Sandusky-Register-theviewfromthephlipside: Social media

Showing posts with label Social media. Show all posts

Friday, March 8, 2013

Why Swimsuits?, Social Death and Variety Fades

This is one of those oddball stories that just feels like it needs to be shared. Another iconic print publication has found itself on the ropes and is downsizing and moving more emphasis to the online publishing. In this case it’s a publication that you have probably never held in your hand but you may have seen several times. What is it? It’s Variety magazine.

Variety may not always have been the top dog in reporting on Hollywood but it’s hard to imagine that any of its competitors are better known outside the movie capital. Over the years it has been a favorite device in the movies for quickly moving the plot forward in movies about the stage or screen. You may remember them in the movie “White Christmas” for example. The other reason to use Variety headlines is that Variety was known for its snappy headline style often involving what was called “slanguage”. Thus you got “Sticks Nix Hick Pix” in 1935 over a story about how rural audiences did not like pictures about rural themes and “Good Book Books Boffo Biz” in 2004 over a story about the box office success of “The Passion of the Christ”.

Variety began as a vaudeville magazine back in 1905 published in New York City. In 1933 they added “Daily Variety” which was headquartered in Los Angeles. It probably published the very first movie review in 1907. That “slanguage” of Variety’s helped to popularize words like “sitcom”, “sex appeal” and “striptease”. Pretty good for a magazine aimed at a pretty focused market.

In the end all the usual problems arose. The magazines and associated web sites were sold late last year to the Penske Media Corporation for about 25 million dollars. To try and keep the icon ticking Penske announced they are ending the Daily Variety, going back to just being a weekly (that’s how the magazine started) and putting more emphasis on the online reporting. In an interesting twist they also announced that they will eliminate the paywall at Variety.com. The big question now is how will they replace the income after losing both the daily subscription and sales PLUS the paywall income too. Penske also owns one of Variety’s biggest online competitors “Deadline.com”.

One way or the other it’s the end of the line for an American icon. We can only hope that they came up with an appropriately pithy headline for their last daily edition.

Social Death

Have you ever opened up your favorite social media site and found that one of your friends there was threatening to quit? Just walk away from the whole deal and never post again and close their account and they’re serious this time? Happens to me a couple times each year. They almost never go through with it but something has just made the experience less than warm and fuzzy for them and they think about quitting. Most of the time you just shrug it off or maybe even laugh it off. I’m sure that’s what the staff and owners of the social network do.

Turns out it’s actually something they need to pay a little more attention to if they know what’s good for them.

A second question (and yes it’s related to the first I promise) do you remember the web site Friendster? Friendster is probably the granddad of the modern social media. It was founded the year before MySpace and two years before Facebook. At its height it boasted 100 million users and snubbed a thirty million dollar buyout offer from Google. And in 2009 it basically curled up and died. Friendster still exists but as a gaming platform.

So what happened? According to a group from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich what basically happened was it simply become too much of a hassle for its users and they left. The group did what is being called a digital autopsy. The results showed that following some technical problems and an unpopular re-design users simply decided it was more trouble than it was worth and left.

Now here’s where your friends come in. YOU may think that the network is just fine. But if enough of your friends leave the study shows that you will leave too. That’s exactly what happened to Friendster. A critical mass of users left, their friends left with them and suddenly you have social media death spiral. These are SOCIAL networks. If your social group doesn’t hang out there any more why would you?

It’s a lesson that current social networks need to heed. The problem as I see it is that the folks designing a lot of this are technophiles who really want to jazz the site up with some nifty new whiz bang. Most of the users simply want the darn thing to work they way they expect it to work. Most of us don’t care if our social network is the latest word in programming. If it makes the experience even slightly more difficult it may be a tiny step in the direction of digital death. Something Facebook should probably keep in mind.

Why Swimsuits?

I have no doubt that this topic is going to get me a fair amount of disbelief and abuse from my fellow men. In fact I expect at least a few of them to hold that I am in fact betraying my gender by taking the position that I am. I will in fact even admit to a small amount of conflict within my own person about this issue. With all that said I’m still not sure I can honestly answer this question:

Why is there an annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue?

Let’s start by acknowledging the purely business argument in favor. It sells a ton of issues and makes lots of money. It is popular enough that there are SI Swimsuit calendars and videos and TV programs. It’s a money maker. I am willing to stipulate all of that.

But I still keep coming around to the original question. Sports Illustrated is a SPORTS magazine. So why an annual issue that has become quite simply about parading beautiful young women (and they are beautiful and yes I like looking at beautiful women, in photos or in person) in as little clothing as you can? The new thing for this issue is to in fact have the women in no clothing and to substitute body paint for the clothes.

And this is sport related how?

Back in 1964 when the first swimsuit issue came out they at least tried. The headline on the cover of that issue read “A Skin Diver’s Guide to the Caribbean”. In very short order this predominantly male read magazine (out of the 23 million readers each week over 18 million are men) staked out its claim to women’s fashion? Am I reading that right? Today there isn’t even an attempt to pretend that this is anything other than what it is. An appeal to the prurient interests of the male readers. It has nothing to do with sports and has very little to do with women’s fashion. It also has little to do with a mature view of women in general. The Swimsuit issue has its roots firmly in the sweaty palmed, furtive sniggering of adolescent boys trying to sneak a peek down a girl’s blouse.

Jumping back to the financial arguments it should probably be noted that SI turning a profit for the first time and that first swimsuit issue occur within a year of each other. Take that for what it’s worth.

Call me a traitor to my gender but there’s just not much of defensible rationale for this issue from this magazine.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, February 1, 2013

Rant on Phones, Corman at Sundance, Radio and Social Media

I need to offer a tip of the hat to my friend and former co-worker Julia Ciesla-Hanley for tipping me to this story. She linked to the blog post by Social Media Strategist Lori Lewis on her Facebook page. It made fascinating reading for someone with a background in radio who is now exploring the world of Internet communications.

Fascinating in a sort of traffic accident/train wreck kind of way.

Along with print radio has taken the greatest beating from our new digital age. Streaming music services like Pandora, Spotify, Slacker Radio and last.fm have taken the core of the music radio industry (the music) and stripped away all those things that so many listeners find annoying (commercials, repetitive playlists and yes, bad disc jockeys). What’s left is a station that theoretically plays only songs you like (well maybe) and nothing else. And that’s pretty attractive.

What’s really astounding is how resistant to fighting back radio can be. Here’s where the blog post from Lori Lewis comes in. She notes the big news in the industry over the last couple weeks has been the return of a big time Country station to the New York City market. When she checked out their website she saw the listed both a Facebook page and Twitter feed. Since she’s a social media specialist she checked them out. And discovered that neither one of them existed. In fact the Twitter handle they publicized turned not to have been claimed yet. So Lewis grabbed it. This a major move from one of the biggest broadcast companies in the nation, Cumulus. And no one bothered to actually create the social media presence that they were promoting.

How many different kinds of stupid do you have to be to pull that off? For my brothers and sisters still toiling in the radio industry salt mines here’s the fundamentals. At bare minimum you MUST have a web page where you stream your station, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. It is vital if you’re going to survive the next decade.

Otherwise an entire industry is going to end up asking if you want fries with that.

Corman at Sundance

This is one of those stories that you end up scratching your head wondering how it could possibly be true. For the first time ever independent film making icon Roger Corman appeared at the Sundance Film Festival which ended this past weekend.
Sundance is one of the largest independent film festivals in the United States. It’s probably done more for raising the profile of indie film makers than any other event. And somehow Roger Corman, one of the most prolific and beloved indie filmmakers of the last half century has never made an appearance. Mind boggling.

If you’re not a film fan the name Roger Corman may not mean anything to you. When you find out that he has almost 400 movies to his name you may wonder why you’ve never heard of him. That’s easy. Corman has made a career out of making films on tiny budgets. With all the sacrifices that might be inevitable along the way. It’s easy to dismiss him as low budget schlock till you remember that he has mentored directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Jonathan Demme among others. He helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda, Talia Shire, Robert De Niro and more.

If you really want to see where he made his reputation take a look at the adaptations of a variety of Edgar Allen Poe stories in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. 8 films, 7 of them starring Vincent Price. Also appearing in some of the titles were Ray Milland, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. All of them are low budget classics.

In 1970 Corman funded his own independent movie studio New World Pictures and brought such cult classics to the screen as “Death Race 2000”, “Rock and Roll High School”, “Children of the Corn” and “Piranha”. Roger Corman is what every indie film maker wants to be even if they’ve never heard of him.

At 86 now Corman is still working and creating low budget movies. The film that premiered at Sundance “Virtually Heroes” was made for less than a half a million dollars.

It was about time that the premiere indie film festival and the premiere indie filmmaker finally were introduced.

Rant on Phones

A bit of a rant today, so you have been warned.

The first great modern mass communication media was the telephone. The phone is the single most commonly used appliance in the developed world. It’s been around since 1876 and is, in one form or another, an indispensable part of most of our lives.

But think about this. The phone is actually a service more than a device. You can have the device in your house and it doesn’t do a thing till you pay to get it hooked up. Then you pay a monthly charge to have that service in your home. Let’s go over this one more time. It is an option YOU choose to have and YOU pay to have it. I would assume that virtually everyone would say that we do so for OUR purposes. So that we can make calls and receive calls from the people of our choice.

Which is why tele-marketers really tick me off. Where do they get off running their business through my service? Yes, I know that the incoming call doesn’t cost me a penny. That’s beside the point. I didn’t pay for the installation and monthly service charge so that someone else can make money by annoying me. Tele-marketers are the epitome of marketing. They are trying to convince you that you need something that you have no desire for intrinsically.

No doubt someone is now wagging thier finger at the radio to remind me that this is a public utility. So is the electrical service. How would you feel about a business coming in and saying “Oh we’re going to tap into your electric to run our business. Thanks so much”. If they are on my phone then they keep me from using it. What gives them the right?

In the world of the Internet we have a word for folks who do this sort of thing. They’re called spammers. Spammers rank down there with trolls in the hierarchy of web society. Yet somehow the person who spams my phone is supposedly different.

I shouldn’t have to put up with people denying me the ability to use a service I pay for. I shouldn’t have to come up with elaborate ways to get them off the phone.

It’s my phone, dang it.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, November 16, 2012

Snark, Please Don't, Just Lie

I’ve talked before about the whole question of safety online for our essential information. The entire digital business model is really based on getting as much of that information and either using it directly or selling it. The problem is trying to control access to that information while still enjoying the joys of the World Wide Web. Folks over in England may have come up with the simplest way to achieve that.

Lie.

No seriously, an Internet security officer for the British government advised people at a major conference over there to only give your actual information to highly trusted sites like those from the government. To everyone else? Lie like a rug.

Andy Smith, listed as an Internet security chief for the Cabinet office, advised everyone to tell social networking sites lies about themselves. The rationale is that while a limited number of sites absolutely need your correct information everybody else is a potential danger and should be treated as such.

The push back was almost immediate. It came from all of the business folk who make their living on the web. If all our social networking info is fake their ability to use that information for advertising purposes. While I understand their concern let’s say it’s not first on my list of thoughts.

In a world where online predators can be a very serious problem this really seems like a simple solution. As with any simple solution it turns out there are a few bumps along the road. I’m a little leery of actually advocating that people start creating fake identities on the web because that comes with its own set of problems. It also means that those “trusted” sites to whom we do entrust our real details will need to be hyper secure. Right now a thief has lots of places to try and grab your info. If they know that all your info is confined to just a handful of sites you can assume that the assault on those sites will go up exponentially. Which means I need to trust the government to do a really good job with their Internet security. Let’s just say that I’m a little doubtful on that subject.

For the moment I think I’ll keep my security to myself and my lying to a necessary minimum.

Please Don't

It used to be that you never saw the names of products or even businesses in the movies. The movie makers would create fake names for pretty much everything. There were always exceptions, like when Macy’s appeared in the movie “The Miracle on 34th Street” but more often than not it was some version of Wile E. Coyote’s ACME Corporation. Then came the days of the paid product placement. Companies would pay the movie makers to actually have their logo or company name to appear clearly and openly on the screen. And in those early days there was not even an attempt to disguise it. You would get a long slow pan over the Pacific Bell logo on a phone booth or have a Pepsi can placed prominently in the scene. Over the years the product placements have gotten a little subtler.

So I was interested in the product placement issue that has arisen around the Denzel Washington movie “Flight”. Washington’s character is a high functioning alcoholic airline pilot. His plane gets into a mid-air catastrophe from which he miraculously saves it and all the folks on board. The problem is that in the post crash physical the level of alcohol in his blood becomes an issue. And that’s the real issue in the dispute.

The character is seen regularly drinking Budweiser and Stolichnaya vodka among other drinks. The manufacturers of the two alcoholic beverages have asked Paramount Pictures to remove or obscure the logos of their products in all future versions of the movie. The reason is simple. Both companies have spent a lot of time and money supporting responsible drinking campaigns. What’s shown in the movie is exactly what they DON’T want connected with the images of their products. From their point of view this is negative product placement.
The real problem is that Paramount doesn’t really have to do it. The Trademark laws don’t give this kind of protection. The products are available world wide and are being used in the manner intended even if over used in this case. It’ll be interesting to see what Paramount’s final decision will be.

And of course on the other hand Heineken paid millions of dollars to have their beer featured prominently in the new James Bond movie. To each their own I guess.

Snark

Last week someone on Facebook accused me of being snarky. Moi? OK I’ll be honest and say it’s not the first time. In fact I’m not the only one out there. I’ve heard people refer to this as the “Age of Snark”. It’s a word that I toss around with fair abandon. But it dawned on me this time that I’d never really looked into the word itself. Since our snark is expressed primarily over digital media I thought I’d take the time right now to do just that.

First we look it up in some online dictionaries. And it’s right there. Most of them seem to agree that the word comes from the combination of the words “snide” and “remark” which gives us snark. The definition of the word itself talks about remarks involving sarcasm or malice. I’m going to come back to that. Now the history of the word (its etymology) is a little unclear it appears that the word has been used in the contemporary understanding going back to at least 1906. But of course that’s not the earliest usage. That probably goes to The Rev. Charles Dodgeson, better known to most of us as Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland”. Among his other works was “The Hunting of the Snark” a nonsense poem about a fictional beast with a made up name. Curiously the name snark has been used a lot since then. There have been missiles, planes, ships, alien races all named snark. There’s even a Corporal Snark in Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22”.

But the kind of snark we’re interested in today is the kind involving sarcasm or malice. And I think that provides the dividing line on snark itself. There’s good snark and bad snark. The bad snark is the kind grounded in malice. It’s meant just to be mean and hurtful. That kind of snark is all too common out on the web. And it’s what gives snark a bad reputation.
The other kind of snark, based in sarcasm, has some value I think. If you went back to the days of the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of wise cracking intellectuals in New York City in the early 20th Century, I think you’d find snark in its finest form. Dorothy Parker would feel right at home cranking out beautifully turned snark all day long. While sarcasm can cut and be quite painful let’s say that it’s a surgical cut where malice based snark is just a blunt instrument.

None of which is going to make me less snarky. But it may push me to raise the quality of my snark.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Friday, September 28, 2012

The Man Who Made Football, Saving Us From Us, and The Next Big Thing

"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Tuesday 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 2012 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of September 24, 2012

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.

The Man Who Made Football

My normal practice when I note the passing of someone from the world of media is to try and stick to folks who don’t get the splashy coverage from the mainstream media. Those folks w
ho made a difference but don’t get the A list star treatment at the time of their deaths. This week is a slight variation from that policy.

The reality is that the sports networks carried lots of coverage about the death of Steve Sabol long time leader of NFL Films. In the larger sense however I still think people overlook the importance of what Sabol did during his career. Quite simply I believe that Steve Sabol along with his father Ed made the National Football League.

Not founded it, the NFL goes back to 1920 as the American Professional Football Association but made it. The argument can be made that pro football was already on its way to being the highest attended sports event in the world based on average attendance but I’m not sure it works its way into our collective psyches the way it has without NFL Films.

The company was founded by Ed Sabol in 1962 as the Blair Motion Picture Company. They won the bid to film the ‘62 NFL championship game (it wasn’t the Super Bowl until 1967) and proceeded to create a film like no one had ever seen before. Two years later the NFL bought the Sabols out but left them in change. That may be the smartest thing the league has ever done.

What Steve Sabol and his father did was create pro football, a sport once sneered on and considered something no self respecting athlete would be involved in. Using brilliant photography, a profound love and understanding of the sport and helped in no small part by the magnificent voice of the late John Facenda (who joined NFL Films in ‘65) Sabol took a game and made it legendary. A sport known for brute force was suddenly displayed as graceful. Games were given the veneer of tragedy and comedy. Football was suddenly high art. I know that in my own case I fell in love with the NFL because of what Sabol father and son did far more than what the awful Steeler teams of the late ‘60s did.

Steve Sabol was 69 years old.

Saving Us From Us

There are times when the cure just might be worse than the disease. We’ve talked a lot about old line media trying to figure out how to survive in a new media environment. One of the other old line groups that is struggling with the new media world is government. When the media that is being used is no longer necessarily physically present in one particular nation how do you go about regulating it? And how do protect your citizens from folks that are trying to hurt them? It’s a question that is still very much up in the air all over the world.

The newest attempt at trying to figure this out is taking place just to our south here in the southern tier. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is trying to take a shot at making Facebook a little bit safer place for its citizens. House Bill 2249 is legislation that would make it a crime to impersonate someone on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It would also outlaw doing the same thing with fake email addresses and text messages. The intent to make online bullying a criminal offense.

Now that sounds all well and good but even the bill’s sponsor, State Representative Katharine Watson, is aware of the pitfalls of trying to do this. She notes that she is not attempting to outlaw people just being stupid. The idea is to control those folks who are actively trying to abuse and rob folks through the Internet. Questions have already be raised about issues like parody, satire and well, commentary.

When I was a student at Edinboro my Criminal Justice professor defined a bad law as one that couldn’t be enforced. Not only because it was a waste of time but because it diminishes the standing of all laws. I’m afraid this law looks very much like a bad law.
I’m not quite sure how you enforce laws against what amounts to adult cyber-bullying. We already have laws against fraud and theft and slander. Given that Facebook and Twitter and the like are globe girdling media monsters what do you do if the person making your life miserable is in Colorado, or Ceylon? How does a state law in Pennsylvania help you much at all?

How much and what kind of law and order we need slash want in the Wild West of the Internet is still an open question. Well meaning but ultimately useless laws like this aren’t the answer.

The Next Big Thing

I am old enough to remember the early days of cable TV. It was the next big thing even though there were plenty of doubters who wondered if anyone would pay for television when they could get it for free with an antenna. The nay sayers lacked the vision to realize how much more there might be in that Next Big Thing. Well the next Next Big Thing might just be lifting its head over the horizon on how we get our television fix.

It’s called cutting the cord. Now to a lesser degree those of us who are on satellite systems or have gone to watching TV online have already begun the process of cutting that cord. But once again the first look may not be the most interesting one. There are a couple of things out there that are really interesting.

For example in Scandanavia HBO has announced that viewers will not have to pay a TV subscription to watch the network online. That differs from the model here in North America where if you want to watch HBO GO you need to be a current HBO subscriber. The move is to take on Netflix which is already a major player with this kind of business model elsewhere in the world. It is a major shift in business model.

The other interesting bit is from an Israeli company called Vidmind. They are marketing an Android based set top box that will allow independent Internet based virtual cable operators to distribute programming not just to TVs but tablets and smartphones as well. All without having to string any cable or launch any satellites. Just the way that the world wide web has become the home for locally based challengers to radio stations this could offer the same kind of ability to TV distribution as well.
If the question you’re asking is why would these companies do this just think about how often we hear of service provides like Comcast and Direct TV getting into fights with networks like AMC or HBO. Setting up systems like these would allow the networks to completely circumvent the whole question of carriage fees and the fights that go with them.

The reality is that the big boys still have too much money in the game to make it likely that we’ll see the change too soon here in the U.S. But if it works elsewhere I think it’s inevitable here as well.

Get ready for the Next Big Thing.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The View From the Phlipside - A Social Revolution

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.

It's very easy to sit back and make fun of the social networks phenomenon and the people who are deeply involved in it. It's a kind of current cheap and easy superiority. At least it was easy until you heard the news out of Tunisia last week.

In case you missed it Tunisia, a country on the northern edge of the continent of Africa, changed government in the most fundamental way. The former president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had held absolute power in the country for 23 years was driven out by massive demonstrations by the Tunisian people. Now that's a real nice feel good kind of a story. If you take a look at the details you realize that it's a rather amazing media story along the way. Think about it, one of the advantages of being the ruler of a third world country is that it is very easy to control people's access to information. For most of the last century you just needed control of three things - TV, Radio and the press. The first thing most autocratic regimes do is make sure that TV and Radio are in control of the state. Nationwide type broadcasting requires big, expensive equipment and permanent locations so they're hard for the opposition to create on their own. Printing is a little easier but you still are tied down to your printing presses. Just keep hunting down the printing press and you can put the alternative newspaper/magazine/pamphlets out of business. The system has worked for dictators for decades now.

Well there's some bad news on the horizon. Early word out of Tunisia is that much of the organization of the massive demonstrations was done by way of social media. That's right a national government was brought down by things like Facebook and Twitter. The government did everything it could to keep people's access to these kinds of sites but on the side of the opposition was an entire generation of young adults with considerable computer skills. They hacked the firewalls and kept the information flowing. The very nature of the web worked to the advantage of the opposition and the detriment of the previous regime. I think we can rely on the fact that other dictators the world over are taking very close notice of this new concept. That people can freely communicate, that videos can be shared showing what's really going on whether the government likes it or not.

Think about that the next time you sign in to your Facebook account.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010

Sunday, January 9, 2011

View From the Phlipside - Social Networking Worries

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.

You can't turn around without running into social media any more. We've got movies about it, Time magazine made its most successful promoter its Man of the Year this year. I saw a letter in Dear Abby the other day where a son told his mother the only way he would be giving her any details about the grandkid was if she joined a social network. No profile, no photos or stories to share at bridge club Grandma.

I'll admit that I kind of like some of the social media. Oh all right I'll admit, I enjoy Facebook. It's one of the first things I check in the morning, I have the app for it on my iPhone and I check it before I call it a day. And that grossly underestimates the number of times I check it during the day. At the same it makes me feel a bit uneasy sometimes. If you haven't drunk the Kool-Aid yet and are wondering if it's just you here's some reassurance.

It's not just you.

Late last year late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel declared a "National De-Friend Day" because he realized that social networks like Facebook put an emphasis on things that aren't really important. And creates "friends" out of people that are just acquaintances or sometimes even people you just really don't like. Maybe we do need to treat the concept of friend with a little more respect.

Beyond Kimmel you'll find the real inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is also no fan of social networks. He sees the Facebook approach of walling in information as a threat to the very essence of what he had created. A closed network goes against the very ideas that were behind creating the web in the first place. It was to be wide open, a vast shared resource where our information would be ours to control.

I worry about folks who think they have privacy on the web. I also worry about people who think that people you only know on Facebook constitute "family". While technology has raced ahead in our ability to connect to one another the basic human method of creating community hasn't changed. We need to be careful about the level of emotional investment we place on our online relationships. While those relationships can be profound, they are also much more complicated and diverse. That means they need their own emotional ranking system.

Digital communication has the ability to isolate and alienate. Now it's attempting to fill that void with relationships that may not offer the depth we expect. Handled carefully the social network can be a great addition to our lives. Handled with less care and we may find greater problems lurk just below the surface.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

View From the Phlipside - Journalism Rant

What follows is a rant. An expression of personal outrage at a complete failure of the media in the last week. Add my voice to those wondering just what happened with the coverage of the Shirley Sherrod speech. Sherrod was the USDA official who was accused of racist comments during a speech before a chapter of the NAACP. She temporarily lost her job because of the furor.

What outrages me in all of this was not the unthinking knee jerk reactions of the White House or the NAACP. This is not a political commentary program. My outrage is directed at the news outlets that failed to perform the most basic level of journalism in their coverage. Journalism 101 teaches that you must always verify the story. That single source stories are to be viewed with a certain scepticism. That you always check the facts before you present them. The coverage on this story was singularly lacking in this particular fundamental practice.

The first warning bells should have gone off with the name of Andrew Brietbart. Brietbart is an advocate, not a journalist. There’s nothing wrong with being an advocate but they operate under a different set of assumptions and rules than journalists. As an advocate there is no call for him to verify whether the quotation was in or out of context. It should have been the first thing a journalist should have done.

Sadly journalism has descended to a place where it is more important to be fast rather than right. There is much ballyhooing of the new age of “citizen journalism”. Unless journalistic standards are respected and taught we must be honest and say that this is not a new age of journalism. It is a return to days of “yellow” journalism and gossip mongering. I truly fear for our republic if that is the best information available for our political discourse.

There is no excuse for what was presented as journalism in this case. A woman’s life and career were very nearly destroyed. All because no one at the White House, the NAACP or the vast majority of the media could be bothered to make a simple check on the veracity of their source.

Call that whatever you like, just don’t call it journalism.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010

Thursday, June 3, 2010

View From the Phlipside - Social Media

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.

OK time to be really honest, just among ourselves. Does it bother you, maybe just sometimes, if no one responds to your Tweets? If no one seems to comment on your Facebook status, or blog post? Do you ever feel when that happens that maybe you’ve become invisible, that you don’t really exist somehow? Come on, you know you do, at least occasionally. Well here’s what you need to know about that. That may actually be a problem.

One of the great concerns about social media is how it can suck you in. You joined Facebook just so you could keep in touch with the family or to re-connect with some old friends, now you’re obsessed w Farmville and Mafia Wars. You burn up far more time doing that than you would really be comfortable admitting to family, friends or perish the thought, your boss.

That constant need to be reassured that you exist is actually a fairly common behavior at one point in the human growth cycle. It’s very common for infants. The concern is that our brains might be backwards trained into a more infantalized condition by long hours on either social media or video gaming. Infants and small children are attracted to visual and audio stimulation and the concern is that this ongoing practice into childhood and beyond may have negative effects.

Now the first thing you need to know is that these concerns are not from anti-technology, no fun Luddite. Rather they are from Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a neuroscientist and apparently a member of the House of Lords. Lady Greenfield is concerned that if too much of the socialization especially of children is done through computer modes there may be real and very serious problems with attention deficit and even autism. Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. There are lots of studies out there that indicate both positives and negatives to social media. There IS a difference between interaction on Facebook or even on a video call through Skype and face to face communication. Making sure our kids get lots of chances for that kind of socializing is probably best all round.

The most interesting discussion to arise in all of this is that gaming and social networking simply isn’t enough fun any more. The problem is that people end up with hundreds of Facebook friends and it becomes a chore to track them all. Games become more and more about building social networks and not enough action and adventure. In other words they’re becoming way to much like real life. And let’s face it we all know that real life will kill you or make you crazy.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY. You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010