Bigipedia – You Think, Therefore We Am
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 12, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009Written by you, for you, for free, for money, for us.
Even before Time Magazine picked you as the person of the year (don’t feel so special, they picked this guy one year, and this guy twice), life and popular media were starting to take on these blurry edges. I’ve never understood your fascination with Reality TV; I mean, even a professional writer only has at most 30-some plots at their disposal, and you’re an amateur, so your storyline (like most people) really only revolves around whether you’re happy or not. Plus, you usually die. That’s why I was pleased to discover – amongst our ever-expanding world of user-generated content, the new BBC Radio program Bigipedia. Forget Wikipedia, forget Dickipedia. With Bigipedia, you don’t even have to be able to read! And since 70% of you use multiple forms of media at the same time, take note that with Bigipedia, you can still take some stupid Facebook Quiz or Twitter while you listen. On the other hand, those of you who are American may need either subtitles or a dictionary. The program – since it’s produced by people who actually speak English – manages to seem highbrow in spite of its clearly adolescent, internet-oriented humor. Welcome to Bigipedia – written by you, for you, for free, for money, for us.
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part II
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009Well, since your music probably sucks, you might as well plan on getting naked.
 If you play your cards right, you could end up as happily successful as this fellow! |
If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and Read the rest of this entry »
We’re All So Meta
[ 4 Comments ]Posted on July 31, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Friday, July 31st, 2009I want my Verfremdungseffekt back. Our collective tech and media savvy makes me feel like I’m living a fictionalized version of my own life.
William Shatner Gets Meta |
Sometimes I feel like my friends and I are living a fictionalized version of our lives as products. How many times a day do you hear someone reference what they said or heard on Facebook or Twitter that day, rather than talking about something that occurred in reality? How many times a day do you hear someone who doesn’t even have a job in advertising or marketing talk about branding, or someone who does have a marketing job talk about utilizing social media as if they have the secret that makes it work? We live in a culture that thinks itself so media-savvy that the best source of news is a comedy show , the most revered art form is reality shows, and the hippest people totally aren’t. I mean, once you move to Williamsburg to be hip, how hip are you? I love metafiction, in fact, I have a half-written novel (Don’t we all? Here’s an excerpt of mine, 116KB PDF) which uses the narrator’s time-traveling and alcohol abuse as the device to explain the writer’s block that prevents him from resolving the story for you. To add an extra layer of “meta” to the whole thing, I plan on not finishing the novel. This kind of hip media self-awareness was cool back when AdBusters was new, or when William Shatner acknowledged his own absurdity in things like this parody trailer for the movie Seven, but now it’s so pervasive that it’s actually cannibalized back into advertising. It’s gotten to the point that I honestly can’t suspend my disbelief about my own life any more, let alone a movie or a product. My fourth wall is gone. I want my Verfremdungseffekt back.
Twittergate – The Biggest Scoop That No-One Cares About
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 18, 2009 by admin in Technology
Saturday, July 18th, 2009The same public that doesn’t care about Twittergate probably doesn’t care about the ethics involved.
 TechCrunch’s Twitter Documents? A Little Bluerbird Told Them |
To me, the most interesting thing about the recent leak and subsequent publishing of secret internal documents from Twitter was not the information revealed about Twitter – we all know they fancy themselves to be in a deathmatch with Google and Facebook – but how TechCrunch’s decision to publish them raises once again a slew of questions about journalistic practices. The death of Walter Cronkite on Friday was a timely sort of metaphor for the kind of questions to which I’m referring; Cronkite’s famous We Are Mired In A Stalemate broadcast during the Vietnam war was a symbol of everything I admire about great journalists, and why, in decades past, I might have actually wanted to be one. TechCrunch’s decision to publish is an excellent 21st century example of 19th century British newspaper and publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe’s statement that “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising“. After pointing out that Twitter is their largest source of outside traffic after Google in June, TechCrunch has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them. Which raises a couple of interesting questions: Are they somehow upholding some value of journalism by informing the public, or are they merely capitalizing on a tremendous traffic generator? And will it backfire? While this is in fact one of the biggest stories no-one cares about (it was barely even a hot topic on Twitter, ironically), it still highlights one of the key problems faced by journalism which is outlined in one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Elements of Journalism
Can Movies Be Made Without Corporate Capitalist Greed?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 17, 2009 by admin in Popular Media
Friday, July 17th, 2009Crowdsourcing is one of many popular new buzzwords gaining traction, but will it work for movies?
A few years ago, my friend Terry Osterhout had a great idea: a zombie movie called “Hybrid”, completely produced with user-submitted material. Although a lot of buzz was generated, the submissions never really poured in. I think he was a little ahead of his time; crowdsourcing seems to be the hot new thing now, thanks to the rise of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter. We recently wrote about the crowdsourced video for the the Japanese pop band Sour’s song “Hibi no Neiro”, but there’s much more afoot: after considerable success launching the project “Live Music” (see the clip at left) via Facebook, the project is being backed by Sony and Intel for release this fall. There’s also This Movie is Broken, a movie about the Canadian band Broken Social Scene and (this will turn out well) Star Wars Uncut which slices “Star Wars: A New Hope” into 472 separate 15 second clips, to be filmed by 472 different users. This kind of “socialist filmmaking” can have beautiful results, as when Israeli artist Kutiman Remixed YouTube or when a non-profit assembles a project like Playing for Change. But can this kind of project really shape up without a healthy injection of capitalist greed? The most successful project like this so far has been Live Music, and as this CartoonBrew article points out, it’s heavily funded by corporate sponsorship. I guess there’s always crowdfunding as an alternative. This Mashable article asks if it is in fact the future of journalism. There’s been a lot of talk about Free Stuff lately, and I have to say: few know better than I how little people who like your work will pay you when you don’t directly charge for it.