'shroom de Trop

The other day a small group of us visited the St. Pete pleasure palace known as the Tropicana, home of the Tampa Bay Rays, razed, eheu, of their diabolical nom de guerre. Concepts of sport, crowd massage, mass media, and the spectacle of fun have evolved. (We don't get out much, and we now know why.)

The indoor ballpark is really more a destination than a place to watch a game. Long before we got there, which was just as the game was starting, large crowds had navigated a complex parking scheme, entered the dome, and spent hours spreading out among a large number of food bins, retail outlets, novelty shops (get a life-sized baseball card of YOU!), more food bins, etc. As at most international airports, all this is at the level you come in on, and marks the yellow brick road you take, up escalators, along endless corridors, to your seats. And as at airports, they are paranoid about YOU. No thermoses filled with water in the arena. All bags are checked. The next Rays bomber could be standing right where you're standing.

The scoreboard one sort of doesn't see at first. The eye is drawn instead to what it thinks is the scoreboard, a giant TV monitor surrounded by Fox News-style info widgets. Lots of insta-data about each player as he comes to bat -- height, college, what he did earlier in the game (complete with visual graphs) mother's middle name, other stats, etc. Every few seconds the large TV screen goes to a commercial break, and all the information vanishes while we are adverted to. For a good portion of the game this was bothersome, as I was always looking across the field to this board to check Outs, Hits, etc. Around the sixth inning I realized there was another scoreboard that didn't just go away, and that it was in fact THE scoreboard. This other thing was just Media flapping itthemselves at us, which is what itthey doesdo best.

It does it by crowdcosseting. People were always being featured on the giant screen, blown up large, as they danced to the music, chanted for their heroes, or did the funny thing that was going to win some exciting something. So the crowd watched as members of itself, writ large, were seen pointing to themselves, writ large. As Fox, Disney, Universal, et al understand quite well, the story is always you, because you will continually attend to you. Media know they can sell beer and food and future events and cotton candy to you while you get your willies off digging you.

All that's missing up there was a giant Twitterized text space.

"C'mon Rays"

"Yeah c'mon you Rays!"

"Evan, I love you!"

"Me too!"

"Sox sux!"

"Me too!"

"Me toooooooooooooooooo!"

This is not to say we didn't enjoy the game. The visibility is good -- odd when high pop-ups hit the lights up there, or nearly scrape the ceiling. So it's a bit much to constantly be prodded to "MAKE NOISE!" at crucial moments, as in the bottom of the 9th, when the Rays were down by 2 and the bats were ominously silent. They were the only thing that was. 40,000 cowbells rang out, along with innumerable incantations, building out of sound a sort of Stimulus Package of Ain't it Grand Energy which, 45,369 people believed, would wake dem bats and blow the White Sox to Obamaland in a puff of Tampa Bay West Wind Witchery.

At this level of crowd prodding, it didn't feel as though I was attending a sporting event. The crowd is there exploring its own features, its resources, its powers. Cosseted by media on one side, forced to see boundaries, in the form of stern looking Protectors of the Field, who got up and faced us between innings, in case the multitude, forgetting where it was, rushed the field, intending to play the game it originally was summoned only to watch, seeing as the spectacle it had paid for as become so intermingled with the watchers thereof as to make it perfectly understandable that it believes its presence is needed, is summoned upon the field of dreams, on the other. The Trop is a magic mushroom; the crowd is Alice, and the boys of summer, they're the animals in a Florida zoo -- part of the somewhat antiquated premise, but, in a roiling media-rich world of prizes, hot cars, food, baubles, Bud, tribes, terrorists and teapartiers and YOU -- no longer entirely where the action is.

autotweet

crowdedfalafel 

  

Just as your eye cannot see itself, so the media cannot see itself; can't see that it is the malaise it purports to tell us of.

Getting it in Oaxaca

un poquito

Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad

Were you thinking newspaper folks were starting to wise up?

Narrative Science automates the creation of editorial narratives across a wide range of content verticals. Their technology application requires no human authoring or editing and can be used to generate narratives about any event that produces significant quantitative data (think sports, financial, health, community data).  Saridakis saying kthxbye to Gannett

Content automated like your ILECs and ISPs always imagined it: Are Sportswriters Really Necessary?
 

Outta everything

In keeping with the falling value of newspapers nationwide, McClatchy's estimated value of its share of The [Seattle] Times has been eroding steadily. McClatchy acquired the Times share when it bought Knight Ridder in June 2006. In 2006, McClatchy valued its Times investment at $102.2 million. At the end of 2007, the value had fallen to $19.3 million.



The McClatchy Co., which owns 49.5 percent of The Times, has again cut the value of its share of the Seattle newspaper company -- this time to nothing. link

Triangulating house negroes and unempirical spokesmen of empire

"And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them." Al Quaeda to Obama.

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Unidentified Bush advisor, 2002.

I can't help but think that until the alleged paper of record comes clean on the source of that paradigmatic quote in Ron Suskind's piece, it will be impossible to gauge the rhetoricity of language like that above, attributed to Al-Zawahiri.

I mean, the quote defines what has become a key node for our understanding of the guiding mind behind the last eight years - at least - of the architectonics of Washington's command of what reality is.

Yet we don't know who defined it for us so neatly, so precisely, because the newspaper of record has never divulged the source.

The newspaper of record is a record of not-for-attribution and off-the-record information that gives us a mottled panorama of journalistic narrative. We are told - sort of - the stories, but the storytellers remain behind the concertina wire of privilege.

Fuck you, New York Times. Fuck you.

NewsPorn

The US media has apparently learned nothing from the hot anal action it provided leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in view of its Pre-K-level coverage of the conflict in Georgia/Ossetia.






A couple of salubrious correctives:

CounterSpin - Interview with Helen Cobban. (See also this earlier bit).

Informant here, here, here, here, and passim.

Consider the sluice

Found this headline:

New Fears on Long-Term Global Oil Supplies

I thought was at the top of a heap of stories aggregated by Google News. It occasioned a mild spasm of anxiety. Until I realized I was not reading a news aggregator, but only the New York Times front page:



I'm still of the wizdumb-of-crowds opinion that the aggregate could carry some weight.

These telenovelas?

In theSessum's memorable phrase, journaljism.

This bit of anxiety copyright MSNBC