Communication and American Culture

Postman, Simon, Burns, Koenig, Bordwell

My name is Jenny Stark and…

Louis CK

Aziz Ansari

Addictions

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

80’s Experiment: A rat alone in a cage. One water bottle has drugs, the other is plain water. The rat becomes obsessed with the drugged water and eventually dies

Bruce Alexander

professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander

Built a rat community

Rat cage with plenty of toys, food, tunnels, and friends

Comparative: rats who were alone drank the drugged water

Rats with friends tried the drugged water, but didn’t continue to drink it

Vietnam

Heroin use was common amongst US soldiers

20% of soldiers

Concern about these soldiers coming home and still being addicted

95% of the addicts discontinued use after returning home

Concepts of Addiction

Hedonistic

A disease

Alexander: It’s not you, but your cage

3rd Experiment

• Rats were in a cage alone in a cage with the drug for 57 days

• They were then placed in the rat park

• They went through withdrawal, but…

Ended up kicking the habit and adapting back to their surroundings

Another more common experiment…

Prescription Medicine

People who are prescribed opiates for injuries do not, in large percentages, become addicted to street heroin.

Street addicts are isolated &

Someone who is getting over an injury is quite possibly going home to families, work, friends etc.

Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

War on Drugs

Prisons isolate drug users more

Isolation (for drug offenses in prison)

Difficult to find work once they are out of jail

Leading to more isolation

The War on Drugs also costs money (keeping money from social programs, schools etc.)

Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent

These studies help us think differently about ourselves

Human beings are bonding animals

Isolation

We have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from

connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the

Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the

next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all

around us.

--For too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social

recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is

sinking on us like a thick fog.

--Bruce Alexander

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1986

Distinguishes Orwellian vision of the future—where totalitarian governments limit the rights of citizens from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where people medicate themselves into bliss

Television reduces the quality of information and devalues rational arguments that can be found in the written word

Postman

McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message", to "the medium is the metaphor" — he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge.

The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing.

Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. --wikipedia

Idiocracy --2006

WHO IS OLIVIA POPE?

Who are all of the late night talk show hosts?

Name 3 Kardashians

Who are your Senators?

Barbara Boxer

Dianne Feinstein

Who is the Supreme Court Chief Justice?

John G. Roberts, Jr.

Who are all of the Supreme Court

Associate Justices?

Antonin Scalia Anthony Kennedy Clarence Thomas Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor Elena Kagan

David Simon and Ed Burns

The Corner, A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood : is an observation of a single corner in Baltimore

HBO’s The Wire is a panoramic drama dealing with many aspects of drug crime in inner-city Baltimore

David Simon: Former Baltimore Sun reporter

Ed Burns: Former Baltimore Homicide Detective

The Corner

book covers a year in the life of an inner city drug market at Fayette & Monroe Streets in Baltimore. Simon and Burns spent over a year interviewing and following around the people who lived on the Fayette & Monroe corner. Although written like a novel, the book is nonfiction; it uses the real names of those people and recounts actual events. --wikipedia

The Wire

American crime drama television series set and produced in and around Baltimore, Maryland.

The Wire introduces a different institution in the city of Baltimore. In chronological order they are: the illegal drug trade, the seaport system, the city government and bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media.

Despite receiving only average ratings and never winning major television awards, The Wire has been described by many critics as one of the greatest TV dramas of all time.[2][3]

[4][5][6][7] The show is recognized for its realistic portrayal of urban life, its literary ambitions, and its uncommonly deep exploration of social and political themes. --wikipedia

How’s He Doing?

Realism

The writers strove to create a realistic vision of an American city based on their own experiences.

They received support from the mayor of Baltimore at the time saying they wanted to portray the city in a bleak way. They also indicated that the show was likely to have no impact on the city's problems.

Why do it?

Serial Podcast (2014)

Creators of This American Life

Sarah Koenig

A true story that takes place over 12 episodes

First season is about Adnan Syed who is convicted of murdering of Hae Min Lee

Ranked #1 on Itunes before its debut and stayed there for several weeks

There was no ending planned—the story took them where it took them

David Bordwell

Theory of story

film theorists such as Noel Burch as well as from art historian Ernst Gombrich,

classical film theory, the history of art cinema, classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema

Bordwell's work considers the film-goer's cognitive processes that take place when perceiving the film's nontextual, aesthetic forms

how films guide our attention to salient narrative information

Conventions

Conventions are the generally accepted ways of doing something. There are general conventions in any medium, such as the use of interviewee quotes in a print article, but conventions are also genre specific.

Story Conventions

Closure, Safety, Discourse

Structure of CSI

Structure of Law and Order

What do those shows mean?

What are they saying?