Future of Mass Media

My last post made me think that most of the things I’ve been writing about are typically negative. In truth, that’s something that I struggle with a lot, since I typically don’t have much to talk about in relation to things that I enjoy; I simply enjoy them and don’t talk about it too much. Talking about my interest in the state of communications and why I decided to switch over from a different career got me thinking about my career-specific reasons for entering this industry, rather than the mental reasons I decided on it. While I’ve made it clear that I’m none-too-pleased with the state of the media, there are some aspects that I really do like about it. Particularly, I’ve had a lot of interest in radio for a long time, specifically talk radio. I’ve talked about how the FCC and lawyers have been steadily ruining AM and FM for a long time now, and I feel that the last bastion of hope lays in satellite radio, like SiriusXM.

Uncensored, unfiltered radio on XM is the only place where freedom of speech exists on a mass scale, barring the jumbled internet. XM is to radio communications what premium channels are to cable, but even premium TV has some limits and people do crack down hard on them at times. Even XM has faced some backlash over the past 10 years for mostly harmless things, and it has started to slowly go the way of FM in its early stages of regulation; however, I like the concept of all these excellent radio personalities combining in one place, most of them in the same building actually, and they work together to help each other’s shows out.

An example of this are my favorite guys on the radio, Opie & Anthony, who are just guys that speak unfiltered and say what they think without having to filter it and dumb it down, regardless of how politically incorrect it is. My first exposure to them was back in the mid-late 90s in Boston, when they were on the local radio in the city. They had just started, so they had some hacky bits at times, but compared to the other, extremely filtered radio at the time, they were many times better. That is, until they made a joke about Mayor Menino dying in a car crash, albeit on APRIL FOOLS, thus obviously being a joke. However, they were kicked off of the air for this obvious joke, because of overreacting FCC censors and immature people. They stuck to their guns, moved down to WNEW in New York, and even got syndicated in Boston again after a while, before a stunt committed by a viewer calling in, not spurred on by the hosts, where the viewer had sex with his wife in a church and got them kicked off again, even though you obviously couldn’t see it on the radio, and it was the callers’ own choice in a weird, misguided attempt to be funny. XM recognized their talent for humor and unfiltered opinions and immediately signed them upon their contract with Clear Channel running up, and they essentially lead the way for big names to join XM.

People like them, despite the restrictions they have to follow from XM bosses after the Sirius merger, give me some hope for the future of communication. Regardless of whether people like them or find them tasteless, freedom of speech has just been under attack for so long that it’s hard for supporters of that freedom to not also support people like them. XM shares a lot of similarities with another form of new media in the social networking age, particularly Podcasting. A lot of great comedians and hosts have started podcasts, and the quality has been surprisingly good in terms of entertainment and production, much better than YouTube channels and vlogs. Both XM and podcasting are created specifically to reach large audiences without the hassle of syndication contracts, and the same thing has essentially happened ever since the switch to digital TV, and from this I started to notice a trend; everything is moving toward mass communication.

TV OnDemand services, Netflix, Podcasts, XM, even video game systems and their online communities; all of them have been moving toward an epoch with similar communication models, and eventually, the lower grade technology is going to switch to these upgraded systems as they become obsolete. It’s becoming ever-closer, and it’s something that I aim to be a part of, much like the Dot-Com bubble in the 90s; not only will it be an excellent financial opportunity, but I predict that it will be the next step in mass communication. What use are weak FM and AM frequencies going to be soon, when everybody has a handheld device connected to the internet and the ability to access things? As wireless signals get stronger every year and internet servers get cheaper, why wouldn’t cars have an internet connection and subscription model right from their car with hundreds of nationwide channels, which has already occurred on satellite radio systems? People hate advertisements, and XM channels have very few to none, with most of the commercials being on the more expensive premium subscriptions, as opposed to FM which has tons of commercials. The only niche they would need to fill is local news, but even that is starting to disappear with social networking causing people to focus more on mass communication.

The last few innovations started with internet, then cell phones, followed by wireless internet, satellite radio, social networking, smart phones, and now podcasting, which has been around for almost 10 years when iPods came out, has finally started to really catch on, and I feel that future is finally on the horizon, as different types of media started to combine into one fluid system.

How I Hate and Love Communication Media

I get a lot of questions from people about why I left a prestigious university and a promising career in computer programming, which is something I’ve been doing since I was young, and went back to school for a degree in Communications, when I have such a negative opinion on the state of media and interpersonal communication in the modern age. The truth is, I’ve excelled at writing since I was young; I essentially taught myself to read from a young age after I learned which sound represents which letter and it just clicked in my head extremely easily for some reason, and even later in life I was able to learn new languages with ease. I essentially skipped children’s books once I learned to read and hopped right into novels, even though teachers would try to get me to read the picture books when I was about the age of kindergarten and first grade. I enjoyed reading stories, whether fictional or not, but what most intrigued me was the concept of communicating ideas vividly and perfectly; it still interests me to think that a pattern of sounds creates a word which denotes a concept, and I like to learn specific words that describe something rather than a whole explanation for a concept.

This merged with my interest in the ways in which philosophy is expressed through entertainment, as well as my meticulous, almost “Star Trek” Vulcan-esque , obsession with pure logic; it’s an unpopular statement, but the concept of “opinions” honestly infuriates me, not in general, but in situations where there’s truly only one valid statement. I think that there are too many opinions in this world in situations that really don’t require them, sure there are times when opinions are relevant, particularly in situations that deal with “emotional” logic, such as psychological concepts and concepts that aren’t strictly defined, or are poorly defined. A quick example for me would be abortion; the idea of sentient life has never been perfectly defined as a concept, so I honestly don’t have a clue what to think about it. I have a personal opinion on the subject, but it’s based on emotion and gut-feeling so I wouldn’t consider it a necessarily strong or valid argument. There are plenty of examples of this, but there are many more situations that, in my opinion, can be completely figured out from pure logic.

This essentially led me to Communications; I had a talent in writing, but was always seeking a better way to express it. My vocabulary is excellent, but when it came to expression, being able to describe something in-depth isn’t where I struggled. Where I struggled was with effectively communicating the idea to another person in such a way that it was interesting and effective, not just eloquently described. Simplifying things for a broader audience is something I also struggled with.

Those are the basics for why I wanted to enter into Communications; I feel that there are too many problems in the industry in the modern age, and that people need to fix it. As established, I have a talent and enjoyment for writing, but it’s not so much the writing part that pleases me, but the effectively communicating aspect OF writing, and therefore I can adapt that to numerous forms of media, not just writing. My experience with computers is extensive, and internet communications is a huge industry these days, with the advent of social networking and the massive popularity attached to it. I’m not a materialistic person, and I simply want enough money to live comfortable and be able to do all the simple things that I want to do, and eventually raise a family. As the saying goes, if your job is doing what you enjoy, then you’ll never work a day in your life, and to be in such a position is my ultimate goal.

De-Evolution of Entertainment Media

At some point in the last century or so, people stopped measuring the existential wealth of a person by the quality of their work, but by the power of their name; a gimmick, per say. For the past half, our media and communications have been primarily accomplished through television and radio, so for a long time, people were essentially forced to watch what was played on those media. The internet has only recently been adopted, at least for people who don’t anything about computers, and this has offered us a much more varied choice in entertainment, news, talk shows, etc. A lot of people saw things like YouTube and other video streaming services as the answer to the declining quality in traditional media since it would be viewer produced content, rather than force-fed media garbage. Wrong. What ensued and became popular were vacuous “vlogs” and some of the dumbest things I’ve ever personally seen. After years of complaining, the ball was in the users’ court, and they fumbled it horribly. But why?

I have some ideas why; certainly the production value was significantly lower than a funded project on TV or in theaters, but production value only amounts for so much. I think the problem is that the people who grew up in this internet generation have grown up thinking that the awful modern television is what television is supposed to be like, so most of them have no idea how to actually be creative, and just follow clichés and tropes from what they’ve seen. 

Among the worst channels that are extremely I’ve seen, they include Pewdiepie, a Swedish guy who plays independent horror computer games and narrates while people watch the game and his “scared” reactions all while inexplicably talking in a creepy “baby voice,” and it’s wildly popular.

RayWilliamJohnson is another channel, where the guy makes short five-minute videos in order to maximize his views-per-video to make more money from the “content partner” program, rather than longer, high quality videos, and he basically plays videos that most people have already seen with obvious commentary that people have already said about the videos, and the result is obviously pointless; I’ll give Ray some credit though, as he does have a decent production quality, but he still just parrots what every other similar show does, from the same videos to the same “comedic” commentating styling.

NigaHiga, a Asian-American named Ryan Higa, is another wildly popular video of absolutely atrocious comedy; it’s like somebody basically read a book about how to be funny and started repeating the words verbatim, with no comedic timing or any actual emotions involved. Just wooden “acting” and cliché gimmicks. I could go on about this for days, but the state of media and communications is just atrocious, and the user-generated evolution hasn’t helped, with the only good YouTube videos being candid home videos, extreme videos and some prank channels that are unique, but most of the channels with commentary and opinions are just watered down crap. Television has become obsessed with terrible “reality” shows, with about five great and unique shows a year, at most, on the cable channels; the premium channels still have some excellent shows, but even they are starting to go downhill, canceling some of the best, some deservedly, some not, and replacing them with uninteresting shows. Radio has been going down for a long time ever since the FCC started cracking down on AM and FM and lawyers, the most uninteresting people, began taking over the production of shows and making the hosts walk on eggshells.

Essentially, people used to blame the media for quality of media dropping steadily for the past 15 or so years, but the truth is that, like most things, it’s really the fault of the people. They’re the ones who still watch the shows and support them, and they could easily fix the problems by just saying that they’ve had enough and they’re not just gonna let them force-feed mediocre entertainment to the viewers, but instead, they choose to adapt to the poor quality shows and just accept them. For this to change, and this harkens back to my other post about the fear of criticism people have, they need to just admit that pop culture has become exponentially dumber over the years. No more excuses, no more pandering, just honest truth and a desire for interesting, intelligent thought in the media. Otherwise, we’re going to end up devolving our communication to the point that our language is equivalent to “newspeak” from the book “1984” by George Orwell, which is essentially a severely dumbed down and simplified form of the English language.

Forced Public Apologies

Among the many failures of communication, one of the things that has driven me absolutely insane over the past 10 years is the concept of the “forced apology.” You see it all the time; two of the more prominent ones included supposed “racial insensitivity” like Michael Richards aka Kramer from ‘Seinfeld,” and most recently, Paula Deen, who was apparently a cook or something on TV. Paula Deen was fired for supposedly saying a racial epithet 20 or however many years ago…. just think about that for a second. Forget rap music, forget what you hear every day from famous people, and let’s attack a woman who told the truth about saying something offensive, in an unknown context, in the past some time. The sad part is that people don’t care about the truth, and they prefer people to be wormy and lie about things, even though they themselves say offensive things. But, when that offensive thing is racist, then whoa! Stop the presses! Apparently racism is the worst thing in the world; a person’s immature, stupid beliefs have no effect on you or anybody else, whether racist or sexist, it doesn’t matter. Yet we treat it as if it’s murder or rape. As I’ve stated, criticize that person; fine. But unless that belief is directly reflected in their job and actions, then leave it alone. A woman cooking food on TV has nothing to do with her saying an offensive term at some point in the past, especially when you don’t even know the context.

Now I’m going to take a very unpopular stance, which I’ve gotten attacked for before; I supported when Michael Richards (Kramer) said racial remarks to a black heckler in his comedy audience. People called him racist, this and that, when he certainly wasn’t; he was simply trying to offend somebody, and he knew that would piss the guy off, since the guy had interrupted his show and was ruining it for the audience like a rude jerk. When you’re insulting some jerk, especially if you’re a comedian, the LAST thing you think about is “oh am I going to offend somebody else?” No, you’re thinking about hurting that person’s feelings by any means necessary, not making some vague social commentary, and it’s childish for people to have asserted that he was making some big racist-ideological remark, when he was just trying to piss the guy off; whatever someone says to insult another has nothing to do with anybody else. No social commentary, no ideological concept, nothing. An insult is primarily meaningless outside of context; for example, “bitch” means female dog, but when somebody calls another that word, I’m 100% positive they don’t mean “female dog.” Same goes for any other insult; “fuck you.” What the hell does that even mean? There’s no definitive answer for what that actually means, but you know it’s meant to insult them. Personally, you could call me any stupid curse word, but what would most insult me is somebody relating an actual concept about me which makes me feel poorly about myself; to insinuate I’m stupid or unworthy of respect, things like that would truly offend me because those are things that I take pride in not being. Some formless word with no actual contextual definition means NOTHING to me, whether it has racial overtones or not.

And this leads me to the forced apology, one of the fakest, most meaningless things that people love. People who love to be phony-outraged over something equally love seeing a person not stand up for themselves and become reduced to groveling at their feet. It’s not a sincere apology; it’s not somebody saying something and then thinking “hmm I shouldn’t have said that because it was inappropriate and disrespectful.” No, it’s somebody saying something, people becoming either truly offended or fake offended when it doesn’t even affect them, and then saying “if you don’t say these magic words and submit to our will, we will try to ruin your life.” Depending on the power and numbers wielded by the demander, they will say those meaningless words or not, and most of the time they do. The thing is, people who stand by what they say are the ones who actually typically end up coming out looking better. I’ve seen numerous examples of people who say something that isn’t politically correct, a bunch of people whine about it despite not even being involved, and the person basically tells them to screw off, because their fans and friends know who they really are and what they’re truly about and they don’t need the approval of others who have nothing to do with them. 

Personally, I think it’s more immature to whine about something another person simply says and try to demand that they grovel at your feet, rather than actually being a person who said something insensitive and stood by what they said. Enough with the forced apologies from people who don’t really mean it. I disagreed with Martin Bashir recently when he attacked Palin for using the word “slavery” in a figurative sense and tried to immaturely relate it to actual slavery, thus prompting him to talk about a slave journal about one who was defecated on (yeah it’s disgusting) and then said that maybe Palin should have been that slave in that position. Insensitive for him to say that? Sure, I completely thought it was a stupid thing to say, not because it was offensive, but because it made no sense. But he shouldn’t have been forced to apologize for­ what he said, because it was appropriate in the context he did. People need to remember that somebody doesn’t offend you; you become offended by doing it to yourself. We’re all adults and need to start acting like them, rather than whining and forcing apologies from people.­­­­­_­

Bullying vs Criticism

In my previous post I talked (or wrote some unorganized thought) about political correctness and how stupid it truly is, but I started thinking about a different, more specific topic, which is this fear of criticism that people have begun having in this modern age. All you hear about is “bullying” everywhere you look. Stories over the past year have been all about this bullying that people face, yet for the most part, all I see is legitimate criticisms blown out of proportion, while real bullying goes entirely unnoticed as socially acceptable. As long as the critical opinion is popular, it’s ok, but when it’s unpopular it becomes “bullying”; you never hear people say anymore that they defend a person’s right to say something, regardless of whether they agree or not, even though that’s something America is based on. People are even afraid just to THINK something unpopular nowadays, and live in fear of the tyranny of the majority, despite the majority being comprised of idiots. Certainly there are some cases, like when people follow someone around belittling them, but that’s just legitimate harassment and stalking. I’m sick of seeing this stuff about online harassment, when there are plenty of privacy controls to limit who you associate with; if you don’t like what somebody has to say, then you have the choice to completely ignore them.

What I was trying to really get at is when people do something stupid, and then get mad when people are critical of them; but, those that criticize have begun to cross certain lines into flat-out harassment over things that don’t even affect them, and that’s where I have a problem with “bullying”. My last post made it obvious that I’m in full support of somebody saying what they think without having to suffer physical consequences, like losing their job. I’ve seen numerous situations where a person says something that other weak-minded people find offensive, and they lost their jobs, which is their livelihood, over something they said.

An example is the girl who went to the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C. and there was a sign that basically said to not yell; the sign is completely pointless, because if you have to tell somebody to not yell at a monument devoted to fallen soldiers, then they’re already a hopeless, disrespectful person. So the girl took a picture where she pretended to yell in front of the sign, and this girl got absolutely hammered by people, despite staying within the rules and poking fun at the concept I just mentioned, and she ended up getting fired for nothing. She didn’t disobey any rules, and she wasn’t disrespecting fallen soldiers, no matter how many people think she did; the facts are quite clear, and she was well within her boundaries. Instead, their phony outage over something that doesn’t affect them in slightest, something they could have easily avoided, ended up causing her to lose her job, being fired by her politically correct, cowardly boss, and if I recall, she actually worked at a nursing home, a job I consider to be much more admirable than the banal jobs most of the people attacking her have. And we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, huh? Criticism of her is a different thing, but it became flat out harassment when people got her personal information, her job information, and started calling and harassing her work and home with death threats, and then she was harassed further by losing her job.

A counter-example to this was a girl who went to Halloween dressed as a marathon runner with severe leg injuries, in reference to the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the backlash got her fired as well. I can actually somewhat understand why this might bother people, as they believe her to be trivializing the tragedy. Ok, so if that’s the logic we’re following, then every person who dresses as a witch is “trivializing” the many female mutilations and deaths at the Salem Witch Trials; people who dress as a mummy are offending the old Egyptian culture; pirate costumes are disrespectful to the people who died after pirates raided their ship during the privateer age. People need to be consistent with their thoughts, and not add false context to certain things. You’re SUPPOSED to dress up for Halloween, and referencing a popular, if violent and sad, subject has nothing to do with disrespecting the incident.

This concept that things can only be referenced after periods of time is childish and inconsistent; if something wasn’t acceptable at the time, then it should NEVER be. Just because those people aren’t around to criticize it now, that doesn’t mean it’s right, but there is nothing wrong with making a caricature of a CONCEPT, rather than a specific instance or tragedy.You can criticize whatever you want, but once that transcends into an intent to harm a person physically or harm their livelihood and work, then it’s bullying. If somebody says or does something just stupid or morally wrong, socially ostracizing them is fine; it’s not bullying when somebody ACTUALLY does something along those lines, and ostracizing them isn’t an attack, but more of an avoidance. That’s how people learn from a young age how to be a civil person, and the more we turn our new generation into a bunch of wimps who are afraid of criticism, the more we are hurting our freedom of speech in the long run.