Good afternoon people. My name is David Thorburn. I'm the director of the MIT communications forum and a professor of literature It's my privilege to introduce today's panel and Before I do that, I'd like to simply remind everyone in the audience that we are embarking this semester on a very exciting series of Forums and a as well as a conference in April The events of the forum are listed on the communications forum website This is the home page Which you're looking at now if there is anyone in the audience who hasn't signed up at the at the Communications forum website for notices about our events. I urge you to do so. We're very we guard our email list very jealously it is I Don't say it never happens But it almost never happens that you will receive a message from the communications forum that isn't about a communications forum event And there are only a few of those so we don't clog your mailbox The few exceptions have to do with events that are so relevant to our mission that we feel our audience should be informed about them And they're always very brief messages So you run no risk if you sign up and you'll have the benefit of getting advanced notice about various projects and Events that we sponsor I'm especially excited and Curious about today's forum, which it seems to me to present a kind of ideal mix of Speakers as you'll see and and the topic as you'll discover if you don't already realize it has Has always been an important topic, but it's become a I think a central one for our society in our politics in recent years I'm going to say something very briefly about each of the speakers and about the moderator and then turn things over to the moderator Professor Jenkins Joanna Blakely sitting closest to me on here is the deputy director of the Norman Lear Center Where she performs research on celebrity culture global entertainment digital technology She lectures on many aspects of media and enter and the entertainment industry And has held a range of jobs in height in high-tech firms in a range of high-tech jobs Including such positions as web producer website reviewer digital archivist Research librarian. She's a universal genius it seems But don't be too happy. That's what they say about Conrad's Kurt's as well. So it may not be so flat In the middle David Carr who is a columnist for the New York Times writes his column appears every Monday and Is it's quite remarkable? I think what a range of materials in recent years Carr has shown himself to be Component to write about and even a specialist in a Whole range of things having to do with popular culture and celebrity culture as you may know He's been he is the carpet bagger for the times that is to say That's his alias as the person who follows the Oscars and he's he's just detoxifying I think from that Very demanding experience and he's had this horrible task of having to interview celebrities for the last few weeks I feel very sorry for him about that Carr one of Carr's Preoccupations is one that I especially share and that the forum has looked at from time to time It is the fate of newspapers and the apparent Disappearance of of the newspaper as a as a central force in American society Or the possible disappearance of it or the migration of some of our best newspapers to what will in the long term Almost certainly be an identity only on the worldwide web And this is a matter to which he's devoted a lot of attention in his columns And if there's an opportunity in the question period some of you may want to ask him about that David Carr it's also the author of a very courageous recent memoir that has been Justly admired by the reviewers of a Book called night of the gun a personal and very revealing memoir that I urge all of you to read Stephen Duncombe furthest from me teaches history and pilot and the politics of media and culture at NYU and In recent years his work has become Among the most often cited by students of popular and digital culture Among his books are two especially influential titles two influential titles notes from the underground Zines and the politics of alternative culture and most recently a book entitled dream Reimagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy He writes a blog at the reality sandwich.com site Finally I want to Introduce and say a few words about my friend and colleague Henry Jenkins When I saw him this afternoon I hadn't seen him in about a week and I was the site of him filled me with Dismay and lamentation not because there's anything about Henry that should cause dismay But because I realized looking at him that this was his last semester at MIT and I'm sure that there will be many Folks who share my feelings about what an astonishing resource for the Institute Henry Jenkins has been But I wanted to take this opportunity to mention that in his 20 years here. He spent 20 years at MIT I've never seen a faculty member in my More than more than 40 years in the profession who had a larger impact on a wider range of activities Connected to his institution than Henry Jenkins as some of you know, he's a very distinguished scholar the author of a number of influential and Seminal books including most recently convergence culture where old and new media collide a book that has been influential in Hollywood as well as among in the scholarly community and has even effect even begun. I think to affect programming in certain ways He is also a teacher of immense gifts and is it one of one of MIT's most admired teachers He's also been ahead for a long time now been a headmaster of one of our undergraduate I don't what should we call them dormitories colleges And in that capacity has affected undergraduate life even more deeply and fully than than a normal teacher would do in addition to that of Course he is the genius behind the graduate program in comparative media studies and Probably half the people in this room have been directly and beneficially affected by Henry Jenkins ideas by his generosity by his powers as a teacher and a thinker I Wanted to take this opportunity and it's long we still have some months. Thank goodness before we actually have to say farewell but I wanted to signal my sense that when Henry Jenkins leaves MIT a gap a Gaping abyss will be created that No single professor will ever be able to fill Henry is currently the Peter de Florence professor of humanities at MIT And as you know the found and most of you know the founder and director of the graduate program in comparative media studies That was launched in 1999 He will leave MIT this summer to go to USC and that's why Lamentations should be modified qualified because clearly Henry is going to what is a very wonderful and exciting job And I'm sure he'll be able to continue his good work there At USC he will hold a joint appointment in the Annenberg school for communication and the school of cinema and in the school of cinema arts and he his Appoints he I'm looking here to see the list then he will become what is called the provost's professor of communications at USC a distinguished endowed chair with That let me introduce Henry and let him take over the event Henry After an introduction like that. It's a little hard to know how to sink back into the role of the moderator But I'm delighted to be joining you today And I thank David for the warm introductions to a panel that I've been deeply looking forward to What I'd ask is each of those speakers just introduce themselves a little bit further and describe their relationship to the topic And then we're gonna have a back-and-forth Exchange I've mapped out some questions for them in advance Which will go for we'll go for about an hour in that mode and then open up the floor to you guys to ask Hopefully equally smart and perceptive questions We're moving toward a more participatory culture and we welcome your participation So that that said fittingly I guess I moved from an MIT speaker to a USC speaker and asked Joanna to Start things off. Sure. I must say we're gloating at USC to have Henry Jenkins coming our way Like who are the fools who let this man go? We tend to cherry-pick from all around the country and around the world and so it's one reason. I'm really excited to be there I'm especially excited about the center within which I work. It's called the Norman Lear Center It's based at the Annenberg school and it's very unique It's it's an academic unit. We have academics. We have a lot of faculty involved with us We have students working there, but we don't teach classes. We put together really sort of entrepreneurial projects that try to improve media improve entertainment and sometimes use entertainment for educational purposes also We're activists. We're trying to find ways in order to harness the power of entertainment In order to do something good for the country for the world We have a few projects like that. I can talk about them a little later But one of the things that I think we're most famous for at the Lear Center is our understanding our commentary our research projects on the intersection between politics and entertainment I don't think I have to convince anybody that there's an intersection I think some people think it's the worst thing that's ever happened to public discourse and civil society Other people see how maybe we can take advantage of that intersection in one way or another Regardless, we have to understand it. It's it's a very powerful sort of convergence There's a lot of anecdotal information about it everywhere in every imaginable discipline throughout the newspapers You know in the media But very few people have good research on it just exactly in what way does? Entertainment affect politics in what way does a person's political preferences for instance affect the way they Become an audience for some sort of entertainment content These were the kinds of questions that we were trying to answer at least start to address with a survey It's called the Zogby Lear Center Politics and entertainment survey and I have some slides and some data that I'll share with you about that pretty soon Okay, David Yeah, go ahead David I just wanted to mention in terms of my duty covering the Oscars in your pity that you showed toward me I Spent time talking to Mickey Rourke and yes, Kate Winslet and the kids from Slumdog And I don't know that it was any more boring or less enlightening than say your last faculty seminar It's it's it's it's it's not terrible duty We're here because the Venn diagram a popular culture and political culture has become a circle and I thought I was watching the State of the Union the other night and There were congressmen twittering the events and I thought three things I think Congress has been twittering a long time before it's been a verb Secondarily, if it's my congressman, I'd rather have him listening than twittering. I don't need him annotating What's in plain sight to me? I don't I don't really need to see his little thought bubbles about this and third is Everybody's watching this probably surprised except Henry Henry totally saw this Coming I think we saw in the last election In the intersec let's just keep Go to the next one Henry. I love that I get to order Henry around It's good the only time of my life One of the things that I wanted to talk about is I'm gonna stand up because I'm self-important because I can't see What what the Obama guys worked out is We'll give you Access to our events to our list all we want is your information That's all we want and that's that's a commercial imperative over and over free is always an exchange for your Data I think of like the text messaging of the vice president, you know all the mainstream media said oh It's a complete failure. We found out what are they gather four million names off that How much money do you think they pulled out of those people and I think we have to acknowledge that friends is more Important than supporters if you think of 2.5 million Facebook friends That is a much more because of network effects because you have a deeper knowledge of who they are Even the nomenclature that they overlaid when they say my bow that implies a kind of custody and a personal relationship and I think what was what was cool is they raised more money By an order of magnitude than ever But then they spend it in very traditional ways, and I don't know that'll be that way the next time round But you know they spent over 250 million dollars on network ad so it was Money harvested on one platform was then then spent on another and I think as you guys look towards 2012 you have to look at the spend side the harvest is is red you want to keep rolling We one thing I want to say about that is if you look at they started with the database they made it into a base Now they're at the White House. They don't just have a base. They have a database and you see the first big hurdle That Obama comes up against if he's having a battle with newspapers like mine He's gonna be able to go around communicate with his guys and say you know what they're not getting that right You have to look and think to yourself. What was going on in 04? No, YouTube Facebook was just across the street. That was that No Huff Po Part of what happened and this just amazed me was the campaign put out 70 of their video 70 of their own videos And they had access that we could not obtain they did something called four days in Denver That showed Obama warming up Obama with the family and any network would have killed killed killed To have that kind of access so they have leverage that we as covers do not the other thing I think people say well, you know, it's on the web unless it's you know Grandma getting tasered out of a tree and falling on a trampoline. Nobody's gonna watch it What was the biggest video for the Obama campaign? It was a 37 minute Unannotated lecture on race so it depends on what you're talking about one I went to both conventions 15,000 media members, but you walk in to say where the LA Times Chicago Tribune the Tribune co used to be No footprint at all nothing whereas political had 40 people Slade had 11 people Daily cost had had 10 people so the number of reporters didn't change But their their identity and approach most certainly did one of the things that happened there was Katie Kirk Who's been imprisoned behind a anchor desk, and it's not been doing? Big numbers left the anchor desk went gorilla with a camera adopted the tools of the insurgency and in in doing so came up with great Coverage rehabilitated her career my seminal moment at the Democratic Convention as I was talking to Craig Newmark of Craig's list I stand there talking to him realize the kid just to my right was live blogging our conversation I thought you know what it doesn't get any more mad other than this it's Craig and I are talking to each other in this Guy's writing about it. Let's see what else I got here Do you guys know who may help follow her as she more or less tilted the ranks? She was a citizen journalist for the hippo and she came up with the bitter remarks that almost not Obama Stride and I sorry afterwards and I said well, what do we take away and she says there's going to be a lot more on me in 2012 presents a kind of asymmetry that I think campaigns are going to have to deal with the The the miracle of that campaign was just to watch and watch an organism organize itself they created a template and so Things like phone banking, which is a goddamn nightmare for every national campaign Self-organized people took ten names off the list They were able to take what they wanted and and and leave it there without a significant management and oversight from the campaign you had a lot of blended media and not just from CNN I was there with a lot of video and CNN was grabbing citizen video from wherever they went and One of the things that happened. I think early on is is It became a kind of style thing or a an expression of who you are and you didn't call somebody and say We need your support. We need your vote. You said hey, have you seen this video by will I am let me send it to you It's out there. It's ready. I think I got One thing I want to just talk about is is is is the fact that what it meant to be a supporter of Obama went beyond your political identity. You you could be a fan of Saturday Night Live, which made you a fan of Tina Fey who I saw last week who looks a lot to me like Sarah Palin And that was an expression of your cultural identity that became part of your political Identity certain memes would develop. I mean when I was at that convention. I heard her say snow machine You know, I knew she was going to be kind of driving her own path To the American public in the same way and it didn't once they created these images And I think Henry has done wonderful work with this way They lost custody of them so Joe the plumber was one thing But Joe the plumber became a million other things mashed up in whatever way people wanted to their own ends Whatever campaigns put out there. They should know that it's gonna be used and and annotated Do I have one more or two more Henry? Oh, you know what? This is this is a cool This is a cool quote that Rahm Emanuel made this comment about not now. He's the chief of staff But I thought it was a really smart thing to say about how the media is operating because I What we are all warning around that the way the conventions had historically done is all the big papers would come in at 10 o'clock Sort of scratch your bellies drink some coffee and say what are we gonna do? No more for one thing we are all up at 7 in the morning.  I thought this is amazing that you could make it feels niche But it's acting mass and what a great tool for marketing What a great tool for democracy or if you're so inclined what a great tool for a fascist as well So I do think that it's not all gooey and and wonderful Um One more and then I'm gonna sit down You know, I'm just gonna talk about one one thing actually is is the miracle of the you can lose the slides Henry That's I was on the a cell on the way up. So I was having these like big long thoughts and I wrote long You had Obama girl Which is one kind of expression and then you had Derek as shown who was a pop guy Who got captured making an impassioned plea on behalf of Obama and just a video that went viral Obama girl didn't vote according to news reports The miracle the miracle of and the reason that the youth vote made an impact It's not what they did not the activity that they did online. It's what they did offline They went and voted and when we look back I think it's gonna be what we're gonna look at is not how they raise the money or how'd they get so many people engaged It's how did they take that behavior and make it work offline and they did it by making voting Seem like something that was cool. Henry and others have pointed out I mean, I'm just coming out of the Oscars where the polls and the participation are endless We all I you know pull up to the American Idol with the expectation that we're gonna pay it play a role And if we just watch for sure the greatest greatest drama in recent American Democracy we would expect at the end as a citizenry as a culture to have an opportunity to say I Like that guy. It's just it's now baked into the process. I'll stop talking There's a moment from the recent presidential campaign which is has stayed with me And I'm gonna ask Henry to do something. I pulled off the web so that the titles aren't mine, but I Understand that because that's the textbook Washington game That's how our politics has been taught to be played That's the lesson that she learned when the Republicans were doing that same thing to her back in the 1990s So I understand it and when you're running for the presidency Then you've got to expect it And All right, you know it was a brilliant move by Barack Obama He had just gotten beaten up actually and this was his comeback after a bruising debate and it was a brilliant move for a number of reasons one is It signaled that he could rise above criticism and separate himself from the politics as usual And he used it as a rhetorical strategy to do that It signified that he understood and appreciated popular culture particularly youth culture It's a great moment if you get that if you see it from a wider angle of who stands up first You know it's all these young people and then the older folks. Okay. I'm gonna stand up as well. I guess this is good I don't know what that means, but it means something It also distanced himself from his opponents on a cultural level. That is Hillary Clinton We'd held press conferences and hearings condemning popular youth culture like Grand Theft Auto But also presidents past I mean think about the use of for example rap music by Hillary Clinton's husband And sister soldier during the campaign that Bill Clinton was running in which he demonized it And it was a way to distance himself from popular culture It also was brilliant because it then got as Henry well knows it got remixed mashed up went viral and Reproduced when I typed in for Google to pull this down I could have picked from one of any hundreds of different versions of this it also reminded us just how unbelievably cool Barack Obama is and The moment really stayed with me and it also got me thinking a lot about the relationship between politics and popular culture and how it's Shifting and also how I think Politicos which one thing that's left out of my bio has been an activist since I was 17 is How politicals can start to think about popular culture in a productive way traditionally there's been two ways for Politicos to think about popular culture One is the the pessimistic line and the pessimistic line whether it's liberal or conservative goes something like this Popular culture is at best a distraction from politics and at worst it's a contagion to be quarantined Anoculated from media literacy and eradicated Like the circuses of Imperial Rome popular culture distracts us from the sorts of Thinking and reasoning necessary if an informed populace in a democracy In other words, we're watching American Idol when we should be reading foreign affairs Worse the values expressed in popular culture and for those on the left its materialism consumerism racism and sexism For the right is hedonism immorality irreligiosity These values infect the public mind making any sort of moral political community impossible We're still as political thinkers since Plato and Aristotle have complained pop culture speaks to the emotions The heart and the gut or maybe a bit lower whether it be Homer or wind instruments or rap music Whereas politics ought to be a rational affair of the sober mind So that's kind of one one approach the other approach is sort of the exact opposite Which is the the populist approach in this approach is the uncritical celebration of pop culture as popular politics This is more traditionally thought of in terms of things like folk cultures the voice of the people or subcultures You know punk rock is proto-revolutionary formation, which I think I argued in a book once but in a case This perspective makes its way out to the wider world as well For conservatives therefore Nascar is becomes the very expression of certain rugged individualism Tied with a superior industrial can do or for liberals. I don't know something like world music becomes a Popular articulation of people's appreciation for diversity and global unity Regardless of political persuasion the pop culture in itself is a fully constituted expression of popular will from this perspective And that is most express as most extreme this sort of cultural Populism substitutes culture for politics in other words Politics it kind of drops off and only culture is the thing which is examined So watching American Idol is democracy doesn't lead to democracy doesn't converge with democracy But actually is a replacement for democracy and that's something to be celebrated But I want to offer another model For thinking about the relationship between pop culture and politics, and that's what on the cell on the way up I came up with mobilization, but we could probably come up with a better a better word And my thinking My thinking has been really heavily influenced in this by two thinkers one Antonio Gromshee Who's an Italian communist who died in Mussolini's jails and the other is Stuart Hall Who is a West Indian British academic who's is still alive and well And although he recently retired from the open University in the UK what they did was I think really valuable I could added Walter Lippman in there the young Walter Lippman, but I'll just take those two What they did is they turn their concern away from whether or not popular culture is political or anti-political in itself But reframe the question what I think is a very useful way, which is How can be how can and how is pop culture used politically that is how is culture mobilized in the service of politics now? This mobilization can be practiced in a pretty superficial level that is Obama referencing pop culture and a political speech But it also can be practiced in a much more extensive and I think productive manner Which I'm just gonna kind of throw out some ideas now we can follow up later if we want Because as the populists understand Popular culture Expresses popular ideals desires and dreams and sometimes nightmares and in this way popular culture is remarkably utopian I remember John Stuart joking before Obama was our president He said well, how do you know when the drama you're watching is set in the future? Because we have a black president.  We'll be in the future But in any case it's that it is he what he was nailing was the utopian element of popular culture But as pessimists argue Pop culture isn't politics. It's an idealization and a fantasy What I want to argue is it's exactly the fantasy element of popular culture It's sort of phantasmagoric element which makes pop culture so useful to politics. That is pop culture is a really unique Laboratory of popular fantasy that can be explored understood mobilized and then actualized through political practice Now this isn't easy and it's not sort of a blanket application that one can do because popular culture is shot through with all sorts of contradictory Messages and desires I mean Grand Theft Auto for example is a misogynistic hyperviolent fantasy But it's also a dream of autonomy and control or celebrity media acknowledges adulation of an ersatz aristocracy of the image But it also Acknowledges our profound desire to be seen and recognized that is not to be invisible in our world Every McDonald's advertisement for example Wrapped up in sort of this bad eating habits being pushed upon us It's also an image of a dillock community life in each case There's a utopian element a dream of what a better world could be Then and I think this is why pop culture at least to me matters politically because pop culture is this great fabulous wide-open Repository of popular fantasy and I think it's the job of politics in a way to actually look at these fantasies And make them reality. I'll just stop there Okay, so we have some interesting opening provocations I think one place we clearly want to start our discussion is around the figure of Obama You two of you have already spoken fairly explicitly about Obama on your a lot on David on your slide You had the phrase Obama as a brand and I think that might be a productive way to think about the campaign you know and what way was Obama a brand and Arguably he was not a television candidate. He was not a digital candidate as a brand He's a trans media candidate who spreads his message across every available media platform And I know you were focusing on that during the campaign and wrote some really interesting stuff about it So yeah, if I were a marketer I would look at That the sort of they began with an ideal and just only that the substance and Meat of who he was accreted only very slowly and was was was brought together So you had I mean you you obviously start with You know a lot of people said Brock Hussein Obama Not the best name to run for US president with but that word Obama its roundness its fullness It's sort of distinction It led to something called Obama ism Where it became a source of not just political identity, but cultural identity and so when you When you said you were for Obama said a couple things about you I'm ready for the future I'm ready for this Time when we're gonna have a president.  I know what he's Talking about and I think there's been this Given what has happened and I'm a reporter So I'm a moral and ethical unit can have no political beliefs that you'll ever discern, but I do think that there was a palpable hunger among people we've seen what sort of the crusty old white guys could do and I think it was yes less about race and more about young and Everything he did where he demonstrated. I mean he what was his big concern once he won? Can I keep my blackberry? Can I keep it and then when they came up with this amazing blackberry that he could keep something? I think a few more than a few of us could shamefully Identify with they asked him about he said oh, yeah, you push a button on this and it turns into an automobile And and you push a button on this and it defends a free world and you go you know what I like that guy He's funny that makes me and what we did what he did is he had a trade dress as a popular culture Figure and admittedly, you know sort of Hollywood and will I am and everybody gathered around gave him a halo of effect, but he's the first guy that Understood I mean when he was really thinking about how can I take something little to make it big who do you go and see? Mark Andreessen, you know and said what is it about you know politicians are all Interested in that interweb, you know we got a you know let you got one guy who can't use Email and the other guy who understands that it is and I Henry has taught the illusion of the black box That you could just pull up to this thing. No, it's he was smart enough to say I have a very small brand It hasn't been dented. How can I make it go viral using a? Variety of platforms in a convergent culture to both create funding for further Advertising but also to create and access network of facts to build my brand into something robust and mighty That might be leave parties a little beside the point that might not make the New York Times as important as they once were And to kind of cut his own path to brand building so So I wanted to extend this to Steve and think a little bit about the utopian side of it And I keep thinking about the shepherd Farley graphic You know with hope underneath it here in Boston shepherd Farley's doing an exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art No doubt probably bubbled up and got a result of that graphic, you know But this is the guy who was an original gorilla graffiti guy You've seen Andre the posse Andre the Giants got a posse underneath the bridges, but that hope icon You know really speaks to that role of fantasy. Yeah I mean there's two ways to read that one is the very cynical way which is you know again This is what Walter Littman's writing about in 1923 how politics works is you float this sort of empty symbol Be a patriotism or be at hope and then everybody attaches everybody in the pipeline attaches their own particular and very heartfelt Emotions to that what might be hope for you might be different for you might be different for you But we can all agree on hope and then you sort of trundle that out And that's the sort of cynical Manufacturer of consent that Walter Littman was talking about in 1923, but I also think that yeah It does work cynically, but somehow Obama was able to I Don't know how to describe this but not betray the individual interest with his generalized hope and kind of allow and become This almost empty and this is why the brand is actually a very good way of describing them Sort of empty thing of which we could all just apply what we wanted to to him But at the same time not come across as fake and empty and cloying One of the things that I think he did really well is that he read that There's lots of types of popular culture out there and lots of types of ideals out there And that the Democrats for years and years and years have basically read popular culture as the way the right has wanted them to see Popular culture that is country and Western is popular rap music and alternative music is somehow elitist Or urban or something of that nature and what was fascinating about Obama is he just went out and said You know, you know, I'm a mixed-race latte sipping urban guy who likes basketball and and hip-hop and Finishes my speeches with the big country. Yeah, I know he did well, but he's not stupid Because it is a big tent out there Okay, but a lot of you know a lot of people listen to country Western also listen to hip-hop But one of the things that's interesting is he he was able to say look that there's actually a sort of competition of culture Out there and a lot of ways and you can actually align yourself with this other thing Which is just as popular and has crossovers into what is considered the real American culture or you know the culture of real American people and so on So Joanna the research you've been doing is all about this competition of culture and how it relates to political taste With the Obama discussion here that it was very interesting to see a certain popular cultural Literacy play out in the campaigns It can be very dangerous for political campaigns to utilize celebrities and to engage in popular music it's so easy to make a misstep and Obama rarely did and McCain desperately tried to Actually make Obama look bad for being so in sync with popular culture and being so popular, right?  It was good writing, but I heard she remember she memorized what she said It was her energy policy But but it's it's it's just interesting to to watch and it was something that I was I was looking at very closely in this campaign because Popular culture celebrity these things are tools their weapons they can backfire so So do you want me to talk about this? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I'll take this so I can see what's up here I'll take you I'll silence you Okay, I just put I just put this slide in here for fun. You know politics popular culture. Yeah, okay. You can move to the next one We did the survey with Zogby International and I think it was a really smart survey because what we what we decided is that it doesn't really Do you much good to ask people what their political ideology is? You can ask a political scientist with their political ideology is they might be able to have some sort of coherent response for you But generally people just have a lot of very deep feelings about a lot of complicated issues But they don't necessarily know how to articulate What that adds up to what they are as a political being and so we developed a very sophisticated Political typology as part of the survey was 42 statements about all of the really scary issues that you can imagine we were asking about environmentalism abortion Diplomacy the wars military action all the kinds of things that are hot and but hot button issues in American politics And we did a statistical analysis of the way in which people responded to To those questions and we checked to see whether there were any groups that emerged We wanted to see if there were cohorts in America that sort of held together by the way in which they responded to these Questions these statements. We didn't care what they called themselves. They could call themselves libertarian They could say they were registered Democrats. We asked them that stuff in another section of the survey But we didn't care what they said we just want to see where they might fall on some sort of continuum We didn't care how many groups would come out of it When we did the statistical analysis that the tightest clusters were when we had three groups The largest group which sounded conservative to us in terms of the way they responded to these Political questions we called the red group The second largest group what we called the blue group They they sounded very liberal in the way they responded to these issues And then there was a very murky middle group is about 24% of the country. This is a national American survey 3200 surveyed And we called them purples because they had these sort of shared values between the reds and the blues it was very hard to figure out who they were very interesting group and Then the same set of people that we diagnosed their Politics we asked them hundreds of questions about entertainment. What kind of music do you like? What kind of movies did you go see this last summer? What's your favorite TV show when you have spare time? What do you like to do? Do you like to read books? Do you like to surf the web? What kind of game franchises are your favorite ones lots and lots and lots of questions like this and also a few questions Where we asked them what they thought about the convergence between entertainment and politics So we found these political clusters that were very significant This is the red cluster and I wanted to just get that slide up there So you could take a look at some of the entertainment preferences among that group and We checked to see there was if there were also a strong correlation between the political groups and a particular way of consuming entertainment And it turned out there was The shocking thing is that there were so few overlaps among the three groups that What we were finding were these sort of entertainment and media ghettos Where if you fell into the blue group you most likely hated most of the entertainment preferences of the red group and vice versa If you liked a certain television genre best You were most likely belonged to one group and not another that was probably the genre that you didn't like So it was it was very distressing actually because one of the main reasons I wanted to put this survey together was to find cultural touchstones You know entertainment products out there that bring people together across ideological divides They weren't there. I was shocked House was one of the few cultural Yeah, why why? Equally favored among purples reds and blues and also across almost every single demographic tab and we had just about every tab that you Can imagine raised gender sex where you live in the country? What kind of citizen you think you are? They all like house, but there were so few of those that it was quite distressing actually to me But it made for good press releases I've just taken out the portion of the data today About entertainment preferences since we're really talking about the relationship between politics and entertainment And here are a few of the red entertainment preferences. Let's go to the next slide Purples were very very interesting These were people who actually consume a lot more entertainment than the other two groups They tend to watch just about everything on primetime television. These are their favorite shows lawn order 60 minutes in CSI a Conservative a person in the red group wouldn't be caught dead watching 60 minutes They really like reality programming or at least they're the only group that's willing to admit it They loved the we and Super Mario Kart and dance dance revolution We thought this was really great, but we had also asked them a question about whether they ever enjoy Entertainment that was made outside of the United States and they said never so it was very interesting that there was this sort of unwillingness to admit or This reluctance to believe that they could actually enjoy something that wasn't created in their own country Go ahead to the next slide Now blues you'll see I have a lot more preferences Listed on this slide and partly that's because of the limitations of the survey I was very rigorous about only selecting entertainment content. That was most popular right the most the best-selling game franchises the most popular shows from the most Recent Nielsen ratings I could find the biggest blockbusters I wanted to make sure that we were asking about the entertainment that the most number of people had most likely seen or heard of It turns out that a lot of the most popular popular culture in this country is quite appealing to blues Reds don't like much of it at all If I had been able to include in our survey questions about niche entertainment The golf network, you know all those places that the Republican National Committee decided that they need to advertise their candidates I would probably get a lot more entertainment preferences for reds So this was very revealing in and of itself that When we're looking at the most popular popular culture, we are looking at a culture that is preferred by one political group over another Okay next slide Um This was something that Henry picked up on in one of his blog entries on his site and it was My favorite part of the survey really where I got to ask questions about what they thought about this convergence between entertainment and politics How often do you find yourself enjoying entertainment that reflects values other than your own? Now 26% of reds that's one in four of them said they never find themselves enjoying entertainment that doesn't reflect their values This was on a Likert scale. I mean you didn't have to choose never and only 9% of purples and 10% of blues agreed Then we asked do you find yourself entertained by things that you believe are in bad taste? 45% of reds almost one and two reds that they never find themselves entertained by things that they believe are in bad taste and only 21% of blues and 36% of purples Agreed with with that statement that they never find themselves entertained by something in bad taste and this was a really key sort of Data point because it's not just that we're arguing that if people like certain Representations then it's because those represent representations reflect their politics reflect their life Reflect what they think the world should be about not at all Actually, there's an entire Sort of audience that that's hungry for representations that are foreign that are unfamiliar That are horrible that are examples of what not to do and this is a very different sort of relationship to representations than than other groups have next slide We asked them whether they thought that you could find political messages in Fictional TV shows and movies and the full question was much more belabored It was like setting aside news setting aside documentaries setting aside talk shows Do you think this stuff contains political messages and a very large majority said absolutely? So there's not some sensibility among the American public that oh popular culture. That's that's that's not political No, it is and the next one One thing that we're very curious about at the Lear Center is whether people learn from Fictional representations. We have a huge project. It's funded by the Centers for Disease Control to get accurate health information Into TV shows because the CDC is found low and behold they were horrified to find this out people watch primetime TV They believe it There's no doctor on staff those facts aren't necessarily checked So they give us money to try to make sure to try to pressure cajole these television Producers and writers to actually get it right So here we ask how often do you learn about political issues when you watch fictional fictional TV shows or films? And a majority of the American public Said that they do Next one, I think that might be at the end. Yeah, I just stuck that in for fun So Steve and David you've both been paying close attention to this It's why we're curious to get your reactions to what its implications might be for your approaches Okay, you actually say it. I want to be able to say Something that David said he said earlier that cultural identity gives is becoming merged with political identity And I think what I love about those last sort of Charts that you throw through up there to an is I think that that's what that speaks to it's not that people I'm guessing that people are finding politics in their fictional entertainment It's what they define as politics is increasingly cultural that is Who loves who? What sort of things do they enjoy in this fictional world? What sort of attitudes do they have about their neighbors and so on and so forth those very things Which we wouldn't necessarily have thought of politics or if you look at politics and Oxford English Dictionary Simply don't include and so I think it's partly about this expansive notion of what we think as political as it starts to Enter into the cultural realm. I do think that there is Part of the problem that we're having as a culture right now is our our core expertise is consumption and so if we don't make stuff, but we're good at consuming stuff consumption begins to be a metric on who we are and So you had this huge movement that you could somehow if you went to the better grocery store and spent more Money on you your food. That was a form of voting or political expression. I think in the same way If you're willing to admit that you like watching Tom Selleck that you're sort of making a statement of who you are We both remarked when we saw a house up there on the On the blues no on the Reds is like well, what is house doing there? He's an anti-authoritarian and But you know what when it comes to certain may poles of culture and this is what the entertainment industry is Looking for is the sweet spot where everybody can find Something that they want and I think a big part of what happened with With Obama is is what you talked about what you talked about is you had some a vessel that got filled up with people's aspirations and it became a cultural marker, which is I listen I watched the Daily Show and I like I mean I called my daughter early on who said a junior at the University of Wisconsin and I said to Obama speaking about what do you think she said? I think he is just gonna kill and I said why he said the biggest nitwit on my floor Just came up to me and said I'm really interested in seeing this Obama guy tomorrow and so what she was sensing is Just as it as as as a handbag being a marker or consumption of a show that this was a way To communicate that you were with it that you that you knew what you were doing and I find that you can Like the Super Bowl I had 10-12 people over we were talking about the Oscars People identify over and over the Oscars were such a great example of people stepping See that is the worst most appalling thing. I have ever seen they can't get that right That's terrible. Other people just go and I loved it Wonderful, and I do think that we tend to use these iconic Large events as a mirror in which we see ourselves or identify ourselves Yeah, sure You probably actually thought about this and putting this together, but is this a bad thing? Oh Is this is this a bad thing? I mean exactly what Dave is talking about Which is a sort of conflation of politics and culture the idea that a Politician can become a brand and sort of an empty brand in which we find ourselves in like we find ourselves in I'm a Levi's wearer or what have you Is this the absolute degradation of politics or is it? One view. Yes the second the second view is is this how We've learned for better or for worse to express who we are and Our identities and our pleasures and our desires and so actually what we should be looking for is those people that do it with Integrity that is this is the game and are you going to do it? Well, are you going to do it badly? Are you going to do it with honor or not honor and stop holding out this idea or idealized sort of enlightenment? Vision of the rational public which is going to make you know decisions based on cold calculation and so on and so forth the risk of using using popular culture and celebrity is Trivializing something that's otherwise important right? That's one thing that gets people so up in arms and you know, they actually shout out from an audience to say yes It's a horrible thing When things are trivialized important things are trivialized. That's a huge problem when substance is somehow Undermined because you have added some glitz factor. That's a huge problem But if you are able to suck some extra people into the tent just because you got Bruce Springsteen to perform a song before you spoke that's probably a good thing So you have to mobilize this stuff with integrity and with care and you have to be a brand manager of sorts You have to figure out what's going to draw the right people in so that they will be open and interested in my message And your message may be a health message for instance like what we do at the Lear Center Or it could be a political candidates message. It can also be you know a proponent of evolution who's trying to explain to You know a very angry audience about why it is that evolution ought to be taught in that school Scientists too need to use the tricks of entertainment and popular culture in order to get people into the tent and to get their message heard so it's it's often more of a method than a content and It can be used in the in the worst the most horrible and unimaginably bad ways But it can also be used to be very effective Let's remember that it's not just a tool of the hip young candidate. What was in 04 and and in 2000 what was George Bush really selling the Didn't he win those elections on style points you can you you would never look at him say well There's a men's I want him in charge of the free world.  You know John Kerry wearing those bike shorts and riding a jillion dollar bikes and button in line There's a guy that knows how to get on a horse and doesn't look stupid when he do it And you can you can laugh but I think if you think back To two thousand what a gas bag Al Gore was and how full of himself that that style The popular cultural approach and he was dealing with memes and and templates from an earlier era Ones that were frankly outright borrowed from Ronald Reagan, but I think worked for him very well So it's not there's there's a huge part of this that is not new It's just being it being it's it's encountering a network effect And you never know which way it's going because people are up in arms with that side of those guys fist bumping It personally brought me an enormous pleasure Both when they did it when I saw it on the cover of the New Yorker You just don't know what way things are gonna cut. I want to bring it back even further to 1933 And you know think about FDRs fireside speech, which is of course one of things that Obama's recent speech has been compared to and Here's FDR using this new medium of radio and he is thinking about style completely and utterly and what's interesting about that speech I encourage everybody to go and download it and listen to it is That he doesn't sacrifice substance. In fact, he actually uses style his rich voice His his the stuff is actually scripted by a Playwright Robert Sherwood, but he had a couple of poets working for him as well So it's very stylized speech, but he very plainly describes how the banking system works And so I think that oftentimes we start thinking about style and substance as you either have one or the other you That I have Al Gore or you have the empty Rhetoric of George W. Bush, but actually I think that FDR did both And I think actually that's that's what Obama is doing as well So I think he's actually pulling those two together and we we don't have to sacrifice one for the other Can I just ask you a brief question? Nobody except your Blues liked anything foreign, but then slumdog millionaire just passed a hundred million won the Academy Award And it wasn't just one cohort that pushed head over the top or was it? You and I both care about the Oscars Let us say I hated slumdog millionaire. I'm so disappointed in it. I am the only person. I know Thank you. I love Danny Boyle. What was he doing with a sentimental schlock? I think it's the sentimentality It's the genre work that's taking place there, I think that that was really appealing to a very broad audience I think there's so many people really do deeply believe that there are universal values and That certain stories can tap into them like Titanic for instance And they show you box office numbers and say see this kind of story resonates with people who have absolutely No connection to that culture whatsoever and I think it's very simplistic It's simplistic to claim that there must be a universal story since people sometimes respond to the same cultural object I think it's much more complicated than that But my presumption is that's what was going on with slumdog millionaire, but still it's quite shocking that it got the Oscar Well pushing in a slightly different direction the role of comedy in the political discourse of this year is what probably one of those Striking features whether we're talking on a bomb a girl on YouTube or serenity live skewering of Palin or the role of daily show and articulating the values of a generation And it seems to me the discourse of comedy is profoundly different as a way of framing political debates Then say the melodramatic discourse of its morning in America the Daisy girl You know the sort of classic political advertising which we might think of as Propaganda and it's deep appeal to Sinimentality and emotion and that's cuts directly to what you were just saying about slumdog So what do we think is what do we make of the role of comedy in this campaign? Even John McCain with the celebrity cycle was trying for a certain snarky Comedy at Obama's expense. It didn't go over very well But it was still an attempt to translate the campaign issues into satire rather than into melodrama I think that I Think that you're right in that things have changed a great deal because if you think back to I Don't know like 88 what was political comedy. It was might do caucus in tank with the helmet on I'm sorry to keep picking on Massachusetts people, but you guys really aren't from here either Okay, sorry represent you've got a lot to answer for That the thing is one of the things that I think has happened and it's so weird like off kilter thing funny is hard Funny is really really hard and when you've got this huge You've more or less empowered all these people cheap ubiquitous video Technology to film stuff cheap ubiquitous stuff to manipulate what and a lot of what Henry talked about is you've got this ad Hocracy out there working and You know a while ago. It's just oh jib jab. That's it now you've got every kid with Photoshop with That can do it and it just gets better and better as it goes up the pole I mean think of how more abundant Saturday Night Live was in the culture when this election started No one watching it and they got a puff of oxygen Off of this realized what they had and wrote it back into the American consciousness So it wasn't just politicians hitching themselves There was only one story trust me as somebody who writes about other things is there really was only one story I had a book out that came out in August doing great doing great doing great the nominations came I didn't even care about my book. No Well, how could you ever in in dramatic terms and comedic terms? How could you ever have come up with? Serapil and you never would have been able to conjure her I mean and she piped into women's magazines right away into All sorts of things we hadn't seen before and the quality of political humor in this Go around whether you're talking co-bear or daily show or the kid in his basement I spent a lot of the season just laughing my ass off It was funny But you also interesting was the type of humor which it was satire and irony and I think that that's actually it's a It's a different type of humor because it's a humor that doesn't tell you what to think It actually is funny because you have to fill in the blank. That is it tells you That this is not what it was this is not what I'm thinking This is not what I believe and then the audience has to figure out that space that that that place of ah This is what the comic really thinks this is what I really think and there's a form of a communion there I think it's a deeply political type of humor I mean this is why Swift was using it in that it actually does create a community of meaning Because you have to kind of both come up with the punchline which isn't there But it also I think it's it's a democratic form in a lot of ways because it is about opening a space It's not about telling you what to think it's about leaving you space and saying okay now fill it in And I love that sort of style of humor and that was the predominant style of humor during this this this So I think that was part of the political excitement in a lot of ways is that the humor helped With the sort of the democratic feeling of this election, right? I have a slide to show you that's related to this You can pop it up We get a lot of calls at the Lear Center from press who want to talk about well We hear that young people these days aren't aren't reading the news and they're just they're just watching John Stewart and So we were very interested to find the results of this survey It was a Pew research project It wasn't done at the Lear Center and and one thing that they do I think on an annual basis as they do these Some they give these quizzes to people in order to find out how much they know about current affairs And they look at knowledge levels and here they looked at knowledge levels And then they asked these same people Where it was they like to get their news and it turned out that the people with the highest knowledge level We're the people who like to get their news from the Daily Show and the Colbert report And one of the reasons this makes sense is because the joke is so not funny if you don't know what the hell They're talking about So you have to do your research, right? You have to already read the paper already kind of know what's going on and then you watch the comedy show and you get the joke Now it's not to say that it necessarily makes you a more sophisticated political thinker In fact, I'd say just among my own sort of personal community of friends I get a little irritated when my friends sort of pretend like the joke that John Stewart told last night is the political Perspective that they have as if they came up with that critique So it's sort of a shortcut to a sophisticated kind of political soundbite I sort of riffing off what smarter people who think about this all day are saying on your TV So it's not necessarily You know the most beneficial and educational method of teaching people about politics, but engagement is crucial There's a give and take there's there's knowledge that's required before the joke makes any sense at all And so I thought this was a really interesting data set plus keep in mind CNN's rank You know ratings with young people went through the roof Doubled and I think it was to get in narrative So they could yes followed the main story but also so that when all that data got annotated at night in in Shows that they were in on the joke and the ratings reflect that in voting reflexive voting was up huge Can I can I ask the panelists including you Henry? Yeah, who got addicted to ticker on CNN? The political the political like it was updated every hour or two hours did anybody has anybody else addicted to that? Just us never mind Look at the trade dress in that room right you got John King on the giant iPod you get the ticker underneath them I mean, but it's just one of the things I think it for me it became a soap opera I mean and it became the sort of constant and my engagement was like it was a soap opera and I got Fascinated with it. I would have to update it every 35 45 minutes the political ticker And I do I do wonder again Is that engaging me or is this turning us into a soap opera, and I'm not I haven't figured that out entirely Well soap operas are among among the most engaging entertainment farms known to man And it is the best place to disseminate health information just to let you know Because he got people five days a week They can have very complicated diseases and you can give them very complex advice about it over six months period of time And then you can administer quizzes and find out they know more than your doctor friend does about chlamydia or whatever it was So anyway, I don't think there's a contradiction there at all by turning politics into melodrama into soap opera You are deeply engaging people in a narrative and it just has so happens that the narrative is actually happening in the real world Does the narrative then actually lead kind of jump from the screen or from the living room out into the real world? Oh, yes We do a lot of survey information on that as well for our health project in particular because we have to keep proving to the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control that this stuff works But also in the Zogby survey we asked people okay Well, what what have you ever done based on what you've learned about politics in some fictional show that you watched And it was amazing a vast majority of the American public said they had done something Written to a newspaper made a donation Among the poorest people were the most likely to say they had made a donation and African-Americans in particular Said they volunteered in their neighborhood They called somebody and everybody said they talked to somebody about it. You see a compelling story. You ask somebody else Oh, did you see that? Did you know? so It's it's I think it's impossible to keep the entertainment experience contained within the media it always ends up leaking into real lives The last I just want to make one point That the thing is this content that seems really stupid in real base level South Park I've spent I was at their studios on On Tuesday, and I've been looking over show always topical Always on the news always with a point of view so what looks like some paper cutouts of Young pre-team boys as shouting filth into the air actually is keep me sort of on beam and in narrative Yeah, it's actually that's where the form really informs the content. It's because they're paper cut Animations that are really easy to put together in a week's time that they can actually talk about the news That happened over the last week if they made beautiful animations, they'd be talking about the news that happened six months ago So I'm gonna open it up to the floor for questions in just a minute But I'm gonna ask one last question of the panelist to give you guys time to begin to formulate your questions and take advantage Of my moderator's role to flash a couple of graphics of my own up here This is sort of the questions designed to bring this up to the moment that is last week New York Daily Post ran this cartoon depicting Depicting the shooting of a chimpanzee who'd gone wild on its owner's home with the headline They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill which forced a begrudging and Some now think really not so much an apology from the New York Daily Post as I was looking to find the cartoon I looked online and found in fact at least a year's worth of cartoons that had directly connected Obama to To chimpanzees that are part of the photoshop culture the participatory culture that we've seen where average citizens are taking images and manipulating them in various ways to Sort of frame the issue and then I went back even further and discovered this which many of my liberal friends had circulated You know, we probably have seen this on bulletin boards and refrigerators which showed George Bush as a chimpanzee And so I throw that open to be provocative But also to think about what do we make of the controversy over this? Particular cartoon and what does that tell us about and what does this tell us about both the role of satire and politics and the role when the politics of participatory culture I got the controversy I mean the controversy is you can you know, you can call me a bad driver And it doesn't really matter if you call a woman a bad driver it has a host of connotations and restrictions and And so on and so forth behind it And so I think it was just it was this idea that humor could somehow be outside of a historical and political discourse While at the same time of course In order for it to be funny it couldn't have been and that's why I never bought the post Well, we didn't it was just a joke and so on so well they get some level they knew and they wanted to skate that line and see what would happen and they wanted to be in some odd way kind of Be post-racial But also Garner the sort of You know the fruits of the the racist discourse as well So I thought it was I could understand why people got upset. I thought it was pretty bad cartoon actually just Executed very poorly. Yeah. Well comedy Happens within a context always and and so that's one reason why it's it's less Okay to talk about how bad an Asian driver is opposed to how bad a white male driver is So there's this cultural context and that cultural context is completely saturated with stereotypes and so One of the things that I was doing after Henry said that he wanted to talk about this cartoon as I googled around for You know racist cartoons about Obama I found several that were actually from last year and it seemed to me that the emphasis was really on Racist stereotypes that might be invoked for a black male That suggested that a black male was somehow superior to the rest of the world penis size If I have to spell it out was something that was mentioned or gestured to in several cartoons that I found and I thought It was very interesting because it's one of those examples where you're utilizing a stereotype that's demeaning and and of course It's reductive But utilizing it in such a way that you're suggesting that this person this person who is a member of a minority and is therefore a Victim of racism and of certain stereotypes actually has it all over us So it's it's very interesting how these things can be invoked and have completely different valences positive and negative Well, I totally agree with what said I think to me what was interesting about finding the Photoshop images including finding myself the George Bush one is is that We operate often as greater participation meant more civility in discourse more diversity in discourse It also means that these what's taken for granted in the world of Photoshop collages is probably Can go much lower than would be acceptable on the pages of a newspaper That these current these images that I'm showing circulate pretty freely on YouTube And many of us were comfortable with it on our refrigerator door when it was about George Bush, but not about Obama So it's sort of I think those of us who are excited about participatory dimensions of the new media Also have to be ethically aware of the kinds of insensitivity the kinds of you know The debased levels of discourse that sometimes circulate in this participatory culture I mean, that's that's what discussion is about in a lot of ways And probably the best thing that one can do is the good thing about the sort of the new media as opposed to the New York Post is The New York Post shows up on my street and what can I do? I can write a letter to them that may or may not be published But anything that shows up on the web. I can actually produce something I can comment below it I can you know try to Make my own counter one go viral and get more hits than theirs That is is that the forum is fundamentally different and so yes There's my stuff might be just as atrocious just as uncivil perhaps more uncivil, but the forum in which we're working in Allows for a discussion around that as opposed to the broadcast model those of us who work at large media outlets always thought of The web is one more publishing opportunity when in fact Jeff Jarvis and others reminded us it's actually a way for you to listen and here and I Grock that and I thought that's great And then I started to occasionally veer into political issues and the level of discourse I mean historically It's always assumed that the people on the right winged on talk radio mouth breathers that they are are the foulest most That they'll come at you with them I noticed no difference in level of discourse according to political opinion and the rawness of it It's disrespectful of us Of it and I'm not even a woman because at our paper if you're a woman It would always start with your physique It would always start with your body parts and before they even got to and so it's it's great That we can hear from our audience. It's sometimes appalling what they really want to talk about So prepare to be appalled I had one thing if you don't mind sure Friends sent this to me and I just found it's so deeply compelling And I think it fits in very nicely with with your book your book project and what you're saying about dreams and politics and and really engaging with political discourse in popular culture having Writing blogs about it making videos and remix videos and stuff. It's a way of Creating a story where you have a role in it, right? It's participatory. Well one thing I was fascinated by was this blog blog entry on the New York Times site It was about it was called dreams of Obama. Did you see that and it was the blogger I can't remember who it was said that our friends started mentioning to her that I've been dreaming about Obama And I like Michelle, but now I feel kind of guilty So people have been and so she started collecting all these dreams about Obama and all the dreams were so fascinating Sometimes they were sexual Sometimes they were fraught with all this angst because I really like Michelle. Why am I doing this to her? But sometimes it was Obama's taking out my trash and he's cleaning out my house I think it's metaphorical and then you you know you post this online and becomes a part of a sort of political Consciousness that that's deeply subconscious and it's great storytelling and it's it's really deeply affecting the lives that we're leading So I just want to throw that one out there. Okay, so over here first In terms of sympathy was with some of what I think was being said about brand Obama and sort of you know reading anything into it You want to? the things that were in a way most impressive to me about Obama as a candidate as a as a presented candidate We're in broadcast television and there are two moments that I want to mention one was in one of the debates where he was being attacked by Hillary and what I Saw on the screen. I thought was someone taking in the attack sort of watching him process this attack in it kind of and his what might have been a An inclination to lash back But sort of processing it Controlling it and then responding from another place And I was impressed with that whether I like Obama politically or or not And I'm not that that impressed with Obama in some ways The other moment was when what I took to be a sort of feigned Gesture at the end of a subsequent debate I think it was when he got up and kind of went to pull to show that he was interested in pulling Hillary's chair away from her at the end of the debate sort of hold her chair for her and What I part of what I wonder is is the first instance possibly does any of you think it's an example of? someone with their consultants understanding the nature of television as a medium and Understanding the importance the need to be present a cool kind of Presentation and whatever you might have to say about the other example and also I'm not sure I quite understand How you can manipulate or and I know this was just a Off-the-cuff use of a word trick people with integrity it seems to me You know you might have a good message you might want to draw people in to hear a good message I was sort of in sympathy with bringing up the example of Bush But I just don't understand how manipulating people is Is something that's done with any kind of integrity even if your message you might think is a good one Yeah, I just want to speak to that quickly Two things one is I actually think that don't underestimate Obama's training since you the age of one and Being surveyed and looked at he's a black man growing up and you know a non-black Country and that when he walks into a room people look at him and have judgments about him And he's learned to look at himself I mean this is what Du Bois writes about with double consciousness And so I think that studied cool that people saw had a lot to do with growing up black in America And it can go one way or the other and this is the way it went with him But going back to the idea of manipulation and how do you have integrity within manipulation? I'll give you one example, which is Las Vegas not the gambling casinos But that Las Vegas is a fake and everybody knows it's a fake That is it manipulates you or rather it is a spectacle it is attracts you it draws you in But no one who goes to New York New York in Las Vegas thinks they're actually going to New York That is is that you can't have a sort of a spectacular Portrayal you can't have a stylistic portrayal But all at the same time be very open about what you're doing and this is the difference between something like George Bush landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is selling a fantasy as the truth versus presenting a good story and presenting a Narrative or a brand that people actually want to be part of we're not saying that he's actually fake We're saying he's learned how to package himself sell himself and be an identity and to be an image in a lot of ways And I think to a certain extent we all do that now and he's just particularly good at it I think it's just a splendid question because when I I remember the first instance you're talking about and when he was Processing was he also processing what you and I would think Doing they think that I think that she thinks that Was he because it's it's I've seen the guy up close and it's hard to sort of Overestimate the amount of processing power At work there is is and I think a lot of it comes from what what Steve was talking about and Also an awareness going forward that at some point this is going to be played out in a public context the other thing and this is Less to that point, but these exemplars over and over the ability of time and platform shifts So if you came in on Monday, and I worked with you and you said did you see? Obama really thinking it through before he and I would say no But I'm going to go look at it right now And I think that's something completely different It was the ability to catch up time and again get narrative the water cooler was this movable time and platform Shifted thing where we could all be in on the joke we could all be in on and it gave us an opportunity to have I think a deeper Conversation along the way Hi, I'm Ian Connery and I teach in comparative media studies Very interesting really wonderful discussion a lot of levels one of the things I wanted to push on Was the image of popular culture, you know What is this popular culture and one of the things I've been getting from the discussion is that a lot of it seems to be about representations or a way of thinking about Individuals either as leaders who are branded in certain ways as chimps or as a cool rap aficionados or In terms of the kind of individualized consumer right the red groups the red consumers the blue consumers the purple Consumers as a kind of Large mass I guess basically and I think one of the things that I found so interesting about the Obama Phenomenon is that it started to draw attention to this middle level of politics where it was more about Small groups networking right a kind of collective engagement That was less about the representations as it was about Facilitating the flow that then got people to feel involved and got people in in kind of small groups I think of it as a kind of jazz democracy, right? You have these people improvising on different themes But in small groups and so you know and some of the things you know that the You know this distinction between you know news what happens in documentaries and talk shows and then that's not pop culture And the other stuff is I'm not sure about those kind of distinctions because if pop culture is the things that we talk about And that if we watch Colbert with the knowledge of what really happens in the news then that distinction doesn't really hold And and why it doesn't hold is because it's about how we talk about it with each other And that there it doesn't matter whether we learned it from Colbert or we learned it from a column in the New York Times And and so I think you know that that I guess that's the level I'm sort of curious to hear more about and that's the conversation You know the word mobilization came up and I think maybe mobilize is is one way to think about it Right collective engagement And that there is this kind of middle level of politics I mean it's a thing It's been so frustrating about the whole meltdown is that it's either we need great leaders to somehow pull us out of this Or we should just keep spending you know as consumers and it seems to me it's this middle level What are corporations? How do they work? You know what are what are our? responsibilities as as a nation of consumers or as people who live in certain ways How do we participate in these smaller groups that really seems what to be what Obama? Suggested or showed was out there, but it seems we still have our discourse still isn't caught up to find out a way to talk about that Thank you Okay, David He said mobilization so it's on you my brother Okay, I would agree if we weren't talking about popular culture say one of the things that I as a political activist really admired about the Obama campaign was that they were able through their networking to reactivate sort of civic society and civil society and so you could actually this is you know you could actually plug in at all sorts of levels and Be an activist for a day and one of the things I learned as a community organizer is the first thing you do And someone comes to a meeting you to give them a job because once they actually complete that task no matter How small it is they are now part of your campaign and so one of the things they did was build You know to expand the term a culture of organizing and one of the things that people have been talking about in my circle of political Organizers is what do we do with this culture of organizing now? Is Obama going to use it or have all these people that used to think of themselves as consumers of politics now? Think of themselves as producers of politics How can we tap into that because that's when social movements and organizations? Explode when people who don't think of themselves as politicos start to actually act as politicos because they bring in all of this new stuff You saw in the civil rights movement You start during act up and that's when these things explode into all sorts of new and exciting formations Which us tired old politicos would have never thought of That's what I thought you were gonna talk about and I read some article that you wrote recently about how powerful these small Networks are in particular because it's a way in which groups of people can sort of Can sort of share a sense of being celebrities right they become known to other people Right. We always think of it as a mass audience and one celebrity and everybody's looking for their seven minutes of fame or the seven seconds of fame but when you have these really tight aggressive and And mobilized little networks Everybody becomes the kind of celebrity within them and so I think that's another way in which popular culture and this whole notion of Celebrity becomes injected into participatory culture and into the political process and in I think a very functional fashion Yeah, the the the ability to customize by Geography among other things I think let itself to a really substantial Online offline response part of what people need to know it. This isn't some crunchy progressive imperative people look at a mega church in Houston and say how can the needs the spiritual needs of 4,800 people be satisfied by this one guy a course not they've Self-assigned into prayer groups they meet where They're there are sub leaders and then they are and everybody gets a role to play and the amount of sort of Feedback about not only do you exist? But you are a good person You're trying You're you're involved on a very retail level and I mean Obama has always since this is Chicago in him But I've watched him Work a room of really drunk and titled the white people and and and watched him work the retail aspect of it And I do think that he came up with a campaign organism that replicated the ability To not just suck things from people but to give them things as well to give them a psychic return One of the things that I argue in convergence culture is we when you learning through our play skills We're gonna quiet we're gonna apply to more serious purposes as we find the cause that drives us So I think what I would argue that can meet pop culture consumption today is almost never Individual it's always social. It's always being through Networks in one way or another that fan communities and gamer communities have more and more become large-scale Collective bargaining units on behalf of media consumers and as they do so they're teaching their rank and file How to act politically and so I'm very interested in sort of proto political behaviors like now So how do people quickly mobilize to write letters to keep a television show on the air or to repel a cease-and-sist letter That's put thrown out them and how do we move from those tactics into new forms of political activism? And I'd suggest that most of what I saw on the Obama campaign I recognized from fan cultures of one sort or another the myth of Obama as fan and chief is running through the communities I regularly study the fact that he reads Harry Potter novels to his kids that he can reference you to videos that He knows how to do the Vulcan salute. There's a whole mythology about Obama as geek fan boy Right. Yes, that has taken root in the society Which may name an appealing candidate for the shock troops who've been learning how to navigate through social networks to achieve Proto-political ends which now are becoming political as they is their tension turns from the cultural sphere toward more traditional politics And the active Activation of those various various verticals of interest It often involves, you know, somebody blew a whistle none of the rest of us could hear But he is a whistleblower in chief He's somebody who can make a noise that that various verticals and he's he's he's able to sort of Customize and segment his message and send it out You know radiated message to where a lot of people feel he belongs to them and They're all very different people and what's different I think is that we're used to thinking of consuming as this sort of passive activity and then of course there's this, you know Moment where people say well, it's not necessarily passive because we bestow meanings on what we consume and so on so forth But now because of technology Particularly in the media sphere. We're really just consumers. We're actually consumer producers all the time And what I think that that Obama tapped into is not just sort of age-old organizing techniques Which he would have learned in the streets of Chicago as a community organizer But also this fundamental understanding that when people consume a message they want to produce it as well They want to make it go viral. They want to put their own little spin on it You know, they call that snowflake organizing within their world Which every snowflake was different so you would take in Obama's message and then you'd reproduce it But they allowed for a lot of sort of How do I say this they allowed people to to make it their own And they never did the clamping down and policing on the videos Not that they could have and on the message not that they could have but they didn't even try They really see on the thousand flowers bloom is going to work for us as long as we got that 30-minute infomercial And I mean Henry and others have written about what customization will do The ability to just put a little topspin on just to touch it and get it moving a certain way I'm not quite sure Henry what new media you used to discern What the question was that I was going to ask but thank you for laying the groundwork for it I'd like to change the perspective a little bit if pop culture is ephemeral and fleeting if we Enjoy, you know discussing the success of the new media and politics. Let's go four years in the future Will there be a Twitter? Will there be a Facebook? What's in the pipelines now that are going to substantially change the paradigm for 2012? Yeah, I'm I crystal ball that they issued when I became an MIT faculty members busted this week You know, I think the interesting thing is I I wrote Completed convergence culture when the last campaign was ending Convergence culture doesn't include any reference to web 2.0 doesn't include any reference to YouTube doesn't include any reference to second life Doesn't include any reference to Twitter doesn't passing efforts added the very last minute to iTunes so all of that has happened since the last presidential election and I'm modest enough to admit to you that I didn't see it most of that coming the logic of what what that book described With account for all of that the specifics are all you know, we're on the horizon, but we don't know yet What they're going to be so I think we can think logically where the culture is going to move us But I think it's none of us could tell you what the technology is for years from now or the platforms for years from now We're actually going to be that enable that politics to take place But if you looked four years ago, you would have seen the beginnings of satire as a political tool You would have seen signs of fan-based movements and politics You would have seen a number of the things we talked about here today the lessons of Joe Trippie and Howard Dean impacted Obama in ways that you know We could have predicted but we can't what we can't predict is what's the platform? I think I don't think you can Overestimate how radical it could be if you look at the slide. I had no Facebook No, you know what I mean how rapidly things could change you could have a candidate in 012 Say yeah, I got a media strategy. Let's not engage them at all Zero We're going to broadcast out using our own Media and we're gonna we're gonna build Constituency and we don't want third-party annotation of anything we do could be as radical as that David put up fleeting reference to Walter Benjamin up there and you know Walter Benjamin's seminal article on Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction it ends in this conclusion Which says essentially reproduction has changed the ballgame for politics And it's either going to lead to fascism or it's going to lead to a democratic communism And he's holding it open because he doesn't know which way it's going to go either the idea the image is going to come re-orified re-brought together and given a singular meaning under fascism or people are going to have a Discussion about the meaning of images and so on and so forth And I think that's exactly we have to look at it now It's you can look at the logic of what's happening But also understand that there's always agency there that it can split one way or split the other way Hi, thanks for a great panel. My name is Madeline. I'm a graduate student in the comparative media studies department I have a question. I guess join him mainly for you, but also expanded outward What role does age play in the the sort of preferences the sort of Definitions of each of those groups because it seemed to me that their you know Age would be a factor and sort of expanded out what role does does age play in the formation of popular culture? Is it really driven by the sort of younger half of people or Also other sort of factors that might that might influence How this popular culture is getting me sure sure well I can give you a little demographic portrait of each one of the groups if that's of Interest and the oldest group was which one Oh, it's the Reds. Yeah, they were also the wealthiest and They were the group within which a majority never graduated from college So they're making the most money, but they weren't the most educated. They were most likely married. They were most likely living in rural areas Most of them a majority of them describe themselves as born again 72% were registered Republican They were the least racially diverse group and they were the only group where men actually outnumbered women So absolutely demographics drive the kinds of preferences that you saw up on the screen for blues They were the youngest group the most educated the most urban the most racially and religiously diverse They were 79 percent Democrats 18 percent registered independence They were as likely to describe themselves as moderate as they were to say that they were liberal or progressive This was in a separate part of the survey where we asked them to self-identify They were female Most likely they were single or in a civil union and most of them lived in the center Great Lakes region Okay, one more purples Most haven't graduated from college Half identify as born again. They were most likely to be divorced widowed or separated. They were female majority Large city or suburbs. They live in the east the largest group of them Middle-aged and middle-class more likely to make less than 35k for household a majority voted for Kerry in 2004 and 45 percent Democrat 24 percent Republican 31 percent independent Maybe just a follow-up question. I'm maybe I don't know enough about sort of statistics and how these sort of numbers play out but it seems to me that they're like I Don't know sort of what what kinds of Consequences will those groupings have because it seems like they're sort of little bits of there's like a percentage of a percentage of a percentage and sort of how does that lead to any sort of consensus Well, I guess what was important to us was just trying to figure out where the ideological divides really are in this country Before we would get we could get to the work of the survey and the research which was to figure out whether there was any Correlation between political ideology and entertainment preferences and we had no idea where the fault lines were going to be how many Groups we were going to discover how coherent they were whether they were going to be coherent groups at all but it turned out that there were these three chunks and it was very interesting to take a look at what each one of those chunks really meant and the The pressure on us from the press was really to figure out who the middle group was Because the way in which we generally talk about politics in the United States is between Conservative and liberal between Democrat and Republican and we have a very vague notion of what those people in between might be like and who They are well it turns out it's one and four Americans if you're looking at our ideological index and who are they? What are they thinking this is this was something that that we wish to answer and we've done different Sub-analyses of the data in 2007 in particular. We did a big New York Times magazine piece. There was about female moderates The moderate group was the largest majority female of all the three groups And we were very curious about who they were as a demographic and so that's the value of it Really is just trying to figure out where the fracture lines are in this country and ideologically how we sort of cluster together in groups because just looking at at party registration and looking at the way people Identify themselves politically is much less predictive actually of what their ideological beliefs are and also less predictive of what their entertainment preferences are We found if you're talking about a youthful cohort and what they might be capable of in Terms of going forward. They're right now tipping over mainstream media culture And they're they're they're their influence is profound as self-producing self-consuming Self-editorializing they're dictating terms Going forward so it is it you cannot underestimate What's going to happen in terms of the political process? Because they can move as a cohort and express needs in a way that previous generations Did not imagine in the 60s if those guys had a desktop like these kids Had and keep in mind keep in mind that people Your age now in addition to all these amazing seemingly transparent Networked behaviors now you vote too So it's like if I'm running nationally It's just like I'm gonna do what Obama did which is is is star young and and and and and Workout first because the amount of asymmetries that the younger cohorts present in media in media terms And and the thing is is people say well, how did Brando Obama get built without? Wobbling off course well, it was self-cleaning oven any time he did you know that the communication goes Both ways and boy if he really screws up in the White House Is he ever gonna hear about when he screwed up on naphtha in the campaign? This huge actualized network jumped down his throat and it's it's it's calling response It's not the polarity goes Both ways well the Republican Party's been trying to pump up Bobby Jendall as the the Republican Obama we saw a good example of his media skills this past week Do you think there are candidates who can learn the lessons of Obama? They haven't found him yet I mean that what what you know poor Bobby Janelle. I mean that was just terrible It was just oh it really was you know is there They don't have any ideas they're exhausted it reminds me of the Democratic Party in 1976 you know through 19 Through the most recent election, and I don't know they certainly don't seem to have any anybody they seem to have sort of retreads of You know Democrats essentially which is what the Democratic Party did Remind people for about 20 years, so I don't see anybody in the wings A Sarah Palin is not You know I I don't I think she might be charismatic But I don't think she has this sort of savvy and the ability to to work across Platforms she can only work in one way which is a prepared speech and And perhaps in public speaking to an audience which agrees with her But she's not good across platform and Obama really is good across platform We also interesting to see that you know if the rest of the Democratic Party can come on board to this I don't know if they can his team certainly can but I'm not sure the rest can Question over here From the researcher in the industrial performance center here at MIT I wanted to ask about I mean seems like one of the things that I keep hearing I You know sort of kept hearing both you know during the You know pre-election as well as post-election about Obama was wow It's so nice to have an Inspiring person in this office or so nice to have an inspiring person running for this office and so nice to have an inspiring person then in the office and Wanted to I just just just wanted to get your sort of collective reactions as to Is that something that Is happens to be an important aspect of our culture right now and is reflected in in in other ways particularly in the in you know in terms of the type of entertainment that people are that that that people are are in You know looking for that and the type of entertainment that's popular and I mean do we see that sort of Inspiration theme is this is this a sort of temporal thing? Or does it happen? Is it something that we sort of see? Throughout time and just so happens that here's a guy who can actually really do this And curious if we see that sort of inspiration theme reflected in other in other areas of pop culture I Think it's very typical in sports in particular where people have these idols You know they they have a body like ours, but they can do the most amazing things with them it's it's just incredibly inspiring and and You love it when you find somebody who's different enough to to Somehow transcend what seems like all the human fallibility that that you're surrounded by and if you too play the sport that you Watch them play on TV. You're just in shock like how do they do that? And I think that's the kind of feeling that a lot of people have about Obama as well that under all of this media Pressure and constant surveillance that he just doesn't screw up very much. It's like how did that happen? So I think it's very important to have icons It's it's part of what celebrity culture celebrates and it can be aspirational for everyone But it's I don't think it's in any way new and I think it certainly depends on on people with huge vats of talent And those don't come around all the time. There's not many of them. I do think that Let the economy stall for a couple more months. Let them Continue to be unable to get a commerce commerce secretary let his Decisions in Iraq come to on him and Mainstream media and the viral media will demonstrate his feet of clay with enormous Alacrity and his exalted status will dissipate Like that and you you'll see a clicking point. I do think to your question Less not not getting into whether us foreign policy has frittered away Enormous equities we had in the world which is sort of a tendentious way of putting it But you know what? I mean just apart from that George Bush is a hood ornament On American culture people have become uncomfortable with because he was in articulate Because he is his great sin in terms of world leadership Probably had less to do with was significant strategic areas and more to do with the fact that the guy Couldn't talk couldn't communicate and didn't represent as well as the people and there was just a cultural reflex I think and I think that was part of the great hunger of For Obama is and you saw people very much purpled out Who were totally into him mostly because he could talk Mostly because he could commute that they're buying into the semiotics as opposed to the practical decisions that he makes I would agree. I would agree disagree with David, and I hope I'm right But you might be right. I actually think that like Ronald Reagan and like FDR that actually the world can go to hell in a handbasket and Barack Obama will still have high approval ratings I think that he is at the top of his game I think the sports metaphor is is an apt one it is like watching an athlete just at the top of his game He has an unerring instincts He can pull what should be a disaster the Jeremiah right thing and turn it into a victory He understands pacing the whole stimulus package when the mainstream media did go after him when the Republican noise machine turned up He did what he had always done his debates, but on a longer timescale He let it go let it go let it go when the news cycle started shift. He dominated the game for the last three days I mean the guy is really really good. He also Win in Iraq. I mean in Kuwait shooting basketball with the troops. He made a swish shot from outside the three-point line You know, there's a Republican conspiracy theory that is a Manchurian candidate at that moment I was thinking there might be some credence to that because no one can do that with the whole world's media watching it Okay over here I'd like to provoke a little further discussion about style and aesthetics and I think that they actually are Political action not that they precede it or that they surround it But that the creation of aesthetics and style is a political action The thing that has inspired me to think that is the increased awareness about Lobbying in the influence of lobbying on our elected officials that what may appear as cold Rationality is in itself a style and it's a style that that tries to disappear Into political action that political action is a certain way of speaking and being and I actually believe that George Bush appealed on A certain level to this for eight years that his speaking style did represent many people and people were very happy that the way that he kind of challenged a certain coldness and rationality with warmth and emotion and Obama is actually taking the Bush project a little bit further in sense of style and performance of politics If you're saying is there is is there a politics actually embedded in style and or aesthetics I I think yeah, I think yes An opposition between style and politics. Oh, yes style is politics Well, I think that I definitely don't think there's an opposition between the two I think that style definitely is politics and within a certain way of appearing with a way of speaking and so-and-so Carries with it a whole baggage a whole way of seeing the world the way of Arranging what comes into our senses and what's left out of our senses and so on So I actually think that's why style has to be thought of politically all the time and we can't say you know One that we don't do style We just do content because of course that in itself is a style So you always have to be thinking that over and over Just just quickly that Is a Billy where? Fame as a loose garment, which is something our culture has come to Admire is it gives him he starts with style points I mean I was I was in Denver and way way up In the stadium and they did that drum roll that they do at a big national convention.   We as a people Regardless of what he does can access the angel of our better nature and to that extent His ability to take that great weight and not let him crush him and not let it become You know he he ran away from race throughout But we all pinned so many hopes on him and the fact that it didn't bring him to his knees or That he didn't go there rhetorically. I just think is there was a grace to it that is You know putting away the three-pointer Jordan at the top of his game. It's like how do you know that? That that that we were already as a people doing that work and assigning that meaning and he didn't need to pound that nail Yeah, that's I think part of what he had going I guess I was just gonna say that There is so much substance in style. I think a lot of us would like to think that style is just that surface It's the bell and whistle. It's it's somehow divorced from what's what it's packaging That's never been the case. It's always historical. It's always embedded in the cultural context it communicates volumes and People who are able to understand the meaning of a style are the people who can usually best communicate with an audience And I think that's one thing that Obama just has an amazing skill at and I think it's one reason that so many people Has talked about his have talked about his campaign in terms of brand Obama, so it's exactly what branding is about It's it's it's creating a space within a retail consumer market that is owned by one thing Right. It has an identity. It has a content. It has substance and It's ephemeral. It's fake. It's constructed. It's a few colors. It's a swoosh It's a it's a whatever whatever it may be composed of is beside the point It's the meaning that it conjures That's really important. And so I think that's that's one reason that it's just completely specious to try to claim that we can somehow Revive politics by taking the entertainment out of it by taking the style and the bells and whistles and and the fun parties And the carnival it's just not going to happen Okay, talking for one last question Talk to a fair bit about the role of of comedy in this past election I wanted to get your thoughts a little bit on the role of drama and particular some TV drama in sort of perhaps laying the groundwork or in helping to define in people's minds a sense of What's possible and what's normal? I'm thinking of things like on the West Wing the character of Santos who was Specifically modeled on Obama back when he was still a local politician in Illinois young Progressive non-white candidate who actually gets elected president The role of a program like commander-in-chief with Gina Davis Becoming the president as a result of having been selected as the running mate for an elderly maverick Republican candidate The black president on 24 That these this sort of continuous week after week set of images That people are exposed to Helps to sort of lay the groundwork for so that even though we've never actually had a black president before The notion of having a black president or a woman president is Not quite as jarring or as surprising or as strange to people because they've lived with it in that in that medium over that length of time and not just not just the the sort of demographic factors, but also the West Wing at a time when People's opinions of both the presidency and the Congress were sort of an all-time low of at least reminding people of the notion that It's at least theoretically possible to have political leaders who are both intelligent and well motivated To help Keep people away from just becoming totally cynical about Politics and reminding them of of what's possible. How much of a role do you think those kinds of images have played? What's coming? I think I think it's immense. I mean, I always joke that West Wing was you know, the exile the good government in exile But I think that it's dangerous to think and I'm not saying it's wrong I just to think that it actually created a mindset which was then going to be accepting of a black president thoughtful president so on and so forth I actually think it also worked the other way which is why that was successful Why the producers thought they could get away with it why the money actually was given to it and so on so forth I'd like to do with a correct reading of the desires of the American population I mean one of the good things about living in a free market capitalist society is when things don't tap into a public Psyche they only last one season and so if you got a couple of seasons under your belt You know, if I was a politician right now, I'd be watching house every single night Trying to figure out what's going on there Of course if we follow that logic Steve it explains why Obama beat Clinton since commander-in-chief didn't last Negative producer of 24 who was a big Democrat and he's like oh people are always making fun of our show saying that it's so Conservative and it's so retrograde. He's like we helped get Obama elected He said if I had been able to get the show on the air You know before the actor strike He thinks Hillary would have won because of cherry Jones portrait of a president on 24, which is just now running so Well, I agree with the basis of the question which we as a culture been doing these calisthenics for a long long time I'm getting ready So well put. Okay. Thank you very much if the audience will join me in thanking the panelists Thank you very much