The Blacklist Declassified

Social Media and Biomimetics BIBLIOGRAPHY, with excerpts

 
Jan 21, 2015
 
🔴 A. Poetics
🔴 B. Politics
🔴 C. Neurobiology
🔴 D. Social Media and the Arts
🔴 E. Social Media and Co-Creation

 

🔴 A. Poetics

mi·me·sis: imitation, in particular.
representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature.
the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change.

UChicago, Michele Puetz (2002): Brief History of Mimesis in Philosophy (1) http://bit.ly/1x94GBP
UChicago, Yasan Doughan (—-): Brief History of Mimesis in Philosophy (2) http://bit.ly/1ubRGds

Wikipedia: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.[1][2][3] ❗ Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate species.[4] Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring system.[4][5] In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.[6]”
“VS Ramachandra: ‘This could be the neural basis of introspection, and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other awareness. ‘,
“In another study, gender differences among mirror neuron mechanisms was reinforced in that the data showed enhanced empathetic ability in females when compared to males. ”

There’s a genetic marker that indicates if you are likely to learn from your mistakes… It’s SNP rs1800497. It 2X higher in Europe & US http://bit.ly/1qag7v1
The gene that helps you learn from mistakes also makes you more likely to become addicted to nicotine because stress lol. – you can’t win http://bit.ly/1qag7v1

PhilosophyInAction, Diane Hsieh: Aristotle on Pity http://bit.ly/1znhrhI
// 6/20/2006, “notice that Aristotle holds that the object of pity must be morally good — and thus not deserving of his fate.” “Pity may be defined as a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, ❗ and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon.”

Poetics: Definition of Tragedy: ⋙ “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. . . . http://bit.ly/1KR8jph
// 1999, “Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Melody.” (translation by S. H. Butcher; click on the context links to consult the full online text)” … “Spectacle is last, for it is least connected with literature”
Tragedy, however, is rooted in the fundamental order of the universe ❗ ; it creates a cause-and-effect chain that clearly reveals what may happen at any time or place because that is the way the world operates. Tragedy therefore arouses not only pity but also fear, because the audience can envision themselves within this cause-and-effect chain (context).
“Plot is the “first principle,” the most important feature of tragedy. Aristotle defines plot as “the arrangement of the incidents”: i.e., not the story itself but the way the incidents are presented to the audience, the structure of the play.”
“We might profitably compare this view of Aristotle with that expressed by Susanne Langer in our first reading (“Expressiveness in Art,” excerpt from Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures, New York, Scribner, 1957):
“‘A work of art presents feeling (in the broad sense I mentioned before, as everything that can be felt) for our contemplation, making it visible or audible or in some way perceivable through a symbol, not inferable from a symptom. Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art . . . are images of feeling, that formulate it for our cognition. What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling for our understanding. (661-62)’

ENotes: Eighteenth-Century British Periodicals http://bit.ly/1y0R1SX
// Undated, [Search name to read without using eNotes app]
News was only allowed from one source [!] “As a result, other late seventeenth-century periodicals, including The Observer (1681) and The Athenian Gazette (1691), either supplemented the news with varied content, such as political commentary, reviews, and literary works, or provided specialized material targeting a specific readership.”
“Another innovation brought about by the periodical was the publication of letters to the editor, which permitted an unprecedented degree of interaction between author and audience.”
“Addison and Steele and other editors of the eighteenth century saw their publications as performing an important social function and viewed themselves as moral instructors and arbiters of taste. In part these moralizing and didactic purposes were accomplished through the creation of an editorial voice or persona, such as Isaac Bickerstaff in the Tatler, Nestor Ironside in the Guardian, and, most importantly, Mr. Spectator in the Specator.”
“In addition, celebrated figures from Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Mark Twain have acknowledged the impact of the eighteenth-century periodical, particularly the Specator, on their development as writers and thinkers.”

🔴 B. Politics

NYT, Peter Pomerantsev: Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth http://nyti.ms/1w111ZN
// 12/11/2014, “The Kremlin’s goal is to control all narratives, so that politics becomes one great scripted reality show. The way it wields power illustrates and reinforces this psychology.”
“When I went to work as a TV producer in Moscow in the early 2000s, I would ask my peers which of the ‘selves’ they grew up with was the ‘real’ them. How did they locate the difference between truth and lies? ‘You just end up living in different realities,’ they would tell me, ‘with multiple truths and different ‘yous.’ ‘ ”
“It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits, and can never quite commit to changing things.”
“‘Everything is PR,’ my Moscow peers would tell me. This cynicism is useful to the state: When people stopped trusting any institutions or having any values, they could easily be spun into a conspiratorial vision of the world.”
“At the core of this strategy is the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. This notion allows the Kremlin to replace facts with disinformation.”
“Sadly, this mind-set resonates well in a post-Iraq and post-financial-crisis West increasingly skeptical about its own institutions, where reality-based discourse has already fractured into political partisanship. Conspiracy theories are prevalent on cable networks and radio shows in the United States and among supporters of far-right parties in Europe.”

TheWeek: The outrageous, surprising, and prescient legacy of Boston Legal http://bit.ly/1yHXgtM
// 10/15/2014, “But for all its courtroom trappings, Boston Legal wasn’t really about upholding the law — it was about pushing the law past its limits. Every week, the show’s lawyers would argue cases that stretched beyond the boundaries of the law and delved into the boundaries of society. Sometimes those boundaries would push right back. But other times, the show’s “stretches” were just the torchbearers for new cultural norms.”

DemocraticUnion[.]eu: Madison and Hamilton: The Legacy of US Federalism http://bit.ly/1y3OOTJ Federalist Papers
// 6/21/2014, “James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, as well as John Jay, a proponent of a strong federal government, the papers were published under the pseudonym ‘Publius’ at the time.”
⋙ Most cited: 42, 78, 81, 51, 32, 48, 80, 44; there are 85 papers altogether; James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

TheNewRepublic, Gordon S Wood: The Great American Argument: Review of Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787 – 1788, By Pauline Maier
// 12/24/2010, also William Findley of Pennsylvania and Melancton Smith of New York, plus “Samuel Thompson of Maine and John Dawson of Virginia, of whom few historians have ever heard.”
“Nothing before had ever engaged such a large proportion of Americans as did the debates over the Constitution. Gilbert Livingston, a delegate to the New York convention, believed that he was involved in the ‘greatest transaction of his life.’ The little town of Oakham, Massachusetts echoed the feelings of many Americans when it told its delegates to the ratifying convention that their mission was of ‘the greatest Importance that ever came before any Class of Men on this Earth.'”

🔴 C. Neurobiology

ScienceNews: Review: Stefan Klein: ‘Survival of the Nicest’ demonstrates altruism all around http://bit.ly/14Or2Ao http://amzn.to/1GdkInL
// 1/10/2015, “inner altruism crops up consistently even at the expense of personal safety or profit. He maintains that humans are innately driven to cooperate, right down to the oxytocin that pours into the bloodstream when people witness acts of generosity. Oxytocin in turn promotes trust and good will, essential ingredients for sharing. We also come equipped with mirror neurons, brain cells that allow us to grasp and emulate others’ emotions, laying the foundation for group responses aimed at the greater good.”

FrontNeurosci, Gariépy (Duke): Social learning in humans and other animals http://bit.ly/1y6vLtc
// 3/21/2014, “Birds, fish, and insects also learn from others”
“The process through which individuals learn from others rather than through direct experience is referred to as social learning”
direct experience learning vs social learning
“…game theory tournaments, in which algorithms that learn from opponents outperform those that do not…”
“Dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra are known to encode prediction errors and are necessary for learning that requires prediction errors”
“reinforcement learning is not sufficient to explain all forms of animal learning” ❗
“in social learning experiments, animals can learn from others by observing their decisions and the resulting outcomes, and adjust their own actions without having directly experienced the outcomes themselves”
“These findings indicate that animals, including humans, can learn without direct experience”
“enhancement of attention to others, in the case of socially facilitated food preferences, and the recognition of emotional facial cues in others as they experience outcomes, to more complex mechanisms including mentalizing and theory of mind.”
“A number of studies have implicated specific brain areas in human social behavior. These areas include the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg), the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). All of these regions may contribute to the interpretation of others’ intentions and social learning (Behrens et al., 2009). The TPJ integrates systems for memory, language, attention, and social processing and its activation is correlated with the degree to which an opponent is perceived as intelligent (Carter and Huettel, 2013). Moreover, gray matter volume in the TPJ predicts altruistic tendencies (Morishima et al., 2012). TPJ has been implicated in mentalizing and understanding intentions, suggesting involvement in empathy, altruism, and learning or strategizing in a competitive context (Samson et al., 2004; Carter et al., 2012). By contrast, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) may contribute to executive control, planning, and goal-directed behavior in social contexts, particularly deception❗(Miller and Cohen, 2001; Knoch et al., 2006). The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex underlies processes including cognitive control and social interaction (Venkatraman et al., 2009). Studies of the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACCg) have revealed involvement in error correction and reinforcement learning from social outcomes as well as emotional and facial expression recognition (Behrens et al., 2008; Venkatraman et al., 2009; van den Stock et al., 2013).”
“we hypothesize that many cognitive and motivational systems that originally evolved to solve non-social problems have been co-opted by evolution to contend with social challenges”
“small set of brain areas for which there is tantalizing evidence of uniquely specialized social functions, which may have evolved in only a limited number of species… extreme social complexity found in humans, some great apes, and highly social birds like corvids”
“where they are looking, a phenomenon known as gaze-following or joint attention”
“In humans, the gaze of others influences where people look and may even change their perception of objects ”
Fear response: “Many animal species are capable of learning to fear a stimulus by observing the behavior of another animal toward it.”
TRUST: “Individuals vary in whom they trust for information to guide learning.” “number of other individuals engaging in a behavior” … “familiarity” … “Expertise” … “Age” (both ways) … “dominance ranking”
“The effects of familiarity on social learning may be mediated by brain regions that process identity information encoded in faces” … “processes by which an individual learns about the reliability of others’ advice” … “recognition of facial and behavioral expressions of fear and disgust”
‘”A role for the ACC in empathy is supported by imaging studies in humans showing that this area responds to pain felt by others” … “The anterior insula also seems to respond strongly to viewing others in pain” … “Theory of mind, the cognitive processes by which people model the goals, intentions and emotions of others, is thought to rely on a wide network of brain regions
“by observing conspecifics”
“Emulation and imitation are forms of social learning in which individuals actively model the goal of another individual’s actions”
“the mirror neuron system, although this proposition is highly debated” … “Differences arise between activation of these regions of the brain when monkeys and humans view an identical action in different contexts, which suggests that neurons in these areas encode aspects of the action’s goal and context, which could indicate a role in intention understanding” … “medial frontal cortex … neurons in this area respond to observing errors made by others” … “monitoring social outcomes” … “The currently available data indicates that the actions of self and others can be represented jointly in some brain areas while separately in others”

PLOS1, Monfardini et al: Model-Observer Similarity, Error Modeling and Social Learning in Rhesus Macaques http://bit.ly/1yjmoIH based of .”like-me-ness”
// 2/14/2014

Science: Monkey See, Monkey Don’t Do: Social Learning and the Casual Observer http://bit.ly/1x8ZRby
// Feb 2014, “We learn by watching mistakes being made as well as by making mistakes, according to a study by Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
“Through observing the behaviour of monkeys, researchers located a neural circuit believed to be dedicated solely to recognising social errors in others.
“The findings, published in the journal Frontiers unveils more about the brain and the nature of social learning. Researchers believe that this neural process exists to protect humans and animals in unfamiliar social environments.”

WIRED, Christian Jarrett: : A Calm Look at the Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience – Mirror Neurons http://wrd.cm/1yumqdM
// 12/13/2013

Cell, Kilneremail (UCL)[UK]: What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons [review] http://bit.ly/1yokFBG
// 2013, “The discovery of mirror neurons has had a profound effect on the field of social cognition. Here we have reviewed what is currently known about mirror neurons in the different cortical areas in which they have been described. There is now evidence that mirror neurons are present throughout the motor system, including ventral and dorsal premotor cortices and primary motor cortex, as well as being present in different regions of the parietal cortex. The functional role(s) of mirror neurons and whether mirror neurons arise as a result of a functional adaptation and/or of associative learning during development are important questions that still remain to be solved. In answering these questions we will need to know more about the connectivity of mirror neurons and their comparative biology across different species.”

PsychToday, Christian Jarrett: Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience? http://bit.ly/1sJMt0W
// 12/10//2012, “Troublesome findings here include the fact that mirror neurons appear to acquire their properties through experience” […and how is this a problem?]

NIH/JNatSciBiolMed, Sourya Acharya: Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain http://1.usa.gov/1yrEbxr
// Jul-Dec 2012, “Mirror neurons are one of the most important discoveries in the last decade of neuroscience. These are a variety of visuospatial neurons which indicate fundamentally about human social interaction. Essentially, mirror neurons respond to actions that we observe in others. The interesting part is that mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves.” … “This review is a brief introduction to the neurons that shaped our civilization.”
“Mirror neurons represent a distinctive class of neurons that discharge both when an individual executes a motor act and when he observes another individual performing the same or a similar motor act.”❗
“Human infant data using eye-tracking measures suggest that the mirror neuron system develops before 12 months of age, and that this system may help human infants understand other people’s actions.”
“Mirror neurons are associated with one of the most intriguing aspect of our complex thought process, that is ‘intention understanding.'” … Two distinct processes: “WHAT action is being done?” And “WHAT FOR or, WHY (Intention) the action is being done.” … “study demonstrated that actions embedded in contexts yielded selective activation of the mirror neuron system. This indicates that mirror areas, in addition to action understanding, also mediate the understanding of others’ intentions.”
“Many studies have independently argued that the mirror neuron system is involved in emotions and empathy. Studies have shown that people who are more empathic according to self-report questionnaires have stronger activations both in the mirror system for hand actions and the mirror system for emotion.”
Reaction to disgusting smell and photo of person reacting to a disgusting smell resulted in same neurons firing,❗
“Similar results[26,27] have been obtained for felt pain and during the observation of a painful situation, which was involved another person loved by the observer”
“The discovery of mirror neurons provided strong support for the gestural theory of speech etymology. Thanks to the mirror mechanism, actions done by one individual become messages that are understood by an observer without any cognitive mediation.❗ The observation of an individual grasping an apple is immediately understood because it evokes the same motor representation in the parieto-frontal mirror system of the observer.”
“Thanks to the mirror neurons, what counted for the sender of the message also counted for the receiver. No arbitrary symbols were required. The comprehension was inherent in the neural organization of the two individuals.”
… “close to Broca’s area, one of the hypothesized language regions of the brain. This has led to suggestions that human language evolved from a gesture performance/understanding system implemented in mirror neurons.” … “remapping of mirror neurons which then became co-opted for other kinds of abstraction that humans excel in, like reasoning metaphors”
“Michael Corballis, an eminent cognitive neuroscientist, argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion,❗ which is the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental “time travel”❗ that is the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness.”
“This theory suggests that humans can construct a model in their brains of the thoughts and intentions of others. We can predict the thoughts, actions of others. The theory holds that humans anticipate and make sense of the behavior of others by activating mental processes that, if carried into action, would produce similar behavior.”
“Mirror neurons are activated both when actions are executed, and the actions are observed. This unique function of mirror neurons may explain how people recognize and understand the states of others; mirroring observed action in the brain as if they conducted the observed action.”
“It has been speculated that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self-awareness.❗ Mirror neurons can not only help simulate other people’s behavior, but can be turned “inward” to create second-order representations or meta-representations of ones own earlier brain processes. This could be the neural basis of introspection, and of the reciprocity of self-awareness and other awareness.”

GreaterGood[.]berkeley[.]edu, Jason Marsh: Notes on Being Human http://bit.ly/1Ej0Qee
A report from the frontiers of human consciousness and connection
// 3/26/2012
“Mirror neurons are probably well familiar to many readers of Greater Good by now: They’re cells in the brain, first documented in monkeys but also observed in humans, that fire when we observe the actions of someone else, activating in regions of the brain associated with the action that other person is performing. In other words, they make our brains act as if we ourselves were experiencing whatever that other person is experiencing. The connection to empathy seems pretty clear.

“But less clear might be how phantom limbs can shine light on our connections to others. People are said to have a “phantom limb” when they still feel sensations from a body part that they’ve lost, like an amputated arm. Experiments have shown, says Ramachandran , that people with a phantom limb have a strong propensity to experience others’ pain as their own.

“How could that be? Ramachandran explains that when most of us see someone get hurt, mirror neurons in our brains fire in such a way to suggest that we ourselves are experiencing their pain. But our skin knows better: It doesn’t send any signal of being hurt (because it’s not), and it serves to “veto” the signal sent by the mirror neurons.

“‘My skin is saying: Look, I know those neurons are saying ‘ouch,’ but there’s nothing happening in the skin—so shut up,’ he told the crowd.

“But when people are missing a limb, there’s no skin to veto the brain’s signal and indicate that the pain’s not real. So when people with a phantom limb observe someone else getting hurt (like by getting pricked in the finger), they feel and react as if they themselves have been hurt—they say ‘ouch’ and pull back their hand.
“’The extraordinary implication of this is that my brain is hooked up to your brain directly,’ he says. ‘The only thing that separates your sensory experience from mine is your bloody skin.’”

💙💙 NeuroHumanitiesStudies, (Duke): Literary Biomimesis: Mirror Neurons and the Ontological Priority of Representation http://bit.ly/1y6T9a6
// 2011, ⋙ ⋙ see separate paper marked up: in Complete Articles folder

WIRED: Study shows we learn more from others’ mistakes http://bit.ly/1KOH6n6
// !0/13/2010, “When their opponent messed up, players experienced responses in both the reward and learning signals in their brain, suggesting that we take notice of our competitor’s failures, and also learn from the actions that led to them, to avoid making similar mistakes in future.
“The study also looked at ‘mirror neuron’ activity. When observing, the players’ brains are activated by their competitor’s moves, as if they’re performing the actions themselves. It was previously suggested that the mirror neuron system was unique in human to human interaction, but here the players knew they were battling a computer.”

☒ TEDTalks, Vilayanur Ramachandran : The neurons that shaped civilization http://bit.ly/1ITiK81
// Feb 2009, subset, 20% mirror; sensory imput contradicts, but phantom limbs
⇈ ⇊
Books&Politics: VS Ramachandran : The Neurons That Shaped Civilization http://bit.ly/1GdNMLM
// 5/24/2011, first chapter of The Tell-Tale Brain 📗
“Data indicates that the human brain reached its current size about 300,000 years ago, but the emergence of the capabilities and attributes that we associate with humanity—tool making, art, and perhaps language— only began to emerge about 75,000 years ago.”
“One must bear in mind that genetic modification by natural selection is a very inefficient process.”
“Once you are able to learn and transmit skills culturally rather than genetically, there is no physical limit on growth of capability. He assigns mirror neurons a central role in this process.”
“In fact, it appears that this tendency to mimic is so strong that a brain function has to exist to suppress it when necessary. The most straightforward benefit of this capability is that one can learn and imprint skills by observing others. This, when combined with a language capability, provides cultural inheritance that can be passed on to, and be amplified by, a succeeding generation.”
“In observing the actions of another we are actually running a simulation of what the other person might be intending to do. The brain sorts through the various options and delivers to our consciousness what it considers the most likely outcome. This process is continually reviewed and updated as more data comes in. If you add to the process the ability to ascertain emotional content in the facial expression and body language of another via the same learning process, then you have the makings of a modern social human.”
“In fact, as the modern world gets more complex, human intellectual adolescence is getting stretched to later years. Some parents are beginning to suspect it might never end.”l
⇈ ⇊
TheGuardian, Andrew Anthony: VS Ramachandran : The Marco Polo of neuroscience http://bit.ly/1KTeXeA
// 1/29/2011, “changing the way we think about thinking”
“within the sciences he is seen as one of the great pioneers of our time”
“Richard Dawkins once wrote: ‘Ramachandran is a latterday Marco Polo, journeying the Silk Road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind.'”
“The Tell-Tale Brain, which, according to the Financial Times, is an unimprovable ‘sweep of contemporary neuroscience.'”
⋙ “And neuroscience is where the intellectual action is these days. In a recent edition of the New Yorker, the journalist David Brooks declared: ‘We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness… brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.'”
“not only is the brain part of the body but the body is also part of the brain” ➔ work on phantom limbs
Mirror cells: “was quick to reflect on their potential and he predicts that their discovery ‘will do for psychology what DNA did for biology'”
“What they appear to tell us is that humans are first and foremost mimics. We make ourselves up as we go along by improvising from what we see. This model also suggests the self is in dynamic interaction with otherness, both copying behaviour and projecting its emotions on to others, which is the basis for the vital human quality of empathy” http://bit.ly/1KTeXeA
“The mirror-neuron system enables us to see another person’s point of view, what’s known as an allocentric view, as opposed to an egocentric one. Ramachandran suggests that ‘at some point in evolution, this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This is, I claim, the dawn of self-awareness'”

NYT Editorial: Room for Debate: Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save the Humanities? http://nyti.ms/159CMOl six perspectives
// 4/5/2010
⇈ ⇊
NYT, Parricia Cohen: Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You Know http://nyti.ms/1Cbcybq
// 3/31/10

TheatreJournal, Amy Cook (EmoryU): Interplay: The Method and Potential of a Cognitive Scientific Approach to Theatre http://bit.ly/14Zg8YQ
// 2009

ResearchGate, Jordan Zlotev [SWE]: Intersubjectivity, mimetic schemas and the emergence of language http://bit.ly/1y4GJ2j
// Jan 2007

APA[.]org, Lee Winerman: The mind’s mirror http://bit.ly/14ZgZIT A new type of neuron–called a mirror neuron–could help explain how we learn through mimicry and why we empathize with others
// 2006, American Psychological Association

 ExperBrainRes, Rizzolatti: Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological
Study http://1.usa.gov/1ypwVQB pp 176-80
// 1992,  seminal

🔴 D. Social Media and the Arts

TheCinema: Content is not king – people are http://bit.ly/1xSU24w about Buzzfeed, etc: creating content people like
// 1/6/2015

RedCarpetReport: Open Letter to Television Show Social Media Community Managers and Network Executives about Spoilers, Big Data, Fans and Advertisers http://bit.ly/1xvxJ7U
// 12/2/2014

NYObserver: TV Writers and Showrunners Increasingly ‘Mute’ the Fans http://bit.ly/1DJ1bGL Sorry, shippers, the ‘auteurs’ (say they) aren’t listening
// 11/20/2014, the article doesn’t really say that…

❥ CapitolFile: Megan Boone Opens Up About ‘TheBlacklist,’ Dating, and Twitter http://bit.ly/11EenzD @NBCBlacklist
// 11/17/2014 (date approx)

“Q: How does the process work? I noticed last season that current events were woven in and references added to the dialogue to make it very timely.
“A: I really think that social media has changed the medium of television in a huge way. We are in the golden age of television. The interesting thing about network TV is that we are developing and shooting episodes at a much faster rate [than cable or streaming], so that means our air date and our wrap date are very close. When we get a response from our fans, we’re able to almost instantly respond to that within our story. Within a couple of episodes, fans will see something play out that they wished for, or something that they noticed will be somehow woven into the story.” ❗

❥ MediaLife: How Twitter helps boost DVR viewership http://bit.ly/12bK02G The most social programs see bigger gains in L+7 ratings
// 11/10/2014, “In these days of telecommuting and social networking, Twitter has become a virtual watercooler, where people go to talk about the day’s events, and that’s especially true when it comes to television.

● “A new Nielsen study on Twitter and television … found that a 10 percent increase in Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, which measure which shows are being tweeted about the most, results in an average 1.8 percent increase in live-plus-seven-day-DVR viewership (L+7). “

“On one level, you can think of social media as providing insights to help network departments make better decisions, including research, ad sales, marketing, promotions, etc.” ❗

● “At a broader level, social media changes the relationship that networks have with their audiences. It for the first time enables networks to create one-to-one relationship with fans, creating new approaches for building loyalty, engagement and enthusiasm.”

● “We know that the number of people who see tweets about programs can be 50 times larger than the number of people who Tweet. We know from prior Nielsen research that some people choose to view TV programs live specifically because they enjoy the added engagement around social TV.”

NYT: Yahoo’s Tumblr Teams Up With TV Shows to Reach Their Audiences http://nyti.ms/1Hh1evp
// 10/19/2014, eg The Voice

IAmRogue: Peter Stormare Talks ‘Autumn Blood,’ ‘The BIg Lebowski 2′ and ‘The
Blacklist’ http://bit.ly/13oWEMW
// 10/22/2014 “There is a great revolution that has been happening on TV …”
“They have six or seven different scenarios, and I don’t know what direction they will go in. I do not envy the writers because they are really kicked from both sides all the time.❗ They try to come up with the best solution, and sometimes they have to do rewrites over night. TV is a gruesome business. But there is a great revolution that has happened on TV. A lot of talent is moving in…”

❥ WSJ (Oct): Sorting Out TV’s New Metrics – Broadcast networks are gathering mounds of new info about viewing http://on.wsj.com/1HLsm74 thorough
// 10/16/2014, “Last season, only two broadcast series saw their total audience grow by more than 4 million when L7 viewing was added in, including NBC’s “Blacklist,” one of the few new hits of last year. By comparison, 11 series so far this season have had a jump of 4 million viewers or more”

EConsultancy [EU]: Six ways social media is changing the nature of TV forever http://bit.ly/1wA98Ic including user-generated content
// 10/14/2014

“While that engagement and feedback can provide a helpful voice for writers to listen to, it doesn’t mean fans are writing their own choose-your-own adventure stories via Twitter.❗
“‘I wouldn’t say we let it drive plot points,” [“Arrow” creator/EP] Guggenheim said. “I sort of treat it as market research. This is playing, this character is resonating, this moment wasn’t so successful. … I call (fans) the extra writer in the writers room. Not always the writer we listen to, but certainly a voice.’ ❗
“‘You can’t think that you’re getting a subsection of the entire audience,’ he said. ‘You have to recognize that these are a very specific subset who have very specific opinions that they want to go online and voice, but I think with moderation it’s very helpful.'”
“‘It is thrilling to get that live feedback.'”
“A common theme of the panel was the danger of giving fans too much power in the creative process.”❗
“‘For us it’s really important that [we] really cater to the audience and make them feel like they’re involved. It makes them appreciate the things that they’re not even involved with at all even more.'”

Variety: Arrow,’ ‘Awkward’ Exec Producers, YouTubers Talk the Impact of Social Media http://bit.ly/1AFGPj9
// 10/20/2014

TorontoStar: Scandal and other shows fuelled by social media hype http://on.thestar.com/1D5iNwe
// 9/25/2014, “Ben Blatt, ABC’s executive director of digital strategy, said the show encourages actors to live-tweet and many do so every week. This year, they are experimenting with Snapchat (where videos and photos disappear after a few seconds) because that’s where young folks preside. They also shoot a lot of video and photos during production and embargo those moments until the episode airs; then they show up on places such as Instagram. ‘Fans love that inside access,’ Blatt said. ‘And we make sure they are more like smartphone photos than professional. It feels more authentic.'”

Nielson: Fast Friends: How Brands are Capturing the Attention of Social TV Audiences http://bit.ly/15LMKq6 most buzz: reality shows, celeb competition and plot-twisting dramas
// 9/15/2014

HuffPo, SL Scott: Serials Are the New Novel… http://huff.to/1x3SP6M
// 9/4/2014, “Serials feel interactive in a new way that breathes life into stories that might not work as longer novels, a lot like TV series.”❗

DigitalRoots: Digital Roots | Social Media and its Influence on Television http://bit.ly/1xU2uSK
// 8/3/2014 (year uncertain), “push for communication between product and consumer. Television just happens to be one example of how social media furthers that interaction; no longer should people look at social media as open for businesses looking for feedback on their electronic products, etc. Instead, the versatility upon which feedback cycles can be created demonstrates the indefinite permanence of social media in business models and the unclear, and perhaps exciting, future this entails.”

Jonathan Hutchinson (USydney, Jun 2014) [AU]: Measuring Social TV: How Social Media Co-creation is Expanding Participation in Public Service Screen Production [slides] http://slidesha.re/1HOAK5R
// 6/18/2014, “The process in which both parties systematically interact, learn and share information and integrate resources to jointly create value. Co-creation reduces research and development costs, increases product relevance and performance, and opens up new markets” – dr van Dyjk Antonides

Slate, Jeff Perry (actor, Scandal): How Has Social Media Impacted Scandal? http://slate.me/1tk3ie3
// 6/11/2014

HollywoodReporter: Fall TV: ABC’s ‘Agents of SHIELD,’ NBC’s ‘Blacklist’ Dominate Social Media Conversation http://bit.ly/1FBLlPq
// 5/17/2014, “Overall, ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was the top show with the most engagement out of all the networks, followed by NBC’s Blacklist and CBS’ The Crazy Ones.”

“Networked Insights, a social media analytics technology company that has worked with MTV, CBS and Samsung, has ranked the new shows dominating the social network landscape (Facebook, blogs, forums, comments, but mostly Twitter) — and the ones that aren’t — with the help of its marketing platform SocialSense. The company measured sheer volume, viewer sentiment and acceleration to determine its findings.

“Additionally, Networked Insights broadcast its “buy”/”don’t buy” recommendations for the networks’ new shows during upfront week with its “Operation Outsmart the Upfronts” campaign, a bold move that could have an effect on advertisers’ sentiments.”

❥ Variety: ‘The Blacklist’ Producers Pay Close Attention to Social Media http://bit.ly/1vVlaSN but not James Spader :-(
// 4/3/2014
“But what is Red’s motivation for turning over the ‘Blacklist’? Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
“Fox gave a few scenarios. ‘Is he doing this out of some selfish motivation? Self-preservation? Or is he on the slow path to redemption?’
– ‘Boy, that would be disappointing,’ Spader interjected. [ oh, no! ]
– ‘I hope that’s a question we can keep alive for a long time,’ Fox said.
– ‘I think the bad guys are good,’ Tawfiq said.”
Trust Dembe. Dembe is the Keystone” [and not the KXL kind]

NYT: Web Fiction, Serialized and Social http://nyti.ms/1wC9hw2
// 3/24/2014, in the past, “in general the more successful the writer, the greater the distance between the author and the reader. The writer was an imperial figure, an artist who dwelt on Mount Olympus. The reader was nowhere.
“Wattpad eliminates any remaining distance between creator and consumer. The reader has been elevated to somewhere between the writer’s best friend and his ideal editor, one who offers only adoration.
“Sometimes her fans help shape the story, like softening her presentation of one character’s speech impediment.
“‘Wattpad lets readers add to the story and gives them so many more access points. It’s more visceral.'”

💙💙 ChicagoTrib, Chris Jones: TV storytelling could change our stories for good http://trib.in/1wHPkno
// 3/2014, These are, people like to say, the golden days of television, which really means we are seeing a renaissance of serialized, long-form drama: “House of Cards,” “True Detective,” “Mad Men,” “Girls” and on and on. This form is hardly new — you can trace the origins of serialized drama back to at least the 17th century — but its renewed impact on creativity in general, and top-tier dramatic writing in particular, is only just beginning to be felt.

I even sense a new frustration among audiences with single movies or plays, which have to start their storytelling from scratch and that complete their narrative arc in one fell swoop, offering only an act of viewership that does not require the thrill of the binge. Single stories are starting to feel minor. These days, all the cool kids are penning, and watching, long-form serials.❗

The last time this happened — in 19th century England, after Charles Dickens figured out the lucrative pull of narrative serialization — the novel changed for good.❗

Some of these scribes knew how their story was going to end before the audience had read Chapter One, for they already written the whole shebang. Others evolved their yarns as they went, responding to the their readers in something like real time. They also quickly learned the importance of both several plot strands moving at once, and of having emotionally resonant central characters.❗ With his Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit and the like, Dickens was a master of this skill, creating a bevy of long-lived malcontents upon whose fate an audience would hang with the rigor they now apply to the doings of Don Draper. And Dickens certainly came to see the pleasures of not needing to explain himself, or the fruits of his imagination, every time. He liked the money, too.

You could argue that today’s serialization mode is, per the Netflix model, very much on the consumer’s terms, not the publisher’s, which has changed the very nature of serialization, perhaps almost beyond recognition or even that definition. Maybe these serialized cable dramas will end up repeating themselves one too many times and lose their centrality in the cultural conversation. Maybe. Things change fast these days.

But to a large extent, long-form drama is in vogue now precisely because we are consuming ever smaller chunks of so much else in the cultural marketplace. Long-form is the antidote to the ubiquitous viral video….

Think about it: it is easier to write the dialogue and subsidiary action to a pre-ordained plot. Some writers, of course, need the plot to be their own. But others do their best work when they do not have that particular burden. In fact, by requiring a different skill-set, these shows are revealing sides of former playwrights we never saw in the theater.❗

It all does beg the question: why is that increasingly famous TV writers’ room (no longer so populated by anonymous figures these days) not often used to write movies or plays?

If the success of some of its products is a guide, it’s actually a more efficient division of creative labor. One person has an idea, guides the ship and worries about the big picture. Others fire off individual sections of the plot, or focus on dialogue or little touches of character. ❗ There is no inherent reason why this should be the modus operandi only of serials.

Of course, teams long have shown up in dramatic writing. Plenty of ghostwriters have saved Hollywood movies. Plenty of evidence shows that William Shakespeare had his writers’ room, too; it’s just that his friends didn’t get any credit in the First Folio.❗ Now, they’d all have agents, a demand for executive-producer credit and, maybe a career within which they’ll never have to come up with a complete story again.

Qwiklit, Phil James: 8 Reasons Why Social Media Is Decimating Art and Literature http://bit.ly/1B3NhiB
// 3/8/2014, “The problem is that visual art is not necessarily meant to please the eye. Oftentimes, it is supposed to be uncomfortable. Whole artistic movements have succeeded on the principle of going against popular aesthetics. Unfortunately, social media prevents us from working with the pieces. We either accept it or reject it immediately.”
“In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey claims that popular cinema compels the viewer to be voyeuristic, to sexualize and objectify whoever is on the other side of the camera lens. This is known as ‘The Male Gaze'”
“Like a casino with no clocks or a restaurant designed to make us hungrier, social platforms are built to motivate consumption. This is a naturally unhealthy environment to present works that are supposed to inspire critical thinking and deep contemplation.”
“Unfortunately, social media actually motivates product design, especially items that further promote the consumption of technology.”
“art is now competing with media that is produced to briefly wow for cheap validation, and this collusion is creating a false binary–that art and literature, in their erudition and complexity, represent the ivory-tower mentality of higher economic classes”
“growing internet audience that is also craving likes and retweets for their responses; complex analysis and unique readings will rarely receive any validation, but more often than not, memes and witty responses become a more popular method of dialogue”
“Companies like Netflix are producing shows that accommodate your interests, but what they are failing to do is challenge the status-quo. Art cannot exist within an echo chamber.”
“Solution [among others]: Art and literature need to become public events completely outside of social networks. Just as the Romantic poets looked back to nature at the beginning of the 19th century for wisdom, we must use physical space to host physical works of art. Similarly, we must continue to promote events that allow for intimate conversation with authors, poets and other speakers.” ❗

❥ NYT Bookends, Adam Hirsh/Mohsin Hamid: Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels? http://nyti.ms/1tzTYIC eg The Wire, The Sopranos
// 2/25/2014, “Television was so bad for so long, it’s no surprise that the arrival of good television has caused the culture to lose its head a bit. Since the debut of ‘The Sopranos’ in 1999, we have been living, so we are regularly informed, in a ‘golden age’ of television.❗ And over the last few years, it’s become common to hear variations on the idea that quality cable TV shows are the new novels. Thomas Doherty, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, called the new genre ‘Arc TV’ — because its stories follow long, complex arcs of development — and insisted that ‘at its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel.'”
“Bill Moyers was echoing what has become conventional wisdom when he said that what Dickens was ‘to the smoky mean streets of Victorian London, David Simon is to America today.'”
“Televised evil, for instance, almost always takes melodramatic form: Our anti-heroes are mobsters, meth dealers or terrorists.”❗
“Spectacle and melodrama remain at the heart of TV, as they do with all arts that must reach a large audience in order to be economically viable.”❗
———
“Movies have always seemed to me a much tighter form of storytelling than novels, requiring greater compression.”
“In its near limitlessness, TV rivals the novel.”
“television has made enormous leaps in the last decade or so.”
”
“Ask novelists today whether they spend more time watching TV or reading fiction and prepare yourself, at least occasionally, to hear them say the unsayable.”
“In the words of the Canadian writer Sheila Heti: “Now that there are these impeccable serial dramas, writers of fiction should feel let off the hook more — not feel obliged to worry so much about plot or character, since audiences can get their fill of plot and character and story there, so novelists can take off in other directions, like what happened with painting when photography came into being more than a hundred years ago.”❗
“Television is not the new novel. Television is the old novel.”

“Television gives us something that looks like a small world, made by a group of people who are themselves a small world. The novel gives us sounds pinned down by hieroglyphs, refracted flickerings inside an individual.
“Sufis tell of two paths to transcendence: One is to look out at the universe and see yourself, the other is to look within yourself and see the universe. Their destinations may converge, but television and the novel travel in opposite directions.”

HuffPo, MW Jacobs: Social Media and Literature ultra-minimalism http://huff.to/1tzYeYL
// 2/18/2014

Technorati: How viewer social media control is the future of television http://bit.ly/14DN0qW
// 1/19/2014, Opposite Worlds “The problem today is that we have all of this incredibly rich discussion online, but that rarely, if ever, makes its way back into the show: people tell us online what they want to have happen, but the show proceeds in isolation from that.”
“It’s easy to imagine a not-too-distant future in which this technology is expanded to all forms of television, including scripted shows, and where a show’s fans can drive major plot developments❗– if enough fans recommend two characters teaming up, the script writers will make it happen. I think social media presents some really incredible opportunities for television to become so much more interactive and in doing so, in making the characters respond and react to the online discussion, television will become even more ‘real’ and more compelling, as shows literally come to life.

TheGuardian [UK]: Has Twitter given birth to a new literary genre? http://bit.ly/13J3BYX
// 1/10/2014

TheConverstion: Will TV series go the way of Charles Dickens? http://bit.ly/14aOPu3
// 12/30/2013, “Once a story was going to be consumed at the pace of the reader, who held the complete novel in her hands, the need for contrived cliffhangers at the end of every chapter was reduced”❗

HuffPo, John Branch: Reading the New TV http://huff.to/1xYAWgw
// 8/7/2013, “Eventually, the idea of doing more and better dawned on the creators of TV shows. Since sometime in the ’90s, the most ambitious of these men and women have been charting the path of characters, situations, and themes across multiple story arcs (episode, season, entire run) and employing what writer Steven Berlin Johnson concisely called ‘complex, multithreaded storytelling.”❗
“Everything Bad Is Good for You, which argued that the best TV series and video games don’t dull your mind but cultivate it. In a way, these shows are the new novels

AmericanReader, David Auerbach: The Cosmology of Serialized Television http://bit.ly/1FEDhkq
// 2013, undated, first comment “two years ago”, “… how serialized storytelling has evolved on television, and how prestigious shows habitually promise viewers more than they can possibly deliver.❗ They trumpet themselves as Art and Social Commentary in order to obscure their more fundamental structural flaws. The result is inferior Product.
“The more creative effort is devoted to advancing the mythology rather than creating immediate moments of creative worth, the less aesthetic value the work has, since the effort is being devoted to something with no structural integrity.”
“This leads to cognitive dissonance among fans, who are attached to the mythology but eventually realize they’ve been tricked, as well as among the writers themselves, who generally don’t like thinking that their work actually requires them to avoid artistic merit.”❗
“While lucrative, the mythology was an utter straitjacket for writers, who had to hew so strictly to almighty “continuity” that storylines became exercises in threading dozens of needles carelessly placed by their predecessors.”
“Again, the problem of mythology entirely relates to ends. As long as there is no imagined or projected end to a work, then any aspect of that work devoted only to advancing toward that end is artistically worthless, since it is intrinsically in bad faith.”
“So what if the end is planned for?”
“I think it hangs together better than it has any right to. I do feel good that the process I always believed in and really defended—about feeling the story instinctively as you go through it, and not being tied to, “Oh, we know exactly how it’s going to end up”—that that was true. We were able to get there and could say, “We’ve been making this mosaic, and now we just need to put the final touches on it and we’ll have a complete picture.” There’s loose thread and things that don’t quite work, but I think that’s in the nature of almost any show. By and large, I think we did a pretty good job of it.”
“The problem is that the Big Crunch model doesn’t account for the changing commercial agenda of a show.” [Four steps]
Impact of historical events
Steady strate, Expansionary, Big Crunch
“Mad Men: Weiner seems to acknowledge that the medium has forced him to promise what he cannot deliver: a coherent story. So he hates himself for lying, and he hates the audience for being dumb enough to believe him—and then trying to hold him to it. This is the mantra of the self-loathing hack: ‘I can’t believe people buy this shit!.'”
“Perhaps the most dangerous effect of the Big Crunch mentality has been to make television creators think of themselves as auteurs, to convince them that in spite of the massive interference with their work, they can somehow create a work of aesthetic integrity and sociological insight even if they don’t know where it’s going.
Comment: Calvin, the BBC produces shows in a vastly different context than Hollywood. A BBC show can shut down after six episodes because everybody involved can get a job the next week on a different BBC show.
Stepxxxz: here are two problems with network and cable franchises. One is that most of the creators arent very good writers, really. They sell and market a concept (Sopranos…which changed gears radically after the opening two episodes, interestingly) and secondly the system, the advertisors etc, wont allow for a gradual build up of narrative. They must hook audiences very quickly.” …
“Without the huge pressures of US nielson ratings and the immediate influence of marketing people and sponsors… The hit show in the US is faced with simply keeping up ratings. Nobody gives a shit at all about coherence or structure or resolution.”
“There are no coherent US franchises. None. It’s not possible within this system.”
Elq1973 “I believe that it’s possible to do both an artistic work, create strong characters and grow them, build a good mythology, AND resolve its mysteries with logical answers. But it needs planning from the get go, and a contract with the TV studio that guarantees the requested-by-the-writers number of episodes & seasons (e.g. 3 seasons with 12 episodes each sounds like a good middle ground for all this). I think that if the writers have such a heads-up 1 year before the show even starts shooting, they can plan their episodes and story to not contain any fillers, stretch-outs, etc.
“…So basically, what I’m trying to say, is that the main problem is the business side of things. It requires a TV studio that wants quality TV that stays in your mind for years (just like a good book, that has a beginning, a middle and a solid end). The writers would follow to write something like it. But if the studios just go season-by-season, always scared about their finances that compromises any artistic outcome, then there’s no hope to fix this situation.”

DukeChronicle, Anthony Hagouel: Duke program blends neuroscience and humanities http://bit.ly/1CycjoI
// 11/9/2012

UCLA, Meg Sullivan: ‘The Social Network’: Charles Dickens wrote the script http://bit.ly/14zOJgd
// 1/17/2012, “Through such novels as ‘The Old Curiosity Shop,’ ‘Little Dorrit,’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Great Expectations,’ Dickens helped his readers synthesize and understand the historic shift engulfing them.”
“‘Dickens grasped the promise that the public transport revolution held in networking people together,’ said [Jonathan] Grossman, an associate professor of English at UCLA. ‘He cheered this revolution. He helped us to imagine and understand a networked world. He also lamented the tragedies that this networking wrought…..'”
“‘Dickens’ stories are often about the crisscrossing connectedness,❗ the density of your relations to other people — literally as a human body intersecting with others across wider and wider expanses, which of course is what a transportation system accomplishes,’ Grossman said.”
“Even the authorial voice that Dickens chooses is affected by his appreciation of this new sense of community, Grossman contends.”

TheAtlantic, Alexis Madrigal: Literary Writers and Social Media: A Response to Zadie Smith http://theatln.tc/1D5gGsa
// 11/8/2010

JustTV: The Wire and the Serial Procedural: An Essay in Progress http://bit.ly/14gw9cr
// 5/22/2007, “For many critics, bloggers, fans, and even creator David Simon himself, The Wire is best understood not as a television series, but as a ‘visual novel.’❗ As a television scholar, this cross-media metaphor bristles – not because I don’t like novels, but because I love television.”
“The Wire is a masterpiece of television, not a novel that happens to be televised, and thus should be understood, analyzed, and celebrated on its own medium’s terms.”
“The Wire’s novelistic qualities are most directly linked to its storytelling structure and ambitions. As Simon attests in frequent interviews and commentary tracks, he is looking to tell a large sweeping story that has traditionally been the purview of the novel…” “The model, modestly left unspoken, might be War and Peace, a vast narrative containing fifteen ‘books,’ each subdivided into at least a dozen chapters and released serially over five years” ❗
“‘Novelistic’ is an apt term for describing this storytelling structure, as we rarely dive into a novel expecting the first chapter to typify the whole work as a television pilot is designed to do—Simon emphasizes how the show requires patience to allow stories to build and themes to accrue, a mode of engagement he suggests is more typical of reading than viewing.”
“…by the time television emerged in the mid-20th century, the literary novel’s cultural role as among the most elite and privileged storytelling formats was firmly ensconced. As the most popular and culturally influential form of storytelling, television has usurped the role the early novel played as a lowbrow mass medium threatening to corrupt its readers and demean cultural standards.”
“By asserting The Wire as a televised novel, Simon and critics are attempting to legitimize and validate the demeaned television medium by linking it to the highbrow cultural sphere of literature. … “But I would contend that emphasizing the literary facets of The Wire obscures many of its virtues and qualities, setting it up to fail when measured by the aesthetic aims of the novel.”
“Novels typically probe the interior lives of its characters,❗ both through plots that center upon character growth and transformations, and through the scope of narration that accesses characters’ thoughts and beliefs.” “But the way The Wire portrays its characters is distinctly not novelistic—we get no internal monologues or speeches articulating characters’ deep thoughts, no sense of deep character goals or transformations motivating the dramatic actions. Character depth is conveyed through the texture of everyday life on the job, a set of operating systems that ultimately work to dehumanize the characters at nearly every turn.” ⋙ compare to Underwood ❗
As Simon writes: “‘The Wire has… resisted the idea that, in this post-modern America, individuals triumph over institutions. The institution is always bigger. It doesn’t tolerate that degree of individuality on any level for any length of time.'” “In the show’s character logic, the institution is the defining element in a character’s life, externalized through practices, behaviors, and choices that deny individuality and agency,❗ a storytelling structure that seems contrary to core principles of the literary novel.”
“The Game. ““The game” is the overarching metaphor for urban struggle,❗ as everyone must play or get played—as Marla Daniels tries to warn her husband Cedric, ‘the game is rigged – you can’t lose if you don’t play'” “in today’s media environment, videogames are the go-to medium for portraying complex systems. As Janet Murray writes, “the more we see life in terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent it—and the less we can dismiss such organized rule systems as mere games” “The show offers a game that resists agency, a system impervious to change, yet the players keep playing because that is all they know how to do.”
“…The Wire’s procedural detail shows official systems that cannot match the discipline, creativity, and flexibility of criminals,…,” ⋙ ⋙ institutions v individual apprx fate v man in classics ❗

“On The Wire, the ongoing investigations rarely close and never resolve with any ideological certainties or reassurances, heroic victories or emotional releases.”
“Many of television’s complex narratives employ a puzzle structure to motivate viewer interest, inspiring fans to watch shows like Lost, Veronica Mars, and Heroes with a forensic eye for details to piece together the mysteries and enigmas encoded within their serial structures. Despite being centered on crimes and detectives, The Wire offers almost no mysteries—we typically know who the criminals are and what they did.”

ENotes: Eighteenth-Century British Periodicals http://bit.ly/1y0R1SX
// Undated, [Search name to read without using eNotes app]
News was only allowed from one source [!] “As a result, other late seventeenth-century periodicals, including The Observer (1681) and The Athenian Gazette (1691), either supplemented the news with varied content, such as political commentary, reviews, and literary works, or provided specialized material targeting a specific readership.”
“Another innovation brought about by the periodical was the publication of letters to the editor, which permitted an unprecedented degree of interaction between author and audience.”
“Addison and Steele and other editors of the eighteenth century saw their publications as performing an important social function and viewed themselves as moral instructors and arbiters of taste. In part these moralizing and didactic purposes were accomplished through the creation of an editorial voice or persona, such as Isaac Bickerstaff in the Tatler, Nestor Ironside in the Guardian, and, most importantly, Mr. Spectator in the Specator.”
“In addition, celebrated figures from Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Mark Twain have acknowledged the impact of the eighteenth-century periodical, particularly the Specator, on their development as writers and thinkers.”

==========

🔴 E. Social Media and Co-Creation

💙💙 WPCarey: Research: Transformative: Social media throughout the firm http://bit.ly/1z4JLBE
// 11/5/2014, “Businesses will see social media as more than a way to get things sold. It’s also a way to get things done, he says.”
“At the center of Gu’s recent research is Kaggle.com, a crowdsourcing site that challenges IT experts around the world to vie for the best predictive analytics solution to big, knotty questions.”
“‘If you don’t have external participation, you won’t have new knowledge coming in,’ Gu says.” ❗
“Gu found that firm-generated tweets drove product sales, but firm-generated Facebook postings had no effect on sales whatsoever.”

FastCompany: Marketing to millennials: the rise of content co-creation http://bit.ly/1y9pZrP
// 11/4/2014, advertising

SwitchAndShift: 5 Rules to Avoid a Collaboration Hangover http://bit.ly/1w6dtIK
// 10/22/2014

Carabiner: Social Media’s Role in Product Design and Development http://bit.ly/1AqMLtM
// 9/17/2014, vs focus groups for upfront design

AIS: How Companies Can Modify R&D for Integrating Social Media into New Product Development [pdf] http://bit.ly/1HCMng0 13p
// 6/5/2014, “Collaboration with the customers through social media didn’t come unnoticed. There was a huge need for that. Traditional market research methods were not able to represent target market. Moreover, customers’ presence online made a possibility for creating communication tools, and starting to interact with them.”

DeloitteU: Social Activation: Tech Trends 2014 http://bit.ly/1AqO4cg
// 2/21/2014

MDS (2013): Thriving in a Social Media World of Continuous Consumer Input http://on.tcs.com/1us3EOF
TCS (2013): Mastering Digital Feedback: How the Best Consumer Companies Use Social Media [pdf] http://on.tcs.com/1vxdhke 136p
“There had already been significant research by other firms about how consumer
companies were using social media to market their offerings and improve their brand
reputations. But we wanted to go beyond that – to know how many companies were
using public social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn
for such purposes as:
n Improving their current products and services
n Generating and testing ideas for new products and services
n Bolstering customer service
n Identifying production and distribution flaws
n Making other vital changes to their products and the processes that supported them”

USAToday: Social media is reinventing how business is done http://usat.ly/1yyeSZO
// 5/16/2012, “Dell says the process produces more detailed feedback than traditional focus groups, and builds links to an important group of customers”