Breathe In, Breathe Out

Does Comedy Endure?

If The Beatles are the baby boom's rock band, then surely George Carlin was its comedian. Or at least one of the more important ones. Carlin endured from the 60's to a live HBO special I watched just a few months ago. He started out funny, but the humor was fairly mild. Then we all know where it went in the later years. The seven words you can't say on TV, etc.

But what about Carlin's place in history? (And, yes, I think comedy has a place in history.) I mean, if you're not a boomer who watched him though the haze of the youth through to the grey-haired HBO rants?

If you read most of the tributes in the news the last few days, you'd think he only did the seven words routine. As What the Media Isn't Saying About George Carlin says, he left a much deeper legacy.

Only most of the stuff is disturbing to mainstream American culture and media. Stuff like that quoted in What the Media Isn't Saying:

• Religion is the biggest load of bullshit ever sold.
• The U.S. loves to bomb countries filled with little brown people.
• Both political parties are owned and operated by corporations.
• Instead of putting drug dealers in jail, we should execute the bankers who launder the drug money.
• Golf is an elitist, pretentious sport and homeless people should be given the golf courses to live on.

I think the point is well-taken here. But I wonder about a larger take on Carlin and on comedy in general. Namely, how does the material hold up over the years? Will our grandchildren or their children know about Carlin? Will this stuff still be funny then?

Comedians live for popularity in the time they are performing. But often they are on the cutting edge of some sort of cultural change - look at Lenny Bruce.

It kind of begs the question of whether comedy or performing arts in general are a reflection of the culture in which they emerge, or if they somehow produce newer cultural patterns that induce or at least reinforce cultural or social change. It'll be interesting to take a look back in 10 years or so to see if this stuff is still funny, or, more to the point, relevant.

Technorati Tags: comedy, georgecarlin, babyboom

Waste Time Watching TV - Again

863707228Here's something related to yesterday's post about television soaking up the free time that came with the 5-day work week. All those hours we pissed away watching inane episodic television? We can waste even more time with the same shows, according to this article in the New York Times. Only this time they won't strictly be on any broadcast or cable channel; they'll be streamed in the internet. And supported with advertising, of course.

This all assumes us passively watching all this dreck, and that's hard to do on a computer screen - at least for most of us. Better, maybe some will remix or mash them up and then share them. Now that might be fun!

Less Television, More Media

Image by gbaku, via Flickr (CC license)

With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube.

Much of the useless information I know came from watching television. I know who shot JR, for example. Or, McDreamy and McSteamy used to live in New York, and McSteamy slept with McDreamy's wife.

Yep, I've pissed away a lot of hours in front of the boob tube. But not nearly so much in the last couple of years. There are plenty of other ways to consume media time - blogging, twittering, sharing stuff with friends and family. What? You thought I was going to talk about using the time to read or exercise?)

Oh, we still watch a few favorites, whenever we want, thanks to TIVO. But consuming media - maybe better put as using media like television - isn't the same as it was and never will be, thank goodness.

Author Clay Shirky has made a career out of talking about this kind of stuff. His book Here Comes Everybody will give you a clear view of what's going on with media and society. And a transcript of his speech at the Web 2.0 Conference puts it in a little more perspective.

Society's television viewing bender came not from the invention of television, but was a kind of side effect from adopting the 5-day work week in the 20th century. That change created a big dab of free time, and Philo T Farnesworth, David Sarnoff, William Paley, et al were happy to fill it.

Shirky calls the free time a cognitive surplus, time you brain doesn't have to think about work. With nothing else to do with it, lots of us veged out in front of the tube. The tube produced, and we consumed; a classic one-way interaction.

But the internet and social media have changed all that. We can still consume media, but we can also produce out own content and share it with whomever we please quite easily and cheaply.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

And that's making for a big change that will be even bigger when today's toddlers grow up:

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

That all sounds like the most wonderful thing - and it is. But I think there are going to be some side effects that aren't necessarily good ones.

Increasingly we can consume, produce and share media on the go with mobile devices like iPhones, Blackberries, or whathaveyou. And we've probably all experienced trying to hold a conversation with someone who's preoccupied with reading email or looking something up on one of those mobile devices.

I've referred to this continuous partial attention syndrome previously. I expect it will get a lot worse as things unfold.

But at least we won't spend enormous amounts of time watching and wondering who shot JR.

Learning Makes a Difference

Image from jonhanson, via Flickr (CC license)

As long as our nervous systems continue learning, we'll probably be OK.

My post on Learning and Change added a Feldenkrais Method spin on a video rant by author Susan Jacoby. Jacoby goes on about the dumbing down of American culture. For example, in one study only 23% of people with some college could locate Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Israel on a map - and the map was labeled.

So it's a bit refreshing to find some smart and informed examples of people who go against the trend. By now, this is not exactly new, but check out the You Tube video that shows what happens when a reporter tries to put a young Obama supporter on the spot by asking for specifics. Find the video here. And for even more specific stuff on interviewee Derrick Ashong, watch this video.

Then there's the news media and their assumptions about news consumers. Kevin Kelly points out their possible role in the dumbing down scenario and finds a nice counterpoint:

In other words, that's the conventional wisdom about newsy stuff: There's the boring important things on the front page and the frivolous self-help stuff on the rest. What Hirschorn found in his study was different:

Instead, the most–e-mailed lists, despite a smattering of parochial concerns, were a rich stew of global affairs, provocative insight, hot-button issues, pop culture, compelling narrative, and enlightened localism. In short, they were interesting...

So maybe we're not all as dull as some make us out. As long as our nervous systems take advantage of the learning experiences richly available everywhere, we'll probably be OK.

Learning and Change

Sometimes I think the Feldenkrais Method gets oversimplified in an attempt to explain it to more people. It's easy to get to the point of lumping it into a sort of rehab service or method of improving your posture. Certainly, it does offer those things, but I hold that it's really about developing the ability to pay fine enough attention to a situation so that you can develop alternative ways of going beyond that situation.

Too narrow a definition and it risks losing the focus on learning that goes way beyond posture, quasi rehab or what-have-you.

How can these ideas of learning, particularly the one of developing awareness of current situation before developing alternatives, be applied outside of the somatic realm? Journalist and author Susan Jacoby offers a dandy way when Bill Moyers interviewed her for PBS recently. See the video here.

Jacoby rants on about the dumbing down of American culture here and in her book, The Age of American Unreason.

I mean, for example, obviously the healthcare situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But if people don't know, for example, how is healthcare handled in other countries? How many people, for instance, do have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. In other words, you can say, "Oh, we don't want a program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors." Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network.

I found it refreshing to see these sorts of ideas alive in the conceptual/intellectual terms, with absolutely no mention of anything somatic.

And this idea of establishing a base of knowledge of how things are is getting especially important in this US presidential election season. The term Change seems to be on every candidate's lips. But change from what; change to what?

Jacoby's argument clearly has a liberal flavor, so I was surprised when she took both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration to task for failing to provide such educational services. They made major policy moves without first educating us on what they mean and why they are important.

As a contrast, Jacoby offers FDR's radio addresses of the 1930's and 40's. Franklin D. Roosevelt urged the pubic to spread out a world map before each chat so that they could follow along, actually see what and where Roosevelt was talking about, and make some sense out of it. Today, one survey shows that only 23% of people with some college can point out important Middle East locations, even when the map is clearly labeled.

Sad comment on our educational system, at least as far as geopolitics goes.

I think the Jacoby interview serves as a good example of taking a universal principle like learning about current situations, and then broadening it to include world politics. The absence of knowing where we are, of having the knowledge and information to locate our starting position hinders our ability to navigate in the world, whether somatically or conceptually.

It's all a learning process.

Where New Television Comes From

One of the perks of working in broadcast television is, well ... you can watch TV while you work. Usually it's video that you're working on for later broadcast. But sometimes it's easy to stray into other territory. So in 1976, I got somewhat hooked on a cutting-edge satirical soap opera, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

So why bring up a 30-year-old show that was at best a cult favorite even when it was first run? Well, it was mentioned today in a film.com review of a new series that may push the envelope in at least on of the ways MH,MH did: the show's format. The new show is In Treatment, and it's on HBO.

The history of the half-hour nighttime serial pretty much begins and ends with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman 30 years ago. That program had plenty of black humor, but In Treatment, which premiered on HBO last night and will run every weeknight for nine weeks, falls in the same humorless vein as Tell Me You Love Me. On that show, the therapy sessions were a way to kill time when the characters were wearing clothes. Here, it's the entire shebang.

OK, first of all, I don't agree with the depiction of Tell Me You Love Me. I found the therapy scenes key to the whole thing. The sex scenes were jolting not so much for their shock value, as for adding a new kind of dramatic voyeurism to the serial dramatic television form, putting the fourth wall into a new room. If drama is about characters grappling with obstacles, then aren't sexual situations a natural fit for some stories? I thought Tell Me incorporated some of those situations into the characters stories, not making them the whole story itself.

But I digress.

Where In Treatment most differs is in the 5-day-a-week format. Not everyone likes that.

The problem that In Treatment is going to have is that the number of viewers willing to commit enough time to really begin caring about these characters isn't likely to be large.

Well, so what, I say. After all, we're talking subscription-based television, not advertising supported. If Treatment flops badly, will it drive down the number of HBO subscribers? If it succeeds, will new subscribers flock to HBO?

You can bet the advertiser supported networks executives will be keeping an eye on this. If it does garner much in the way of viewers, you can look for a lot more daily serial programming. Increase the frequency of viewing, as a successful daily serial would, and the advertisers will sit up and take note. You can expect more of this format if that happens.

Only it might not be well-written and acted serial drama. That's expensive. Heaven help us if crappy reality TV packagers ever adopt this format.

The other thing worth saying about this is the kind of new idea incubator the premium subscriber service offer. They're the places trying out cutting edge stuff.

Thank goodness for that.

hbo, television

The Opportunity Offered by Mad Men

Roger Von Oech likes Mad Men, the AMC series that centers around advertising guys in 1960. Me, too.

One of his comments refers to something like nostalgia:

I was twelve in 1960 and it was interesting to re-enter that world again: people watched Twilight Zone and Leave It to Beaver.

It can seem like nostalgia, but to me Mad Men offers something like toddler/adolescent voyeurism. Now that you're an adult (at least age-wise), wouldn't it be interesting to put yourself back in that environment that you were present for, but hardly aware of. Be able to fend for yourself against all those big, serious adults; maybe get to know that redheaded secretary a little better. Know what I mean?

Technorati Tags: learning, memory

Yellow Journalism: Not So Bad?

Yellow journalism generally gets a bad rap, but maybe it wasn't really so horrible. Some of the same factors that gave rise to yellow journalism are with us today. But we might all benefit from it this time, at least according to one journalism scholar.

It seems like everything's reality TV and celebrity gossip, neither of which I have much interest in. But everything isn't, thank goodness.

The hugely fragmented market for TV programming provides a lot of choice, and a TIVO provides the means to capture it and let me view it whenever I want. A lot of crap on TV, but I don't have to see it. No slam against Dancing with the Stars or Entertainment Tonight fans: they can do the same as me. (At least when the writers come back from their strike.)

Same idea with news and other sorts of topical information. The Internet has made for an almost infinitely segmented market where all sorts of regular (and irregular news) can be found. And that trend will expand greatly in the future.

Search engines make finding news and info easy, and distribution technologies like RSS and email bring it to you so that you can do whatever you want with it on your own timetable

This level of choice seems relatively new and shiny, but it's not, not really. We've seen stuff like this before in an unlikely place - the era of yellow journalism about a hundred years ago. At least that's what writer Steve Boriss is getting at in Yellow Journalism: the Golden Age of American News.

Now most of us are used to thinking of yellow journalism as a bad thing, what with Citizen Kane telling his journalists "you supply the headlines, I'll supply the war."

But there's a lot more to it than that. Yellow journalism arose in response to both technology's effects on publishing and distribution, along with population growth. Boriss paints a clear time line of all this:

• expensive-to-publish newspapers appealing to the elites at first;
• then steam driven presses driving down the cost of production;
• then the telegraph and telephone making in all current and relevant.

Suddenly in the late 19th century, technology stood the elite and the unwashed side by side, so to speak. The audience was a mass one, but the media hadn't caught up.

Then Joseph Pulitzer came up with a formula for covering the real news, but doing so in a sensationalist way that also appealed to the masses. The serious news presented in a way appealing across the board, driving circulation and profitability to new heights.

According to Boriss, this lasted until the elite publishers got pissed enough to form a cartel out of the Associated Press, drying up the sources of sensational news treatments and setting the tone of the news business for the next 100 years.

So here we are again. Technology has dealt us a new hand. If you want sensationalized news, it's just a click or two away. If you want the serious stuff, same thing. But now it's really segmented, coming from too many sources to count - for now, at least.

Not everyone will agree with Boriss' ideas. One commenter on the blog that published the post took exception, saying in effect it could promote even more Britney and Paris news than ever before. If Boriss is even remotely onto something here, the answer is yes, it probably will. And there will be people ready to snap up even the most minute gossip nugget. I'd bet saturation determined by advertisers,not news consumers.

There aren't any Pulitzers or Hearsts - yet, though we do have Murdoch. But that's OK. I'll just start to worry when someone like Murdoch owns Fox News and MSNBC at the same time.