Some drawings

SOME IMAGES

 

DECODER MAN AS REWRITE-MAN

I am now finishing up the revision of my book Media and Communication Research Methods.
This will be the fourth edition of the book, which means I've revised, added to, etc. four times.  To do a new edition, you need around 15% to 20% of new material, so over the course of my revisions, I've written close to the equivalent of a new book.

I've done five editions of Media Analysis Techniques and five editions of Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture....so I've written the equivalent of a new book for both of those books.  I've also done
two editions of several other books.  So I've spent a lot of time rewriting my books.  As things
stand now, I don't have any new rewriting assignments...and hope I'm done with them.  At least
for a while.

WHAT AM I DOING, WHERE AM I GOING????

I'm still not sure how to use this site, other than scribbling some ideas and attaching
images.  But maybe that's what
blogging is all about?

I'm too lazy to bother attaching URLs or whatever to my blogs so they show up
on Facebook.  I'll just mention this blog every once in a while.  I'm not sure how
anyone finds this blog, even if I've told them it exists.  It does tell me how many
people have seen something I've posted....which is a step up from not knowing
if anyone has seen something I post on Facebook.  But the numbers are not anything
to get excited about.  There's something to be said about writing a post and not
knowing whether anyone will read it...a Quixotic exercise????

Below:  SuperNoble meets SuperBerger.  Created 30 or 40 years ago.

KEEPING JOURNALS

I've been keeping journals since 1955 and have now written 94 journals and am almost
finished with journal number 95: Messages.  I give all my journals names.  I called this
journal Messages because I was working on a book about communication with Messages:
An Introduction to Communication as the title.

I'm going to Iran in a month to give nine lectures and hope to get my students to try their
hands at keeping a journal...to apply what they learn in the lectures to Iranian pop culture,
media, material culture, etc.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arthur-Asa-Berger-and-the-Literary-Life/186972494663099?fref=tshttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Arthur-Asa-Berger-and-the-Literary-Life/186972494663099?fref=ts


Testing.  Will this item go to my Facebook pagea?

DECODER MAN ARISES FROM A DEEP SLEEP

I didn't post anything on the blog because I had problems using it
and so I moved to Facebook where I have a blog "Arthur Asa Berger
and the Literary Life."  But now I'm learning how to use Blogger
and will spend some time with it....linking it to my Facebook
blog if I can figure out how to do this.

I also want to find out how to attach articles to the blog
without reprinting the whole article--if that is possible.
Below is the first edition of my Media Analysis Techniques,
first published thirty years ago for $7.95.  Now, the fifth
edition...which is much larger, costs around $60.

Did a post and lost it.  Let me try again.  Mary 29, 2015.

Drawing of myself as "Decoder Man"

Here is a drawing I made of myself as "Decoder Man."  The term suggests that one of the things I like to do is "decode" aspects of media, pop culture and everyday life that interest me.  For example, I wrote a book, Bloom's Morning, that "decodes" the hidden significance of items like electric toothbrushes, gel toothpaste, pajamas, etc.

I am just learning how to use the new Blogger so it will take a bit of time until I am comfortable with it.

RETURN TO DECODER MAN AFTER LONG ABSENCE

I don't think I wrote anything on this blog since 2013...maybe even before that.  I want to

learn how to transfer articles to the blog next....but not long articles that will take up twenty

pages or so....maybe via an icon that can be used to download the article.

So I'm experimenting now.

Arthur Asa Berger                        

Travelers as Collectors, Collectors as Travelers

                        Recently I read a message on Facebook from someone who said he has now been to ninety countries and was hoping to reach one hundred countries in the near future.  I can also recall conversations I’ve had on my travel with travelers who told me they had been to six continents and were going to visit a seventh soon.  Their goal was to have been to all seven continents.

                        These conversations made me think about travel in a new way.   We know that there are many reasons why people travel—such as to have new experiences, to see interesting and beautiful places, and to get away from their routines and the crush of everyday life. So tourism marketers have designed their advertising campaigns to resonate with these aspects of travel.  But what about trying to appeal to the collector mentality in people?  That seems to me to be a neglected area.

                        What, we may ask, are the components of what we might call the collector personality?  What motivates people to become collectors of whatever they collect:  Tibetan scrolls, seashells, erasers, comic books, sexual partners, classic automobiles, or cities, beautiful places, or countries that they have visited. 

                        There more certainly is an element of pleasure in obtaining examples of whatever collectors are collecting.  One of my grandsons is a collector and he told me, recently, of how much pleasure he got from a box of seashells we sent him.  He went over every shell carefully and sent us an email saying he has almost all the shells he’s looking for.

                        One thing collectors want is completeness…to have as many, if not all, of good if not the best specimens of whatever it is they are collecting.  Some people derive pleasure from collecting, realizing they can never will get all of whatever it is they collect.  Collecting for them is a quest that, in curious ways, gives some purpose to their lives.  Some people collect things because they think they can eventually make money from their collections.  Children who collected comic books when they were young and during their adolescence may have collections worth a great deal of money. 

                        That’s because collectors are willing to spend money for things they want.

So some collectors, we may say, make money from other collectors.  Collecting may be a way of fighting off the strictures of the superego in the service of id functions—a desire for things, or in the case of travelers, experiences.  People who are collectors want to have many things, but by being, a collector disguises their lust for acquisitions by papering it over with a coating of fastidiousness and expertise.  If you collect thimbles (which, I discovered, are a very popular collector’s item) it won’t cost you very much, but if you collect classic automobiles, it can be very expensive.  Some people incur great debts to obtain items they feel they need to complete their collections.  Sometimes marriages fail because of the zeal of a collector.  Some collectors, as the result of the number of divorces in many countries, collect new wives and husbands, one after the other.

                        Freudians would suggest that the collector mentality stems from infancy when, at certain times, infants desire to hold onto their feces.   It then manifests itself in the momentous battle in western countries between children and their parents known as toilet training. Most children eventually overcome this fixation, but this residue from infancy, what Freud called the “anal retentive” stage, lodged in the unconscious, may be at work on collectors of all ages who never resolved their anal-retentive desires.  For some, in curios ways, their sense of loss of what went into the toilet and was flushed away, leads them to try to make up for their losses as infants and children.  Freud, himself, it turns out, was a collector of oriental rugs.

                        If many travelers are motivated, unconsciously of course, by the collector mentality, advertisers should find ways to appeal to this dimension of their personalities.  They must find some way, subtly, of touching this “I’m a collector” responsive chord in travelers.  The product advertisers are selling is not only places but places that enhance the feelings of a collector that this place is a valuable “part” of the collection—going to Antarctica or Tibet or Bali or wherever--is important and will enhance the collector’s desire for completeness.   

                        What travel marketers have missed, I would suggest, is recognizing what many traveler collectors feel they are missing—the right place to complete the collection of important places to visit, that will enhance their feeling of wellbeing and their status as a collector of the best places.  Matthew Arnold talked about knowing “the best that has been thought and said.”  We can add to this, the best places to have visited.

                        For some traveler collectors, numbers count.  And if a traveler collector has been to one hundred countries, that is quite an accomplishment.   For other traveler collectors, going to the right places is crucial, so one’s collection of places visited is as important as the number of places visited.  In the course of my travels, I had occasion to lecture on some cruise ships where I met people who told me, proudly, that they have been on seventy cruises.  I could describe this as an example travel collector connoisseurship, with the emphasis here on ships.

                        Mary Douglas, an English social anthropologist, developed a theory she described as grid-group theory.  It argues that everyone in modern societies belongs to groups with either few or many rules, which she called grid, and weak or strong boundaries, which she called group.  So we can have strong boundaries and many rules, strong boundaries and few rules, weak boundaries and many rules, or weak boundaries and few rules.  This leads, then, to four social groups or lifestyles in all societies, which we can describe as elitists, individualists, egalitarians and fatalists. 

                                                                        Group Boundaries

                                                            Weak                           Strong

Rules                           Many               Fatalists                      Elitists

                                    Few                 Individualists              Egalitarians

                                                            Four Lifestyles

                        Everyone, Douglas argues, belongs to one of these four groups, even though they may not recognize the fact.   Her point is that it is membership in these lifestyles that shapes our behavior.  In her article “In Defence of Shopping” in Pasic Falk and Colin Campbell’s The Shopping Experience (London: Sage) she writes (1999:17):

            We have to make a radical shift from thinking about consumption as a manifestation of individual choice. Culture itself is the result of myriads of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but between kinds of relationships.  The basic choice that a rational individual has to make is the choice of what kind of society to live in.  According to that choice, the rest follows.  Artefacts are selected to demonstrate the choice.  Food is eaten, clothes are worn, cinema, books, music, holidays, all the rest are choices that conform with the initial choice for a form of society. 

(My italics)

What is crucial, she argues, is the lifestyle with which we identify, even though we are not conscious of being a member of a given lifestyle.

                        Her theory is important, for our purposes, because it helps us understand why people collect certain things.  Collecting, if Douglas is correct, is also not a manifestation of individual choice.   People who are elitists collect different things from people who are egalitarians.  And elitist travelers, out to collect experiences of the right places, tend to visit places where they hope they won’t encounter egalitarians, individualists, and fatalists, who are collecting different kinds of places and experiences that are congruent with their values and beliefs.  And income.  All four groups are in conflict with one another but need one another to survive.

                        All collectors, if the Freudians are correct, are ultimately motivated by their childhood experiences and the psychic trauma of their infancies, when so much of their precious poop was dumped into the toilet.  They spend their lives as collectors making up for their tragic losses and, when they are travelers, searching for reparational experiences.  The child is not only the father of the man, but also of the traveler.

           

                                                                                                                                               

            Arthur Asa Berger is Professor Emeritus of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts at  San Francisco State University.  He has published more than one hundred and thirty articles and more than seventy books on media, popular culture, humor and tourism.

Testing and Learning on New Blogger Site

I've learned how to download some images.  Now I'm going to try and download others, from my desktop...to see whether that is possible.

Here are some books I've published.  The research methods book just came out last week.  That's

exciting.

Now I've learned how to upload images on my desktop, so now I have access to images in two places.

The question I have now is whether I can link my blogs together so I only have to do one.  I also have

to decide whether by blog here will be more suitable than my "Literary Life" one on Facebook.

Return from Lower Slobbovia

I have been blogging on Facebook, where I have a blog titled "Arthur Asa Berger and the Literary Life."  I forgot about this blog until I had a conversation with my daughter and then remembered I had done some blogging earlier.  I stopped because I didn't know how to upload images or previously written material.  Now I am going to see if I can upload images and maybe I'll start blogging on this site regularly.

I see, now, that it is easy to upload images...I will explore other new things one can do with this blog
and see what happens.

This Blog has become a yearly event, so it seems. Once a year I add something to this blog site...in part because I haven't figured out how to upload new stuff and in part because there are automatic blogs such as Facebook and Twitter. So the question arises...what will happen to standard blogs. I tend to think they will last, because you can do so much more on this kind of a blog than on the so-called social networking blogs.

Maybe I'll start blogging more often once I learn how to get here (it always seems like an accident to me) and how to upload textual material in addition to image.

The Writer's Life

I just published a book on writing...I had to rewrite it five times before my editor accepted it.

The moral is:  writing always involves rewriting.

Now I've sent off a book on ways of analyzing objects and artifacts--material culture

and am waiting to see how many times I have to rewrite it.

One problem I face...which all writers face...is that sometimes you lose editors...who

move to other jobs, leave publishing, whatever.  When you "lose" an editor, you've

lost someone who suggests new books, who helps you get them through the editorial

committee at publishers, etc.  In addition, I've "lost" several publishers...who either

were absorbed by bigger publishers or went out of business.  So now, despite a rather

long list of books, it seems harder to get stuff published than it was when I was just

beginning.

I'm retired and don't have to publish to avoid "perishing" but I still like to write,

so it isn't easy.  I'm also used to being rejected by editors...par for the course.  The

important thing is not to dwell on the rejection but figure out someone to send the

article or book to and face the prospect of being rejected again.

Check List for Analyzing Print Advertisements

“The tendency to interpret everything in an artistic text as meaningful is so great that we rightfully consider nothing accidental in a work of art” (1977:17).

Yuri Lotman in The Structure of the Artistic Text.

1. How would you describe the design of the advertisement? Do we find axial balance or an asymmetrical relationship among the elements in the advertisement?

2. How much copy is there relative to the amount of pictorial matter? Is this relationship significant in any respect?

3. Is there a great deal of blank (white) space in the advertisement or is it full of graphic and textual material?

4. What angle is the photograph shot at? Do we look up at the people in the advertisement? Do we look down at them from a height? Or do we look at them from a shoulder-level position? What significance

does the angle of the shot have?

5. How is the photograph lit? Is there a great deal of light or is there a little light and very dark shadows (chiaroscuro lighting)? What is the mood found in the advertisement?

6. If the photograph is in color, what colors dominate? What significance do these colors have?

7. How would you describe the two figures in the advertisement? Consider such matters as facial expression, hair color, hair length, hair styling, fashions (clothes, shoes, eyeglasses design and jewelry), various props (a cane, an umbrella), body shape, body language, age, gender, race, ethnicity, signs of occupation, signs of educational level, relationships suggested between the male and female, objects in the background, and so on.

8. What is happening in the advertisement? What does the “action” in the photo suggest? Assume that we are seeing one moment in an ongoing narrative. What is this narrative and what does it reveal about the two figures?

9. Are there any signs or symbols in the photograph? If so, what role do they play?

10. In the textual material, how is language used? What arguments are made or implied about the people in the photograph and about the product being advertised? That is, what rhetorical devices are used to attract readers

and stimulate desire in them for the product or service? Does the advertisement

use associations or analogies or something else to make its point?

11. What typefaces are used in the textual parts of the advertisement? What importance do the various typefaces have? (Why these typefaces and not other ones?)

12. What are the basic “themes” in the advertisement? How do these themes relate to the story implied by the advertisement?

13. What product or service is being advertised? Who is the target audience for this product or service? What role does this product or service play in American culture and society…or any other culture and society?

14. What values and beliefs are reflected in the advertisement? Sexual jealousy? Patriotism? Motherly love? Brotherhood of man? Success? Power? Good taste?

15. Is there any background information you need to make sense of the advertisement? How does context shape our understanding of the advertisement?

Adapted from Berger, Ads, Fads & Consumer Culture Rowman & Littlefield.

Breaking News

I just started a new journal, number 84, which I've ironically titled "Breaking News," because nothing newsworthy happens in my life...Only minor events from time to time...the only news is that my friends are beginning to suffer from various ailments of a serious nature...this one got cancer, that one was in a car accident, a third is suffering from early stages of Alzheimers, and so it goes. Old age is a shipwreck. But when does a person get old?

I am sending a book manuscript, Bali Tourism, off to my publisher and it will be out in a year or two. Things often move slowly with publishers, even though the book has been accepted.

A CURIOUS THING

It's a curious thing...I only write in my blog every couple of years, or so it seems...and yet I've kept a journal and written in it just about every day for the last fifty years. I had hoped to be able to send selections from one of my novels to the blog and have my blog run as something with new chapters every week, or something like that. But I don't know how to upload text so I just write a bit every once in a while. When I find out how to upload text, rather than retyping it, I'll turn my blog into a novel.

Return of Decoder Man. I've been busy writing books and chasing about the world
but now, with a new version of Blogger that I can use more easily, I intend to return
to the blogger wars.

I've been speculating on the irony of our political situation...that we elected a president
who we would be more telegenic and now, so it seems, millions of people can't stand
to look at him. The Republicans put in a bumbler but someone who they thought could
win and help destroy the Democrats and now it seems he's destroying the Republicans.
Of course a lot of people think he wasn't elected but "selected" by the Supreme Court.
And so we're deep in a hole in Irac and 43 got us into...and he's made a terrible mess
of the middle east.

I am a confirmed ironist. When things are going too well, be careful...because there's
a good chance that something will happen to change things around. Reinhold Niebhuhr
wrote a book about the irony of American politics. He was right. Things have changed
since 43 pranced around on the aircraft carrier under a sign "mission accomplished."