Capsule: Where did our 70's yen for social revolution go? Today's social change is conflated with social media, courtesy of Facebook, YouTube, twitter and MySpace. Yesterday's generation gaps are today's socio-economic gulfs, defined by whether you listen to alternative music on your iPhone, slim down your telephone service to wireless only and pare your broadband down to wireless 3G--with the richest demographic trending more progressive on media and less progressive on politics. Maybe the media was always a poor barometer of cultural evolution. But today, social change seems pushed into the background in a world of immediate gratification through centralized search, e-books, iTunes, apps and news-filtering aggregators. As predicted, the medium is the message; and, the message is less about art, political and cultural change than about recovering economic dominance.
Revolutionary Media
Revisiting the Day When Internet was Born
NPR on Wikipedia
On the Media
The Hidden Brain
People love the Beatles. Their lyrics seemed right in the '70's and they still seem right today.
You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. You tell me that it's evolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you got a real solution. Well, you know we'd all love to see the plan. You ask me for a contribution. Well, you know we're doing what we can. But when you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you'll change the constitution. Well, you know we all want to change your head. You tell me it's the institution. Well, you know you better free your mind instead. But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. (From: "Revolution," initially released in 1968 as the "B" side of "Hey Jude.")
In some ways, the most revolutionary aspect of the Beatles' Revolution lyrics is the fact that we can look them up online today and quote them anywhere--probably not as powerful as what Lennon had in mind. Today, one of the highest ranking Google choices under "revolutionary media" is a religious site of the same name.
Media milestones in the '70's included what seemed like confrontational coverage of centralized power and geopolitics. In a rich irony, The New York Times' Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post's Watergate coverage poisoned perceptions of the Vietnam War and helped depose the US President who took us out of it.
For those who cared to learn what havoc the cold war and colonialism were wreaking in southeast Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America, there were words and images that had never before been shared.
NPR was born in 1970, beginning its 40+ years of earnest struggle to maintain an attitudinal center. And, for distraction, widespread sales of color TV's and VCR's offered technicolor entertainment, as did the beginning of today's 500+ TV choices with the birth of cable, including MTV and CNN as the 70's turned into the '80's.
Today's media milestones include: the international coverage of September 11th; the Iraq War and its aftermath in an increasingly unstable Middle East; Hurricane Katrina; 2008's US Presidential campaign; President Obama's inauguration; the passage of national Health Care legislation; and, lots of gut-wrenching news that doesn't seem like news at all, reported in high emotional color by cable networks and bloggers with vague attachments to the facts and strong affiliations with their employers' bottom lines.
We may not have news the way we used to yearn to make it, but we have greater content personalization and greatly expanded distribution at a fraction of the cost of old media and, maybe, at a fraction of the social impact. The evidence of these changes--captured by the global internet and iTunes, as well as Google's entry into and exit from China--seems less revolutionary than powerful in placing cultural choices in alignment with economics.
NPR, having survived a near-death experience in 1983, is still striving to earn its 2005 Harris Poll credential of "America's Most Trusted News Source"--despite the misappropriation of titles like this by popular cable news networks. WNYC's On the Media carries stories like this past week's nuclear summit, during which President Obama asked the press to leave, just as the discussions began; this year's Pulitzer award to ProPublica, an internet-only news source, reporting on the deaths of purportedly euthanized patients in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and, the publication of Panorama, a 328-page newspaper designed for nostalgic news interests.
On the Media also blows the lid off gender bias--again?--by completing an inventory of NPR news sources and commentators, concluding that the voices invoked most commonly overwhelmingly belong to men. (Even at NPR?)
On the Media's commenter on this story is a male university professor and blogger who has the guts to say that women still don't stand up for themselves in the marketplace because of a too-substantial fear of what people will think. His theory: there won't be real media equal rights until women learn not to give a *#$@! (You know the word; I'd say it but I'm afraid of what you might think.)
Brooke Gladstone, On the Media's host, opines that women have learned not to express themselves aggressively, because when we do, we're treated as if we've expelled methane in public. Can this story really still be in the news 40 years after Gloria Steinem first published Ms. magazine?
Is the culprit an unevolved media or is it The Hidden Brain? Shankar Vedantam's 2010 book hypothesizes that most public thought is the product of a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious. On gender bias and racial prejudice, Vedantam theorizes that our earliest cultural associations favor men and caucasians and that this unconscious bias is most likely to defeat conscious thought when we're emotionally weak--fearful, angry, distracted.
Maybe this explains the lack of a real revolution in today's media images. Instead, we have a steady stream of angry white men and a few unattractively angry women--at least they seem unattractive to our collective unconscious, according to Vedantam (who, after all, likes an angry Mommy?)--talking about taxpayer revolts, attempts to rewrite the Constitution and our perceived proximity to communist China.
And this is just the right wing. The left wing seems delusional in mistaking our common sense in electing an African-American President and Democratic party leader for real revolution, when it seems that today's revolution is all in our heads.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Apple Bites
Capsule: Has Apple reinvented retail for the rest of us? Is the iPad launch akin to the birth of broadcast or cable TV? Before TV, movies fit in the theater; sports, in the stadium; and, news on the broadsheet. After TV, they all fit--shorter, portable and with commercials--on a little screen. After reinventing music, has Apple reinvented TV--as well as newspapers and magazines, to fit on the Mac, the PC, the TV, the smart phone, the "pod," the "pad," in the purse, in the pocket--everywhere, as long as you buy your media from Apple? Will the media ever be the same?
Apple Bytes
Business Insider
The New York Review of Books
Apple iPad
The New York Times
The Financial Times
It's a new way of experiencing media, they say. Could it be long before they say: "It's a new way of watching TV?" Will a new way of shopping be far behind?
"They" are the inaugural iPad buyers, who came alive this past Saturday, April 3rd, when over 300,000 iPads were sold.
Other Apple iPad "birthday" statistics: one million applications were downloaded, as were 250,000 e-books from the iBookstore, prompting JP Morgan to increase its Apple per-share price target from $240 to $305.
Apple is projected to sell one million iPads in Q2 and five million in FY 2010. For a nation of over 300 million consumers, that ain't chicken-feed--especially at $500-$800 a pop, plus monthly 3G subscription fees for partners on the high end. Is the iPad a green shoot (planted by Johnny Appleseed) on its way to becoming a retail media beanstalk?
Americans spend over 30 hours a week watching TV and 13 hours online. The American media appetite is extraordinary. Until now, that appetite couldn't go out on the town. It had to be satisfied at home through a cable, satellite or telco TV connection. After the iPad launch, who will keep us down on the farm now that we've seen Paris?
It's inevitable that WiFi service, as well as subscription 3G and plus-G's services, will make TV more of an online viewing experience: something you can watch at home and carry with you to share. But with our current wired and wireless broadband limitations, we don't yet have a sense of how the portable online viewing experience will alter today's network-and-VOD spin around the digital-set-top-box dial.
We'll have a better sense soon. Before those five million iPad's are sold by year's end, the iPad model will begin to stimulate broadband expansion. Cable and telco broadband distributors will announce improvements to the American online experience, as they've already begun to do through wideband and 100-500Mbps broadband market launches. Broadband's main motivation for a service upgrade: to retain customers and to ensure that cable and telcos' retail path to the customer wallet and credit card remains the preferred way to buy media.
Developing an alternative retail view, Apple has already announced a plan to add more TV and movies to its iTunes online store. It's even talking numbers with content giants CBS, News Corp., Disney and others. As a show of media strength, Apple's iBookstore disrupted the Amazon Kindle retail book-selling model before the iPad was even launched. Given that two major publishing houses--Simon&Schuster and Harper-Collins--are owned by CBS and News Corp., multimedia content deals make sense.
Omnibus content deals also make sense because it's time content found other outlets beyond the existing wired mega-model. Cable networks remain on solid revenue footing as long as the combination of advertising and subscription dollars continue to dual-stream in. But the breakdown of advertising value--enabled in part by Google and its ad search model that has contained ad unit pricing within its online revenue zip codes for most of the last five years--persists.
Cable networks have pushed the subscription stream as far as possible by adopting what some cable distributors call "the arms merchant model"--selling to cable, telcos and satellite until they've wrung the annual growth potential out of the wired subscription model. Seeing this coming, content networks have been hopeful that their world will get larger with new wireless TV subscription distribution through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile's wireless phones. These hopes have been largely dashed over the last decade; phone companies have been even less likely to "get" TV in its wireless form than in its wired Fios or U-verse just-like-cable-plus versions.
All of which leads today's content mega-giants to the retail Master of the Universe: Apple. Ready to accept TV as the new software with open arms, Apple's iPad is developing its brand definition as a media device for today's media consumer. Computing seems old-school, particularly when most computer users use computers more as portals, simple e-mailers, word processors, calculators and TV screens already. (Can door-stops be far behind?)
Where will this all lead? Cable, satellite and telco TV distribution won't go away, but their attractive growth will likely be curbed as content networks find new supplementary distribution paths, grinding their primary distribution relationships down to arguments over carriage fees while pretending to wonder: "Where did the love go?"
If they're cautious, distributors will resist iTV the same way they resisted alliances with DVD retail (and, before that, videotape rentals and purchases.) But, given the speed of the device advances that digital technology has wrought, waiting out the deterioration of the iTV platform as if it were Blockbuster won't necessarily work.
If confident, distributors will jump on the iTV bandwagon with a clear vision of their broadband backbone as the best foundation for the iTV retail store, even when that store travels via an iPad.
In the meantime, the biggest losers could be Google and the TV commercial. Isn't it likely that Apple goes after advertising after conquering music, voice, books, movies and TV? In this scenario, TV ads will follow their fast-shrinking relatives--the online display ad, the online search ad and the displaced newspaper ad--into a more confined space.
With iPad viewers free to catch-and-carry TV-on-the-run, TV ads may have to thrive in a new media form--iSpots?--via a new technology embrace. Google--the online advertising market-maker--may have to search its pockets to play in an online environment that carries TV-and-text on a portable screen.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple bit Google in the end?
It's not so far-fetched. These twin online Masters of the Universe are already in a scuffle over mobile operating systems. A scuffle over the value of advertising may be next, with Apple setting the market for ad prices on its ingenious traveling platform. Because the iPad will get there first, Google's Android model--stuck on a phone while looking for a tablet to call its own--may have to dance to the iTunes' music.
Welcome to the new media reality: it's paradoxically like a musical chairs game where the market plays its tune while technology pulls chairs to eliminate players. Will the last laugh belong to the last distributor standing?
Apple Bytes
Business Insider
The New York Review of Books
Apple iPad
The New York Times
The Financial Times
It's a new way of experiencing media, they say. Could it be long before they say: "It's a new way of watching TV?" Will a new way of shopping be far behind?
"They" are the inaugural iPad buyers, who came alive this past Saturday, April 3rd, when over 300,000 iPads were sold.
Other Apple iPad "birthday" statistics: one million applications were downloaded, as were 250,000 e-books from the iBookstore, prompting JP Morgan to increase its Apple per-share price target from $240 to $305.
Apple is projected to sell one million iPads in Q2 and five million in FY 2010. For a nation of over 300 million consumers, that ain't chicken-feed--especially at $500-$800 a pop, plus monthly 3G subscription fees for partners on the high end. Is the iPad a green shoot (planted by Johnny Appleseed) on its way to becoming a retail media beanstalk?
Americans spend over 30 hours a week watching TV and 13 hours online. The American media appetite is extraordinary. Until now, that appetite couldn't go out on the town. It had to be satisfied at home through a cable, satellite or telco TV connection. After the iPad launch, who will keep us down on the farm now that we've seen Paris?
It's inevitable that WiFi service, as well as subscription 3G and plus-G's services, will make TV more of an online viewing experience: something you can watch at home and carry with you to share. But with our current wired and wireless broadband limitations, we don't yet have a sense of how the portable online viewing experience will alter today's network-and-VOD spin around the digital-set-top-box dial.
We'll have a better sense soon. Before those five million iPad's are sold by year's end, the iPad model will begin to stimulate broadband expansion. Cable and telco broadband distributors will announce improvements to the American online experience, as they've already begun to do through wideband and 100-500Mbps broadband market launches. Broadband's main motivation for a service upgrade: to retain customers and to ensure that cable and telcos' retail path to the customer wallet and credit card remains the preferred way to buy media.
Developing an alternative retail view, Apple has already announced a plan to add more TV and movies to its iTunes online store. It's even talking numbers with content giants CBS, News Corp., Disney and others. As a show of media strength, Apple's iBookstore disrupted the Amazon Kindle retail book-selling model before the iPad was even launched. Given that two major publishing houses--Simon&Schuster and Harper-Collins--are owned by CBS and News Corp., multimedia content deals make sense.
Omnibus content deals also make sense because it's time content found other outlets beyond the existing wired mega-model. Cable networks remain on solid revenue footing as long as the combination of advertising and subscription dollars continue to dual-stream in. But the breakdown of advertising value--enabled in part by Google and its ad search model that has contained ad unit pricing within its online revenue zip codes for most of the last five years--persists.
Cable networks have pushed the subscription stream as far as possible by adopting what some cable distributors call "the arms merchant model"--selling to cable, telcos and satellite until they've wrung the annual growth potential out of the wired subscription model. Seeing this coming, content networks have been hopeful that their world will get larger with new wireless TV subscription distribution through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile's wireless phones. These hopes have been largely dashed over the last decade; phone companies have been even less likely to "get" TV in its wireless form than in its wired Fios or U-verse just-like-cable-plus versions.
All of which leads today's content mega-giants to the retail Master of the Universe: Apple. Ready to accept TV as the new software with open arms, Apple's iPad is developing its brand definition as a media device for today's media consumer. Computing seems old-school, particularly when most computer users use computers more as portals, simple e-mailers, word processors, calculators and TV screens already. (Can door-stops be far behind?)
Where will this all lead? Cable, satellite and telco TV distribution won't go away, but their attractive growth will likely be curbed as content networks find new supplementary distribution paths, grinding their primary distribution relationships down to arguments over carriage fees while pretending to wonder: "Where did the love go?"
If they're cautious, distributors will resist iTV the same way they resisted alliances with DVD retail (and, before that, videotape rentals and purchases.) But, given the speed of the device advances that digital technology has wrought, waiting out the deterioration of the iTV platform as if it were Blockbuster won't necessarily work.
If confident, distributors will jump on the iTV bandwagon with a clear vision of their broadband backbone as the best foundation for the iTV retail store, even when that store travels via an iPad.
In the meantime, the biggest losers could be Google and the TV commercial. Isn't it likely that Apple goes after advertising after conquering music, voice, books, movies and TV? In this scenario, TV ads will follow their fast-shrinking relatives--the online display ad, the online search ad and the displaced newspaper ad--into a more confined space.
With iPad viewers free to catch-and-carry TV-on-the-run, TV ads may have to thrive in a new media form--iSpots?--via a new technology embrace. Google--the online advertising market-maker--may have to search its pockets to play in an online environment that carries TV-and-text on a portable screen.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple bit Google in the end?
It's not so far-fetched. These twin online Masters of the Universe are already in a scuffle over mobile operating systems. A scuffle over the value of advertising may be next, with Apple setting the market for ad prices on its ingenious traveling platform. Because the iPad will get there first, Google's Android model--stuck on a phone while looking for a tablet to call its own--may have to dance to the iTunes' music.
Welcome to the new media reality: it's paradoxically like a musical chairs game where the market plays its tune while technology pulls chairs to eliminate players. Will the last laugh belong to the last distributor standing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
