Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

I don’t pretend to know much about music. In fact, most debates about it confuse me. It seems like most arguments about why one artist sucks are only backed up by “because she sucks, that’s why!”

I think I can see a trend running through popular songs, though. Doesn’t it seem like break out hit songs have really clear, easy to understand vocals? Here’s what I mean. “The 10 Dumbest Ke$ha Lyrics” is an article that’s gone viral on buzzfeed. Would this article be funny without anyone knowing that she “brushes her teeth with a bottle of Jack?”

High-pitched, well enunciated vocals seem to be the common thread here. You’ve got the same thing going with Eminem, Michael Jackson, Motley Crue, and especially the Beatles. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t at least have one Beatles chorus stuck in their head as they read this sentence? I’m not saying the high tenor is the key to musical success, but at least it’s part of the formula.

“Mommyblogging” (one word) was the recent topic of choice for Heather Lyn Fleming’s Master of Communications Thesis at SFU. Through a myriad of collective blog posts, Fleming wanted to know if she could delve deeper into the story behind the tweets. What were these writings telling us about modern-day mothers?

When the Mommybloggers in question saw the findings of the thesis, enough of them were horrified that the hash tag #creepythesis came to be. It’s not that Fleming was accusing them of locking their children in pet carriers or anything like that, it’s that the assumptions, gleaned from their publicly available writings, were incorrect. Fleming tried to paint a picture of these bloggers’ households that they had no control over, and this was simply unacceptable.

I can see how some people see the internet as this world-wide private journal. Look at my infinitesimal website stats if you don’t believe me. But if irrelevance is your only defense against scrutiny, you might be expressing yourself in the wrong medium. If we want the internet to fulfill its true potential, we need to accept that it is the most public and accessible form of communication there is. If people misunderstand you or if they don’t like your message, they are now able to tell you and the only thing you can do about it is write them a sternly worded note. This kind of criticism is no reason to abandon blogging all together. The greater good of any debate is served by more voices, not fewer. Just be prepared to take part in the debates that you start.

Political Cartoons get a lot of flack for being as recycled and unoriginal as the newspapers they are printed in. Fortunately, there’s one artist out there who seems to be getting with the program. This awesome Obama/Ash cartoon is from Terrence Nowicki Jr.’s This is Historic Times, a site which is destined to go down in my RSS reader.

Here’s how most industrial corporations work.  They use a combination of loans and investors to purchase land, machines, and labor. All this capital goes in to producing one or more consumer goods. The corporation then buys time and space on mass media (TV, Radio, and Newspapers) to promote their product. If everything goes according to plan, the product will sell. Unfortunately, this model does not work anymore. It has nothing to do with new government regulation or awareness about the evils of consumer culture. We are merely becoming immune to corporation’s calls for our attention and our money.

The immunity is by no means complete, but already we’re seeing a downward trend in the use and effectiveness of advertising. Ads have become so ubiquitous, that instead of brainwashing us into buying more, they have become easier to ignore. Think about it. When was the last time an ad consciously affected your purchasing decisions? Corporations are starting to realize this, and traditional media outlets have started hemmoraging money as a result. The recent Conan-Leno controversy is nothing more than NBC panicking because their medium simply can’t sell any more widgets.

This is not to say that people will stop buying consumer products. We will be well supplied by the infinite torrent of competitors provided by inexpensive and ubiquitous machine labor. The resources to start a business are now a fraction of what they were 10 years ago. This low barrier of entry will attract companies who actually care about the customers they are serving. If corporations make their mistakes through their apathy and callousness,  then every call bumped to voicemail, every eye-roll from a customer service rep creates a niche for another small competitor to squeeze through. Those competitors don’t have to clear every decision with the head office, and they don’t have a board of shareholders answer to. When they have good ideas, they can move faster and with more purpose than large corporations.

Where does this leave companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle? As we’re seeing with India and China, eventually developing countries turn into developed ones. Cell phone and computer networks are cheaper to implement than terrestrial television and radio. This means they’ll be more used to media they can talk back to, rather than the one-way monologue of traditional media. It’ll be hard to trust the alien and artificial machinations of Pepsi when you can get the same kind of communication from your own culture and community. If those large corporations want to stay in business, they’ll have to be present for their customers in a way that is unprecedented. God help them if they put another person on hold.

If you want to read more on the subject, I suggest picking up Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing or Linchpin. They inspired many of the ideas in the last two posts.

If Vancouver isn’t the anti-corporate capital of the world, it’s certainly in the running. Greenpeace and Adbusters both got started there. The city has repeatedly denied Wal-mart the right to build there, despite the company’s attempts to create an environmentally friendly building. There is a good reason to keep an eye on corporations. Nestle and Coca-cola’s actions in the third world are two examples from a very long list of literal wars, famines, and plagues that corporations have been involved in for the past 400 years. Still, I hate how anti-corporatism has become so trendy. If I told people that the batteries in the Chevy Volt were made from ground puppy livers, I have the feeling I’d be met with approving grunts and a donation check rather than someone with a straight jacket or some other sane response.

The problem I have with agreeing with most gaffes against corporations is that it assumes Comcast, Rogers or Microsoft is burning calories to get YOU. Yes, that OEM software agreement means that Steve Ballmer will hide in your closet and eat your bones if you’re not asleep by 8:30. Please. All my run-ins with corporations, be it through working for them or being on hold for their tech support, can be explained by one thing: Apathy. Throughout the industrial revolution, corporations worked well by having rigid sets of simple, repeatable rules that can be carried out by the cheapest and least skilled workers possible. Basically, if it’s not your job, don’t think about it. Nestle’s marketing of formula to developing countries was not part of some insane eugenics conspiracy. They were just repeating actions that had worked in North America and Europe. So if it’s not profitable for corporations to consider the consequences of their actions, what can we do? Write more legislation? I don’t think so. The business model is already dead. Find out why in tomorrow’s post.

On Friday, February 12th, my wife watched as 188 grade sevens experienced their first Nerd Rage. The Percy Jackson movie was compromised beyond repair. The Greek mythology was messed with for no apparent reason. Some totally sweet battles from the book were cut out entirely. The suspected evil mastermind from the book was the actual evil mastermind in the movie, stripping away layers of complexity and character from the story like turpentine on a Monet.

How long does Disney, Sony or Dreamworks think they can keep bilking kids out of their allowance money this way? When the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potters of the world pack as much of the books as they can on celluloid and make billions in the process, how is it that film producers still believe they can make more money by appealing to a larger audience? Disney, like most of the corporate world, thinks they can get by with the factory approach to film-making. Create a product that will please the most people, because more people means more money. That approach worked in the days of Ma Bell and Johnny Carson, but we now live in a time where you can’t own all the media channels, and the equipment to make a movie can be bought with your average credit card. The market is completely open for a few true believers to take Disney’s customers away forever.

Today my wife is going to take her class to see the film version of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. It’s part of their novel study of the book of the same name. The kids have high hopes for this movie (and so does their teacher). When Disney takes on a film, it’s always a crap shoot whether they can keep their corporate bureaucracy out of the production. In their rush to reach a wider market, they may try to make Percy Jackson into something it’s not: An American Harry Potter.

Having read all five Percy Jackson books myself, I can tell you that while there are similarities, the two series are completely different. While Harry was studious and accommodating, Percy is impulsive and defiant. His ADHD makes him a poor student (while at the same time makes him an accomplished soldier), and he will actually go out of his way to provoke magical beings that can end his existence with a thought. It goes without saying that Percy would have never stood for the Dursley’s shenanigans if they ever had the misfortune of meeting him. Like most of the demi-gods at camp half-blood, Percy has led a hard life because of his lineage. It’s going to take more than a summer camp with dryads dancing around to make up for being hunted by monsters and used as a pawn in the sibling rivalry of the gods. At many points in his adventures, Percy has to make choices between his duty to the gods and his duty to his friends and his own happiness. In Potter’s world, the goals of protecting the world from Voldemort and protecting Ron and Hermione were always one and the same. The only hard choice Harry had to make was whether the Death Eaters got to him at Hogwarts or at the Dursleys’ house.

If you need any proof that the Percy Jackson movie deserves to do well, you don’t need to look further than my wife’s grade seven class. People excuse the worst excesses of Harry Potter and the Twilight series by saying that it at least gets kids to read. Sara’s class, with full access to both Twilight and Harry Potter, has finished all their missing homework assignments to see this movie. Students would ask for the sequels from their parents for Christmas and then trade the books amongst themselves to read. Some of them have said, without hyperbole, that The Lightning Thief was the first chapter book that a teacher didn’t have to force them to read. It’s the books that convert non-readers that mean the most to literacy rates. Even if the movie is compromised beyond repair, if you enjoyed the Potter series at first, but were left high and dry by the end of it, do yourself a favour and pick up Percy Jackson.

The nature of knowledge has become an interesting question lately. Knowledge used to take up space in the form of printed books. Now, a simple thumb drive can hold an entire library inside its RAM chips. MIT now posts course notes online for free, whereas before students would have to pay thousands just for the privilege of taking such notes. Many of the world’s websites are powered by Linux, an operating system that is free to download and completely open to anyone brave enough take a look inside its inner workings. If you want to be a knowledge worker, it’s not enough to have specialized knowledge. You must demonstrate that knowledge through blogs or collaborative websites like github.

If you ask me, I think that trade secrets are about to become obsolete. The idea that information can be controlled by legislation or ill-conceived software protection will soon be considered nonsense. Fortunately, this will not put an end to knowledge workers. While the human brain can never store as much data as a computer can, the ability to combine that data and use it to solve a problem is still the sole province of the good old wet noodle. It doesn’t matter that any knowledge, be it legal, medical, or mechanical, can be accessed from any computer anywhere in the world. It still takes time to learn the information well enough for it to be useful. Humans can also categorize and prioritize all the right observations that correlate to the right kind of knowledge. Computers can only work with the data they are given. Even as computers get more complex, humans are still necessary to make sure the computer is solving the right kinds of problems. If or when human-like AI is invented, hopefully we’ll have a whole different set of problems to work with, like the coming robot revolution.

Fast Company posted an article on some revealing statistics about facebook users. While the total number of links, videos, and content are going up, the number of users actually sharing that content is going down. This should come as no surprise, since many online communities go through these kinds of usage curves (see The 90-9-1 Rule).

So once again, a social network has been taken over by a core contingent of oversharers. And farmville. Don’t forget farmville. If this is a stage that all web 2.0 sites go through, why do we bother with them in the first place? With the price of hosting going down every year, what’s to stop people who want to share links with their numerous friends from taking market share from these social media giants with sites of their own?

When I look at this photo, I don’t see an orgy of corporate branding. I don’t see a carbon footprint. I don’t see the gap between rich and poor widening. I see my friend Dan realizing his dream of carrying the Olympic Torch, a symbol of international competition and camaraderie.

This is not merely a burning piece of wood. Seeing the relay go past the homes, schools, and grocery stores we grew up with is something that can’t be quantified by poverty statistics or government debt clocks. Sure, our country has problems, but they’ll still be there with or without the games. We may even be in a better position to solve them with all the revenue coming into the country.  Until then, the stadiums are up, the athletes are in town, and the snow is being trucked in from Manning Park. Let’s enjoy the show.