Posted on No Comments on hallmark channel vs. YouTube

hallmark channel vs. YouTube

Understanding media and technology through the lens of politics is always fascinating, but in class we talked about the Lincoln/Douglas (seven hours! a break for dinner! liquor on sale!) and Nixon/Kennedy Debates and it was very fun. (Read this, which goes into a little detail about how people on the radio thought that Nixon had won, but people who watched it on television got to see Tricky Dick drown in flopsweat.)

Anyway,  Krugman had an interesting op-ed, which gets at the money and media. About Hillary’ town hall meeting, broadcast on the Hallmark Channel in comparison to the will i am Obama video:

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

(Hillary was, in fact, cut off mid-sentence for the regularly scheduled programming, A Season of Miracles.)

Posted on No Comments on facebook and $

facebook and $

I’m pretty mixed about facebook, and by ‘mixed’ I mean mostly underwhelmed. I have tried it out over the past month to see what it is like, particularly since I’m teaching this Technology, Media & Sociology course. So far, it has proven a useful way to get connected with some acquaintances who I never really had a chance to build a friendship with and a way to get into touch with people whom I don’t see any more. I know that it is supposed to be impressive and social networking is the future, etc. But I’m just not too jones about ‘poking’ and ‘movie quizzes.’

Anyway, a student sent me an interesting read in The Guardian (didn’t I hear that they were coming out with a US rag?), ‘With Friends Like These,’ which details the social networks of the two main venture capitalists behind Facebook. It’s a little paranoid, but good to think about–especially when read alongside Paul Starr’s wonderful The Creation of the Media–so long as you can get around temporal logic like this:

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund…

Still, one of the key points of the article explores the economic profiteering of social ties:

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries – and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

(By the way, if you watched the Grammys, the ‘underwhelmed’ link has a performance that is a million times more entertaining. I watched about 10 minutes and it was sooo bad. ZZZ. Atrocious. I did like Kanye’s jacket, though.)