Opening Note

The fifth part of this six-part series from C3 Director Henry Jenkins looks at some of the broader implications of the use of parody in analyzing the political process, surrounding the 2008 Presidential Election in the U.S. This series gives C3 Weekly Update viewers an advance version of Jenkins' latest essay, which will be featured as an additional chapter for the paperback edition of Convergence Culture and as part of a forthcoming book from Jonathan Gray, who was one of the speakers at the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference. The previous four pieces in this series have ran in prior Opening Notes.

We can not reduce the complexity of this hybrid media ecology I've been writing about to simple distinctions between top-down and bottom-up, professional and amateur, insider or outsider, old and new media, Astroturf and grassroots, or even "serious fun" and "barely political."

Grassroots and mainstream media might pursue parallel interests, even as they act autonomously. Consider, for example, a video which TechPresident identifies as one of the top "voter-generated videos" of 2007. The video starts with a clip of Joseph Biden joking during one debate appearance that every sentence Rudolph Giuliani utters includes "a noun, a verb, and 9/11," and follows with a database of clips showing the former New York Mayor referencing 9/11. The video was produced and distributed by Talking Points Memo, one of the most widely read progressive political blogs. In many ways, all the parody does is amplify Biden's own political message, supporting his claims that Giuliani was exploiting a national tragedy for his own political gains.

The ready access of digital search tools and online archives makes it trivial for small scale operators, like the bloggers, to scan through vast amounts of news footage and assemble clips to illustrate their ideas in a matter of a few days. Such tactical raids on digital archives – for both serious and satirical purposes – will become commonplace during the 2008 political season – originating from campaign staffers and politically motivated bloggers alike.

Often, these playful tactics get described in terms of the needs to adopt new rhetorical practices to reach the so-called "digital natives," a generation of young people who have grown up in a world where the affordances of participatory media technologies have been commonplace.

Researchers debate whether these young people are, in fact, politically engaged since their civic lives take very different forms from those of previous generation. W. Lance Bennett contrasts two different framings of this data in his essay "Changing Citizenship in a Digital Age" as part of his 2008 MIT Press book Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth:

The engaged youth paradigm implicitly emphasizes generational changes in social identity that have resulted in the growing importance of peer networks and online communities [ . . . ] This paradigm emphasizes the empowerment of youth as expressive individuals and symbolically frees young people to make their own creative choices [ . . . ] As a result, the engaged youth paradigm opens the door to a new spectrum of civic actions in online arenas from MySpace to World of Warcraft."

He might have added YouTube.

Bennett continues, "By contrast, the disengaged youth paradigm may acknowledge the rise of more autonomous forms of public engagement such as consumer politics, or the occasional protest in MySpace, while keeping the focus on the generational decline in connections to government (e.g., voting patterns) and general civic involvement (e.g., following public affairs in the news) as threats to the health of the democracy."

The activist deployment of parody videos can be understood as an attempt to negotiate between these two perspectives. It starts with a recognition that young people have come to see YouTube as supporting individual and collective expression and that they often feel excluded by the policy wonk language of traditional politics and the inside the beltway focus of much campaign news coverage.

Parody offers an alternative language through which policy debates and campaign pitches might be framed, one that, as Stephen Duncombe (author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy) suggests, models itself on popular culture but responds to different ethical and political imperatives.

The often "politically incorrect" style of Internet parody flies in the face of the language and assumptions by which previous generations debated public policy. Such videos may not look like 'politics as usual' yet their goals are no different in many cases from traditional political advertising: the people who produced and circulated these videos want to motivate young voters to participate in the electoral process. Such a model sees internet parodies as springboards for larger conversations – whether through blogs and discussion forums online or face to face between people gathered around a water cooler.

These parody videos bring the issues down to a human scale, depicting Bush as an incompetent reality show contestant, Romney as someone whose afraid to go man to man with a snowman, Giuliani as obsessed with 9/11, or Edwards as a narcissist with fluffy hair. Duncombe has argued that news comedy shows, such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, foster a kind of civic literacy, teaching viewers to ask skeptical questions about core political values and the rhetorical process that embody them:

In doing this they hold out the possibility of something else, that is, they create an opening for a discussion on what sort of a political process wouldn't be a joke. In doing this they're setting the stage for a very democratic sort of dialogue: one that asks questions rather than simply asserts the definitive truth.

We might connect Duncombe's argument back to Wealth of Networks author Yochai Benkler's larger claim that living within a more participatory culture changes how we understand our place in the world, even if we never chose to actively participate. Yet, there is also the risk, as Duncombe points out, that such parody "can, just as easily, lead into a resigned acceptance that all politics are just a joke and the best we can hope for it to get a good laugh out of it all."

Here, skepticism gives way to cynicism. Nothing insures that a politics based in parody will foster one and not the other.

Next week, in the Opening Note, Jenkins provides the conclusion of this six-part series.

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Closing Note

The first part of this series ran in the Closing Note of last week's C3 Weekly Update.

One increasingly popular model of project management which is being implemented in numerous major companies from General Electric to Nintendo of Europe is the notion of Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) advocated by Eliyahu Goldratt on the basis of his Theory of Constraints (TOC). Most basally, CCPM attempts to streamline projects by eliminating intermediary deadlines, abolishing multi-tasking to prevent negative associated side affects such as adaptation times to switch between tasks or 'social loafing' (Ringelmann effect) and inserting various types of buffers to protect planning goals.

Individual employees are thus supposed to finish one task after the other without being required to report regularly or meet in-between deadlines; the 'critical chain' thereby ties together all steps required to reach a given goal by having employees move in and out of the chain depending on the relevance of their task for the superordinate goal. While this project management paradigm appears only applicable with quantifiable tasks (or 'numerically expressible' according to Lev Manovich) in the first place, it arguably reflects the move from procedural to object-oriented programming (OOP), focusing less on routines and sub-routines than on semi-autonomous 'objects.'

Other CCPM elements like resource dependencies back this assumption, envisioning a company as a multithreading 'processing unit' that the TOC can be 'run on' as software. This 'technical' reading of economic organization is simultaneously reflected in program code rhetoric employed in CCPM textbooks; the key concept of "protecting" the critical chain with "buffers" is but one obvious example. The plausibility of this rhetoric draws mainly from the fact that computer programs have implicitly become a perceived epitome of organizational clarity and efficacy, not only in economic contexts but also e.g. in warfare as I elaborated in my dissertation. Ironically, the ergonomics of a well-run company itself previously, most notably in the 1980s, used to occupy this role model function for warfare.

For instance, Noam Chomsky repeatedly quoted contemporary (even left-wing liberal) politicians like Michael Kinsley arguing that the US intervention against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was officially and, to a degree, publicly considered a "sensible policy" since it allegedly complied with the logic of "cost-benefit analysis." The consequently popular analogy of a succesful military as business or company has been influential on decision-making processes and even conceptually 'prepared' notions like private military contractors; with the pervasive use of programmable technologies in both areas, this interplay of role models has become more bidirectional with e.g. the popularity of maneuver warfare as a retrofitted model of business organization evident in the work of Pech and Durden in their 2003 Management Decision piece "Manoeuvre Warfare: A New Military Paradigm for Business Decision Making," and Clemons and Santamaria's 2002 piece, "Maneuver Welfare: Can Modern Military Strategy Lead You to Victory?" in the April 2002 edition of Harvard Business Review. Just as Benedict Anderson explains how 'media technologies' like maps and census historically shaped forms of governance, the use of programmable media technologies can be expected to shape the style of 'governance' in media businesses as will be demonstrated in the concluding case study.

Accordingly, the TOC is described as a "toolkit," i.e. its non-mathematicized economic principles are labelled and considered as "tools" which implies their internal stability and reusability in compatible contexts much like modular program code is ideally reusable and quasi-organically 'evolves' over time (See here.). CCPM and TOC thus insert a layer of abstraction that conceptually separates work processes from planning; as 'middleware' like e.g. game engines or internal scripting languages such as LUA, CCPM and TOC introduce a common 'interface' and set of instructions that can ideally be reused in various work contexts to optimize processes. Similar to development middleware, however, they also produce a characteristically limited perspective on the task at hand; by establishing themeselves as an 'epistemological buffer' and these social technologies intrinsically plausible and conceal their basic assumptions similar e.g. to the underlying soft physics model being concealed as built-in 'bias' by implementing a physics engine.

The CCPM/TOC as middleware consist of a number of lower-level 'algorithms' such as 'reality trees,' 'obstacle trees' and 'conflict clouds'; analoguous to program code, these business tools take in specific 'data types' (i.e. data in a specifically pre-structured form), process the information and deliver output which in turn can be read as a variable or reprocessed by a complementary 'algorithm' as e.g. in the subsequent use of obstacle tree and conflict tree. These lower-level algorithms lend themselves to or are even dependent on visualization techniques similar to UML (Unified Modeling Language) which, themselves, are equally expressible as program code; 'reality trees' in that regard are largely congruent with UML state machine diagrams in that they represent a dynamic configuration of causal relations. These tools thus require the user to conceptualize a business within the formal imaginary of program code, i.e. within the constraints of what is expressible using the formal repertoire of UML diagrams.

These 'trees' are designed to be solved by removing 'branches' that represent interoffice problems and observing or rather cognitively 'simulating' the repercussions within the modeled system. Completing the circular argument, UML is increasingly being considered for business modelling purposes as e.g. in various essays by Eriksson and Penker, such as their 2000 book Business Modeling with UML: Business Patterns at Work. Their work demonstrates the plausibility of conceiving of a company or business process as a computer program. Even very specific properties of program code and OOP in particular such as recursivity are exhibited in this model, notably e.g. in the case of obstacle trees and reality trees being suggested as actual tools to tackle problems and remove branches in the tree itself; for instance, the logic of the reality tree is implicitly regarded as the common 'interface' provided by CCPM in business contexts (cf. above) and creating as well as sharing these trees as a common data structure is intended to be useful within the tree itself to remove problems by improving internal communication. This procedure is largely in accordance with the use of recursive algorithms/functions in programming, e.g. for basal techniques like describing Fibonacci sequences as in the following simple C function:

int fibonacci (int n)
{ if (n < 2)
            return 1;
else
            return fibonacci (n-2) + fibonacci (n-1);
}

To conclude this point, the 'installation' of CCPM/TOC as 'middleware' in a company has far-reaching consequences, ideally requiring every issue that needs to be solved (e.g. the acquisition of equipment) to be formulated 'compatible' within the infrastructure, i.e. e.g. 'processable' with an obstacle tree. Goldratt published his concept of CCPM both in economic papers and as a novelized version. Even this system of distribution can arguably be conceived of as quasi-algorithmic since the disparate positioning of those two very different text forms constitutes a system of interdependent 'discourse algorithms' (in a logical rather than linguistic sense where 'discourse' is parsed semantically or grammatically) which mutually reinforce each other and still continue to establish the ongoing popularity of the approach.

The conclusion of this series will run in the closing note of next week's C3 Weekly Update.