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perfectirishgifts · 4 years ago

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Netflix Rolls Out Playback Speed Control—So Who’s The Real Director During Our Ambient TV Era?

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/netflix-rolls-out-playback-speed-control-so-whos-the-real-director-during-our-ambient-tv-era/

Netflix Rolls Out Playback Speed Control—So Who’s The Real Director During Our Ambient TV Era?

The company is letting viewers go warp speed

This past summer it was reported Netflix NFLX was experimenting with the ability to control the playback of any show or film— from 0.5x slower to 1.5x faster.

While the feature was primarily tested on Android mobile devices, the feature is now being spotted on desktops across the country.

The creative community has been pushing back since the rumors. Judd Apatow, an outspoken critic, replied to the early headlines, ”Distributors don’t get to change the way the content is presented. Doing so is a breaking of trust and won’t be tolerated by the people who provide it.” He added, “Don’t make me have to call every director and show creator on Earth to fight you on this. Save me the time.”

Aaron Paul also joined early, “There is NO WAY Netflix will move forward with this. That would mean they are completely taking control of everyone else’s art and destroying it. Netflix is far better than that. Am I right Netflix?…I love Netflix. Always have. Always will. This simply can not be true.”

It is.

Paul’s tweet is now unavailable and close to 195,000,000 Netflix subscribers will soon be getting a taste of this control.

In a previous statement from Netflix, Keela Robison, VP of Product Innovation, justified the test, “It’s a feature that has long been available on DVD players – and has been frequently requested by our members. For example, people looking to rewatch their favorite scene or wanting to go slower because it’s a foreign language title.”

The context of controlling speed on a DVD player is different than our present moment. Culture changes. We’re in a market landscape where Netflix infamously “competes with sleep” in addition to now HBO, Hulu, Apple and Disney. This is about being able to better understand a foreign film as much as it’s about crunching more consumption numbers for shareholders. “Are you still there?”

How do you increase viewership metrics quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Approaching the equation by attempting to increase subscribers is myopic. Saturation is tough. You also can’t increase the time frame for people to watch Netflix, there are only so many hours in the day. But what you can do, and what Netflix has done, is shrink the content to fit more of it within subscribers’ existing time frames. Same timespan each night, but more content watched… all without growing subscription numbers. Brilliant… for the stock.

Netflix is signaling: Consumption volume is prioritized over artistic intent. What’s disturbing yet unsurprising is that we’ve mistaken the figure for the ground. Where metrics were once leveraged to understand the resonance of a piece of work, we’re now solely optimizing for the metrics themselves, forgetting why we’re here. We’re undermining the material for stats. Have we really experienced the work, or have we merely seen it?

For Team Human, author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff shares, “Any art that asks its viewers to slow down or, worse, pause and reflect is hurting a market that depends on automatic and accelerating behaviors.” Netflix doesn’t want to play in the slow and ambiguous space. However for the creatives, it’s the deal with the devil.

This figure-ground reversal is what Apatow and Paul are concerned about. The distributor, Netflix, now controls the priority: numbers over art. This means Netflix also controls the watch experience—or at least empowers viewers to control their own watch experience, different than that of what was intended. Fairly, who are we to make such directorial decisions over Apatow, the creator? If he wanted a shorter film, his editors would have done so. And as any fan knows, that’s not what Apatow wants.

The trigger for all is that we’re beginning to widely remix an established and sacred medium: film. The chaotic spirit of TikTok is getting mapped onto the nearly 100-year-old Motion Picture Association. Or better yet, YouTube’s existing playback controls can now be applied to a Best Picture.

This is 2020—power dynamics are changing. The crowd now determines if Sonic the Hedgehog gets re-animated, or which actors get canceled. Further, with the pandemic, films like Wonder Woman 1984 are bypassing bottleneck theaters and hitting laptops first. In this relationship, it means Sam gets to decide how they want to view the blockbuster: on their iPhone or at 1.5x the speed. After all, they are the one paying. No one needs to flash their B.A. in Cinematic Arts from USC to sign up for Netflix.

Defenders of the feature flaunt the benefits for the deaf and blind community, in addition to many others requiring such accessibility options. Longer time to read subtitles, or quickened audio for those who can’t see well, allows freedom. It’s applaudable and overdue. But can this truly be the fundamental motivator? Netflix wouldn’t have first tested on Android, but first fostered a PR-worthy partnership with the American Council of the Blind. Or at least that’s how they should have framed it.

This feature also signals what television’s role is in the zeitgeist. Markets once proclaimed the arrival of “Second Screen Viewing”, where phone screens accompanied the big screen and acted as the outlet for Tweet reactions and live group chats. However, there’s been another reversal. The TV is now the second screen. The real attention is on the phone: TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube is the foreground. Netflix’s Emily In Paris, dubbed Ambient TV, runs in the background. Many approach their Netflix shows as they would a digital Yule Log, a calming stream of colors and sounds to fill the void.

“At its core, Ambient TV is about modulating our split attention,” says Sean Monahan, founder of the new trend consultancy 8Ball formerly of K-HOLE. “Speeding up certain content for focused turbo-ingestion or lowering the complexity of plot so it can be more ambient background noise are two sides of the same coin. Split attention isn’t only a workplace problem. We also multitask while we consume entertainment.”

Our debate shouldn’t be about the speed and length of an Apatow film, but what Ambient TV and a speed feature symbolizes: our content glut, and how we can’t seem to escape it. Every nook and cranny is filled with content. We multiply our screens to get through.

Entertainment—or even better, art—is now framed as a task to complete hastily, defeating its primary purpose: timeless escape. Our watchlists have become Sisyphean. There is no progress. Yet there’s still a mirage of completion. Our new 1.5x speed can get us there. Or so we hope.

What we need is a movement, a figure or organization, to declare: we don’t need to watch, read or listen to it all. This is that early and modest rallying call.

We are suffocating in content, all competing for our attention—family, friends and co-workers meanwhile attempt to prioritize the list on our behalf, only making it worse. Completed content has become our all-access social pass. Your opportunities for conversation accumulate as hours slept shrink.

But are we watching because we want to or because we feel compelled to?

If we’re watching at 1.5x speed, missing nuance and timing all while disrespecting the creator, perhaps we truly don’t want to. And that’s okay.

From Media in Perfectirishgifts

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reesebird · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://reesebird.com/2019/02/14/how-do-you-talk-to-an-angel-the-plight-of-parents-raising-a-special-needs-child/

How Do You Talk to An Angel? The Plight of Parents Raising a Special Needs Child

“How Do You Talk to An Angel” was a one-hit wonder of the Heights musical group. It could also be a rhetorical question that enlists answers from various schools of thought. This article is not about music and musicians. It is not about heaven and paradise because it has “angel” in the title either. It is about real life events that befall real people here on earth. You may know some of the people very well. They may be your acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, members of your place of worship; nevertheless, these are people you know. You might even be one of them.

Let me preface this piece by saying since no human is perfect, we all have special needs; we each have our own handicaps or disabilities, so to speak. The degree of specialness may vary.

When faced with one of life’s complexities to the point mini juru nwa awo onu (one is rendered speechless), I resort to this statement: “life is something”. In December 2010, I accompanied someone sick to a special medical facility here in Austin, Texas. What I witnessed that fateful day rocked my core. There were husbands helping their sick wives, parents attending to their stricken children, some as young as two years old, adult children helping their ailing parents. Then there were people who looked healthy on the outside but are in for the fight of their lives. All the sick people there were fighting cancer.

As I struggled to take in the strange environment while remembering to breathe so I don’t pass out from nausea, I asked myself, could it be possible that a few city blocks from this treatment center, there are healthy husbands and wives engaged in all-out divorce battles? Couple these once-madly in love couples be wishing the other death and sickness now? Could a brother be so jealous of his sibling that he wishes him or her harm? Could arguments over irrelevances be robbing some families from treasuring today? Could these feuding folks witness this other hospital scene over here? Do we always acknowledge how precious and precarious life is? Life is truly something!

Whether you an agnostic, Atheist, Christian, Ethicist, Hindu, Jew, Moslem, Pagan, etc. you sometimes arrive at a point where you question your belief and wonder if the alternative is a better choice. It is at the point you could rhetorically ask, “how to you talk to an angel?”, any angel of any faith that will give you answer to the pointed question you ask.

How does someone raise a special needs child and remain sane? How? While you ponder that question, let me compound it by asking what type of higher power (Father, God, god, Allah, Buddha, Juju, Idol, Maker, Almighty) allows such hardship to befall mortal beings who have done nothing to be so deserving? Finally, if the parent(s) deserved it for whatever reasons that did not merit forgiveness, then why bestow such heavy crosses on innocent children? As the Supertramp put it, ” There are times when all the world’s asleep, the questions run too deep for such a simple man”. Think about it; don’t just brush it aside by saying “it’s just part of it, that we’ve got to fulfill the Book”, or the Lord will not allow you to tempted beyond what you can bear. To the naked eyes, some of these loads are pretty Sisyphean and are calling for any angel to come lighten these massively heavy loads

Sadly, some men and women of the cloth have taken advantage of the stricken at their weakest point. A good friend summed it up by saying, it is what is “behind” the place of worship that is more important: the kindness to others, assisting people you don’t expect to return the help to you, standing up for people who cannot stand up for themselves, remembering your former teachers, helping people in need both here and overseas, aiding an employed person find work and hope, flashing smiles to brighten sad faces as you pass by, cleaning the windshield of the elderly woman or man next to you at the fuel station. Telling that embarrassed waiter/waitress who just dropped your food on the ground that it is OK and that you’re glad he or she did not get hurt. Knowing, if you are in power, that “no condition is permanent”. And being kind to people you meet on your way up because you will meet them on your way down where they will remember you by your record.

What makes this article more difficult to write is, I am a mere outsider looking in. I have not lived the life of caring (on a daily basis) for a special needs child or parent or wife or sibling. While I am thankful for not being in any of those shoes, I do not feel those who are doing this true labor of love work are less fortunate than the rest of us. In every previous article, I start out stating a problem, discussing that problem, and tabling solutions the reader can use to solve that problem. In this case, I have no solutions. In fact, I am asking the reader how does one go about helping caregivers or parents of special needs children? While the Internet is full of what appears to be excellent information on this subject, only first-hand practical solutions will suffice.

If someone you know goes to a hospital to deliver a baby and comes home with a special needs child, how do you go about supporting that family in deed, not just with words, if you have not been in this situation before?

As often the case, families who have had to carry these extra heavy loads tend to have extraordinary powers and resiliency of coping. They develop Sampson-like strength of dealing with life without asking or wanting anyone to feel sorry for them. They seem to feel it is their cross and they are going to bear it with grace and without leaning on friends and family. And if you are that friend or family of the caregiver or parent, how do you get in a word in edgewise, so to speak… how do you begin to show you care and want to be of help without stepping on the toes of same people you want to aid? How?

Do you offer to help take care of the child while the parents take a break, albeit for a few hours? If the parents allow you to do so, would you know what to do and how to take care of the child? Is helping one day a week or a month good enough? Are you really strong enough for this task, in other words, can you handle it?

If you have not witnessed a snippet of how difficult it is to care for a special needs child, next time you are in a public place (park, bus, hospital, etc) keenly observe what it takes to get that 8-year old child with Cerebral Palsy in or out of a vehicle just one time. Then imagine if the parents can’t afford a vehicle as the case in many developing countries and here in the United States. To add salt to injury, Nigerian well-to-do parents who happen to have special needs children are often accused of using their stricken children for black magic money machine (ogwu ego), due to sheer ignorance. Growing up in Nigeria, many people used to believe that stuff. Birth defects and cancer afflictions in the middle and upper income families were erroneously attributed to this money machine nonsense. This stereotype makes it possible for society to piles on these innocent people like they were the Witches of Salem instead of affording them the compassion they crave.

Imagine the unfortunate stare and shame of the whole situation day after day?

Think about what that parent of a down syndrome child was goes. Then imagine that scene repeated day and night, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year and years on end. Imagine being that parent, my friend!

The essence of the above vicarious exercise is not to create the misery-likes-company feeling of seeing people who are worse off; I totally reject this notion. Rather, the goal is to foster empathy and humility and gratitude and to treasure every moment we have because it could easily be worse. Also, we need to accept the fact we may not have done everything to deserve our good fortunate or the challenges in our personal lives. No, they did not bring these evils on themselves.

The simple act of going to the grocery store or the doctor’s office or to the park entails Pentagon-War-Room logistics. The caregiver has to check off things on a long list. Some things will have to be planned way in advance with every t crossed and i dotted. Even normal fun-filled family vacation becomes another Mission Impossible for those who can afford to go on vacation. Then there are parents who have to do these things and still work demanding jobs outside the home. Some work for bosses who either have no clue or don’t care about what these caregivers are going through in their home lives.

Then there are cases where the heavy load befalls a happily married couple and after bearing it for some time, one of them gives up and leaves because he or she can’t take it anymore. Sometimes both decide their child is better of in a home or institution. Either way the parents live with the heavy hearts of thinking they did not do enough for their special needs child. Who are we to judge any parent or situation, especially when we have no idea of how hard a road that is?

Parents of normal kids and special needs children have it tough too. The normal children may feel they receive less attention than their sick sibling. This may create the Prodigal Son-like jealousy. The normal children may also feel burdened by helping take care of their sibling or even the uneasiness or awkwardness some people feel being around people who are different. Parents can be caught in the middle of all these family storms with no escape hatch.

There are lessons we all can draw from this topic: treasure everyday and count your countless blessings. Regardless of how bad you think life is today for you, don’t make it worse, because it could be worst.

I don’t even know where to begin to write about parents who have had the unthinkable task of burying a child, especially parents in Diaspora whose children passed away. Whether the child was laid to rest here or in motherland, the child is resting in peace. It does not really matter where one is buried as long as the person is rested in peace. Either by choice or by circumstances, many of us (including the big wigs back home) will meet our Maker abroad. The big wigs will likely be on their last medical trip overseas when they kick their bucket. They could help themselves and the masses today by establishing in Nigeria the same first-class medical facilities they seek overseas. But would they?

For some of these parents whose only child or only daughter or only son passed away, take heart! The parents can legally adopt another child or daughter or son, not to replace the irreplaceable one, but to help fill the void. If you have other children be they all boys or all girls, still count your blessings. Don’t be so consumed in mourning the dead that you forget to be appreciative of the living. There are childless parents who want a child… any child in any condition.

Also, there perfectly normal parents with normal children who adopt special needs children, like the Orlando Magic Basketball General Manager Pat Williams. There are parents of dead children who wish their children were alive and severely disabled. There may be parents of critically challenged children who want to end it to save their children from the pains. There are perfectly normal families that have all perished in an accident or crash. This happens all over the world all the time to people who did not do anything to deserve such fate. Life’s something.

So to parents and parent-to-be everywhere, be grateful for what you have. If you are blessed with only girls and you long for a boy to carry on your family name, can you (in the wise question of my friend Fidelis Okonkwo, M.D.) please tell me the first name of your great grand father who was a boy? And can you positively identify his grave? If you can’t name (or ID the grave of) your all-important great grand father, then relax and be happy! Being male or female does not matter after a while after all.

If you have only boys and wish for a girl to care for you in your old age the way only a daughter can, chill out! Boys can care too. So what your child made A-minus instead of the A-plus you wanted? Big deal your child scored less points in a game than you expected? So your week or day has been too routine and boring for your liking because everyone is healthy and normal in your family? Well, do you know getting into a serious car-wreck or your child getting sick can really excite your life and get you jumping and your days hectic and less boring? Boring can be great!

So when your child comes home from school in one piece, but just hungry, I say, rejoice! When your wife comes home whole, overjoy! When your husband arrives home safely, forget any arguments of the night before and say a little prayer of gratitude. Should you make it a point to hug each member of your family the first time they walk-through the door everyday? Do we really have time to ignore, disrespect, and not smile at people we are supposed to love? Should one divorce the spouse because he or she has a chronic illness; or that one now makes more money than the spouse? Should one parent ever cause their child to disregard the other parent?

In the heat of the moment and the battle, it is easy to sometimes forget how good we have it. For a majority of us, what we term our bad days are better than some people’s best days! Let us keep that in mind as we treasure the best times of our lives which is NOW. That might be how we talk to an angel of our faith.

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theliterateape · 7 years ago

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The Answers to All the Great Mysteries Are Found in the Laundry

by Don Hall

Let's be honest with ourselves for a moment. No one likes doing laundry.

Having clean clothes has some value but the act of doing laundry seems repetitive and unending, a pile of Sisyphean rocks to roll up the hill only to do it again over and over. Laundry is the punishment the gods have handed down to those who have finally moved out of mom and dad's basement and declared some semblance of adulthood.

Yet within the simple task of gathering up your smelly socks and the pair of jeans with the ketchup stain near the crotch and hopefully using that Tide Pod for its intended use is the all important, elusive Meaning of Life.

First (and I apologize for posing questions this early in the morning that make your mind want to stab me in the eye) to ascertain what the Meaning of Life is, we need to figure out what Meaning is.

Humans attach meaning to everything. We can't help it. We created religion to explain the meaning behind rain, for chrissakes. Throw out the image of a woman crying and then an image of a phone and we will create a meaningful narrative out of it like dogs lick their balls. Meaning is an arbitrary construct like race or political affiliation. One hundred people can witness the exact same event and derive one hundred different meanings from it.

Manufacturing meaning in the chaos of a world hellbent on our demise is a survival instinct.

Our cerebellums truck in two different types of meaning:

Cause/Effect Meaning: You smash yourself in the soft squishies, you feel pain in said squishies. You tell your friend her ass is fat, your friend pops you in the squishies. You do X, and with reliable certainty, Y will result. Y usually being some sort of pain in your lower regions.

Cause/Effect Meaning is essential for pragmatic survival. Basing your predictive reasoning on the semi-consistent results from doing things is the only reason we know in our best brain cells that gun control works and arguing on the internet is pointless.

Better/Worse Meaning: Pizza is better than no pizza. Having money is better than being broke. Relaxing is better than stressing out. Better/Worse meaning is all about our assessment of what is and is not of value in our lives. It is also the source of discriminating judgment and comes from our emotional responses.

We need both types — the first to be able to avoid an untimely death due to a constant misunderstanding of gravity, fire, and that whole fork in an electrical socket conundrum; the second to navigate the social mores of society and avoid having your only companion be a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.

Meaning is evolution's way of motivating us into action. We find great meaning in something and we will go to great lengths for it. Wars only work if there's a meaningful reason for it which is why we try to compare every minor authoritarian to Hitler and elevate the type of smartphone we have to defining our status in the Grand High School of Life.

Find meaning and you act. Find no meaning and you stagnate on your couch, moaning about the existential hopelessness of it all until you suddenly find meaning in the sea that eating is better than starving. Then you get up off your ass and make a fucking Hot Pocket.

Finding meaning is a skill. Like juggling or being a cat whisperer, it is a skill that needs to be practiced or that indentation of your pajama-covered seat on the couch becomes irresistable.

How does one practice the discovery of meaning?

1. Crack the Codes

Learning new things about the world is kind of a universal good. Finding problems to solve and then overcoming those problems with trial and error solutions kind of forces learning and creates gateways to solving other problems. Sure, it's nice to have the death of one's parents and subsequent wealth to become the World's Greatest Detective but not necessary.

What's truly fun about this is that you approach things as a scientist, using your rational mind to address everything under the sun. Like a crossword puzzle, your solving it doesn't change the world but it does change you and we're talking about you finding the meaning out of your drab existence, so why not?

From how to unclog your sink to ending the rank rule of revisionist Republicans, life is filled with problems to solve.

2. Be a Collaborator

Going the route of the misanthrope is freeing but not fulfilling. Find people in the world and engage. Share stuff with them. Help them. Assist someone move that indented couch or take care of their plants. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or stand around on a street corner, waiting to help blind people cross. Whatever. Participate in the real with actual people.

3. Avoid the Grand Scheme Approach

Make a million dollars. Become the best athlete in a sport. Find your soul mate.

Sounds good but once you attain any measure of this, where's the meaning? Part of the fun in searching for the answers to the Great Mysteries is the searching. Once you have all of the answers, it's time to cash in your chips and go to dirt town.

The adage is to be the change you'd like to see, right? Trying to change everyone else is fruitless. Changing yourself is difficult enough so keep those motivational goals realistic and specific. Like simply getting your laundry done.

It needs to be done. Someone has to do it. Why not go do that thing that needs to be done? The rewards are immediate — fresh smelling boxer shorts, free of that sweaty ass smell. And there's great meaning in that no complete task if you look at it from a certain angle.

#The Meaning of Life #Laundry #finding meaning

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