Posts tagged media
Something I created the other day: The Photography Industry Landscape
Taylor structures the entropy of the photo industry much better than myself.
How many of these boxes will roll up into the camera?
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter on Samples, Creating Samples, and Studio Production
It’s really hard to say. The whole starting point of that record was to somehow question the magical powers of recorded audio at a time when pop music is mostly recorded on laptops with a small microphone and a pair of headphones in airport lounges and hotel rooms. We’re not really part of that generation. We’re part of the previous generation, where a studio was a collection of hardware and electronic components assembled in a discreet way to try to create a unique global system in a home environment; somehow a distinctive system.
The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain? Because harmonically the samples are just an F minor or a G flat, something not so special. It occurred to us it’s probably a collection of so many different parameters; of amazing performances, the studio, the place it was recorded, the performers, the craft, the hardware, recording engineers, mixing engineers, the whole production process of these records that took a lot of effort and time to make back then. It was not an easy task, but took a certain craftsmanship somehow cultivated at the time.
We started to say, “OK, let’s see from a production standpoint, also in terms of performance, whether we could create records that embed this level of production and craftsmanship, and see whether the culture would allow for records like this to be produced. ”So it’s true that we decided to try to recreate these circumstances and really select a team of firsthand actors in witness of that golden age, that era and in the same time go back to the places where that magic had happened. We really think, we feel the walls can speak, and at the same time there’s really this idea that these are magical places.
The most endearing thing a brand can do these days is reveal that there are humans inside.
This quirk is as good a sign as any that brands as we know them are increasingly obsolete. Their future is as a brand/human cyborg, more akin to a sports star playing for a team than as a pure icon.
(via nostrich)
“ The film’s two producers, Marvel Pictures and DMG Entertainment, had earlier announced the release of a specific version dedicated to the Chinese market, with a pledge to include more China-set scenes. The statement also explained how sequences featuring actress Fan Bingbing will be exclusively seen by Chinese audiences — another way of saying how the A-lister is basically cut out of the international version altogether.”
When video game’s moved to CD-Rom formats and video could be included, major pictures scheduled shoots to capture assets for tie-in games.
Now, as funds come in from different audiences we’re seeing additional actors, directing units, and cuts being released to deliver locally tailored products.
Frank Rich on the State of Journalism
This is excellent:
Today, complaints about the state of publications in their surviving print incarnations are borderline irrelevant. They’re all placeholders. Survival, not survival of a print edition, is what’s at stake now. (At long last, the day is coming when Times readers can finally retire their timeless gripe about the newsprint coming off on their hands.) There’s no likelihood that advertising, digital advertising included, will ever again subsidize any old-media news organizations in the style to which they (and their audiences) had been accustomed. Nor can a white knight—that would be Michael Bloomberg—annex one and all, from the Times to The Economist, to his media empire. The holy grail of a new business model, awaited as long as Godot, has not shown up yet, and may never. In the meantime, as old media scramble to adjust to the new order, there will continue to be casualties of employees and of entire publications.
Read the whole thing. It’s a great summation of many of the issues and trends squeezing the imagined ideal of journalism.
(Ironically via NY Mag, a publication which happily loses money employing both ex-bloggers and ex-NYT columnists.)
"The Vice Guide to the World"
No matter how the future unfolds, Lizzie Widdicombe’s piece on Vice will be very interesting to reread in 3 years. (Via The New Yorker)
Amazon Buys Goodreads
From the Goodreads blog:
I’m excited about this for three reasons:
- With the reach and resources of Amazon, Goodreads can introduce more readers to our vibrant community of book lovers and create an even better experience for our members.
- Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we’re looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be.
- Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.
Very hopeful for this…
Google Glass is Just Like the Segway – and Similarly Doomed
The Segway was an achievement. It was nimble and simple, balanced on two wheels, and moved with barest of intents. The Segway delivered on its lofty technical goals. It was magical.
But the Segway was doomed. After summiting its technical challenges the Segway hit a brick wall of cultural challenges. It was too fast for sidewalks and too slow for roads, a liminal mode of transportation that mowed down pedestrians and held up cars. To ride a Segway is to be antisocial, to implicitly admit to not being of the culture one glides through1.
Google Glass faces the same roadblock as the Segway. Both products focus too heavily on their users while ignoring the societies users exist within. Both products are (and will be) significant technical achievements brought down by the cultural challenges encountered.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume Glass works perfectly. Information is delivered smoothly, image capture is instinctual, notifications are subtle yet effective and the display is balanced and clear.
“We created glass so you can interact with the virtual world without obstructing the real world,” explained Isabelle Olsson, who is leading the design efforts for Google glasses. “We don’t want technology to get in the way.”2
The imporant question to ask is for whom the technology doesn’t get in the way. We should note the Segway was intuitive and welcoming to it’s users only, a fluid means of removing the distance between A and B, but cars and pedestrians were apparently never considered. Glass is similar in that it’s product design is focused on purely the user, never on those around it.
Glass’ screen is visible only to it’s user and it’s camera looks out documenting everything except the user, storing content to be shared at the user’s discretion. I believe that these always on, core functions of Glass will prevent it from being welcomed in social settings. Those around the Glass users must implicitely trust the Glass wearer, for they have no idea where the Glass user’s current attention lies and cannot visually confirm whether or not they are currently being captured by Glass.
Google is working so hard to keep technology out of the way that they’re forgetting why it’s important to see technology when it’s present.
If someone holds a cellphone sideways to frame a shot, we can assume we’re being photographed. If a conversational partner starts fidgeting with their phone, we can read into that as well. With Glass all these options are constantly on the table because their functioning is imperceivable to anyone but the user, creating a feeling of unease among all present.
In an article on Mashable yesterday, Chris Taylor makes the case that all personal technology starts with a wave of handwringing like my own. Eventually, he says, the tech becomes the norm and we forget to protest. Headphones, cellphone cameras, and even PCs started this way.
While this acceptance cycle does exist, the always-on but never-apparent nature of Glass is unlike any the cases Taylor cites. Headphones can be taken out and cellphone cameras pocketed or checked at the door. This awkward dance can go on for a year or two without sacrificing the benefit to the user, affording the new tech and culture time to understand each other. But Glass is all or nothing. I’m certain they’ll be occasionally placed on table tops or cases for the first couple years, but because they’re active at most times (and this is largely the selling point) these explicitly ‘off’ periods will be the exception, not the rule.
Glass is doomed because of social imbalance, an ignorance of culture. Glass empowers it’s users technologically for social situations that don’t exist yet, just as the Segway deployed to a world filled with ill-suited sidewalks and roads. I believe non-users will begin to shun Glass just as the masses shunned the Segway. We will see restaurants, gyms, and bars banning the device to keep their patrons at ease. Offices will fear a world where all conversations are on the record, especially large corporations, doctor’s offices and legal firms. Social settings will not emerge for Glass and its usage will be confined to places where it was never an issue to take out your cellphone in the first place.
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It’s no coincidence that the last vestige of Segway use is confined to tourists and security guards, two groups explicitely outside of their current social setting. They’re observers and referees, respectively, not participants. ↩
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Nick Bilton, in the New York Times, emphasis mine. ↩
"Revenge of the Sources"
Ezra Klein weighs in on the writing for free debate:
But behind this debate lurks an uncomfortable fact: The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free.
Call it the revenge of our sources.
And:
If you look at who’s turning out copy for major media outlets but isn’t being paid, it’s not, by and large, professional journalists, or even wannabe professional journalists. The former typically won’t write without pay and editors generally don’t want to publish the latter. It’s people who, in another world, would be sources for professional journalists. It’s academics and business consultants and market analysts and former politicians. They have the expertise that makes editors –and readers — trust them. They have good ideas for articles. They have day jobs that are happy to subsidize the time they spending working for media exposure. And they’re often very good writers.
Read the whole thing.
Fortune is Now Selling Content to Brands
Fortune is launching “Trusted Original Content”, Fortune-brended editorial content for marketers to purchase for $250,000 to $1 million. Certainly, this raises some questions:
Yet creating content expressly for an advertiser creates other questions for editorial, particularly at a prestige title. That’s why Fortune insists TOC would keep church-and-state separation—clients would agree on the topic and how the material is distributed but wouldn’t see the content until it’s ready to run. Like any piece of editorial, TOC content goes through the normal Fortune editing process, and editors have the final say over it. And Fortune TOC is likely to rely on trusted freelancers, which will keep its staff writers far away from the process. “Nothing we’re doing is compromising editorial integrity,” Caine said.
Now I’m all for advertising innovation and believe the wall between business and editorial can’t stay standing for long, but this seems pretty questionable. If nothing is “compromising editorial integrity” why limit this to freelancers?
Further, brands won’t have editorial power, but Fortune staff certainly has incentive to not write something that will encourage additional clients! The editorial power isn’t explicit, but present in the implicit form of future cash.
(Via AdWeek)
