Imagine There's No Pergatory

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27857596/



Read that ^^^



Twenty eight years after the death of John Lennon, the Vatican, in a beautiful display of mercy and goodwill, has decided to pardon him. Yes, John Lennon is absolved. Not of all his sins, mind you, just of his more public ones, mainly his off color comment, comparing the popularity of the Beatles to that of Jesus Christ.



First of all, I am pretty sure this shouldn't warrant the title of news. When Lennon was storming the castle doors of Christianly courtesy and respectful propriety in the 1960's, there were significantly more important things happening than a popularity contest between a rock band and the pinnacle figure of the largest religion in the world. Things that the Beatles, through their music, attempted to draw attention to. The Cold War, the Vietnam War. But Lennon's comment topped headlines. Now, fifty years after the fabulous four made it big, they are still snatching headlines away, although today it was a teetering financial market, and 18 more dead in an Iraqi blast. The Vatican's pardon was one of the most popular stories today, and I can't help but feel as though we are letting the trivial distract us from the immediately important.



And anyway, John Lennon didn't need the Vatican's pardon anyway. Historically speaking Jesus's following slowly, and hundreds and thousands of years after his death. I am almost certain the amount of people who knew of him while he was alive, first preaching at the Galilee, was significantly smaller than the number of people who knew about the Beatles when the embarked upon their first American tour. Lennon wasn't being sacrilegious, he was merely pointing out the vast advancements in technology since the time of Jesus. A whole new wave of communication tools and technology brought a whole number to the word popular.

Musical Money

I love John Mayer. He is the one gossip column, hopelessly self centered performing artist I just can't help swooning over.

I was never one of those connoisseurs of obscure and eclectic music. I found music I liked and I listened to it, pretentiousness aside. When smaller acts I had taken a fancy to found a way to make it big, I harbored them no ill will. That was the dream right? To become rock stars. How can you deny someone their dream? I didn't accuse anyone of selling out and trading down. I was a very forgiving, steadfast fan. But I have a feeling times, times are a-changin'.

Ever since watching the in class video on the music industry, I get this gut wrenching feeling every time I turn on the radio. Listening to a successful and independent artist like Annie Difranco, a woman who could have completely become the next hit female artist, talk about her absolute refusal to play into the machine made me want to simultaneously cheer and cry.

I can't help it. I think the music biz is a farce and I think everyone participates in it has to shoulder some of the blame. That includes me, for purchasing CD's and downloading music. That includes radio stations and televisions stations for monopolizing our music exposure. Of course that means the record companies and the massive media oligopolies and monopolies. But it also means all the mainstream artists, who perpetuate the notion that it is ok to subject musicians to the power of the almighty dollar. Ugh.

And I am not completely naive. I know art has been manipulated, forever, probably since the beginning of time, by money. Money made Michelangelo and Leonard Da Vinci famous. Some of the earliest philosophers and writers had time to spare and inherited cash to burn. But I love to believe that we have come so far, that we could accomplish something so much more, so much bigger and better. Instead we just buy into the same dog eat dog, money makes the world go round kind of status quo. Our methods are smoother and are products are shinier, but in the end we are just as bad as the unappreciative public that made Van Gogh take his own life.

We kill creativity. It's disgusting.

Awkward Waltz

What you have above is a silly sequence of events. My roommate pointed this out to me tonight and I found it ridiculously funny, so I thought I would post it up here. Even though it is slightly old news, it still brings up some valid points about inter connectivity of media.

It starts with Chris Matthews, the host of the MSNBC's Hardball visiting the talk show of Ellen Degeneres, which is owned by the Warner Brothers. Now of course stuff like that happens all the time, celebrities visit the shows of other celebrities, politicians visit the shows of journalists. But when the show goes south, not only the audience of Ellen Degeneres witnesses the incident, the next day, so does the standard Chris Matthews audience. Then, to really top it all off, the youtube audience, which is absurdly vast, also gets the witness the blessed event.

I know this doesn't seem all that revolutionary, but I had one of those "oh!" moments when watching all of this. We can talk all we want about how completely connected we are, at however shallow a level, to everything. But it is small things like this, like the Ellen Degeneres Show, that make me realize information and stories can be swapped and traded and gussied up and shown in the blink of an eye. But for operations that big, someone has to be running the show, and I can't help feeling that that someone isn't me. Stories like Ellen and Chris can be told over, and over again, passed through whatever medium people would like to use, because they are stories that don't harm any large media corporation's interests. Try to find those stories, like videos of what is going on at Guantanamo Bay, and they won't pop up with thousands of hits on YouTube.

At any rate, Ellen and Chris were able to entirely exploit their story, bank on the awkwardness of the situation, and broadcast it to multiple types of audiences. They definitely know what mass media is all about.

Arab Media

In my Arabic culture class today we discussed media in the Arab world. It was a discussion that was strikingly similar to many of the ones we have recently had in Mass Communications. The print media in the Arab world is largely controlled by the government. But the government, much like the large media corporations in America, allow for a controlled amount of content diversity, which give the illusion of free speech, and multiple perspective reporting. The reality is much like the critique of the Uses and Gratifications theory. Although citizens are given multiple options for information sources, ultimately they are not choosing because the information has already been chosen for them.

There are a a few opposition newspapers, but they place themselves so rigidly against the mainstream that they are unable to sustain a large enough audience and quickly die out. The other type of newspaper, besides those printed by the governments for Arab countries, and those printed by opposition parties, are the newspapers printed for Arabs living abroad. Often these papers are printed in two languages, Arabic and German, English, French or Italian. They are wildly popular, as they give Arabs living abroad an Arab view on international and regional events. Some of these papers have an established following, such as the Jordan Times, and others are just beginning to make their mark, such as Alquds, which is a London based paper with a pro-Palestinian slant. These papers act as checks for the news systems in the western world and their accounts of international happenings.

I asked my Arab culture professor about blogging and citizen reporting, and he said that it was gaining popularity, but hadn't reached the level it has in America. Personal viewpoints expressed on social networking sites, such as Facebook, are still under scrutiny by the government, which makes all forms of first hand citizen news reporting risky. Still, people are claiming the technological wave for their own. A group of Egyptian activists used a Facebook group to start a strike which prompted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to up the salary of government workers by 30 percent.

Check out some Middle Eastern newspapers and the story about the Egyptian activists

http://www.jordantimes.com/

http://www.alquds.co.uk/ (Hit the translate button for this one!)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24390035/

Better Than Fiction

I love the west wing. Come January I am pretty sure I will love it literally, but before November 4th, when the main inhabitant of the west wing was unsavory, and the fate of its future inhabitant hung in the balance, the fictional west wing was a nice alternative to love. In the fictional west wing the president made wise decisions, based on a firm commitment to do right by his people. The white house staff was intelligent and informed. Aids to the president, while not always right, were unabashedly honest and unfailingly moral. Ignorance was unacceptable and ignoramuses were lectured well and promptly dismissed. It was American politics as they should be.

And it was fake. It was a warped version of reality, a rose-tinted glasses view of American government and the status quo. It imagined a white house where an inexperienced, minority candidate could beat out a highly experienced, highly respected Washington insider. Then, two years later, after the show had long gone, the fairy tale story came true. It is no longer confined to the silver screen, it is our reality.

I posted the video to illustrate the similarities between the television candidate and the actual one. Below there is a link to an imagined meeting between Jed Bartlett, the president on the West Wing, and President-Elect Obama.

What the whole thing got me thinking about is Gerbner's cultivation theory, and Media Framing and structure versus content. Cultivation theory argued that people who watched large amounts of television began to perceive reality as similar to the world of television, even though it was drastically different. The perceived reality tended to be much more negative the the actual reality. In this case though, the world of television was light years ahead of our world. The content of the West Wing was different than the standard content, different than the norm. Television adopted minority Presidents far sooner than reality did. The television series "24" featured an African-American president, and the West Wing's Mark Santos is Hispanic.

Obviously Obama won based on his own merits and not based on some subtle hinting from a television show two years gone, but it does add another story to the question of media influence, particularly that of televised drama's. Their content does not ubiquitously follow the line of least resistance, the line of how it always has been. Some times they challenge people and their understandings for the better.

New York Times Opinion Article Link:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE2D61E30F932A1575AC0A96E9C8B63&scp=2&sq=Maureen+Dowd%2C+West+Wing&st=nyt#