purple motes

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. The Newseum's theater that gives visitors a chance to Be a TV Reporter, 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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Steve Outing observes:

For years, sports enthusiasts have read about their sports in magazines, mostly — with advice and celebrity profiles written by professional journalists and freelancers, and the occasional athlete. But what we’re seeing with the EG sites [here] (which are primarily about climbers/bikers/runners/et al sharing their own stories and images) is that people like being the writers and photographers themselves, and viewing the amateur musings of fellow enthusiasts who they can interact with easily and directly.

Some recent research is consistent with this view:

Advertisements featuring endorsements by celebrities such as David Beckham are less effective than those featuring ordinary people, new research suggests. This is because keeping up with the Jones's rather than with famous people is the main motivation behind many people's choice of which product to buy.[1]

Personally, I'm keen to keep up with my brother Dwight. But he is, in fact, a celebrity.

Note:

[1] Quoted from University of Bath press release (separate paragraphs condensed). The research that is the basis for this press release seems to be Torsten Tomczak, Daniel Wentzel, and Martin Brett, "Consumer Susceptibility to Normative Influence," forthcoming in Journal of Advertising, 2007. While that journal bills itself as "the premier journal devoted to the development of advertising theory and its relationship to practice," not making the paper and associated data freely available on the web makes this research less credible.

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In the nineteenth century, continuous partial attention was a burning problem:

Until the 1820s (when candle technology started to improve markedly), both wax and tallow candles needed frequent "snuffing." We commonly misunderstand the term snuffing today -- it did not mean to put a candle flame out; instead, it meant to trim the candle's wick. If one did not snuff frequently, then the wick would grow longer as the wax melted, curving over toward the small wall of solid material holding in the melted wax or tallow. The curving wick would then melt the wall, causing the molten material to flow down the candle and be lost. This phenomenon was called "guttering," and it ensured that the candle burned less efficiently and for a shorter time. Tallow candles left unattended might use just five percent of their material and gutter out within half an hour. ...the point is that reading was regularly interrupted -- perhaps every ten minutes or so -- by the need to snuff a candle.[1]

Candles early in the nineteenth century were probably about as distracting as Twitter is today. Perhaps a distinctive feature of modern life is that the admonition "stay awake, stay alert" has become unusual.

Note:

[1] Eliot, Simon (2001), "'Never Mind the Value, What about the Price?"; Or, How Much Did Marmion Cost St. John Rivers?" Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 173, 177.

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Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, recently honored as Bureaucrat of the Month, has identified advertising-funded business models as Microsoft's top concern:

Today, the big phenomenon that we can embrace - the big fat thing for us to think about, embrace, endorse, compete with - is what does ad-funding mean? Whether it is for search, or whether it is for business-services, or whether it’s for other online services, what does that funding mean as a competitive business model and do we embrace it as is? Do we modify it? Do we just compete with it, with more of a transaction or subscription model? But how we deal with that is a Job One issue.

Advertising spending as a share of GDP has been relatively constant across large changes in media. This past constancy provides useful background for thinking about innovations in advertising business models.

Google targets textual ads to moment-specific user desires indicated by user search queries. Demographic and interest segmentation and targeting has long been a central concern in the advertising business. Targeting advertising based on search queries effectively segments individual persons. Ads depend on what you want right now.

Less noticed has been innovation in another direction of advertising. Brand advertising typically has depended on expensive, mass-media ad campaigns. Online marketing campaigns, in contrast, depend on more diffuse patterns of example and influence. New sorts of online advertising relationships, such as pay per post, sponsorship of bloggers, or endorsements by bloggers, require working out norms of integrity, respect for personal relationships, and fair disclosure. But the challenge of working out online advertising norms shouldn't be exaggerated. Logo-branded clothing typical requires users to pay extra to advertise fashions in their daily interactions with others. That's not even controversial. Ethical online brand advertising is likely to be a major advertising growth area.

Consider, for example, Life of a Farm blog. As Jonathon Trenn notes, the blog offers the authentic voice of Joel Combs, a small farmer, describing details of his life. Joel uses a Mahindra tractor. Mahindra Tractors clearly sponsors the blog, which is hosted on a Mahindra domain and includes a Mahindra logo on the right. Mahindra Tractors' connection with Joel through this blog speaks to how they understand who they are as a company and contributes to the meaning of their brand. At the same time, each post seems to include at least one link to Mahindra Tractors. Those links don't detract at all from the personal quality of the posts. But it seems to me that the brand value of the Life of a Farm blog is not in its explicit links, but in bringing Mahindra's brand into the real life of a particular person.

This is the sort of guy who uses a Mahindra tractor:

Unfortunately my Chevy truck is on the fritz. The stupid thing will just die on you for no reason. It may go a mile or 30 miles then usually starts right back. I suspect it is the PMD (Pump Mounted Driver) on the injector pump. $389 new, wow that hurts! I’m seriously considering changing brands when I get it fixed. I have always been a GM guy, but I don’t think I will ever own another GM diesel truck. That kind of puts me in a bind though because I absolutely worship Trans Ams and I can’t see driving a Ford or Dodge truck and a completely opposite brand car. I’m sure Mustangs are fun to drive like TAs, but I like the T-tops and 6 speed tranny in the TA. Not to mention that thing still runs great at 187,000 miles.

This guy also loves a Mahindra tractor. That's an impressive endorsement of Mahindra Tractors.

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Faces, particularly eyes, naturally attract human attention. One aspect of the biological machine of faciality is eye structure. Compared to other primates, humans have more salient eyes:

the human eye lacks certain pigments found in primate eyes, so the outer fibrous covering, or "sclera," of our eyeball is white. In contrast, most primates have uniformly brown or dark-hued sclera, making it more difficult to determine the direction they're looking from their eyes alone. … Humans are also the only primates for whom the outline of the eye and the position of the iris are clearly visible. In addition, our eyes are more horizontally elongated and disproportionately large for our body size compared to most apes.

Experimental evidence indicates that a chimpanzee’s gaze direction responds primarily to a person’s head movements, while human gaze tracks another’s gaze direction. But if the objective is to indicate direction, the advantage of using eye movement rather than head movement isn’t obvious.

Eye contact, however, has more subtle value in communication. Seeing someone’s head move doesn’t mean that she knows that you were looking at her in a situation in which you would track her change in gaze direction. Eye contact generates common knowledge of gaze direction (you both know that you’re looking at each other, you both know that you both know you’re looking at each other, etc.) and common sense of whether a change in gaze direction would be tracked (nervous distancing or needed shift in attention?). Just looking at each other’s head doesn’t work this way, because head orientation doesn’t imply eye orientation in humans and other primates.

Making sense of presence is probably more valuable to humans than to other primates. Across species, a larger neocortex, both in absolute size and relative to total brain volume, is correlated with greater social complexity (pdf link). Relatively salient human eyes, like the relatively large human neocortex (particularly prefrontal cortex), support sense of presence. Direct gaze is a powerful way to produce sense of presence. I relay to you fourth-hand a plausible reported fact: “human infants look at the face and eyes of their caregiver twice as long on average compared with other apes.”

Given the importance of gaze to humans, a video viewer’s ability to discern the whites of the eyes of persons on a video might be a useful measure of video quality with real human relevance. My video of the JDRF Spin to Win has little interest other than the eyes, faces, and expression of the participants. Viewing the video on YouTube, the faces are distorted and whites of the eyes are barely discernable. But viewing the video on Blip.tv, you can see whites of the participants’ eyes much more clearly. The point is not simply that Blip.tv offers better quality video than YouTube. High-density, huge-screen television offers much better video quality than either. People want to see the whites of others’ eyes. That is a human-relevant measure of video quality.

Note: Technical discussion of video quality problems here (see especially comments) and here.

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