Category Archives: Entertainment

Could a new Chicago casino be a cultural hub?

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Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones argues that the inevitable Chicago casino should be more of a cultural hub than a gaming paradise:

Instead, it should be viewed as a major new cultural hub, which happens to have a little gambling going on alongside its many other attractions.

And that won’t happen unless Chicago’s creative professionals — its architects, entertainment executives, chefs, artists, actors, music promoters, cultural officials — hold their noses and overcome, as did the former street performers of the Cirque du Soleil more than two decades ago, whatever qualms they may have about becoming involved with gambling, which will arrive with or without them. They must grab hold of this civic debate right now, before the chance is lost for good.

The main energy of a Chicago casino should have everything to do with experiencing architecture, watching spectacular shows, eating at world-class restaurants, interacting with thrilling technological art and the like, and as little as possible to do with gambling. When winners are few, the core activity, experience elsewhere has shown, is more frequently depressive than ecstatic. The casinos’ commercials showing constant excitement at the slots are, as anyone who has spent time in a casino late at night will attest, illusions.

The only thing the actual gambling would bring to the table is the revenue that will make other great things possible in what could be an intensely creative building, one of the few big-ticket cultural developments that actually could pay for itself and get built in a barely recovering economy, rather than languishing as a costly, unfunded dream.

This is an intriguing idea – and one that might be too aspirational. The conversation about casinos in Illinois has been primarily about money as state and local governments are in desperate need of cash. My primary question to Jones would be whether there are actual models to follow here – are there urban casinos, outside of Las Vegas, that meet the goals he suggests or would Chicago be doing a whole new thing here? What would it take to have both a profitable casino as well as one that could be a cultural center? Where would such a cultural casino be located that could build upon existing tourist flows while also attracting new crowds that would be drawn to a casino? Historically, casinos tend not to have the best reputation as they attract certain kinds of crowds so building a world-class casino and cultural hub would be a big coup if done well in Chicago.

Do “Anthropological Video Games” lead to anthropological learning?

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The New Yorker has a short article about several anthropological video games including “Guess My Race,” “The Cat and the Coup,” and “Sweatshop.”

A cluster of teen-agers gathered around a small table, and passersby could hear them exclaim, “Asian! Yeah, I knew it!” and “Aryan? That seems ridiculous.” They hovered over two iPads in the Grand Gallery of the Museum of Natural History during the Margaret Mead Film Festival, playing a game called “Guess My Race.” It was one of five video games in the Mead Arcade; the others included “The Cat and the Coup,” which traces the downfall of Iran’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and “Sweatshop,” in which you hire and fire workers for your loathsome factory.

Aiding the swarms of museum patrons who stopped to play were volunteers from Games for Change, a New York City-based nonprofit that encourages the development of what it calls “social-impact games.” (All of the games at the arcade are also available for free through the organization’s Web site.) I sat down at a laptop to try my hand at running a sweatshop. To a bouncy techno soundtrack, the boss floor manager, who keenly evoked Hitler, spewed insults and directions—”Lazybones! How are you today? Shh-h-h-h. I don’t care!”—and the orders started pouring in for shoes, shirts, hats, and bags…

In 1940, Margaret Mead created a card game along with her husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Called “Democracies and Dictators,” its cards contained instructions such as “Dictator! Crippled Industries: You have put your leading industrialists into concentration camps. (lose a card in 5).” Mead wrote that it was based on “the basic ideas that democracies and dictators play by different rules and work with different values.” She tried to sell the idea to Parker Brothers, but it was never produced for public consumption. The games on display at the Mead Arcade have been markedly more successful. “Sweatshop” had a million plays during its first three months, and “The Cat and the Coup” has received acclaim from gamers around the world—including one German reviewer who wrote that it is “like Monty Python being dropped in a bowl full of Persian kitsch.”…

But if games train players in the rules of culture, what happens when those rules become too complicated to follow, or, perhaps, obsolete? Settling down to play “Guess My Race,” the player looks at photographs of ten faces—no artifacts here, the subjects are familiarly modern. You choose from six possible races that vary widely from one round to the next—descriptions might be nationalities, skin colors, religions, or loaded epithets like “Illegal” or “East Coast.” The player might have to select from options that would seem to be simultaneously plausible (i.e., Asian versus Indonesian, or Black versus Caribbean) with answers that suggest race is self-defined, not regionally or ethnically determined.

And so the gamification of the world continues. I’m not surprised these games are featured at a museum; when recently visiting the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago for the first time in a few years, I was struck by the number of hands-on exhibits and games that allow one or two users to explore some dimension of science. It is interesting to see that these games have had so many downloads – people are either interested in the topics or there are a lot of gamers out there willing to trying a lot of things.

My biggest question about these games is whether players learn the intended lessons. As the article notes, games have been used and proposed for decades to teach players different lessons. We know, for example, that Monopoly is partly about capitalism. It seems to me that the crop of more recent Euro games, from Settlers of Catan on downward, tend to teach about what is needed to grow a community or society. Even new video games like Assassin’s Creed III are related to historical events. However, having played a lot of games over recent years, I wonder how much I’ve actually learned about anything as opposed to enjoyed competing. Is the point of the board game Agricola to teach me that Germans living in the 1600s needed a diverse base of multiple foodstuffs? Did the video game Civilization (II-IV) teach me something meaningful about how civilizations actually develop? I’m not sure.

Also, I have to ask: what would a sociological game look like?

Looking at Seneca Falls, New York, “the real Bedford Falls” in It’s a Wonderful Life

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Social Explorer, a cool tool for looking at demographic data, takes a quick look at the New York community that was the inspiration for Bedford Falls in the holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life:

Producer and director Frank Capra set the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life in the fictional small town of Bedford Falls, NY.  The actual town of Seneca Falls, NY, claims to be Capra’s inspiration.   The town hosts the annual It’s a Wonderful Life Festival and visitors can explore the history at the museum dedicated to the legend…

Back in 1940, Seneca County had 25,732 residents, of whom 99.5 percent were white and 0.5 percent were black.  Nearly a third of the county’s foreign born population (32.0 percent) hailed from Italy, more than both statewide (one fifth) and nationwide (one seventh).  Many foreign born residents also came from Germany (10.2 percent) and England and Wales (9.1 percent).

Today, Seneca County has grown 37.1 percent to 35,285 residents, while the state grew 43.2 percent and the nation grew 133.0 percent.  Seneca County remains predominately white (92.9 percent) with a small but growing black population (4.3 percent).  According to 2006-10 ACS data, today 4.6 percent of the foreign born population comes from Italy.  Larger shares of newcomers come from other countries including Canada (17.4 percent), India (11.2 percent), Laos (6.1 percent), Ukraine (5.1 percent), and Poland (3.6 percent).

The top occupations in 1940 were:

  • Proprietors/Managers/Official (20.9 percent)
  • Craftmen/Foremen/Kindred Workers (16.4 percent)
  • Operatives/Kindred Workers (15.0 percent)
  • Laborers (13.9 percent)

Of the adult residents, 18.2 percent had completed high school (or more) and 3.0 percent had graduated from college, which were both smaller percentages than in the state (22.9 percent and 5.5 percent) and nation (24.1 percent and 4.6 percent).

Sounds like small town life that may not be much different today. The movie seems to provide more information about the “feel” of the community rather than the demographics. George Bailey is trying to build suburban-type homes and is thwarted by the evil banker in the community. By the end of the film, Bailey and other average citizens in the community are shown to be decent people who rally together in times of need. Does this story necessarily line up with the ancestry of the community or the top occupations? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps demography is not narrative destiny in this case. Perhaps the best way to attack this issue would be to compare the demographics of Seneca County in 1940 to other typical small towns and counties and see how “representative” the movie demographics might have been.

Website of the day: gradeinflation.com

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Perhaps it is finals week that piqued my interest in this particular website: gradeinflation.com. There is a lot of fascinating information on this site about college grading trends in recent decades. Yes, my own institution is represented on the site.

If this puts you in the grading spirit, you can try out The Grading Game app which one Wired reviewer liked:

I’m frankly surprised by how much I like The Grading Game. It is ultimately about grading papers and looking for spelling errors, but somehow the intense time limit, scoring mechanics and various modes wrapped around that seemingly bland premise make the game super addictive. And, as someone who does a great degree of text-editing, I suspect that this simple iPhone app is making me better at my job.

Not quite the same experience but it is an attempt to put grading through the gamification process.

Nielsen and Twitter combine to measure Twittering about television

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With the rise of Twitter messages about television shows and events, Nielsen and Twitter just announced a new project to measure the connection:

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” said Steve Hasker, President, Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”…

The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will enhance the social TV analytics and metrics available today from SocialGuide by adding the first-ever measurement of the total audience for social TV activity – both those participating in the conversation and those who were exposed to the activity –providing the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.

SocialGuide, recently acquired by Nielsen and NM Incite, currently captures Twitter TV activity for all U.S. programming across 234 TV channels in English and Spanish, and more than 36,000 programs.  Through a sophisticated classification process, SocialGuide matches Tweets to TV programs to offer key social TV metrics including the number of unique Tweets associated with a given program and rankings for the most social TV programs.

This may be interesting in itself but the key may just be translating this into information that TV networks can sell to advertisers:

Brad Adgate, an analyst at Horizon Media, said advertisers will view the Twitter ratings as a useful layer of information about a show’s popularity, but it is “not going to be close to the currency” of existing ratings metrics.

“It lets producers and creative directors know if the storyline is working, like a huge focus group,” Adgate said. “But I don’t think you can translate comments to ratings for a show. Right now I think the bark right now is bigger than its bite.”…

Mark Burnett, executive producer of NBC’s hit “The Voice,” argued that advertisers should value programs that can attract a high level of social media engagement from viewers. Deeply embedded social media elements, such as live Twitter polls, were critical in driving “The Voice” to the top of the Tuesday night ratings among viewers between 18 to 49, Burnett said.

“If you’re an advertiser, wouldn’t you want to know whether people are watching this show passively or if they’re actively engaged in the viewing experience?” Burnett said. “Five years from now this will make traditional television ratings seem archaic.”

In other words, if this metric works well, television networks will be able to charge advertisers more based on increased levels of Twitter engagement or find some way to provide more targeted advertising to Twitter users. What will Twitter engaged TV watchers get out of it? I’m not sure. Will any of this measurement and action based on the data enhance the interactive element of TV watching? Theoretically, if TV networks could get more money for advertising based on social media engagement, they might have more money to put into developing quality programming. But, there are few guarantees there.

I’ll be very interested to see in coming years if Twitter and Facebook continue to remain relatively ad-free or if the need to monetize these experiences to make money takes precedence.

Contrarian view: “Why 2012 was the best year ever”

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The Spectator argues that 2012 wasn’t so bad when you look at the big picture:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And so on. It is hard to keep this big picture in mind. Tragedies seem common or at least too frequent. Good news doesn’t seem to trickle up to the top of the news heap as much. Or perhaps it is because our relative status in the United States and elsewhere in the West seems precarious. Or perhaps it is because due to globalization we are also more aware of the risks in the world around us.

This argument reminds of Stephen Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature (my quick review here). Pinker argued in the book that humans have had a much more violent past and today is marked by relative peace and conflict today tends to be more limited in terms of deaths and how big of an area is affected. Yet, the average citizen would not probably pick up on this.

Before watching The Hobbit on Friday night, my wife and I were struck by the number of movie trailers for post-apocalyptic films. Granted, we didn’t see any trailers for romantic comedies or many Oscar worthy dramas – the theaters clearly think there is a certain audience for The Hobbit – but these sort of narratives seem to be on the rise. People want to watch fictionalized movies and TV shows about the end of times, when the narrative of human progress is clearly smashed and small groups of people try to put the pieces together again. Of course, such movies can also be an excuse for monsters and violence but this is a fascinating trend tied to pessimism about the present and future.

Mixing genres with Sears’ “Connecting Flight” commercial

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The Sears TV commercial running right now titled “Connecting Flights” turns a holiday romantic comedy trailer into an appliance advertisement. Watch here.

My Culture, Media, and Society class recently discussed genres and how they help structure narratives. If you have seen a holiday romantic comedy movie trailer or commercial, you have seen the opening part of this particular advertisement. Two people are trapped at an airport after their flights have been canceled. They meet and start enjoying each other’s company in the airport. Yet, when they finally find flights out, they realize they want to stay together and start running toward each other.

This is where the genre falls apart. Instead of running the arms of the other, each crashes into a stainless steel refrigerator. And it turns into a clear advertisement for Sears. On one hand, it is a smart use of an existing type of cultural work. On the other hand, the ending is so different than the beginning that I wonder how many people like Sears at the end. It is a bait and switch: what happened to the cheesy, feel-good romantic comedy?

In the end, Sears uses an existing narrative form to try to provide a new perspective on appliances, one of the few things Sears now has going for it. But, the contrast in genres, switching so abruptly from holiday romantic comedy to selling home appliances, is jarring.

Sociologist says portrayal of Iranian-Americans on “Shahs of Sunset” isn’t so bad

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The second season of Shahs of Sunset began last night on Bravo and a sociologist looks at how it portrays Iranian-Americans:

Iranian-Americans talk about white people in surprising ways. Reza Farahan, the show’s gay, mustachioed breakout star, is also its racial id. Whether hollering at “yummy white hos,” asserting “a white guy [can’t] make a Persian man jealous” or assessing a rack of gingham-checked bikinis as “the white section … Persians wouldn’t be caught dead in that,” Reza says things about race no Iranian has ever said before — on TV, that is. The paradox is that Iranians and other Middle Easterners have been (often happily) categorized as “white” in the U.S. since their earliest arrival in the 19th century. Recent efforts among these groups to gain federal recognition as “Middle Eastern” are reflective of internal and external cultural shifts. For example, in my survey of 500 freshmen in my Introduction to Sociology course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, over 75 percent of the students perceived “Middle Eastern” to be its own racial category.

Iranian-American kids and parents are more tightly knit than a carpet. The ubiquitous presence of elders on “Shahs” predates the Osbourne/Kardashian formula for compulsively watchable family drama. Multiple generations of Iranians have always lived on top of one another in apartment buildings, as neighbors in small villages and within the same compounds in posh suburban areas. Here in the U.S., a 2005 study found that second-generation Iranian-Americans cite “parental love and care” as the most important “Iranian” value to pass on to their own children. This contradicts the portrayals of abusive, authoritarian Iranian parents from films like “Not Without My Daughter.” Season two of “Shahs” explores the terrain of Iranian-American filial love even further as bohemian singer Asa Soltan Rahmati struggles to pull her refugee parents out of financial hardship.

Iranian-American interfaith relationships will make you question what you think you know about the Middle East. The show’s inclusion of Jewish and Muslim Iranian Angelinos sets it apart from nearly every other depiction of Middle Eastern life on TV. In fact, religious identity is at the forefront of season one: Mike Shouhed, an Iranian Jew, dates non-Jewish women against his mother’s wishes; the whole cast engages in candid conversation about interfaith marriage; and Reza’s anguish as the child of interfaith divorce (his Iranian-Muslim mother and Iranian-Jewish father “never had a shot” due to disapproving families) is the denouement of the first season. Iranian history is similarly rich with interfaith commerce, friendship, scholarship and even marriage, despite attempts to rewrite the record. Like Reza, I know about interfaith love first-hand: My Iranian-Muslim mom and Iranian-Jewish dad remain married in the rain-soaked Tehrangeles outpost of Portland, Oregon, which makes me at least a Princess of Precipitation.

There’s much to dislike about “Shahs”: Its celebration of consumerism, the cast’s delusions of ethnic superiority and their nostalgia for a mythic “Persia” contradict truths I know as a sociologist. But admitting any degree of depth in “Shahs of Sunset” is a minority position among Iranian-Americans and apparently among academics, too. Most dismiss the show as ethnic defamation, some even signing petitions against such dangerous fiction.

I suspect reality TV faces the same issues as novels do when trying to depict reality: just how much can you cover and with how much nuance?

This makes me wonder: perhaps the bar for declaring a reality TV show good is if it is not horribly contrived and unrealistic. Also, is there any chance sociologists could be consultants for reality TV shows that do want to be more realistic?

Argument: Tom Wolfe’s “sociological novel” about Miami doesn’t match reality

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A magazine editor from Miami argues Tom Wolfe’s latest “sociological novel” Back to Blood doesn’t tell the more complex story of what is going on today in that city:

TOM WOLFE has often declared that journalistic truth is far stranger — and narratively juicier — than fiction, a refrain he’s returned to while promoting his latest sociological novel, the Miami- focused “Back to Blood.” With cultural eyes turning to Miami for this week’s Art Basel fair, and on the heels of a presidential election in which South Florida was once again in the national spotlight, “Back to Blood” would seem a perfectly timed prism.

Yet Mr. Wolfe would have done well to better heed his own advice. The flesh-and-blood reality not only contradicts much of his fictional take, it flips the enduring conventional wisdom. Miami is no longer simply the northernmost part of Latin America, or, as some have snarked, a place filled with folks who’ve been out in the sun too long.

For Mr. Wolfe, the city remains defined by bitter ethnic divisions and steered by la lucha: the Cuban-American community’s — make that el exilio’s — frothing-at-the-mouth fixation on the Castro regime across the Florida Straits. The radio format whose beats Miami moves to isn’t Top 40, rap or even salsa, but all Fidel, all the time. It’s a crude portrait, established in the ’80s, reinforced by the spring 2000 telenovela starring Elián González, hammered home in the media by that fall’s Bush v. Gore drama and replayed with the same script every four years since.

Yet the latest data hardly depicts a monolithic Cuban-exile community marching in ideological lock step. Exit polls conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International revealed that 44 percent of Miami’s Cuban-Americans voted to re-elect President Obama last month, despite a Mitt Romney TV ad attempting to link the president with Mr. Castro. The result was not only a record high for a Democratic presidential candidate, it was also a 12 percentage-point jump over 2008.

Can a novel, even a sociological one, capture all of the nuances of a big city? Or, is a novel more about capturing a spirit or the way these complexities influence a few characters? While I do enjoy fictional works, this is why I tend to gravitate toward larger-scale studies about bigger patterns. One story or a few stories can explore nuance and more details. However, it is hard to know how much these smaller stories are representative of a larger whole. In Wolfe’s case, is his book a fair-minded view of what is taking place all across Miami or does he pick up on a few fault lines  and exceptional events?

While browsing in a bookstore the other day, I did notice an interesting book that was trying to bridge this gap: The Human Face of Big Data. On one hand, our world is becoming one where large datasets with millions of data points are the norm. With this, it may be harder and harder for novels to capture all of the patterns and trends. Yet, we don’t want to lose perspective on how this data and the resulting policies and actions affect real people.