Category Archives: Media & Culture

The end of capitalism has begun

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The provocative headline of this article (by Paul Mason in The Guardian) is enough to make some dismiss it out of hand. I hope you’ll give these excerpts a quick scan and, if you see something interesting, click through to the article.

  • Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs.
  • We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory.
  • The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them.
  • Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse.”
  • By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being.
  • The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company.
  • The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago.

We are data: the future of machine intelligence (2015)

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“Artificial Intuition happens when a computer and its software look at data and analyze it using computation that mimics human intuition at the deepest levels: language, hierarchical thinking — even spiritual and religious thinking. The machines doing the thinking are deliberately designed to replicate human neural networks, and connected together form even larger artificial neural networks.”

This is from an article by Douglas Coupland. Maybe one of the more frightening things I’ve read about data collection. Let’s start with a few of one-liners:

“Amazon can tell if you’re straight or gay within seven purchases.”
“Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.”
“The amount of internet freedom we have right now is the most we’re ever going to get.”

He starts his piece with a description of an imaginary app called Wonkr. I had to read this a few times to decide if he was serious or not.

“You put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat. You’ll be in an elevator in Manhattan and the higher you go, the percentage of Democrats shrinks. Go to Germany — or France or anywhere, really — and Wonkr adapts to local politics. The thing to remember is: Wonkr only activates in crowds. If you’re at home alone, with the apps switched off, nobody can tell anything about you.”

“Wonkr’s job is to tell you the political temperature of a busy space. “Am I among friends or enemies?” But then you can easily change the radius of testability. Instead of just the room you’re standing in, make it of the block or the whole city — or your country. Wonkr is a de facto polling app. Pollsters are suddenly out of a job: Wonkr tells you — with astonishing accuracy — who believes what, and where they do it.”

“Wonkr is a free app but why not help it by paying say, 99 cents, to allow it to link you with people who think just like you. Remember, to sign on to Wonkr you have to take a relatively deep quiz. Maybe 155 questions, like the astonishingly successful eHarmony.com.”

If you’re busy, put this aside until you have 10 minutes. It’s packed tighter than cocaine mule’s carry-on.

How to hire radio talent

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Mark Ramsey is a “media strategist, researcher and trend-maker.” What we used to call a consultant. Here’s part of his answer to the question: “what qualifications should we be looking for in talent, programming, and sales that are different from today’s conventional qualifications?”

For talent, nothing else will be more important than that talent’s skill and engagement with social media and digital platforms.

Here’s some questions he’d ask before hiring:

  • How big is your personal audience, the one you have direct relationships with, as measured by social media?
  • How many Twitter followers do you have?
  • How big is your Facebook fan page, and how strong is your engagement?
  • How many Instagram followers and likes do you have?
  • How many YouTube subscribers and total views do you have?
  • Do you have a website for your own brand?
  • How big is your brand’s personal email list? How often do you send out email? What do you send?
  • What podcasts do you produce? How much listenership do they receive? How many podcast subscribers do you have?

“In other words, to what degree do you – the talent – take responsibility for building your own personal brand? And how can you demonstrate the power of that brand to me?”

I think he’s right. As I’ve watch social media grow and evolve I’ve wondered how I would have fared in this new media environment. Glad I didn’t miss the “spinning records” era.

Fortunate Son

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I recently heard a bluesy/jazzy version of CCR’s Fortunate Son. The uke chords seemed to be within my limited range so I’ve been amusing myself (and our two dogs). This afternoon I took a break to fiddle around with Garageband. This sounds nothing like the cover that got me started. Submitted here for your amusement.

The people formerly known as advertisers

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Media researcher Gordon Borrell says “we’ve reached the end of the Golden Age of Advertising.”

  • 82% of SMBs have established their own media channel in the form of a website or social media page.
  • Since 2007, spending has skyrocketed to the point at which businesses last year spent 72% more on marketing services and promotions than they had spent 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the annual expenditure on local advertising was 22% less than it was a decade ago.
  • “Over the next 12 months, the gap will almost certainly widen to the point that all traditional advertising channels — print, broadcast, outdoor and mail — begin to look like niche support mechanisms to a local businesses’ digital marketing plan.”

At the Dark End of the Street

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“In the summer of 1966, while a DJ convention was being held in Memphis, Dan Penn and Chips Moman were cheating while playing cards with Florida DJ Don Schroeder,and decided to write the song while on a break. Penn said of the song “We were always wanting to come up with the best cheatin’ song. Ever.” The duo went to the hotel room of Quinton Claunch, another Muscle Shoals alumnus, and founder of Hi Records, to write. Claunch told them, “Boys, you can use my room on one condition, which is that you give me that song for James Carr. They said I had a deal, and they kept their word.” The song, lyrics and all, was written in about thirty minutes.” (Wikipedia)

I first heard this song in the 1991 Alan Parker film The Commitments. It’s been covered by lots and lots of artists (Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman, Linda Ronstadt, to name a few) but my favorite versions are by Bobby King & Terry Evans and Veronica Klaus.

How many songs is enough?

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My recent purge/re-org of photos was productive and satisfying. So I decided to tackle my iTunes music library next. I collected a lot of music in the 60s and 70s. LPs, reel-to-reel, cassettes. After I left radio (no longer “on the air” playing music for others to listen to) I pretty much lost interest in music until the iPod came along in 2001. But I never amassed a giant collection of songs.

As I turned my attention to my iTunes library I discovered I had 800+ titles. Scanning and sampling, it quickly became apparent that I hadn’t listened to some of these songs in years… and probably wouldn’t listen to many of them ever again. The result of ripping and entire LP that included only two or three songs that I liked. Or purchasing an entire “CD” from iTunes. But you don’t delete songs, right? You might listen to them someday. So, just tuck them away in a folder or playlist for that day.

In some manner I can’t explain, keeping those never-gonna-listen-to-them again songs were preventing me from listening to the stuff I liked. So I purged. Down to about 650 songs.

I’m still organizing. Creating playlists, adding ratings, etc. This morning I picked my 100 “favorite” songs (from the 650). Much harder than I expected and certainly a moving target. I’ll keep refining that. The goal will be, I think, to reach a point where any song that comes up in shuffle will prompt me to think/says, “Ooh. I love that song!”

I know what you’re thinking (as does The Amazing Kreskin): Why not subscribe to Spotify or Beats or one of the other streaming services and enjoy ALL the songs. See, that’t the problem for me. I can’t enjoy all the songs. Too many choices. I’m glad those services exist and hope there are more and better ones coming, but I’m gonna concentrate on really listening to and enjoying the music I have.