Is It Over? Part 2

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On Monday I began talking about endings, and how I feel that, more and more, we are seeing a difference between endings and conclusions. I started out by examining long-form magazine and newspaper articles and how not all of the reading public continue past the bump. Then, I examined the small-bits-after-the-credits trend for big budget films, and how only an informed, insider audience would be able to take advantage of the added information those scenes provide. Today, I’m going to talk about this phenomenon in relation to America’s two favourite things to talk about these days: sports and politics.

I love sports. In fact, I’m enamored with them—I can’t get enough. Sports are the purest form of competition, and have a tendency to explain complex sociological, cultural societal narratives in very simple ways. In fact, Soccer is how I live my life. Yesterday, after a shockingly bad performance by the English soccer team I support, I had to take a short nap to keep myself from exploding. All of that because of a draw. That’s right, the result that got my grits enough to force me to slumber wasn’t even a loss.

And it’s the idea of the draw that brings me around to sports today. In what would be considered “regular season” soccer games, if the teams are level on goals scored after 90 minutes, the game is over. A draw is the result. In the sports we most covet here in the USA, a draw is almost never the case; American sports fans simply do not accept a draw as an ending nor conclusion. On Sunday, while at the gym, I became enthralled by the Oakland Raiders vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL game. It was the 4th quarter and Oakland made some great plays and a field goal to even the score at 20.  I knew NFL games had overtime rules—as all USA sports leagues do (except for MLS, the soccer league)—but I didn’t know what they were. I was expecting some more excellent back and forth excitement! Instead, since the NFL’s rules are simply “first to score wins”, overtime amounted to simply trying to get a field goal. I was disappointed, but remembered a sports story from a little while back about draws in the NFL.

In 2008, the Cincinnati Bengals and Philadelphia Eagles played out the 17th tie in NFL history, a history which began in 1922. In 86 years of football, only 17 draws. And, apparently, fans hated it. To quote the author of the above-linked article:

Needless to say, ties are the worst and football fans detest them. NFL fans want a winner and a loser. There’s no solace in tying, only frustration. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/82672-eagles-bengals-its-like-kissing-your-sister)

In case you’re wondering what the deal with the sister kissing is, that quote is attributed to Navy-team coach Eddie Erdelatz in 1953 after Navy and Duke drew a game (source).

The intense distate—hatred, if you will—of the draw game in American sports is at an odd contrast to the way people interact with their other media. Instead of simply accepting the ending (the end of regulation time), American sports viewers demand a conclusion. The same people who don’t read to the conclusion of newspaper or magazine articles and don’t sit through the credits for the conclusive scene simply cannot accept an a tie game. The difference has to do with equality. It seems to me that Americans simply cannot accept equality as an ending; one side simply, as a rule, must be better. One team or the other must be better for a conclusion to be acceptable.

And that brings us to politics—more specifically, the mid-term elections. Just as with the reader/viewership pool when it comes to media, there is a voter pool when it comes to the political landscape. According to Pew Research, 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning news consumers use Fox News as their primary source of news information (in the interest of fairness: the report states “insufficient number of cases to profile MSNBC audience”). If we compare hearing a news story to reading a magazine article, that 63% are a portion of the voting pool who are not reading after the bump, not fact checking, not investigating on their own. Whenever there is a situation wherein a single pool of listeners, viewers or readers can consume the same media but have a different sense of the ending, there is an information flow problem.

Fox News is in the position of controlling the non-bump readers, and can not only give them a false conclusion, but can do so so convincingly, its viewers think they’re getting an ending. This last mid-term, Fox and its on-air endorsements and fear mongering convinced that 63% that they had heard all they needed to hear. To them, the conclusion to the story was to vote out the Democrats. And that’s exactly what they did.

Is it over? Part 1

Today I sat down to write and realized there were tons of things I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want to be schizophrenic about this endeavor, so I thought it out; “What do these different topics have in common?”. Interestingly enough, it dawned on me pretty quickly. I want to talk about endings. More specifically though, I want to talk about whether or not something really is over when we’ve reached the ending. The more I started drafting my brain onto the computer, the more I realized I had a lot to say on the subject, so I’ve split the posts up for easier reading.

It seems these days that a specific event, film, show or anything’s specific ending isn’t necessarily its conclusion. In print, we have print articles that are often “continued online”, blockbuster movies have a trend of tacking on short bits after the credits, and then there’s the issue which kick-started this whole endings thought process, which is sports overtime. In addition, there are lessons to be learned about our current political climate buried on all of this ending/conclusion talk. Upon examining the above cases as a whole, I find myself wanting to draw a parallel through them that has to do with dedication.

I have exactly two magazine subscriptions: GQ and Esquire. I had never subscribed to anything before 2008 when I first asked to get GQ in my mail, but it seemed like a no-brainer since I found myself buying each issue from the newsstand, and the subscription price was miles cheaper. In essence, I am a dedicated follower not only of menswear and fashion styles, but of GQ as a magazine and a brand. While a certain percentage of my enjoyment in each issue does come from the style-watching and photo editorials, I also am rather fond of the celebrity interviews and journalistic pieces they often run, some of which have a tendency to get quite long. GQ’s tactic, instead of having a string of text-laden pages inside their image-heavy magazine, is to bump oftentimes half or more of the article to the back of the issue, with

Continued on page #

at the bottom. Years ago, when I was wee-lad working for my High School paper, I remember being taught about the notion that, the longer an article went on, the more readers you would lose, ending with some staggering statistic I can’t recall right now that deals with how few people will finish an article if there’s a bump. That idea speaks to the notion about endings—an article may, in fact, be done for that page, and a reader might be satisfied with that, but the conclusion doesn’t come until after that bump. All of this means that only the most dedicated and interested folks arrive at the conclusion. Even more interesting is not only the knowledge lost by those who don’t “Continue on”, but the knowledge gained by those who do. Suddenly, there are two distinct audiences for the same content.

The same applies in movies, specifically blockbuster “nerdy” ones. If you’ve taken a minute to click on one of those links to the left of what you’re reading to explore the bits about me, you’ll find that I fancy myself something of a geek, pop culturally. I grew up on comic books and continue my obsession with them to this day, and I live and breathe Star Wars when oxygen doesn’t suffice. Needless to say, I’ve stood in midnight lines to see the likes of Iron Man 2, The Dark Knight, most of the Harry Potter films and many countless others in the past and still to come (I can hardly contain my excitement for Tron: Legacy, or Captain America, The First Avenger!). For many films in this genre, there is a built-in club of exclusivity due to the fact that they’re based on existing pop culture niche works. It’s a simple fact that people love to be a part of groups, and nothing gets a group going (and paying for things) more than insider information—things which reward their being a part of that niche.

When Jane and Bob Public went to see Iron Man 2, they got a funny action film with explosions, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. And when the soundtrack started up and the credits rolled on, that was their ending. But to the insiders, those dedicated enough to their fandom to have the knowledge, there was more. Once we learned no animals were harmed during filming and saw the copyright information, we were treated to the conclusion: Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, found in the desert. Those who stayed in their seats a few minutes longer now have more information the next time around—they know of Thor’s in-universe appearance much earlier, and they now carry that knowledge into the upcoming films. When it comes time for Iron Man 3 or Thor’s own film, some members of the very same audience will know less than the others.

In Part 2, I’ll be looking at overtime in sports, and how it differs from the consumed media ending/conclusion paradigm and I’ll  apply these ingrained principles to our post mid-term political climate. You better stay tuned!

P.S.: It would go against my nature not to at least acknowledge the inherent funniness not only of a paragraph like the above one in a bit about endings and conclusions, but of a “P.S.” at the end considering the meaning:

A postscript, abbreviated P.S., is writing added after the main body of a letter (or other body of writing). The term comes from the Latin post scriptum, an expression meaning “written after”^[1][2] (which may be interpreted in the sense of “that which comes after the writing”). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postscript)

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UPDATE: Olbermann back on Tuesday

 

In my last post [Baseball analogy], I talked about Keith Olbermann’s suspension from his MSNBC show for not donating to political figures through the correct corporate channels. After a weekend of quite a bit of press coverage, not only did it turn out that MSNBC’s own Joe Scarborough donated $4200 or more to Republicans, but he was never censured as Olbermann was.

Those findings out, plus a public outcry from many viewers, caused MSNBC Phil Griffin to change his mind and return Olbermann to the airwaves.