The End of Mass Media? Again?

Let me begin with a little excerpt from The Simpsons since it always seems to apply so well to real life:

BROADCASTER: On our panel is a porn star, a physics professor, a robotics engineer, a make-up artist, and...a print journalist?

NELSON: Ha ha! You’re medium is dying!


I don’t know if I listed the non-print journalist professions correctly, but what matters here is the idea that print is dying. And not just print; the CBC’s documentary The End, suggests even TV and radio might also be meeting their untimely demise – or timely; whatever way you look at it.

The truth is I would rather hold a book in my hands than read off a screen; then again, I don’t see the point of a computer without the internet. And I don’t listen to the radio. (When I worked in an office 2 summers ago, the same radio station was always on, and they played the same 10 songs 3 times a day every day. I’m not even exaggerating.)

What I think The End is getting at isn’t necessarily that radio, TV, and print are dying, but changing. The documentary called it an “evolution of choice.”

We don’t have to wait for our favourite shows or songs to come on, a decision made primarily by broadcasters and advertisers.

On that note, one of the most interesting things from the documentary is the idea of “conversation vs. consumption.”

Thanks to video on demand and TiVo, we can just fast-forward through commercials; with the internet, we can search for what we want, and make contributions to the content ourselves in however way we choose, which is usually honestly and without restraint.

I also want to mention something that was said aboutWikipedia - the idea that it’s “killing encyclopedias.” That, I’d have to disagree with because like radio, TV, and print, the same information will just move to another format.

Other complaints are that Wikipedia isn’t always accurate because anyone can add to it; that too I disagree with.

Wikipedia is a shared space. If someone makes something up and posts it, it'll get caught because everyone has access to it, making it more reliable in some ways.

Wikipedia’s contributors don’t have advertisers to please or government riding their butts to keep certain things out, like mainstream information-disseminating networks. It’s also free and easily-updated, whereas as the expensive traditional leather-bound versions are a little more difficult to add to.

Plus, finding what you want on Wikipedia is fast and can be done from anywhere with a cell phone – which apparently 815 million people bought last year. (As an added bonus, Wikipedia doesn't weigh a hundred pounds.)

The end of radio, TV, and print? Not likely. We’re more likely looking at the end of long attention spans. Hey, a bird!

Jon Stewart Gets Serious

Last night, I saw an episode of The Daily Show that really wasn’t that funny. (I think it originally aired on the 12th, but since this is Canada, maybe it was delayed?)

Jon Stewart let 'er tip on Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, calling out the host, the show, and the entire company for not doing what they’re supposed to be doing as, 1) a news network,and 2) a news network that markets itself as having trustworthy answers to people's financial worries.

The best part was that Cramer couldn’t do or say anything about it other than shrug his shoulders and act like a suck-up. So I guess it was funny in an I-don’t-believe-this-is-actually-happening kind of way.





I can see the headlines now:

“Money Matters Fails: Jon Stewart Takes Down Another Mainstream News Program”


Go here to watch the full episode: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

YouTube, ITube, WeAllTube: Response to An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

Whenever I tell people I’m in MIT (Media, Information, and Technoculture), they always ask, “What do you do? Watch movies in class?” And when I say, “yeah, sometimes,” they give me this disappoint head shake, as if that’s nothing. As if what we’re doing doesn’t matter, or is so easy and fun that it’s completely pointless.

This is not the case. At all.

As Marshall McLuhan said (and I think this quote might actually be the MIT catchphrase), “The medium is the message.” The reason we watch movies, TV shows, news broadcasts, and YouTube in class, is because everyone does it. Because media affects us and plays such a major part of everyday life, us MIT-ers are just trying to find out the why and how.

In the YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” there was one line in particular that caught my attention: “When media change, human relationships change.” So why shouldn’t it be studied?

Without TV, the internet, and cell phones, we probably wouldn’t be alone as much. We might not even feel the need to be as self-expressive, to set ourselves aside form the anonymous mass. Being separated/fragmented individuals, it’s obvious we want a solid community. It just so happens that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere is it.



People were offended and hurt when lonelygirl15, for example, was revealed to be fake, resulting in a YouTube “authenticity crisis.” You wouldn’t want your friends or family to lie to you, so why is it any different when your online friends (people you trust and talk to and listen to) aren’t who you thought they were? It brings the loneliness back, and people don’t like that feeling. No one likes to be played like that.

Sometimes...no, every time I YouTube I find the rudest comments (and some I can’t even read because apparently spelling and grammar are a thing of the past). I almost want to tell them to shut the F up if they’re going to be so negative, but then it really wouldn’t be YouTube.

The anonymity of the “invisible audience” is what makes YouTube a place for and of authenticity; if everyone knew it was really YOU speaking, you might not say what you really think. You might not even bother to say anything.

Newspapers, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the Internet have all changed the way we work, interact, think, and basically live. But there’s one scenario that can change everything, and I mean, everything: a power outage.

Imagine you couldn’t watch TV, check your email, drive, buy groceries, check your email again, text your BFF, cook. Our world as we know it would fall in on itself; without our technology and our media, we’d be completely lost and probably very lonely.

Then again, it might mean we’d start connecting more physically, say, having a conversation with someone while in the same room. Not that we don’t do that now, but now we have a choice not to.

See? There's more to MIT than just “watching movies.”

Now watch this movie.

Ad-Less, Get More

Do you ever tire of opening the newest issue of your favourite magazine only to have to flip through 30 pages of ads just to get to the index?

Do you ever start reading a captivating article, turn the page and – UGH – it’s gone, replaced by some perfectly perfected supermodel you hope is simply the result of extensive airbrushing?

I know I do.


In my feeble quest to find alternative ad-free magazines, I made a rather shocking discovery: there are a lot of them. (So, on second thought, I guess it wasn’t really that feeble of an attempt.)

The slightly higher cost aside, there's an ad-less magazine for almost every audience out there, audiences that are currently being targeted and captured by the mainstream – and even ones that aren’t.

There are magazines for Christians, and divers, and poetry writers...And butchers, and bakers, and candlestick-makers. Okay, that last one was a joke (as far as I know); it just seemed to fit so well.


If you want to break free from the pressure to BUY! BUY! BUY! here are some alternatives:

- for Christians – Geez

- for Scuba Divers – In-Depth

- for Feminists – Bitch

- for Gardeners – Garden Gate

- for Science-Fans – Greater Good

- for Literary-Lovers – The Sun

- for Design and Photography Buffs – U&I

- for Political Junkies/ Environmentalists/ Culture Critics – Briarpatch; Adbusters; could also include Bitch

- for those who Like to Laugh – The Funny Times

- for a Little Bit of Everything – YES!


…and one last thing for Bloggers – Ad-Free Blog

If none of these sound like you, check out NewPages.com.

Blogging, and Linking, and Tags, Oh My!

Have you ever heard the expression, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”?

Yeah, I guess that saying has a ring of truth to it, and as most of those wise old sayings go, they can be applied to just about everything. For example, just replace “old dog” with “journalism,” and “can’t” with “can,” and what do you get? BLOGS!

I’ve been aware of these things called “blogs” for a while, read them occasionally, and wrote for them never. Now my first one is just one among millions – 70 million according to The State of the Live Web – so it’s hard to imagine that anyone would find mine in the vast sea of civic journalism and actually read it. Then again, Perez Hilton did pretty well for himself, as did Arianna Huffington.

But with a massive jump of 40 million new blogs in less than a year, I have to wonder why so many people are hopping on the blog-wagon. Being one of those people, here are some of my own reasons:

• Need for personal expression
• Desire to know, understand, and connect with others
• Distrust of the mainstream media
• Love of writing
• Had to find out what all the fuss is about

Another motive for the blog craze could be out of a need to understand and deal with real-life issues. Techorati suggests this through its graph of Daily Posting Volume, which shows spikes in the amount of postings during such events as the 2004 US election, Hurricane Katrina, the Israel/Hezbollah conflict, and the time now-V.P. Biden called Obama “clean.” (Isn’t it strange that most of those are US-based?)



But if you think about it, the growing popularity of blogs can also help explain the increase in tagging and the trend towards folksonomy.

Folk (common people) and taxonomy (categorization system) collide in this modern and fun-to-say word. And just as categorizing everything and everyone – from gender, to religion, to political leanings, to food groups, to movie genres – helps us organize and better understand our world, so do blogs. Blogging and tagging allow us to search, link, share, debate, connect, and learn.

Their popularity has also given the mainstream news media some unexpected competition, even making it feel threatened enough that they had to incorporate our medium into theirs.

If you ask me – although, I guess if you’re reading this you want to know what I think – this brand of news, ie., blogging, is the most reliable news we have (for the moment anyway).

Bloggers don’t hide under journalism’s guise of “objectivity;” they tell it like it is and as it ought to be. But right or wrong, left or right, bloggers’/our ideas are flowing, leaving marks on a world we live, learn, and write about.

New tricks indeed!



One last relevant, timeless (yet slightly updated) saying:

“The blog is mightier than the Military-Industrial-Media Complex.”

Nas-ty Message to FOX

“Subtle” doesn’t quite describe rapper Nas’s support for Barack Obama, or his views on FOX News’ treatment of the President (not to mention African Americans in general).

After FOX News’ referred to the First Lady as “Obama’s baby mama,” and made other hideous remarks about the couple, rapper Nas said what everyone with an ounce of sense is already thinking:

“Fox poisons the country with racist propaganda and tries to call it news.” (USA Today.)

While FOX normally labels him as another violent gangster rapper, it inspired the lyrics and video for his song, “Sly Fox.”

Here’s just a sample of what it’s all about:

They say I'm all about murder-murder and kill-kill
But what about Grindhouse and Kill Bill?
What about Cheney and Halliburton?
The backdoor deals
On oil fields
How's Nas the most violent person?
…Only Fox that I love is the red one
Only black man that Fox loves is in jail or a dead one

Make sure you watch/listen until the end, when the music fades and you’re left with a FOX News clip. The interviewee’s words are the last ones you hear, but they resonate even after the video’s over:

“He’s not the worst rapper around, but some of his lyrics are very violent and they really do have a point here.”

Beautiful!

That’s FOXed Up

As the famous X-Files tagline states: “The truth is out there.” There’s just one question: How do we go about finding it? The obvious answer should be through research and investigation. But when the sources of information – who have the tools, means, and responsibility to research and investigate – fail to disclose the truth, what then?

(Note: Don’t be surprised when X-Files references occasionally pop up. It’s bound to happen from time to time.)

Before I take a crack at answering that, maybe I should clarify. We’re not (usually) outright lied to by the mainstream news media, but given a selected version of the truth. But as the documentary OUTFOXED shows, sometimes lying is part of the gig.

The stories we’re told are not only fictitious at times, but suggest that “objectivity” – in other words, what journalism is supposed to be – is also a lie. When journalists can’t do their job, what does that mean for democracy?

I don’t care if FOX is a conservative, Republican, Bush-idolizing news source, but if they’re going to be that obvious, they should just admit it. Maybe journalism had it right when partisan presses were the norm. At least then you knew when you were getting the facts and when you were getting commentary.

When Bill O’Reilly – shudder – tells his left-wing, anti-war, anti-Bush guests to “shut up,” how can FOX news morally, legally, logically, consider itself “fair and balanced”? What’s even more amazing is that anyone watching the show can think it is.

However, to be fair and balanced, the same can be said about the more recent coverage of Barack Obama and John McCain. I can’t think of one news channel – besides FOX, of course – that regularly cast Obama in a negative light. On the other hand, McCain tended to be the subject of ridicule, if not for his relationship with Bush, then for his incessant references to Joe the Plumber, and major attitude shift throughout the campaign - oh, I almost forgot, Sarah Palin too.

I’m not saying those criticisms weren’t founded – especially regarding Joe – but it was clear that neither candidate received equal coverage.


To get the opposing view, and to see a neat bar graph comparing Obama and McCain coverage, visit Donald Douglas’s blog. (Notice that he subscribes to the FOX newswire.)