1. The Medium is the Metaphor  Las Vegas is the metaphor for our national character (1984)  In the eighteenth century, Boston was the center of political radicalism  Donald Trump Tweet 52:15 Donald Trump Tweet

2. Vegas  Public discourse takes the form of entertainment  Politics, religion, news, athletics, education, are all show business now  In America preachers, athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, teachers and journalists are all expected to entertain

3. “Conversation”  Used metaphorically to refer to all techniques and technologies that permit people of a certain culture to exchange messages  All culture is a conversation or a corporation of conversations  Postman talks about how different forms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can come from these forms

4. William Howard Taft (27 th President) Neil Postman questions whether a 300 pound man could be president today

5. Television Gives us a conversation in images and not words

6. Metaphor  Suggests what a thing is like by comparing it to something else  Now metaphors are far more complex (other aspects come in to play)  Symbolic forms (the form contributes to the symbol)  The context in which their information is experienced  The quantity and speed of their information

7. Epistemology  the study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge.natureknowledge  How do we know things?  How do we understand something to be the truth?

8. Medium as Metaphor  Message: denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world  Our current forms of media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements.  They are more like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality

9. Media and Truth  There is no one way to know truth  A civilization’s media will determine that culture’s understanding of truth  Primitive oral cultures will value someone who has the ability to remember proverbs  A written culture may find proverbs quaint and value written word as the way to truth

10.  “Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.”  “Some ways of truth-telling are better than others, and therefore have a healthier influence on the cultures that adopt them.”

11. TV  Postman speaks highly of TV as a form of entertainment  His concern is that entertainment has become a dominant form of communication  Television influences: politics, education, religion, and journalism

12. Typographic Mind  Colonial mid nineteenth century  Early Americans were a literate culture  Written word is rational discourse  A written argument provides, exposition and makes points that are explained  The reader makes a judgment about whether the statements are true or false (based on supporting evidence)

13. The news of the day Comes from the telegraph And is continued through the news media Made it possible to move decontextualized information across vast distances Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist Postman agrees with McLuhan about his aphorism: the medium is the message Postman agrees that the clearest way to see through a culture is to look at its tools of conversation (TV, Advertising, Telegraph) William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's electric telegraph ("needle telegraph") from 1837

14. The Telegraph and the News of the Day  “Peek a boo world”  The telegraph (and later forms of media) bring instantaneous information that was no longer limited by geographic distance  Society became less driven by the understanding of context  The news of the day brings us irrelevant information divorced from its context.  The deliberate process of rational discourse began to break down

15. Media as Epistemology  “the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense” according to Postman  This is due to entertainment becoming necessary in all forms of communication  Epistemology is concerned with the origins and nature of knowledge  Entertainment/Communication is a part of that origin--nature

16. There is no universal way to know truth, but rather that a civilization will identify truth largely based on its forms of communication.

17. primitive oral culture  great stock in a man who remembers proverbs, since truth is passed on through such stories

18. culture of the written word  Will find oral proverbs quaint  The rationality of written arguments would be considered superior to a proverb

19. Television  limited our discourse to where all of our serious forms of discussion have turned into entertainment. Television has influenced the way we live off the screen.  His examples: Religion, politics, journalism

20. Metaphors that Resonate  Athens=intellectual excellence  Hamlet=brooding indecisiveness

21. Every medium of communication has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large” --A medium has the power to fly beyond that context into new and unexpected ones, because of the way it directs us to organize our minds and integrate our experience of the world The medium of TV and also of Twitter can lead us to believe that Donald Trump should be consulted on issues that are not in keeping with his qualifications

22. Medium of TV  Creates new forms of truth-telling  The epistemology of TV is inferior to a print based one (according to Postman)  Amusement (and pleasure) is how TV communicates  (contrast to Linda Williams and David Simon)

23. Emotional Power of TV  Emotional power so great that it could arouse sentiment against the Vietnam War or against Racism  We must be careful in praising or condemning a medium because the future may hold surprises for us  Enter Linda Williams and her writing in “On the Wire” and the use of emotion to point to injustice

24. Literate Culture  Common Sense by Thomas Paine published 1776  Popularity of that book close to an event like the Superbowl today  Different classes were all interested in reading about a variety of subjects  Printed matter was all that was available  American was founded by intellectuals

25. Literate Culture  Approaches the world from a rational perspective  based around a series of rational propositions that challenge a reader or audience to judge them as true or false, the entire society was founded around the idea of rational discourse.  This not to say that rational arguments made in print can’t be false—he is talking about how communication is structured in this format

26. “The Age of Exposition"  defined Typographic America  Exposition: a comprehensive description and explanation of an idea or theory.  replaced by a spectacle that prizes flash and entertainment over substance.  The message itself is less important than the entertainment value of its delivery.

27. TV  Demands rapid-fire editing, non-stop stimulation, and quick decisions rather than rational deliberation (not in the case of The Wire)  Also, the pleasure of an ending that ties everything up into a bow  No spoilers either! The pleasure of a surprise ending that ties everything up.

28. The Corner (Simon’s Editorializing)  To look backward across thirty years on the Fayette streets of this country is to contemplate disaster as a seamless chronology, as the inevitable consequences of forces stronger and more profound than the cities themselves. Cursed are we with a permanent urban underclass, an unremitting and increasingly futile drug war, and Third World conditions in the hearts of our cities, the American experiment seems, at the millennium, to have found a limit.

29. Wealth  In neighborhoods where no other wealth exists  An economic engine so powerful they will sacrifice everything to it  A “wealth generating structure”  “Lives without any obvious justification are given definition through simple, self- sustaining capitalism”

30. Purpose  They all do it not so much for the cash- which they will piss away anyhow-but for a brief sense of self  The disaster of the American rust belt  Shut down the assembly lines, devalued physical labor, and undercut the union pay scale  Some of the current addicts used to “make steel”

31. Wealth  neighborhoods where no other wealth exists (aside from the drug trade)  An economic engine so powerful “they” will sacrifice everything to it  A “wealth generating structure”  “Lives without any obvious justification are given definition through simple, self- sustaining capitalism”

32. Purpose  They all do it not so much for the cash- which they will piss away anyhow-but for a brief sense of self  The disaster of the American rust belt  Shut down the assembly lines, devalued physical labor, and undercut the union pay scale  Some of the current addicts used to “make steel”

33. The Bag  1960’s” prohibition of public drinking  Paper bags allowed police to ignore public drinking  Hiding the alcohol gave police respect  Allowed the government to ignore petty offenses

34. War on Drugs  With nothing like “the bag” on the corners, then there can’t be the same type of equilibrium of priorities  Creates alienation of underclass from the government  “rather than focus on the truly dangerous—the murders and the shootings we have indulged our furies”

35. “Statistical Charade”  Placates public  20,000 prison beds (at the time of the book) in Maryland  In Baltimore 15,000-20,000 drug arrests  Build more prisons?  “You could bankrupt the state government—and still not have enough prisons”

36. Federal vs. State Budget  Federal prisons can be built by running up the deficit  States have to balance their budgets and they carry 90% of the burden of incarcerations  For all of the arrests only a small percentage will go to jail  State budgets devote a great deal of resources to the arrests, courts, legal aids etc

37. Current Numbers  2,418,352  70 Billion spent on prisons annually

38. California numbers: 2006  Oakland spends 8,000 per student annually  CA spends 216,000 on one juvenile inmate

39. War on Drugs  Hasn’t taken back a single corner  Community folks (who vote) complain about drugs  Local government reacts  Fed and State government can’t be honest about how ineffectual the war on drugs is  Arrests and convictions for violent crimes, rapes, burglaries, and armed robbery goes down  So many resources go to generating stats about drug crime  Leads to police brutality Bad morale: hate between police and corner kids  Leads to meaningless arrests for things like loitering

40. Serial vs. The Wire  What are the similarities?  What are the differences?  Is one more informative than the other?  What information is the most relevant to you?  Which one is the most like traditional storytelling/entertainment?

41. Serial: The Alibi (Exposition)  Jay recounts the entire day of the murder  the entire case hinges on just 21 minutes  the window of time in which Hae is killed  About those 21 minutes, precious little is known.  "The Alibi," lays out the day of the murder and Adnan's alibi that would clear him of killing Hae.

42. Serial  What is the exposition?  Character exposition?  What does it say about the case?

43. Linda Williams (On the Wire)  Considers it the most serious and ambitious fictional narrative of the 21 st Century  The Wire, 2002  On the Wire, 2014

44. Praise for The Wire  Greek Tragedy (according to Simon)  Williams says this description isn’t accurate, but corresponds to the series’ excellence  First is a form of journalism and second as conventional  Conventions: seriality, televisuality, and melodrama (not necessarily the soapy kind)

45. Simon  For 12 years Simon worked as a journalist  Digging increasingly deeper for social context  When he could not deliver that context in the Baltimore Sun’s current form he wrote fictional stories based on fact  The Wire, breaks with the editorializing journalism that shows up in The Corner  Instead of telling—he shows

46. Melodrama  Melodrama doesn’t necessarily mean corny  Demands justice while tragedy reconciles us to its lack  Justice does not (in the show) consist of catching dope dealers or solving homicides or thwarting surveillance  Larger questions of what might be an equitable and just society

47. Simon vs. Williams  Simon calls The Wire a modern tragedy  Williams calls it superior serial melodrama  Tragic heroes rail against injustice but in the end they accept their fate  Melodramatic heroes suffer injustice, sometimes they overcome it by brave deeds, sometimes they show their virtue by continuing to suffer

48. The Wire  Reveals interconnected truths of many institutional failures  Drug trade  Devaluation of work  Cynical city government  Failure of education  Media that can’t report the truth on any of this

49. The Wire’s Melodrama  Operates at both the personal and institutional level  The meshing of the two allows it to picture the political and social totality of what ails contemporary urban America  It “imagines” what justice can be  (From Williams text) “No other television series or film “franchise” has accomplished this feat

50. Real Justice  We are allowed to imagine what would consist of genuine, creative work, democratic governance, education with “soft eyes”  The interest of the audience tends to lie with those who suffer the failures of justice (that use of emotions to create interest is a technique of melodrama)

51. Character  Digs deep into character without making any characters simply virtuous or evil

52. Race  Isn’t simply about racism ..and the drug trade  Decline of work  Class  Education  Media

53. “Soft Eyes”  Best police work done not with the hard surveillance, but with “soft eyes”  An alternative to prying “hard eyes”  Can take in subtle, seemingly peripheral forms of information and creatively process them to successful effect  Understanding comes from the perceptive intimate experience of a given situation

54. Ethnography  Defined as a method of nuanced qualitative research “in which fine grained daily interactions constitute the life blood of the data produced,”  In that sense Simon’s journalism at the Baltimore Sun can be described as ethnographic

55. The Corner, 1997  Employs basic methodologies of ethnography  long-term stay in the field  Observation of social relations  Observer learns rituals and habits of the culture by following selected individuals in their work and daily lives  Stayed long enough to become “fixtures on the scene”  “stand around and watch journalism”

56. Ethnography  Is a more systematic extension of stand around and watch journalism

57. Ethnographic Imaginary  Limitation of “single-site” according to George Marcus  How do you indicate the existence of the larger system that affects the micro-level of the community studied?  Ethnographers of a “single site” have recourse to a larger whole that has not been studied in so deep or systematic a fashion  The whole is more assumed than observed  Marcus calls this recourse “the fiction of the whole”

58. This usually amounts to some abstraction like: “the state” “the economy” “capitalism”

59. The “fiction of the whole” controls the narrative in which an ethnographer frames a local world Solution: undertake a “multisited” ethnography The problem: no single ethnographer has enough knowledge of enough worlds or enough time to map this constantly evolving world system Multisited ethnography may be an ideal more than a reality Imaginary “world enough and time” Ethnographer George Marcus holds out hope for an Ethnographic Imaginary

60. “I am looking for a different, less stereotyped and more significant place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledge in a variety of academic and non-academic forms…Tracing and describing the connections and relationships among sites previously thought incommensurate is ethnography’s way of making arguments and providing its own contexts of significance” --George Marcus

61.  “different, less stereotyped and more significant place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowledge”  Simon’s unique fabrication of ethnographically informed serial television melodrama speaks to this according to Williams  Makes arguments, sets up contexts that could not be managed in journalism alone  Serial television melodrama, according to Williams, makes possible the larger canvas of the ethnographic imaginary

62.  Combined factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world  With the exception of Spike Lee’s 1995 adaption of Richard Price’s novel Clockers there had never been a film that had given equal time to both sides of the law

63. Season 1  Breaks crime story conventions  Introduces a crime  A cop who pursues solving the crime  Higher ups who have no interest in solving the crime  Doesn’t stay with the cop, but moves to the complex world of the committer of the crime  Humanizes that character as well  Equally important procedures of cops and dealers are introduced

64. Comparison between two microsites  Cops who want to be good and cops who just want to bust heads  Competent drug dealers vs. ones who lack the discipline to avoid capture

65. Complexity of the Series’ microsites (plotlines)  Politics  Different police details  Education  Co-ops  War on drugs and “Hamsterdam”  Etc.

66.  The vivid and interlocking stories from so many concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords, what ethnography aspires to, and what newspaper journalism can rarely achieve  Multi-sited ethnographic imaginary that no longer needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of “the state,” “the economy”, or “capitalism” as its “fiction of the whole”  The many sites reveal a vivid picture of that “whole”

67.  Simon had to quit the business he loved and turn to television  Hasn’t fully embraced the form  Hence the comparison to Greek Tragedy?

68. John Carroll and Bill Marimow  From Baltimore Sun (criticized “The Metal Men—1995”  Said it was too much like “The Corner” and that it wasn’t hard enough on the thieves  Simon believed that newspapers should adopt a wide sociological approach  His editors thought he should be more clear and focused on right and wrong

69. Rifle-Shot Journalism  One story is small and self-contained and has good guys and bad guys  The other is about why we are where we are  About who is being left behind  Harder to report  Carroll and Marimow saw them as performing a public service that can’t reach for the larger ethnographic complexities

70. Rifle-Shot vs. Multi-Site  Rifle shot is like a half hour of episodic television whose world is necessarily narrow and whose time is limited to a half hour or hour  In contrast, Simon’s reporting presented an expanded world view  Transforms a social “type” to a human being

71. White Middle Class Editorializing  In The Corner, his editorializing has an identity  In The Wire he shows instead of telling  (Which is more truthful?)

72.  In place of the five-paragraph rifle-shot story he would eventually create a five- season cumulative serial whose primary outrage-a futile war on drugs-encompasses myriad others  Serial melodrama can show us, in a way sociologists and ethnographers cannot, how much as Detective Lester Freamon puts it, “all the pieces matter.”