Category Archives: media

Filling the Market Void: Why the E-Reader is not the End of the World

Posted on October 31, 2011 by | 1 comment


Some of the more literary types in my life (I am an English major so there are a quite a few of these) have been lamenting the demise of the good-old-paper-book since the very first e-readers appeared on Christmas lists. I cannot assuage the material frets of such people (What will hipsters put in their wedding photos if not piles of old books?), and it does seem sort of inevitable that paper books will go the way of vinyl. But as a movement in literature (if not material aesthetics), the e-reader does not worry me as much as it does some, who say that the Kindle and the Nook aren’t only the demise of nice-looking books but the quality of writing and fiction in general, touting the mass of self-published books and the hypothetically lower standards of publishers and editors.

There will always be a world of literature that is distinguished from books written and sold purely for entertainment, just as there will always be films made that are distinct from Hallmark TV movies, even though the same medium is being used to create the two things. This is the world that I am commenting on. The distribution of entertainment has always been fairly automatic – whatever medium is most popular will be used to make the most profit. Yaay, capitalism. There probably isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with this, but it’s important to remember that the hordes of paperbacks on the shelves in Walmart are not the front-runners of what’s being published right now – the most currently popular art will not necessarily be the most enduring.

Any media change creates a market void, and this medium is going to change, which means that there’s going to be a new horde of mediocre (and bad) material produced. I think that society tends to judge media change as culture-killing (or satanic or elitist or antielitist or condemning adjective of the day) (this generally only applies to media changes brought on by those in a younger age cohort than the complainer) and point to the “clear evidence” of the new medium’s depravity: the slew of obviously artistically empty new entertainment. But the fact is that artistically empty (unedifying, depraved, what have you) entertainment is like a cultural given – it has and will always exist. But I think that [maybe not all but at least some] humans are never going to fail to be surprisingly and inspiringly creative.

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Kids Those Days

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | 2 comments

Twilight Spoilers, if that’s something you care about.
                                                                                                                                                                      

This topic was dated when I wrote about it for my other blog a year ago, August 16th. That being said, you’re going to have to think about popular trends that occurred quite a while ago, no easy task when popularity ebbs and flows as it does nowadays.

A little before my original writing on this subject, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and the Twilight novels were all the rage. I’m going to say right now that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, with the hopes that what I’m about to say will back it up.

Every trend has its own share of supporters and critics. In this case, everyone everywhere (on the internet) was aghast at this cultural phenomenon that had befallen us. We (a collective we) were disgusted with this slurry that had become every teenage girl’s obsession, and we took every chance we could to denounce and deride Meyer’s novels, the Jonas’ music, and so on.

It struck me one day, however, what exactly we were doing. A lot of the issues that people were nitpicking (and deriding) were tenets that I not only agreed with, but that I lived by as well.

In Twilight Edward refuses to have premarital sex with Bella, and is adamant that if they are to go any further1  they must get married first. The Jonas Brothers wear purity rings to symbolize their commitment to, well, being pure.2 Lo and behold, these two items were brought under the most scrutiny and were mocked excessively.

So I questioned why, when girls finally had a half-decent role model, they were being ridiculed. Post-nowish Miley Cyrus didn’t wave the banner of blatant sexuality that former It girls Britney and Christina did,3 and that alone would have made me more comfortable letting my daughter obsess over her than many others.

From this point on in my original post I began to write about the Disney/Family Channel, but I’m not headed in that direction this time. What I want to focus on is the spirit of snarky judgementalism that seems to be permeating our culture. The constant search for what to demean and deride next, without any thought as to what good it may contain.

Yes, there are subjects which I will not defend [The Westboro Baptist Church, for example], but for the most part I’d like to call for moments of discernment whenever a target presents itself. Feel free to slam the Jonas Brothers for their musical ability, but leave their spiritual beliefs out of it.4 We should be able to consider that which we belittle and why it is we think so little of it.

To summarize what I’m trying to say, there was a point where people observed the fanatical, obsessive manner in which (pre)adolescents were throwing themselves at certain figures. In backlash against this behaviour they ridiculed their role models, yet targeted attributes which may not have been harmful for young people to mimic.

Be judgemental of those who garner the interest (and obsession) of many, but be smart (and civil) about it.

1. Than their creepy, unnatural kissing where she finds it difficult to find the air to breathe.

2.  Meaning, in this case, to save themselves sexually for their future wives. 

3. Not any more, though. You can’t release a single called “Can’t Be Tamed” and get away with it.

4. And their health issues. People made fun of Nick Jonas for being diabetic. I mean, why?

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Does The Onion Even Have Lines? #CongressHostage

Posted on October 3, 2011 by | Leave a comment

So The Onion tweeted [#CongressHostage] about Congress holding schoolchildren hostage last Thursday. The Internet, as expected, exploded for a bit in a few places and then returned to normalcy.

A rather convincing photograph of what appears to be Speaker of the House John Boehner holding a little girl hostage

The tweets were fake live-action reports of an Onion headline that day that reported that Congress had taken hostage 12 schoolchildren and were demanding, for their release, 12 trillion dollars “in cash”. A less tasteful part of the story involved John Boehner threatening to kill “one child every hour” until the money was given, with a rather amusing photoshopped picture of Boehner holding a gun to a girl’s head.

The US Capitol police responded with a release affirming that there was no situation of any kind at the Capitol, which created a scad of angry tweets ridiculing at anyone who could “be so stupid to believe” the story – and by scad I mean like hundreds, which seems to be many more than the small amount of people who took the story to be actual news. Time asked if The Onion went to far with #CongressHostage, and lots of followers said that they did, which created another scad of angry tweets ridiculing anyone who would be offended by The Onion story and lamented over the lack of education about satire, etc. etc. Basically summarizing the whole debate, @GS_Design responded to Time’s question: “Does the Onion *have* lines?”

Some people compared the event to the War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938; @kevinhamel55 asked, “@TheOnion today, War of The Worlds in 1938; is there any difference?” (the answer is yes, yes there is, because this time nobody thought the world was actually ending and hundreds of people weren’t calling studios panicked, afraid for their lives; whether this makes the Onion more or less successful than the 1938 broadcast is another matter altogether).

Admittedly, in perhaps poor taste The Onion’s #CongressHostage thing started with this tweet: “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.“, which wasn’t really funny or entirely unbelievable in any way. Further tweets were more appropriately hilarious: “Reports from those who know Congress say the legislative body had seemed desperate as of late“. Another tweet that isn’t really funny enough to justify its offensiveness was: “Two chaperones are also being held, one of whom is said to be pregnant “. It’s sort of amusing just because it’s so intensely typical of a hostage situation report, but it had nothing to do with the story’s strongest point, the nature of Congress in real life – as exemplified by the tweet: ‘Obama on bullhorn: “John, I know you can hear me in there. Please, you don’t need to do this.”‘

The article was a pretty accurate metaphor about Congress’ sense of desperation, as well as the public and presidential opinion of Congress this year, and the #CongressHostage stunt did a good job of drawing attention to it, at least. @TheOnion’s twitter account gained something like 7,000 followers, and the article received a ridiculous amount of news and blog coverage. The whole event was just another example of The Onion doing what The Onion does – drawing public attention to the nature of veracity and sensationalism in news sources, which is almost always good. The best summary of the situation in the current cultural context, in my opinion, came from @FultonMatt, who tweeted: “@TheOnion’s #CongressHostage has gone too far. Why can’t they just hack dead kid’s phones like a real news org?”

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News written by computers will make opinions matter more

Posted on September 19, 2011 by | 3 comments

For the first time, automatically generated articles are becoming practical for news sources to use – this carries interesting implications for journalism and internet writing. A variety of news sites, including The Big Ten Network, have published articles generated by a computer program written by Narrative Science, a company that uses computer algorithms to generate news articles. It saves money on writers and the public can’t really tell the difference. Here’s an excerpt from an article generated by Narrative Science [from MediaBistro]:

“Wisconsin jumped out to an early lead and never looked back in a 51-17 win over UNLV on Thursday at Camp Randall Stadium. The Badgers scored 20 points in the first quarter on a Russell Wilson touchdown pass, a Montee Ball touchdown run and a James White touchdown run. Wisconsin’s offense dominated the Rebels’ defense. The Badgers racked up 499 total yards in the game including 258 yards passing and 251 yards on the ground.”

The program, for sports articles, will even determine the MVP of the game and select a photograph to use for the article.

This is an interesting development in the “What the frick is going to happen to journalism?” question that is frequently discussed. And yeah, the fact that articles can be generated like the above, saving publishers time and money, does seem to be another pretty strong indicator of the slow and hard-to-watch decay of journalism. But I don’t think that the demand for a professional, reliable, and enjoyable source of important information is going to go away – not enough to eliminate the need for good news sources completely. I think that a story like the one above points to the fact that journalism is going to change, possibly drastically, to fill a slightly new niche in contemporary society.

One thing that might happen is the inflation of value in organic things – things clearly human, like more creative sentence structure, original metaphor, and distinct voice. I think there is a strong possibility of a reaction against cheaply written, algorithmic writing – whether computer-generated (as in the sports article quoted in the mediabistro article) or written by a sad and poorly paid writer (as in the 98% of sports articles that sound exactly like the computer generated one that are basically written by the thesaurus entries for “won” and “lost”. Not that such writing would cease to exist, but that it would fade into the background, especially amongst higher quality internet publications, the way low-quality websites do now: they contain information, but if we can tell nobody put any time into designing or laying out the website, nobody’s going to read it. I think that with the advent of more commonly computer-generated writing, readers are going to become more sensitive to what was written by a person and what is simply stark information.

As previously hard-to-get interviews and inside data (stuff stops being hard-to-get once it goes on the web) become more ubiquitous, the thing that is going to make a publication stand out in the market will be wit, voice, narrative skill, and opinion. IE, a good opinion article that you find yourself reading the whole way through will be distinctly more important to publishers and editors than an article that simply relays information that you can get from a variety of headlines.

News sources will also need to provide more background information that explains news stories. Again, the news about the latest events in Libya could be found throughout the internet, but the NYT offers topics pages on Libya (Wikipedia-esque), interactive maps of the conflicts as they unfold day-by-day, copious links to news analysis, and debates and predictions about what will happen next.

This, not cold journalism, is what is going to make or break internet news sources. Readers will be affected by how much they can interact with the information, how much they can learn in one place, and the level of trust they place in not the veracity of the information being relayed (that can be checked against any other news source instantaneously available to him/her) but the arrangement and explanation of that information.

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Some Frightening Things About Popular Technology

Posted on September 12, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Frederick Jameson said that “Contemporary people alternate between states of euphoria and anxiety.”

Euphoria, perhaps, because that is one natural reaction to being in the state of perpetual stimulation and entertainment and comfort (at least objectively) that we, the middle class, experience. Every minute, 48 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Any thought of YouTube, really, or Hulu or Grooveshark, makes one realize how kind of horrifyingly immense is the amount of entertainment available to anyone with an internet connection.

Cyborgs are probably going to start showing up soon. Hopefully Jean Luc Picard will be among them (if we can get a non-evil version).

You could do nothing but read, watch, and play on the internet for the rest of your life and there would still be more things you hadn’t seen or read. Information has always been that vast – for at least the last few centuries – but never before has it been so readily available almost all the time. With smartphones and future developments like SixthSense, access to the internet is going to start feeling like an extra limb – something without which you will feel nervous and clumsy and limited. For some people, this is already true – think about most people who’ve owned a smartphone for more than a few months, or anyone in a fantasy football league, or the fact that a SecondLife Shakespeare Company exists.

In The Shallows (read a good reflection on the book at The Millions), Nicholas Carr speculates and muses about the various psychological, social, and cultural effects of more completely immersing ourselves in an environment made entirely out of nonphysical stimulation.

As a member of the first generation to really experience internet access (if you count AOL 4.0 as internet access) for our whole lives, I look to the future of the human brain with interest and horror.

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Hurricane Occurs, Media Freaks Out About Itself

Posted on August 29, 2011 by | Leave a comment

As Hurricane Irene swept up the east coast, the President issued a warning for 10 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico), people stocked up on fresh water and condoms, and, importantly, vaguely famous country singers tweeted about it.

Another name ruined for at least another year.

But as the storm moved north and decreased in intensity, eventually being downgraded to a tropical storm, grumbling started among people who had spent two hours looking for bread, and New Yorkers especially began saying that the hurricane was gratuitously over-hyped. A New York Times article noted that, unlike the forewarnings, “Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.”

People are generally accepting a better-safe-than-sorry-but-I’m-still-kind-of-annoyed attitude, like the building superintendent who said of NYC’s mayor, “Bloomberg, he did O.K., but he made people crazy and spend a lot of money.”

And there was quite a bit of hype about Irene, mostly in the northern states, where hurricanes are less common and therefore more exciting for meteorologists, like this poor weatherguy who pretends to be buffeted around as people hang out on the boardwalk:

(The worse part is when the anchor says “There are, like, people sightseeing behind you. We can see them.” and he says “That’s because they are hardcore weather-watchers!“)

George Will even had nuggets of wisdom to dispense on the topic, saying “[Journalism] shouldn’t subtract from the nation’s understanding and it certainly shouldn’t contribute to the manufacture of synthetic hysteria that is so much a part of modern life. And I think we may have done so with regard to this tropical storm as it now seems to be.”

New Yorker Editorialist Adam Gopnik called ‘startling’ “the relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios—the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about.”

Many commentators, like editorialist Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast called out news stations for rabidly covering anything to do with the hurricane while failing to adequately cover the political events in Libya.

And of course, there have been deaths and significant losses in states all along the coast. Just because New York City didn’t collapse doesn’t mean that Irene wasn’t a significant disaster, and every time a columnist starts to talk about “sensationalism”, they are quickly reminded of this fact. But this just adds to the media’s kind of embarrassingly transparent public introspection that seems to be common now after significant unplanned events.

And just for fun, here’s that video of that reporter reporting while getting covered in sea gunk:

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