Posts Tagged → television

Finding History in the Pile

Thanks to TV

This quote is on a wall in the Newseum, a museum in Washington DC dedicated to news, information (not always the same), and the First Amendment.1

However, with all due respect to Ms. Mead, I don’t think her optimism for television was ever warranted. Even in it’s early days, the medium was controlled by a few corporations run by those elders and the world being viewed by kids, and everyone else, was heavily edited (a nicer way of saying censored) by them. Today that’s even more true, even with hundreds of cable channels, most run by a few large media companies.

So, is Ms. Mead’s quote any more valid if we replace television with “the web”?

It’s too early to say. The possibility is still there. But only if “the young”, not to mention their elders, learn to filter the crap (see Sturgeon’s Law) on the web from the history being made. Developing that crap detector should be at the core of every school’s curriculum.

Dumb TV News (or is that the audience)

A recent piece in Rolling Stone makes some great points about how what passes for TV news these days is not serving it’s audience. The writer claims Americans are Too Dumb for TV News, and that is the fault of the news producers themselves.

We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that’s basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.

The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.

When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they’re doing, informing themselves, and what they’re actually doing, shopping.

The big problem is that TV “news” these days is just too easy, both to produce and consume. But actually staying informed in an age of a constant flood of data is not easy.

You need to seek out sources you can trust to tell the truth (even if it’s not always what you want to hear). Then take the time to regularly read/watch/listen to them. And then you need to continually question the information they provide. It’s hard work.

So, is the American TV news audience dumb? Or lazy?

Just asking.

Artistic Television

There’s much to like about Stephen Cobert’s Late Show that debuted last September, starting with the opening credits. The visuals are hard to describe, a video flyover of New York scenes, modified using techniques that make the images look like a combination of miniatures and a color saturated drawing, slightly out of focus at the edges to give a dream-like feeling.

capriMany different inexpensive and free image editing programs allow amateurs like me to play with the technique (like one of my pretty lame attempts at the right) but it takes real artistry to create the 45 seconds that open Colbert’s program every night.

Now the show has released a longer, “director’s cut” version of the opening video 2 with about 90 seconds of unreleased footage. As a bonus, it’s backed by the full version of the show’s wonderful jazz-funk musical theme. Go. Watch. Enjoy.

And I’ll go back to playing with my software.

Picture Post #1

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m trying to carve out more time to devote to photography. Here is my first post featuring a few shots from the previous week or so.

I had planned to post these sooner but got lost in trying to learn a software alternative to Aperture, the photo management program Apple has decided to abandon in favor of their new Photos application. However, Photos has a long way to go before it’s an appropriate replacement and another possibility called Emulsion also needs a lot of work. More to come on this topic.

Getting Snacks

The National Zoo’s male panda Tian Tian (I think; Karen could certainly tell me) batting around his snack dispenser looking for more food.

Color TV

A real modern-age antique. We had one of these when I was a kid but I’m pretty sure my dad paid more than $150 for it.

More pictures below the jump.

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Twitter Droppings

Being a small collection of links from my Twitter posts this past week that deserve a few more than 140 characters.

For many years we’ve been told that we need to differentiate our instruction. But, according to one writer, it doesn’t work. More specifically, “Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.” I wouldn’t go that far but I’m concerned the concept is being used to push “personalized” or “individualized” instruction which, as I wrote in an earlier post, is often about automating the learning process. That could be the ultimate joke.

One writer seems to believe there’s Too Much Damn TV: “1,715 TV series aired in 2014, of which 352 were scripted.” Yes, that is insane. It also makes me wonder how producers found 1363 subjects in the “real” world that were interesting enough to record.

Last week saw the first serious talks with Cuba in nearly 40 years. It’s great progress but also represents just how pig-headed US leadership can be. This “normalization” is long overdue and hopefully will lead to rethinking some of our other stupid foreign policy.

And finally, a milestone for anyone who has flown on US carriers in the past thirty years, Sky Mall is filing for bankruptcy. The cause is supposed to be “internet access and more gadgets on planes” but I’d like to think that people just got a little smarter about spending their money on that catalog’s crapgadgets. Or maybe not.