onfocus

I recently read the Penguin Classics version of Aristotle's Poetics, and holy crap, why didn't anyone force me to sit down and read this sooner? In college I minored in Film Studies and English, and I thought I had a good introduction to deconstructing texts through those years of classes. Little did I know I've been missing a core way to think about stories.

A great book about giving presentations is Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson. (I've mentioned it here before: Public Speaking.) Atkinson has a very useful system for telling a story via Powerpoint that's based on some of Aristotle's ideas in Poetics. He mentions that a couple times in BBB. I've put together a few presentations using the advice in the book, and the ideas were very helpful. So I figured ad fontes (I often think in Latin, heh), and picked up Poetics. I also recently read Eco's Name of the Rose, which tangentially featured Aristotle.

I know next to nothing about Artistotle beyond the fact that his books are sort of teaching notes on various subjects, and only a few survive today. I'm also vaguely aware that Aristotle and Plato had two different ways of viewing the world that continue to split our collective psyche to this day. (Something about Plato's love of ideal forms vs. Aristotle's favored observation of the real world.) I guess this basic understanding kept me from reading Aristotle. Why would I want to read some half-finished ideas? I figured the ideas were probably so remote, abstract, and ancient that they wouldn't have much relevance to me. So I had low expectations going in. I figured I wouldn't even be able to understand it.

I read the introduction to Poetics by Malcolm Heath, and I got quite a bit out of it. Of course it's very dry and academic, but it did help explain some sort of consensus of thinking about Aristotle, some of the issues raised in Poetics that people have been struggling with, and some of the context in which Aristotle was writing. But the real value was Poetics itself.

Aristotle shows how Greek tragic plays like Oedipus are most effectively constructed. He contrasts tragedy with comedy and epic a bit, but Poetics is focused on tragic stories as a form. And he wasn't so concerned with plays as they are performed, but as they are written. So his thoughts translate well to any type of story.

The overriding idea I've been thinking about since reading this is that stories, art, any media we consume, is an imitation of reality—and this imitation is trying to evoke an emotional response so we can identify with it. (And I've been thinking about this in relation to advertising, especially, which are really little stories that evoke emotions about products.) Aristotle says that tragedy should evoke fear and pity, and discusses the best way to evoke these emotions: by having normal characters go from good fortune to bad through no fault of their own.

Aristotle places quite a bit of emphasis on social status which is sort of taboo in our society. And it's a bit uncomfortable to read. But now that I've seen stories through Aristotle's eyes, I can't help but see changes in fortune and differences in status in stories everywhere. It's like seeing a fundamental building block of the content I continually consume for the first time. And this is why I can't believe I haven't read it sooner. I know this sounds obvious, but character status, arc through the story, and emotions evoked should be the first step in analyzing a story. I've found it's very useful when watching a Youtube video, reading a blog, or looking at a billboard to think, "What emotion is this work trying to evoke?" This step back seems so clear that I should have been doing this all along. But analyzing for Aristotelian effectiveness is quite a bit different from "Hot or Not", Love/Hate decisions about stuff I consume.

Anyway, this is my attempt to sit you down and force you to read Poetics, because I wish someone would have made me do it sooner. There's a lot more than what I've described to get out of it, and I think it will help you think about media in a new (old) way.

A few years ago I put together a list of books about media that have helped me understand different pieces of our culture. I'm currently reading a book that I'm officially adding to my Guerilla Media Literacy List. The Consumer Trap by Michael Dawson sounds at first like a personal finance book, and I suppose it might affect readers' buying habits in some ways. But the book is really an examination of the business systems that influence and direct our off-the-job lives.

Before reading this book I was very aware of standard marketing terms such as branding, differentiation, distribution channels, and targeting. I was even aware of psychological advertising methods that were pioneered by Edward Bernays, explored by folks like Vance Packard, and are in heavy use today. (Check out the excellent documentary The Century of the Self for a crash course in psychological advertising.) So I considered myself fairly familiar with the Marketing Machine. But reading Dawson's book brought together these familiar concepts and many more new marketing tools into a complete, coherent picture.

The book starts with a history of both marketing and marketing criticism. Dawson introduced me to Frederick Winslow Taylor, who used methods from science to organize business, and Thorstein Veblen, an economist and early critic of corporate business practices. In one example of scientific observation, Taylor attached lights to workers, filmed them as they worked, and found ways to make their movements more efficient. Taylor's ideas about engineering work environments, objects, and people's actions lead to companies taking a similar, scientific approach to people's off-the-job, product-related activities as well. Veblen, on the other hand, coined the term conspicuous consumption and found that corporate marketers were using "force and fraud" to engineer people's activities in a form of absentee ownership that has existed throughout history. These two figures set up the tension that exists throughout the book.

At times I couldn't tell if I was reading a critique of marketing or a how-to manual. But I think a big part of being a literate media consumer is understanding how the system works. Dawson shows that marketing is about much more than advertising, and that it's marketing that decides which products are produced. He describes marketing strategies such as differentiation between equal products, planned obsolescence that increases the chances someone will buy a new product before an old one is used up, and elaborate packaging that extends the brand.

I don't think we can be completely free from the forces of marketing, and we probably wouldn't want to be. But a greater awareness of the carrots and sticks that are out there can help us make informed decisions. If you're interested in how your media environment influences you on a daily basis, you are the target market for The Consumer Trap.

Try a search for the word "vows" at any news aggregator: Google, Yahoo. Everyone is vowing to do stuff across all news categories from entertainment to politics to technology to sports. I like a good vow as much as anyone else, but I vow not to use the term in my own post titles. Except this post, which is alternately titled: PB Breaks Vow on Headlinese.

Update: Jason noticed a lot of urging going on as well. And you can't help but notice the eyeing everyone is apparently doing.

Update 2: PB Eyes Wiki Headlinese, Urges 'Vows' Addition.

One of my favorite programs on NPR is On the Media. I always seem to miss it on the radio because it's on at an odd time for me. So I've messed around with FM tuners on my PC, and TiVo-like programs trying to catch them. I could never find the right combination of hardward and software. They recently started podcasting their shows—On the Media podcasts—and I haven't missed one since. New episodes just show up in iTunes and I can listen to them whenever I have time. I didn't quite understand the appeal of the subscription component of podcasting before, but now I see that if there's a program I always want to catch, podcasting is very handy.

Last November 3rd I mentioned that, "...it's time to eliminate the [television] from my daily life as much as possible." If you're following along at home, you might want to hear how it's going. I'm down to an average of one hour a day. I get almost all of my news online, so I don't feel any less informed. Now I'm not even watching "good" progams I used to love like News Hour, Frontline, and Nova. (My one hour/day is mostly The Daily Show, South Park, and some McLaughlin Group on the weekend.) sk and I recently removed the television from our bedroom—which was tough because we were both used to falling asleep with some background noise. But that has drastically cut down the remaining daily TV time.

I may be compensating in other ways, though, because I picked up a nasty PlayStation 2 habit in the last couple of months. ;) Ahh well, at least the experiment in cutting out television programming has been a smashing success. It may even be time to go completely off the tv grid and cut the cable cord. At least that idea doesn't seem impossible now.