Subscribe
Add my RSS feed to your reader.
Mar
16
We Are Not Machines
Filed Under Media, Rant | Leave a Comment
Michael Hiltzik wrote a piece for the LA Times about Jaron Lanier. Lanier, 49, was one of the early visionaries for what the internet could do, and is the author of You Are Not a Gadget. He “has been pondering the effect that the World Wide Web — its ideology as well as its design — has had on creativity, society and commerce for years.”
America’s Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven’t seen before,” he says. “The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves — Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn’t have been able to forget their former selves.”
Is it just me, or does it seem like there is an increase in the number of people who are writing about the perils of technology, media and always-on connectivity?
Or maybe I’m just drawn to these prophets because they provide catharsis in the midst of my unanswered questions about technology’s role in my future.
Mar
2
Future Belongs to Content Curators
Filed Under Big Ideal, Media | Leave a Comment
As content becomes more and more populous, the gap between what exists and what exists that I’m interested in will continue to grow larger. Google search has been a convenient distraction because it has taught us to believe that a robust search engine is all we need to deliver all we need. Unfortunately, search is only good for me if I take the initiative to search. It doesn’t come looking for me. At least not yet.
Content creators are everywhere. From writers, photographers, designers and musicians to YouTube maestros and Twitter provocateurs, content is being generated everywhere and it seems by everyone (I’m adding to the noise by writing this blog post). The beauty of more content is that it encourages more creators to take part in the joy of creation. It’s a natural part of the way we were… created.
The future, I believe, will be seized by those who figure out the best way to curate content, not just create content. I call them Content Curators (apparently Rohit does too). Content Curators are the people who sort and sift through the glut of content and organize it in a way that is relevant to a desired filter.
Amazon gets this. Every time I purchase something from Amazon, my habits are recorded and compared to give recommendations that I might also appreciate, based on others who enjoy similar combinations and/or content that is related. A similar logic exists behind iTunes’ Genius Mixes. Magazines are good at this too. They provide a specific frame (sports, marketing, sales, cooking, design, news, etc.) that all of their content filters through.
Content Curators will also become “branded” because people will be hungry to have someone else do their sorting and sifting.
Our dependency on content creators will become less and less as our dependancy on curators becomes more and more.
Maybe it’s time to brush up on those mixtape skills and start curating!
Jan
25
Tell Me A Story
Filed Under Inspiration, Media | Leave a Comment
Don Hewitt, the founder of CBS’ 60 Minutes passed away last August. Last night, 60 Minutes dedicated their entire hour-long show to remembering Don’s life and, more specifically, the influence he had on television news.
I’ve been a fan of 60 Minutes for many years. Growing up, I remember my dad watching it every Sunday evening as it was the only official night of the week where everybody had to fend for themselves when it came to dinner. (Dad did all the cooking in our house of eight.)
I realize I’m the odd man out with my generation for liking 60 Minutes, but I think I’m the odd man out for a lot of things. I digress.
Learning about the man behind the show was quite a treat. I also couldn’t stop thinking about Neil Postman’s criticism about why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”
Admittedly, 60 Minutes is entertainment first and news second. Hewitt’s goal was to combine the two so that more people would be captivated by the stories.
It seems like everyone is talking about story these days. Don Hewitt was famous for four words that he said all the time. He said it to aspiring interns and he said it to his staff: “Tell me a story.”
Hewitt was also adamant about steering clear of the “issues.” He didn’t want to do stories about issues. He did stories about people. The issues would surface so long as people were the subject.
Tell me a story.
Jan
8
If I had cable, the History channel is probably what would suck most of my time. According to Matea Gold’s January 3 article in the LA Times, it looks like History has been making some big changes.
Three years ago, then 38-year old Nancy Dubuc took over as president of the network and has been breathing new life into an old story ever since. In addition to championing new reality-type shows–she prefers to call reality TV “the next iteration of documentary storytelling”–Dubuc is also behind the forthcoming “America: The Story of Us” and “The People Speak,” a series based on Howard Zinn’s thoroughly incriminating book, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present.
I love it when established organizations take big risks like this. Not only is Nancy Dubac young, she doesn’t have the typical background you’d expect a History president would have. She has a minor in History and “cheerfully confesses she wishes she had paid more attention in class.”
Looks like I’ll be paying more attention to History–and Nancy Dubac–in the future.
Nov
23
LA Times’ Zachary Pincus-Roth wrote a great introduction of Henry Jenkins, the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC. Jenkins just arrived at USC, after 20 years at MIT.
For what it’s worth, I love it when people find ways to apply their wisdom in new contexts. Going from techie MIT in Cambridge, Mass. to pop-driven USC in Los Angeles is quite a culture clash.
Jenkins has been studying what he calls “transmedia” storytelling, “in which a story spans multiple media in a coordinated way.”
In the traditional Hollywood model, the novelization, video game or website simply restates the characters or the plot of a film or a TV show. In transmedia stories, the creators of the entertainment will use those extensions to, say, fill in the gaps in a narrative or look at events from a minor character’s point of view — all of which combine into one big story that audiences have to piece together. “It appeals to the hunting-and-gathering impulses of fans,” Jenkins says. For instance, “District 9″ has online documentaries, websites for fake alien-rights organizations and, yes, benches, all of which help drive home the human-alien divide in the film’s fictional Johannesburg. “Those benches are designed to shape our experience of the film,” Jenkins says. “They’re not just designed to get us into the theater.”
Transmedia is certainly an emerging method for maximizing the plethora of media options available to storytellers and marketers.
Jenkins acknowledges that transmedia has its challenges. Does it exclude moviegoers who just want their films to begin when they enter the multiplex and end two hours later? What if some people watch the TV show first and the webisode second, when the reverse would be much more gratifying? And can the satisfaction of piecing together these bits of storytelling ever measure up to the simple pleasure of watching the hero defeat the bad guys? “It may be that you try some interesting stuff,” Jenkins says, “but at the end of the day, our grandest ambitions aren’t going to be realizable.”
Definitely a subject and conversation I’ll be following…
Aug
20
Food, Inc.
Filed Under Media | 3 Comments
Jamaica and I watched the movie Food, Inc. a couple weeks ago. In addition to being a beautifully shot, well-done piece of entertainment, the movie had enough reality baked in to appeal intellectually as well. These Michael Moore-ish docudramadies are definitely increasing in popularity and Food, Inc. is no exception.
The big bad evil corporations are the villains and the small mom-and-pop farms are the heroes. The story of David and Goliath never gets old. Here’s the marketing copy from the film’s website:
In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
If you don’t care where your food comes from, what it’s doing to your body or why any of this matters to the future of humanity, I don’t suggest wasting your time on this movie.
Although Jamaica and I didn’t quite convert to full vegetarianism, we have been modifying our diet quite substantially.
Fortunately, one of my favorite restaurants is on the same page with this conversation. They call it “food with integrity.”
Aug
10
“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” —Neil Postman
I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read the late Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Published in 1984, unfortunately, it is still just as relevant today as it was then.
Although loaded with quotes and quips by communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, Postman takes things a step further and argues why television is killing us. “The A-Team and Cheers are no threat to our public health. 60 Minutes, Eye-Witness News and Sesame Street are.”
With an initial nod to Orwell’s 1949 classic Nineteen Eighty-Four and to Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World, Postman believes Huxley got it right when he said that what we love will be our ruin.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
What follows is my feeble attempt to string together personal highlights after immersing myself over several days in this thoughtful book.
It began with the clock…
“And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.”
“And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”
…and public discourse went from oral to print…
“The Dunkers came close here to formulating a commandment about religious discourse: Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”
“Methodist camp meetings combined picnics with opportunities to listen to oratory.”
“What kind of audience was this [who listened to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates]? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education.”
“This language is pure print. That the occasion required it to be spoken aloud cannot obscure that fact. And that the audience was able to process it through the ear is remarkable only to people whose culture no longer resonates powerfully with the printed word.”
“Even the sounds of sentences of spoken words are rarely engaging except when composed by those with extraordinary poetic gifts. If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”
…slowly moving from reason and logic to an appeal to our passions…
“In 1786, Benjamin Franklin observed that Americans were so busy reading newspapers and pamphlets that they scarcely had time for books.”
“Lewis Mumford wrote of this shift, ‘the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local; …print made a greater impression than actual events…. To exist was to exist in print: the rest of the world tended gradually to become more shadowy. Learning became book-leaming.’”
“Unlike the principal figures in today’s ‘great awakening’—Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et al.—yesterday’s leaders of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository gifts. Their disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious inspiration.”
“The differences between the character of discourse in a print-based culture and the character of discourse in a television-based culture are also evident if one looks at the legal system.”
“Indeed, the history of newspaper advertising in America may be considered, all by itself, as a metaphor of the descent of the typographic mind, beginning, as it does, with reason, and ending, as it does, with entertainment.”
“Advertising was, as Stephen Douglas said in another context, intended to appeal to understanding, not to passions.”
“The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, there being no other means, besides the oral tradition, to have access to public knowledge.”
“This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.”
“The name I give to that period of time during which the American mind submitted itself to the sovereignty of the printing press is the Age of Exposition.”
…because the more we ‘know’, the greater our inaction becomes…
“[With the telegraph], transportation and communication could be disengaged from each other, that space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information.”
“For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’”
“The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.”
“The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”
“Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives.”
“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
…and television is the king of entertaining inaction…
“If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth.”
“The assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle.”
“For these reasons and more television will not have the same meaning or power as it does in America.”
“But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.”
“Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television.”
“Thinking does not play well on television.”
“The single most important fact about television is that people watch it, which is why it is called television.”
“Therefore—and this is the critical point—how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.”
…meanwhile religion is further marginalized…
“[One example is that] on television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.”
“Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”
“The danger is not that religion has become the content of television shows but that television shows may become the content of religion.”
What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.
…and education is being re-defined…
“Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch.”
“John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.”
“The greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes … may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history…. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”
“We learn what we do.”
“America is, in fact, the leading case in point of what may be thought of as the third great crisis in Western education.”
“I mean only to say that, like the alphabet or the printing press, television has by its power to control the time, attention and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”
“But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment.”
“Television is a nongraded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away with the idea of sequence and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”
“There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or, worst of all, endured. It is assumed that any information, story or idea can be made immediately accessible, since the contentment, not the growth, of the learner is paramount.”
“The name we may properly give to an education without prerequisites, perplexity and exposition is entertainment.”
“The consequences of this reorientation are to be observed not only in the decline of the potency of the classroom but, paradoxically, in the refashioning of the classroom into a place where both teaching and learning are intended to be vastly amusing activities.”
“The content of the school curriculum is being determined by the character of television, and even worse, that character is apparently not included as part of what is studied.”
…in the end, the joke is on us.
“For America is engaged in the world’s most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.”
“For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
Jun
25
I Love Magazines
Filed Under Media, Stuff I Like | Leave a Comment
Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had a peculiar interest in the magazine publishing industry. I remember taking advantage of free subscription offers before I would cancel after the trial period to avoid incurring bills at such a young age.
I was 15 when I started selling advertising for a niche magazine and by 16 I wrote my first business plan for a student magazine. It would launch a year later and continue until I was 20.
I’ve continued to love magazines and I subscribe to at least 20, including Fast Company, Time, Fortune, Christianity Today and Adbusters. I’ve seen many come and go over the years (George, Life and Portfolio have been missed) and many more struggle their way through tough times (Paste and Relevant are recent examples).
One of the trends I’ve noticed lately is the idea of having a celebrity editor. A magazine will turn an entire issue over to a “guest editor” and infuse their personality into a particular issue. Wired teamed with mister mystery man J.J. Abrams and Newsweek teamed with satirical news host Stephen Colbert in what was a hilariously historical moment.
It’s an obvious and admittedly planned publicity stunt intended to sell more copies on the newsstand. I kind of like the idea.
Tip: I read the majority of my magazines when I’m on the dreadmill (er, I mean, treadmill) at the gym.
I love magazines!
Jun
22
Kevin Kelly helped to launch Wired magazine back in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. His blog gets a million visitors a month. The guy is super smart.
I’ve had the opportunity to be with him a couple times. This past May he and I served on a planning team for a nonprofit we’re both very fond of. In addition to talking about an article he had just submitted to Wired (see below), Kevin spent an hour talking to me about his forthcoming book. He says the book will make a moral case for why we need to create and use more technology, not less. That should be interesting!
His latest article in Wired makes another bold argument, this time about a “new socialism” of sorts. The rise of open source, crowd sourced social networks, “suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.”
We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.
Kelly continues…
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
“We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds,” he says. “Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?”
Dec
17
What Matters
Filed Under Inspiration, Media | Leave a Comment
My friend Jeff Sinabarger is always finding great media that communicates stories of significance. On his blog today was a link to the “What Matters to Me” video for the VFS and YouTube “What Matters to You” Scholarship Competition. Love it!