Earlier today, I read Richard Forno’s Powerpoint Manifesto. It was a refreshing affirmation about how I have tried to minimize the use of slides in my class in favor of a more personal form of presenting. There has been some resistance to this method in class because it seems like most students are conditioned to rely on slides as the primary product of the lecture. That’s dangerous because if I don’t put it on a slide, then students don’t consider what material I’ve covered as important. Consequently, they won’t bother to study it for an exam.
Over the last few years, my goal in lecturing is to emphasize my own relationship to the material we’re covering. I often include anecdotes when discussing course material in an attempt to share my personal connections to the material. I hope that students find the connections meaningful and forge their own links to the material we’re covering. Isn’t it easier to memorize something when there’s a meaningful and lively context behind it? Some of the material I cover in lecture may not appear in the readings. That’s because not everything I’ve learn originated from our textbook. As most scholars would agree, our insight comes from studying extensively and dutifully researching over time and across a variety of sources.
Forno discusses the personal aspect of presenting, even ascribing a “soul” to the presenter and the presentation. He writes:
I firmly belive the art of “presentation” is more than reading animated bullets on a computer – it’s the speaker’s personality, dynamics, war stories, vocal inflections, dramatic pauses, spontaneous remarks, and how he interacts with the audience while conveying his MESSAGE that are the “memorable” parts of a presentation, and is traditionally how a speaker emphasizes the important points of his lecture as well.
Technology – if used – should enhance the quality of a presentation, not become the sole reason for its existience. While computers are a handy tool for presenters, they have no personality and no soul; nothing to “hook” the listener or interact with them in any meaningful way. That usually makes for a boring lecture and a well-rested audience.
Forno is not the first person to argue that slides should not be the focus of a lecture. A year ago, Gabe Zichermann discussed presentation software last on his list of tips for giving a great keynote address. Even then it was only to recommend Apple’s Keynote over the downright ubiquitous Powerpoint. Moreover, the argument that technology should serve your presentation instead of be your presentation is a common refrain that is, unfortunately, frequently ignored.
While a lecture should not revolve around reading slides, it also should not entirely consist of reading anything. Eliminating all technology from a presentation could lead to simply reading a lecture. It always saddened me that, at conferences in film and media studies, we have to read a paper, word-for-word, to be taken seriously. Our subject is inherently visual, but we must revert to a strictly textual form to present our research.
My strategy to avoid reading my lecture is simply to use an outline. To help students with studying, I post outlines of my lecture. The outlines contain almost no complete sentences, just a few key words or phrases. Each outline is a “map” of my lecture, rather than a record of it. Rather than read from them, I use them as cues, reminding me what to cover. (If I’m on my “game” however, I won’t need to look at them.) The outlines are also not study guides. They are only reminders of what I discussed in class. Attentive students should be able to reconstruct my lecture based on the slides and the outlines. But, first, they have to be there and listen to me and my message in order to make sense of them. If I gave them nothing more than what they could get from slides or an outline, then why bother meeting in person?
When you get to be a thirty-something year-old in New York, or any big city really, your wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend likely goes away without you. I think the commonly used term for this state is being a “bachelor” or some derivation of being single. However, that’s not an accurate term since it implies that you’re newly single not that you’re without your partner for a temporary period of time. There has to be a better term.
A few weeks ago in my silent film class, I screened a series of European films. One of the films featured the pioneering French silent comedian Max Linder. The film was called Troubles of a Grasswidower (1908). In the film, Linder’s character’s wife leaves for a bit. (“I’m going home to mother”) The comedy is a pretty standard formula for a time when gender roles were quite strictly defined, not unlike Mr. Mom (1983) where household chores are challenging. In Troubles of a Grasswidower, Max has to maintain the home while his wife is away. He struggles with chores familiar to us, such as washing the dishes and making the bed, and other deprecated tasks, such as plucking a chicken.
While the film makes for entertaining physical comedy, I have been sharing the title with many of my friends about the common situation of being without your partner. The Oxford English Dictionary offers two definitions, although the entry indicates that the following is the more common usage:
grass widow (n.)
A married woman whose husband is absent from her.
As one would expect, there is the derivative of the term for men, too. What’s good for the gander is apparently good for the goose:
grass widower (n.)
a man living apart from his wife.
While many of us in this situation are not married, thus the term does not entirely apply to us, it is still a wonderful, antiquated term to reintroduce to contemporary usage. And when I think of bachelor, it implies you’re partying. That’s not alway the case for me. In an age when bartenders and barbers dress up like film pioneer W.K.L Dickson, you’ll forgive me for mistaking our era for the late nineteenth century.
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Over the weekend a student wrote me to ask a question about an upcoming assignment. His query was a very basic but fair one. According to the assignment guidelines, each student is supposed to write a 500-word essay. The student asked:
it says the paper is to be 500 words. Are we limited to roughly that amount or is that just the minimum required?
My response was my usual boilerplate about word count. I said that the word count was a target, meaning that he could be a reasonable amount over or under that count.
Then I started thinking about my response. As a challenge, why don’t I have students write their essays to exact word count? Every student uses word processing software of some type to write their essays. College students have been doing that for the better part of the last thirty years. Word processors make it really easy to count words. It’s part of what they process, isn’t it?
The benefit of writing to an exact word count is that it forces students to edit their essays beyond running the spelling and grammar checkers. One of my colleagues in graduate school used to write paragraphs so that the last line of a paragraph would be flush with the right margin. In other words, he would edit until his paragraph was a fully-justified, four-sided rectangle.
Having students write to an exact word count would also help ensure more equitable grading. Although I’ve tried to avoid this particular bias, I have found over my years of reading undergraduate prose that the more-engaged (i.e., "better") students tend to write longer-than-average essays and get better grades. If every student writes to the exact same length, it would minimize the "verbose-essay bias" and ensure I am grading on written content not its form.
While it’s a little to try with an assignment due in a matter of days, I will experiment with an upcoming assignment for my Media Technologies class. They have three essays to write over the semester so I have some room to perform an experiment such as this one. If it works with exactly 500 words, maybe I’ll have them write to other counts, consisting of prime numbers like 571, 839, or 1013. After all, a word count is just an arbitrary number.
In this morning’s Introduction to Electronic Media class, which one member of the university staff referred to as my “volunteer job” without even the slightest sense of irony, we covered American network television. The topics involved the networks’ competition and a bit of its style over the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. It’s a lot to cram into a one-hundred fifty minute section, but I like to make sure students can see a bit of what television looked like some decades ago.
One of my favorite programs to screen from the 1960s is an episode of Dragnet from 1968. In this episode Joe Friday and Bill Gannon stumble upon an epidemic: youngsters taking LSD. In the clip I screened in class, Joe and Bill go to an abandoned house only to find several youngsters tripping on acid. The representation of the hallucinating kids is a bit over the top. One guy holds a paintbrush and proceeds to put it in his mouth. A woman takes to climbing a wall, although her feet never leave the ground.
As a way to disorient the viewer when entering this mind-altering den, the cinematography establishes the room in an unconventional way, at least for the television medium. We see a very wide-angle shot with several planes of action. The most string element is the placement of the colored lightbulbs throughout the room. There is even one in the front and center of the frame. The framing does not last very long. The subsequent shots are of the officers’ bewildered expressions and then of the kids tripping. It’s not the most innovative message: kids taking drugs is bad. It does however take advantage of the visual form to make the audience trip a little without resorting to unnecessary effects.
It’s hard to say anything new about Miami Vice that hasn’t been said, especially concerning its form. But I wanted to share a very different shot than the Dragnet example. While the shot of the kids tripping on LSD is a wide shot, this is the opposite: a telephoto lens that collapses the planes into one flattened image.
In this shot, we see Crocket call his estranged wife before heading out on a potentially fatal mission to take down a Miami drug lord. As he and Tubbs speed to their mission, Crocket stops the car and pulls it over at a phone booth. (Yes, this is slightly before “car phones”.) The shot shows this neon sign, which we see earlier in the episode, the phone booth, and the marina. Because of the telephoto lens, it makes Crocket seem very distant. Moreover, it is also disorienting because of the unconventional use of the flattened space. Subsequent shots show close-ups of Crocket and of his wife and reestablishes the conventional focal length to revert the television style back to “normal.” Normal focal length…normal television style…normal action-packed episode.
Earlier this morning, Blockbuster Express delivered the bad news:
Your preferred Blockbuster Express kiosk is going away.
Since moving to Long Island City, five years ago, we never had a video store other than this automated box. With the closing of our Blockbuster Express machine, the closest semblance to a video store will now be gone.
It’s not the greatest loss. We can stream just about any title available at one of these kiosks. The film studios release a movie title to these kiosks on the same day as it is available to rent on iTunes, for example, usually thirty days after the Blu-ray and DVD release. Moreover, our kiosk never had Blu-ray disks. The only way to watch a high-definition video was to either rent from a kiosk elsewhere or to stream the title. There was no real appreciable difference in price either: iTunes charges between four and six dollars for a twenty-hour rental, versus two and four dollars for a Blu-ray disk from Blockbuster Express.
To an old-timer like me, losing a “video store” would have been devastating in a different era. Did you know that people use to rate a New York City neighborhood based in part on the presence of bookshops, video stores, and record shops? It seems crazy to think about since those barely exist in any neighborhood. We’ve never had those in my years in Long Island City. And later this week, we won’t even have this video store proxy either.
This afternoon at NYU, I went to a seminar on media archeology and digital humanities. I had thought that these two areas were new to me, but it turns out that I have been doing alot of that work already without having realized it. There were some very enlightening discussions at the seminar, but I’ll save those points for another day, another post.
After we adjourned for the day, a graduate student in the English department told me about an educational television series NYU had helped produced in the 1950s called Sunrise Semester. It was where television viewers could take classes from NYU faculty with broadcasts scheduled as early as 6:00 AM, and the program ran from the 1950s to 1980s, he said. This format of "telecourse" was not as rare as most people might think. Most notably, NBC produced and aired The Continental Classroom from 1955 to 1963, if memory serves, as an early-morning nationally televised program. Unlike Sunrise Semester on CBS, many different universities participated.
The "telecourse" is back with the push for Massively Open Online Courses and ways to "disrupt" traditional universities with technology. NYU shares its courses for free through its OpenEd initiative. Some subjects include sociology, biology, and mathematics. A professional crew records lectures throughout the semester and posts them on YouTube, iTunesU, and its own NYU Stream platform. Students anywhere can "take" the course, although they do not yet receive credit.
Here’s one example from Cyrus Patel’s American Literature course.
The two programs are more different than I would have thought. For one thing, the primary audience for the OpenEd example is the classroom and the paying customers attending. In the case of the Sunrise Semester, the professor speaks to the camera in direct address. There is a fair amount of editing in the Sunrise example, especially compared to OpenEd, although it does not leverage the visual form by showing slides or other illustrations as we see in the latter course.
It is hard to make generalizations about a single episode of a television program with a decades-long run, but that is why we need media archeology to uncover these media artifacts. By looking at how universities were using new technologies, such as television in the 1950s, we can better gauge the possibility of something like MOOCs replacing the traditional university.
Having just screened some early television programs in my Electronic Media class, I never seem to get across the extraordinary nature of live anthology dramas, specifically the gravity of Days of Wine and Roses (1958).
Every television historian has a soft spot in his/her heart for live anthology dramas. What’s not to like? These “teleplays” were well-written, well-acted, and focused on deep character psychology. They were also performed live and almost never repeated. The only reason we have these programs is because someone made a recording of the kinescope. A kinescope recording works like taking a film camera and recording a television screen, but because video runs at a rate of 30 frames-per-second and a film camera runs at 24 frames-per-second, the camera had to drop six television frames for each second. It was not easy, nor was it always pretty.
In this installment of Playhouse 90 from 1958, Days of Wine and Roses concerns a married couple who are alcoholics. The portrayal of this disease is extraordinary. This clip starts after Joe, a public relations man, has reached his moment of clarity and begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. AA was a fairly new organization in the late 1950s, founded in 1935, and was gaining prominence by this point. During his testimonial, there’s a flashback to a particularly dark part of his and his wife’s lives.
Joe’s and Kristen’s addiction is absolutely breathtaking. When I first saw this about five years ago, the representation of rye whiskey, a socially acceptable and even upscale spirit today, compares to how we think of crack cocaine or meth today. Beyond the addiction, the performance is relatively naturalistic: the stage-trained actors seem like real people, not delivering a stylized performance. It’s gritty but not exaggerated. Also, consider the medium of television. There are a lot of closeups and very few cuts (or “switches” in the parlance of live television). Televisions were much smaller than the sixty-inch sets of today, and the tight framing would foster some intimacy between the viewer and the character.
In my New Technologies class, one of the recurring topics we’ve covered is that of disruptive innovations. I did not use the Clayton Christensen text as the basis of this discussion, primarily because Christensen seems a bit too optimistic about the role that disruptive innovations can have in creating new markets and new players. Instead, I felt that Tim Wu’s The Master Switch was a more complete discussion of potential disruptions such as telephone, radio, and the Internet because it not chronicled how these and other technologies disrupted existing markets but also how they were consolidated anew.
Cable TV: From Community to Commerce
Once a grassroots technology, cable television is an example of a technology on the cusp of a disruption. The cable industry emerged as a community-oriented project in the 1940s, known as Community Antenna Television, that gave television set owners in remote locations access to broadcast signals necessary to make television a worthwhile product.[1]Hardware is essentially useless unless you have enough software. By the 1960s, the broadcasters saw cable as a threat to their livelihood and convinced the FCC to block it in all but the smallest markets. Meanwhile, policy wonks were enamored with cable television because it offered an alternative to broadcast television. Television viewers could be liberated from the dependence of watching television via scarce and tightly controlled radio waves. They could access more specialized, relevant than anything that the broadcast networks could ever offer.[2]
By the 1970s, cable television was hardly a disruptive medium. Ted Turner had pioneered a way to distribute his Atlanta-based UHF station to a nationwide audience, via satellite. While this was a truly innovative strategy for starting a superstation that could rival broadcast networks, its programming strategy was actually less ambitious than that of the broadcasters. The superstation WTBS aired off-network syndicated programming, such as older sitcoms and movies, and live coverage of Atlanta Braves and Hawks games.[3]
The Threat of Internet and Cord Cutters
As cable television has evolved to “multichannel television” as it has included direct broadcast satellite for the better part of twenty years, new Internet-connected television sets and over-the-top devices appear as disruptive innovations for multichannel television, possibly encouraging “cord cutters” to sever the ties with cable and satellite suppliers and their high bills once and for all. Derek Thompson has challenged that idea because he sees the technology titans, namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft, not as agents of change because they simply don’t care for unbundling specific content from the lucrative packages that net multichannel video providers their fortunes. As Thompson writes, “Apple has realized that it doesn’t have to beat Comcast and Verizon to own your living room. It only has to join them.” The tech giants are more likely than not partner with multichannel television providers than to challenge them.
The Smartphone Sustains the Wireless Carriers
Any television device that Apple could market will likely fall short of disrupting the multichannel television industry and will likely resemble what we’ve seen with smartphones. While the smartphone has clearly been a wonderful innovation, it is, to use Christensen’s terminology, a “revolutionary” one because it introduced an unexpected innovation but one that ultimately sustains the existing market. That’s what we saw with the iPhone and with its chief rival Android. Charles Arthur explains that Android actually strengthens the wireless carrier industry. He writes, “Google wants as many carriers as possible to sell Android phones – that’s how you get market share, and because the phones are ad-supported the more the better; it defrays the cost of software development faster. The business model for the carriers is exactly as it was before Android: sell a variety of phones from a variety of handset makers at a variety of prices. No disruption there.” Despite its significant marketshare, Android has not disrupted the smartphone industry, much less the wireless telephone industry.
The wireless carriers have benefitted greatly from the innovation of the smartphone. It has allowed them to sell new services, such as lucrative data plans and unlimited text messaging plans while retaining the legacy voice services that make up a significant portion of a consumer’s monthly bill. In the case of the iPhone, Apple might control the hardware and the software at the expense of the carriers’ tight control, but the wireless carriers are also benefitting from expanding revenues.
“No Disruption There”
As the smartphone has strengthened the finances of the wireless carriers, I expect that any new television product Apple introduces will actually strengthen the position of the multichannel television providers. In the case of the multichannel television providers, they might lose control over the hardware necessary to deliver video to the television set, but they will still be the beneficiaries of such any innovation that the tech companies develop. I wouldn’t be surprised to see any new Apple TV device to first work with Verizon FiOS and AT&T’s U-Verse, since there’s already a partnership between Apple and those companies in the wireless space, and then to the others, such as TimeWarner Cable, Cox, and Comcast. I don’t know what that device is, all I know is that it will be revolutionary, but, Charles Arthur would say, “no disruption there.”
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Mullen, Megan. The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? University of Texas Press, 2003. 32–38. ↩
