Avatar- oddly familiar?

James Cameron seems to have recreated his magic with his latest blockbuster Avatar that has grossed over 1.6 billion USD at the box office. Last night the movie had 2 wins at Golden Globes and using cutting edge special effects to the budget of a whopping 500 million USD!


It's a futuristic movie with a wildly original story, but it resonates with themes and imagery set a little too many bells ringing in my mind. As one critic put it: "The technology and technique are as shiny and innovative as the story and themes are familiar and recycled, and the end result is something like ordering and eating a $100 burger at some white-linen four-star restaurant."
For example..

 

• The representation of the Na’avi: This tribe from distant planet of Pandora. Peace loving, 7ft tall, blue skinned and proud, living in perfect harmony with nature. Reminiscent of popular culture representations of a tribe anywhere in the world: bandanas, chunky jewellery, warrior face paint, swinging from tree to tree…

• The latest colony- Pandora: The materialistic and mercenary human race, having depleted the resources on their own planet, come to Pandora to seek “unobtainium”.The next gen colonial frontier, maybe?
  
• The white man saves the day: As David Brooks, a columnist writing in the New York Times puts it: 'Avatar is a racial fantasy par excellence ... It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic.” Jake Sully is portrayed as the white messiah who arrives to fight the battles of the weaker race, the Na'avi.
  
• It reminds me of the Pocahontas story, where the exotic native woman reveals to the white male protagonist the mysteries of the forests of Pandora. After he learns the ways of the tribe, he acts as their savior from his own people.

Well, for a blockbuster success that delivers to Mr. Cameron the return on his investment, mass appeal is important. And so, the imagery plays to popular representations of the " exotic other". The Na’avi’s look and rituals fits quite well into our mental image of a distant tribal race, so much so that by the end of the movie we find ourselves rooting for the Na’avi, as the underdog, over our own race. The Na’avi somehow seem to appear even more “humane” than our own human race.

A well made movie, no doubt…

Call me a sucker for rosy endings if you will, but with all the gloom and doom of 2012 and the doomsday prophesies, I would have just liked it more if we could have saved ourselves…

26/11: Crisis communication on the Web

This week marked the first anniversary of the terror attacks in Mumbai. Over the last weeks, the Indian media has rehashed memories and tracked stories of the victims, touching upon a nation’s collective experience of the event. On the 26th of November, thousands of Mumbaikars converged towards the effected areas to offer their respects- many of whom traveled from far away to do so.

In the mediated world that we live in today, the coverage of the 26/11 crisis in the mainstream media created a community of onlookers that felt a part of the unfolding crisis. Through social media platforms such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and blogs, an extended community of onlookers was created that followed the event, collaborating for exchange of information and news, offering help and services to those affected..

On Twitter, a spontaneous virtual community of over 400 users (Maholo.com, 2008) was rapidly developing comprising citizen journalists, reporters, students, and citizens watching the event unfold on television in front of them and across the city while on the move. This community was buzzing with activity- sharing information, stories, coordinating blood donations and compiling information regarding victims, dangerous locations and situations. Over the 60 hour period of the Mumbai attacks, updates from users from across Mumbai, the rest of India and the world were at the rate of over 100 updates or “tweets” (in Twitter speak) per minute (Wired Magazine, 2008).
There has been a lot of media talk of Twitter being at the edge of a new wave of journalism because of the quick updates and volume of participation and sources of information. While this “mass-self communication” enabled by Twitter received much attention from the media as “citizen journalist” activity, the nature of the activity on Twitter also points to previously researched behaviour in crisis.

Curious about the volume of activity on Twitter at the time, I conducted my master’s thesis on the topic (titled: “Was all the tweeting just a lot of noise?”) After conducting interviews with several of the participants (twitter users) at the time and analyzing the content of the tweets, I found that most of the conversations/ posts on twitter could be categorized into three groups- information sharing, personal expressions and collaborative behaviour to help the victims. This pointed to the social function of the medium, Twitter, to bring together people in crisis.
Going back to previously documented behaviour in crisis, I saw parallels of this online activity in the literature on traditional human response in behaviour.

1. Firstly, we observed large scale “social convergence” (Kendra &Watchendorf, 2003. Social convergence is the sudden flocking of onlookers to the site of disaster. We observed this in the increased number of participants on Twitter discussion groups at the time.

2. An Altruistic community (Barton, 1969): This is a tendency common in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, where people who have had previously no contact with each other form associations to offer help and support to the victims. In the online behaviour on social networking sites and Flickr, we saw people offer support to others that were in unsafe locations, or those who were abroad and unable to contact their loved ones in the city.

3. Mathewson's (1957) and Watchendorf's (2003) combined typology of roles of participants in disaster can also be applied to online behaviour:
•The helpers: As mentioned earlier, a vast amount of activity was information sharing behaviour. Apart from this, answering requests for information, organizing events was seen as the largest category of online behaviour.

•The curious: the internationals who participated weren't physically connected or emotionally connected to the event but acted like onlookers. While it is natural to be curious of major events like this, this behaviour has been termed as “disaster tourism” (de Waal, 1997)
•The mourners: This category involved those posts who mourned the victims of the attack, and expressed their own shock and disbelief at the ongoing events
•The supporters: These were participants who express gratitude to emergency workers (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003). In this study, this was categorized as expressions of “patriotic/nationalist” sentiments

Research such as this is useful to understand the way our society evolves as we increasingly live our lives on the internet. We begin to observe trends in online activity that mirrors our offline lives. It is important to recognize the nature of the technology, Twitter, and its role to offer citizens a platform for effective, quick communication and to express themselves place in times of crisis. For more on the report, click here

Mail-Order Brides: Cruel Intentions or a case of misrepresentation?

Mail-order brides, as a term is typically used in the context of women from ‘third world countries’ who marry men from another: usually financially developed country.

I was fairly unaware of the phenomenon until recently and I won’t be entirely off track to assume that it is not a topic of conversation (read consequence) in India. We have our very own genre of ‘no-love’ marriages – the arranged ones. The desi version of the picture perfect Mrs. Cleaver waiting for her husband at the front door with chai and a million dollar smile is an actuality and men don’t have to venture too far for such forms of TLC. My guess would be that excepting geography, the other nuances of Mail Order Brides would barely evince a response in India. And even if it did – not one that remotely compares to the popular stereotype elsewhere. This post is an overview of the Mail-order bride stereotype - one that is not positive at all.

Most of the references around Mail-order brides are the ones that titillate, involve deceit, sex, and abuse – essentially anything that sensationalises and in turn sells.
“Mail Order Bride murders in the US”
“Mail Order Brides do not exist – are they gold diggers or prostitutes?”

This sensationalism imbues the women and in some cases entire nations with descriptors and images that they cannot easily do away with. The women, projected as manipulative, passive and subservient are hoping to move out of their current economic, social or personal situations and these marriages are projected as the ideal ticket to better lives. The men on the other hand, are projected as either divorcees or geeks who have been evaded by luck, (in most cases tired of the career centric ways of their women), and are now seeking nurture providing, traditional women who will take care of both their homes and hearts. The men are looking for their second chance at love and a happily married life with someone who is attentive, loving, eager to please and is concerned with nothing more than her husband and the home.’

I am familiar with these characterisations however I would argue that these representations (of both the men and women) are skewed and to some degree reflect the surrounding stereotype without delving into the real picture. These representations fail to take into account the actual situations and interests of the people in context. There are several voices, which are far removed from the gold digging, passive, subservient persona that the stereotype leads us to believe. These voices, understandably have been muted in the flurry of sensationalism perpetrated by the media and other feminist writings. So, what is it that attributes the negativity surrounding the stereotype?

According to me, a lot of the negativity stems from the fact that it does not align with the western concept of marriage. This in turn gives rise to the perception of people marrying for economic considerations. The idea of two people getting married without being in love raises questions and also concerns about the legitimacy of the union. The western concept of marriage assumes that marriage is based on the romantic attachment of two free individuals and anything deviating from this norm is viewed suspiciously. Marrying for practical considerations is viewed to be a selfish and calculated motive and it is this aberration from the usual norms, which results in transference of negative values. This ‘apparent transgression of the ideology of romantic love’ allows for the women to be branded as opportunists. The more sympathetic version projects them as sex slaves, who are forced to sell their bodies in (obviously) loveless marriages. (Luehrmann, 2004).

Although this genre of marriage is linked more to materialistic considerations, I agree with Madhu Kishwar when she suggests that even marriages that arise out of pure romantic love, are not entirely devoid of calculation and motive.
Perhaps we draw too easy a division between such arranged relationships and those which come without professional intermediaries, as if the latter never involved unequal power relations or false pre-conceptions. (Luehrmann, 2004, p.862)

Much has been said about the women opting for such forms of cross-cultural marriage but the images projected cannot be treated as representational. What most people know are the instances that have been sensationalized by the media – wives suspect of marrying their husbands to acquire a green card. This is the popular and prevailing stereotype and also presumably a central motivation for the women. At some level, economics does play a role in determining such life choices but it is definitely not the tilting point. There are other factors, macro and micro which are instrumental. Understanding the real motivations of these women to enter such marriages will help us see the mail-order bride in true perspective and in some way over time balance the stereotype. Until then, the image – however negative will persist.

Metrics for determining player compensation in Major League Baseball?

With the growing popularity of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the familiar question relates to whether a player is overvalued or undervalued. Is Kevin Pieterson really justifying the ROI for a US 1.55 million dollar contract? How much should a franchise owner bid for a player when a new transfer window opens up? These are the common questions hounding IPL and many other sports leagues across the world.
Player valuation is an important factor in baseball considering the megabucks involved in the league. According to 2008 estimates the minimum salary of a MLB player was 3,90,000 US Dollars (source: www.mlb.com). Sabermetricians have often tried to determine models for player valuation in baseball, but there is a still a long way to go in terms of arriving at more accurate and parsimonious models. A key aspect of baseball is based on the fact that it is both an individual and a team based sport. Tennis is completed an individual based sport while football is more team based compared to baseball. Without getting into the technicalities of the process involved, I would like to briefly state that two types of additional dependencies were considered: players within a given team are more likely to have certain similarities compared to players from other team and time variant characteristics of a player are likely to be related (eg: current compensation will be related to previous compensation). The other aspect is related to non-baseball attributes. It is interesting to understand the impact of non-baseball attributes on player valuation (eg: superstar effect). Non-baseball attributes largely fall in the domain of brand equity.

Several interesting results emerged from the study. Among the performance related factors only batting average of the batter and number of stolen bases by the batter were found to influence player compensation. As expected increase in the batting average was found to increase player valuation. However stolen bases was found to have a negative effect on valuation for certain players and a positive effect on valuation for certain others. This can be explained due to the fact that certain players may have characteristics like build, speed which may be considered to fit in well with ability to steal bases. In the case of such players increase in stolen bases would increase the player valuation. Certain other players may be deemed to fit in better with the concept of big hitting. Stolen bases in the case of such players may be an indication of poor form or lack of core competency. In the case of such players increase in the number of stolen bases may have a detrimental effect on the valuation.
This can happen with switch hitters and designated hitters in the team. Stolen bases is an important factor which serves to explain a lot many things. Stolen bases encapsulates both tangible factors (speed, response time) and intangible factors (judgement, communication ability on the field). Many of the fielding and pitching characteristics may have been captured by the stolen bases itself. Player weight and experience were other parameters that were found to have a positive effect on player valuation.
However the effect of experience on player valuation depends on the age of the oldest player in the team. Greater the age of the oldest player in the team lesser will be the effect of increase in player experience on valuation. A team where the age of the oldest player is greater, would value experience lesser compared to a team where the age of the oldest player is lower. Intangible player related characteristics (Eg: temperament, playing style) and intangible team related characteristics (Eg: revenue realization philosophy of a team) were also found to influence player valuation. In the case of superstars the brand equity attached to their name adds a premium to their valuation.
There is scope to develop better metrics for player compensation by considering player characteristics over a great time duration. Team revenues, marketing and sponsorship data might be useful to develop more accurate metrics for player valuations.
The quest will continue….
- Padmanabhan Ramaswamy