Lost

It seems that Lost Coast Outpost, which suddenly began linking to this site after the first 8 years of its existence, suddenly stopped this month.  Unless it was a one post glitch.

Maybe they didn't think that pointing out a show business connection to President Obama's State of the Union was sufficiently local.  Not as local as say, Shakespeare.  Whatever.  I do wish they'd waited one more post, for Retro Retro, which says something I feel is important about this blog and the Internet in general that doesn't get said very often.

Of course if they link to this post, as Emily used to say--never mind!

Retro Retro

A little retrospective on my Stage Matters retrospective: I mentioned that the posts on theatre that make up the bulk of this site often get readers far from the North Coast, and long after the date of the post.  Here are some examples from just this past few weeks of January 2015:

A reader in the UK was interested in "I Hate Hamlet: Additional Notes," readers in France and Kingston, New Jersey in "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Other Versions."  Readers in South Korea and Manchester, England sought posts on "The Tempest," Edmonton, Canada on movies of "As You Like It" and somewhere in the US, somebody looked at "Equivocation: Notes and Spoilers." Readers in Midland, Texas, New Zealand and Brisbane, Australia were interested in various posts on Othello.

Australia and San Gabriel, CA accessed HLOC's "Thoroughly Modern Millie," somebody in Oregon dove into the "Titanic" musical.  Readers in Petersborough, UK; Jenks, Oklahoma; Memphis, Tenn.; Canoga Park and San Rafael, CA; Mechanisburg, PA and Atamonte Springs, FLA looked at posts on "To Kill A Mockingbird."  At certain times of the year (Term papers? High school productions?) this is a very popular subject.

Someone in Qatar looked at "Sweeney Todd," someone in the UK at "Brigadoon." Somebody in Marshfield, Wisconsin looked at "Spinning Into Butter," and an Internet machine in Beaver Falls, PA focused on "The Pitmen Painters."

Powell, Ohio and Winnipeg, Canada were into "Chekhovania."  New York City and Arlington, Virginia looked up posts on the Federal Theatre Project.  Aquitane, France related to Uncle Vanya.  Buenos Aires headed for "The Time Machine."

Some of the accessed posts were intriguingly local. France found "Jason in Eureka." India was into "Freaks & Greeks." Oakland, Tenn. and someone in Japan accessed "Requiem." Orlando, FLA read the Lauren Wilson interview. Storm Lake, Iowa checked out "Elisabeth's Book."

This is the Internet I believe in: access to a backlist forever, from anywhere, at any time.   An Internet for individuals as well as the swarm of the moment.

Pick Yourself Up

"My fellow Americans, we too are a strong, tight-knit family. We, too, have made it through some hard times. Fifteen years into this new century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and begun again the work of remaking America." --President Obama, his "defiant" State of the Union 2015 last night.

Print is the New Vinyl?

Before we move on beyond this accidental series on digital domination, one interesting and perhaps delightful (if true) countertrend. However, first let's restate the trend, with the eloquent opening to Leon Wieseltier's New York Times Book Review essay (with my emphases), in your Sunday Times today and online:

 "Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. 

Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous." 

 The death knell for non-digital reading and writing is often sounded, sometimes with lived alarm, sometimes with complacent (I've made my money and reputation thanks) acceptance. But leave it to my favorite newspaper columnist, Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle, to find (or maybe make up, just a little) a somewhat countervailing trend: "Print is the new vinyl."

 These words were uttered, he writes, by a tech savvy entrepreneur, suggesting a trend that combines retro with realization (that analogue records offer better sound than digital.) Together they fantasized a sweet (if likely brief, or if ever) future:

 "So perhaps the latest bunch of tech billionaires want quality too. They want long-form journalism, say, that can be reproduced in a portable and well-designed format. They want editing and fact-checking. Perhaps they want fiction, poetry, excerpts from the classics.

 Nothing like old media to add that sheen of prestige. The guy I was with suggested that writers might once again make actual money, that the sight of someone carrying a book would be like seeing someone toting around a dulcimer — it indicates that they have hidden depths. We’re talking about a covert desire to follow the dream of the Enlightenment." 

 A last ditch dream? Probably. But I do recall that on several visits to a fashionable cafe in Menlo Park not far from Stanford--close enough to ground zero for the tech world--I saw more people reading books, newspapers and magazines than were starring at laptops and tablets, or even conspicuously glued to their smartphones etc. A definite counter-trend to, for instance, the HSU campus.

Keyless Cars, Brainless Humans

Phones and other electronic devices may be smarter, but people seem to be heading the other way into a brainless stupor.

 It's not just the kids who literally cannot be separated from their phones without psychological and even physical trauma. There's an even more serious form of dependency, and it is becoming less and less avoidable, even for those who reject it.

 For instance the keyless car. An item in Consumer Reports recently affirmed that new cars in all price ranges are coming equipped with this technology. What is this electronic marvel? It allows you to start your car without sticking a physical key into a physical slot. You just push a button on your device, known as the key fob (even though there is no key attached to it.)

 What a miracle! You can start your car with your hands full of something else--your smartphone probably. Although you've had to push a button on the fob to get into the car, and then you still have to push another button in the car. But you don't need that damn inconvenient key.

 So let's start with the basic rule of electronic wonders in and on your car, which is that, for all their benefits, they are each something else that can go wrong. Usually more than one something else. And almost always nothing you can fix yourself.

 So there are things that can go wrong with your fob, such as the batteries, and if you don't have a backup system (electronic or key), you're screwed. You ain't moving. It may mean a tow, and it definitely means time and money.

 But that's minor compared to the much more likely possibility--you misplace or lose the fob. Then without a mechanical key system, you are really really screwed. And CR says replacing the fob could cost hundreds of dollars, and who knows how much time and trouble.

 Think about it. When somebody swiped my jacket with my car keys in the pocket, I got someone to drive me home, wait a minute while I got my duplicate key, then he drove me back to my car. Duplicate keys cost a few bucks, and you can make as many as you want and stow them in as many convenient places as you wish, so losing your car keys is not a catastrophe.  Many people attach a duplicate to the car itself.

 But for the dubious benefits of a "keyless" ignition, you still have to have that fob (although eventually there will be an ap on your phone device, which will make losing that even more catastrophic), and the cost of losing it is much much greater than losing that terrible old fashioned key.

 Behind this is the survival principle of redundancy, along with hedging your bets with alternatives (a gas stove that operates even when the electricity is off, etc.) Everybody loses stuff, so you cut down the consequences with redundancy (i.e. duplicate keys.) That is, while you can still buy a car that allows you to start it with a key.

 And that's the most brainless part of it. An entire society so dazzled with new toys that they never bother to think ahead to what could go wrong, and what the comparative consequences might be. It's great for the car companies etc. who sucker you into this, and then charge you hundreds of dollars for a fob, and thousands for extra electronic toys that may or may not improve the operation of your vehicle, but certainly make it harder and more expensive to repair. When something goes wrong. And something always does.

 But you might have paid tens of thousands of dollars for no alternative. How smart is that?

One Amazing Old Trick to Make Millions!

Shocking Top Ten Made Easy!
photo credit

Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker recently profiled young Emerson Spartz, crowning him King of Clickbait. The Spartz new-media company made millions in ad revenue last year, and attracted even more millions in venture capital. At 27, Spartz is widely admired, the article says, he's "inspiring," "awesome," "impressive." One of his investors is quoted as calling him "a Steve Jobs kind of guy...I think his stuff is indicative of where digital media is heading."

If that's true it's heading in the direction of manipulation on the order of Orwellian cubed. And theft. Theft is very old news, and apparently very new media. For that seems to be how the Spartz sites make money. They steal the work of others.

 It's not just that Spartz is a self-righteous Philistine whose idea of how to make a great song is to get 40 people to record vocals, ask thousands of people to pick their favorite, then use the winner. "To me, that’s a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio, he says. "Art is that which science has not yet explained.”

 Or even that his model for success is relentless cynicism, which is admittedly widely shared among those trying to get attention through the Internet. His websites are all about attracting traffic, and learning what content and packaging attracts the most traffic at a given moment.

 It's the same sort of technique that fills my inbox with email appeals for political donations that vary mostly by the subject line and the purported sender. (At least I hope President Obama isn't spending a lot of time drawing boxes for me to check beside the amount of my donation.) The idea is to throw a lot of subject lines out there, see which ones succeed the best, take the top five or so and use them, throw out the rest, and invent another five to test tomorrow. Or more likely, later today.

 Similar techniques are used to test and select photos and copy, including the kind that appear as ads on just about every web site, and contribute to making otherwise substantive sites look and feel like the back pages of tabloid papers and cheap magazines.

 But moron bait (and there's a moron lurking in all of us) is only part of it. There's the content, and where it comes from. One of Spartz Inc.'s sites, called Dose, publishes lists. (Lots of sites do that these days, because as Spartz proclaims, "Lists just hijack the brain's neural circuitry." This is your brain.  This is your brain on the Internet.)

 For example, “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.” But all Spartz did was slightly repackage this information (as other similar sites had already done.) They didn't do the research, and didn't even link to the guys who did, let alone pay them a fee or a cut of their winnings.

 On Dose, the list got 200,000 page views, very good for advertisers, and very good for Dose. The New Yorker:

 'The Dose post, which received more Facebook shares than its precursors, briefly mentioned D’Aluisio and Menzel (though D’Aluisio’s name was misspelled). But their book, “What I Eat,” went unmentioned, and they certainly did not share in the advertising revenue. “This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told me. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images. But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing. They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught."' 

 But when you have no respect at all for content or for authorship, theft is probably not how you think about it. Spartz admits that content is of no interest to him: "We considered making Dose more mission-driven,” he said. “Then I thought, rather than facing that dilemma every day—what’s going to get views versus what’s going to create positive social impact?—it would be simpler to just focus on traffic.” 

 As someone who creates "content" (i.e. writes stuff) on the Internet, I'm waiting for the argument that convinces me that making millions from somebody else's work isn't theft. Sure seems like it to me. Maybe it doesn't occur to them that real people have worked to gather information, judge its value, see patterns, check it, find where it fits in larger contexts, craft it into a story etc. or even a damn list. Because most of their work is done by mindless algorithms.

 But not even that charitable excuse will wash. Spartz himself says why. On earlier sites they featured novel combinations of images, with text that reflected at least a few minutes of online research—but with Dose “we’ve stopped doing that as much because more original lists take more time to put together, and we’ve found that people are no more likely to click on them.” 

 Right--stealing is so quick and easy! Let other people do the creative and actual work. It's been the secret of success for generations of robber barons. How inspiring!

What's really amazing is that Spartz got started at the age of 12 by creating a Harry Potter fan site. He got to meet J.K. Rowling. Does he now think that the way to create a Harry Potter saga is to propose alternative plot points, and choose what happens by vote? Not that plot is the only factor in the saga's success--there's characters and their characteristics, descriptions, inventions, pacing, chapter order, chapter content, sentence rhythms, right down to the individual words. Not to mention the values, morality and emotion within it all. Got algorithms for that? And if you did, do you really think the whole Potter thing would have happened, including inspiring a 12 year old in Chicago to create a fan site?

 And how do you suppose Jo Rowling feels about somebody appropriating somebody else's creative work--say, Harry Potter? Maybe let her lawyers answer that for you, although she's been known to show up in court herself to defend her intellectual property.

 The New Yorker article mentions an internal study at the New York Times lamenting that their Internet site isn't creating these viral blizzards. What's scary about this memo is that journalism in its various forms and functions is talked about only in the argot that Spartz and his ilk own. When you define what you are doing by the premises and terminology of those whose mission sees yours as irrelevant, and they're out to destroy you or just suck you dry, you've pretty much lost already.

 The New Yorker article ends with Spartz' ultimate solution: “The lines between advertising and content are blurring,” he said. “Right now, if you go to any Web site, it will know where you live, your shopping history, and it will use that to give you the best ad. I can’t wait to start doing that with content. It could take a few months, a few years—but I am motivated to get started on it right now, because I know I’ll kill it.”

 I'm guessing that Marantz, with some old media skills, didn't end the piece with "kill it" by accident.

 Spartz begins his canned speeches by proclaiming that he wants to change the world. Apparently he is doing so. He's helping to make it worse.

Postscript and Re-Dedication

A postscript to 2014: My thanks to Joan Schirle and everyone who responded to (or "liked") her thread about Stage Matters on the Humboldt Theater Commmunity Group on Facebook.  And thanks as well to Michael Fields who pointed it out to me in an email. (It also allows me to post this photo of Joan, which I couldn't fit into previous posts.)

Re-dedication in 2015 is suggested in the form of a paragraph from literary and cultural critic Northrop Frye that he published in 1970:

"...[G]enuine society preserves the continuity of the dead, the living and the unborn, the memory of the past, the reality of the present, and the anticipation of the future which is the one unbreakable social contract. Continuity and consistency are the only sources of human dignity, and they cannot be attained in the dissolving phantasmagoria of the newspaper world, where we have constantly to focus on an immediate crisis, where a long-term memory is almost a handicap."

Happy New Year everyone!