Tag: Jerry Springer

Lehrer and Hart

The list goes on and on. As if they could fit another Vietnam War memorial wall, but this one, for broadcasting.

Someone observes that on campus, the dorm lounge during news hour is a quietest place to make a phone call.

I still remember when Peter Jennings, Frank Reynolds and Max Robinson  shared the ABC newscast.

NBC got two anchors, PBS two and CBS, just one. That’s 8 talking heads sharing pre-CNN Evening news prime time.

America has always had an appetite for news (and TV dinners) besides eating while driving.

Over-the-top pay services such as Netflix and soon, Apple and Google will take us, the audience, further down the road of our self-initiated programming. Combo number 1 (Panda video, consists of hard news, soft porn and targeted advertising etc…).

This paradigm shift is telling us that even seasoned broadcast journalists still can’t command digital native audience. TV viewing used to be a family affair. Now, news is what being sent and recommended by friends. We are transitioning from broadcasting to narrow-casting,

one-to-many to many-to-many (“followers”). Bin Laden raid was announced via a Tweet by, of all people, an engineer who wanted to take a vacation away from it all “can I catch some sleep now”!

My guess is we will end up getting the information via aggregators like Facebook or Alltop.com, the new priesthood of the information age.

BTW, LinkedIn starts publishing its own news headlines.

Black-and-white TV used to be the only “game” in town ( I grew up waiting for the sign-on at 6PM. The whole country turned on their TV sets to warm up with the Indian-head poster – I found out later, used by studio engineers to calibrate their white balance, and align broadcast signals).

As portrayed best by William Hurt in Broadcast News “what do you do when your life exceeds your dream”, we can now wish farewell to those veteran broadcasters with “what do you do when your retirement exceeds your entitlement”. They know when to hold, and when to fold. After all, they are the ones who have set the tone and the pace of conversation in America. Now the burdens are on those who try to sell soup, soap and cereal to know exactly which half of their marketing dollars fails. Again, someone observed that they should at least try Gagaville, a private-label site from Farmville before having bouncers on the set like Jerry Springer .

Before signing-off, I just want to quote Ishiguro through the observation of Madam (dean of “clones” in Never Let Me Go) “When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world.And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.” “That’s the way it is” once a nightly sign-off by Walter Cronkite,  America’s most trusted man.

Uplink-Upload

Remember Nightline when it first debut?

Satellite uplink made possible real-time, split-screen dialogue, with multi-continental guests and in-studio moderator.

Safer than appearing on Jerry Springer (which need at least two or three bouncers).

Now we have video upload from crowd source.  We have moved beyond “lonely girl” in front of a fixed web cam, to

high-resolution digital videophones that can run with the Iranian students in street protest.

These incidents somehow share a thread: technology and social history converge (uplink-upload, Iranian revolution and counter-revolution).

ATT was asking the public to refrain from using too much wireless bandwidth. The same people who were joking about Russian bread line are now asking others to ration their data consumption (brought back to mind “rolling black out” in CA ten years ago).

Spy kids have outgrown their allotted bandwidth (early days of Google at Standford U saw this happen as well).

It has been tough on network planners: back in the voice-only network, ATT used to plan for Mother’s Day calling traffic. Once you can handle that peak day, you are set for the rest of the year.

Now, even with all the Global Crossing, Qwest and Level 3 excess capacity, we don’t seem to have enough (turn on those dark fibers, Let there be Light!). Off-shoring makes sense because worker bees can operate in a 24/7 Information Conveyor belt, and VPN can “follow-the-sun” to load balance their network capacity.

Social networking, M-commerce and groundswell for companies to crowd-source will feed the network effect, as Web pages become more multi-media in appeal, attracting more viewers (not readers), whose attention load will only increase (same strategy which Portals like Yahoo tried to do in their inception). Today, we have roughly 3 Billion+ email users.

Socially, however, we have less face time, and become more attention-starved, esp the extroverted  among us. (I notice advertiser’s move away from the Organization Man – IBM clone, to tech-centric spoke persons for companies e.g.  UPS, Cable and Verizon.

It’s as if the stage hands are now MC’s of the show, retiring the PR-Marketing folks to the background to do SEO tedious work).

So much to read, so many people to chat with and scenes to upload.

Is it a great time to be alive or what!

Too bad even John Lennon couldn’t have “imagined” a multi-media world we have today, and it’s evolving still.

After all, 29 years is a long time to be gone from the scene.

People are hurrying to compile “2009 the Year in Review”, “the top Ten of the Decade” etc…

Stop. We barely get through the warm-up part. Easy on the appetizers. Things are still cooking and this time it’s not pie in the sky. Modern Family now features a gay couple adopting a Vietnamese baby girl. Society is accepting of social change. And technology facilitates speed of adoption. (Good) hacker’s mindset brings about Wikipedia. It’s like reading college papers but never the final draft. Rashomon multiple POV. Keep uploading, the more the merrier.  The architecture is such that one server down, the myriad will rise up (redundancy).

Back then, you either watched Johnny Carson in pajamas, or Nightline (with guest from PTL, Tammy’s tears over her make-up, a deja-vu today if you watch Barbara Walters top ten list which honors SC Governor’s wife ).

Now, day or night, with DirecTV, Slingbox etc…you wish you had multiple lives for the 5-hour average TV viewing. And that’s just downlink viewing. We still have Hulu and YouTube for you to download. You don’t want to miss the talk of the town. It’s our new Water Cooler chat-up of the 21st century, where you don’t need a tie to stand in the hallway.

Just a connection to upload your share of social lubricant. Just remember not to take up too much of ATT bandwidth.

It’s our 21st century version of “Russian bread line”.