I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

I’m a little late to my Lost blogging again – mainly because I didn’t end up watching ‘Sundown’ until this past Friday.  I thought it was a good episode.  Very dark.  The show is getting decidedly creepier this season.  In any case, more after the leap… [obviously, spoiler alert]

I think I’m going to start blogging weekly on the final season of Lost.  I wish I’d started this with the season premiere, but it’s too late for that.

As a primer – I become very disgruntled with the show around season 3.  It was a combination of burn-out (too much Lost in rapid succession) and the show’s own struggles which had me doubting whether I’d keep watching.  Suffice to say, I’m glad I did.  Season 4 was much better, and Season 5 was excellent.

So far, the final season looks to be shaping up to be just as good or even better than the last one.

So – some thoughts and spoilers on the season so far, and especially the latest episode, “Lighthouse”, after the leap…

Jim and Pam getting married did more than give Michael and excuse to hook up with Pam’s mom. It expanded the lens of The Office wide enough to reveal a disturbing fact: Jim and Pam don’t have any real friends.

Suddenly, a romance that seemed like the natural progression for two quietly charming people revealed itself to be much more depressing.

All of Jim and Pam’s witty asides and eyerolls in response to their officemates’ antics have stopped being expressions of untapped potential and started to look like passive-aggressive attempts to undermine their peers—who are the only people who will socialize with them.

I admit that the earlier seasons – seasons one and two in particular – were the most fun when it came to the Jim/Pam dynamic.  The tension of unrequited love was the life and breath of the show, and the triangle between Jim/Pam and Dwight was a lot more funny back then.  But I’m just confused by this idea that somehow Jim and Pam have no friends, and that they are somehow acting in a passive-agressive attempt “to undermine their peers – who are the only people who will socialize with them.”

First of all, how does Keane know that their peers are the only people who will socialize with them?  What does that even mean? [Read more →]

Matt Yglesias says:

What’s really depressing to me about the current TV landscape isn’t so much that we haven’t seen another Wire-quality show as it is that we haven’t even seen a serious effort to produce another show that’d be as good. The aesthetic message of the The Wire is that it’s possible to create TV shows with much higher aspirations than what you typically see—long, densely structured plot arcs with sprawling casts of characters that allow you to go beyond what’s possible in movies. But the business message is that being near-universally celebrated as the best TV show doesn’t bring with it any particular financial rewards.

Consequently, if you watch Dexter or True Blood you don’t say to yourself “this is every bit is ambitious as The Wire but doesn’t quite hit the mark.” Instead, you’re looking at shows that have constrained their ambitions.

To some extent, this complaint rings true. Shows like Dexter and True Blood borrow the superficial appeal of gritty cable dramas – the sex, the drugs, the gory violence – and dumb down/sex up the premise for a broader, less discerning audience.  A series about sex-crazed vampires or a charming serial killer simply isn’t built for deep social commentary.

But the scope and ambition of other reasonably successful cable dramas like Mad Men and Big Love clearly owe a lot to The Wire’s example, even if they haven’t achieved comparable levels of critical acclaim. Big Love is a surprisingly rich look at family life through the lens of Mormon polygamists. Despite the occasional bout of ham-handedness, the drama of Mad Men owes a lot to conflict over identity and cultural change. That neither show has matched The Wire’s track record with critics isn’t evidence of a lack of ambition. It’s a testament to The Wire’s singular awesomeness.

The Simpsons via last.fm

1. Deadwood, aside from being far too foul-mouthed for my taste (and a bad influence on me) was pretty good the first season.  After that it totally fell apart.  I think this was because of the producers’ (and especially David Milch’s) urge to cast Ian McShane’s character, Al Swearengen, as a “good guy” in the final seasons rather than the more villainous role he plays in the first season.

2. I like The Tudors for its historical qualities.  The English reformation is a fascinating period.  But I get awfully tired of King Henry.  At first I kind of liked how he was played, but he’s become entirely too flat.

3.  Weeds lost me after the second season.  Why does every episode need to end with some huge, dramatic cliff-hanger disaster?  Why can’t some episodes just be funny?

4. Is The Wire really that good?  I’ve seen one, maybe two episodes.  Didn’t really capture my attention.

5. I almost stopped watching The Office after the third season.  I’m glad I didn’t.

6. I’ll take The Simpsons over the Family Guy any day of the week.

7. I like South Park but I really, really don’t get this whole “generation Y conservatism” thing.  What – are we basing the next generation of conservatives off of some potty-mouthed cartoon?  (I know, South Park is very good at lampooning liberals.  But remember, when asked, the creators said “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.”  Okay.  But they hate conservatives, too.  Is generation Y conservatism actually…libertarianism?)

8. If you have a toddler in the house you should introduce them to The Wiggles.  Not for your own sake.  Australian kids music is not the most enjoyable thing for adults.  But kids seem to love it, or at least my kid does.  And it’s not Barney, so….

9. I’m still debating whether to continue watching Mad Men or not.  What say you?

Heroes started out quite good and has since deteriorated into what I can best describe as an ad hoc show full of very lackluster episodic seasons.  There is no over-arching plot that weaves the “chapters” together.  We never do encounter the Hiro Nakamura of the future – the hardened, somber counterpart to the goofy modern Hiro who we first meet in Season One – after that first meeting of Future Hiro and Peter.  Hiro tells Peter to “save the cheerleader, save the world.”  To me this was a long-term project, not just something Peter was meant to achieve that season.  But the writer’s felt differently.  And the apocalyptic future we were introduced to in season one is all but gone from following seasons.  Future Hiro is gone, too.

Villains shift, and plots die off.  The world is threatened time and again by one villain after the next, but we’re never really immersed in an extended battle of good and evil.  There’s no high stakes, because nothing is sustained.  Characters drift apart and then come back together without any rhyme or reason.  There is no long view even now, after however many seasons.  It’s maddening, really.  I don’t know why I keep watching.

I used to feel similarly about Lost, but seasons 4 and 5 have disabused me of this.  By season 3 I came to the conclusion that the writers themselves were hopelessly lost.   The introduction of new characters and new plot lines seemed haphazard at best.  And the constant addition of new extras – new crash survivors – became such a pet peeve I could barely take it anymore.  (this is still a pretty big pet peeve, actually)

But then things changed.  They tightened up the plot, cut out a lot of the unnecessary narrative and back-story, and began focusing on tying together the various plot-threads and points in the past, present, and future in such a way that is both gripping and – for a time-traveling story – makes enough sense to keep us from rolling our eyes.

I would argue this is the difference between a good show and a bad show – the ability of its writers and producers to be patient, to take into account the long view, and to extend the plot out beyond just the season or the episode in question.  That’s not easy.  I’m glad Lost seems to be back on track.

P.S. – I watch all these on my computer which invariably means I’m behind on everything – at least for Lots.  No spoilers please.

(Image via DRM Artwork)

I’d love to be wrong about this. But I’m not. If you want to understand the world, not just collect endless factlets, you still need to read books. If you do, the internet makes you smarter. If you don’t, it makes you dumber.  ~ Kevin Drum