Sep 27
Posted: under Digital Migration, Multimedia, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Online (Multi)Media, Viral Fame.
This is painted on the ceiling of the Rila Monastery in the mountains of Bulgaria, one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. I can’t help but wonder whose eye this ancient artist used as the model for the Eye of God. The history and beauty of this complex makes me feel like I’m about to embark [...] [...more]
This is painted on the ceiling of the Rila Monastery in the mountains of Bulgaria, one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites.
I can’t help but wonder whose eye this ancient artist used as the model for the Eye of God. The history and beauty of this complex makes me feel like I’m about to embark on some sort of DaVinci Code-like adventure, only this one will involve online business models and the mysteries of HTML5. Heh. Hopefully, I won’t be pursued by some self-flagellating Newsroom Curmudgeon, bent on undermining my message about how there is actually hope for the future, that journalism will survive, even if it does take a form that is strange and possibly abhorrent to the practitioners steeped in The Old Ways.
I’m traveling to Bulgaria (and to this amazing historical site) to lead a series of panel discussions with scholars, students and the nascent digerati on the future of journalism in the digital age, hopefully continuing in my role as an international Digital Johnny Appleseed. The training session we did yesterday at the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla was amazing – one of the best groups we’ve ever presented to, and one where we could see already that journalists from all over Latin America were discovering on their own, ways that they could cooperate and help each other across the vast distances.
And once again, I shall be completely shameless and link to the recordings on UStream of the live sessions, featuring my wife Janine.
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Institute of the Americas, Janine Warner, Rila Monstery, Bulgaria, digital migration,
Sep 23
Posted: under Pod/Vodcasts.
A couple years ago, I toyed around with including audio and video files into this blog as pod/vodcasts. My experience was that the level of control that I was able to achieve really wasn’t worth all the blood, sweat and repetitive-stress injury to my mousing hand to achieve; and that I was better off posting [...] [...more]
A couple years ago, I toyed around with including audio and video files into this blog as pod/vodcasts.
My experience was that the level of control that I was able to achieve really wasn’t worth all the blood, sweat and repetitive-stress injury to my mousing hand to achieve; and that I was better off posting my video clips to Vimeo or YouTube.
I’ve since returned to the scene of my experiments, to find that the PodPress plugin that I sweated over back in ’08 has really grown up. There are all sortsa features & fields there to play with now, and it doesn’t take degrees in sound engineering, Apache Server Maintenance, PHP coding and SEO optimization to get a stinking mp3 file into my blog. Which is pretty much just in time for me to show off to a whole new round of traditional journalists, eager to break free & start putting pretty pictures and killer sounds up onto the web.
The file types that PodPress handles have grown in complexity - and usefulness. There's even the capability to use the non-traditional open-source Ogg formats within HTML5. This bears serious consideration.
So to kick off this little journey into multimedia, I’m uploading a song — the first song I’ve ever actually created all (well, pretty much – I’ll explain in a bit) on my own:
Downloadable version: Heads Up-No Beer
My friend Steve and his buddies were supposed to meet me & go to a Dodger game on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, they were rather over-served the previous night, and this is the (unintentionally) hilarious voicemail message they left me to tell me they really weren’t up to drinking any more beer that day.
Sep 13
Posted: under Amusing Nonsense, Denial of Reality, Pop Culture Quirkiness.
Tags: gossip, Madonna, mass delusions, mass media, Moran Cerf, reality, Sean Penn, trussed up like a turkey
Moran Cerf's work centers around the micro scale -- how on a personal level, we don't really know what we think we know. My life has been spent examining that effect on a more macro scale -- where, as a society, it doesn't matter what really happened, only what people think (and say) happened.
Reality is, indeed, what we make of it. Which is both exciting, and frightening. [...more]
Moran Cerf describes his “Liberty Valance” moment on KCRW’s UnFictional
I’ve already posted this to my Facebook profile, but the story put a hook into me, and deserves a more thorough reaction, comment & perhaps clarification.
This story struck a particular chord with me, because in my professional career, I’ve seen first-hand how a media meltdown can bend reality, even for the people who had first-hand knowledge of what really happened. If you haven’t already heard it, please click on the link above and listen to what happened to Moran when he blundered into the international media spotlight.
Basically, Moran was doing research into how the brain functions, and two words in the press release they had prepared sounded to an editor at the BBC as though they were announcing that they were able to record dreams.
The story took off, and Moran struggled for weeks with the misperceptions that hardened into “facts” in the minds of the international media. I can’t do justice to what happened next, only groan in familiar pain as he describes how the story took on a life of its own and drowned out the original message they were trying to convey (which is in the video below).
Thought projection by neurons in the human brain
This really resonated for me because of something that happened more than 20 years ago, back when I was working as a paparazzi (yes, I was one of the unholy legions that race through the streets of Hollywood like the minions of The Humoungous in Road Warrior. It was fun for a while, and I wrote a book about it). The situation was that Madonna and Sean Penn were getting divorced. The bureau chief was struggling to find some new way to spin the story; it was widely suspected that Penn, who was, and is, notorious for his volatile temper, had freaked out over some of Madonna’s flirtatious behavior. But to say that Penn had smacked her around would be to accuse him of a felony in print — a real no-no in the journalism game, and one that can wind you in court for years, defending serious libel litigation.
What to do, what to do …
Well, the editor fabricated the story that Penn had pitched a fit over Christmas and tied Madonna to a chair. He used the phrase “trussed up like a turkey.”
Perfect!
The story was the right combination of lurid & salacious (leading to big newsstand sales!) while still remaining on this side of actionable and defamatory. It ran to great acclaim and got picked up by all manner of other news outlets, repeated again & again as the moment that Madonna and Sean split up. And the phrase “trussed up like a turkey” was used by other media outlets, and then spread to all the TV tabloid shows – A Current Affair, Hard Copy, etc. etc.
Years later, I was going through the morgue (no, not the place where they store dead bodies, although I was actually in such places for stories at other times during my career — the “morgue” is what we used to call the battered filing cabinets full of clippings from old newspaper and magazine stories that we used for research). I was trying to find some background fact on Madonna, and I started to notice a pattern.
Over the years, every time she did an interview in the early 90s, Madonna was asked about her relationship with Sean Penn (and in turn, he was asked about her). They would refer to the story about their Christmas fight, and they would deny it. At one point, Sean said something like “they said I dressed up like a turkey” (apparently, someone had mispronounced or misunderstood the verb “trussed”) and laughed.
And then something very strange started happening.
Madonna started saying that the reason she split up with Sean Penn was that they had had a fight over Christmas. And that he had tied her to a chair.
She even used the phrase “trussed up like a turkey.”
The story had been repeated so many times over the years, that even the people to whom it was supposed to have happened, who knew it to be untrue, had come around to believe that it had actually happened to them. Madonna had heard so many people talking about how she had been tied up, that she actually believed that it had happened to her. Her perceptions of reality had become unmoored … although many might say that this is a rather common condition in Hollywood.
This is the effect of the mass media on us these days. It is like an enormous, all-encompassing hypnotist, whispering in our ears wherever we go, flashing subliminal (or liminal) messages at us all the time.
Repetition has an effect on human consciousness. On perception. On memory. Why else do those damn radio ads for cheap car insurance chant their “Dial 1-800-blahblahblah” numbers at us over and over again? Why else do we train little kids how to say their alphabet and do their times tables with flash cards?
Moran Cerf’s work centers around the micro scale — how on a personal level, we don’t really know what we think we know. My life has been spent examining that effect on a more macro scale — where, as a society, it doesn’t matter what really happened, only what people think (and say) happened.
Reality is, indeed, what we make of it. Which is both exciting, and frightening.
Now watch this video of Moran talking about colonoscopies.
The Illusion of Free Will – Mindshare LA
