There’s such a heated political environment this season.  Everyone is concerned about the Democrats losing Congress.  There is pressure on both sides of the debate in an extremely crucial non presidential election year.  All of the candidates are hard at work pushing advertisements about how great they’ll be  in office and all of the good things they plan to do when they get there.

Wait no they aren’t.  Everyone seems to have cut out the bull shit and instead are busy slamming the opposition relentlessly.  I complained to my wife about these ads and told her I’m going to make a list of and simply not vote for anyone running the ads.  She pointed out that the candidates don’t run the ads, it’s other groups running them on behalf.  While this is true, why do you think these ads run in the first place?  The group says “hey, we’ll donate some money to your campaign,” meanwhile the politician says “no wait, instead run these ads”.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter if they are directly supporting these ads or not.  They are still offensive.  Offensive to the people supporting them and offensive to the people watching them.  Is this how we really want to elect our politicians?  Based on who can piss all over the opposition the most?  Maybe these people need to wake up and actually listen to the public.  I constantly hear complaints about how everyone is sick of the government and sick of these idiot politicians.  Part of the reason is they are sick of this bull shit political bickering.

Fortunately there’s a third factor that’s cropping up more and more.  The third part.  The two primary parties are so preoccupied with telling us out lame the other side is that everyone seems to be completely ignoring the third party.  While I don’t particularly support the Tea Party, They seem to be the stronger contender for taking a few spots from the Democrats and Republicans, and i hope they succeed.  If only so people will maybe wake up to the fact that we don’t have to have two parties and we don’t have to stick with what obviously isn’t working worth shit.

There are some other issues to consider here.  It’s my belief that ultimately these ads are terrible for television.  They are offensive to watch, which turns off viewers.  They also tend to preempt regular advertising, which irritates the normal non-election season advertisers.  Sure, you end up with a great month but it would be interesting to see how it affects the long term advertisers as well as how the viewing habits of people are during October.

There is a video floating around the internet lately that you may have seen where a Congressman “attacks” a student reporter and demands to know “Who Are you?”.  In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a link. 

This is not the first of these sorts of videos to go around.  Nor will it likely be the last in this world of citizen Journalists and bloggers.  I’m not here today to discuss this video or who is right or wrong in the video, what I am here to discuss is this video in the sense of it’s “type”.

Many people will agree that the mainstream news on the cable channels tends to be somewhat mediocre, full of pointless paranoia and alarmism with little actual digging into the details of even the most important stories.  One Sided tends to be the term applied.  Bloggers take these stories and try to dig a bit deeper sometimes, or at the very least, they will question some aspect of what is being reported to possibly suggest an alternative viewpoint.  This is great except when the blogger or Independent news source starts pushing the same sort of paranoia and anger fueled type of news that they show contempt towards cable news outlets for.

Like the video above.  Taken at face value, assuming honesty on the part of these “students” the Congressman is clearly a bully and a jerk.  However there are too many unknown facts at work for a true judgment to be made.  For example, why is it so terrible that these students can’t let the guy know what they are really doing?  They claim “Students working on a project”. 

What kind of project? 

What school?

The students don’t provide any of this information.  The Congressman is not required to respond to any of their questions either.  These are people who receive death threats and get harassed by nut jobs pretty regularly, what makes these students any different if they can’t or are unwilling to back up their story.  Even if they said “Hi, we’re students working on a Journalism project for the University of Whatever”, that cordial greeting will go a lot farther in getting a response than the ambush style of “We’re students, why do you need to know more, PS answer our question, answer our question.”

Which brings up the other questionable part of the video.  This clip is almost totally out of context.  For all we know these students have been harassing this poor senator as he walked down the street for an hour.  It’s one thing to keep a straight face and look the other way but there’s a point when people just break from harassment.  This may have been the main goal all along even. 

1) Find some Congressperson

2) Harass him endlessly with vague questions he won’t want to answer

3) Wait for him to explode at you and yell at you (or worse)

4) Post it online for kicks and hits!

Yet people circulate these sorts of videos constantly, out of context with no back story.  I’m not saying that it’s not possible it’s what it seems to be, nor am I supporting the manhandling of this student, I’m just suggesting that even if a story of video comes from some independent “non biased” source it should still be questioned.

There seems to be a subtle push by a decent number of people in the government and the “Old Media” against the so called “New Media”.  There have been numerous cases popping up questioning the validity of Bloggers and Independent News sites in general.  I have written previously about how the internet is giving rise as a new sort of printing press, where anyone can voice their opinions and anyone can listen easily, cheaply, often freely.

As mentioned in that article, the more easily disseminated information flow and easier access to a collective thought process makes people less easily controlled.  I’m not talking about some conspiracy theory based “”Make the population all sheeple so we can tax them and enslave them”.  I mean even a basic style of say, “control via advertising”.  A company could push the old model of press releases and commercials to push say, a new hamburger, but if the bloggers of the world go out and spread the message that the burger tastes like ass and is over priced, that marketing tactic will fail.

There is also the side of the issue where Politicians are suddenly more accountable.  There isn’t any “pay off the local paper to keep the slip ups quiet”.  It’s all posted on Youtube within minutes.  Politicians do stupid or shady things, some independent journalist can easily get the message out.  Now I do agree somewhat there there is a lot of “out of context” or even worse “blatantly provoked” responses being pushed, but there is something to be said about people who push one image when they clearly end up being another.

Finally we have the old school print media.  Readership is declining for magazines and newspapers.  Television viewing is on the decline.  These industries blame the internet and the new media.  They struggle to keep up and stay relevant.  The realities is there are a myriad of other factors that are causing the decline in both of these industries.  There’s enough that I could do a whole article on each Television, Print, and Radio individually, but it can be summed up by "laziness”.  That is to say, these industries were the monopoly behemoths with a strangle hold over their respective industries.  Sure there is internal competition, but there is still a huge cost barrier in all of these areas keeping the average person and their views out.  The internet has changed this.  Anyone can make a “video series” easily and syndicate it to Youtube.  Independent artists and podcasters can make a decent living without the help of radio or the record industry,  “Print” can quickly be achieved with a laptop and a free blog account.  These independent sources don’t subscribe to the model that you have to make a zillion dollars to be successful.  They also don’t subscribe to the idea of the middle man fluff.  This makes them quick, easily adaptable, and able to survive easily on “breadcrumbs”.

So these old industries fight back the best way they know how to.  They lobby for laws.  They lobby for laws, which benefit the makers of laws just as much as it benefits themselves.  A Michigan senator wants to license Journalists, to help push the idea of trustworthiness.  .While there isn’t much support for the bill, it’s something that can set a seed of thought in others and gain support with the proper coercion..

[State Sen. Bruce Patterson] told FoxNews.com that some reporters covering state politics don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re working for publications he’s never heard of, so he wants to install a process that’ll help him and the general public figure out which reporters to trust.

While this seems innocent enough, the promoted litmus test contains the extremely ambiguous qualification of "Good moral character” and demonstrate they have industry “ethics standards acceptable to the board.”.  As the article points out, the bill could easily lead to abuse by politicians and other outlets in promoting a preferred viewpoint to the population.

So where do you turn when you can’t get support in a bill that would help to discredit dissenters?  Perhaps a better plan is to simply turn to the old tried and true method of the money-wall barrier.  The FTC is now proposing a tax on independent news websites.  The best analogy I’ve heard for this is “Taxing cars to save horses”.  This speaks loads to just how much the online “blogosphere” is changing the way people receive news and information.  There has already been a push by the associated press to prevent bloggers from linking to and quoting their stories, now there are rumor of a tax for doing this same action.  It’s unclear from this article how the tax would be figured, though one version suggests attaching it to portable “New Media” style devices such as iPhones and Laptops. 

The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC’s policy staff fears this new reality.

There’s the joke of the situation though,  “forcing media to adapt and experiment”.  God forbid we have any sort of change or innovation in the market?  We should just keep everything the way it is now, forever.

http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-05-07/film-studios-said-to-be-allowed-to-use-anti-piracy-technology-on-tv-sets.html

The film industry can block outputs on home television equipment so studios can offer first-run movies while preventing viewers from making illicit copies, U.S. regulators said.

Temporarily disabling the outputs will “enable a new business model” that wouldn’t develop in the absence of such anti-piracy protection, the Federal Communications Commission said today in an order.

So…. They want to block outputs on set top boxes and TVs so they can distribute first run level content directly to the home while preventing piracy.

I’m sure there’s something more to this but the details here are a bit sketchy as to how exactly this is going to work.  On one hand, they could send a movie to your television directly via cable, presumably on a television with the cable box built into it, so you could watch it but not play it out and record it with an external DVR.  This makes sense, and it fairly easy to follow.  It’ll piss off anyone who likes to pipe the sound from their TV out to their surround system off enough that no one will want to rent/buy/whatever these movies in the first place but hey, it could be done.

What I don’t understand is where they think this will work on a set top box.  Firstly, the box NEEDS outputs of some kind in order to view the movie.  You have to hook it to your TV via coax or RGB or HDMI or whatever.  Limiting it only to say, HDMI which would be slightly more difficult to casually record on a VCR than coax wouldn’t work since not everyone uses HDMI and you can buy an HDMI converter pretty cheaply online.

So somehow, this block will disable the outputs, while still outputting to your television.

Or perhaps there is some sort of encryption involved, which would put anyone with an older television out of luck since the Television wouldn’t have these controls built in to handle the encryption.  Also, the encryption would have to be standard to work with any combination of television and box, so presumably once it’s broken, which it will be, anyone who cares could buy a descrambler box online easily.  Sort of like how you can use a line blocker to disable the copy protection on VHS tapes.

Then there is the fact that anyone who really cares is going to go out to limewire or emule or bittorrent or whatever is convenient and simply download the movie anyway.  Unlike pirated programs, pirated television generally doesn’t contain spyware, though occasionally you’ll end up with some porn clip instead of the latest Toy Story flick so it’s a good idea to pre screen your downloads before firing them up with the family floating around.

There is a tremendous problem going on with the news cycle.  The world has developed a severe case of ADD when it comes to following up on news stories and topics.  We move on almost immediately to the “next big story” completely oblivious to the holes still needing to be filled in the last big press push.

There are two major factors I see causing this problem. Firstly, is the internet.  Secondly, are cable news channels trying to keep up with the internet.

The internet is lightning fast.  With mechanisms such as Twitter, people can be connected and start getting reports of crisis and disaster all over the world before any other news source.  This sparks an awareness level.  There’s not much detail there and it can be hard to follow.  Hashtags can help but there’s often inconsistency in how people use this system. 

We’ll run through a hypothetical situation throughout this column.  Let’s say there is a huge Earthquake in Los Angeles.  People start tweeting about how the ground is shaking or maybe a building next door has started to collapse.  Others tweet bout how they have found shelter in a certain area.  The mainstream news begins to pick up on this story.

LA is a big city so there are reporters about pretty quickly.  We start to get breaking news coverage about the quake seeping into television programming.  Newspapers run stories online since they won’t print a new paper copy until tomorrow morning.  Reports start flowing about shelters and rescue efforts a few hours later as things calm down a bit. 

Then, later that evening, a prominent politician dies when his plane fails and he crashes into a mountain.  Suddenly, no one cares any more about the Earthquake.  Coverage is still there but now it’s in half hour updates as the news focuses on this plane crash.

Questions come in about the safety record of the plane, there is suspicions of sabotage as this politician was a prominent supporter of a critical bill.

The next morning a war breaks out between two nations and there is a huge push from Washington to send troops to support one side or the other.  Now no one cares about the Earthquake or the investigations into the death of the Politician.

Some people would call this a conspiracy.  The war was a staged effort by some massive shadow group known as THEM in an effort to cover up the death of the Politician.  Or possibly even to cover up the actions of some other event all together.

The reality is, it’s all just a huge ratings grab.  CNN, FOX News, all want to get the eyeballs of the public, so they all cover the same stories ad nauseum.  If people want Earthquake news, they’ll get Earthquake news, if they want war news, they’ll get war news.  The real question is, who determines what the people want?  No one wants to chance missing out so they all dog pile onto every new event as  it occurs.

Let’s look out a week after our hypothetical news cycle.  Now all the news cares about is the scandal between two celebrity couples or how there’s potential racism going on inside a big city police department.  People in LA may still be without power and those two countries are now lobbing rockets at each other but we don’t care, we’ve moved on.

The information is still out there on these stories, most often online.  The problem is, it’s buried deep beneath a sea of more recent stories.  Or it’s been researched by some small website that gathers maybe 1000 visitors a month.  The other issue is that some of this research into older news stories is picked up by people who see conspiracy around every corner.

Some blogger on “thecoverup.com” researching the death of the Politician in his plane is likely only every going to conclude foul play.  Even if he actually could afford the time, cost, and effort to go to the crash site and somehow managed to get in to inspect the plane himself and to question those who worked on the plane, that is, if he actually did some real investigating, he’s still likely only looking for the conspiracy angle.

Thus, as mainstream media has been caught up with ratings and flash, the obscure-stream media tends to be caught up in the glam of “everyone’s out to get you”.

In the end, it all just comes down to a numbers game.  No one has time to do real research and everyone has their own bias.  It’s easy to armchair quarterback the news but what happens where there’s no real good news to watch?

So, I’m listening to the radio over the weekend.  I hear an Ad Council PSA for Water conservation.  We’ve got to save our water, it’ll run out, prices will go up due to shortages, all that sort of thing.

Then, a few minutes later there is a CNN news donut with the following report.

Water Bills Go Up As Usage Drops

Many water utilities are raising rates because water use is down, in part because manufacturers have closed or are cutting back, tourism has fallen and the real estate market is in the doldrums.

Ok, wait a minute, so people are using less water, now the rates are going up.  Meanwhile, there is someone pushing the idea that using more water will cause the rates to go up!

So which is it?  I should probably point out that the planet has more Water on it than anything else.  Yeah, a lot of it needs treatment since it’s ocean water, but in general, it never really goes anywhere.  Things (plants, animals) consume it, then they expel it.  Much of the treatment happens naturally though weather cycles and such.

Another angle here, PSAs are often not paid for by the industry in question but instead by Non Profits with agendas of their own.  Some do-gooders get the bright idea that we all need to reduce our water usage because they dislike the idea of using recycled piss water even though Nature takes care of this on it’s own anyway, so they run some PSAs and push a campaign to get everyone to conserve.  Next thing you know, the industry itself isn’t making any money anymore.

Water seems to be one area where Supply and Demand just doesn’t work.  There’s an essentially infinite supply and an equally infinite demand.

This is an interesting report on several repeated “Flash mobs” in Philadelphia.  They talk about how the mobs became violent though one has to wonder if they were in fact provoked into the violence to some extent.  Still, I recall in my college town of Carbondale, IL, there was basically a huge todo around Halloween every year where people were not allowed to gather in any sort of groups because for several years there had been riots.

Still, a Flash Mob is not a Riot.

The thing is, it could be.  And this is why these folks are becoming increasingly afraid of the idea.  They mention the pillow fight thing in the news story.  Another good example is the group Improv Everywhere, a website devoted to getting people together for large scale “pranks”.

So how long until the increasingly disgruntled people put things together that a flash mob can be used for more than just making people laugh.  Hell, it more or less happened before (see the 1960s), there isn’t any reason it couldn’t happen again,  The internet is a way for people to connect in ways never imagined.  Regardless of your stance on conspiracy theories about the government, this connection is revolutionizing the way the people receive information, and not just by making it faster.

Text Article…

What’s with these idiot people.

One, you program the name in.  Obviously this is basic text to speech software with Elmo’s voice stuck on.  So Anyone could have simply reprogrammed the doll to to think the kid’s name was “Kill James” instead of just “James”.

I’m reminded of these older videos.  The issue is, once you have the idea suggested, you’re always going to hear it.  The doll, assuming it’s not programmed, may simply be saying “Tell James” or something similar that is being taken out of context.

Alternately, we make all of this shit in China these days, It’s likely simply some hilarious joke by some poor downtrodden Chinese Hacker.

[In Mandarin Chinese]

Huang: “Hey Lee, check it out, I can program these voice chips to say whatever I want”

Lee: “Awesome man, let’s mess with some 3 year old American’s head”

Though if they had been smart they would have tried to go for something a bit more ambitious, but then that’s partly why China is full of poverty stricken sweatshop workers and isn’t Japan.

Viacom is suing Youtube over copyright violations.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the protection of copyright, though the whole concept of copyright has been completely and deliberately destroyed over the last 60 years or so.  That is the subject of a whole separate article however…

The best part of this lawsuit is that Viacom itself uploaded much of the “stolen” content as part of various marketing schemes.  They took many lengths to ensure that the videos couldn’t be tracked back to them in order to make them seem like authentic “leaks” for it’s programs.

Via the Google Blog…

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Which of course makes this whole lawsuit seem totally ridiculous.  One, as many would argue, people uploading clips of shows more or less only serves as “free advertising”.  Obviously this advertising method works, otherwise why the hell would Viacom go to such a trouble to stage it?  They GET the whole viral style advertising, sort of.

The problem is they apparently also don’t get it.

There’s three reasons I can see why Viacom would argue against the upload of it’s content, though only one is really legitimate and it’s the one that is most likely to be caught by Youtube anyway, so we’ll start with reason number 1…

People upload entire episodes of shows…

I understand why they don’t want this and I support this sort of take down.  Like I said, due to the length of these uploads, these would be the easiest uploads to spot and take down.  Youtube does take measures to prevent this copyright theft and I’m sure this level of content theft is right at the top of the list.  That said, there is something ridiculous like 24 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, it’s difficult to police it all.

People upload clips to criticize a show…

Firstly, I’m pretty sure criticism falls under “Fair Use” in terms of copyright.  The term Fair use is heavily abuse by people who try to support content theft but one of it’s main uses would be criticism since it’s easier to get a point across by using visuals of what you’re talking about.  Viacom would of course dislike this idea since it’s “negative publicity” for them.

Viacom thinks it needs to control all marketing exclusively…

This is the gray area.  Sure, we’ve shown that even Viacom thinks that viral video style marketing works and technically they have the right to control the marketing of their programming.  On the other hand it mostly just makes them appear really douchey by insisting on controlling things to such a needless degree.  Just accept that your “numbers” and “research” of the perfect marketing schemes are complete bull shit pushed by marketing specialists and roll with it here people.  You’re only going to irritate and turn off your customers.

So to wrap things up a bit, Youtube, which is of course owned by the internet juggernaut Google, has more than a leg to stand on in this case.  They have made efforts to police this content, much of which was uploaded by Viacom in the first place.  Still, I’m sure Viacom will try every crummy law trick they can think of to slip in a win.  Obviously they think they have something going on or they wouldn’t have bothered with the lawsuit in the first place.

Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad

Lindsay Lohan is suing the financial company E-Trade, insisting that a boyfriend-stealing, “milkaholic” baby in its latest commercial — who happens to be named Lindsay — was modeled after her. And she wants $100 million for her pain and suffering, The Post has learned.

It’s pretty sad when you think you’re such hot shit that obviously any reference to your name, even if it isn’t related to your name, is about you.  I mean it’s not like anyone in the history of EVER has been named Lindsay before Lohan came along.

I mean sure, the people making the commercial in question could have named the baby Paris or Angelina but those names just wouldn’t have made sense in the context of “Milkaholic”.

And what is a “Milkaholic” anyway?  Are we supposed to believe that babies consume mostly milk or something?  Clearly “Milk” in this case” is a euphemism for “crack”.  How else can you explain how creepy these babies are OR how they are capable of so effectively managing their stock portfolios?

Nevermind the fact that pretty much no one gives a shit about Lindsay Lohan anymore.  Who cares that both her music and movie careers are pretty much in the crapper.  Who cares that she’s become such a creepy anorexic looking skeleton that she’s not even particularly hot anymore.  It’s clear that most people still think of Lohan constantly and would clearly make the whole “Crackaholic Creepy Baby” connection when they hear the name “Lindsay”.

via IHatetheMedia.com