fuck communication economics
Recent scholarship on fuck jurisprudence has been downloaded 28,305 times from SSRN. This scholarship ranks fifteenth among SSRN’s all-time most downloaded papers. That’s an impressive achievement.
As an ambitious spare-time scholar, I thought of this achievement when I heard someone on the metro say, “He has no fucking idea!” What about fuck communication economics?
Fucking in “no fucking idea” functions semantically as an intensifier. Fuck is also a common ejaculation: fuck! Fuck and its derivative forms are verbally performed in a variety of positions: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, e.g. “he got fucked over,” “I don’t give a flying fuck,” “she’s a fucking idiot,” “that’s a fucking beautiful dog.” In communication, fuck has achieved astonishing penetration and has been highly generative.
Fuck’s communication market success occurred despite considerable irregularity. The scholarly literature has analyzed well this irregularity:
[fuck] exhibits syntactic irregularity (e.g., the word’s noncompliance with the English reflexivization rule in allowing the object pronoun you instead of yourself in the common imprecation “Fuck you!” — cf. “Punish yourself!” or “Abuse yourself!” vs. *”Punish you!” or *”Abuse you!”); if one analyzes the common imprecation not as an imperative (with the underlying subject you) but rather as a speech act, the word exhibits pragmatic irregularity (e.g., the word’s inability to co-occur with hereby when used as a speech act verb of condemning or cursing — cf. “I hereby condemn you” and “I hereby curse you” vs *”I hereby fuck you”).[1]
Words that are irregular tend to have shorter communication industry lifetimes. Fuck, however, has had a long history. Some etymological evidence indicates that fuck predates the development of the English language. Fuck appeared in an Italian-English dictionary in 1598.[2] Many communication goods have come and gone while fuck has endured.
To better grasp fuck’s valued attributes, imagine that the word leeniddle replaced fuck. If you fully believe that languages are fundamentally arbitrary social constructions, then words have no essential significance, and a leeniddle is as good as a fuck. In that imagined alternate universe, the person on the metro would have said, “He has no leeniddling idea!” If you think that’s plausible, you have no fucking common sense of the real world.
The phonological form of fuck supports its use. The initial f blows air through lips pressed to teeth. The short, low u echoes dread. This efficiently monosyllabic word then ends with a harsh, explosive k. Four-letter words have a characteristic linguistic and sensory form. Fuck has a superb design for obscenity.
Notes:
[1] Noguchi, Rei R. 1996. “On the historical longevity of one four-letter word: the interplay of phonology and semantics.” Maledicta 12: 29-43, at. p. 30. The phrases that have a preceding asterisk in the above quote are phrases that a competent English speaker would not normally produce.
[2] Read, Allen Walker. 1934. “An Obscenity Symbol.” American Speech 9: 264-79, at p. 268.
formal characteristics of obscene words
Some words are perceived as shocking and in proper circumstances cause persons to turn away. For the purposes of the following analysis, those words will be called obscene.[1] Obscene words in English have common phonological characteristics:
- the form CV(C)C, where C is a consonant and V a vowel (four-letter words)
- the outer consonants usually are produced “by an abrupt stoppage of air in the vocal tract followed by an abrupt release,” e.g. k, t, p (hard consonants)
- the medial consonant usually is sonorant like l,m,n
- the vowel usually is short and pronounced with the tongue relatively close to the mouth’s roof, i.e. a close or high vowel [2]
These characteristics make short, violent-sounding words. Such words are efficient and communicatively propitious for ejaculative, shocking use. Insightful scholarship explains these characteristics through word survival under selection for these characteristics:
it seems unlikely that speakers consciously create obscene words to fit some abstract phonological form for obscene words. This kind of competence simply does not exist. Nor is it likely (or at least demonstrable) that obscene words, which are in some ways akin to onomatopoeic words, originate from some natural connection between meaning and sound. It does seem highly plausible, however, that given a set of semantically related words vying for survival,those words having some match between sound and sense have an added edge in the struggle {to endure}, other things being equal.[3]
That general process also describes the evolution of biological organisms.
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Notes:
[1] U.S. administrative and case law has distinguished between obscenity and indecency. All seven words at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation (1978) include two or more of the above characteristics for the word or prominent components of the word. Adjudicating indecency is a challenging and often challenged task. Vagueness of indecency standards is a a central concern. See, e.g. Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations (2009) and U.S. Supreme Court, certiorari granted, June 27, 2011, 10-1293, FCC v. Fox.
[2] Noguchi, Rei R. 1996. “On the historical longevity of one four-letter word: the interplay of phonology and semantics.” Maledicta 12: 29-43, at p. 34.
[3] Id. p. 41.
users transforming content forms
Blogger’s new dynamic views transforms the organization of blog posts. Blogs usually have scrolling posts with web-paged post groups. If that description seems complicated, you probably have taken for granted the conventional form of a blog. Blogger dynamic views dissolves that convention and reshapes a blog into a flipcard checkerboard and four other views (change the view via the dropdown tab on the top right). Each different view differs in the arrangement of blog posts and in the flow from one post to another post.
Each Blogger dynamic view replaces the author’s customized presentation. That replacement concerns authors. One direction for dynamic views would be to give authors more control over the layout of each dynamic view. But that’s probably not the direction in which dynamic views points. With Blogger dynamic views, Google is pushing forward users’ options for blogs’ bindings.
What makes a book is its binding. Digital content has much greater possibilities for bindings than those for books. For different users and in different circumstances, different bindings can be more useful and more enjoyable. Authors should embrace those possibilities.
If you find the text of purplemotes tedious and frustrating, you are welcomed to view just its photos — here’s an apparently ad hoc assortment and here’s the collection of flowers.
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The photo above shows Justin Michael Finnegan‘s book sculpture entitled Frustration (2009). Finnegan is dyslexic. His work was on display at the Smithsonian in the exhibit, Revealing Culture.
Tagged: content
voice and video calling
Skype’s recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) states that, in the last three months of 2010, video-enabled calls accounted for 42% of Skype’s within network communication minutes. In October, 2009, Skype described video calls as accounting for “more than a third” of its total communication minutes. Given that description, Skype’s video call share probably has risen over the past year.
Other Skype actions are consistent with the increasing importance of video communication. Skype recently acquired Qik. Qik offers live video calls from mobile phones as well as a wide range of options for video sharing. In January, 2011, Skype officially launched a group video calling feature. This paid service allows a social video call among up to nine persons at a time. Group video calling requires more expensive product development than rebranding “speaker phone” as “social mode”, but it serves a similar need. In addition to these developments, Skype reportedly is negotiating with Facebook to establish a video-calling partnership.
The sensory form of communication offer a propitious field for service innovation. Mobile network operators are slowly integrating voice and data communications under LTE mobile networking technology. Will they finally produce a show-and-tell communicator? How about a Twitter-like service using photos? Like Skype’s SEC filing, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s Order in the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet (adopted Dec. 21, 2010) refers to “voice and video telephony”. Expect communication services of different sensory forms to gain importance in the future.
Tagged: telephones, video
what makes a book
What makes a book is its binding. The binding implies a linear order of text and turning pages.[1] A book is a slow, regular, rhythm of new textual images that plays out a story. A book is a filmic projection of text, run in slow motion.
Turning pages isn’t the same as scrolling. Scrolling is an undressing. Scrolling is a gradual revelation of a form behind the text.
Book paging is likely to remain an important form in electronic works. Web pages usually are not book pages, because web pages do not have a fixed frame. They often have different sizes and require scrolling. The movement from web page to web page is typically ad hoc. E-readers for electronic books, in contrast, support book paging. This paging will give books enduring meaning in electronic media.
A bound order of book pages is likely to remain an important form in electronic works. A beginning and an end characterizes human lifetime. A narrative arc makes a story memorable and shareable. Electronic works make possible forms that incorporate user choices and random effects, e.g. virtual worlds and games. Such works, while popular, will not replace within electronic media a bound order of book pages.[2]
Reference books will cease to exist in electronic media. Codices allowed more efficient random access than did scrolls. Electronic databases allow more efficient random access than do codices. Where random access is the primary attribute of use, books have no meaningful electronic future.
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Notes:
[1] In an unpublished MLA presentation in December, 2006, Peter Stallybrass asserted that the book binder makes a book. For discussion and related thoughts, see Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2007), “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” Journal of Electronic Publishing, v. 10, n. 3, DOI: 10.3998/3336451.0010.305
[2] While the electronic future of a bound order of book pages seems secure, traditional book publishers face a difficult future.
Tagged: text
accessibility of a good increases its value
An scholarly article in a leading economics journal recently considered “the problem of a restaurateur who has to decide whether to provide customers with a written menu, a picture-based menu, or a desert tray.”
Scientific experiments provide relevant evidence. Laboratory tests indicate that a picture of an item does not prompt a higher valuation for the item than does a textual description. However, if the item is accessible to the subject (the subject could grasp the item, if allowed), willingness-to-pay is 40% to 60% higher. The effect does not depend on the the smell of the (food) item, and the effect does not occur if the item is presented behind a plexiglass barrier. The immediate accessibility of an item to a subject seems to prompt an unconscious process, which the authors call a Pavlovian process, that increases the value of the item to the subject in those circumstances.
Hence the scholars conclude:
The results in this paper suggest that dessert sales should go up significantly if the restaurant uses the dessert tray as opposed to the other two options. Furthermore, the results of the plexiglass experiment suggest that a transparent glass dome should not cover the dessert tray, as is the practice in some establishments.
These result also indicate limits of sense in mediated communication. Real, accessible presence seems to evoke a distinctive response.
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Reference:
Benjamin Bushong, Lindsay M. King, Colin F. Camerer, and Antonio Rangel, Pavlovian Processes in Consumer Choice: The Physical Presence of a Good Increases Willingness-to-pay, American Economic Review 100 (September 2010): 1–18. The quoted text above is from p. 13.
Tagged: biology
illustrating the Shahnama
A millennium ago, the Persian poet Firdawsi completed his epic poem the Shahnama. Artists instantiated this lengthy verbal text in illustrated books. Lavishly illustrated pages from Shahnamas produced for wealthy patrons from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are displayed in the exhibition Shahnama: 1000 Years of the Persian Book of Kings, now at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC.[1]
The extent of visual investments in these Shahnama texts is extraordinary. The earliest pages in the Sackler exhibition are from the Great Mongol Shahnama. It probably contained about 280 large folios with about 190 highly detailed, painted illustrations. Although commonly called the Great Mongol Shahnama, it was produced in the waning years of the Mongol empire.[2] The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, produced in a thriving Persian empire early in the sixteenth century, consisted of 769 large folios with gold-flecked margins, prized calligraphy, and 258 exquisitely painted illustrations.[3] The paintings from both these books, and from other books on display, delight at the closest scrutiny.
While these Shahnamas are extraordinary, pictorial storytelling has attracted large investments across cultures and time. The interaction of words and images occurs at early stages of sensory processing. Writing and pictorial narratives have used common conventions from the time of the earliest writing. Today, time spent watching television far exceeds time spent reading. Adding images to words adds considerable value to a narrative.
The Bier of Iskandar, an illustration from the Great Mongol Shahnama and included in the Sackler Gallery exhibition, shows ways in which an image can work with a narrative. Firdawsi’s Shahnama text describes intense grief at the death of Iskandar (Alexander the Great). His troops, “a hundred thousand children, men, and women of Alexandria,” Greek sages, his mother, his wife, and nobles all grieve in extravagant ways. Firdawsi, however, doesn’t include chaotic, non-verbal, emotional expressions. His verse maintains a relatively formal register.[4]
The Bier of Iskandar illustration highlights chaotic grieving. The physical setting is highly regular: a central lamp, a square frame, symmetrical lamp niches on the sides, four tall candles marking the corners of the bier. Within this regular setting crowd irregularly individualized figures who gesture in markedly different ways. In the foreground, two women have their veils pushed down. One pulls out her hair, while the other has her hands crossed palms downward on the top of her hand. Perhaps this represents her heaping dust on her head. Iskandar’s mother leans across the side of the coffin, with the back of her veiled head appearing to the viewer. Aristotle, the philosopher, with his head bent downward into a handkerchief, appropriately seeks to conceal his grief.[5] A Greek sage next to him looks serenely skyward. Some men hold their hands across their chests; others stretch their hands forward, and others, skyward. The composition places and juxtaposes these gestures in ways that make the differences quickly apparent. These choices of visual art bring out the emotional chaos of grief contained within Firdawsi’s verbal art.
Isfandiyar’s Funeral Procession, another illustration from the Great Mongol Shahnama, has less personal differentiation than does the Bier of Iskandar. At both Iskandar and Isfandiyar’s deaths, Firdawsi describes some common conventions of grief: weeping, wailing, pulling hair, heaping dust on head, unveiling women’s heads, cutting horses’ tails, and reversing saddles. Both illustrations display the disorder that these actions indicate. Firdawsi’s narratives of Isfandiyar and Iskandar differ, however, in extent of internal tension. The Isfandiyar’s narrative emphasizes unity that should have been between Isfandiyar and his father (Isfandiyar’s father sent Isfandiyar to his death) and Isfandiyar and Rostam (Rostam killed Isfandiyar). The Iskandar narrative, in contrast, points to tensions between the Persians and the Greeks, between Persian wisdom and Greek sages, and between Iskandar’s mother and his wife. The Isfandiyar funeral illustration shows a tumultuous sea of persons surrounding Isfandiyar’s coffin. The disorderly persons surrounding Iskandar’s coffin are more individually articulated and contrasted.
The Sackler Gallery’s exhibition occupies only two small room on the first floor of the gallery. The displayed works are book pages that cannot be fully appreciated if they are viewed as wall paintings. But like the Shahnama text does for world history, these illustrated pages encompass a huge span of visual art. Visit Shahnama: 1000 Years of the Persian Book of Kings at the Sackler Gallery through April 17, 2011. Until supplies run out, you can leave with a free exhibition brochure that, appropriately, has large pages and lavish illustrations.
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Notes:
[1] Firdawsi declared that he finished his work “in the month of Sepandormoz, on the day of Ard, and four hundred years have passed since the Hejira of the Prophet.” Sepandormoz and Ard are a month and a day in the Zoroastrian calendar, while the Hejira is the focal date in the Muslim calendar. Firdawsi’s finishing date corresponds to 1010 AD (Anno Domini) among persons oriented to preserving the cultural history of the Mediterranean, and 1010 CE (Common Era) in the currently dominant dating system in the West. A very small party of progressive, culturally sensitive scholars refuses to conform to either and uses 1010 GC (Gregorian Calendar) instead. The quote is from Firdawsī, trans. Dick Davis (2007), Shahnameh: the Persian book of kings (London: Penguin) p. 854.
[2] Scholars have attributed the Great Mongol Shahnama to royal artists in Tabriz, Iran, in the 1330s, under Il-Khanid ruler Abu Sa’id or Arpa Ke’un. It is sometimes called the DeMotte Shahnama. George Joseph Demotte was an art dealer who dismembered the book and sold individual paintings from it.
[3] Artists under royal patronage produced the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in Tabriz, Iran, circa 1525. It is sometimes called the Houghton Shahnama. Arthur Houghton was an art dealer who bought it in 1959 and dismembered it in 1972. The Hamzanama of Akbar is the only illustrated text that plausible exceeds the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in magnitude of material and artistic investment.
[4] In contrast, ancient Greek texts, e.g. Prometheus Bound, explicitly represent non-verbal shrieks and cries.
[5] See, e.g., Plato, Phaedo, 117c. More generally, Cairns, Douglas, “Weeping and Veiling: Grief, Display, and Concealment in Ancient Greek Culture” in T. Fögen (ed.), Tears and Crying in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 37-57.
Image credit:
The Bier of Iskandar (Alexander the Great), from a Shahnama (Book of Kings) by Firdowsi (d. 1020); Tabriz, Iran; Il-Khanid period, circa 1330-1336; opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper; Freer Gallery of Art Purchase F1938.3.
Tagged: illuminated manuscripts, review, Shahnama
the big picture more important than specific text
The Book of Kells is the most lavish European manuscript surviving from the early medieval period. Probably created about 800 GC on an island off the western coast of Scotland or perhaps in Ireland, the Book of Kells includes many brightly colored illuminations with fractal-like intricacy. The beautiful calligraphy in further enhanced with many decorated letters and additional small illuminations scattered across most pages. The extent of decoration is extraordinary:
The decorations are all high quality and often highly complex. In one decoration, which occupies a one-inch square piece of a page, there are 158 complex interlacements of white ribbon with a black border on either side. Some decorations can only be fully seen with magnifying glasses, although lenses of the required power are not known to have been available until hundreds of years after the book’s completion.
The Book of Kells was produced to be a special treasure. It has been appreciated as such since its production.
While the Book of Kells was enormously costly in materials and time to produce, the literal quality of the text is poor. The text of the Book of Kells is the four Christian Gospels — the central texts of Christian revelation. The Irish monks who produced the Book of Kells dedicated their lives to following Christ. But that dedication apparently did not include dedication to textual correctness:
The impractical and muddled nature of the manuscript’s text — even by the standards of the day — is well established. Nearly every page of text contains decorated initials, yet, with the exception of a few folios at the beginning of John, no Eusebian markings. The Old Latin Breves causae [summaries of sections of the Gospels] do not match the mixed-Vulgate text. The text is further marred by a large number of conflate readings, or ‘doublets’, and poorly copied contractions. Additionally, the syllabification of the text is erratic. Even the ornate display script contains its share of textual errors….[1]
Many persons who gaze on the Book of Kells today probably don’t realize or care about the literal quality of its text. Did persons in early medieval Ireland, even the monks who produced it, look at the Book of Kells the way many tourists do today?
Lack of investment in the text of a lavish manuscript is not a unique feature of the Book of Kells. Elaborate picture bibles produced in Paris early in the thirteenth century, known as Bibles moralisées, also had poor quality biblical text. A study of the Book of Ruth in these manuscripts observed:
two gross errors…strikingly ignorant / a ‘biblical’ text so bizarre as to be (unintentionally) amusing / there is no event in the biblical Ruth that remotely resembles what is narrated here / The priest of the law who gives Ruth to Boaz is an invention of the author without any basis in biblical narrative. / it is striking that the author is ignorant of the sex of the child and of his name, since a major element of the importance of the Book of Ruth (in terms of medieval Christianity) lies in the role of Ruth and of Boaz’s son Obed as the progenitors of David.[2]
These manuscripts were intended to provide moral instruction. Their illuminations were made at great expense, probably for royalty. Yet apparently little investment was made in ensuring the literal quality of the biblical text.
While Christianity is a religion of the book, it is also a religion of the word made flesh. Perhaps among medieval elites, Christianity was so institutionalized that the textual specifics of Christian revelation were in practice not given great importance.[3] More generally, persons who perceive a big picture don’t literally read textual specifics.
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Notes:
[1] Pulliam, Heather ( 2006) Word and image in the Book of Kells ( Dublin: Four Courts Press) p. 32. Examples of errors include the text of Mathew 10:34, where Jesus declares, “I have come not to bring peace, but a sword.” The Latin text of the Book of Kells erroneously replaces gladium (“sword”) with gaudium (“joy”). It thus creates the much different statement, “I have come not to bring peace, but joy.” The immediately subsequent text of Matthew (10:35: “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother….”) jars sharply against the Book of Kells’ erroneous text.
[2] Lowden, John (2000) The making of the Bibles moraliseés. 2, The Book of Ruth (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press) pp. 72-3, 129, 171, 185-6. The backslashes above separate non-contiguous quotations from this source.
[3] The thirteenth-century Morgan Bible of Louis IX did not originally include any text. On that work, see Galbi (2003), Sense in Communication.
Tagged: illuminated manuscripts
the fine art of coloring
Could a green light signal stop? Could a red light signal continue naturally? Perhaps, but the colors used for traffic lights seem to have deeper psychological significance than merely a social convention.[1]
From early mass market prints to modern display devices, the details of coloring do not greatly affect the strong human preference for colored images. Moreover, humans’ electroencephalographic responses to emotionally differentiated pictorial stimuli don’t vary with formal pictorial properties such as color.[2] Such evidence suggests that color contributes mainly to sensory efficiency, not sensory semantics.[3]
The U.S. National Gallery of Art’s exhibition, Edvard Munch: Master Prints, shows an artist acutely concerned with the emotional significance of color variations. The exhibition places side-by-side Munch’s multiple variations on a single composition. Many of these variations involve changes in coloring. An image in black and white that might be seen as a woman consoling a broken man becomes with some red and yellow coloring a woman biting a man’s neck and sucking out his life (Vampire II, 1895/1896-1902). The acuteness of a sick child’s suffering seems to vary with the intensity and contrast in red across the composition. A dramatic change in the coloring shifts a naked woman from repulsive to alluring. Both images are appropriately entitled Sin and were made in the same year (1902). An important part of Munch’s art seems to be creating images that not only powerfully express emotion, but also have considerable emotional complexity. Munch’s iconic Scream isn’t a good representative of his emotional art.
Mundane life is complex only to those who aren’t experiencing it. Color variations can occur from no more than changes in lighting. They typically have little significance. Edvard Munch’s art, in contrast, is far from the ordinary. See Edvard Munch: Master Prints, now at the National Gallery of Art.
Edvard Munch: Master Prints is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, from July 31 through October 31, 2010.
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Notes:
[1] I was told that in a certain country, everyone runs red lights. So drivers stop at green lights to make sure than no one is coming through the red.
[2] See Junghöfer, M., Bradley, M. M., Elbert, T. R. and Lang, P. J. (2001), Fleeting images: A new look at early emotion discrimination. Psychophysiology, 38: 175–178. doi: 10.1111/1469-8986.3820175
[3] Being color-blind affects how one interacts with the world much less than does being blind.
Image credits:
Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; lithograph in black on heavy polished white wove paper; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009
Edvard Munch; Sin, 1902; color lithograph, from two stones in red and beige with blue applied à la poupée on very thin Japanese tissue; The Epstein Family Collection; © Copyright Munch Museum/Munch Ellingsen Group/ARS, NY 2009
Tagged: review
the video revolution
Anyone can now make and distribute video world-wide at zero incremental cost. That’s a mind-boggling video communication revolution.
Google’s recent heroic effort to count the number of books that have been published around the world shows how scarce video has been. Google estimates tomes — symbolically distinguished, printed and bound works — to number 146 million. Google also estimates the number of video works in library catalogs to be about 2 million.[*] Hence the number of video works equals less than 2% of the number of tomes that the world’s libraries hold.
Other public library statistics indicate popular interest in video. U.S. public libraries’ video holdings amounted in 2008 to 5.4% of total items held. These item counts include duplicates of works within a library and across libraries. The higher video item share compared to the video work share suggests that U.S. libraries include more duplicate video items than duplicate print items from the world population of tomes and videos. Moreover, U.S. libraries’ video circulation accounts for about 30% of total item circulation in 2010. The higher circulation share compared to item share for videos indicates that videos are borrowed more frequently than other items.
Public library holdings represent institutionally authorized items. Commercial video rentals, which are about five times as numerous as video borrowing from public libraries, are institutionally authorized through a different process than are public library holdings. The vast video libraries on YouTube and other video sharing sites typically have little institutional authorization. Institutions are as much a part of reality as is human nature. Institutions change much more rapidly than human nature, but much more slowly than human behavior. Public libraries as institutions almost surely will endure. But the share of video works distributed through public libraries probably will increase greatly.
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[*] These are rough, imperfect estimates, but they seem to be the best available data-based figures that currently exist. Complaining about statistics is easy. Analyzing data and calculating statistics are difficult, but useful.
Tagged: libraries
