A tip of the hat to Dr. Marion Hambrick, who brought the first social network analysis to sport social media research in an earlier edition of the International Journal of Sport Communication. This effort, by me, Dr. Burch, and Dr. Frederick, attempted to look at things from a systems theory perspective on Twitter during a live event.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to employ systems theory to analyze the social network of a Big Ten football team’s Twitter community. An identifiable network was found among the observed actors (N = 139), with fan accounts composing the largest percentage of the network. The number of observed reciprocal interactions was low, only 11.8% of the interactions and only 21.5% of the nodes. Traditional- media accounts frequently interacted with other media accounts, while fans inter- acted primarily with other fans. Overall, nontraditional-media accounts’ users were most focused on interactivity. Team-related accounts were almost nonexistent in the interactive network. A systems-theory-based network was found in terms of input, transformation, and output components. The feedback loop was the weak link in the network, indicating a possible lack of importance of direct feedback in Twitter social networks.

2012 Clavio Burch Frederick

Another Dr. Frederick special, published in the International Journal of Sport Communication.

Abstract: An Internet-based survey was posted on the Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of 1 predominantly social and 1 predominantly parasocial athlete to ascertain the similarities and differences between their follower sets in terms of parasocial inter- action development and follower motivations. Analysis of the data revealed a sense of heightened interpersonal closeness based on the interaction style of the athlete. While followers of the social athlete were driven by interpersonal constructs, fol- lowers of the parasocial athlete relied more on media conventions in their inter- action patterns. To understand follower motivations, exploratory factor analyses were conducted for both follower sets. For followers of the social athlete, most of the interactivity, information-gathering, personality, and entertainment items loaded together. Unlike followers of the social athlete, fanship and community items loaded alongside information-gathering items for followers of the parasocial athlete. The implications of these and other findings are discussed further.

2012 Frederick Lim Clavio Walsh

One of three papers I was fortunate enough to be a part of that got published in the special Twitter issue of the International Journal of Sport Communication. This was Matt Blaszka’s concept, and it’s an interesting look at hashtag usage in sport among fans and organizations in college sports.

Here’s the abstract: Sport organizations, teams, and athletes are growing constituencies that use social- media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to engage in dialogue with their respective audiences. The purpose of this study was to examine Twitter hashtag use during a major sporting event. Specifically, this study analyzed #WorldSeries during the 2011 World Series. The study employed a content-analysis methodology to determine who was using the hashtag and how it was being used. Using systematic sampling, 1,450 tweets were analyzed. The results demonstrated that #WorldSeries was being used predominantly by laypersons to express fanship, as well as interactivity. When individuals were being interactive with this hashtag, they were doing so mainly with MLB/league officials and other laypersons. Most of these interactive tweets were also expressions of fanship. The implications of these findings are discussed further.

2012 Blaszka Burch Frederick Clavio Walsh

This article was the brainchild of Dr. Evan Frederick, and he did an excellent job on it. This looks at parasocial interaction and athletes as it relates to Twitter. This one is also published in Communication and Sport.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships promoted by professional athletes on Twitter utilizing the theoretical framework of parasocial interaction (PSI). Specifically, this study was a content analysis that examined professional athlete tweets in order to determine whether they predominately promoted social or parasocial relationships. The study also explored with whom athletes were engaging in social interaction as well as the topic of each tweet. The data revealed that professional athletes promoted both parasocial and social relationships equally. When they chose to be social, athletes were communicating with lay people and other professional and college athletes. Most athlete tweets were either general statements or insights into their personal lives. The implications of these and other findings will be discussed further.

2013 Frederick Lim Clavio Pedersen Burch

This is an article by me and Dr. Patrick Walsh about college sports fans and social media usage. This is still an area that hasn’t been touched on very much from a scholarly perspective. Looking at it through a slight twist in the traditional uses and gratifications lens. Published in Communication and Sport, a great new journal that covers this and other topics related to communication.

Here’s the abstract:

“As social media provide athletic departments and their constituents with an additional point of engagement with their fans, it is important to understand the social media audience. However, despite the growth of social media use among collegiate athletic departments, coaches, and teams, relatively little is known about the individuals who are utilizing various social media forums. This study was the first to attempt to understand why college sport fans engage in sport-focused social media use, with a theoretical grounding in uses and gratifications. Utilizing a survey of student fans from a large Division 1 institution, the results suggest that there is a relatively low level of social media participation among college sport fans in relation to official Twitter and Facebook feeds of the team, and a surprising prevalence of traditional media usage for informational purposes. Factor analysis reveals dimensions of gratification for social media use include content creation as an identifiable factor. These and other findings are discussed.”

2013 Clavio Walsh

I tend to go through these phases where I listen to as much new music as possible and almost totally disregard the immense hours of music I already own, and then the pendulum swings back the other direction and I rediscover what I love about the older stuff in my collection. I’m on a bit of a 60′s kick right now, and have been listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash a lot. Part of that was due to randomly stumbling upon this outtakes album on YouTube, which had a lot of really interesting stuff on it, including a full-band version of “Helplessly Hoping” that I’m bitter about having not heard years earlier.

Anyway, I was doing some extra article-hunting and came across this interview with David Crosby on his website where he gives some thoughts on each of the songs on the debut album Crosby, Stills, and Nash. I thought these were really fun insights, so I wanted to give you a link to the page. I am also going to copy the thoughts he gave and put them after the jump below, because I hate how these websites tend to vanish randomly and I really want to keep a copy of these for later reading.

Again, these comments can be found here on David Crosby’s web page. Please go there to read them. The below is just intended for archiving and posterity’s sake.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my most recent articles, this one was a collaborative effort with Drs. Kaburakis, Pierce, Walsh, and Lawrence. Published in the Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics at this link. I’ll just include the abstract here for now, but I’ll have some more thoughts on it in a later blog post:

This study sought to gauge college sport video-game consumers’ ability to identify National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) college football players, whose likenesses are featured in such games. The study also measured whether consumers perceived the use of athletes’ likenesses as sponsorship of these games, as well as whether certain demographic, usage, and other criteria may influence their positions on whether athletes should be compensated for such use, in excess of their current athletic scholarships. Findings point to the ability of consumers to identify athletes in the video games overall, and at a significantly higher percentage for nationally known football players whose likenesses are utilized in the games. Unsurprisingly, knowledge of college football as a sport, and of the video game series itself, significantly correlated with increased likelihood of identifying digital representations of real-life players. These and other findings, and their implications for NCAA policy and pending litigation related to student-athlete likenesses, are discussed.

2013 Clavio Kaburakis Pierce Walsh Lawrence

This is the MicroKorg learning how to play with the AKAI EIE interface. Mostly using the HipHop/Vintage channels but with a little electronica arpeggio thrown in.

Caught Between [ 1:31 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“You know what the problem is, right?” Carter was rubbing his right temple now, a combination of the double Jameson he’d just downed and the conversation we were having.

I took another sip of my scotch, knowing that I was going to have to order another one soon at this rate. I looked at him for a brief couple of seconds, saw that he was going to string this along, raised my eyebrows and shook my head no.

Carter’s fingers slid down to the table in the bar and started drumming the coaster slightly. “It’s a matter of political correctness,” he said slowly. “You want to create art, you want to exhibit your feelings, but you are also living in the wrong age to do any of those things.”

Ah, political correctness. This was always one of his biggest conversational tropes, complaining about political correctness. “I really don’t think that’s it,” I said quickly. “You’re always blaming everything on that. Can’t it just be that I’m out of ideas?”

I looked around the hotel bar, wondering why I’d stopped smoking a few years ago. This entire month, from the writer’s block that started it to the conversation that we were having now, just screamed cigarette in my mind’s ear. Then again, the hotel bar didn’t allow smoking inside, it was freezing outside, and I only missed smoking when I was drinking or under a lot of stress. Granted, both of those conditions existed right now, but…

“Look,” Carter slurred, motioning to the waitress for another round of drinks, “this is exactly the world of political correctness. But it’s not like a normal political correctness. Listen.”

I looked at him and nodded.

“Okay, so you’re a special case. Most people aren’t even worried about creating things. They’re not writing anything, they’re not making music, they’re just fucking EXISTING, man,” he said. “They just hopped on the fucking metro train of life, sat themselves down near the route map, and are playing on their phones until they die. Right?”

“Well, I mean…there are plenty of creative people out there.”

“Bullshit,” he said, grinning at the waitress as she brought two more glasses to the table. “You know that’s silly. Look at where you work. Big lobbying firm in D.C., you’re surrounded by people with college degrees. What do they do with themselves? Go to parties and screw around on Match.com. And try to get promoted. You could be doing all that yourself, you know.”

I shrugged my shoulders and sipped from the new scotch in front of me.

“But you don’t,” Carter said, “Because you want something more satisfying. You want to create things, you want to exist outside of this miserable shell that most of your co-workers and friends let themselves get cocooned in when they left college. And you do, so cheers to that.”

“I don’t get what this has to do with political correctness at all,” I said.

“Alright, good point. Let me explain it this way,” he said. “Let’s say you write a new blog post tonight. And your muse, your creative energy, wants you to write about how you really love your fiancée and your sex life is satisfying, yet you want to have sex with three or four other girls you know, because the need for variety is intrinsic in the human condition, and has nothing to do with your emotional feelings towards your fiancée. You may even want to compare it to music, because only the brainless would listen to the same artist over and over again, even if it’s their favorite, so how can we be expected to do the same in our private lives? Are you writing that in your blog post?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Okay, first of all, we had that philosophical discussion like six months ago, and that’s cheating on your part for bringing it up. And second…no, of course I’m not writing that blog post.”

“Why not?” he said. “What’s wrong with it? Seems like a logical philosophical question to me.”

“You know damn well what’s wrong with it,” I said. “Not only does that make my fiancée question my fidelity, but it also could end up causing my boss to get mad.”

“Okay, see? This is where political correctness comes in,” Carter said, suddenly all business. “First off, you’re not actually going out there and having sex with these other girls, but you’re making a larger point about the inconsistencies of societal norms and expectations, and one that makes some sense when you compare it to the things being said and written about in our generation. Second, you work for a firm that lobbies on behalf of the fucking telecommunications industry, Ryan,” he laughed. “I mean, really? How does anything you wrote have anything to do with what they do?”

“It’s the perception that matters. And you know that.”

Carter waved his finger in the air. “Ah, but see, that’s the issue. The perception of you as a worker shouldn’t be impacted by this at all. But you want to be seen as having a proper attitude and approach to life, as viewed through the lens of your employer. And they want the same for you. Isn’t that basically the textbook definition of political correctness in action?”

I had my doubts about that, but it wasn’t worth the argument. “Look,” I said. “Ultimately I just have to accept where I’m at with this. I want to write, I want to be creative, but I also have to be careful what I say because people have a tendency to get offended.”

“And that’s a shitty way to create, Ryan,” Carter said.

“It’s the only way I have at this point,” I replied. “I’m aware that it’s limiting, and I’m aware that what I end up writing is only a fraction of what I’ve got up here. But I have a job that’s at least paying the bills, and I’m not going to get a job anywhere just writing my thoughts down for a living.”

“I don’t buy that,” he said. “You have to take a chance on this at some point.”

“Look…no.” I glanced around the bar and over into the hotel lobby. Carter and I had known each other since college, where we met at the college radio station. We used to get into these sorts of arguments over meaningless things like baseball and politics. Now the topics, though less national, seemed more weighty. It was always about where one or the other of us were going in life.

I forced a small smile. “I’m doing alright,” I said. “I’m able to put some things together, write on occasion, and capture what’s around me. It’s really quite fascinating, living here in DC. So many personalities on display.”

“Right,” said Carter, “Except you’re only writing about a tenth of what you’re capturing. And this is my point. You’ve got to let all this stuff get outside of you, because it’s just sort of sitting inside you at this point and it’s not doing anyone any good, let alone yourself.”

He had a point, but I was trying not to encourage that line of conversation. Didn’t matter, he kept right on.

“Any good art,” he said, downing the rest of the Jameson in his glass and raising it at the waitress for another. “Any good art is going to have rough edges, but it’s got to be real, and it has to have that…that soul imprint that comes out of the creator. You’re worried about writing so many things, man, it’s sad. You don’t want to write anything political because you’re worried your boss will get pissed. You don’t want to write anything sexual because of your fiancée. You don’t want to write anything about characters because you post your blog on Facebook and your friends all see it and you’re worried they’re gonna be upset, and you don’t want to write anything deeply personal because you think your co-workers are going to think less of you.”

“Not LESS of me,” I hissed. “I’m honestly just worried they’re going to start thinking of me, period.”

I finished my drink just as the waitress brought another. “And look, man,” I said. “You keep talking about I have to let these things get on the page because that’s how it needs to be. You’re a sports radio host, Carter. You get paid for your opinions. People see something strange or controversial from you, it’s almost expected. Hell, it’s shocking when it’s not strange or controversial from you. But I’m in another world now, a different world. Nobody in this world wants to see my internal dialogue, unless it’s about innocuous bullshit like what my favorite 90s movie was, or the latest craft beer I drank.”

Carter smiled and shrugged. “You really think they’re going to be that focused on what you’re saying? You must be a superstar in that office for that many people to care.”

“I’m not a superstar at all,” I said, expecting to have something else to follow up with. I suddenly realized I didn’t.

“Then what are you worried about?” Carter laughed. “You’re going to throw away your creative apex because you’re afraid some jerk in your office is going to make a big deal about your writing?”

“I’m worried,” I said, “about people thinking I’m not taking my job seriously. No, actually, scratch that. That’s not right. It’s more that I’m worried that people are going to start thinking negatively about what I do because of what I write. I know that sounds strange but it’s true.”

“I don’t get it,” Carter said, leaning back and taking another drink.

“It’s like this. I have a friend who’s a professor in the business school at American. He teaches finance, has a PhD, pretty normal guy. But he’s creative. And he likes to write about things. Lots of fiction writing, mostly political stuff but there’s other things in there, relationship stuff. Interesting dude. But he’s told me several times that his colleagues in the faculty, and people around the country in his field, they’ve seen his writings and they actively question him as a person in the field now. Even though he’s writing fiction, they’re taking what he writes as some sort of internal commentary from him, like he’s the one who believes what his characters are saying.”

Carter shook his head. “See, that’s some screwed up people. That’s people who don’t understand the creative process.”

“YES, EXACTLY,” I laughed. “And that, my friend, is the problem. You want me to write and be creative, and trust me, I want the same. But I’m surrounded by a bunch of people who don’t understand the creative process. Anything I write has to be fucking neutered, because anything with cursing, sex, or unconventional ideas is going to be received as some sort of personal manifesto by me. Not as a work of fiction with a bunch of characters doing character things.”

Carter gazed around the room. “So just don’t let them see what you write?”

“Hah,” I laughed. “Social media makes that impossible. It’s funny, you know. 20 years ago, I’m probably just writing at home and sending things in to magazines and small publications and able to do this by myself, without anyone seeing it. Now I have a blog and a Facebook page, and everyone sees what I write, and it’s like being in a fishbowl.”

“And that,” said Carter, “is a shitty way to create.”

“It really is,” I said. “I started writing as a way to be myself. So I can either be myself and risk people looking at me differently, or I can create a persona to write in that no one knows is me. Neither of those is worth doing.”

“Or you could quit your job,” smiled Carter.

“Hah, yeah. When they start paying me for blog posts, man. When they start paying me for blog posts.”

In this essay, I examine the nature of creative containers in media, and the sorts of things that we need to be thinking about when it comes to the creative process.

At what point do people stop buying musical albums? Even asking this question seems kind of silly to me. As someone who grew up in the 1980’s and 90’s, and whose musical palate was conditioned on artists from the 60’s and 70’s, the album seems the logical base unit of the medium. Albums are collections of songs, and some of them have no identity beyond that. Many albums are artistic statements, however. They stand as constructions architected by musical artists, individuals or groups who wanted to say something.

How long is an album, in a temporal sense? Or rather, how long does an album have to be? 30 minutes? 45 minutes?

Your answer probably depends on when you grew up.

The 1950’s stand as the dawn of popular music as purchasable media. While phonograph records had been available for decades by that point, the primary delivery system of music had been single-use, such as concerts and radio transmissions. However, the 1950’s saw the rise of the music single, or “the 45”. These small vinyl records generally contained only one song per side, and sold at a pricepoint that was reachable for almost everyone, even teenagers. Most popular music sales started and ended with the single, so most bands and artists focused on creating singles. The greatest gift of artists like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry was their ability to reel off a string of hit singles, whereas most of their contemporaries were limited to one-hit wonder status. While there are artistic elements in many of these singles, most of them were designed as one-offs, rather than as part of a larger statement. There may be a thematic connection between Holly’s “That’ll Be The Day” and “True Love Ways”, but the method of physical presentation of these songs reduces the ability of commentators to truly demonstrate an artistic statement being made.

The rise of the album in popular music came a few years later, and changed both the economics of the music industry and the artistic focus of those performing it. Bands who couldn’t string together eight to ten songs in an album format were suddenly seen as poseurs, while true critical and artistic weight was given to artists who excelled in the longer formats.

When they were constructing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it wasn’t as if John Lennon and Paul McCartney said “You know, the best artistic statement we could make, the greatest representation of our talent and vision and ethos, would be 39 minutes and 42 seconds.” After all, that was only six minutes and fifty-seven seconds longer than Please Please Me, an album they had released four years earlier and recorded in just a day. Surely John and Paul had far more artistic paint to spread over a broader, longer canvas. But of course they didn’t, because the canvas had a hard end-point.

The average record released in the vinyl age rarely ran over 42 minutes, and that limit was entirely due to the amount music one could compress onto an LP while still retaining the structural integrity of the grooves. An artist could extend past that point only by releasing a “double album”, but in most cases artists were not granted such freedoms by their record labels.

By the 1990s, things had changed somewhat. The vinyl album was no longer the primary container for music, as the CD had taken over in the previous decade. The CD had a much longer runtime than did the vinyl album, with CDs topping out at 74 minutes of recorded music. The broader container created some interesting problems for musical artists, because the temptation was now to extend the musical statement over a wider canvas. The average length of albums crept up towards 50 minutes, but new problems emerged. Many of the artists of the era simply could not create coherent artistic statements that traversed these longer runtimes. While there were exceptions, many albums released in this era felt overlong, with healthy amounts of filler material artificially boosting their length.

Complicating the situation was the dominance of the music video, which took the singles market from the 1950’s and 60’s and breathed new life into it. Suddenly, having a hit single (and a hit video to deliver it in) became the primary focus of many popular musical acts, and the key to achieving popularity for many musical acts that flew below the radar. But still, the vehicle for these songs was ultimately the album, and a band that focused on just selling CD singles of their material was both missing out on huge potential revenues and likely seen as artistic or musical lightweights.

The economics of albums on CD brought record labels and their parent companies the greatest windfalls in the history of the music business. In order to own music and listen to it when you want, you had to either buy a single, which was overpriced, or you had to buy an album, which was also overpriced but at least contained additional materials. New music album prices crept up throughout the 1990s, to the point that many retailers were selling albums for $16 or $17 each – a huge premium to pay for individuals who were only interested in one or two songs from the artist that they’d heard on the radio or seen videos of.

Contrast that with the economics of the industry today. There are two parallel pricepoints that compete with each other. iTunes and Amazon sell songs by themselves, normally for .99 or 1.29 each. Yet a collection of songs purchased in album form will sell for less per unit – for instance, a 12-song album that should cost $11.88 actually ends up costing just $9.99 because it sells as an album.

The question is, are we really interested in albums anymore? Why give a price break on an arbitrary container unit?

It took sixty years of the popular music industry to find ourselves right back where we were in the singles era. While albums as artistic statements are still selling via digital MP3 distribution, the focus is once again on a small number of popular songs. Rather than freeing musical artists from their constraints, the lack of physical containers has created huge amounts of uncertainty about what is considered proper and acceptable in music. If you are a music artist, how long should your album be? Do you utilize the convention of the 1960’s, where collections of songs lasted 35-40 minutes? The 1990’s and their 45-50 minute standard? Do you release EPs, which tend to contain 4-6 songs? Do you put together two or three hour extravaganzas?

The obsession with containers is deeply ingrained in all aspects of the creative process, from inception to consumption. No one is to be blamed for this, because for the majority of human history, containers have had to be closely intertwined with the production of goods.

The key to truly grasping the new age that society finds itself in is to slowly rid ourselves of the container mentality. Containers were so important to the creative process that in many ways they became the creative process — the endgame for a collection of songs, the runtime of a television show, the binding which held together an anthology. In short, containers are a great way to organize things, but the flipside of that organization is that the expanse of creativity is sacrificed at the altar of the container to which it belongs.

Human beings as consumers are creatures of habit. We appreciate standardization in our consumables, because large variations in amount or price or quality tend to create confusion. Cereal boxes contain roughly similar amounts of cereal because we are used to that agreed-upon standard. There are ways to purchase cereal in bulk, but the vast majority of consumers would never consider using them.

But in terms of intellectual media such as books, movies, or music, I’m convinced that most of these standardized units are nothing but contrivances, either forced upon the media creators by the hard limits of the medium in which they work, or conveniences foisted upon both creator and consumer by the publishers of work.

Take the written word, for instance. Readers have shown a willingness to consume writing in just about any format that they are able to access, from 300 word blog posts to multi-page magazine articles to books with many chapters. The standard for mass consumable written work has historically been the novel, which comes in book form and which requires a tremendous amount of creative output on the part of the writer. In many cases, 80-90,000 words are required for a novel, or else editors and publishing agents may not take a submission seriously. How much of that is due to the word count increase equating to a greater work of writing, and how much is due to publishers being hesitant to commit the time and effort of publishing a book if it doesn’t deliver a specific amount of pages?

There’s no question that it’s expensive to edit, typeset, and publish a novel in a book format. Publishing houses have been very selective over the years about what they publish due to that level of expense, and having a novel published has come to be seen as a watershed moment in a writer’s life. But the advent of E-readers and digital book technology should have called the value of the content of the words (as opposed to the paper they are printed on) into some question. Take a look at Amazon’s book sales section, and you’ll see most best-selling or popular books retailing in hardcover or paperback for just slightly more than their Kindle versions. In many cases, the Kindle price is 85-90% of the hardcover price. So does that mean that the paper version isn’t really that expensive to produce after all, and the true value of the book is in the written words? Or does it mean that the publishers are trying to establish a value point that does them the least amount of bottom-line damage, without regard for the actual value of the book or its contents?

Much as we’ve seen with the music industry, the book industry should be due for a major correction, and that correction should take the form of shorter, more easily consumable pieces of written work. Free of the container requirement of the novel and its accompanying word count hegemony, it should be possible for publishers to release shorter works, and price them accordingly.

Perhaps the best possible location for this practice is in academia, which has existed for many years under the turgid rule of semester-long textbooks. Rather than crafting insightful and detailed educational works, many publishers push editors and writers of textbooks towards behemoth tomes bloated with sidebars, personal perspectives, and action questions, all of dubious quality. These ideas and concepts for what should make up a textbook rarely originate with the editor or author, but rather emanate from the publisher. Each chapter becomes its own container, too small to stand on its own, but stuffed full of extras that make selling add-on study guides that much easier. The textbook itself ends up as overly long and lacking in detail, but it must be this way because the container known as “the textbook” demands it.

At some point, enterprising scholars and small publishers will begin producing small or single chapter works that specifically focus on a study topic or area, and will be able to successfully market these works to teachers and students. Targeted E-books of 3 or 4 chapters will be far more successful at explicating topics than 16 chapter texts, and these smaller works will be far easier to keep updated as changes in technology and approach alter their subject matter. Eventually, the large publishing houses will come to accept this change in approach, and will likely dominate the field the way that they dominate the current one. But as of now, the small entrepreneur has the advantage, because the small entrepreneur is neither committed to, nor obsessed with, the container.