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A wealth of evidence is turning mere futuristic scenarios into collective anxiety about the future of television. The long-time king and queen of media is going through a process of reinvention that has the potential of messing up badly with its current economics, which hence justify in big part all the confusion and mixed predictions about its future.

A quick scan over traditional media in the past few days can confirm the intensification of the debate; ADWEEK speculates whether or not “New Nielsen data could lead to chaotic upfront,” referring to the controversial commercial ratings data, which could provide some light on whether or not people are actually recalling advertising from watching it live or via pre-recorded DVR sessions.

FORTUNE magazine’s Geoff Colvin published a piece titled “TV is dying? Long live TV!” that deals with the fact that America is watching more TV than ever, “despite (or because of) the Web,” which seems counterintuitive but can help us understand the latest wave of gadgets and platforms focused on enabling digital content on TV sets as well as TV content on other screens.

Irregardless of whether people watch more or less TV in more or less screens, we can’t detach the present state of television from a model that was developed when the concept of “media fragmentation” was completely foreign to society at large, leading to a rhythmic advertising-based model in which interruption was normal and accepted as part of the package. The model also created standards in which TV shows were symmetric in relation to the advertising pod. Every genre had a specific length and was broadcasted at the same time and under the same frequency.

This model is being reinvented in front of us enabled by the multiple screens and digital platforms that have transferred control back to the masses. Control of the means of production and control of content options, an explosive combination, dangerous but not lethal to traditional outlets in a world that is proving to be more about complementing than about substituting.

A great example of the new asymmetric model is referenced in a WIRED article titled “Must-Stream TV,” which reviews the ultra-local, grassroots internet sitcom The Burg. The article refers to the show and its model in the context of TV, which is interesting due to the fact that it is far from it. In that sense it acknowledges that its creators “aren’t trying to remake TV--they are trying to break into it.”

In more than one sense, The Burg is in fact remaking TV, or at least redefining the storytelling format of the sitcom [can we really disconnect the two?]. Compared with traditional TV shows, The Burg has clear differences that set it apart in interesting ways. Probably the most important is its asymmetric structure, in which no two episodes are equal. The typical episode can last anywhere from one minute to 16 minutes, and is uploaded without a predetermined frequency. This asymmetry is perhaps the key to fresh, entertaining content: free from the restrictions of mandatory length and frequency.

Although less unique than its asymmetric nature, another interesting feature of The Burg is its blog format, which allows for immediate participation from viewers which can potentially alter the course of the story or at least alter it within the subconscious mind of its producers, director, and actors, who most likely read viewer’s comments at one point or another.

At the end of the day whether TV survives or not is not as important as whether fresh thinking reinvents the nature of its somehow tired storytelling, opening up options beyond the traditional model in which creativity is not constrained by the format but rather leads it.

Posted by camilo at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s continue with this glimpse at John Oswald’s work, considered an early wake up call to the reality of a music industry that pioneered and supported the development of what Nicolas Negroponte in 1990 and Chris Anderson in 2006 [among others] referred to as the modern “hit culture,” which perhaps will be deemed by the media critics of the future as a necessary step towards a post-modern, open society [no sarcasm here].

Post-modern and open [consumer] society have been incompatible for a long time, however today there are signs that the antagonism is fading. The Economist recently published a piece that deals with the unlikely reality of marketing appropriating the tools of post-modernism, that is, the discourse that post-modernists fashioned to eliminate consumer society, and using that same intellectual framework to do precisely the opposite: “…capitalism employs the critique that was designed to destroy it.” At least in the so-called advanced world, with its wired homes and wireless hyper-connected society.

The article reminds us that post-modernist thought predicted “the individual’s desire (and ability) to take control –-to become ‘the artists of his own life…’” in response to the ubiquitous influence of capitalism in society at large, with its tight control over mass media and the means of production. Plunderphonics, as a music genre, offered [back in the early 80’s] an interesting and creative way to challenge society’s conception of authorship by materializing the vision of individual control, which at the time was extremely revolutionary [Michael Jackson and CBS actually burned most copies of Dab] but that, in 2007, seems to be a little more than acceptable. Just refer to 2006 Time’s Person of the Year [You] or Advertising Age’s Agency of the Year [The Consumer] to see how, in the 21st century, post-modernism changed sides.

Here are two more brilliant pieces from John Oswald’s repertoire: BLACK from the album Dab, which is “part one of James Brown's Greatest Bits…” with a “guest appearance by Prince,” and BRAZILLIONAIRES THEME from the 69PLUNDERPHONICS96 box-set, which you will easily recognize.

BLACK

BRAZILLIONAIRES THEME

Posted by camilo at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a 1967 interview published in Encounter, Marshall McLuhan discussed, among a variety of topics, his views on media and technology as extensions of man. The interviewer, Gerald Emanuel Steam, asked if these extensions were as well “extensions of man’s will…” to which McLuhan replied:

“In the ordinary sense of subliminal wish and drive --yes. Man, however, never intends the cultural consequences of any extension of himself.”

Understanding media as cultural systems that grow around a particular technology [concept coined by Lisa Gitelman], then TV and Radio, just to use two common examples, are not TV and Radio in the literal sense. Television is not the actual extension of man but the system of Network Television [or Cable Television, Video on Demand, etc.]. Radio becomes a complex medium, which absorbs other technologies such as the telephone [essential for talk shows], and even other media systems like record labels.

The “consequences” of these extensions of man are today even harder to predict or understand, which is why we must turn our heads towards the work of artists as well as towards the artists themselves. As McLuhan explains in a 1962 essay [ironically] titled The Electronic Age, “for the most part men’s perceptions are overlaid by patterns of past experience that render them unapt to apprehend the world they actually live in. The artist alone is an expert in the contemporary use of his senses.” Paraphrasing Chuck Porter, experience is only relevant under the premise that the past is going to be like the future.

In this brief series we will look at the media system of the music industry in the context of John Oswald’s Plunderphonics as the response of the artist to an environment that, although not intended by the industry [as the extension of the industry itself], was and still is very real. Oswald’s work reveals the reality of a system that pioneered “hit culture,” and that created a legal framework that beyond good and evil has been recently rendered as [at least] unrealistic.

Back in 1985, in a paper titled Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative, Oswald reacted to the notion of copyright laws in the context of a pop culture environment that had transcended the brick-and-mortar principles in which the law was based. Over 20 years ago the artist led us to understand the end of the producer-consumer paradigm: “After decades of being the passive recipients of music in packages, listeners now have the means to assemble their own choices, to separate pleasures from the filler. They are dubbing a variety of sounds from around the world, or at least from the breadth of their record collections, making compilations of a diversity unavailable from the music industry, with its circumscribed stables of artists, and an ever more pervasive policy of only supplying the common denominator.”

Perhaps one of the strongest ideas in Oswald’s paper is rooted in the fact that, by acting as a tight filter focused on big moneymaking hits, most record labels had already entered a vulnerable space in which their final product is not entirely theirs anymore. Oswald clearly articulates why the music industry, powered by radio [among other distribution vehicles], lost their archaic right to have a tight ownership of every bit of sound:

“All popular music [and all folk music, by definition], essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn't a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we're bombarded by it. In its most insidious state, filtered to an incessant bass-line, it seeps through apartment walls and out of the heads of walk people. Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the total noise; specifically, in music, those with megawatt PA's, triple platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate, how does one not become a passive recipient?”

Plunderphonics goes to an interesting extreme in its quest to enunciate Oswald’s ideas, the genre offers fresh thinking in the shape of music, that happens to challenge our conception of authorship in a world that doesn’t know how to differentiate producer from consumer, active from passive.

It is very important to mention that, as you will find out in Oswald's site, Plunderphonics [the album] is not for sale.

Click on the image below to hear the song that gives the name to John Oswald's 1989 album Dab.

Thanks to Mogollon’s Francois L Betancourt [AKA: Francisco Lopez] for his dedicated collaboration with this blog.

Posted by camilo at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of lying, here is an excerpt from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in which Alvy sneaks out of a very highbrow cocktail party to catch up the Knicks game in a random bedroom:

Alvy sits on the foot of the bed watching the Knicks game on television.

ALVY
(Looking at Robin)
What's fascinating is that it's physical.
You know, it's one thing about intellectuals,
they prove that you can be absolutely brilliant
and have no idea what's going on. But on the
other hand ...
(Clears his throat)
the body doesn't lie, as-as we now know.

That might be precisely why most humans are obsessed with sports and it might also be the reason why we are increasingly looking for physical ways to express ourselves. Parkour offers a great example, we could think of it as the corporeal manifestation of street art. A relatively young discipline, born and raised in the streets of France (where unrest among youths is well known and became evident these past few years), it is considered more than a sport, frequently compared with martial arts and seen as a way to express some kind of acknowledgement of the urban environment at the same time that it has been confused (like street art) with vandalism.

Pop culture has been slowly absorbing Parkour in the past decade, not always with a clear understanding of what it is or what it means, but surprisingly open to include it in anything from mainstream films (Casino Royale being the latest) to advertising.

Here are two examples of Parkour in advertising, no especial effects added.

Posted by camilo at 08:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Henry Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with a brief account of the events that brought the imagination of a high school student to the public eye in different mediatic contexts. “Bert is Evil” offers the perfect example to illustrate the mechanics of Jenkins’ convergence culture. By taking Sesame Street’s Bert out of his context and placing him in a bizarre world, its creator accidentally provided visual support to anti-American protesters far away from Bert’s home at the same time that a set of reactions from the media and Bert’s owners unchained. Jenkins then welcomes the reader to “convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”

What follows is probably one of the most influential books in years to come, dissecting three essential concepts of modern media theory [media convergence, participatory culture, collective intelligence] and providing a framework to further advance the conversation surrounding contemporrary media channels [as he does almost daily in his blog as well as in the Convergence Culture Consortium weblog].

“Bert is Evil” is not only a great, radical example of convergence culture [which we will look at in detail at a later time]. It also provides an interesting platform to understand semiotics through the lens of Umberto Eco’s work, particularly through his Theory of the Lie, explained in the introduction of A Theory of Semiotics: “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.”

Keeping in mind that this is merely a grain of sand in the huge desert of Eco’s theory of semiotics, it nevertheless provides an interesting view of sings through which anyone can question and challenge the assumptions and preconceptions around them. In this specific case, we could always ask ourselves who is lying when it comes to Bert’s intentions. Is he really good or evil? The process of answering this and similar questions has the potential to unlock the semiotician that lives within us.

Posted by camilo at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is evident that most of the Airline industry (and its agencies) could benefit from the wisdom of parody. After all, parody has been a powerful genre to uncover that common knowledge that oftentimes gets dismissed as unimportant, remember Borat? In the words of Umberto Eco, parody, “if it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile –and without a blush– in steadfast, virile seriousness.”

Eco’s parody has indeed been taken seriously by a wide variety of professionals, from architects to anthropologists as he explains in the preface of How to Travel with a Salmon: “Parisian friends from Transcultura, an organization that imports African and Asian anthropologists to study European cities, say that their program was inspired by my ‘Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society,’ in which Melanesian anthropologists analyzed the primitive Milanese by sophisticated phenomenological parameters.”

Going back to the Airline industry and inspired by a recent international trip, one wonders why so many of their resources are focused on advertising as opposed to solving structural issues (i.e. mediocre meals). Perhaps they need a different type of advice similar to Naked Communications' recommendation to Boots Pharmacy which led them to improve their in-store experience as opposed to create more TV spots (see a brief summary within a Fast Company article here).

In any case, the frustration that surrounds airplane meals have been documented for decades and Umberto Eco's Diario Minimo offered an insightful review in its article How to Eat in a Flight, published in the above-mentioned second compilation titled How to Travel with a Salmon.

Here is an excerpt from How to Eat in a Flight, written at least two decades ago. It drives home the point with amazing clarity:

“…a typical in-flight menu comprises some long-cooked meat smothered in brown gravy, generous portion of tomato, vegetables finely chopped and marinated in whine, rice, and peas with sauce. Peas are notoriously elusive –not even the greatest chefs can produce petits fois farcis– especially if, deterring to the insistence of Miss Maners, the consumer is determined to eat the peas with his fork rather than the more practical spoon. Don’t tell me that the Chinese are worse off. I can assure you it is easier to grip a pea with chopsticks than to pierce it with a fork. It is also pointless to rebut that the fork is used to collect the peas, not to pierce them, because forks are designed for the sole purpose of dropping the peas they pretend to collect.

Furthermore, peas in flight are dully served only when there is turbulence and the captain turns on the “fasten seat belts” sign. As a result of this complex ergonomic calculation, the peas have only two alternatives: either they roll down your shirtfront or they fall on your fly.

As the ancient fabulists taught us, to prevent a fox from drinking out of a glass, the glass must be tall and slim. Glasses on planes are short, squat, rather basin-like. Obviously, any liquid will spill, obeying the laws of physics, even when there is no turbulence. The bread is not a French baguette, which you have to tear with your teeth even when it’s fresh, but rather a special friable roll, which, the moment is grasped, explodes in a cloud of fine powder. Thanks to the Lavoisier principle this powder vanishes only in appearance: on debarking, you will find that it has all accumulated under your behind, managing to stain even the seat of your trousers. The desert tends to the meringue genre, and its fragments mix with the bread, or else it dribbles over the fingers immediately, when the napkin is already steeped in tomato sauce and hence unusable.

True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelettte has already ended in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled with brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has now congealed around your waist…

…why, then, in first class, where space is ample, do they serve compact foods, like Russian caviar or buttered slices of toast, or smoked salmon or lobsters chunks with a drop of oil and lemon? Is it perhaps because in the films of Luchino Visconti, when the Nazi aristocrats say “shoot him,” they pop a single, compact grape into their mouth?”

Posted by camilo at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The beginning of 2007 is already suggesting that we are getting closer to accept comics as a serious and powerful communications channel. On the second day of the year, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Holy Heroes of Indian Lore. Batman!” which explains at length new ventures by Virgin Comics.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is taking an interesting approach to develop stories on comics, loosely based on traditional Indian mythologies and with preconceived cross-media extensions (mostly film). A bold approach includes recruiting the talent of two gifted film directors (John Woo and Guy Ritchie) to develop some of the stories, a move that will certainly raise the profile of the medium.

Also on the first week of January, The Economist published a short note referring to Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka, and Riss’ “La Face Karchée de Sarkozy;” the newest iteration of the political comic book in France (a country with a rich tradition with the medium). The book has also been at the center of a BBC article, discussed in several blogs, and even turned into amateur videos.

The recent success of Burger King’s Xbox arcade game series, with over 2 million copies sold at the end of 2006 (in just a few weeks), can’t be detached from pop culture’s increased appetite for comics. Since the beginning of the history of video games, designers have openly acknowledged the huge influence of comics in general and Japanese manga in specific on the video game medium. Chris Kohler documented this influence in multiple interviews with Japanese game designers; a great example comes from Nintendo’s Shigueru Miyamoto: “Thinking back, I would say that although it wasn’t done consciously, I ended up designing Donkey Kong like a traditional Japanese four-panel manga comic strip. That way of telling a story in four distinct parts seemed natural to me…”

Why is this medium so important? No one better to answer than Scott McCloud, who 14 years ago made a great push to liberate comics from its paradigm through his book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” Invisible because the mechanics of the medium include a great deal of interaction among the creator, channel, and reader that results in understanding beyond what is on paper. The visual language of comics lends itself to become a thought starter in the mind of the reader who often must complete the picture in her mind (in both, the literal and abstract sense). This exercise, known as closure, empowers comics with a unique and special faculty.

Invisible also because comics are created literally from nothing: ideas, pen, and paper. The medium of comics is as democratic as it is powerful, and the web as well as other internet-based platforms like Linden Lab’s Second Life will definitively play an important role in disseminating and offering new tools to artists and anyone with a vision.

We should welcome these developments because they will contribute to equalize tomorrow’s conversation while making us smarter in the process.

Images from Virgin Comics.

Posted by camilo at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The tools that we use at work tend to define [in both literal and abstract ways] an important part of who we are. Marshall McLuhan’s “extensions of man” metaphor [applied to media as tools in their own right] seems to be more and more relevant these days, with computer-intensive work environments proliferating in the great majority of urban areas causing an overdependence on CPUs of all shapes and sizes.

Today we have a symbiotic relationship with these chameleonic machines that is intensifying as the amount of time that the average knowledge worker spends with them increases. The ubiquitous Microsoft Office, king among spreadsheets, memos, emails, and sales presentations, has created an environment in which cut and paste, more than an operation represents a lifestyle.

Microsoft defines the suite as “productivity and information management tools” with an aura of efficiency very much inline with the corporate environment. The users of Office would probably define themselves in the same terms, at least in the professional context. This might be why the limitations of the medium end up becoming our own. Proof can be found not in our obsession to fit ideas within the confines of PowerPoint, but in the fact that, whenever anything goes wrong, most people tend to blame the software rather than the person behind it. Edward Tufte provides great insights on this matter, his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching our Corrupts Within” is probably the best place to initiate any reflection on humans versus this software.

David Byrne also offers an excellent example of PowerPoint in the hands of the artist, which can also be seen as a realization of McLuhan’s vision of the artist as a technological leader in modern society, helping us understand technology while technology itself is literally running over most of us. The work of Byrne started as an exploration of the medium, more to condemn its limitations than to really use it for artistic purposes. That initial approach changed dramatically as the artist realized PowerPoint’s potential beyond its traditional use, a great account of this early stage can be found in a 2003 Wired article titled “Learning to Love PowerPoint.”

Two years ago Byrne published his experiments with PowerPoint in a book/DVD set ironically labeled “Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information.” By breaking the imaginary “limitations” of the tool, the artist pushes us to confront our own approach to communicate ideas, adding significant value to corporate life in the process.

Other artists have been a lot more daring, going beyond PowerPoint [that could be considered the low hanging fruit] and into a more hostile territory. Detroit-based Danielle Aubert discovered the joys of Excel from the point of view of the designer; the result is a web exhibition and a book titled “58 Days Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel.” The January/February 2007 issue of I.D. reviews Aubert’s Excel work defining it in the exact context of Microsoft’s own description of the software: Personal and Productive.

Art is leading the reinvention of corporate software, which far from depending on further [inevitable] technological breakthrough, seems to depend on a broader understanding of the same tools. The answer to better PowerPoint won’t be found within the software itself but rather within the people behind it.

Excerpt from “Four and Half Months of Daily Drawings Made in Microsoft Excel.” See the full video @ danielleaubert.com

Posted by camilo at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How do we know that it is going to be in fact happy? Perhaps happiness is too personal to be described or even measured. In any case The Economist brilliantly ended 2006 with an article that looks at happiness (and how to measure it) through the lens of economics.

Economists have an infinite number of tools to tackle a particular challenge. In the quest for measuring happiness the article walks us through the most scientific ones such as brain scans and face recognition to the more straightforward as a simple survey. The result so far is foggy with no apparent winner and the tragic (but very real) conclusion that it is all relative. Our happiness seems to be directly related to our neighbor’s unhappiness, “Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep.”

Maybe economists need to stop looking inwards and do what they do best which is precisely the opposite. As the article openly acknowledges, economists’ forte is studying “outward behavior, not inward feelings; choices made, not pleasures taken.” And it is precisely a change of paradigm that is motivating new research on feelings. Well, feelings are not necessarily the domain of individuals as much as they are not confined to the depths of our hearts. Media Studies has been telling us for a while that we can also interpret feelings from people’s expressions, from art.

Marshal McLuhan once wrote in one of those essays that at the moment fell through the cracks, that artists are the one group of individuals that inhabit the present (which is regarded as the future by society at large) and their role is not merely limited to their own self-expression but is a reflection of the larger community as it also helps the community to understand themselves as well as the technology (or environment) that surrounds them.

If this is even close to be true then street art as well as Sonia Katyal's Semiotic Disobedience (see more about the latter in previous posts), offer a non-pretentious form of expression that is extremely intimate at the community level and perhaps can tell us more about our feelings than isolated individual opinions. Artists can be catalysts for the rest of us; sometimes they can accurately represent us. Street art with its irreverence has the potential of becoming a powerful medium to express and analyze feelings beyond the stiff limitations of scientific research.

Here are a few examples taken directly from the streets of New York City during the last day of 2006.

Have a happy new year anyway.

Billboard in Nolita, Manhattan

Poster in Nolita, Manhattan

Decorating Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Luxury Condo Construction Site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Bus Stop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Empty Lot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Posted by camilo at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)