<![CDATA[Thomas Conner - COMM10blogWi15]]>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:41:35 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[great cultural criticism example]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2015 17:41:10 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/great-cultural-criticism-exampleAnyone watch the cable drama "The Americans"? I've heard it's good, but now I'm convinced to give it a try after reading this great piece about it. I'm sharing the link because it's a superb piece of cultural criticism — a great model for how to take a piece of popular culture and connect it to social discourses, historical points of view, and many of the themes of our syllabus.

To wit:
And yet, there is something deeply disturbing about The Americans, a sense that it presents recent history through adversarial eyes to toughen us, to encourage us to absorb certain moralistic criticisms of capitalism as a means of acclimation to deprivation and toil. 

By presenting the Soviets as worthy adversaries pursuing a noble but futile cause, the show encodes their assessment of the United States as perceptive and prescient. But the “capitalism” the characters lambast is less a structure than a symptom: they see the US as a nation weakened from the inside by consumerist luxury.

In focusing its critique on decadent mass consumption rather than exploitative production, The Americans uses Soviet speakers to valorize the virtues of austerity. This is its ideological prescription: that Americans — well, some of them, anyway — must forego consumptive pleasures to strengthen the nation and its economy.
]]><![CDATA[recent events, media, and race]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2015 17:32:51 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/recent-events-media-and-raceTwo good explainers provide basic background on the situation in Ferguson, Mo., and the case of Eric Garner in New York.

Here are the New York Times videos reporting from Ferguson after Michael Brown's shooting. As you watch, experience the videos as objects of communication — pay attention to the information being reported, of course, but also what information is highlighted, what is left out, what frames are being selected (both literal, in terms of camera positioning, and theoretical, in terms of Gitlin and Schudson), that music being used, etc.
Participation! Consider: No reporter is seen or speaks in the above video. Does that mean it is unbiased? What factors does Schudson outline that contribute to bias, and where might they be present here?
Participation! Toward the beginning, the man with the sign reading "Propaganda: It Won’t Be Televised — Pay Attention" — he looks at the reporter filming him and adds, "I know you seen it, tell the truth, tell the truth!" What truth, and why does he believe it is not getting out by other means? Relate his expression about propaganda to the readings that addressed earlier propaganda fears.
Participation!
— Pay attention to the discussion here about the original choice of Michael Brown photo used and picked up by the news media. What frames are at work there, and how? How does this relate to Schudson's explanation of selection?
— Think about the reporter's final comments. What photos of you or other information about you is out there on social media that could be similarly misconstrued?

Of course, I have to wrap things up with some pop music ...
Consider these two songs. The first is related to the protest sign above and deals with a similar message. The second relates a story remarkably similar to that which caused the death of Eric Garner. In other words, these issues are not exactly new in America.
1. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron, 1970

2. "Graffiti Limbo" by Michelle Shocked, 1988
(unavailable for embedding, click link)
]]><![CDATA[final exam: what do you want to review?]]>Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:21:31 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/final-exam-what-do-you-want-to-reviewParticipation: Required! To prepare for the final exam, complete and submit the following survey by midnight Sunday, March 8!

    FINAL REVIEW SURVEY

    List two readings from the syllabus you feel like you'd benefit from further discussion in a review:
]]><![CDATA[rock vs. commerce]]>Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:12 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/rock-vs-commerceThe art vs. commerce binary discussed in the Gray chapter is a cultural dilemma almost as old as cave paintings. In my professional work as a pop music critic, I wrestled daily with walking the tightrope between addressing and critiquing the artistic elements in a recording or concert experience, and advising the consumer on whether the product or experience was worth shelling out money for.

FWIW, in the academic side of my work, I've addressed this binary in two different journal articles ...
1. Conner, T. (2002). "Dear Reader: A Pop Critic Responds to the Day’s Mail." ARTicles, No. 7, pp. 138-149.

This is a qualitative essay from my point of view as a music critic for a daily newspaper, reacting to a theme common to letters written to arts critics in which the reader (a) complains that the reviews are "too biased" and (b) denigrates the critic's particular subjective perspective and suggests a more objective stance instead. My answers: (a) duh, and (b) impossible.

An excerpt: "One's reaction to music is inextricable from your personal experience. How else could you respond to art but through the filter of your own conditioning? Yet here you are demanding that I operate differently, that a 'real critic' should write for an 'audience instead of yourself and your pathetic little Generation X clan.' C’mon, now—you know this is impossible. You couldn’t write like that. If you had this job, if your editors were wringing their hands over their struggle to attract 18- to 30-year-old readers and casting furtive glances your way, do you think you’d be able to tailor your responses to music for a specific audience, one younger than yourself, one composed not only of the Generation X you hold in such low esteem but of the giddy and even more fickle Generation Y? You couldn’t do it, and, like me, you wouldn’t. Sure, you write of the experience in language that anyone could understand, but you would not have the experience on behalf of some- one else. If you tried, you’d learn as quickly as I did that readers, when it comes to the particular act of criticism, are irrelevant.

"I know, I know—what a haughty, preposterous statement. The nerve! Sorry, buddy: I’m not writing for you. You have nothing to do with me and the music. You and all the other 149,000 daily subscribers of the Tulsa World couldn’t be farther from my mind as I’m listening to a record and working out my response to it. It’s my response, after all. I was hired to offer my unique perspective. I’m lucky to have this opportunity, of course—to get paid to continue my personal quest for good music, meaningful music. But I assure you, I have no altruistic drive, no missionary zeal to spread the word and uncover the truth for you, the deserving reader. You complain that I write my reviews—my “biased” reviews—for my own gratification, and here I agree with you wholeheartedly.

"What is it you have in mind—objective criticism? You want me to try and experience music the way you do? All of you, all the readers? That’s absurd.
Even if that were possible, it would defeat the entire point of criticism. Indeed,
my goal is to transcend the experience of the music and find some underlying absolutes, some universal truths, that I can connect with aspects of my life, and to use these new connections in the future to make sense of the world around me. This transcendence, though, can only occur if the quest for these bedrock truths is passionate, driven, and my own. Otherwise, I’m just a hack doing your dirty work. If you gain perspective for yourself after reading my own experience, I’m thrilled. In that sense, my own criticism has enabled your understanding just as the music itself might have. Perhaps the critical faculty— a purely subjective expression—is indeed as worthy as the music itself."


2. Jones, S. & Conner, T. (2014). "Art to Commerce: The Trajectory of Popular Music Criticism." IASPM@Journal (International Association for the Study of Popular Music), 4 (2).

This paper had its genesis in an observation from my experience as a working critic as well as from reading the work of my peers. I suspected that, over the decades of pop music and its corresponding body of criticism, critics had progressed from criticism that dealt more directly with the artistic experience of music and toward criticism that examined music more as a commercial product.

We secured access to an archive of rock music criticism and ran searches of keywords — a list we generated, including artistic terms and commercial terms — to assemble a qualitative analysis of the trajectory.

From our conclusion: "In an analysis of the shrinking influence of British music magazines, John Harris, a columnist for the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, quotes rock critic Greil Marcus: 'Mostly, when you read about musicians, what’s being reviewed is their career, not their work: how is this record going to contribute to the building of their audience, or their ability to reclaim an audience that’s been lost?' (Harris, 2009, our emphasis).

"Harris attributes the focus on audience and market to a lack of artistic merit demanding better criticism, writing that, 'in the absence of enough creative substance, you too often end up with writing that reflects the empty stuff of commerce.' He also perceives a surrender by writers to the ease with which new media allows fans to bypass the words of critics and click straight through and actually hear and judge the music for themselves. As he puts it, 'when the main event is only a click away, there isn’t always much point to rhapsodies or forensic critiques.' It is too soon to know whether such a shift is under way in contemporary popular music criticism since the rise of the internet, but it is clear that by examining a large corpus of popular music criticism we can discern trends over time that gives insight into the constituent elements of critic discourse.

"... The direction of business-related keywords appears empirically to back up the claim by Sanjek (1992) that popular music criticism, 'began as little more than a branch of publicity' (1992, p. 13). Indeed, the 1960s reflect few uses of the keywords for which we searched. It would be interesting to examine individual critics’ articles over time, or those of a single publication, for example, and understand the critical tendencies, particularly between the oft-juxtaposed poles of art and commerce, or authenticity and manufacture. Indeed, an analysis such as the one we have performed provides an opportunity for new theories concerning art and commerce. As Stratton (1982, p. 283) noted:

 Hits are in the first place popular records, but in the second place they are commercial. The ‘good’ and the ‘commercial’ with all its rational capitalist implications are, therefore, still kept radically separate. Paradoxically it is the radical separation of these two sets of criteria which allows the ‘output’ end of the industry to resolve the problem of the relationship between them so successfully. ‘Art’ and commercialism are articulated as two separate domains by music journalists. Consequently one domain may be discussed with the intrusion of the other. The results is an ideological resolution of a real economic conflict.

"From what we have discerned in the data it does seem that while art and commerce are intertwined in critics’ discourse, which is unsurprising, the ratio between the one and the other changes over time. Future research should further examine the keywords in context, and determine word concordances and valences to obtain a more fine-grained understanding of the interplay between art and commerce in critics’ discourse."
]]><![CDATA['your consumer is your marketer']]>Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:04:13 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/your-consumer-is-your-marketerThe PBS series "Frontline" produced a typically insightful program about many of the issues we read about last week. It's called "Generation Like" — yes, that's meant to be you — and it explores the various dimensions of participatory culture, from how it affects celebrity to how media consumption itself changes.

Watch the full episode here.

Here are a few snippets ...
Participation! Comment about your own experiences as a participatory fan of something. Relate this awareness to the for-profit goals discussed in this video and in the Sterne reading.
]]><![CDATA[Project part 2: an example]]>Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:47:51 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/project-part-2-an-exampleBelow you may download part 2 of a former student's project paper.

Again, this is a paper that scored well — though it has significant room for improvement, too. We can discuss an edited version of this later in class.

Use this paper as a good example of using the denotative and connotative description from part 1 as examples for an analysis of the communication at work in your object. Note how the student incorporated readings from the syllabus to support her argument.
assignment_part_2.pdf
File Size: 6628 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
]]><![CDATA[Remediation's revolving door]]>Wed, 04 Feb 2015 21:29:37 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/remediations-revolving-doorAnother interesting example of the pattern/direction of technological development we discussed this week: Moleskine, makers of high-quality notebooks and sketchbooks, have partnered with a digital stylus maker to create a pen ... that writes on real paper ... and backs up the words/imagery digitally!

Read the article here

And here's a video showing how it works. Pretty amazing!
]]><![CDATA[studying + music]]>Thu, 29 Jan 2015 21:24:15 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/studying-musicWe had a good music discussion at the beginning of the 10am section this week. We'll definitely talk more about music within the larger realm of pop culture in a couple of weeks, as the syllabus turns toward art-vs.-industry studies and the maddening correctness of Adorno & Horkheimer. But here are two purely extracurricular follow-up thoughts ...
1. In our early discussion about reading habits, we didn't talk about what media might be present while you read. Music, of course, is a common background source while studying. Some people can read with music on, some can't; same goes for working/writing.

FWIW, in writing my master's thesis, I found a particular music service to be indispensable in aiding my concentration and focusing my attention. It's called Focus@Will, an online streaming service providing several channels of instrumental music and sounds specifically designed and sequenced to facilitate focusing your mind. There's a detailed page on their web site outlining the neuroscience behind this. I highly recommend it.

There's also this stupendous, ginormous playlist on Spotify called Instrumental Music to Work To. Or, if you're used to working in coffee shops and find that your mind focuses well amid the din of chatting customers and clanking dishes, try Coffitivity.

2. Speaking of Spotify playlists (if you're a customer), here are three I assembled several months ago when my grad cohort was going through a qual exam. In case anyone's remotely interested ...

studybreak: Inspiration! — songs to rev you up and help psyche you out to start studying.

studybreak: Dance Party! — songs for the needed get-up-and-dance-around break after hours of work.

studybreak: Nightynight — songs to help calm down body and brain when it's all done.



]]><![CDATA[Anzaldua & Tan follow-up]]>Thu, 29 Jan 2015 20:43:56 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/anzaldua-tan-follow-up1. Some of you requested the extra essay by Gloria Anzaldua, "La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness," from which I used the quotation at the beginning of this week's classes. You can download the PDF here ...
anzaldua-mestizaconsciousness.pdf
File Size: 1523 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File
2. We watched a few minutes of these clips from comedian Margaret Cho's stand-up routine; here are the full video clips, if you'd like to see the full pieces.

These segments discuss race from a similar point of view to the characters you encountered in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Cho's parents came to America from South Korea, and in these segments you'll hear many of the same issues Tan illustrated, such as assumption based on race and the power dynamics between mothers and their first-generation American-born daughters.
]]><![CDATA[Hey, 'folks'!]]>Mon, 26 Jan 2015 20:45:53 GMThttps://www.thomasconner.info/comm10blogwi15/hey-folksCheck out this interesting article, which nicely follows up our class discussions last week about the evolution of language. "Folks" — a word that somehow transitioned from "us" to "them"!

Participation! Try looking up the word in the OED, via the library database links here, and see what history they show for the word. Use the comments here to post any results/thoughts.]]>