purple motes

Sacred to Commonweal was this net design'd
To pierce the heart and humanize the mind.
But if a hitless Blog, the Blogger's curse,
Shows us our Thoughts and Reasons lose their force
Unwilling we must change the nobler scene,
And in our turn present you Celeb-queens;
Quit Poets, and set Journalists to work,
Show gaudy scenes, or mount the starring Buck:
For, though we Bloggers, one and all, agree
Boldly to struggle for our -- vanity,
If want comes on, importance must retreat;
Our first, great, ruling passion, is -- to eat.

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Elite men competed intensely for public attention in the Roman empire.  Oratory was a primary field of this competition.  According to one Roman authority:

it is impossible to imagine [a pursuit] in our state richer in advantages, more splendid in its prospects, more attractive in fame at home, more illustrious in celebrity throughout our whole empire and all the world.  ... ["armed" with the art of oratory] a man can always bring aid to friends, succor to strangers, deliverance to the imperiled, while to malignant foes he is an actual fear and terror, himself the while secure and intrenched, so to say, within a power and a position of lasting strength [1]

Sophisticated Roman texts on oratory tend to emphasize the appeal of eloquent oratory to an elite audience.   A leading public intellectual of the third century GC chronicled the triumphs of sophists through the ages.  He described the attention accorded to a sophist who in the second century GC held the prestigious Chair of Rhetoric in Rome:

they listened to him as to a sweet-voiced nightingale, struck with admiration for his facile tongue, his well-modulated and flexible voice, and his rhythms, whether in prose or when he sang in recitative.  So much so, that, when they were attending shows in which the vulgar delight -- these were, generally speaking, performances of dancers -- a messenger had only to appear in the theatre to announce that Adrian [holder of the Chair of Rhetoric] was going to declaim, when even the members of the Senate would rise from their sitting, and the members of the equestrian order would rise, not only those who were devoted to Hellenistic culture, but also those who were studying the other language [Latin] at Rome; and they would set out on the run to the Athenaeum, overflowing with enthusiasm, and upbraiding those who were going there at a walking pace. [2]

Ordinary court cases created most of the demand for instrumental oratorical skills in imperial Rome.  But as lawyers soon learn, much of the action in ordinary litigation is quite dull.  Competition among orators for attention, students, and speaking fees created, as if by an invisible tongue, oratory focused on sex and violence.  Here are some mock cases that were the subject of discussion about two millennium ago.

• Law: A priestess must be chaste and of chaste [parents], pure and of pure [parents].
• Discuss: A virgin was captured by pirates and sold; she was bought by a pimp and made a prostitute.  When men came for her, she asked for alms.  When she failed to get alms from a soldier who came to her, he struggled with her and tried to use force; she killed him.  She was accused, acquitted and sent back to her family.  She seeks a priesthood.

• Law: Whoever catches an adulterer with his mistress in the act, provided that he kills both, may go free.  A son too may punish adultery on the part of his mother.
• Discuss: A hero lost his hands in war.  He caught an adulterer with his wife, by whom he had a youthful son.  He told the son to do the killing.  The son refused.  The adulterer fled.  The husband now disinherits the son.

• Law: A girl who has been raped may choose either marriage to her ravisher without a dowry or his death.
• Discuss: On a single night a man raped two girls.  One demands his death, the other marriage.[3]

These sort of discussions now tend to be associated with legal education.  Law professors might solemnly describe them as fine training for developing and practicing legal reasoning.  That's quite sophistic.  These cases developed out of intense competition for attention, students, and speaking fees among the Roman equivalent of law professors.[4]  That's a competitive pattern also seen in modern trends in the content of television talk shows, reality TV, and network news.  Intense competition for attention naturally generates representations of sex and violence.

*  *  *  *  *

Notes:

[1] Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory, 5 (circa 102 GC).  Quoted from Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942) pp. 737-8.

[2] Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, 590 (circa 235 GC).  Quoted from Philostratus and Eunapius, trans. Wilmer Cave Wright (London: William Heinemann, 1961) pp. 231, 233.  The sophist described was Adrian the Phoenician (fl. mid-2'nd century GC).

[3] Seneca, Controversiae I, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1 (circa 37 GC).  Quoted from Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom (London: William Heinemann, 1974) pp. 59, 105, 121.  I've added the tags "Law:" and "Discuss:".

[4] Stanley Bonner, Roman Declamation in the late Republic and early Empire (Liverpool: Univeristy of Liverpool, 1949) p. 39 states:

the Senecan declamations were mostly delivered at gatherings of quite mature people. ... it is also true that nearly all these themes were invented for and debated in the schools, as is witnessed by their survivial in the Lesser Declamations attributed to Quintilian, where they are prefaced by the professorial sermo.  But most of the Senecan declamations appear to have been based upon debates where rival professors used the school-subjects to exhibit their powers and win the plaudits (or be shamed by the ridicule) of their contemporaries.

I think it much more likely that the school subjects followed the professors, rather than the professors the school subjects.

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Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, a recent, magnificent exhibition at the Sackler Gallery, included paintings memorializing the life of Maharaja Bakhat Singh. He was an eighteenth-century Rathore-Rajput ruler of the Jodhpur-Marwar kingdom, now in the Indian state of Rajasthan. A number of paintings depict the royal, cultured Bakhat Singh at his Nagaur Palace in a garden amidst a crowd of beautiful young women. They rub his legs, bring him food, play music for him, and bath with him. In one painting, Bakhat Singh, bare-chested in a large garden pool with twenty-one young women, playfully squirts, with an elongated pumping toy, water at one of the women.[1] Being a ruler gave Bakhat Singh extraordinary pleasure.

Before the Sackler Gallery's exhibition re-introduced them to the international art world, the Nagaur Palace garden paintings had never been published and apparently were largely unknown. Why these paintings were not previously celebrated isn't explained in the exhibition or accompanying book. Perhaps the paintings' subject matter was a cause of intercultural moral concern in the past. Some tragic history may also have caused unease: Bakhat Singh gained his position in Nagaur by killing his father, the reigning ruler of Marwar. The book accompanying the exhibition explains:

It is unknown whether Abhai Singh [the eldest son] incited the murder so he could gain the throne for himself or, as was rumored at the time, Bakhat Singh was enraged that his father was having an illicit affair with his daughter-in-law, Bakhat Singh's wife. Perhaps, as some historians have speculated, it was a joint effort formulated by the brothers to further their dual political and personal agendas. What is known is that when Abhai Singh returned to Jodhpur in late 1724, he gave Nagaur to Bakhat Singh in what many have interpreted as a reward for the murder. The Rathore nobles, however, never forgave this monstrous act. They found the patricide so abhorrent that no prominent structure was built for Abhai Singh at Mandore, the strikingly picturesque Rathore ancestral site where Marwar rajas' deaths are honored with elaborately carved, red sandstone cenotaphs.[2]

Bakhat Singh's Nagaur Palace garden paintings were not created to evoke horror and pity. But appreciating the pleasure they depict requires a simple heart.

The Tale of Shuten Dōji, now on exhibit at the Sackler, depicts a morally sanctioned response to a male with unauthorized, wicked relations with beautiful young women. The tale of Shuten Dōji goes back in illustrated form to fourteenth-century Japan or earlier. Shuten Dōji is a demon-ogre typically depicted as large, ugly, stupid, and barbaric. He kidnaps beautiful young women to serve him at his castle-fortress. The emperor dispatches samurai to rescue the women and destroy the ogre. Carrying out this mission leads to a series of prototypical incidents involving wise men, a distressed woman, some brave woman, a magic potion, and disguises. Ultimately, the samurai prevail in a ferocious battle. They behead Shuten Dōji and kill many of his demon-helpers. They rescue many beautiful women from the ogre. Returning the women to the city, the samurai parade through the streets and display Shuten Dōji's head on cart.

An early nineteenth-century Japanese wall hanging depicts Shuten Dōji with food and two beautiful women amidst blossoming cherry trees.   While one of his demon-helpers kneels on the ground in a guarding position, Shuten Dōji, in attractive human form, sits on a tiger skin.  The two women wear lavish, noble dress and have extraordinarily long, black hair.  One woman serves sake to Shuten Dōji, who does not look at her but rather gazes out on the cherry blossoms.  Below, a lone woman washes a kimono undergarment in a stream.  The remaining parts of the voluminous kimono rest on the river bank.  The kimono belongs to one of Shuten Dōji's unpictured female victims.  The wall hanging is large, about 1 by 2.5 meters, and sumptuous, made from gold on silk.  It presents an elegant composition with hints of barbarism and horror.  It is a well-designed as a noble incitement to anger and retribution.[3]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in a variety of media and became known throughout all levels of Japanese society. As a treasure made for the royal Japanese court about the year 1700, the tale of Shuten Dōji was represented in three, 20-meter long scrolls illustrated with color ink, silver, and gold on silk.  A noted painter made the illustrations, and an imperial prince and two other noblemen contributed calligraphy. Two large six-section folding screens, dating from 1625-1650, display scenes using ink and gold on paper scenes. During the Edo Period (1615-1868), the tale of Shuten Dōji was also depicted on lavish hanging scrolls and arrangements of multiple paper fans.[4]

The tale of Shuten Dōji was also represented through much more modest means. In nineteenth-century Japan, the tale was depicted in small, printed books with black-and-white woodcut illustrations and very little text.[5]  The book was relatively cheap and accessible to the illiterate. At the end of the nineteenth century, the tale of Shuten Dōji, with English text, was printed in Japan in a small, color-illustrated book series entitled "Japanese Fairy Tales." Book no. 19, Ogres of Oeyama is on display in the Sackler exhibition. Book no. 18, The Ogre's Arm, is available online through the Internet Archive (thanks to Armchair Asia for the link). Drawing on popular English Gothic clichés, the text at one point declares, "It happened one dark and stormy night...." The Japanese fairy tale series seems to be designed for middle-class Japanese readers eager to learn to read English novels.

Male sexual desire is a powerful motivating force. It plays out within interpersonal fields of authority, resentment, and anger.  Resentment and anger at an imaginary ogre's access to women was probably easier to generate and distribute than appreciation for a historical ruler's fantastic sensual delights.

*  *  *  *  *

The Tale of Shuten Dōji is ongoing at the Sackler Gallery through September 20, 2009.

Notes:

[1] "Maharaja Bakhat Singh Rejoices during Holi," Nagaur, ca. 1748-50, Mehrangarh Museum Trust, catalog number 20, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2008).  For a similar painting, click on the upper right thumbnail for the online gallery.

[2] Glynn, Catherine, "Rathore and Mughal Interactions: Artistic Development at the Nagaur Court, 1600-1751" p. 14, in Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur.

[3] "Shuten Dōji on Mount Oe Viewing Cherry Blossoms," Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858), from the Feinberg Collection, USA.

[4]  Kano Shōun illustrated the scrolls, which include calligraphy by Imperial Prince Fushiminomiya Kuninaga (1667-1726).  All the works described here, unless otherwise noted, are on display in the exhibition.  Some of the works can be seen online here.

[5] The exhibition displays such a book with illustrations by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849): Ehon Wakan no Homare, Japan, 1850, thread-bound, woodblock-printed, Sackler item V20.2006.195.

Above images courtesy of the Sackler Gallery: The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Scroll 3 from a set of 3, section 7, by Kano Shoun (1637 – 1702); Japan, Edo period, 1700; Handscroll; Ink, color, gold, and silver on silk; 37.2 x 2405.2 cm; Purchase, Friends of Asian Arts, F1998.26.3.  The Tale of Shuten Dōji, Section 23, scroll 3;  Japan, Edo period, 17th century;  Handscroll; Ink, color, gold and silver on paper; 32.7 x 1338.3 cm; Purchase, F1998.303.3 .

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What's the difference between a search service and a service perfectly targeting informative advertising to its users?  Susan Wojcicki, Google VP, Product Management, recently stated:

Google's advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is very similar to our mission in search, and, like our colleagues in search, those of us on the ads team are constantly striving to achieve better results.

Daniel Tunkelang insightfully responded:

Google insists that it maintains a wall between its search and advertising businesses. But Wojcicki’s post–which is on Google’s official blog–suggests otherwise, at least in spirit. If Google believes that both search and advertising aim to “offer relevant content” and “deliver the right information to the right person at the right time”, then why put up a wall at all?

If an advertising platform truly provides only the most relevant, useful, timely information to its users, it gives advertisers no incentive to bid against each other to place ads.  The most relevant, useful, timely ad, not the highest bidding advertiser, would be presented to users.  Ad results wouldn't differ from search results.  The perfect advertising service would provide no incentive for advertising expenses.

For both search and advertising, emphasizing relevant, useful, timely information obscures the importance of emotions in human decision-making.  A vast amount of information is subconsciously processed within the human body.  Only some of this information is brought into the brain's working memory and higher-order cortical regions.  Competing for attention is not just the business of advertising.  Emotions have a major role in the ongoing competition for attention within the human brain.

Actually making a decision requires a motivational push, not just information processing.  In an influential book describing new understanding of emotions, a neuroscientist described the behavior of a patient with damage to brain regions associated with emotional processing.  The patient was offered the choice between two dates for a laboratory appointment:

For the better part of a half-hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could reasonably think about concerning a simple date.  Just as calmly as he had driven over the ice, and recounted that episode, he was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis,  an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences.[1]

When the doctors finally halted this process and asked the patient to come on the second of the two dates, the patient was happy to accept that choice.   Human-Computer Information Retrieval services should not be implicitly modeled on the behavior of emotionally damaged humans and emotionless computers.  An impulse to choose, apart from organizing and accessing information, is a key aspect of human search behavior that concludes with choice.

Search and advertising involve much different emotional patterns in users' information processing.  Web search produces a list of choices designed to be informative, not emotive.  Given the importance of search result rankings to users' choices, users seem to view these results with a feeling "tell me right now" and "whatever, good enough."  The emotional drive is not primarily to make a good choice, but to go somewhere, to finish the search.[2]

Advertising has much more specific emotional targeting than search.  Advertisers design brand names and tag lines to be emotive.  Where possible, they use images and audio-visual materials that evoke favorable feelings.  Compared to clicking on search results, users are much more likely to click on an advertisement based on emotions that the specific advertisement generates.

Because emotions are an integral aspect of human information-processing and decision-making, advertising's future is secure.  Even if they perfectly target ads to be relevant, useful, and timely for users, advertising platforms cannot effectively rank the emotional value of ads.  Persons and companies have deep-seated feelings about how good they and their products are.  These feelings are fully sufficient to drive vigorous bidding for advertising opportunities.

Search will not replace advertising.  Information technology can greatly improve human's ability to organize, rank, and make accessible information.  No such technology exists for human emotions.  That fact will keep advertising platforms in business.

Notes:

[1] Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain (New York: Putnam) pp. 193-4.  Skin conductance responses, which typically are correlated with emotional responses, have been documented to precede a risky choice in normal individuals. Such a response does not occur for individuals with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices. The later persons' choices systematically differ from normal persons' choices within the same laboratory experiment. See Bechara, Antoine, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, "Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy," Science, V. 275, 28 February 1997, pp. 1293-5. Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis provides a more general framework for understanding such effects.

[2] Image search seems to involve a different emotional pattern than web search.  See the recent talk of Peter Linsley, Google Image Search Product Manager.

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Crime and punishment has featured prominently in the rise of mass media. The first book published in Boston was A Wicked Man's Portion (1675), a sermon that Increase Mather preached at the execution of two men for murder. About this time in England, the Ordinary (minister) of Newgate Prison began publishing accounts of prisoners who were executed. Printed execution sermons in early New England and the Ordinary's Accounts in England became immensely popular news publications.

Broadsides -- single page, highly current news reports -- took news circulation to unprecedented heights. In England in 1849, the hangings of James Bloomfield Rush and of Maria and Frederick Manning each were reported in 2.5 million broadsheets rapidly distributed around the country.[1] That number amounts to about one broadsheet for every four persons ages 15 years old and older in England and Wales about that time.

In England about 1850, a news distributor, an industry veteran with more than twenty years of experience, explained how the business works:

There's nothing beats a stunning good murder, after all. Why there was Rush [James Bloomfield Rush, executed in 1849 for two murders] — I lived on him for a month or more. When I commenced with Rush, I was 14 s. in debt for rent, and in less than fourteen days I astonished the wise men in the east by paying my landlord all I owed him. Since Dan'el Good [executed in 1842 for murdering his lover] there had been little or nothing doing in the murder line — no one could cap him — till Rush turned up a regular trump for us. Why I went down to Norwich expressly to work the execution. I worked my way down there with 'a sorrowful lamentation' of his own composing, which I'd got written by the blind man expressly for the occasion. On the morning of the execution we beat all the regular newspapers out of the field ; for we had the full, true, and particular account down, you see, by our own express [printing shop], and that can beat anything that ever they can publish; for we gets it printed several days afore it comes off [before the execution]; and [I] goes and stands with it right under the drop [the gallows]; and many's the penny I've turned away when I've been asked for an account of the whole business before it happened. So you see, for herly [early] and correct hinformation [information], we can beat the Sun [a London newspaper] — aye, or the moon either, for the matter of that.[2]

Selling news to a mass market has long been a highly competitive business. Focusing on crime and punishment and having a pre-established story have been important competitive tactics. As this news distributor indicates, journalistic integrity has also been an important part of the business. The story should not be sold before the event happens.

The Newseum has recently re-opened. The news organizations that designed and funded the Newseum relocated it from Rosslyn, Virginia (about 4 miles from the U.S. Capitol) to a new, $450 million-dollar building about a half-mile from the U.S. Capitol. Being extremely close to the physical seat of the U.S. government apparently is crucial to news organizations' representation of the history of the news.

The Newseum contains neither a gallows, gibbet, stocks, nor pillory. While the Newseum's theater gives visitors a chance to Be a TV Reporter, it doesn't put them in front of a bleeding body (Maddy and Tess, when you grow up may you never have to spread news by reading from a teleprompter!) The Newseum fails to report well the importance of crime and punishment in the history of the news.

Notes:

[1] Mayhew, Henry (1851), London Labour and the London Poor (London), vol. I, p. 284.

[2] Id. pp. 223-4.

Illustration Credit: From broadsheet describing trial and execution of Charles Shaw, Richard Tomlinson, and Mary Smith, 1834. Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides. Courtesy of Special Collections Department, Harvard Law School Library.

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For more than four months, hundreds of persons a week have probably viewed a display of minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC. A collection of minerals and meteorites were part of James Smithson's bequest to the United States for founding the Smithsonian as an institution "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." James Dwight Dana, a mineralogist, looked at Smithson's collection and described the minerals:

a choice and beautiful collection...comprising, probably, eight or ten thousand specimens. The specimens...are extremely perfect, and constitute a very complete Geological and Mineralogical series....

Dana described Smithson's meteorites as "a valuable suite of meteoric stones, which appear to be specimens of most of the important meteorites which have fallen in Europe during several centuries."

The minerals and meteorites exhibited at the Smithsonian are not Smithson's collection. They are a small number of specimens gathered from a variety of sources to indicate what Smithson's collection probably had been like. The exhibit explains that the minerals and meteorites in Smithson's collection were destroyed in a fire that greatly damaged the upper floor of the Smithsonian Castle in 1865. But how could a fire destroy minerals and meteorites? Stones don't burn!

Heather Ewing's deeply researched book, The Lost World of James Smithson, notes:

There remains some confusion about what exactly survived from the regents' room in the south tower. The report investigating the fire states vaguely that among the losses is "a part of the contents of the regents' room, including the personal effects of Smithson, with the exception of his portrait and library." Smithson's library and portrait survived because they were kept in the west wing of the building ( which was unharmed in the fire), where the institution's library was housed. [p. 356, note 9]

The fire at the Smithsonian apparently was an open fire fueled by wood and interior furnishings. There's no reason to believe that the fire was hot enough to melt or transmute minerals and meteorites. The fire would have left Smithson's minerals and meteorites disorganized and covered in soot, but not destroyed or even significantly damaged. So what really happened to Smithson's mineral and meteorite collection?

The Smithsonian Institution has for more than a century offered nationally sanctioned and acclaimed displays of authoritative scientific knowledge. In those circumstances, a claim that stones were destroyed in a fire apparently passes unquestioned. That's an impressive monument to the value of blogging and Wikipedia.

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Most television watching is best modeled as a two-stage decision process. First, a person decides to watch television. That means the person sits on a couch and stares vacantly at a large screen a few yards away. Then the person decides what to watch. That means choosing among current, salient video programming offerings. These two decisions are very loosely connected.

The behavior of persons who own a digital video recorder (DVR) is consistent with this decision model. In the U.S., households with a DVR use it for at most 25% of their television viewing time.[1] In the UK, households with a DVR use it even less -- about 14% of television viewing time.[2] Most of the time, persons can't be bothered to record and watch programs pre-selected from the huge universe of programs available to be recorded.

Persons don't even bother to record programs so that they can skip advertising. When UK DVR owners were asked about how they use their DVR, 40% reported regularly fast-forwarding through adverts, while 42% reported never fast-forwarding through adverts. When specifically asked, 78% claimed to always or almost always fast-forward through adverts when using the DVR.[3] Evidently persons can't remember well their immediate viewing behavior with respect to adverts. More significantly, persons who aren't using their DVR surely aren't fast-forwarding through adverts.

Average time spent watching television is likely to change neither quickly nor by a large amount in response to changes in the relative value of media use opportunities. Differences in video programming have little effect on aggregate television viewing time. New services offered on computer screens and mobile screens --- video sharing, social networking, community news and information, in-depth learning opportunities -- are similarly likely to have little effect on aggregate television view time. The amount of leisure time available (total working hours, weekday versus weekend) and socio-economic characteristics affecting broad patterns of life -- educational attainment, employment status, presence of children at home -- largely control television viewing time.

A recent IBM-sponsored survey has media pundits discussing the decline or explosion of television, but the survey actually provides rather weak evidence. The survey was an Internet-based survey, not a random sample of some relevant universe. Persons who respond to an Internet-based survey are likely to use the Internet more than average adults. U.S. respondents to the survey were 71% women and 27% persons ages 18-24, while U.S. adults (persons 18 and over) are 51% women and 13% ages 18-24.[4] Thus the survey demographics highly over-represent women and young adults.

Most significantly, persons who have commented on the results of the survey generally don't seem to understand what was reported. The press release for the survey reported that "personal Internet time rivals TV time." In the survey, "personal Internet time" meant Internet use at home and on "personal time at work."[5] A survey in 2002 of a representative sample of U.S. adults found that employees with web access spent 3.7 hours per week in personal use of the Internet at work, and 5.9 hours per week using the Internet for work-related purposes at home. Both these time uses apparently count as "personal Internet use" in the IBM survey. Television isn't a feasible alternative for either of those time uses. Most workers in the cushy private sector don't have televisions in their offices, and watching television is almost never a work-related activity at home.

The challenge for traditional television isn't that television viewing time will decline rapidly. The challenge is that traditional television advertising, compared to personalized, action-oriented, performance-measurable advertising, will decline rapidly in market value.

Notes:

[1] Reporting on a telephone survey, June-July 2007, of a random sample of 1,800 adults in households with a TV (and a telephone), Leichtman Research Group stated that "over one in every five households" had a DVR and estimated that "95% of all TV viewing in the U.S. is still of live TV." These data imply that no less than 75% of DVR owners' TV viewing time is live viewing, i.e. distributor-scheduled programming. The extent to which persons record and watch television programs on analog videocassette recorders raises the estimated DVR owners' live TV viewing time. So does the extent to which DVR ownership is over 20%. An IBM-sponsored Internet survey found 24% of persons in the U.S. owned a DVR in April, 2007. See U.S. findings, p. 9. As discussed subsequently above, this sample isn't representative of the U.S. adult population.

[2] Spring, 2006 BARB measurements in households with Sky+ DVR.

[3] Ofcom, The Communications Market 2007, Section 1 Converging communications markets, p. 85. In Q1 2007, 15% of UK homes had DVRs, almost double the 2006 figure. See id. p. 69.

[4] See U.S. study findings, p. 4, compared to U.S. census data.

[5] U.S. study findings, p. 7, comparing "Daily Personal Internet Usage; Home and Personal Time at Work" to "Daily Television Viewing."

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The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this fall will release another report lamenting the decline of literary reading. From the late seventeenth century through the early twentieth century, many cultural leaders would have applauded a decline in reading of popular novels. Now, however, such a decline is a cause for grave concern. Fiction has become a major public good.

Appreciating modern fiction requires considerable sophistication. The Executive Summary of the NEA's 2004 report, Reading at Risk, declared:

Reading at Risk presents a distressing but objective overview of national trends. The accelerating declines in literary reading among all demographic groups of American adults indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

The NEA's news release begin with this description:

Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature.... The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002....

The report's Executive Summary included this finding:

4. Women read more literature than men do, but literary reading by both groups is declining at significant rates.

Under that finding was this data:

Thus less than half of American men have read literature for at least as far back as 1982. While the overall share of literary readers declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002, the gender protrusion in the share of literary readers (the difference between women's and men's shares of literary readers) has been larger than 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002. In 2002, the gender protrusion was 17.5 percentage points!

Reading at Risk emphasizes the tremendous public importance of literary reading. In the preface to the report, Dana Gioia, Chairman of the NEA, declares:

print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that makes complex communication possible. To lose such intellectual capability -- and the many sorts of human continuity it allows -- would constitute a vast impoverishment.
     More than reading is at stake. As this report unambiguously demonstrates, readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. The decline in reading, therefore, parallels a larger retreat from participation in civic and cultural life. The long-term implications of this study not only affect literature but all the arts -- as well as social activities such as volunteerism, philanthropy, and even political engagement.

The gender protrusion is literary reading is much larger than the decline in literary reading that the NEA and many concerned persons, including some who note various flaws in the NEA report other than the lack of interest in the impressive gender protrusion, have addressed. Why hasn't the awesome gender protrusion attracted widespread public interest, or at least concern, or at least notice?

The NEA's press release for Reading at Risk detumesces sex. The press release states:

Women read more literature than men do, but the survey indicates literary reading by both genders is declining. Only slightly more than one-third of adult males now read literature. Reading among women is also declining significantly, but at a slower rate.

The first independent clause of the first sentence has "women" as the subject and indicates that women lead men in the valued activity of concern. That sentence then has an attention-deflecting conjunction ("but" rather than "and") linking to a second independent clause indicating a similarity between the sexes. The second sentence returns to the idea of the first independent clause of the first sentence. It presents a statistic about "adult males." It does not, however, present the parallel statistic about "adult females." The third sentence returns to women and slightly qualifies the second clause of the first sentence. This disjoint prose structure doesn't convey what should be a major concern for those who truly believe that literary reading has great public importance: in 2002, 37.6% of men, in contrast to 55.1% of women, were literary readers.

Good literature is an antidote to conventional master narratives and narrow interests that obscure the continually new reality of the world. When it comes to men, failure of imagination may in fact indicate an imminent cultural crisis.

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Sarah Ann Long, a former president of the American Library Association and currently director of NSLS, a library consortium in the northern suburban region of Illinois, recently noted public library users' interest in audiovisual materials:

In 2001, the NSLS conducted an informal survey of member public libraries and found that in a few libraries, loans of AV materials were about 40 percent of all loans. The same survey was just repeated and the numbers have grown. Many libraries now report that AV borrowing is in the 40 percent range. The Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin said that almost 57 percent of their loans were for AV materials and the Glencoe Public Library reported that AV accounted for 63 percent of all items borrowed.

Some libraries are adopting innovative collection management approaches to audiovisuals, such as having the library subscribe to Netflix.

National censuses of U.S. public libraries provide more comprehensive information on audiovisual materials in U.S. public libraries. Audiovisual materials as a percent of the number of book volumes in libraries’ collections have increased from about 3.5% in 1987 to 9.5% in 2004. The share of videos grew much faster than that of audios, with videos rising from 0.6% of book volumes in 1987 to 4.6% in 2004. Estimates based on cross-section variations in libraries' collections indicate that videos account for about 20% of libraries circulation in 2004, and audio and visual materials together (audiovisuals), about 35%. Thus the reported figures from northern Illinois appear to be representative of the situation in the U.S. as a whole. The popularity of audio and video materials compared to books is consistent with a variety of other evidence from the communications industry.

Public libraries' provision of audiovisual materials has received relatively little scholarly attention. The Library Media Project, which sought to foster the development of public libraries' video collections, recently expired. Nonetheless, public libraries have provided and are likely to continue to provide many services besides lending books.

Update: Some state library websites (search them here) provide data on audiovisuals circulation. The data I've found are in the table below. These data suggest that audiovisual circulation for libraries across the U.S. might be closer to 25% of total circulation in 2006.

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Persons like to look at photographs of pretty girls and pretty boys. Taking objectification to a higher level, rigorous experimental testing (using photographs from Hot or Not, re-rated in a controlled laboratory procedure) has established that subjects discount the value of looking across time and trade money and work for viewing opportunities. These behavioral patterns are highly general and are also observed in biological markets among non-human species.

Subjects discounted opportunities to look at persons at a rate many orders of magnitude higher than the time discount of money. The time discount factor for viewing photographs was around 9% per second.[1] That's about seven orders of magnitude greater than a monetary time discount around 6% per year. Internet users are commonly considered to have a short attention span. Perhaps a better way to understand Internet users' behavior is that they have a very high discount rate for the goods that they commonly seek.

Male heterosexual subjects valued half-second looks at attractive female faces at roughly half CPM advertising rate for cable television. Based on subjects' choices revealed in a monetary choice task, heterosexual male subjects valued looking at photographs of attractive females at a rate of $4.50 per thousand half-second views (see table below). CPM advertising rates vary greatly depending on the audience targeting and demographics. For general video program across a wide range of national channels, $10 CPM is a reasonable benchmark. Can Internet banner ads attract attention? This evidence suggests that banner ads showing pretty female faces and targeted to a heterosexual male audience have considerable attention value.

Other evidence also indicates that many men are highly responsive to an attractive female face. Economists with impressive respect for bureaucratic work have studied the design of loan forms. They've estimated the effect of including on the form a picture of a female bank employee rather than a picture of a male employee:

A woman’s photo instead of a man’s increased demand among men by as much as dropping the interest rate five points! These things are not small. And this is very much an economic problem. We are talking about big loans here; customers would end up with monthly loan payments of around 10 percent of their annual income. You’d think that if you really needed the money enough to pay this interest rate, you’re not going to be affected by a photo. [Harvard Magazine]

Behavioral economics surely is a fascinating new intellectual field.

One valuable general insight from research in behavioral economics is the importance of a wide range of complex circumstances for human behavior. Humans do not behave as if a general-purpose computational device determines their actions. The researchers who studied valuation of photographs of faces suggested that their results point in the opposite direction:

Collectively, our results indicate that social orienting decisions obey principles remarkably similar to those underlying economic choices about food or money. These results suggest the possibility that a shared neural system mediates both social and non-social decision making.[2]

Taken literally, that's absurd. Behavioral routines to secure food and sex go back to the beginning of sexually reproducing organisms. The value of money is much more neurologically elaborate. That token money mediates human trade is an amazing human social-cognitive feat. Discounting and trade are better understood as behavioral characteristics that commonly emerge from specific biological problem-solving.

References and Notes:

[1] Benjamin Y. Hayden, Purak C. Parikh, Robert O. Deaner, Michael L. Platt (2007), "Economic principles motivating social attention in humans," Proceedings of The Royal Society B, Figure 2, p. 4. Financial institutions typically exponentially (in time) discount the value of money by the relevant interest rate. Human intertemporal choices in behavioral experiments are typically more consistent with hyperbolic discounting. The subjects approximately hyperbolically discounted future opportunities to view photographs of attractive persons. The differences between these two forms of discounting, while important, has little relevance here.

[2] Id. p. 1.

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