The world has started to rely upon mobile phone technology that enables communication when people are, for example, travelling. Or visiting friends.
The life we live has been seriously changed but is it all for the better? Being aware of danger makes us alert. Driving a vehicle, for example, requires constant attention. Using mobiles when driving has been made illegal in this country, for very good reasons. Our brains are unable to do language and steering at the same time, it seems.
When mobile phones started to appear it was considered gauche to allow one to ring when at dinner or in a shared public space (like the cinema). These days if your mobile does not go off during a date, it almost like saying you are not all that popular.
Attention is now a commodity. No longer can you own or control your own time. It is randomly portioned out to the will of others. Is this entirely wise?
There is nothing wrong with mobiles, it is just they accentuate existing human foibles by increasing access, increasing interruption, and increasing anxiety.
And then the adverts that give you an IQ test requiring your mobile number to charge you for the answer. The test can not be an accurate IQ test. Is this valuable?
Disclaimer: I do not own a mobile phone.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Free content
The web should always be free is one of the mantras that started back when the forefathers of the web were ordaining rules for the new medium. Except that in the beginning it was not a "medium", it was really a way to share academic research and so forth. Information should be free.
But the web became a place to buy books - with the rise and rise of Amazon. It became a place to buy anything with web shops everywhere - some that work and many that simply do not.
A catalogue of products obviously is not something you can ask for a subscription to, but the news media produce access to information that is not exclusive. It originates from the public domain so charging for it, per se, seems unnatural.
Charging for a document that carries advertising makes perfect sense. But the internet's evolution has deconstructed that idea. Now we are all so overloaded with information that the very idea of paying for any of it seems downright silly.
In this brave new world, journalists and content makers are expected to make a living for free.
But the web became a place to buy books - with the rise and rise of Amazon. It became a place to buy anything with web shops everywhere - some that work and many that simply do not.
A catalogue of products obviously is not something you can ask for a subscription to, but the news media produce access to information that is not exclusive. It originates from the public domain so charging for it, per se, seems unnatural.
Charging for a document that carries advertising makes perfect sense. But the internet's evolution has deconstructed that idea. Now we are all so overloaded with information that the very idea of paying for any of it seems downright silly.
In this brave new world, journalists and content makers are expected to make a living for free.
The death of the blog
No more boring blogs! The linked article is the most magnificently detailed and varied layouts more like a magazine than a traditional web page.
With a webpage, a blog like this one, a template is used to give the entire site a common look.
But who are we kidding. Looking at the same page design all the time may be branding, but it is boring. Therefore the blog is a dead medium. To make it exciting an alive requires design.
Maybe we will switch our templates around more often.
With a webpage, a blog like this one, a template is used to give the entire site a common look.
But who are we kidding. Looking at the same page design all the time may be branding, but it is boring. Therefore the blog is a dead medium. To make it exciting an alive requires design.
Maybe we will switch our templates around more often.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
0900 Give Me A dollar for FREE
The world is drowning in media-ocraty
If you had a message for others to listen to 2000 years ago, you stood on a mount, and raised your arms to the sky. These days there are a million ways to invoke powers you may or may not really have, to impress people. Primary amoung these is "design". Another is "compelling communication". Both are merely vehicles for something. What? Something!
The media is not the message. It took a long time to afford broadcast quality beta cam video and it restricted our air waves to only include "broadcast quality" images. Now the media analysts have just noticed that a handheld video device you can get for three hundred bucks can make fairly decent TV. The "real" world of artificially popularised journalism has newly reborn at TVNZ, with a tech revolution now only 10 years behind the rest of the internet. We have new channels to carry more local content, most safe and pedestrian, but one gem is radical new-school journo Russel Brown on Media7 quizzing the Minister of Broadcasting (who's on camera manner is truly dreadful) essentially if the show he makes analysing media can still attract Government funding? He could have been waving him arms in the air. Quite surreal.
Government funded TV should be find expressive arts, to develop a pool of talent. Sorry, Julie Christie may enjoy her own ideas. But Government funding is wasted if spent on quiz shows.
Reality TV is simply observing human behaviour. Sleezy setup journalism dressed in dapper graphics is still boring. The endless quest for yet another way to slice bread brings us a million ways to not make profit.
Real news and real drama take the breath away. Yet another way to scalp $2.50 for every sucker that puts their mobile number into your website is not art. It is crime.
The greatest friend the conman has is his next victim. These sites that invite you to call in on your teenage funded mobile account (they figure parents have lots of money to waste) to vote and be charged each time do nothing for the consumer that uses them.
And then they appear in millions of guises. They are annoying and do not advance humanity one little bit. The danger of the intrusion of "Web 2.0" into newspapers is like the intrusion of advertising into editorial. It does not belong.
Quality content is not dreamed up by "designers", they do the shiny part. Quality is dreamed up by thinkers, architects and designers create surfaces to represent them. The danger with Web 2.0 media is that everything is so designed, that nobody noticed what a waste of time most of the iPhone apps really are.
Computer software is an art, and every so often it is highjacked by those who only want a surface to slide upon, and do not want to be bothered with the detail.
Like my old boss kept saying "click the ticket" - he wanted applications that provided a minimal if somewhat useful service and took a few cents each time. It was a mantra gimmick he was after. A magic spell. A service that essentially gave you an excuse to click the ticket.
When I read a news story, I want the paper it is printed on to not be the best thing about the news. I want the writing to hold my attention. The product is human shock.
If you had a message for others to listen to 2000 years ago, you stood on a mount, and raised your arms to the sky. These days there are a million ways to invoke powers you may or may not really have, to impress people. Primary amoung these is "design". Another is "compelling communication". Both are merely vehicles for something. What? Something!
The media is not the message. It took a long time to afford broadcast quality beta cam video and it restricted our air waves to only include "broadcast quality" images. Now the media analysts have just noticed that a handheld video device you can get for three hundred bucks can make fairly decent TV. The "real" world of artificially popularised journalism has newly reborn at TVNZ, with a tech revolution now only 10 years behind the rest of the internet. We have new channels to carry more local content, most safe and pedestrian, but one gem is radical new-school journo Russel Brown on Media7 quizzing the Minister of Broadcasting (who's on camera manner is truly dreadful) essentially if the show he makes analysing media can still attract Government funding? He could have been waving him arms in the air. Quite surreal.
Government funded TV should be find expressive arts, to develop a pool of talent. Sorry, Julie Christie may enjoy her own ideas. But Government funding is wasted if spent on quiz shows.
Reality TV is simply observing human behaviour. Sleezy setup journalism dressed in dapper graphics is still boring. The endless quest for yet another way to slice bread brings us a million ways to not make profit.
Real news and real drama take the breath away. Yet another way to scalp $2.50 for every sucker that puts their mobile number into your website is not art. It is crime.
The greatest friend the conman has is his next victim. These sites that invite you to call in on your teenage funded mobile account (they figure parents have lots of money to waste) to vote and be charged each time do nothing for the consumer that uses them.
And then they appear in millions of guises. They are annoying and do not advance humanity one little bit. The danger of the intrusion of "Web 2.0" into newspapers is like the intrusion of advertising into editorial. It does not belong.
Quality content is not dreamed up by "designers", they do the shiny part. Quality is dreamed up by thinkers, architects and designers create surfaces to represent them. The danger with Web 2.0 media is that everything is so designed, that nobody noticed what a waste of time most of the iPhone apps really are.
Computer software is an art, and every so often it is highjacked by those who only want a surface to slide upon, and do not want to be bothered with the detail.
Like my old boss kept saying "click the ticket" - he wanted applications that provided a minimal if somewhat useful service and took a few cents each time. It was a mantra gimmick he was after. A magic spell. A service that essentially gave you an excuse to click the ticket.
When I read a news story, I want the paper it is printed on to not be the best thing about the news. I want the writing to hold my attention. The product is human shock.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The New Media Wars
Facebook vs Blogger. Facebook wins that in one sense. It loses in another.
Blogger vs Wordpress. Same conundrum. Blogger is better for instant publishing, wordpress is better for everything.
And if I posted that on Facebook, criticizing Facebook's latest new way of operating (their revisions are huge and jarring), I could expect Facebook to remove my ya ya yaing about them. At least that is what a friend said happened to her reactions to Facebook's new features. Maybe, maybe not.
Facebook is useless for art or idea development. They retain indefinite copyright on what you post there. Yuck. Read their terms and conditions.
When it comes down to privacy and copyright anything is better than Facebook. Here you are publishing actual details of your actual life, your connections and your hopes, and hopefully not your trade secrets or finished works of art.
It is like open book email. You must beware who you connect to unless you are a celebrity and have a public persona. But people seem to survive without being too concerned and not much goes wrong.
Facebook is very nosy - it wants to know which Rock Star you want to be so they can tailor which house ads you get to see. It is the pinnacle of intrusive marketing. Extremely smart to give you the ads you want rather than go for exposure with its mountain of failed impressions(google's only real mistake was to emulate publishing in this way).
The reason FB is successful is that is an approximation of real social connection. It is well exposed to quiet media giants enslaving your attention to their ideals. It is civil, people behave well and it is accurate. In the same sense that Wikipedia is accurate. A wall is a wall, with all its graffiti. Your own garden wall is something that you grow plants on (the Myspace model, and moreso youtube - most comments are garbage, so why engage?)
The hybrid to watch is Twitter. This models more truly the incidental nature of the web and the independence and fleeting nature of throwing your words into the cosmic pile. There is sufficient lack of focus on the author, more focus on the posts and where they lead. With Google Chrome you soon are overwhelming your machines memory with links to some interesting things.
FB does that too. Myspace is more like an arcade of your own talent. Leads nowhere. The page is the destination, and everyone else plasters their ads on it. You are the free entertainment for Rupert Murdoch to sell ads.
So what does this lead us to? Social Networks are at an evolutionary stage. Another new entrant can still upset the jelly wobbling it's evolving ways. It is still amorphous because it does not really have a formalised way of succeeding. Like most things it is also transitory and will be outmoded by more refined communication.
As drivers in vehicles are starting to discover by rapid elimination, cell phones and control on the roads do not go hand in hand. I also believe that cell phones and the billions being ploughed into linked advertising campaigns require a social network to survive. And if that is the driving force behind a social network then are we not engaging in a collusion of mass delusion? My phone told me I wanted an ice-cream and the company hired the best psychologists to make that desire nearly unbearably linked to my subconscious sexual instincts.
For this reason, I feel that the current trend of "smart marketing" will go the same way as "smart drugs" - people will realise they were better off without them.
If I want to have an ice cream, I want it to be on a hot summers day - not late at night.
And if a driver is controlling a car I do not want then to receive a text message. It would make a whole lot of sense for cars to have a mobile receptacle that creates limited call time hands free with verbal dialing (but car firms have no money for R&D).
The next big social network development - the one that could transform the way we think and survive Facebook is Google Wave.
I just got invited to Beta Test it. More soon.
Blogger vs Wordpress. Same conundrum. Blogger is better for instant publishing, wordpress is better for everything.
And if I posted that on Facebook, criticizing Facebook's latest new way of operating (their revisions are huge and jarring), I could expect Facebook to remove my ya ya yaing about them. At least that is what a friend said happened to her reactions to Facebook's new features. Maybe, maybe not.
Facebook is useless for art or idea development. They retain indefinite copyright on what you post there. Yuck. Read their terms and conditions.
When it comes down to privacy and copyright anything is better than Facebook. Here you are publishing actual details of your actual life, your connections and your hopes, and hopefully not your trade secrets or finished works of art.
It is like open book email. You must beware who you connect to unless you are a celebrity and have a public persona. But people seem to survive without being too concerned and not much goes wrong.
Facebook is very nosy - it wants to know which Rock Star you want to be so they can tailor which house ads you get to see. It is the pinnacle of intrusive marketing. Extremely smart to give you the ads you want rather than go for exposure with its mountain of failed impressions(google's only real mistake was to emulate publishing in this way).
The reason FB is successful is that is an approximation of real social connection. It is well exposed to quiet media giants enslaving your attention to their ideals. It is civil, people behave well and it is accurate. In the same sense that Wikipedia is accurate. A wall is a wall, with all its graffiti. Your own garden wall is something that you grow plants on (the Myspace model, and moreso youtube - most comments are garbage, so why engage?)
The hybrid to watch is Twitter. This models more truly the incidental nature of the web and the independence and fleeting nature of throwing your words into the cosmic pile. There is sufficient lack of focus on the author, more focus on the posts and where they lead. With Google Chrome you soon are overwhelming your machines memory with links to some interesting things.
FB does that too. Myspace is more like an arcade of your own talent. Leads nowhere. The page is the destination, and everyone else plasters their ads on it. You are the free entertainment for Rupert Murdoch to sell ads.
So what does this lead us to? Social Networks are at an evolutionary stage. Another new entrant can still upset the jelly wobbling it's evolving ways. It is still amorphous because it does not really have a formalised way of succeeding. Like most things it is also transitory and will be outmoded by more refined communication.
As drivers in vehicles are starting to discover by rapid elimination, cell phones and control on the roads do not go hand in hand. I also believe that cell phones and the billions being ploughed into linked advertising campaigns require a social network to survive. And if that is the driving force behind a social network then are we not engaging in a collusion of mass delusion? My phone told me I wanted an ice-cream and the company hired the best psychologists to make that desire nearly unbearably linked to my subconscious sexual instincts.
For this reason, I feel that the current trend of "smart marketing" will go the same way as "smart drugs" - people will realise they were better off without them.
If I want to have an ice cream, I want it to be on a hot summers day - not late at night.
And if a driver is controlling a car I do not want then to receive a text message. It would make a whole lot of sense for cars to have a mobile receptacle that creates limited call time hands free with verbal dialing (but car firms have no money for R&D).
The next big social network development - the one that could transform the way we think and survive Facebook is Google Wave.
I just got invited to Beta Test it. More soon.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Distribution
Once upon a time, distribution used to be a controlled, expensive and very restricted activity. Suddenly it is unrestricted and a perception has developed that there is an increasing demand for triviality. With a hope that people will buy into this on their mobiles. Buying a series of 5 minute dramas seems like a producers dream. Cheap plentiful content with very little need for sustained writing, can be written and donated by contributors and the random hit and low cost guaranteeing a return.
Is not fantasy the suspension of disbelief? As everyone in the universe attempts to attract a following on the momentum of a digital tidal wave of media access, it is a mistake to commodify availability to the exclusion of a cultural progress.
It is inevitable that overreach into false entertainment will eventually suffer competition of actual genius. The television formats were false regimes, but suitably gripping content was required to sustain decor for advertising.
It is not that people want or need insubstantial content. It is that the medium is not the same medium. Will the advent of rapid broadband world wide change our perception of privacy?
Is not fantasy the suspension of disbelief? As everyone in the universe attempts to attract a following on the momentum of a digital tidal wave of media access, it is a mistake to commodify availability to the exclusion of a cultural progress.
It is inevitable that overreach into false entertainment will eventually suffer competition of actual genius. The television formats were false regimes, but suitably gripping content was required to sustain decor for advertising.
It is not that people want or need insubstantial content. It is that the medium is not the same medium. Will the advent of rapid broadband world wide change our perception of privacy?
Friday, September 18, 2009
Content vs Social
Is there a war on between content and the social connectiveness illusion we call social networking? My experience tells me that there is a friction between reporting facts and creating a fictional society in relation to news media. Fictional society? Magazines are well familiar with "fictional society" making up stories that keep up hooked usually about the king and queen of the celebrity planet, where-ever that is.
Frankly, socialising with the kinds of people who contribute to the newspaper is not my idea of fun. The idea of doing it behind a non-de-plume, to me, is plain dishonest.
Creating a fiction or a character to interact with the likes of Twitter lends itself to a business application in the same way as being a Facebook artist or a myspace artist, but which is best? All are. But should an artist be spending all their time creating social networks or creating art?
Frankly, socialising with the kinds of people who contribute to the newspaper is not my idea of fun. The idea of doing it behind a non-de-plume, to me, is plain dishonest.
Creating a fiction or a character to interact with the likes of Twitter lends itself to a business application in the same way as being a Facebook artist or a myspace artist, but which is best? All are. But should an artist be spending all their time creating social networks or creating art?
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