media galaxy
Recently assembled cultural artifacts
I was at a conference called NewsFoo this past weekend. In sessions and in conversations throughout the event, folks shared a number of impressive or memorable cultural artifacts they’d encountered; I wrote down as many as I could. I often stupidly neglected to note who pointed out what. Where I’ve remembered the source, I’ve included her. Thanks to everyone who shared!
First, some British psychedelia from Alastair Dant and Nicola Twilley — a show called “The Magic Roundabout” that was apparently pretty fantastic:
The Cave, The Corps, The League
I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS
I’m going to jump in the middle of Robin and Gavin’s exchange on the DC Comics reboot, even though I explicitly told both of them that I didn’t want to read about it and had nothing to say about any of it, because some things Robin just wrote sparked some ideas that I want to follow here.
Today, you don’t go work at Marvel and DC because of what they are; you go because of what they have. It’s almost like a natural resource. Superman and Batman are potent substances. They have this incredible innate energy, this incredible mythic density, built up over decades. They really are like petroleum—a bright eon of individual organic contributions all compressed into this powerful stuff that we can now burn for light, for entertainment, for money…
How do you weigh the opportunity to work on an old titan like Superman against the opportunity to create something wholly new, and to potentially profit from that creation? Is it only sentimental or emotional value that draws an artist to the former—or is there more?…
Maybe what we’re talking about here is the difference between being an entrepreneur and being a custodian. We tend to think of artists as entrepreneurs, right?—inventors, trailblazers, risk-takers. To make meaningful art is often simply to try something new.
Now before I start, I want to stipulate a few things. First, I want to take seriously Robin’s two primary arguments in his post:
- “I want to talk not about Superman’s universe, but our own—because I think this strategy says something interesting about creative economics today.” Let’s call this the explicit argument.
- Comic books themselves, as content, not just the strategies of their publishers and artists, have something to say about this. Let’s call this the implicit argument.
And I want to add a third point, that I’ll call the unconscious argument. It’s something I don’t think Robin necessarily intended, but which is entailed in the way he formulates the problem:
Everywhere in Robin’s post where he writes “artists,” you can substitute “journalists”—and probably many other nodes in creative economies, broadly construed.
It’s not the echo, it’s the chamber
Eli Pariser’s op-ed in the New York Times, “When the Internet Thinks It Knows You”:
Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.
The Times had run an earlier story on Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. It takes the easiest possible reading of this idea, applying it to media choices and political disagreement:
If you want to test your own views on personalization, you could try a party trick Mr. Pariser demonstrated earlier this year during a talk at the TED conference: ask some friends to simultaneously search Google for a controversial term like gun control or abortion. Then compare results…
With television, people can limit their exposure to dissenting opinions simply by flipping the channel, to, say, Fox from MSNBC. And, of course, viewers are aware they’re actively choosing shows. The concern with personalization algorithms is that many consumers don’t understand, or may not even be aware of, the filtering methodology.
Reading Pariser’s op-ed, though, I got the sense that he’s not nearly as concerned about narrowing of opinions on the web as he is about the narrowing of interests.
“[I]f algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see,” he writes, “we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow ‘relevance.’ They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye.”
If you spend much time on the Internet, you know that there’s clearly no shortage of disagreement. But it’s more likely that you spend most of your time and energy disagreeing with people who care deeply about the same things about which you already care deeply.
You’ll argue about whether LeBron James or Derrick Rose should have won the MVP, whether or not Mitt Romney has a shot in the Iowa caucuses, or why Apple decided to pre-release information about the WWDC keynote.
We dive deeply into a range of pre-defined topics, tied to our professions, hobbies, needs, and histories, and sharpen our swords with opponents who do the same.
And on the margins, maybe that’s okay. Mass culture throws a whole lot of stuff at its audience that I, like you, have no intrinsic interest in. The time, energy, and cognitive surplus we once devoted to those things we used to consume only because “they were on” are all much better put to use tackling subjects we actually care about.
But it does mean that we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally.
More to the point: those of us who produce and share content that other people read — and at this point, that’s almost all of us — need to trust that our readers are lateral movers too, and encourage them to do so.
I’m reminded of this blog post from last year, predicting the death of the niche blog and the rise of the lens blog. The lens blog can tackle any subject, but always from the point of view of a subset of enthusiasms or perspectives that find clever ways to find the same in the different, and vice versa.
Hyper-specialization, like information overload, is an old, old problem. But exactly for that reason, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up as a potential problem with our new tools and new media, too.
In short, if you’re really worried about search engines or social media overfiltering what you see, worry less about your reading being one-sided and more about it being one-dimensional.
(For more smart takes on Pariser’s argument, see also Mat Ingram at GigaOm, Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing)
Snark by Snarkwest: Unexpected Non-Fiction Storytelling
Update: Dropped in the wrong embed code. I wondered why it was so quiet! Fixed.
Must not sleep. Must liveblog Ze Frank.
You’ll barely regret this
Another Storify experiment, this time about my so-far 71%-successful effort to lobby for followers on Twitter.
Here’s another analogy
Publishers trying to sell ad space inside their books is like the producers of a TV show selling the commercials that air during the show, or the director of a film picking the previews that appear before the movie starts.
I mean, maybe there are some interesting, creative things you could do with that on a case-by-case basis, that would really add something to the total experience. And product placement (in books, TV, or movies) is something else altogether, because it needs to be incorporated into the narrative flow. But there’s a reason why we have TV networks, movie studios, and theater programmers. They’re really good at these things. In fact, some of them, like Nick Jr, are really good at marketing and incorporating ads in books and DVDs, too. So are Apple and Amazon. People on the creative side aren’t. (And yes, I’m including book publishers in the “creative” camp.)
If anything, even as traditional broadcast television might be beginning a slow decline, we’re seeing the metastasis of the television network model. Netflix, particularly since Watch Instantly, is more like HBO than it’s like Blockbuster. People talk about it the same way; “ooh, did you see that they’re showing all three Die Hards on Netflix?” Someone pointed out recently that Netflix has started producing their own original content. Zach Galifinakis had a comedy special released on DVD exclusively to Netflix. You could say the same thing about Hulu, which is trying to figure out whether it should be Showtime or Fox.
Amazon and Apple are like TV networks too, and not just for video. They’re the channels you tune to to get what you want. The difference is that in the digital age, content frequently appears in more than one place. But 1) that’s usually NOT true for what Apple sells, and Amazon’s been pushing for more exclusive deals too.
Twitter, too, isn’t microblogging or an archive of content — it’s a broadcast channel that carries its own water-cooler. And in blogs, Gawker (which already actually is a media network, including Gawker TV) is redesigning itself for bigger screens. highlighting “must-see” content to catch casual drop-in readers, a synthesis of blogs, magazines, and television
So that’s the new world: no more dot-coms, no more blogs, no more revolutionary retailers.* Instead, it’s all channels. We TiVo a handful of favorites and let ourselves flick through the rest.
* Obviously, all of these things will continue to exist and thrive. It’s just these are no longer the only metaphors/terms of art we have to talk about these emerging powers.
Wicked Breitbart
I realized today that the entire Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod/Obama administration scandal, and arguably the entire Tea Party/conservative/media pundit civil-liberties and “reverse racism grievance industry” can be explained in this sketch about the heavy metal band Wicked Sceptor from the Mr Show with Bob and David episode “Show Me Your Weenis!”:
“Guys, you gotta see this tape. It’s a black official being TOTALLY racist in front of the NAACP!” A guy gets a tape from some random college student the Underground Young Republican Tape Railroad, dubbed so often it’s practically worthless, that doesn’t really show what it’s supposed to. But the guy — and I don’t know if this recipient is Andrew Breitbart, or if Breitbart’s the guy from the Underground Tape Railroad and cable news is the recipient — says “No shit?”, watches it anyway, and decides to cynically pass it off as what it’s claimed to be.
After all — you’ve already paid for the tape, what are you going to do, not show it to your friends? Even if it isn’t what it says it is, you can get some entertainment out of debating whether or not the tape really shows what it says it does. The elephants [get it?] aren’t really fucking, but who cares? You can have a “conversation on race,” one that’s exactly as serious and informed as the conversation college kids have sitting on a couch watching a viral video together.
Meanwhile, the guys in charge watch a little bit of the tape and freak out. Every blogger in the country is downloading this! Tour’s cancelled, career’s over.
Okay, now the metaphor shifts. Now the band, Wicked Sceptor, are actually the Bush-era conservatives who have suddenly turned around to see racism, erosion of civil liberties, economic disaster, failing wars, a man-made ecological disaster on the gulf coast, a bottomless budget deficit, and the spectre (scepter) of a totalitarian regime everywhere they look.
They’re watching two videotapes, one of the years when conservatives were in power, and all of those things were happening, and another of the lunatic, demagogue fringe that’s gradually defining the institutional and ideological center of the Republican party, engaging in all manner of incompetence, parodic levels of racism, making jokes about eating ribs and witch doctors and anchor babies and the NAACP and Obama secretly wanting black people to stay poor and stupid and they’re saying, what’s the big deal? It’s just a party tape.
| The Colbert Report | Mon — Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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Then we say to the conservatives, “guys, I’m gonna take your tape out, and I want you to do me a favor and watch this OTHER tape of the Democrats being racists and fascists and acting hateful.” Meanwhile, we’re actually taking the same tape, putting it behind our backs, and putting it in the VCR.
And when they see it, they’re horrified. Outraged. Disgusted. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.
And we scream, “That’s you!!” And they laugh and dance around and sing, “alll-rii-iight!”
Then someone tries to be reasonable. Tries to break it down and explain the complexities and the nuances of the situation, and how we’re all, all of us, implicated in the horrible history of our country, its racism and wars and intolerance and political dysfunction and neglect of the sick and the poor and its energy addictions and terrible media culture and general short-sighted willingness, even eagerness, to murder the future to pay the interest on the present.
And they say, “Racist!”
Meanwhile, Shirley Sherrod says, fuck it. I’ll go to Fire Island.
Ta-Nehisi sums it up:
It’s always a marvel to me to watch this guy [Colbert] go in on somebody. As much as I love Stewart, Colbert is act is for the ages. He is channeling all of our simmering left-wing anger and refracting it through the mask. From a black perspective, it is very familiar–but I need to re-read Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to tell you specifically why.
A few years back, he sliced up D’Nesh Dsouza so bad, that I don’t think he knew he was bleeding until a week later. And now, here he is according Laura Ingraham all the respect that she so richly deserves. That this woman can satirize Michelle Obama for eating ribs all day, and when wonder why anyone would think she was racist is vexing. I actually regret that–the anger, I mean. Frustration with these people, so often, feels useless. And then you see it turned into something like this, and you understand that rage has its purposes.
And:
We had a few years, post-9/11. where it seemed like this sort of language disappeared–at least as it related to black people. Now we’re back to situation where the most publicized political movement of our time believes, that charges of racism have destroyed “whole cities,” that the NAACP is as bad as the Klan and is perpetrating “racial terror,” that white people should have the right to say nigger, that the amendment that granted African-Americans citizenship should be repealed, and that “white America” needs to “see black people condemning the NAACP.”
It’s worth remembering that this is the Tea Party’s reply to charges of racist elements in their ranks. It feels like something out of 1986.
See also here, here, and here.
And then you have to read the final thought.
What’s next for TV?
In a post yesterday, I offhandedly referred to “giving up TV.” But like giving up Facebook, very few of us have actually given up TV. What’s happened instead is that (like with Facebook), TV has become a problem.
Sure — historically, TV has probably lost whatever monopoly it had on our total cognitive-surplus, staring-at-screen time. It also may have lost a fair degree of its cognitive priority. For instance, when I recently needed to cut some money from my monthly household budget, I dropped my cable TV, switched the internet to DSL, and kept my phone’s data plan — not the decision I would have made three years ago.
But I probably watch more TV than ever now. It’s just coming in the form of DVDs, video games and Netflix streaming on my Wii, and catching up via Hulu, The Daily Show, etc. on my computer. But — wait. See what I just did there? I just ran together everything I do on the big, stationary screen that sits in my living room (called a television) and the short-to-medium form video originally broadcast for that screen, but which I can’t watch there (called television). And both big, stationary screens that we watch from 6–10 feet away and short-to-medium form broadcast video seem to have a pretty firm lock on our psyches and social practice. They’re powerful, versatile, and fun.
One of the things I loved from the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates joint appearance at D5 a few years ago — a really illuminating talk that I periodically return to, that holds up well and has new resonances now — is how they analyze the natural form factors for digital media. And it sort of divides pretty cleanly, with Jobs (big hit then: iPhone) focusing more on smaller forms and Gates (big hit then: XBox) on bigger ones. Gates, I think, doesn’t get enough credit for his vision here:
Walt: What’s your device in five years that you rely on the most?
Bill: I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.
Kara: Light.
Bill: Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you’ll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there’s navigation computers, there’s media, there’s phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there, but then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there’s quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-size device. But I think those are natural form factors and that we’ll have the evolution of the portable machine. And the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary–that is, if you own one, you’re more likely to own the other.
Kara: And then at home, you’d have a setup that they all plug into?
Bill: Well, home, you’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things.
That idea of “the 10-foot experience” is really powerful to me — even though my living room and TV set are clearly a lot smaller than Bill Gates’s. And the whole point of it is that it’s heterogeneous and versatile — not just in terms of the kinds of machines and platforms that run on them, but in terms of the use of the space itself.
And here’s Jobs, equally visionary, if not more so. (Apologies again for the long blockquote, I like the banter.)
Walt: So what’s your five-year outlook at the devices you’ll carry?
Steve: You know, it’s interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient because, as Bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years.
Walt: And here when you’re saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows PCs?
Steve: I mean, personal computer in general.
Walt: Yeah, OK.
Steve: And, you know, there was the age of productivity, if you will, you know, the spreadsheets and word processors and that kind of got the whole industry moving. And it kind of plateaued for a while and was getting a little stale and then the Internet came along and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet, browsers came along, and it was this whole Internet age that came along, access to the Internet. And then some number of years ago, you could start to see that the PC that was taken for granted, things had kind of plateaued a little bit, innovation-wise, at least. And then I think this whole notion of the PC–we called it the digital hub, but you can call it anything you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house, started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff and it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life.
And you can sort of see that there’s something starting again. It’s not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree.
So I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that’ll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one.
But then there’s an explosion that’s starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them. There’s a lot of things that are not…
Walt: You can get into trouble for using that term. I want you to know that.
Steve: What?
Walt: I’m kidding. Post-PC devices.
Steve: Why?
Walt: People write letters to the editor, they complain about it. Anyway, go ahead.
Steve: Okay. Well, anyway, I think there’s just a category of devices that aren’t as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they’re phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we’re going to see lots of them.
Kara: Give me an example of what that would be.
Steve: Well, an iPod as a post-PC…
Kara: Well, yeah.
Steve: A phone as a post-PC device.
Walt: Is the iPhone and some of these other smart phones–and I know you believe that the iPhone is much better than these other smart phones at the moment, but are these things–aren’t they really just computers in a different form factor? I mean, when we use the word phone, it sounds like…
Steve: We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter. It’s, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what’s inside it anymore?
And that sort of seems to be where we stand right now when it comes to TV: caught between all of the different services and hardware devices competing for that 10-foot experience and the emergent category of these post-PC, video-capable handheld devices — tablets, phones, game consoles, plus the screen of your laptop/desktop PC in the middle.
There are a couple of things from Jobs’s appearance at this year’s conference, D8, that follow up on this exchange. The first, which was better publicized, was Jobs’s comparison of post-PCs like the iPhone and iPad and traditional laptop and desktop PCs to cars and trucks, respectively. The analogy being — just as in the early 1900s, most cars were initially trucks, then smaller cars emerged that were better tailored for urban and suburban living, smaller, post-PC devices like the iPad weren’t going to eliminate traditional PCs, but would gradually replace them as the dominant form of consumer computing. It’s a powerful, provocative idea; 2007 Jobs was clearly more skeptical towards it, more inclined to think that the PC was going to morph into something else.
The other is Jobs’s discussion of the balkanization of the television business — that is, the business of getting content to those screens, not the content providers as such: the multiplicity of settop boxes and lack of genuinely national providers or international standards that prevented any company, from Apple to Google to TiVo, however technologically sophisticated, from rolling out a clear go-to-market strategy. This, I think, does seem to explain why, despite all of the local innovations in DVRs, net-connected game consoles, streaming content, and so forth, TV still seems to be forever putting the pieces together.
Last, finally, is the whole consumption/production imbroglio that similarly washed over the iPad. Is the TV space “merely” a space for consumption? Is that a bad thing? Or could there be new/emergent ways to create/contribute/share/connect there, too?
What do you think? What’s next for TV?

