor it to your own needs. However, it’s always helpful to study the approach taken by large companies with a strong track record in engaging their audience with great content.

Does your brand need to implement a digital content marketing strategy?

Simply put, yes. If your brand is not employing some form of content marketing then you are bound to fall behind the competition. To learn more about how your brand can benefit from digital content marketing, contact Mediaboom.

By: Frank DePino

Frank DePino is Principal and founder of Mediaboom. Since 2002, Frank has lead Mediaboom’s award-winning staff of creative and technical professionals building the most effective marketing and advertising solutions for its clients.

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is-gangsta-rap-bad-blog · 4 years

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Is Gangsta rap considered bad music?

133.257

Philosophical Perspectives

Manalani-Lotuola Halatanu

Statement: Is Gangsta Rap considered bad music due to the negative depictions through the eyes of the media?

What is Hip Hop/Gangsta Rap Music? Generally, they are spoken about in the same sense. Rap is only a part of Hip Hop which has transcended past being a genre and has turned into being a culture/movement, having a massive influence over television, film, advertising, fashion and even extending to language itself. (Kabbani 3). However over the past forty or so years, the media's representation of Hip Hop, specifically Gangsta Rap has created misleading narratives, portraying an image which leads various audiences to create false pretenses, such as focussing mainly on artists who glorify a life of crime, drugs and vandalism.

The argument against Gangsta Rap is that certain mainstream media outlets have labeled the sub genre as intensely violent. And have outlined how Gangsta Rap has graphic depictions of sexual conquests, the gang lifestyle and it’s “glorification of violence toward women and homosexuals”. (Rule, 1994). Despite these criticisms, the sub genre has grown over time with a lot of success behind it. Part of the negative reputation that Gangsta Rap receives comes from the attention that media gives to the lifestyle of rappers themselves rather than the stories that are told through their music. In particular, the cases of Tupac, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Flavour Flav, who were charged with serious violent crimes during the time of their album/music releases, which created major concerns, especially that the youth would try and “emulate the actions of popular rap artists who were held in very high esteem” (Hansen 44). However, the argument is that in actuality, Hip Hop and Gangsta Rap are the voice of the urban community, and has provided “a sense of hope and purpose for millions of people” (Baker, 11). As the rappers say, “don’t shoot the messengers -- we are simply chronicling life the way it is in the jagged-edged inner city” (Rule, 1994).

So is Gangsta Rap music bad? This depends on the context of which it is being judged. There are different definitions as to what “bad music” is. The media would argue that bad music due to the nature of Gangsta Rap encourages adverse behavior among youth and the general public. Creating concerns such as having a harmful effect on its listeners (Hansen 44). Simon Frith, A sociomusicologist, author of “Bad Music” notes down that music can be seen as different types of bad, and the term “vicious song” is used which corrupts the public (Frith 15). However, Frith goes on to explain how “there is no point in labelling something as bad music except in a context in which someone else thinks it’s good, for whatever reason” (Frith 17).

The whole debate behind whether or not it is bad music leads back to what has been presented to mainstream audiences. The media's negative portrayal of gangsta rap music purposely targets authoritative figures. In understanding that Gangsta Rap music is a youth orientated genre, although there are factors within gangsta rap that magnifies aspects that should not be in reach of youth. The raw realness provides the resource and understanding of the discriminatory world to which they live. and understandably so, the themes within Gangsta Rap is certainly not family friendly, and are by no means what should be magnified and placed within a stigma that has negative influences on authoritative figures that force youth to go into thinking that this is a genre that is deemed as “bad”. What toll does this have on youth? Still, according to gangsta rapper Ice Cube, youngsters in their country have already been sensitized to accept and even desire the kinds of violent entertainment exemplified by gangsta rap (Hansen 44). Cube also acknowledges the negative connotations within the genre but explains that in order to get his message across, “I have to speak the language of the street to get their ear” (Rule 1994). But what older audiences don’t understand is how appealing the aspect of authenticity is within Gangsta Rap. Moore describes authenticity as being “Real, Honest, Truthful”. (Moore 209), and to these younger audiences, they desire the “real” aesthetic, especially in a postindustrial, globally interconnected New World Order (Kabbani 9).

So how can the media blame gangsta rap for inciting themes of violence within the youth when there are movies like “The Terminator” and other action films which make millions at the box office depicting fictional violence? Dana Kabbani, written seminar version asks the same question and states that “at the very least, both should be considered equally” (Kabbani 19). Unfortunately this goes back to how black artists have been covered by mainstream media outlets, and Marc Allen Rutherford, author of “Mass media framing of hip-hop artists and culture” explains that when they are presented in the media, the trend seems to be that they are usually portrayed in stereotypical ways, and that the stories only add to the negative overtones to the little coverage that Hip Hop/Gangsta Rap gets, Thus leading to a different path of thinking. To conclude, Gangsta Rap could be considered bad music, although it would be heavily debated and most likely be disproven.

References:

Reference i: Kabbani, Dana. Hip Hop and the Media in the USA. GRIN Verlag, 2002.

Reference ii: Rule, S. (1994, April 3). Generation rap. The New York Times, Section 6, pp. 41-45.

Reference iii: Hansen, Christine Hall. “Predicting Cognitive and Behavioral Effects of Gangsta Rap.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology, June 2011. world, www.tandfonline.com, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01973533.1995.9646100?needAccess=true&.

Reference iv: Baker, Soren. The History of Rap and Hip-Hop. Greenhaven Publishing LLC, 2012.

Reference v: Frith, S. (2004). What is Bad Music?. In C. Washburne and M. Derno (Eds.) Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (pp.15-36). New York: Routledge.

Reference vi: Rutherford, Marc Allen, "Mass media framing of hip-hop artists and culture" (2001). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 1131

Reference vii: Moore, A. (2002). Authenticity as authentication. Popular music, 21(2), 209-223.

Photo Reference i: “Eazy-E on Instagram: ‘#NWA #StraightOuttaCompton’ | Gangsta Rap, Hip Hop Music, Hip Hop.” Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/677017756452967274/.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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There’s a growing push to have celebrities who have ever made dark jokes about pedophilia face major consequences for their past humor. Since Disney’s firing of Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over tweets Gunn wrote several years ago, the right-wing internet mob that brought about his dismissal has moved on to other figures.

Most notably, Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon deleted his Twitter account entirely after Daryl, a short parody pilot he made almost a decade ago, was seized upon as further evidence of many people in the entertainment industry using comedy to mask their underground support of pedophilia.

Harmon made Daryl in 2009 as a pilot for Channel 101, an “untelevised TV network” he co-founded with his former writing partner Rob Schrab in 2002. The “network” takes the form of a monthly screening event in Los Angeles where five-minute TV pilots are shown to a live audience, and viewers vote on whether they want to see more episodes at the next month’s event.

The shows that are “picked up” produce additional episodes, as you can see by observing one of Channel 101’s longer-running titles, Harmon’s own Laser Fart. The project’s programming typically skews toward comedy — and often dark comedy — but isn’t always comedic in nature.

Which brings us back to Daryl. Harmon removed the pilot from the Channel 101 website a long time ago, perhaps realizing it wasn’t his finest hour, but you can still see the page for it. It’s a spoof of TV shows about vigilante justice, most notably Dexter, the Showtime series about a serial killer who kills serial killers that ran from 2006 to 2013 and was at the height of its popularity in 2009, when Daryl was made. Where Dexter’s title character killed killers, Daryl’s raped children to prevent them from becoming murderers.

It’s not really funny (Harmon — who’s stated before that he disliked these sorts of “murder reconfigured as entertainment” shows — would later parody them in more fruitful fashion in an episode of his 2009-2015 sitcom Community). But regardless of whether you think Daryl (which you can still watch on the surely reputable site “BitChute”) is brilliantly hilarious or stomach-churning and horrifying, it’s hard to imagine interpreting it as being in support of horrific sexual abuse of children.

Yet this is exactly the argument being advanced against Daryl in 2018. against Gunn’s tweets, against comments from so many other comedians with long, successful careers. (A tweet currently being used to pillory Patton Oswalt is one the comedian deliberately constructed to seem as if he was supportive of pedophiles, but only if taken completely out of context, which makes the head spin.) It’s a bad-faith argument, spun up by people who manipulate other people’s words and conjure some of the darkest behaviors humans are capable of to score cheap political points against those who criticize Donald Trump.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about it is that you can draw a direct line between the shock humor culture that produced Daryl and other edgy jokes, and the rise of the alt-right itself. But let’s start somewhere else: How did this strategy of trying to take down celebrities by weaponizing jokes they made a very long time ago come to be?

What has happened to Gunn, Harmon, and other public figures of late reflects a convergence of old-school trolling and organized attacks. The right-wing folks going after them are working from a scattered set of ambivalent and contradictory goals and motivations — but they’re using highly organized, systematic, and well-oiled tactics to carry out their disruptive work.

It’s crucial to understand that for many of the people involved in the quest to “take down” and delegitimize public figures like Gunn and Harmon, the whole endeavor is a giant joke. That’s because there’s rarely a singular motivation behind any given right-wing crusade, including this one, and why people seem to be angry isn’t the point. The point is to manufacture outrage, both to score victory points against the opposition and to sweep other bystanders into the fray.

This approach is essentially built atop a foundation of old-school trolling — the kind that originated in the forums of Something Awful in the early 2000s, spread to 4chan users, and ultimately made the leap, mainly through the Gamergate movement, to modern social media platforms.

Old-school trolling is absurdist artifice at heart, but it also covers a broad spectrum of sincerity and irony. The result is that no matter the topic at hand, some members of the modern internet mob will be arguing seriously and straightforwardly because they believe the argument.

Some will be making the argument as a total joke, because they think the argument itself is funny.

Some will be making the argument ironically, such that their performative outrage becomes the joke, regardless of what the actual argument is.

Some will say they are making the argument ironically, even though they secretly or not-so-secretly believe the argument is true.

And some will start out making the argument ironically, only to eventually start to believe it.

What’s more, many of the people making the argument for any of the reasons listed above also sincerely want other people to take them seriously — either so those people will join in the outrage ironically, thus contributing to the lulz, or so they’ll join in the outrage sincerely, thus creating the appearance that this socially constructed performance is authentic. In both cases, the result is that very real messages begin to spread with or without the “irony” still attached. This can lead to extreme harassment of whoever’s being targeted, often with serious, harmful, and even deadly consequences.

The most famous example of a modern post-trolling internet mob is probably the Gamergate movement, as its “success” gave many on the extreme right a template for how to attack their perceived enemies. Gamergate began in 2014 as a backlash against feminist game developer Zoe Quinn and a Kotaku journalist with whom she had a personal relationship. It then evolved into a widespread movement aimed at targeting feminist gamers and progressive gaming journalism at large.

Members of Gamergate worked under the guise of restoring “ethics in journalism” — but really, they used that so-called mission as an excuse to intensely harass individual feminists and journalists. They also used it to appeal to companies that advertised on websites that wrote critically about their behavior, in occasionally successful attempts to get the advertisers to withdraw their financial support.

The spark that lit the powder keg of Gamergate involved a blog post written by Quinn’s ex-boyfriend — and it deployed a tactic that would ultimately become a standard form of trolling used by the alt-right. He basically publicized a litany of private details about their lives in an attempt to paint Quinn as a manipulative abuser, citing “evidence” culled from private chats, texts, and emails. Context was stripped away from the exchanges, twisting their meaning to build a specific narrative around Quinn.

This shaming of Quinn was soon labeled “Gamergate,” and rapidly coalesced into a much bigger movement that started among the gamers who initially rallied around Quinn’s ex. They used the private details shared in his blog post as an excuse to harass Quinn, her supporters, and the aforementioned Kotaku writer — because simply being connected to Quinn, in the eyes of Gamergate, made the writer an unethical journalist whose bias toward Quinn and feminists like her was indicative of the broader corruption of games journalism at large.

The actual content of the so-called “damning evidence” against Quinn didn’t matter; what mattered was that it gave the mob a reason to harass her. They saw her as a “social justice warrior” who advocated for progressive politics, feminism, and diversity in gaming; by crying corruption and trying to ruin her career, their intent was to stop what they perceived as a threat to game culture.

The methods deployed in this ground-zero Gamergate event have since become standard practice for internet mobs wishing to attack seemingly anyone they believe to be a foe. We saw then with Quinn, as we’re seeing with Gunn and Harmon and other figures now, that the larger context of whatever “incendiary” material is on offer — be it a private text message or an old tweet — has been stripped away. And in the minds of the mob, it’s irrelevant anyway, because the outrage is performative rather than sincere.

Essentially, Gamergate systematized a form of online harassment that involved close-reading ancient chats and private messages, as well as public content and social media activity, in search of anything that could be used as fodder for righteous indignation.

Since 2014, this “manufactured outrage” approach has led to the firing of multiple game developers and staffers at game companies (with the latest example happening just a few weeks ago). It’s simultaneously diabolical and simple: Greatly exaggerate your enemies’ behavior while removing, distorting, or ignoring the context surrounding it.

And there’s an ironic twist to the way this tactic is being used today against the alt-right’s chosen enemies. The thing the group is now being performatively outraged about — shock humor — is arguably the foundation of its entire culture.

In 2017, as the Comedy Central series South Park turned 20 years old, writer Sean O’Neal pondered whether the show had inadvertently created a generation of trolls. Wrote O’Neal at the A.V. Club:

To these acolytes, Parker and Stone have spent two decades preaching a philosophy of pragmatic self-reliance, a distrust of elitism, in all its compartmentalized forms, and a virulent dislike of anything that smacks of dogma, be it organized religion, the way society polices itself, or whatever George Clooney is on his high horse about. Theirs can be a tricky ideology to pin down: “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals,” Stone said once, a quote that has reverberated across the scores of articles, books, and message-board forums spent trying to parse the duo’s politics, arguing over which side can rightfully claim South Park as its own. Nominally, Parker and Stone are libertarians, professing a straight-down-the-middle empathy for the little guy who just wants to be left alone by meddling political and cultural forces. But their only true allegiance is to whatever is funniest; their only tenet is that everything and everyone has the potential to suck equally. More than anything, they’ve taught their most devoted followers that taking anything too seriously is hella lame.

O’Neal was careful to distinguish between what South Park does — which at least has a comedic ethos behind it — and the rise of online, meme-driven alt-right humor, which mostly seems designed to shock people as much as possible. He was also careful (as he should have been) not to claim that South Park somehow created the alt-right, which arose from a wide variety of influences and took its humor style from 4chan and similar forums, where eliciting a shocked reaction is often the best thing you can possibly do.

But it’s not hard to draw parallels anyway, and to do so requires evaluating South Park as one of a whole bunch of jokesters who set out to lampoon American society by poking it in the eye, and then smiling. Most of these jokesters were late baby boomers and Gen X-ers, people who were raised by television and pop culture and could see all the seams.

Therefore, they often engaged in irony-drenched deconstruction of the tropes of that pop culture — via programs that seem tame now but were shocking then (like The Simpsons, which pulled apart the myths of the perfect sitcom family), or programs that pointed to the very artificiality of television (like David Letterman’s early talk show or Garry Shandling’s ’80s sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show), or programs that traded in crude, politically incorrect humor intended to provoke a reaction (this is where South Park comes in).

Many of these programs and comedians are still around, still making jokes today. Some, like Sarah Silverman — whose earliest work was steeped in ironic racism — have mostly abandoned that sort of humor. Some, like Bill Maher — who built a whole career out of seeming to tell things like they were — now seem like relics. And some, like South Park and Family Guy, manage to evade much notice of just how out of time their comedy can feel because their animated trappings allow for some degree of detachment and distance.

But when it was more in vogue, this style of “Who can shock whom more?” humor became well established online, and the late 2000s and early 2010s saw plenty of it permeate Twitter and YouTube — two sites that are still around, still easily searchable, and still just sitting there waiting to sabotage the career of any famous person who doesn’t go back and do a hasty purge. (Someone like Gunn, who seemed to have left his own bad tweets intact as evidence of his later personal growth, apparently learned the wrong lesson from our age of weaponized social media histories.)

The act of dredging up and passing judgment on someone’s past social media posts is not new. You can look back as recently as 2015 to witness something similar happen to Trevor Noah before he took over The Daily Show — even if that particular instance of outrage was spurred much more by those on the left, who took issue with lazy, hacky jokes the comedian had made based on several awful stereotypes.

Still, Noah’s experience reflects a subtle but notable shift that occurred in the short period of time between Harmon’s Daryl (made in 2009) and most of Noah’s tweets (which were made just a few years later, in 2011 and 2012): At a certain point, ironic, shock-driven humor stopped being a cool way to get noticed, as more people realized it was an easy way to smuggle actual racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice into the discourse.

That’s because shock humor didn’t only reside on Twitter and YouTube. It also resided on 4chan and the other forums that gave rise to the alt-right, and it was too often expressed as, essentially, a kind of racist or sexist or [take your pick of any prejudice you like, really] gag that still said what everybody really thought. The key difference was that a great comedian could find a way to twist ironic racism so that the punchline was aimed at the ironic racist — an approach that had its pitfalls but was miles more nuanced than the slew of genuinely anti-Semitic images and other horrible “jokes” that spew out of various alt-right depositories.

And such “jokes” are the defining element of chan culture, where if you care, then you’ve lost and everybody can laugh at you. The idea is provocation for its own sake, but when you stew in that provocation long enough, it becomes extremely easy to forget where the jokes end, as described in this recent BuzzFeed article about an alt-right rising star who murdered his own father after accusing him of being a leftist pedophile.

The thing about Daryl or South Park or even James Gunn’s tweets is that even if you don’t think the jokes work, even if you believe they’re couching truly terrible things in irony while failing to consider the potential irresponsibility of those tactics, they’re all, on some level, coming from a place of thought and craft. They’re all trying to say something — about modern society, or about how ingrained horrible ideas are in our culture, or just about the TV show Dexter.

The great irony of this bad-faith war on comedians and other Hollywood figures by right-wing internet mobs is that the right-wing internet mobs are ultimately just as steeped in shock comedy culture as anybody else. But they’ve never understood what that culture intended, what its context was, or why some people found it funny. They only heard the racism and never the irony, and maybe that’s as perfect a parable for how we got to now as anything else.

Original Source -> Alt-right internet mobs are attacking celebrities with their own jokes. The irony is stark.

via The Conservative Brief

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topmixtrends · 6 years

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SINCE HIS DEATH in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu has remained one of the most significant and commonly cited scholars in sociology. His 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was voted the sixth-most important work of sociology of the 20th century in a poll conducted by the International Sociological Association, and he is the rare sociologist whose ideas are widely diffused in the humanities. In the English-speaking world, interest in Bourdieu remains so strong that publishers, having brought out translations of his dozens of books, have more recently turned their attention to his lectures and unfinished manuscripts.

Manet: A Symbolic Revolution is the latest collection of scholarly remnants: a compilation of lectures on the art of Édouard Manet given at the Collège de France in 1999 and 2000, to which is appended an older, unfinished monograph on the same subject, co-written with his wife Marie-Claire Bourdieu. Though he influenced many subfields of sociology, from the sociology of law to the sociology of education, Bourdieu’s presence looms particularly large in cultural sociology, where an absolute majority of current books and articles cite his work. This is so, in part, because he made such a strong case for the larger social importance of studying patterns of cultural consumption. Distinction builds a general theory of social inequality from a descriptive study of differences in individual taste: what sort of people like what sort of food, decorations, works of art, et cetera, and just as importantly, how people talk about what they like. Bourdieu argues that variations in taste, and the success of the powerful in making their personal tastes appear to be natural or objectively valid, play a role in reproducing large structures of social inequality. Bourdieu’s approach to culture makes it possible to move easily from the local world of face-to-face interactions to patterns unfolding at the national level over generations.

In later books like The Field of Cultural Production and The Rules of Art, Bourdieu turns his attention from consumption to creation, examining the social world peopled by artists and authors, producers and publishers, and critics and gallerists. Bourdieu views the art world as a space divided in many ways: not simply between those with high and low status, but between young and established artists, work that embraces tradition and work that challenges it, and work that appeals to a large paying audience and work that appeals to a small group of fellow artists who offer their social esteem. In this pair of books, he sought to explain how art became an independent world (or, in Bourdieu’s parlance, an “autonomous field”) in the first place, and how the aesthetic we know as modernism moved from a marginal position to canonical status: both processes he traces to the 19th-century Parisian demimonde.

These books say a great deal that will ring true to anybody who has spent much time in the small, gossipy, status-conscious worlds of art or literature. A cynic could take The Rules of Art, which pays particular attention to the career of Gustave Flaubert, as a handbook for getting ahead in the literary world. But many critics have found something very important missing from Bourdieu’s account of the art world: art itself. He does not approach art as a critic, and typically spends little time in careful examination of particular works of art or literature or their aesthetic qualities. His extended reading of Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education, whose plot Bourdieu regarded as a mirror of his own theory of cultural production, stands as a notable (and in some ways troublesome) exception.

Bourdieu’s theory, when applied to people who live by and for art, may thus seem dispassionate. More seriously, absent a sustained engagement with art works themselves, his theory may appear to suggest that artistic esteem or aesthetic change is purely arbitrary or mechanical: simply one more means by which social power makes itself manifest. Bourdieu did not endorse this view, but the fact that so many readers have interpreted him this way suggests that the charges of dispassion and determinism are not trivial. A theory that seeks to explain how art gets made, assessed, and preserved should have some place in it for genuine appreciation of art, and ought to be able to make sense of the bodies of work of particular artists, not just large-scale, long-term changes in taste.

In the lectures included in Manet, Bourdieu sets himself exactly this task. He argues that Manet’s career was the catalyst for a “symbolic revolution,” a complete change in how people produced, looked at, interpreted, and valued visual art. Understanding how this transformation happened is no simple matter, because the art world Manet helped invent is the one in which we now live. “[T]here is nothing more difficult to understand than what appears to go without saying,” Bourdieu writes, “in so far as a symbolic revolution produces the very structures through which we perceive it.”

Bourdieu argues that the emergence of a distinctly modern art happened first in France, a country that was, at the time, notable for its large number of practicing artists, its robust contemporary art market, and strong connection between art and government institutions. (His effort to answer the question “Why France?” is a welcome contrast to the many researchers who simply assume that their own country’s mores are an appropriate starting point for building a universal theory. American social scientists often level this accusation at the French, while the rest of the world levels this accusation at Americans.) The lectures consider a wide range of factors that made this period one in which an aesthetic upheaval was possible: technological innovations, growth in the number of practicing artists to a level not easily managed by the French academic system, the ideological and political crisis of the Second Empire, and the earlier emergence of a body of professional critics all played some part.

The artistic world that existed before the upheaval of modernism was rigidly rule-governed. There was an established, strictly hierarchical course that successful artistic careers were meant to run during the Empire. There were also strict hierarchies about the value of different subjects and rules for depicting them. Most foreign to the modern sensibility, there were formal government institutions empowered to decide what could be exhibited, and thus, in a nearly legal sense, which paintings could even be counted as art. At one point, Bourdieu discusses a group exhibition that was shut down by French officials, not because the paintings were morally harmful, but simply because they had been judged aesthetically inferior.

The position Manet occupied in that world was unusual. His aesthetic was rebellious and his political values were far to the left, but he had little affinity with bohemia, and his personal conduct was thoroughly conventional. His general level of cultural literacy and education was unusually high for a painter of that time; he was also well schooled in the dominant academic artistic system. By his familial and educational background, Manet was connected to notable members of the commercial, artistic, literary, and political elite of Paris, and he moved in that world gracefully. And he always enjoyed the moral and financial support of his respectable, wealthy parents, which allowed him to remain artistically independent and productive during a long period of infamy.

Manet was by no means the only painter to bridle against the rules of official art. But unlike others, he embodied a combination of personal qualities, education, and social background that allowed him to break those rules thoroughly and skillfully, and in a way that would necessarily command the attention of the people who defined the artistic conversation of the period. Just as importantly, his career began at a moment when larger factors, outlined above, left France’s official artistic culture vulnerable to crisis. Manet’s revolution may well have been partly accidental. Over the course of the lectures, Bourdieu advances the view that Manet’s most controversial works — Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia (both painted in 1863) — were animated by a youthful spirit of parody, and came to mark the start of a revolutionary transformation of painting, in part, because of the consequences of the controversy they created. Rather than viewing Manet as a charismatic genius, he calls him “someone who got himself into a very strange situation, and […] then spent his life struggling with the very tools he had used to produce this problem, in order to try to solve it.”

Pursuing that solution made for an artistic life that was, in many ways, lonely. Differences in social class and education limited the mutual understanding of Manet and the Impressionists. Manet and Courbet, who are now frequently viewed as closely related figures, were antagonists in life. The radical critics who first came to Manet’s defense, Bourdieu argues, comprehended him even less than the conservatives who opposed him; it was Manet’s peculiar burden to be understood only by his enemies. And even while Manet remained infamous, imitators like Jules Bastien-Lepage grew rich by producing “a soft version of the hard revolution.” Such, in simplified terms, is Bourdieu’s explanation for the aesthetic transformation associated with Manet: a mixture of general social conditions in the France of the Second Empire, specific conditions of the Parisian art world, and Manet’s peculiar combination of skills and connections.

Bourdieu’s corpus is already so extensive, and his ideas already so embedded in sociology, that this new volume is unlikely to have much effect on his reputation or the use of his work. That is unfortunate, because the lectures in Manet provide a particularly lively approach to a topic on which Bourdieu is frequently misunderstood: how cultures change, sometimes quite rapidly and unexpectedly. Although he is often interpreted as a theorist of social reproduction, Manet offers a dynamic account of cultural change that improves on his earlier writings on cultural production.

More striking than the argument itself, perhaps, is the way it is presented and developed. The lectures on Manet are the result of a great deal of labor, and for me, their value is to be found in the fact that they often appear labored. Like any major thinker, Bourdieu has left behind theories and schemes that can be applied thoughtlessly by others (“field,” “habitus,” and “cultural capital” being among the most famous), and there are many readers who seem to believe that recourse to such formulas can solve any and all sociological problems. The self-assurance and impersonality of his finished works can make it easier to slip into these mistakes, despite their author’s repeated warnings against them.

Manet provides a view of a thinker at work, not a prophet. At various points in the two lecture series, Bourdieu confesses frankly to feelings of anxiety and doubt about the project he has set himself. He calls attention to questions that are in principle answerable that he lacks the time or skill to answer: most notably, a reconstruction of the biographies of the body of professional critics who defined the era’s taste. He also points out important questions that cannot be answered at all: for instance, the substance of conversation in the Boulevard cafes where Manet’s reputation grew. Bourdieu often breaks off the exposition of his argument in order to pursue thought experiments, answer audience queries, and share anecdotes and witticisms. In some places, he knocks down what he has already said, obliging him to rebuild his argument from scratch.

Bourdieu had an extremely unfavorable view of the normal mode of art appreciation and criticism. “[T]here are few social objects which […] provoke as many historically determined stupidities as works of art,” he carps at one point. Yet throughout the series, he spends a great deal of time looking at and talking about Manet’s paintings, even at the simplest level of verbally describing the composition, or trying to puzzle out what it would have felt like to paint them. Storming the “fortress of received wisdom” that surrounds Manet’s work requires a naïve, direct approach, Bourdieu believes, that leaves the interpreter vulnerable “to the charge of appearing uncouth or philistine”; this is typified by a four-page speculation on “what happened on the day that [Manet] started to paint” Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe. Such sustained attention to Manet’s paintings, though not conducted in the standard mode of art criticism, provides exactly what many critics regard as a missing piece in Bourdieu’s earlier accounts of art. These lectures provide the fullest example of what it would take, within Bourdieu’s theoretical scheme, to produce a truly sociological explanation of art.

Bourdieu’s performance also embodies the virtues of his subject. Painters like Manet reacted against academic art’s obsession with producing perfectly “finished” works. Such a fixation, they argued, reduced art to the planning and careful application of proven methods: a thoroughly academic enterprise of tackling only problems that are predictably soluble. Bourdieu’s unabashedly speculative lectures mirror Manet’s own insights about the value of attacking a problem boldly and without the sort of forethought that produces a neat, readymade truth. This document of Bourdieu in action, grappling with a problem he has not quite mastered, is particularly valuable for those of us reading his work in translation, in a different country, after his death. It provides not just a statement of theories, but a sense of his personality and his intellectual practices — exactly the sorts of things that must be understood, if one wishes to see, and explain, the world the way Bourdieu did.

Ben Merriman — a sociologist by training — is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas.

The post Rewriting the Rules of Art: Pierre Bourdieu’s “Manet: A Symbolic Revolution” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 6 years

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Ben Merriman — a sociologist by training — is an assistant professor at the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas.

The post Rewriting the Rules of Art: Pierre Bourdieu’s “Manet: A Symbolic Revolution” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2AU9VOo

#Blogger

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