Rolling Alone

December 21, 2006

Posted by Jay Livingston

The news today is that Pittsburgh, my old hometown, is going to get a gambling casino. All slot machines.

Up until about 25 years ago, the action in casinos was at the tables. People crowded around a crap table generate excitement, almost a team spirit since most are betting with the shooter rather than with the house. And everyone gets a chance to be the shooter, as the dice pass from player to player around the table. Roulette and blackjack are calmer, the players seated, and the house, rather than one of the players, spinning the wheel or dealing the cards, but the players are still there together, aware of each other’s bets.

The tables were where the casinos made their money. They courted the high rollers, comping them rooms, food, and even air fare. The slot machines were small-time stuff, a way to keep wives from getting bored.

Then the balance began to shift until now slot machines account for most casino revenue, typically 75%, even higher in some places. So why not just get rid of the tables altogether and have nothing but machines? From the casino’s point of view, there are lots of reasons to get rid of the tables, mostly things like labor costs, health benefits, and other potential difficulties that arise when your employees are human beings.

But what is the attraction for players? Is that they too feel more comfortable alone with a machine than among other humans?

There may be other reasons as well. You don’t have to worry about how much to tip if you win; you don’t have to tip at all. Also, the machines are far more complicated than the old three-wheel one-armed bandits. They resemble video games, with different levels you can move through and different choices you can make. The generation raised on video games may feel more comfortable with these machines and may find a simple pair of dice or deck of cards incredibly one-dimensional.

Even the traditional games are becoming mechanized. You can play poker, craps, or roulette at an electronic console rather than at a table. I guess I’m hopelessly old fashioned. I’d be less likely to trust a programmable computer to give an honest roll of the dice or turn of a card than I would a real person holding the actual dice or deck.

The sociological question is the one Putnam raised about bowling. Does this transformation of gambling yet one more way that social life is becoming more fragmented and individualized? What makes public social life interesting is the possibility of new experience, something we never expected. The more individual control we have over our environment, the more we remove the possibility of these unplanned encounters.

In the fully mechanized casino, people minimize the chance of a random social encounter while at the same time they cede complete control over their money to a flashy random-number generator.

Smile, You're On Camera

December 20, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston

Surveillance cameras. London has a half million of them. In New York, in Greenwich Village and Soho, there are about 4,200 — a drop in the London bucket, but five times more than in 1998. That’s according to a survey out last week by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The majority of the cameras were installed and operated by private businesses and buildings.

The cameras are supposedly for our protection, but the NYCLU and others claim that the cameras do not reduce crime, though they may help catch perpetrators after the crime has been committed. But perhaps that’s only because the criminals don’t know about them. Or if criminals do know, the cameras are so unobtrusive that the criminals forget they are there. As anyone who has done participant observation knows, after a while, people will tune out even human observers who are standing right there and go on about their business, even when that business is of questionable legality. “I don’t see how my men could have done that with those observers right there in the car,” said one police officer when shown an observational report about police brutality. That was forty years ago. Now the cops are on videotape. Has possibility of a video turning up all over the news on TV has had any affect on the way police do their work?

The NYCLU worries about the erosion of privacy, especially by police cameras. The camera proponents argue that the cameras are trained on the streets or the interiors of stores. They see nothing more than what a person in the same situation might see, though usually from a higher angle. The NYCLU points to cases where people thought they were alone, in fact were alone in the sense that no other people were around, but were secretly taped. The NYCLU even found a classic example: police using the night-vision capacity of a helicopter camera switched the focus from a bicycle protest to the terrace of an apartment building, where a couple who thought they were alone in the dark were making love.

Still, there’s a difference between being out in public, casually noticed by strangers, and being watched. One afternoon in ancient times, back when I was in grad school, I was walking around town after lunch one day. (It may even have been one of those days when I lunched with a group that included the current director of the NYCLU, not that that’s relevant.) It was a warm day, and because my hands sweat, and because I didn’t want the paperback book I was carrying to get damaged, I folded it into the protection of my newspaper. At some point as I was walking down the street, a man in a suit tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you mind if I see that book you’ve got inside that paper?” he said.

I was stunned. He was a store detective from the bookstore, where I had been browsing earlier, and he thought I might have shoplifted the book. I showed him the book, which he could see immediately was not stolen. “O.K.,” he said. I had no problem with the bookstore wanting to protect itself from shoplifting. But then it hit me. “You mean you’ve been following me all this time?” I had left the bookstore ten or fifteen minutes earlier. “Yeah. I lost you over on [he named some street or store, which I don’t remember] for a while.”

My reaction was visceral; I could feel it in my gut— uneasiness, almost fear. I immediately thought back over my path since leaving the store. I had been in public the whole time, all my activities visible to strangers. Still, I wondered if I had done anything that I wouldn’t have wanted him to have seen— nothing criminal, just embarrassing or in some way private. I didn’t like the idea that I’d been followed and spied on.

When we’re in public, we take it for granted that others will notice us as one of the crowd. It’s a very different feeling to think that we are having every movement, every twitch and scratch, closely observed and recorded.

I guess I’ll watch Coppola’s film “The Conversation” next time it comes around on television. And maybe I’ll include the Civil Liberties Union among my year-end donations.

Mobility and Morality

December 19, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
 
A standard church sermon warns us against placing too much emphasis on material objects, wealth, and success. Pursuit of these worldly goals imperils not only our souls but our human relationships with family and friends. That’s Sunday. Monday morning, we go back to a life dominated by the very same values -- success and the money and material goods that come with it.

For those who don’t go to church to hear this message, there’s always the movies.

Last weekend, I saw “The Devil Wears Prada,” recently released on DVD. How many times have we seen this story? I was tempted to stop the DVD after the first two minutes and ask my 16-year-old to predict the plot, and I’m sure he could have. I suppose it’s a sign of progress that this story can now be told with women in the main roles and men as pretty faces. But the moral about yielding to the devil is the same, and so are his temptations— career success and the things money can buy.

In “Prada,” a sensible young woman (Anne Hathaway) with a journalism degree, good values, and a working class boyfriend (the good-looking guy from “Entourage” as a chef) gets caught up in the world of high fashion, where appearance counts for everything. That world and its values are personified in the character of her arrogant, demanding boss (Meryl Streep), a fashion editor who apparently dominates the entire fashion industry.

Our good girl, seemingly against her will, winds up getting new hair, new makeup, and clothes, clothes, clothes. She works long hours trying to please her boss and becomes super-competent at her job. Only late in the film does she realize what she has sacrificed: “I turned my back on my friends and family.” And when she tries to blame everything on the external pressures of her work, Streep tells her bluntly, “You chose to get ahead.”

Of course, in the end, she walks out on the fashion world and into the good kind of journalism she was looking for at the beginning of the film.

The conflict between relationships and success is standard stuff in American TV and movies and perhaps in real life as well, though only in the movies do people regularly turn their backs on a successful career. If “Prada” offers anything new, it’s to call into question not just our materialism but even our values on achievement and good old fashioned hard work.

This is not to say that movies show us the underside of all our values. Just a select few like success. Freedom, independence, equality, optimism, rationality, informality — it’s hard to think of a film that portrays these as anything but good.

But at least “Prada” confronts its heroine with a choice. More typically, American movies and TV pretend that you actually can have it both ways. You can be successful without abandoning your roots, you can move up without moving out. “Entourage” is a good example, an urban version of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The guys remain true to their Queens working-class ways and to one another even when surrounded by Hollywood with all its tension and pretension, and yet they always come out on top.

The NBA's Worst Day?

December 17, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
A long time observer of American society once said, “The other night I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out.”

Last night it was basketball. Knicks vs. Nuggets at the Garden. It was late in the game, and the Knicks had no chance of winning. Mardy Collins of the Knicks committed a flagrant foul, horse-collaring J.R. Smith of the Nuggets, who was about to jump for an otherwise uncontested breakaway jam.

Smith reacted. In-your-face chest bumping, led to pushing. Other players joined in, some pushing and grabbing, some trying to separate the combatants. Others threw punches. Some of the punches may even have landed. The refs ejected all ten players.

The tongue clucking in the media afterwards was so loud it could have been heard above a NASCAR race. “The worst day in NBA history,” said someone on ESPN. “The only ones to benefit from this will be the charities,” said someone else, referring to the ultimate recipients of the heavy fines that the NBA will levy on the players.

Really? I’m sure that the NBA commissioner will, in his media appearance, look as stern as possible. He will deplore the actions of these players and say how terrible it is for the league. Then he’ll go back to his office and watch the TV ratings for the NBA, especially the Knicks and Nuggets, for the next couple of weeks, especially in they have a rematch. We should watch the ratings too, and we shouldn’t be surprised if they rise.

I suspect something similar is true about NASCAR fans. For spectator interest, the best race is not the one that is crash-free. It’s the one with the the spectacular, multi-car crash where all the drivers walk away unhurt.

Regardless of ratings, the NBA may actually want to end these brawls. I am more skeptical about the NHL. I suspect they could greatly reduce the fighting if they wanted to, and if they were willing to impose real penalties. Deterrence works, at least in some circumstances. Sure, fights are crimes of passion, and in the heat of the moment, players are not thinking about all the contingencies. But players are aware of the penalties. I don’t have the data, but I’d bet a lot that if you looked at when flagrant fouls and fights occur in the NBA, there would be a very strong correlation with the point differential. Nobody wants to give up a technical or get thrown out of a game they might win.