Nonfiction reviews
My version of nesting: trying to clear the backlog.
Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World: This book starts out in a way that horrified me because of its resonance with current political culture: “This is a story about why marketers must forsake any attempt to communicate nothing but the facts, and must instead focus on what people believe and then work to tell them stories that add to their worldview.” I’m a believer in storytelling; how could I not be? I believe in interpretive frameworks, too. But the idea of always reinforcing, never challenging - that makes me despair. Godin argues that successful marketing requires advertisers to live the lie, and make it somewhat true. He suggests that you can eventually get consumers to tell themselves a changed story over time if you do it right. I’m still depressed. There’s a difference between, on the one hand, an expensive wineglass that makes wine taste better in taste tests than kitchen glasses do even though it’s scientifically no different and, on the other, an expensive SUV that makes people enjoy driving more even though it’s less safe and less fuel-efficient than the alternatives. To his credit, Godin makes this distinction and argues that it’s unethical to use his persuasive methods - or any other methods, for that matter - to sell bad products, and ultimately I was depressed rather than angry at him. The book is weak, however, in that it is so short and relatively free of examples that it would not be a real help to anyone who wanted to put Godin’s principles into practice.
William W. Fisher III, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment: This book offers in its introductory sections a summary of where we are in copyright law; while well-written, it's unnecessary to readers familiar with the topics. The meat is in the three alternate strategies for dealing with new technology Fisher offers, (1) property, offering copyright owners total control over new uses of their works except for an oddly untouched vision of fair use, (2) regulation to achieve some sort of balance between owners and users, for example by banning price discrimination and regulating copy controls, and (3) an alternative compensation system funded by a tax on hardware or from general revenues, allowing unlimited copying by anyone. Fisher prefers option three, which would pay copyright owners in proportion to the extent their works were used by the public.
This option, very popular in the law reviews of late, leaves me skeptical; it works best for pure copying, and starts to have trouble with derivative works. Fisher would allow unlimited remixing and reusing, and the original copyright owner would get paid for the remix based on how much, quantitatively, was taken from the original, but that standard works a lot better for a rap song using samples or a documentary than, say, fan fiction. And what about fan videos? Fisher proposes that mash-up creators should get a 25% share of any revenues for the work they do. But people are doing that now for nothing but the reputational (and creative) benefits. Maybe we should value mash-ups and fanvids in monetary terms, but we don't need to do so to get them produced, which I think is a relevant consideration. An interesting comparison is to expurgated films like those produced by CleanFlicks, which removes sex and violence from Hollywood films and sells the new versions for a profit - should we reward them for that? Or is virtue, like fandom, its own reward?
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book: geekturnedvamp gave this to me, and I'm grateful. It was a breezy, readable pop history, mostly biographies of several major figures in the history/mythology of comics, including Siegel and Schuster. The book does a good job of evoking the era of infinite promise and then deep threat in which these Jewish boys grew up, and Jones also occasionally offers some nice insights into the attractions of superheroes, true crime and other comics staples.
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter: This slender (200 pages, big type) volume makes a simple argument: today's entertainment has a complexity of narrative that requires more cognitive processing power than prior linear narratives, and this is true in video games as well as in TV with its multiple plot threads. Johnson mostly resists the urge to tear down traditional media forms (particularly books) in comparison, but occasionally slips into unqualified judgments such as "We absorb stories, but we second-guess games." Clearly he's never hung around LJ after Sci-Fi Friday. He allows only reality television as an exception to the rule that we merely spectate at prime-time television, since reality TV depends on our excitement about the personal interactions of the participants and thus forces us to pay close attention to social cues (essentially, gossip), which, he holds, is always engrossing. Today's games and shows, he argues, offer new pleasures with each viewing, where we learn something new. Kind of makes those of us who liked Ms. Pac-Man feel stupid for enjoying the comfort of the familiar. In general, I think Johnson discounts the audience's ability to make complexity out of simplicity - fandom aside, I clearly recall the pleasure of analyzing the lyrics of "Maniac" for their potential meanings ("She's dancing like she's never danced before" allows two quite opposed interpretations, much like the motto of a community near us, "[x-dale]: We take time to care"). That said, I recently rewatched "Miri," the first Star Trek episode I ever remember seeing, and found it pretty dull and subplot-free. Is culture getting more challenging, on average? Johnson's argument is provocative, but I await more data.
Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World: This book starts out in a way that horrified me because of its resonance with current political culture: “This is a story about why marketers must forsake any attempt to communicate nothing but the facts, and must instead focus on what people believe and then work to tell them stories that add to their worldview.” I’m a believer in storytelling; how could I not be? I believe in interpretive frameworks, too. But the idea of always reinforcing, never challenging - that makes me despair. Godin argues that successful marketing requires advertisers to live the lie, and make it somewhat true. He suggests that you can eventually get consumers to tell themselves a changed story over time if you do it right. I’m still depressed. There’s a difference between, on the one hand, an expensive wineglass that makes wine taste better in taste tests than kitchen glasses do even though it’s scientifically no different and, on the other, an expensive SUV that makes people enjoy driving more even though it’s less safe and less fuel-efficient than the alternatives. To his credit, Godin makes this distinction and argues that it’s unethical to use his persuasive methods - or any other methods, for that matter - to sell bad products, and ultimately I was depressed rather than angry at him. The book is weak, however, in that it is so short and relatively free of examples that it would not be a real help to anyone who wanted to put Godin’s principles into practice.
William W. Fisher III, Promises to Keep: Technology, Law and the Future of Entertainment: This book offers in its introductory sections a summary of where we are in copyright law; while well-written, it's unnecessary to readers familiar with the topics. The meat is in the three alternate strategies for dealing with new technology Fisher offers, (1) property, offering copyright owners total control over new uses of their works except for an oddly untouched vision of fair use, (2) regulation to achieve some sort of balance between owners and users, for example by banning price discrimination and regulating copy controls, and (3) an alternative compensation system funded by a tax on hardware or from general revenues, allowing unlimited copying by anyone. Fisher prefers option three, which would pay copyright owners in proportion to the extent their works were used by the public.
This option, very popular in the law reviews of late, leaves me skeptical; it works best for pure copying, and starts to have trouble with derivative works. Fisher would allow unlimited remixing and reusing, and the original copyright owner would get paid for the remix based on how much, quantitatively, was taken from the original, but that standard works a lot better for a rap song using samples or a documentary than, say, fan fiction. And what about fan videos? Fisher proposes that mash-up creators should get a 25% share of any revenues for the work they do. But people are doing that now for nothing but the reputational (and creative) benefits. Maybe we should value mash-ups and fanvids in monetary terms, but we don't need to do so to get them produced, which I think is a relevant consideration. An interesting comparison is to expurgated films like those produced by CleanFlicks, which removes sex and violence from Hollywood films and sells the new versions for a profit - should we reward them for that? Or is virtue, like fandom, its own reward?
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book: geekturnedvamp gave this to me, and I'm grateful. It was a breezy, readable pop history, mostly biographies of several major figures in the history/mythology of comics, including Siegel and Schuster. The book does a good job of evoking the era of infinite promise and then deep threat in which these Jewish boys grew up, and Jones also occasionally offers some nice insights into the attractions of superheroes, true crime and other comics staples.
Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter: This slender (200 pages, big type) volume makes a simple argument: today's entertainment has a complexity of narrative that requires more cognitive processing power than prior linear narratives, and this is true in video games as well as in TV with its multiple plot threads. Johnson mostly resists the urge to tear down traditional media forms (particularly books) in comparison, but occasionally slips into unqualified judgments such as "We absorb stories, but we second-guess games." Clearly he's never hung around LJ after Sci-Fi Friday. He allows only reality television as an exception to the rule that we merely spectate at prime-time television, since reality TV depends on our excitement about the personal interactions of the participants and thus forces us to pay close attention to social cues (essentially, gossip), which, he holds, is always engrossing. Today's games and shows, he argues, offer new pleasures with each viewing, where we learn something new. Kind of makes those of us who liked Ms. Pac-Man feel stupid for enjoying the comfort of the familiar. In general, I think Johnson discounts the audience's ability to make complexity out of simplicity - fandom aside, I clearly recall the pleasure of analyzing the lyrics of "Maniac" for their potential meanings ("She's dancing like she's never danced before" allows two quite opposed interpretations, much like the motto of a community near us, "[x-dale]: We take time to care"). That said, I recently rewatched "Miri," the first Star Trek episode I ever remember seeing, and found it pretty dull and subplot-free. Is culture getting more challenging, on average? Johnson's argument is provocative, but I await more data.