A Traumatic Engagement (5/19 Panel)

To fail to criticize everyday life means accepting the prolongation of the present thoroughly rotten forms of culture and politics…

-Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life”

What is Trauma Art?

• Works of art that disturb
• They “attach an excess of meaning to the objects designed to convey meaning” (Siebers, 14)
• Shock viewers with wounded bodies and traumatized flesh
• Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990)
• A “life cycle in a box”

• Hirst: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigor.”
• Blurring the artificial and the real
• Contemporary forms of entertainment rely on “the inability of the spectator to know what is real – which means that everything is real” (Siebers, 14)
• Reality TV
• Violence:
• “no perceivable distinction between the thrill and terror felt before so-called artificial forms of violence, e.g., slasher films, and what is felt before the media reportage of biological disasters, terrorist bombings, ethnic conflicts, and famines” (14)
• Trauma art disrupts this:
• “A particular and ordinary object becomes the subject of intense focus, with the result that it changes into another object, but an object of a special kind, one that maintains a peculiar materiality while achieving a universal and communicable meaning beyond its materiality.” (15)

Think back for a moment to our understanding of “the spectacle”; revisit this below under Discussion

What Does Trauma Art Have to Do With Coverage and Reporting?

• Shock readers/viewers into paying closer attention?
• Images of war, torture, assaulted victims
• Engage publics through discomfort?
• Is this effective or counterproductive?
• Make the unfamiliar familiar?
• Mortality and death, taken-for-granted practices and behaviors

Case Study: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)

• “Meat is Murder” campaign (NYC, 2010)
• “All meat comes from somebody”

• Jeff Mackey: “The thought of chewing and swallowing the skin and muscle of a murder victim surely ruined some viewers’ appetites for flesh food. It’s the appropriate response to witnessing a gruesome display of the corpses of those who have been tormented and killed – you know, like in the butcher department of your supermarket.”
• PETA Asia’s recent “Behind the Leather” campaign
• Cruelty involved in making exotic animal skin products and leather goods
• Kept in inhumane conditions, brutally paralyzed, skinned alive

• Kalel vs. Down (and Foie Gras)
• Cruel practices involved with obtaining down feathers and making foie gras (liver of fattened goose/duck)

Other Examples

SeaWorld of Hurt: Where Happiness Tanks

#DissectionKills

Discussion

Is this sort of traumatic shock and disruption effective? Or, is it distracting? Are you going to follow the advertised campaign links and hashtags to read more about the particular circumstances being covered on non-human animal abuse and mistreatment? Or, are you going to head over to Google for some more risque images of your favorite celebrities posing for PETA?

How do we balance these types of approaches with the push-back groups might receive for the controversial or “offensive” nature of their imagery; e.g., PETA’s sexualized depictions of men and women and their “whatever it takes to turn heads” strategy?

How might we think about the use of traumatic imagery and its relation to “the spectacle” of the various industries amid consumer culture (meat, fur, cosmetic, research, etc.)? Consider Pierre Canjuers and Guy Debord’s insistence that “[r]evolutionary artists are those who call for intervention, and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt and destroy it.” (308)

Source Material

Canjuers, Pierre and Guy Debord. “Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program.” In Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, 305-310. California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.

Debord, Guy. “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life.” In Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, 68-75. California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.

Siebers, Tobin. “The Return to Ritual: Violence and Art in the Media Age.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5 (2003): 9-33.

How News and Video Games Have Come Together to Make a Change

What are some examples of gaming used in news narratives? What potential does this and other emergent genres have for the future of news and public engagement?

Emma Spencer

Key Points

1.      Video games like Sweatshop allow players to understand a situation in which they wouldn’t have had the same emotional connection to otherwise.

2.      Video games offer an exciting new platform for news because of the way they engage their audience and appeal to the younger generations.

Sweatshop (and other examples of social impact games)

-In this game you play a floor manager of a sweat shop, and have to fulfill orders by selecting workers to make the goods etc. You have the choice of adult and child workers, as the game continues you are forced to choose the child workers for profitability. Workers also die from dehydration and lose their limbs. As you play child workers pop up on the bottom of the screen begging for descent treatment.

-Betsey Morais from the New Yorker played this game and described the elements above. She also said “The longer I played, the more each moving part—workers, children, hats—became abstracted into the image of one big machine.”

-Betsey reflected that the ability to both identify with the character you are playing as well as being aware of yourself as a player has a profound impact on players of the game.

-Other examples of games; Budget Hero, a game in which the player has to build a federal budget that must stay balanced for 30 years, the game includes up to date financial data. Gauging your Distraction, in which players must perform tasks driving as well as send messages to a friend.

Why are Newsgames Important?

- Newsgames create a meaningful, memorable experience in which you engage in complex stories with strong emotional ties, says Sisi Wei of ProPublica

- Allows the viewer to generate strong understanding through emotional involvement.

-Sisi also argues that these games can be almost as easy to make as a news infographic, “Technologically speaking, HeartSaver was just a few files of HTML, CSS, Javascript, some custom icons made in Illustrator, and free sound files off the Internet. Coming up with the concept and designing the game was the harder part.”

Discussion Questions

1.      Do you think the younger generation is really more likely to play these games than other games they have access to? And are they targeted towards people too young for the content being delivered?

2.      How do you think these games can be more easily accessible and known about?

References

Morais, B. “Anthropological Video Games”. The New Yorker. December 7, 2012.

            http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/anthropological-video-games

Wei, S. “Creating Games for Journalism”. ProPublica. July 11, 2013.

            https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/creating-games-for-journalism

Using Virtual Reality for More Impactful Science Reporting

Main Points:

·      The videogame industry is quickly outpacing all other digital entertainment industries in terms of revenue.

·      In 2015, Hollywood earned $11 billion in revenue (a record)

·      Meanwhile, in 2015 the video game industry earned 23.5 billionin revenue.

·      In 2009, 67% of all U.S. households play Video games

·      The video game industry, pioneers in immersion and story telling of a different kind, have advanced Virtual Reality more than any other industry.

·      If VGs can tell and immerse one in science fiction/fantasy, why cant it immerse us in science reality?

·      Science issues are difficult to understand, let alone conceptualize.

·      Since VR can take us to places we cannot ever visit, why shouldn’t we be employing it to explain science phenomena? Places that are too cold, too far, too small, too hot, too dangerous, too expensive… VR can work around all of this!

·      It is already being done; NYT VR has launched an initiative to focus more on VR.

·      NYT editor Sam Dolnick in charge of VR production.

·      Dennis Overbye, Times Science writer, “Seeking Pluto’s FridgedHeart” transports us to the 9^th planet. You get to walk around on three different locations on the surface, fly over it with New Horizons.

·      Using NASA’s images from New Horizons, the Times graphics desk created the experience.

·      Pluto experience was created entirely by the Times Science desk. (first of its kind).

·      The Times has stated that it will be developing a series of these science stories: “Out There” deals with Space exploration, in 2016 they will develop “Climate Change in Antarctica,”

·      They have already produced VR dealing with swimming with wildmarine mammals in the ocean as well as one in which the user is transported tothe middle of a bison heard.

·      For important science stories, perhaps a VR experience could better communicate the gravity of something like climate change. If someone was able to walk around Antarctica and see the ice shelf disappear, perhaps the story would have a more profound effect.

 References:

Bilton, Ricardo. "The New York Times Is Trying to Make VR Films That Aren’t One-offs, and That Keep Readers Coming Back." Nieman Lab. May 6, 2016. Accessed May 18, 2016. http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/the-new-york-times-is-trying-to-make-vr-films-that-arent-one-offs-and-that-keep-readers-coming-back/.

Brazilian, Emma. "New York Times Doubles Down on Virtual Reality at NewFronts." AdWeek. May 2, 2016. Accessed May 18, 2016. http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/new-york-times-doubles-down-virtual-reality-newfronts-171177.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Virtual Reality Movies Add Dimension to Tribeca Festival." The New York Times. April 18, 2016. Accessed May 18, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/19/movies/virtual-reality-moviesadd-dimension-to-tribeca-festival.html?_r=0.

Visual:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIxQXGTl_mo

Discussion: 

What do you think? Is VR bound to revolutionize science reporting? Do you think it would help you understand science phenomena? Would this have helped you in a science class? Is it worth it or could you get the same information/impact from a traditional science story (print, photos, video)?

Trump's Uphill Battle Against Hillary

Nate Cohn’s assessment of a potential general election scenario between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton mostly utilizes poll numbers and miscellaneous data from surveys to outline its main points, falling somewhere within the quantitative/rigorous and empirical quadrant of Nate Silver’s Approaches to Journalism chart in its style of reporting. While indicating that Clinton is leading by about ten percentage points in general election surveys – at both the state and national levels – Cohn compares much of the currently polling data to the 2012 election to create what should appear to be a fairly predictable narrative: odds are, such a scenario will likely result in Clinton’s election this November. Even though Clinton is not incredibly favorable among some of Obama’s previous supporters (young, nonwhite, well-educated voters), she still trumps Trump in that area; nonwhite voters could end up comprising 30% of the electorate this year, and Clinton leads the younger (18-29) demographic by a larger margin than when Obama did in 2012. As Cohn draws on differences between both the Republican candidates from 2012 and today (Romney and Trump) and the Democrats (Obama and Clinton), he points out some additional, and easily observable, trends in the data. For example, Trump is currently doing worse than Romney was back in 2012, and Romney, of course, did not become the 44th President. And Trump is apparently having a difficult time gathering up some of the voters who had previously supported Romney: white women and white college-educated voters (both categories have reported less than a 30% favorable opinion of him). This, along with the fact that Trump is not even winning the states Romney had four years ago (e.g., Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), certainly seems to indicate the ten-point trail will not really change much in the coming months. And at this point during the election year, and given the public status of both individuals (i.e., they are not exactly strangers to most audiences and groups of voters), Cohn points out that it is not typical to see any big swings in the polls. However, that also assumes we are dealing with a typical sort of election year, too. In other words, Cohn summarizes his report by noting how atypical Trump is as a Republican candidate, which makes a comparative analysis between this year and 2012 a little more murky.

Even though the data used in Cohn’s report is noticeable quantifiable and gathered empirically, he does utilize it in a way similar to Silver when the latter addresses NHL player and game statistics: there are qualitative dimensions that Cohn sifts through in order to draw his conclusions; e.g., the fact that an unusual “big swing” might only come about if Trump gets people to stop being “scared” of his candidacy, that most Americans now seem to be relatively happy with the Obama administration, and that present economic conditions are now seemingly more favorable to the President’s party than they were in 2012. These aspects of the data and the numbers Cohn compares could certainly have been spun, however, to cast Trump as the likely-unlikely Republican nominee in the current political landscape, stressing his “underdog” status that did not really result in him being much of a Republican “underdog” after all. A comparison could have also been made between him and Bernie Sanders, whose views and positions on certain matters might make one wonder why only the political Right could elevate an unconventional candidate on the podium and not on the Left. In other words, rather than be a telling tale of Hillary’s likely success in a general election against Trump, the report could have focused on why the comparative figures and periods might not matter as much during this election than it would appear.

Time for a Change? Donald Trump Will Test a Forecasting Model

 The article that I read was about how Donald Trump is testing an election-forecasting model. The model deals with how voters are more likely to give the opposing party an opportunity to govern after a party has held office for two or more terms. However Trump’s reputation, irresponsibility, and lack of experience are overshadowing this time for a change in the typical political forecasting model. In the past this unlikeable factor has be overlooked and even improved upon when considering a candidate during the general elections, with Trump this seems unlikely given his nature. Data in this particular story is used to analyze how the election process in terms of changing governing parties typically works versus how it will work during this coming election. The creators of this model and another similar to it characterize Republicans as the favorite in this election with an estimated probability of winning of approximately 60 percent. However Trump and his unfavorable nature place him around 25 percent. This story is employing a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative reasoning, rigorous and empirical approach because while the data is numerically based, what will happen with this coming election is purely based off of logic and observations. The data in this story can be changed in different ways so that is more based on quantitative reasoning and information. Or conversely it could be exclusively qualitative information as opposed to a mix of the two types of reasoning. The data in this story is used as a prediction of what will come in this election and how this will differ from elections past in addition to what is to be typically expected during an election process.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/upshot/voters-fears-about-trump-may-outweigh-wish-for-change.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fupshot&action=click&contentCollection=upshot&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election - 538

The story aims to show the audience why Pennsylvania is more of a swing state than others, such as Florida or Ohio, through calculating how states have been trending (red or blue) since the 1992 elections. In terms of approaches to journalism, Wasserman uses a combination of quantitative data and empirical values. Wasserman first uses a combination of examples from his data collection that validate “common” beliefs among Americans  (California has been trending more democratically every four years while West Virginia has been trending more republican every four years). Wasserman finally reveals his point that Pennsylvania, a state that has gone blue since 1992, has been trending more and more red every four years. The way in which his “trending” data was explained was a bit confusing, but once he got into the specifics of why this type of trend was occurring, it made more sense. Wasserman specifically uses data that shows a democratic increase in the Philadelphia market since 1992, but also a democratic decline in the areas outside of Philadelphia. Afterword’s, he states three reasons (economic trends, demographics, and voting laws) as to why this is occurring and how it will help Trump perform better in Pennsylvania compared to usual swing states such as Colorado and Virginia.

Overall, I think all the data was presented well, but was hard to interpret initially. He aims to change a common perception of swing states, by evaluating all of them, and then gets specific to Pennsylvania. Although it took me some time to interpret all of this, I believe Wasserman did a good job of presenting a wide scale belief, addressing a possible change in a trend, and then stating why it could matter. I don’t think the data could have been presented differently, but in the end I was left with a feeling of uncertainty. Was data like this that important to the election? Was a state that really has been Democratic since 1992 really going to change? Like some data journalism stories, the point is that this probably matters, but of course we won’t know until the election.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/pennsylvania-could-be-an-electoral-tipping-point/

Camila Navarrette and Chris Lowell 

People are angry, but about politics, not the economy 
Matthew Yglesias, Vox Policy & Politics  

What combination of the above graph does the story employ? 
- Use of trends from previous decades regarding the economy to analyze the short-term
- Observing trends to culminate quantitative data 
- Quadrant 1: Rigorous & empirical / quantitative 
- Thin connection to conclusions drawn 

How is data used as an explanation or prediction of something? 
- Data used to bolster and explain points 
- Mislead: charts and data draw thin conclusion
   - ex) People feel okay about the economy subheader 
           - Illustrated by graph, ranging from 1960 to 2016, that measures consumer sentiment and satisfaction                while emphasizing the present 
           - Wage increases not accurate measurement of economic growth/prosperity 
                 - Wage increase movements across country 
                 - Tenant of Sander's campaign rests on economic inequality and the wealth gap 

Are there other ways the data could be explained that would give the story a different frame? 
- Emphasize Republicans and Democrats view that their side is losing 
- Political parties and notion of "losing" : under-analyzed 
   - Graph: by age, who believes is "losing" in politics 
--> What does this say about the media and perception? 
--> What does this say about the political system? 
- Koch Brothers ex) 
--> Could be more analyzed given their political status and influence 
--> If they don't feel like heaps of money can solve an issue, what can? 

Summary 
--> Politics and economic issues are intertwined; incomplete analysis of their importance to one another 
   - The economy may be better at this moment, but this doesn't mean that it is not an important issue to Americans during this election 
    - ex) The wealth gap and its connection to racial/ethnic issues 
--> Given this relationship - no matter its state at this moment -, how can we better our political system to reflect the interests of the public? 
--> What do individual's political insecurity and belief that their "side" is "losing" say about the health of our political system?