Theme 1 Tie In: Orson Welles and Mass Effects

Theme 1: Media and their Audiences

If media are the avenues by which the public receives information and entertainment, then these avenues must have 'street signs' to guide the broadcasters to which direction will lead them to their audiences. Whenever you are writing a newspaper, or broadcasting a television program, or writing a book, one must always know "Who is the audience for my content?" The content might define what you are delivering to the audience, but the medium will define how you will get it to that audience, and even how large an audience you can reach. Every medium is therefore concerned with which groups of people will define their audience. Are these audiences defined by their geographic location, their interests, their profession, their political perspective, their lifestyle? Oftentimes we recognize that some content or program is unsuccessful in reaching its target audience, but we don't fault the medium for not being able to reach its target audience because the medium is only the vehicle to deliver the content to that audience.

The classic case of a medium that was able to reach a huge audience with one particular program was the infamous 1938 broadcast by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of "The Invasion From Mars". Radio was a relatively new medium at the time of this broadcast, and the relationship between listeners and the broadcasts was still developing. Thousands of people reacted to the play as if it were an actual report of invading creatures from Outer Space, and mass panics occurred across the country. Cantril noted that "such rare occurrences provide opportunities for the social scientist to study mass behavior...The situation created by the broadcast was one which shows us how the common man reacts in a time of stress and strain [to such a broadcast]." This broadcast influenced all audiences in the population simultaneously, and it is an example of "mass media". Mass media affect huge proportions of the population in the same manner, which is dangerous, as this particular broadcast proved, because these mass media can create mass panics. Thus, though mass media had the benefit of reaching large segments of the population simultaneously, its dangers became obvious with the Welles broadcast.

From the earliest days of 'mass media', the broadcasters began to realize that they would have to define their target audience because trying to appease all audiences is far too unrealistic. Programs that attempt to "have something for everyone" rarely please anyone, so programs became more focused on who they defined as their target audience. Also, defining your target audiences is important because it entices advertisers to support your medium in order to reach the ears and eyes of that audience. An obvious example would be the Wall Street Journal, which is written for professionals in the finance and economic industry. Rarely does one see an advertisement for Toys R Us or for McDonalds in this paper. No, we see ads for the newest BlackBerry on the market, the brand new Lexus coming to dealerships, or ads promoting one law firm or another. Advertisers will chase their target audience with targeted advertisements. Therefor this partitioning of the population into target audiences is both natural and logical.

The niche is not just a biology term, but one essential to advertising as well. Given the tremendous diversity in our society, creating advertising that can satisfy the demands of a majority of the existing niches is a good idea. Niche advertising is just another term for the segmentation of audiences into groups that advertisers can successfully market to. Essentially, niche advertising is the polar opposite of mass media advertising. Whereas mass media were used to carpet bomb a population, niche advertising is much more like a precision strike. Niche advertising was traditionally unprofitable, because the smaller the niche the harder it is to attract advertising support. As our society's technology has improved, we have created more efficient and faster ways to bring information to more and more people, thereby lowering the barriers to niche advertising, and making niches that are smaller and better defined.

With the advent of the Internet, niche advertising has become much easier and much more profitable. Whereas newspapers and television programs needed corporate advertising support to broadcast to millions, establishing a website and filling it with content is much much less expensive. Any average Joe can make a website and fill it with junk without ad revenue. This makes the Internet perfect for satisfying every niche there is, along with the fact that there is an unlimited amount of room on cyberspace. We can do almost anything on the Internet these days, from accessing any genre of music, to watching films online, to accessing newspaper articles from around the world. The Internet has become The Mass Medium!

Chris Anderson, in his article "The Long Tail", discusses how the Internet has created more and more niches by making what used to be "unfindable" content available online. The "Long Tail' refers to the outliers/extremes on any normal parametric curve. If the vast majority (~90%) of an audience pay attention to popular content, then only a small percentage of the population will pay attention to the less popularized films, music, newspapers, comic books, etc. Anderson notes that as the Internet has provided access to obscure and quiet content, "unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo!Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store..." The Long Tail is all about satisfying niches, however small they may be, because the Internet has made this kind of niche advertising profitable. "As they [the outliers] wander farther from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture.)"

Pandora Online Radio is an example of a program that is designed to satisfy every musical niche there is (the long tail). The website was designed to "learn" what its users look for in musical taste and deliver content that fits that taste. Rob Walker, in a New York Times article, points out what makes Pandora different from other online websites. "Pandora's approach more or less ignores the crowd...The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like." Pandora was designed intentionally to zone in on the users particular tastes, thus creating a seperate niche that is designed only for you! "If you click a lot, the idea is that Pandora's algorithm adjusts, squaring your taste with the [Music] genome's database." Obviously if the website does not have your particular brand of music in its database, then you are out of luck. Other than that though, this website is focused on finding every possible niche mathematically conceivable and delivering music to fit that niche.

Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker Magazine article titled "The Things People Say" demonstrates just how effective the Internet is at creating secluded niche communities. The article discusses how individuals on either extreme of the political spectrum have learned to utilize the internet to find other extremists just like themselves, as well as media content that drives their political insanity. There is literally weeks worth of reading material supporting every political perspective imaginable now available to anyone and everyone over the internet. "Left-leaning readers know, for example, that if they go to the Huffington Post or to AlterNet they will find stories that support their view of the world. Right-leaning readers know to go to the Drudge Report or to Newsmax to find stories that fit their preconceptions. " Whereas a few generations ago these extreme communities would have to be geographically related in order to subsist on the same polarized media, now with the Internet anyone anywhere can access these polarized niches. "And what holds true for the news sites is even more so for the blogosphere, where it's possible to spend hours surfing without ever entering new waters." The Internet has made it possible to exist exclusively within one's own niche, without a deference to the greater world outside.

Theme 5 Tie In: TV (and Beer) Are Addictive

Theme 5: Off loading our Brains onto Computers

Nicholas Carr wrote an article titled "Is Google Making us Stupid?" in The Atlantic Magazine about how our 21st century society is increasingly leaving the greater part of our intellectual effort to machines. Apparently, writers are finding it more and more difficult to concentrate on longer passages and prose because we have become accustomed to skimming information off of webpages, and no longer delving deeply into what we read. "And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles." I can't say that I am an avid reader myself but to hear actual writers and other who are very literate confess to spending more and more time 'reading' on the Internet is somewhat troubling. Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University who says " 'We are not only what we read, we are how we read.' Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts efficiency and immediacy above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged [long ago]. " What is it about the Internet that is degrading our ability to analyze and enjoy traditional writing and literature?

Is this a trend that we can see with other electronic media as well? Are we becoming stupider as our technology gets smarter? When television first was introduced in the 1950s, there were some cynical critics who said that television would turn us all into brainless zombies. From my personal experience, I would have to agree. Sometimes if I watch t.v. for too long, I temporarily lose the capacity to think abstractly and remember exactly what I am supposed to be doing. But why does this happen. Does focusing our mind on a medium extract some sort of mental power our of us?

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and stole from us more of our intellectual capacity. In an article titled "The Untold Story, How the IPhone Blew up the Wireless Industry" by Fred Vogelstein in Wired Magazine, the author writes "In 2002, shortly after the first iPod was released, Jobs started thinking about developing a phone. He saw millions of Americans lugging seperate phones, BlackBerrys, and now MP3 players; naturally, consumers would prefer just one device. " Yes it is true that consumers do prefer the iPhone over three or four seperate devices, but one of the unintended (or intended, I'm not sure how evil Steve Jobs is) consequences of these "smart phones" is that previously intelligent people become brainless and useless idiots without these devices. How many times have we heard someone crying because their iPhone isn't working, literally becoming depressed because they can't check the weather from the palm of their hand!? Ok, maybe that example was too specific, but you get my point. The advantage of these devices is that they can help us to be much more organized and efficient. The disadvantage of these devices is that they make us unable to function without them. They zap our brain power and leave us useless.

The Kindle is a device introduced by Amazon.com that simulates the traditional book. It is basically an electronic book for those who consider themselves 'trendy'. Is this another example of our society offloading our intellectual efforts onto a machine? Absolutely! Apparently, Amazon considered the regular old book far too cumbersome. Now we have buttons to turn pages and we can download books straight off of the web. "Navigation through the various features is via a novel system centered on a clickable select wheel that moves a cursor up or down a slim bar...It's dead simple to master, but a little slow." How this is any sort of improvement over the bound novel, I don't know. Some might say, its easier to get a book now, just download it, to which I would respond, just go to the public library and borrow one for free! The whole idea of a novel is to be able to immerse yourself in it and transport your mind within the world that the story creates. If you can zip through the Kindle using an index function to jump to the good parts, that is sort of short circuiting the entire idea isn't it? The Kindle is just another example of how we soon will be mentally helpless without electronic technology!

Then again, perhaps the Kindle is just another way to access the literature that for so many years has captivated us. In an On The Media podcast titled "For the Love of Reading" Ann Kirschner discusses how she set out to investigate what she truly adored more, books, or the act of reading. "I realized that there really is a difference between books and reading, and that in the final analysis it's reading that I love. " Kirschner experience the same novel four different ways: as a paperback, as an audio-book, on her iPhone, and on her Kindle. This personal experiment is interesting because it examines just how the newest technologies that simulate the paperback experience stack up to the original. Kirschner noted that the audio-book format was much better on the subway, the Kindle format was easier to change to her liking (i.e. making font larger, changing margins), and the iPhone format was just convenient because she already took her iPhone everywhere. To a person with a Ph.D. in literature, perhaps these new technologies are more beneficial than they are deleterious.

Marshall McLuhan said that "it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association." Each medium influences our society by creating new ways for us to interact, and consequently, new ways for us to think. Our thought processes are influenced by the ways we interact with each other and the world, so it isn't surprising that television changed the way the American family interacted with one another or that the iPhone changes the way business professionals do business. "for electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet the eliminate time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV[and the Internet], creating involvement in depth." As each new technology emerges, the ways in which we can and do interact with one another will also continue to change, which will change the ways in which we think and process information.

This tendency for us to 'Offload' mental effort onto a computer's process may be worrisome, but it is also natural. Why not find ways to make our lives easier and more efficient. For example, I use Microsoft Excel in a number of ways simply to make my life easier. I created a spreadsheet to record all the phone numbers of my extended family, second and third cousins who I never see until Thanksgiving or Christmas and who I never call until then. I have a spreadsheet to log whatever maintenance I have on my car. I record when I get my oil changed and when I bought my new tires with the precise data and mileage. I don't need to do this, but it helps me to stay organized and makes me much more efficient. I would panic if all of my files were erased from my computer, because some of that information I don't have written down anywhere else. I have become dependent on technology to help me be successful, and I am not ashamed of it either.

Marshall McLuhan on Why Politics and Television don't Mix

Theme 6 Tie In: The Kindle by Amazon. The Future of Books???

Theme 6: The Internet Absorbs Old Media and changes them in its Image

The Internet has made it possible for us to access terabytes of information from the comfort of our chairs. Today, everything from films to music to study notes (SparkNotes) to advice are available online, and are being accessed day after day. What people most look for on the Internet is content that used to be accessible only through other means. We look for the content of old media on the Internet because the 'Net makes it so much more accessible to us. And people have found ways to circumvent those pesky copyright and distribution laws to make popular content available to the masses for free.

Marshall McLuhan discussed how "characteristic of all media....the 'content' of any medium is always another medium." When the Internet was just beginning, there were no blogs, no online followers on Twitter, no online presence of anything at all. The Internet was introduced to more efficiently carry the content of another medium, specifically the academic notes and research of computer scientists who had previously (like all other scientists) relied on academic journals. The new medium (the Inter-Web) was filled with the content, and thus the essence, of a much older medium (academic research). Thirty years later, the Internet still is filled with the content of other media; films, newspaper articles, opinion articles, academic journals, and even radio programs. McLuhan would ask, "what is the content of the Internet" and we would answer, just the content of many other media. McLuhan is famous for saying " 'The Medium Is The Message' because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." The Internet has dramatically changed the way we interact with each other, and more subtly, the way we interact with other forms of media.

David Denby's article in The New Yorker discusses how the emergence of digital music and video have been incorporated into the latest generation of portable media devices, such as BlackBerry's, Ipods, and Smart Phones. Denby talks about how old media, most notably films, are being digitized and made available to anyone online. Want to watch the latest blockbuster, there's no need to go out to the movie theater anymore, just go online and download the file onto your hard drive. "In a theatre, you submit to a screen: you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it....at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen....Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces." Especially now, the Internet is radically changing the Entertainment industry, forcing them to make their products available online to everyone, and at very cheap prices too. Denby also predicts that "soon new movies will come pouring through the Internet and perhaps through cable franchises as well, and people will look at them on screens of all sizes." The Internet has absorbed this old media and made it available to us in a completely new way.

Steven Levy's Newsweek article about the Kindle is yet another example of how the Internet, and by extension portable media devices, are sucking old media into the tech malestrom. The Kindle is made by Amazon.com, and it is a "portable electronic reading device", if that makes any sense at all. Why do we need this portable reading devices when we have books already (which i think are portable, right) is anyone's guess. One question that Levy must ask is how closely does this device mimic the 'old fashioned' book? "the real acid test was whether Kindle was capable of transporting a reader into that trancelike zone where the world falls away." Levy also describes the way in which 'books' are downloaded into this device, and the disadvantages of the Kindle to the Original. "Though the copy protection doesn't affect book-reading, it is limiting and annoying. You can't print out a passage, email it to a friend, or copy it into a document. You can't lend a book to someone, or sell it after you're finished." Basically, the Kindle is a one man only device, guard it against all enemies, whereas I just borrowed a Steven Coonts novel from my cousin last week, and after I read it I can bring it back to her without paying any fees. The Kindle is just the latest way the Internet is trying to 'simulate" good old fashioned and reliable media.

The Kindle comes as fewer and fewer people in the United States and around are spending their free time reading. Caleb Crain writes in an article titled "Twilight of the Books" for The New Yorker magazine about how we are spending more of our leisure time watching television or films and much much less reading a book, a newspaper, or even studying a textbook. "In 1982, 56.9 percent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four percent in 1992, and to 46.7 percent in 2002." The article also discusses some of the frightening trends that the National Endowment for the Arts found between a decline in reading and things like income, employment levels, exercise, and voting. Obviously, the Internet has led to this decline in leisure or investigative reading, making television programs, videos, and films available online for even the least educated web-browser to find and waste time on. Perhaps the Kindle is just a way for us to reconnect with our literate selves in a way that this generation can relate to, through an electronic portable device.

Another medium that the Internet has successfully incorporated for users is of course radio. There are a myriad of sites available to listen to, stream, or download music tracks. Radio broadcasting has always had its backbone in music broadcasting, and Internet users and innovators long ago realized that this medium was the perfect way to make music available to everyone online. Though music can be streamed online from your MySpace page or even by uploading a track onto YouTube, there have come some very interesting ways to broadcast music over the Internet. Pandora is perhaps my personal favorite, as it introduces the listener not just to your own favorite artist, but to other artists that fit into that genre. Pandora has transformed our concept of the radio station. It is "our personal" radio station now, and we can influence the playlists simply by noting whether we approve or disapprove of each song. Many traditional radio stations have created an online presence as well, to maintain their place in our society. Analog broadcast stations, my favorite being WNYC, now stream their shows live over their websites. Many of them also keep an archive of their previous shows available to online users, as well as playlists of whatever songs they play. The Internet has absorbed this medium and crafted it into its own image.

Theme 4 Tie in: Apple Advertising on YouTube, The Horror.