Yesterday Becca and Charlie hosted Tricky Nick Sylvester in their CyberOne class in order to discuss “Active Participation in the Media.”
It’s an interesting conversation, raising a number of points every good reader should consider (and that means YOU). Nick speaks well, students don’t let him off easy, and Becca keeps our eyes on the prize.
You can gawk watch the (Quicktime) video of the class in two parts: first | second
I recommend it. If nothing else, one gets a stronger sense of Nick’s voice.
All the better to appreciate the next turn he takes.
Interesting… I assume all concerned are aware of ‘The Day Today/’Brass Eye’ and the work of Chris Morris?
Both were British Media satire shows from the early/mid 90s, prempting the likes of Ali G (spoof celebrity interviews) and the Daily Show (News-talk pastiche) which were the subject of major controversy due to the fact that a sizeable amount of viewers thought that the content was genuine.
Essential stuff IMO.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Brass-Eye-Christopher-Morris/dp/B000066NT9
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Day-Today-Disc-Set/dp/B000171RU4/ref=pd_sbs_d_h__1/202-7593071-2629457?ie=UTF8
No, I don’t think all concerned are aware, so thanks for the tip, Droid.
I think it’s important to get a sense of the longstanding history of this sort of practice (as when a student mentions parody/satire more generally), though I also like Rebecca’s point that the inherently untrustworthy (?) nature of the internet might encourage readers to be more discerning regardless of obvious, or not so obvious, cues.
Ah – just assumed he might be better known than he (obviously) is over your side of the water.
Hes practically an Icon in the UK, and his LP on Warp ‘Blue Jam’ has increased his exposure, but I guess brass eye and TDT are still ‘cult’ classics… Regaring the inherent dodginess of internet content, it is fair to say that morris does the exact opposite, and hijacks THE most trusted form of media from whcih to broadcast his satire – but it is precisely this parodying of the trappings of TV news (convoluted intros/CG segments and pointless graphs etc…) that convinces the unobservant viewer. Interesting that Morris’ comedy career started as a result of being fired from ITV for putting make up onto disaster victims…
Anyway – hes the original and best TV media satirist, and Im sure several theses have been written on his work already, but the 2 DVDs above really are essential viewing for anyone in the field – I dont know how theyll appear to a transatlantic audience 10 years after the fact, but at the time, they were utterly convincing and extremely funny. Theres a lot of good stuff in the Amazon comments if you want more info.
some things do not compute. “moral weight?” the notion that dude self-identifies as crusader is a little distressing. he was kinda more on point about breeeeport as a media oddity than he was on the schwarzenegger issue, mainly because the latter dealt with someone’s actual life, which he was only half taking seriously. however, if he believes that crusading against trivia as news is novel, then he’s really deluded about media criticism and people who take it very seriously.
along those lines, this crusade is entirely undemocratic in its solipsism and narcissism. and “more violent or real dissonance” is some next level authenticity psychobabble. [and lol @ the idea that the new york times could grow a brain, not just being agnostic on important questions, in public, everyday.]
ugh, not gonna even watch these!
hey jt, all really great stuff you’re bringing up. i just wrote to wayne about this actually, how the first hour i felt like people were happy to let the pieces be what they were, i.e. humorous plays on new media and manipulation of, etc. but then people started wanting a point, like a nicely summarized worldview, and i obviously don’t have one. i tried to connect the piece’s dots as much as i could for people, which i agree led to overstating things, and i found myself rubbing up against a thing i hate: the boxing, shipping, processing and filing of events into quantifiable information, who what where when why and how. they wanted the work, in toto, to be “about” something and i don’t know what exactly that entails, or whether i’d want it so cleanly put anyway.
someone after the class asked me about the “moral weight” stuff, the irony in using the term, etc. and i think the distinction i’d make is between ethical and moral, where maybe some pieces toe the line ethically (hence “violent”) but hopefully in service of an idea. i mean not all the time. there’s not much to the game saying he’s his favorite game. but i don’t think there’s much of a crusade to me admitting that sometimes i’m looking for more than laughs.
I found that comment about the NYT pretty funny as well… whats that Chomsky quote? Something along the lines of Pravda being more informative than the NYT, because it’s readers KNEW it was all propaganda, wheras NYT readers seem to think that they’re getting ‘the official truth’, so they unquestioningly accept its content no matter how ludicrous…
Perhaps feeling that my own very anti-mass-media, pro-Nick stance crowded the more conservative views out of the debate, some students have continued the discussion about Nick’s work on our course wiki. Check it out.
Unsurprisingly, I’m not really with Blackmail on his comment. Take the Schwarzenegger piece. Suppose I were Googling for that transcript obsessively and I finally turned up Nick’s piece. I would go to it, I would read a little way, I would find that it was not the real transcript. I would (maybe) be pissed, and I would wonder why someone did that. If I were using my brain, I would see the point Nick was making: it is crazy that someone who became famous playing a heartless executioner should be in the position of choosing whether a person (who arguably actually was a heartless executioner for some part of his life) deserved to live. This certainly takes the issues of life and execution seriously. It just doesn’t honor the desire of the reader to “get what he’s looking for”. Given how much time I spend searching through hits that aren’t what I want on Google, I’m not that concerned about getting something fake–not really too unusual on the web, is it?
And is it undemocratic? I don’t think so. Undemocratic would be taking away the ability of others to speak, not giving your own point of view. Nick doesn’t claim to be the final word on anything. Quite the opposite, really.
Is Nick on a crusade? Most certainly not. He picks things to write about (i imagine), probably mostly because he thinks he can make them funny and sometimes because they make another point, perhaps something with moral weight, perhaps something about “trend-busting”. He just uses some devices for making his points that journalists have made the collective decision not to use. They manipulate truth by selectively choosing and framing facts in their narratives and claiming objectivity. He does it (from time to time, when it serves his point) by not letting the reader rely on any facts so that he/she has to determine the value of the narrative based on the ideas rather than facts. The pieces of his writing that do this intentionally undermine any assertion of objectivity.
It is up to us as readers to decide what type of writing and reporting is valuable to us. For my part, I’m with droid. It makes my stomach turn to think that people actually believe that the mass media is trustworthy and is providing truth. I’m not saying journalists should give up the quest to provide facts and truth, I just think they should put it right up front that they are not and never will be objective. We have the power as readers to bring our critical faculties to bear on the information we take in. We should be using that to bring the news media in line, as Blackmail points out many media critics have been trying to do for a long time. We should also consider using that to free authors of the unattainable burden of providing us with “objectivity” that we can just absorb without analysis. Nick’s writing forces his readers to do that because it is self-consciously and obviously unreliable. I think we should thank him.
I am surprised how many defend Nick, when at the heart he is a fake journalist caught “fake journalizing” in a real publication. He f*ed up and now the spin is Nick As Crusader. I am atonished how many people can get behind something when hipness is attached.
Lame.
So I guess my question then is who’s going to trendfuck truthiness, and what would that feel like?
[Keep in mind that I used to really feel structure, sign, play, etc. and then I got reprocessed as a sociologist, to which I attribute much of my philistinism; since The Squid and The Whale came out I’ve been possessed of an idea of an essay entitled “I Wanna Be a Philistine” but the praxis seems more alluring than the theory itself.
That said, I have been a fan of Nick’s work for some time, but this seems a bit much to ask of him in some respects, w/o offering the view of those who, in his own words, were psychically damaged by the outcome, which I don’t doubt in the least. I feel that in so many respects that despite what we’ve been given, Nick’s story still adheres to the narrative of a tragic hero, which comes off like an ironic cliche with a longstanding tradition.]
I admire anyone who can so thoroughly intellectualize laziness. The fact that he’s got a Harvard Law prof on board with this specious argument cracks me up.
Jesus fucking christ, you people, do you really actually believe that people think the mass media is objective? Bernard Goldberg’s _Bias_ was a NYT bestseller for weeks and lotsa conservative pundits have made their fortunes complaining about a lack of objectivity in the mainstream media. For fuck’s sake, the NYT has a “public editor” now, which pretty much explicitly acknowledges the fact that they fail to be accurate and honest 100% of the time. Please stick your head out of the bubble for a second and stop assuming anyone who’s not currently on a college campus lacks the ability to think critically, especially on as basic an issue that’s gotten so much public attention like the media’s non-objectivity.
There are lots of interesting ways to look at Nick’s case but this is not one of them.
It surprises me how venomous a response Nick’s work — or a discussion of it — continues to elicit. My own appreciation of what Nick does has nothing to do with hipness, it has to do with humor and critical commentary. To call what he does “lazy” is to mismeasure it, to expect the stuff of tried-and-true reportage rather than crafty critique. (Plus, it elides the fact that the quotation that got Nick in trouble was not fabricated out of “laziness” but because it was taking place in an imaginary universe, if regrettably peopled by real people who don’t want to be Googled and misunderstood.) But this is all beside the point. I don’t think that I or Becca or even Nick are pretending that he is a hero or crusader. That’s a red herring (and probably nothing but an envious preoccupation).
The main question that Nick’s work raises — and the piece on “The Game” is not the best example of this, though the reaction to it does expose a great deal about assumptions and hypocrisy — for me and B anyhow, has to do with the role of the competent reader. She stated it well enough in her comment above though, so I’ll refrain from recapitulating.
If what is at debate here is whether one should publish fabrications in a mainstream paper that purports to sell you the truth, I think we can all agree that that’s a somewhat shady move. Seems to me, though, that the real “psychic damage” to discuss here has more to do with an American public that’s overfed by media but still learning how to read. This is not about college campus myopia. (There are plenty of students — and professors — still learning to read, too.) A public editor does not make the NYT a totally trustworthy source. Any scan of the headlines on any given day will show you plenty of slant (but what it doesn’t show you is even more telling). And George Bush in the White House (twice!) is enough evidence for me that people need to read media more critically.
(ps — I see that the famous gawkerites over at Idolator are linking here. That explains the bile. Sheesh, the anti-Nick mafia is not to be misunderestimated.)
Er, I didn’t say that “a public editor makes the NYT a trustworthy source,” I said that a public editor actually explicitly acknowledges that it’s not always a trustworthy source. Look, here is an actual statistic. “Attitudinally, Americans stand out from citizens of the other countries surveyed on a number of dimensions. They are the most critical of the news media’s reporting of all sides of a story; fully 69 percent disagree that the media does this. They are also significantly more inclined to disagree (46%) that the media reports news accurately; and more likely to agree (68%) that the media covers too many ‘bad news’ stories.” You have to be super willful not to acknowledge that the untrustworthiness of the media has become a truism in American public discourse.
And while it might be comforting to attribute two Bush victories to Americans bein’ stupid, it might not be particularly true.
If it provokes a strong reaction it might be because reducing interesting, complex issues of comedy, institutional pressures on writers, and truth to “other people do not see the truth, unlike me, and their eyes must be opened via subversion” is pretty intellectually lazy.
I’m not sure who’s doing that sort of reduction, Dick, except for Nick’s most strident critics. It’s one reason, I think, why Nick resists boiling down his writing to such a simple point or stance. And I certainly wouldn’t characterize my or Becca’s position that way either.
As for Americans “bein’ stupid,” it’s often difficult to come up with any other reason why so many people would vote against their own best interests. I guess selfishness can explain some of that, but I still think that if people were more demanding (and not just skeptical) in their relationship to mass media, then we might have a more “interesting, complex” public conversation about all sorts of things.
I think Nick’s writing is funny, interesting, mostly on point, and generally worth reading (though I kind of disagree with his characterization of “The Game”??), but on some of the wider ramifications being discussed here I am, uh, feelin a little Dick, his datapoints if not his exact sentiments –
the ‘actual statistic’, the point that distrust of the journalistic estabilshment is already widespread and bipartisan, is relevant, if not totally… true? I think that the *idea* of distrusting the media is pretty ingrained into the whole vibe of America, a close cousin of the value that’s traditionally placed on distrusting the government – but it seems to me that most people, myself included, actually believe pretty much everything they read/see, or at least everything they read that confirms their own beliefs and sense of self (and, obv I hope, ideological myopia is also evenly distributed across the political spectrum), and people actually trust government to do an insane amount of things that it shouldn’t and/or isn’t capable of doing. we’re much more gullible than we think –
– but, collectively, and not paradoxically, I think we’re much smarter and critical than we are individually, and that we generally give ourselves credit for. if I can be a little loose in my language here, I’d say that ‘truthiness’ is an emergent property of systems of information that increases as the amount of information and diversity of perspectives increases. the universe of media consumers and media producers is larger and more diverse than it’s ever been, and the rate of growth is increasing. the fact that this is perceived in a wide range of polemical ways by different actors (elitists sense a ‘dumbing down’, lefties see ‘corporatization’, conservatives see ‘moral decay’, etc) gives a hint as to the real breadth of the phenomena, as does the fact that all these inevitably biased sources are increasingly forced to acknowledge the breadth of perspectives on an issue, even when these perspectives conflict with their bias. the media of the past may seem more authoritative or reliable, but in reality it encompassed a narrower range of opinions about a much more limited, less complicated idea of ‘the world’ than today. we’re in the midst of the biggest expansion of the global mind in history, but we’re really just starting, and it’s gonna be a long, weird, rocky ride
where am I going with this? I don’t know, I might be pointlessly nitpicking or maybe I’m just making a subtle point, but I think that the idea that a satiric avant garde will cause people to demand more from the ‘mass’ media (mild scarequotes cos it’s getting harder to make the distinction in the info age, is Drudge mass media?, etc) and elevate the level of public conversation – which, in an unspoken but I think implied subtext, is expected to lead to certain kinds of desired political changes – is too linear and teleological, too not really representive of how the infosphere functions. the media isn’t improved by making it or us smarter, more critical, or more demanding so much as it is improved by adding more and more diverse and more easily-accessed collections of biased, misinformed idiots to the mix (present company included).
basically, I think the issues of journalistic/internet credibility reliability etc etc that Nick’s writing raises are interesting and stylistically satisfying as a particularly knowing representation of our cultural moment, which is kind of all I’m ever looking for in reading anyway – but the idea of it having this kind of directly oppositional, cryto-political subversive relationship to the larger mediasphere, which is already rife with similar examples of cultural self-awareness and is consumed by ever-savvier readers/watchers, seems more teleological and less post-modern than the actual ontolo-and-epistomologies manifested in the writing itself
Well put, John. And I think Nick would definitely agree with you on that last paragraph. I’ll confess to rooting for a role for the vanguard — as generators as well as filters of content — in all of this media messiness. But maybe that’s just b/c I’m just a hopeless romantic (or a hopeful artist/critic).
I think there’s definitely, self-evidently a role for the ‘vanguard’ – just not the kind of historically privileged, special role that it often implicitly assumes, nor with the kind of linear relationship between expression and reception, the ‘I am going to express this idea with this technique and it will make people realize this larger idea’ mode that is also implicit in this model of cultural progress. we are all blind men copping feels on a very large elephant, and while some may make better or worse use of what they can tell about the whole from this ear or this tail, no one is really seeing the whole picture, there is no real ‘outside the box’ position that can definitively critique the whole. Nick’s writing doesn’t presume this, but the ‘vanguard’ narrative that may or may not be implied here does –
As you know, j.f., I do appreciate your anti-teleological orientation. As you also know, I’m an unreconstructed (and at this point, unapologetic) sonuvagun.
I was really amazed at how no one could really grasp what Nick was implying implicitly throughout his speech. It’s tempting to mention how the questions were misguided at times and at others self-promotional, but that’s as irrelevant to the point as where they were trying steer the topic of conversation. This made me respect Nick’s fidgeting points a lot more. More and more the important news that is beamed to us (through the internet, print media, or television) could be mistaken for satire. Look at the major stories and issues in America, what really matters to the majority of people? For weeks the stories of Anna Nicole’s child’s death and Foley IMing little boys have been as big a story as a looming nuclear threat. Is it a joke? The fact that objective news can be misaligned as actual news is where Nick begins his work. He preys on this new escapist media, where people only pretend to care about issues or being the first to be in-the-know about buzz topics. What Nick does is give these people their news in the same palatable format, only with a twist, sometimes subtle-sometimes blatant. The perfect example of it his Village Voice article. The fact that the article was made up didn’t matter, it convinced people along the way that is was real and along the way exposed the much larger issue at hand. The topic was irreverent and unimportant, but it was given front page treatment, the same could be said for many “real” front page articles. Everyone reading the article was happy enough trudging along, getting their hot new trend information and blurb of information to gossip with their friends about over lunch before the next bit of fluff “real news” pushed it out. Did it really matter it was made up? I think that’s indirectly what Nick’s article brings into question. The person in the class asking if it would be OK if a journalist at the New York Times could drop his objectivity and validity to pursue his artist endeavors as Nick has done. To ask that question is absurd, Nick is not posing as a highly credible important news reporter who is attempting to mislead the people. What Nick is doing is experimenting in a new form of satire, not one that can be immediately dismissed upon reading a red starred warning upon entering a website or article, but one that isn’t entirely noticeable upon first glance. When your guard is down and you mistake irreverent satirical fallacy for actual news, isn’t that a bigger issue than if a name checks out? I think that’s what Nick is getting at. The made up issues and facts he spouts aren’t important beyond their entertainment value. The fact that people are so obsessed with meaningless facts and trends that they can’t discern fact from fiction is the ultimate point Nick makes in pointing out that the dissonance many experienced following his exposing and subsequent loss of validity wasn’t merely an expression of anger about the fact that he had cheated the readers with his article, but more so that they had bought into it all the same as if it were real or not. It’s clear that readers can handle satire when it’s labeled and packaged as such, but when they become the object that’s manipulated for the end joke-it becomes all too real and when forced to self-examine it turns into a blame game.
I don’t think people got angry at Nick Sylvester because they were heavily invested in a silly trend piece in a failing alternative weekly that noone cares about anymore.
I think they got angry because he never really copped to what he did–which was make up scenes and quotes in an article presented as factual, which is actually rather different from the interpretation and spin which is built into all journalism and discourse in general, and does nothing at all to point up the existence of that interpration–and continues to present elaborate pomo bullshit justifications for it. He gets to be semi-famous, speak at Harvard, and have seemingly intelligent people twisting themselves in knots trying to defend him. Jayson Blair got to do a book attacking the employer he fucked over. Stephen Glass got a movie made about him. It’s America: Fucking up makes you a celebrity. It’s tiresome.
I appreciate “old fashioned” values about transparency and truth and such, but I still think comparisons to Jayson Blair and company tend to miss a lot of what is great about Nick’s work (though “presented as factual” is clearly the key phrase here, despite some perhaps too subtle cues — e.g., that “The Game” would have so thoroughly corrupted the dating scenes in LA and NY is a pretty absurd premise). Such comparisons to reviled fabulists give people a quick, easy means of dismissal. But to engage with the rest of his writing, as many Voice readers had done via the “ripsters” piece and such, is to develop some sense of what is real and what is not in such articles (and to make one’s own decisions about whether it matters in certain instances).
Relevant ?
I actually happened to read the piece before it came out that parts were made up. And I remember thinking it was kind of ridiculous and being amused by it. Actually, it was one of the few entertaining things published in the Voice recently. But people write absurd trend pieces all the time, so yes, those cues were a tad ‘subtle.’
Obviously the scale of what he did doesn’t compare to Jayson Blair, who was operating on a monumental level by comparison. It was really quite trivial, and he’s more than done his time, and should be left to get on with his career quietly.
It’s just the attempt to argue that there’s something radical about making shit up that’s so frustrating. The idea that there is no objectivity is pretty crusty at this point, you know? American culture has been kicking that one around fairly seriously for a couple of decades at least. And progressives don’t have exclusive rights to it anymore–we’re being governed by an administration that trades daily on the idea that you can reinterpret facts as you see fit, to the point of, yes, making them up.
I hear you, ofg. But again I think we’re coming down to a distortion of what was under consideration in class and what I read as subversive and vanguard implications in work like some of Nick’s more out-there, but still engaging, pieces. I wouldn’t argue that people don’t suspect the objectivity of what they read quite regularly, but I am concerned that there are a lot of ‘subtle’ forms of framing and of discourse in media of all sorts, esp ‘news’ media (or infotainment more generally, e.g., Rolling Stone to Maxim to People to Jet), which tend to pass under the radar for most readers most of the time (myself included, I’d wager, despite the vigilance with which I attempt to maintain a critical reading practice). A few more reminders of the role of the author (and not just his death), including a well-publicized scandal or two — not to mention slightly more obvious examples of the narrator’s unreliability (a modernist notion/technique before it was a pomo one) — might be just the thing.
And not necessarily to move in some putatively progressive direction, but to develop a deeper and broader kind of critical thinking and public conversation.
Some of us have certain ideas about (of hopes for) where that might lead us collectively in a political sense, but I think it would probably be a good thing at any rate. And judging by the news and the polls and the “culture wars,” I don’t think we’re there yet. I just don’t.
Not to fan the flames, but I couldn’t resist posting the following, which I read in the NYT’s Public Editor’s op-ed this morning:
“The fact that the article was made up didn’t matter”
Devin, please.
Nick Sylvester is NO Chris Morris.
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As for Americans “bein’ stupid,†it’s often difficult to come up with any other reason why so many people would vote against their own best interests. I guess selfishness can explain some of that.
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g_d!
this is atrocious postfacto rationalization, the idea of a consensual ‘mediasphere’ in which collegial _progressives_ can introject their concerned indie critiques is just like so myopic and NOT A VERY REAL DISSONANCE whatsoever.
This discussion has been far less productive than I’d hoped. I see a lot of strawmen, a lot of reductionism, a lot of talking past each other. Thanks for the “thoughts,” y’all. Keep on snarkin’.