The most contagious Super Bowl ever

I didn't watch the Super Bowl live last night, I was at a dinner with friends, out of reach of a television, so I first registered the game's presence secondhand, through social media, on the drive back home as I flipped through Twitter and Facebook. To get a contact high just from secondhand social smoke gave me a sense of just how newsworthy this Super Bowl was. One couldn't engineer a more perfect Super Bowl for maximum viral transmission in this socially networked age.

Super Bowl commercials were, of course, the original viral video, long before the internet was a thing. They continue to be, even if they seem a bit like your parents trying to post a Vine or a company Twitter account using the word fleek. Corporate appropriation of what's organically trendy is always awkward when done earnestly; far better to do it in a more craven, meta manner.

Doritos perhaps realized the lunacy of trying to engineer viral videos professionally long ago and just held an annual contest to crowdsource Super Bowl ads from the public. I'm not sure if they did so again this year, but what a clever way to enlist the ad agency of thousands of citizens yearning for their 15 minute of fame, in the process collecting videos with a style coded to wink at those sophisticated consumers who've already become accustomed to the blurred lines between the professional and the amateur, between content and advertisement.

The Nationwide Insurance ad got flak for its horrific twist ending, one which hearkened to the memetic narrative of The Sixth Sense in a tragicomic misread of what emotional tonal range an audience gorging itself on nachos and chicken wings would tolerate. The only way this ad could have landed harder was if the child at the end announced that he'd died from contracting the measles because his parents were crazy anti-vaxxers.

[Speaking of The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment guest starred in this remarkable clip from Walker Texas Ranger that could have been an early draft of the Nationwide Super Bowl ad, too.]

Still, one can see why an insurance company might overreach with such an ad on this of all nights. Why spend so much money if not to enlist over a hundred million viewers to speak your name for days and days after the event?

Never in history has a clever punch line had such value, and advertisers don't bother hiding their hopes and dreams: many ads came with their own hashtags and/or URLs, even some of the more serious ads. Who ever thought we'd see what are the equivalent of virality tracking tags get so much airtime. I'd love to see a tag cloud of Super Bowl commercial themes, it would read like the collective inventory of the American subconscious: puppies, beer, boobs, hamburgers, fast cars, mythical fathers, beauty, sex, junk food, celebrities, and, in a nod to the times, website hosting and mobile games.

The halftime show seemed just as precisely calibrated to echo through feeds and timelines and blogs in subsequent days. From the moment Katy Perry emerged from the tunnel wearing a Katniss-like “girl on fire” body suit, astride a two-story golden lion float, no person with a social network account and a phone with any remaining battery life could resist proclaiming their ironic (or not) appreciation to their extended social graph. Facebook and Twitter took the collective gasp of the nation and unfurled it in vertical scrolls, one status update or tweet at a time.

Katy Perry was the perfect choice for the viral Super Bowl. She has more Twitter followers than anyone on earth. Her music is engineered in Swedish laboratories for maximum pop appeal. Her music is so catchy that it stands for catchiness; trying to decipher what Perry stands for is fruitless. Whereas Beyoncé will pose in front of a giant sign that reads FEMINISM and it will feel natural, I have no idea at all what Katy Perry feels about any subject.

We'll never know if the dancing sharks would have become an instant meme if Left Shark hadn't gone rogue, but as with many of Perry's on-stage companions, they were just psychedelic and visually peculiar enough to distract from her inability to really dance and to start another wave of online gawking. Left Shark will forever live on as a metaphoric hero for individualism, or lack of preparation, or people who just don't give a damn, or potheads, or anything, really. Left Shark is, at the most basic level, a generic viral mascot. Here's hoping the Left Shark emoji is already in the approval process in Japan or wherever the papal council of emoji calls home.

We got Missy Elliott, because everyone loves a comeback, and everyone loves Missy Elliott. We needed something for the cool kids.

Then the game. The pregame statistics indicated it would be one of if not the closest matches in history, and it was, but how it was close seemed designed for maximum drama.

One player suffer a gruesome injury. NBC could have given us slow-motion replay after replay from all different angles a la the Joe Theismann broken leg, but thank goodness they refrained.

One player caught a touchdown and then celebrated by pretending to defecate the football onto the field. The shocking thing is that NBC missed it, robbing the event of some of its potential buzz.

An epic drive led by league heartthrob Tom Brady. Then a miraculous catch. All topped off with a shocking twist ending, a decision to pass from the one yard line with now famous Beast Mode in the backfield, a choice that seemed as if Pete Carroll were trolling the internet. How better to enrage armchair quarterbacks everywhere than to have the game end on a decision whose merits were statistically murky; unleash the statisticians! If that wasn't enough, the game's final kneel downs were marred by an on field brawl, extracting a bit of moral outrage.

All this adds up to the most perfectly contagious Super Bowl of my lifetime. Maybe Buzzfeed directed it. Late night talk shows already seem to have adjusted their strategy to produce bite-sized videos that will travel smoothly across the internet the next day, a smart move since no one stays up to watch those shows live. It's only a matter of time before programs like that, or perhaps even events like the Super Bowl, Golden Globes, Oscars, and MTV Music Awards just release online press-kits as the events unfold with key viral moments encoded as animated GIFs for easier social sharing. I'm ready. Frankly, I'm tired of pointing my cell phone at the TV screen.

The hidden message in The Silence of the Lambs

One of the iconic lines in The Silence of the Lambs is of course Hannibal Lecter declaring “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Reddit user mrcchapman points out that the line has two meanings, the literal one and a more coded message.

Lecter could be treated with drugs called monoamine oxidase inhibitors - MAOIs. As a psychiatrist, Lecter knows this.

The three things you can't eat with MAOIs? Liver, beans, wine.

Lecter is a) cracking a joke for his own amusement, and b) saying he's not taking his meds.

All those years in prison, and no one realized Lecter wasn't taking his meds. Brilliant.

The quadrant system

Tony Zhou back with another great installment of Every Frame a Painting, this time analyzing the quadrant system as it is used by Nicolas Winding Refn in Drive.

One of the many pleasures of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” (2011) is that the shots feel both tightly composed and weirdly unpredictable. Even though most of the images follow a simple quadrant system, Refn puts plenty of subtle touches within the frame. Let’s take a look. For educational purposes only. You can donate to support the channel at Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/everyframeapainting And follow me here: Twitter: https://twitter.com/tonyszhou Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/everyframeapainting Music: Desire - “Under Your Spell"

I'm not crazy about the movie, but it oozes style, from the outrun soundtrack to the mise-en-scène.

The aesthetics of tennis

While the graphically inclined would no doubt find the layouts of other athletic playing courts and fields intriguing, there is something special about the tennis court: pleasingly symmetrical, relatively small in size, and, since they contain at most four contestants, never so crowded that the design can be smothered by action. One does not play atop a tennis court so much as inside it. The same basic design is utilized by women and men, young children and the elderly, ball-chasing buoyant players and hard faced, serious drillers.

"It's set up with particular parameters in mind—like there's a doubles alley; it's a very functional grid, and it's a grid that I connect with," Fletcher said.

"It's a geometry that has a story to it."

B. David Zarley on why artists love tennis.

The path traced by a tennis ball during a rally conjures triangles and arcs and other geometric patterns that really tickle that union of math and art.

And don't even get me started on Roger Federer. I suspect the reason he's so many people's favorite player is not because he's one of the greatest players of all time but instead for the sheer aesthetic perfection of all his strokes. There are dozens of YouTube videos of Federer hitting tennis balls in slow motion, and watching them triggers such strange pleasure sensations in the brain that they can't be called anything but pornographic.

[Since Federer is out of this Australian Open, the most beautiful stroke left in the men's draw is his countrymen Stanislav Wawrinka's one-handed backhand. Here are 70 backhand winners of his in HD. When he keeps his front shoulder closed and wings the ball down the line from the backhand side...lord have mercy.]

Conversation with Adam Curtis

Jon Ronson interviewed Adam Curtis over email. Good stuff.

On social networks as echo chambers (a common lament about the internet):

But I do really agree with you about Twitter domestically. Twitter – and other social media – passes lots of information around. But it tends to be the kind of information that people know that others in that particular network will like and approve of. So what you get is a kind of mutual grooming. One person sends on information that they know others will respond to in accepted ways. And then, in return, those others will like the person who gave them that piece of information.

So information becomes a currency through which you buy friends and become accepted into the system. That makes it very difficult for bits of information that challenge the accepted views to get into the system. They tend to get squeezed out.

I think the thing that proves my point dramatically are the waves of shaming that wash through social media – the thing you have spotted and describe so well in your book. It's what happens when someone says something, or does something, that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system. The other parts react furiously and try to eject that destabilising fragment and regain stability.

...

I have this perverse theory that, in about ten years, sections of the internet will have become like the American inner cities of the 1980s. Like a John Carpenter film – where, among the ruins, there are fierce warrior gangs, all with their own complex codes and rules – and all shouting at each other. And everyone else will have fled to the suburbs of the internet, where you can move on and change the world. I think those suburbs are going to be the exciting, dynamic future of the internet. But to build them I think it will be necessary to leave the warrior trolls behind. And to move beyond the tech-utopianism that simply says that passing information around a network is a new form of democracy. That is naive, because it ignores the realities of power.

On the failings of modern journalism:

The thing that fascinates me about modern journalism is that people started turning away from it before the rise of the internet. Or, at least, in my experience that's what happened. Which has made me a bit distrustful of all that "blame the internet" rhetoric about the death of newspapers.

I think there was a much deeper reason. It's that journalists began to find the changes that were happening in the world very difficult to describe in ways that grabbed their readers' imagination.

It's intimately related to what has happened to politics, because journalism and politics are so inextricably linked. I describe in the film how, as politicians were faced with growing chaos and complexity from the 1980s onwards, they handed power to other institutions. Above all to finance, but also to computer and managerial systems.

But the politicians still wanted to change the world – and retain their status. So in response they reinvented other parts of the world they thought they could control into incredibly simplistic fables of good versus evil. I think Tony Blair is the clearest example of this – a man who handed power in domestic policy making over to focus groups, and then decided to go and invade Iraq.

And I think this process led journalism to face the same problem. They discovered that the new motors of power – finance and the technical systems that run it, algorithms that try and read the past to manage the future, managerial systems based on risk and "measured outcomes" – are not just obscure and boring. They are almost impossible to turn into gripping narratives. I mean, I find them a nightmare to make films about, because there is nothing visual, just people in modern offices doing keystrokes on computers.

Where I'm often most frustrated with modern journalism is in its coverage of areas it does not understand well, technology being one of them. I'm not saying you have to be a programmer to be a tech journalist or a filmmaker to be a movie critic, but not having domain knowledge limits the scope of your critique. One more layman's point of view isn't all that useful at the margins, and as with things like the last financial crisis, the lack of understanding from the financial press removed what we think of as one of the watchdogs of democracy, the fourth estate.

The one saving grace of the internet is that many technology domain experts can chime in. Still, for many reasons, most do not. They may be too busy, or they may bite their tongue for competitive or political reasons (technology is a heavily connected industry).

Given technology's growing political, economic, and cultural power, a vigilant and independent check is needed. A Gawker or Valleywag picks off just the most egregious and obvious of moral failings, but much of that is distraction from far more complex and significant issues.