"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-14 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.Program scripts from week of February 3, 2014
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Super Media
Normally I like to do a little wrap up of the Super Bowl in the week that follows. Unfortunately for me I will have to be on the road for the first of the week so I won’t have the chance to do that. So as I record this show the day BEFORE the big game I thought I’d take a look at what is without argument the single biggest media event of the year in the United States.
Now you may be under the impression that this was a sports event. You know teams from Seattle and Denver playing the championship game of the most popular sport in our nation. Well let’s be honest, the game itself just isn’t that a big deal. I know that there are a lot, and I mean a LOT, of people who pay little to no attention to football during the regular season and playoffs who will suddenly show up for the Super Bowl. It’s not because the quality of the play jumps up for this game.
No it’s the media aspects that make the difference. Take a look at the first Super Bowl, which, parenthetically wasn’t even called the Super Bowl. That didn’t happen till the third one. In 1967 that first AFL-NFL Championship Game wasn’t nearly the show it is today. It was broadcast on both CBS and NBC, it is the only one of the series that wasn’t a sell out and a 30 second ad sold for only forty two thousand dollars. Oh and the half time show? The marching bands from the Universities of Arizona and Grambling.
Since then the commercials have gotten outrageously expensive and sometimes astoundingly creative. While last year’s game actually gave you a reason to watch more often than not the commercials are a lot more interesting than the football. As for the half time shows they have grown progressively more complex. Right up to ten years ago when the show was so complicated that the rehersal ran more than four hours long. Following some changes required by the league to the show two of the performers decided to add a little risque twist to the show. When Justin Timberlake pulled off a little more of Janet Jackson’s costume than expected we all learned the phrase “Wardrobe Malfunction” and the FCC proceeded to lose its marbles. All over something that took something like nine sixteenths of a second.
It may not be a great game but it’s likely to be the most watched television broadcast of the year (it has been recently) and the second largest watched event in the world (after the World Cup).
Yeah, it’s really about the media. And now we can all get on with our lives for another year.
Super Media
I’m not talking about the ones we normally think about. On the other side of the issue there are problems as well. First of all there’s the fact that big data is, well, big. Enormous. Gigantic. Elephantine. In fact we may need to come up with a whole new word just to describe it. If you’re someone trying to make some sense out of all of this you completely understand the image of trying to drink from a firehose.
There is so much data being generated every day by millions of millions of people that most systems just can’t keep up. You need specialized programs to sort through it all that have some kind of method of sifting the important stuff from the stuff most of us generate. Then you need people who are accustomed to dealing with this massive weight of information. Here’s the problem. The programs only sort of exist and there aren’t nearly enough of the people to deal with the output of the programs we have at the moment.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this problem. Back in the early days of the Cold War the United States began to intercept massive amounts of Soviet coded information. We lacked the computers, the codebreakers and the time to deal with the massive amount of information that poured in. Decades later millions of pages of information still hadn’t been processed.
So what’s likely to happen with the problems of big data in the 21st Century?
The software will get better, the computers will get faster and more people will begin to specialize in its analysis. The other curious side effect is that big data users will begin to change how they gather the information. Some experts are saying that rather than gathering EVERYTHING they will have us do some of the filtering based on how we’re asked to share our information.
Meanwhile some of us will get more careful how our information is shared. Most people won’t understand the issues or the problems. For those people big data will remain just too big to comprehend.
RIP Pete Seeger
I have very mixed feelings about this next topic. I am aware that technology marches on and the old must make way for the new. I’m also aware that we’ve been through this same shift in several other areas of the media and have survived, even thrived in many ways. But this is different.
The movies are moving away film. Most of us don’t even think about it but when we go to the movies we are watching them presented in the same way they’ve been presented for decades. Our parents watched them pretty much the same way and even our grandparents would recognize the basic technology. It’s called 35 millimeter motion picture film. The same basic technology that was the basis of still photography for more than a century. Expose the film, develop the negative then create the positive print. Pretty straightforward.
Of course film in the still photography world is largely a thing of the past. I’ve been a hobby photographer since the 1970s and it’s been years since the last roll of film passed through my camera. I still love photography and have enjoyed learning about digital imaging. We went through a similar challenge when we moved away from vinyl for music recording to digital.
But I still have reservations about this shift. First of all is the visual difference between film and digital recording. Too often it’s easy to spot the video versus the film. It looks different and I’m not sure its an improvement.
I understand the business aspects of this decision. Paramount is leading the way announcing the current “Wolf of Wall Street” is the first wide release movie to come ONLY in digital form. There’s a huge savings on creating prints and physically shipping them worldwide. Now they can be delivered electronically or by satellite.
Beyond my artistic concerns are the worries of the archival community. There are advantages to having a negative to preserve. Kept at a proper temperature and humidity an old fashion negative will last for centuries. With digital formats changing seemingly every decade or less the cost of trying to keep a master library could quickly become astronomical. Because early movies weren’t considered worth preserving there is at least a decade of the early days of the movies we have completely lost.
We need to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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