ETHNOGRAPHY

A method of nuanced qualitative social research “in which fine grained daily interactions constitute the life blood of the data being produced

Simon’s work from back to the Baltimore Sun could be described as ethnographic from the beginning

METHODOLOGY FOR THE CORNER

Long-term, one year stay in the field where a particular set of social relations can be observed

The observer learns the visuals and the habits of the culture by following selected individuals in their work and daily lives

Police culture and drug culture

Stand-around-and-watch-journalism

GEORGE MARCUS

Inherent problem with the ethnographic method

Concentrates on a specific location of study

“single site” ethnographers have recourse to a larger whole that has not been studied in so deep a systematic fashion

Researchers do not have data for the whole

This amounts to an abstraction: “the state, capitalism and so on.

Enables some sort of closure

He and others developed an ambition to undertake a multi-sited ethnography

One that can approach the system as a whole

THE PROBLEM…

No single ethnographer has enough knowledge of enough worlds or enough time to map this constantly evolving world system

“ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINARY”

World enough and time

Simon’s unique fabrication of ethnographically informed serial television melodrama speaks to this according to Williams

Makes arguments, sets up contexts that could not be managed in journalism alone

Serial television melodrama, according to Williams, makes possible the larger canvas of the ethnographic imaginary

Combined factual, ethnographically observed, and detailed worlds of cops and corners into one converged fictional world

With the exception of Spike Lee’s 1995 adaption of Richard Price’s novel Clockers there had never been a film that had given equal time to both sides of the law

SEASON 1

Breaks crime story conventions

Introduces a crime

A cop who pursues solving the crime

Higher ups who have no interest in solving the crime

Doesn’t stay with the cop, but moves to the complex world of the committer of the crime

Humanizes that character as well

Equally important procedures of cops and dealers are introduced

COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO MICROSITES

Cops who want to be good and cops who just want to bust heads

Competent drug dealers vs. ones who lack the discipline to avoid capture

COMPLEXITY OF THE SERIES’ MICROSITES (PLOTLINES)

Politics

Different police details

Education

Co-ops

War on drugs and “Hamsterdam”

Etc.

The vivid and interlocking stories from so many concrete ethnographic sites is what fiction affords, what ethnography aspires to, and what newspaper journalism can rarely achieve

Multi-sited ethnographic imaginary that no longer needs to depend on allusions to abstract ideas of “the state,” “the economy”, or “capitalism” as its “fiction of the whole”

The many sites reveal a vivid picture of that “whole”

Simon had to quit the business he loved and turn to television

Hasn’t fully embraced the form

Hence the comparison to Greek Tragedy?

JOHN CARROLL AND BILL MARIMOW

From Baltimore Sun (criticized “The Metal Men—1995”

Said it was too much like “The Corner” and that it wasn’t hard enough on the thieves

Simon believed that newspapers should adopt a wide sociological approach to the city’s problems

His editors thought he should be more clear and focused on right and wrong

RIFLE-SHOT JOURNALISM

One story is small and self-contained and has good guys and bad guys

The other is about why we are where we are

About who is being left behind

Harder to report

Carroll and Marimow saw them as performing a public service that can’t reach for the larger ethnographic complexities

RIFLE-SHOT VS. MULTI-SITE

Rifle shot is like a half hour of episodic television whose world is necessarily narrow and whose time is limited to a half hour or hour

In contrast, Simon’s reporting presented an expanded world view

Transforms a social “type” to a human being

WHITE MIDDLE CLASS EDITORIALIZING

In The Corner, his editorializing has an identity

In The Wire he shows instead of telling

(Which is more truthful?)

In place of the five-paragraph rifle-shot story he would eventually create a five- season cumulative serial whose primary outrage-a futile war on drugs-encompasses myriad others

Serial melodrama can show us, in a way sociologists and ethnographers cannot, how much as Detective Lester Freamon puts it, “all the pieces matter.”

CRIME STORY VS. MELODRAMA Controls knowledge

The genre aims to create curiosity about past story events

Suspense about upcoming story events

Surprise with respect to unexpected disclosures about either story or plot detail

We learn what the detective learns when he or she learns it

Focus tends to be on finding out who committed a crime

Closure—leading towards full knowledge

Story can rely on broad emotional impact

Evokes pity, sometimes irony or distanciation. Sirk and Bertholdt Brecht

Maximizes the viewer’s urge to know what will happen next—and, especially, how any given character will react to what has happened

 The emotional expressiveness of the film issues partly from the narration’s tendency to be omni--communicative

 To wring every emotional drop out of the narration employs omniscience

 Various characters discover what viewers already know

 Unrestricted knowledge: of multiple storylines

 Crosscutting different plotlines

 Following several characters from one locale to another

Expanded range of knowledge

Plot will inform us of initiation of a chain of action and then skip over some time or move to another line of action

RELIGIONArt

Music

Icons

Ritual

ENTERTAINMENT

Are all of these things entertaining?

Is there another word?

“Enchantment”

By endowing these things with “magic” enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness

Entertainment is the means by which we separate ourselves from it

TELEVISION (OR ANY SCREEN)

Has a strong bias towards a psychology of secularism

The power of a close-up face makes idolatry a hazard

Brings personalities into our hearts and not abstractions into our heads

Walter Cronkite plays better than the Milky Way and Jimmy Swaggart better than Jesus

Attracts viewers by the millions (good thing?)

TELEVISION COMMERCIAL Assault on capitalism

Capitalism was originally an outgrowth of the Enlightenment

Its principal theorists believed capitalism should be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed, and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self interest

Legally, companies are supposed to tell the truth about their products

That law is destroyed when commercials come into play

The discourse of “true” and “false” is discarded in commercials

Empirical tests, logical analysis, and any elements of reason are impotent

Commercials

If a seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational market place, then the seller loses out

The assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep winning

Television commercials made linguistic discourse obsolete as the basis for product decisions

Images are substituted for claims

Pictorial commercials made emotional appeal not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions

The distance between rationality and advertising wide

The truth of an advertisement’s claim is not an issue

The commercial insists on unprecedented brevity

Disdains exposition

Complex language is not to be trusted

The argument is in bad taste and leads only to intolerable uncertainty

Politics as show business

What if we didn’t know anything about the politicians except their policies, voting history etc?

What do we know primarily about politicians?

WHAT MAKES A BETTER POLITICIAN?

Capable in negotiation?

More imaginative in executive skill?

More knowledgeable in international affairs?

More understanding of the interrelations of economic systems?

The reason we almost always believe a politician is better is because of image

A politician does not offer an image of himself

A politician offers himself as an image of the audience

Reach out and Touch Someone: Most powerful example of the TV commercial on political discourse

Reach out and Touch Someone

The lesson of most TV commercials like “Reach out and Touch Someone” They provide a slogan, or a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling vision of themselves

We are likely to vote for people whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on screen, reflect our most positive images of ourselves

VOTER INTERESTS

TANGIBLE INTERESTS

Supreme Court Appointments

Investment in programs that have positive effect on the populace

Protection from Bureaucracy

Support for one’s own union community

Support for poor and homeless

SYMBOLIC INTERESTS

Image

Charm

Good looks

Celebrity

Personal disclosure

TV AND (LACK OF) HISTORY

“The past is a world, and not a void of grey haze” --Thomas Carlyle

The past is not just a world, but a living world

The world of the present is the most shadowy and difficult to understand

The world of television is all about immediacy

The quickness of information and TV communication removes contextual and historical content from politics

HUXLEYAN VS ORWELLIAN

Television does not ban books it displaces them

With a limited ability to interpret, contextualize (historically and conceptually) we have way of protecting ourselves from corporate America