#society advanced past the need to stream music when we made music you could keep forever with no strings attached

[maeshelix]

If any website should be banned by the government it should be Spotify cause I personally don't like it and also hate it

[alanaknobel99]

Book Review: “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell

1. What is your favorite quote from the book and why do you find it meaningful?

“It's a bit like falling in love, that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our Fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them how much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebal appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these strangers not just now but for life.” (pg 183) 

I know this is a long quote, but when I first read this passage my eyes filled with tears and I let out the most inspirational “wow.” I was just shocked when I read this, at this point in the book this quote made everything make sense. We are connected to each other and to this earth, and our survival is counting on that connection. However, we are so absorbed in the attention economy we forget what and who are around us. We need to fall in love with each other again rather than the people stuck on our little screens. 

 2. Why do you think this book, released by indie publishing house Melville Press, has become an unexpected bestseller in Corona Times?

What else do we have to do during quarantine than sit our phones? We are quite literally in a cage where the only thing we have is to lose ourselves in the attention economy. People forgot how to take walks outside, rather than go to the gym, or just sit on the porch and watch the kids play. I think why this book was so successful during Corona Times is because people needed a break, and this book was a guide to that break. There was a pause in life, and I don’t think anyone truly knew how to take that pause. 

This past year has been a constant pressure cooker of the attention economy, and people needed to find a way to turn it off. While social media was a great way to connect us when no one could be together, we really had no escape. This book also came out at a time when a lot of people found it necessary to evaluate their life, and really look at themselves including what and who we surround ourselves with. The book, I believe, allowed people to open their eyes to seeing more than what was really there. 

 3. How does the attention economy benefit from our social media activity and media streaming consumption?

Refresh, Refresh, Refresh. That’s how the attention economy benefits from our social media activity. There are certain aesthetic choices that suck us into platforms like Instagram, or Facebook. The endless scrolling is what sucks you in as a consumer, and its main purpose is to keep you scrolling. There is always something new, and it never stops. 

Our attention span as society has continued to dwindle down to the bare minimum. Musicals and plays used to be over 3 hours, and now they are compact into 90 minutes with a 15-minute intermission, to recharge your attention. With the advancement of technology, our attention span continues to decrease. So much that we can’t deal with the feeling of not knowing something. We have to take out our phones and ask Siri. Our phones and other devices have allowed us to develop these emotions that we don’t want to feel anymore, and the only way to avoid that is to continue our use. 

 4. How does this book relate to the topic of celebrity culture?

Celebrity culture is a huge part of the attention economy. A majority of the ‘news’ on my Facebook feed is about celebrities. Social media allows them to develop a brand, and it’s almost as if they are constantly selling to us. Also, social media breaks down this barrier between the celebrity and the audience where it makes us feel as though the celebrity is our friend. The closer that connection becomes the easier it is to get sucked into this cycle of celebrity culture that is produced on social media. 

 5. Do you take digital detox breaks? If yes, describe them. Have they been more challenging during the quarantine era? Why?

I don’t take digital detox breaks. For one, I just don’t think I could remember all of my passwords after. 

All joking aside, for me I don’t know if they would work. I feel like no matter how long the break was, I would just go back, and perhaps it would be worse. What did I miss? Who messaged me? I’m not saying there aren’t benefits, but I try and find other times to avoid social media during the day. Maybe I’ll take one just for an experiment. However, I feel as though I would have to be alone. I don’t know how effective it would be because I have roommates, and watching someone else scroll all day wouldn’t give me the same benefits that I would expect to happen if I were alone. 

 6. Do you sleep with your phone or computer? Are you aware of impacts on your sleep cycles and relaxation caused by overnight proximity?

My phone is on my nightstand, plugged in, and on do not disturb at night and mostly throughout the day. Notification sounds just bother me, especially if I’m trying to concentrate on something else like homework or reading a book. However, I have many habits with my phone. Just like notification sounds, notification numbers bug me so much. If I see one I have to clear it, I like things to be clean on my phone. Usually when I’m stressed about something I will go on my phone to escape or avoid. I follow a lot of “aesthetically pleasing” accounts that I turn to in order to calm myself down when I get anxious. Scrolling through Pinterest always helps because I’ve tailored that to be aesthetically pleasing to my eyes. If I’m surrounded by a calm, good-looking space, it’s less likely I’ll be anxious, and that pertains to my phone as well. 

That being said, I am trying to limit my phone usage. I’ve noticed I can’t watch television without scrolling on my phone. This is just bad for my eyes and everything else cause I’m staring at two screens. My biggest habits with my phone are in the morning and before I go to bed. I’m very into my routines, and this has just become part of it. I also look at my phone when I first wake up, and I scroll for about 30 minutes. Mainly, it’s just to clear all my notifications from overnight. Then at night, which is where I watch tv shows or Youtube, and then scroll on my phone before I go to bed. I’ve been trying to break this habit by reading before bed, which ultimately limits my watch time because if it’s past a certain hour, I just go to sleep. I’m very aware of my habits and am trying to change them, especially because of this book. But I don’t think it has an impact on my sleep cycle, if anything my phone relaxes me because I use it in a relaxing way, but that is also a problem within itself.

 7. What is the role of nature in Odell's book, in particular the role of birds? (P.S. Did you know that birdwatching has become a HUGE pastime in the Covid era with a Snow Owl becoming a celebrity in NYC's Central Park? See NY Times (Links to an external site.)  article on Birdwatching and another on the snowy owl  (Links to an external site.))

The presence and care for nature in Odell’s book is what I mostly took away. We as a society are so absorbed within ourselves and advancement of technology that we have lost a state of consciousness with the very ground we walk upon. I watched a TED talk by Graham Hancock called “The War on Consciousness” (which was originally banned from TED due to it’s radical content) and he echo’s a lot of what Jenny Odell says. Humans have lost this connection to spirit, and if we don’t reconnect we may be holding ourselves back from further evolution. The way that Hancock suggests we grasp this reconnection is through the psychedelic drug of ayahuasca. There are a lot of parallels between these two because Odell suggests a lot that we need to render our attention, in order to open ourselves to more than what is considered surface level. If we allow ourselves to embrace a further, deeper state of consciousness we can reconnect with earth, and the nature that surrounds us in order to become a greater society. 

We need to reintroduce ourselves to nature, rather than take it for granted, which is why I think something like birdwatching became a pastime activity during COVID. I also want to mention the attention that nature has been getting during COVID. I remember a couple weeks after the lockdown there were stories of how animals and wildlife were starting to come back to places they haven’t occupied in a long time because nature was somehow repairing itself. There are also a lot of before and after lockdown pictures of cities where you can see the difference in pollution form the sky color. I think a lot of people took that as a sign that we are the problem, and things need to start changing. 

 Here is the link to the TED Talk, I highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0c5nIvJH7w

 8. Experiment: Leave your phone at home for one hour to talk a walk in your neighborhood. Write down your observations when you return and draw a map of your path. What did you observe?  Take a photo of your map to include in your book review. Did the experience provide any revelations? Were you anxious, relieved, inspired? Did you notice anything you'd never seen before?

I love taking walks, it’s been a daily activity for me since Corona Times have begun. I usually just plug my headphones in and listen to music, but I don’t really look at my phone when I’m walking. My phone is also a safety net for me, so walking without it made me a little more anxious than comfortable. 

I live kinda close to a park in New York, but it’s a bit of a trek to get to. Usually I speed through my neighborhood in order to get to the quite area when the park begins, but not this time. I took more of a casual stroll through my neighborhood, still the same route. There was a lot of traffic noise, music from people’s speakers at storefronts, groups of people talking in Spanish. I always walk by a pet store to stare at the puppies in the window. Once I got to the park there is always this sense of relief, and it was still there even without my phone. The wind was brushing through the trees, footsteps of people running, birds chirping. There was a lot that I noticed, I sometimes forgot my phone wasn’t there and I could just be present. 

9. What does Odell mean by 'doing nothing?' Are we capable of doing nothing? 

The very last line of her book when she describes her encounter with the pelicans was, “The answer was nothing. Just watch.” We need to be able to disconnect, and we have lost that ability to disconnect ourselves from the attention economy. We live in a society that tells us we can’t do nothing, because you can’t survive that way. To take time to breathe, relax, connect with nature is looked at as selfish rather than necessary. The question of if we are capable of doing nothing is simple, of course we are capable. However, are we willing? 

[letithappeneverafter]

Came across Nicks essay about living in a far-away country and what it means to be a creative human at the arse-end of the world. This comes from a past edition of Griffith Review which is a pretty impressive literary essay magazine. Full of cultural and thought-provoking stuff. Go Nick. I probably shouldn’t just copy’n’paste but I did borrow it from Brisbane library to read in the flesh. Just wanted to share with all you Tame Impala and POND fans.

Creative Darwinism by Nick Allbrook

- This is my city and I’m never gonna leave it. Channel 7 News 

WRITING ABOUT MY experience of making music in Perth is a strange thing, because as soon as a ‘scene’ is bound and gagged by the written word it is finished, petrified, swept up into the Rolling Stone archives and forever considered ‘history’. It might be revered and glorified, but it’s still long gone. This could be a very restricting view to take on a community like Perth, which is still just as inspiring and productive as it ever was. I can’t pretend to understand where ‘music scenes’ begin or end. It seems a futile and narrow-minded pursuit. So before I begin, I want to say that this is merely a reflective exercise. There was never a ‘golden age’, and if one does exist I can’t see it, because it’s floating all around, invisible and omnipresent.

For years I suffered serious cultural guilt as a Western Australian. The orthodoxy and banality made me feel isolated, relegated to the company of eccentric long-haired ghosts singing to me from inside my Discman. Every birthday and Christmas, Dad would give me a care package of CDs. This blessed nourishment of Jethro Tull, Lou Reed, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie shone a light into the murky tunnels of my future. Playing music and generally being a flaming Christmas fruitcake became my sole purpose, and me and a few other school friends – Steve Summerlin and Richard Ingham of Mink Mussel Creek, and many other brilliant but criminally under-recognised projects – revelled in our little corner of filthy otherness. This outlook was key to our musical and creative development. We railed against the boredom of Perth not with pickets or protest, but with a head-in-the-sand hubris that made us feel invincible and unique. We found more comrades along the way – Joe Ryan, Kevin Parker, Jay Watson – and together we erected great walls of noise and hair and mouldy dishes around our Daglish share house commune citadel on Troy Terrace where we incubated, practised, recorded, talked and grew. A friend stick’n’poke tattooed a spiral shape into my arm to represent that way of life (which I’d lifted from Hermes Trismegistus and other alchemical mumbo jumbo I learned at university). Look inside and the world can be whatever you want. Look out and it’s ugly and shitty. In Perth, use of public space is regulated to the point of comedy, and Orwellian restrictions on tobacco, noise, bicycles, alcohol and public gatherings breed a festering discontent and boredom because no one likes being pre-emptively labelled a deviant. Being trusted enriches the soul – you can see it on the face of the child who leads the family trek. You can see the flipside on the faces of disenchanted detainees. On weekends, this restlessness is unleashed across clubs and pubs in Northbridge and Subiaco in an avalanche of Jägerbombs (17mL of Jägermeister dropped into a larger glass of Red Bull and then consumed with haste) and Midori and violence and cheap sex. When the Monday sun staggers over the horizon, people rub their eyes and heave a great sigh and the city reverts to its utilitarian state – the ‘bourgeois dream of unproblematic production’, as The 60s Without Apology (University of Minnesota Press, 1984) puts it, ‘of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’. That this description of pre-revolutionary 1950s and ’60s America is so apt for Perth is damn scary. Or hilarious. I can’t decide. I guess it depends on the depth and colour of your nihilistic streak, or if you actually live here. Whichever way you look at it, it does not paint a picture of a city conducive to creativity. Art is the antithesis of logic and functionality – it is romance and wonder and stupid, pointless lovelies. As good old Mr Vonnegut so often said, it’s an exercise to make your soul grow. So how, in a super-functional and conservative environment whose every will is bent towards digging really, really big holes in the ground, have I seen and heard and felt some of the most brilliant, pure and original creativity in the world? I USED TO dream about living in a cultural powerhouse like Paris or Berlin or New York, but after spending time in these places I’ve realised that the emptiness and isolation of Perth – boredom to some – was a far better environment for creativity. The ‘cultural capitals’ are so rich in art and wonder that it can feel pointless to add to it. Maybe just being in those ‘cultural capitals’ fills us up with wonder? Strolling through Berlin at night, ducking into a bar with fish nailed to the roof, skipping across the cobblestones for some cheap beers in a record shop in a Russian caravan in an abandoned peanut factory…that kind of stuff fills the romantic void. Having a Ricard and a few Gitanes on the terrasse of Aux Folies; stumbling through Camden after a lock-in at the Witch’s Tit or the Cock’n’Balls or the Cancerous Bowel or whatever you call it; recollecting a possible conversation with Jah Wobble over a pint…Perth? It has no secret tunnels to romantic fulfilment. For me, music and art have always been a way to manufacture that romance lacking in upper-middle-class Western Australia. To be honest, if I had lived in New York I probably would’ve been so damn hung-over – or busy ensuring that I would be later – that a whole lot less creation would’ve gone on. Mundane and discouraging places like Perth create a vicious Darwinism for creatively inclined people, where survival of the fittest is played out with swift and unrepentant force and the flippant or unpassionate are left behind, drowning in putrid mind-clag. You have to really need it, and without the mysterious and poetic benefits of a vibrant city culture this has to come from deep inside. Amber Fresh, otherwise known as Rabbit Island, is one person who produces constant streams of music, drawings, essays, poems, calendars, videos and photos from her home. She fills her world with little pieces of homemade, lo-fi, photocopied beauty and magic. They don’t have funding or precedent or material ambition – and the result is something fresh and original. Mei Saraswati does the same thing, although completely different styles of music. She has produced, mixed, mastered and illustrated scores of albums in her bedroom and then released this other-worldly electronic R’n’B brilliance onto the internet with no fanfare, simply to turn around and start making more. These are just two examples. There are many more. SOMEHOW, BY BEING a cultural long-drop, Perth lit a fire under my arse. In more scholarly terminology this could be called a ‘spirit of negation’ – a margarine version of the same zeitgeist that has catalysed most worthwhile movements throughout history, from dadaism to punk to all the intellectual and artistic wonders of The Netherlands freshly unchained from their dastardly Spanish overlords. Being isolated spatially and culturally – us from the city, Perth from Australia and Australia from the world – arms one with an Atlas-strong sense of identity. Both actively and passively, originality seems to flourish in Perth’s artistic community. Without the wider community’s acceptance, creative pursuits lack the potential for commodification. There’s no point in preening yourself for success because it’s just not real. It’s a fairytale, so you may as well just do it in whatever way you like, good or bad, in your room or on the top of the Telstra building, which – as anyone with any common sense will attest – was built for that one potential badass to drop in on a skateboard and parachute off. Growing up in the Kimberley and then Fremantle, the true machinery of the music business evaded me. It was about as real as the Power Rangers and twice as awesome. Led Zeppelin and U2, all the way down to whatever was on Rage that morning, was just a pretty dream. But if I grew up in a city where success in music was common and highly visible, I reckon it would have been far more alluring. I would’ve understood how to go about it, probably before I actually realised how deep my love of music was. With the template for success laid out so precisely – gigs to be got, managers to be found, reviews to be had and the ultimate dream of ‘making it’ tangibly within reach – Perth would find itself producing far less original art. Because as it stands, it doesn’t really matter if you’re crap or silly or unbearably offensive, you wouldn’t get much further doing something different anyway. This helps to preserve a magical purity because it’s executed with love – with necessity. And what’s more, when these artists keep going and practising and advancing – which they must – somehow their crassness coagulates into something brilliantly individual and accomplished, and you can see it performed in an arena that makes the audience feel truly blessed. I saw Rabbit Island and Peter Bibby and Cam Avery play in backyards. I saw cease play in a tattoo parlour in Maylands. Me and Joe Ryan were plastered against the wall by their sound, gawking up at Andrew, the guitarist, precariously standing on his enormous amp wearing high heels and full fishnet bodystocking, slowly trying to drive his guitar through the top of his cabinet like some pagan-burlesque reimagining of King Arthur. After hours they slowed to a halt, and the crowd cheered from the stairs and bathroom door and kitchen and I remembered where we were: in a tiny share-house in Maylands, in the flaming cauldron of hell or the halls of Valhalla. Mink Mussel Creek played there a few times and once, in a flash of drunken inspiration, someone turned the only light in the room off mid-performance. I saw the fourteen guitarists of Electric Toad destroy a warehouse art gallery wearing ’90s WA football jerseys. Tame Impala and Pond played in Tanya’s garage and every time I cried and danced and felt like the breath of God was being embarrassingly saucy all over my skin. We played our very first show in that garage and I can still see Jay demolishing the tiny drum kit – kick, snare, ride, tom – as sparks floated from the forty-gallon drum and lit the faces of the people looking in from the dark. None of us had ever seen anyone play like it in real life, let alone in a garage, sitting on milk crates. As far as genres go, our music ‘scene’ in Perth was an anomaly. A mad mosaic of groups and artists only held together by gallant separation from conventional Perth society. Nick Odell, the drummer of CEASE and Sonny Roofs, still has a poster for a gig at Amplifier Bar that I remember as a kind of microcosmic Woodstock – a tactile realisation of all the beauty and communion we cherished. The line-up included us (Mink Mussel Creek), CEASE (aforementioned stoner/doom/drone lords), Sex Panther (punk-party queens), Oki Oki (Nintendo synth pop) and Chris Cobilis (experimental laptop noise music). I think most members of the bands ended up on stage at more than one time, wrapped in Cobilis’ wires or yelling into a madly effected microphone in front of CEASE. I certainly did. Nowhere else would such a ridiculously mismatched line-up consider themselves a tight community. We all partied together, played together and are still friends. I think this spirit is lacking in a lot of the more culturally enlightened parts of the world. Maybe in these vibrant communities the countercultural idea is so entrenched it becomes capitalist orthodoxy and loses its edge. It is subjected to the rationality it once challenged. In the cultural capitals – Paris, Berlin, New York – creativity and original thinking are accepted and valued parts of mainstream life. In Perth they are not. Paris has over four hundred streets named after artists and writers, and this honour is not restricted to the most unobtrusive or patriotic. Rue Albert Camus, Rue Marcel Duchamp and the recently proposed Place Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, show the state glorifying revolutionaries, absurdists, libertines and a gay, heroin-using, Haitian–American graffiti artist. Today we can stroll along the verdant Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui, named after the man who led the uprising of the Paris Commune. A revolutionary, a prisoner, an anarchist. In modern terms: a terrorist. There, art is a basic fact of everyday life, while in Perth it is an anomaly hidden in garages and living rooms – deep beneath a conservative fishbowl of productivity. So, all things considered, ‘cultural capitals’ should be havens for art and music, and Perth should not. The romance just seeps into the pores, ja? I always thought this before I left Western Australia, but have since found it to be otherwise. I asked a young photographer and artist in Amsterdam about the music scene there and her reply was wholly negative. A lot of Parisians seem to feel the same way. I look back on my time in Perth and think about the huge number of brilliant musicians and artists who I saw and knew, often not in official venues but in backyards or sheds or the abandoned entertainment centre (yes, CEASE). Perhaps with the freedom – almost expectation – to create, revel and throw it all around the streets, it all just gets a bit boring. Like much good art, it doesn’t really ‘mean’ anything, so writing an essay about it is an odd activity. The experience of a city or community varies so much that it can never be defined while it is still occurring. When it’s actually happening, a ‘scene’ is not really a ‘scene’ – it’s completely intangible and only coagulates into a definitive and convenient ball when history puts it in a cage, when someone from the outside looks in and decides there’s something shared between a bunch of vaguely artistic fools. I guess that’s what I’m doing now, which is pretty ridiculous seeing as nothing is finished and the Perth artistic community is so ethereal that it couldn’t and shouldn’t be labelled at all.

From Griffith Review Edition 47: Looking West © Copyright Griffith University & the author.

[nikolinaboldero]

Lecture notes; ‘The favourite child of capitalism’. Discussing the logic of the Fashion system.

25/01/19.

In today’s lecture we covered numerous topics, first we spoke about the logic of the fashion system. Morna Laing underlined how fashion has mechanised as a result of the industrial revolution. Prior to the revolution everything was done by hand, by artisans. After the industrial revolution everything became mechanised, sewing was not done by hand instead it was done on a sewing machine.

Fashion - ‘The favourite child of capitalism’. Sombart 2009. ‘Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles’. Wilson 2003. These two quotations suggest that fashion is a necessity, that trends are constantly changing which encourages us to keep buying more. It also explains how fashion can be used to portray social status and depending on what you wear you can be marginalised in society. ‘A cheap coat makes a cheap man’. To great extent, this statement is not true, people can wear cheap clothing, it might be second hand but it could come from a designer, therefore once is was very expensive.

Craik 1993- ‘the hallmark of fashion is said to be change’. - Fashion is about change. - Fashion involves a continual stream of new styles that render old styles. - Fashion is authoritarian. - Fashion is dictated by an elite. - Fashion is about power.

Morna Laing spoke to us about these three concepts; Neomania, planned obsolesce and cycles of change. Neomania refers to this idea of newness, needing to have the latests thing. When people shop in Zara there is often a sense of urgency because there are limited runs of each style. This is the same in Topshop ‘buy it now or regret it later’, suggesting that these clothing lines are limited and that if you don’t purchase one of the garments then you won’t be able to find the same piece again. Planned Obsolescence, refers to when you plan in advance what piece of clothing is no longer going to be useful. However it is not that this piece of clothing is falling apart, and is of a bad quality, but instead it suggests that something is no longer useful because it isn’t in fashion. This has been a common trend with ‘skinny jeans’, people making out that they are no longer In style, despite them still having practical purpose. Cycles of change; in the past there were two seasons: Autumn and Winter, Spring and summer. Now there are many more collections, such as; cruise, couture and resort.

Fashion is ideological, it is not natural. With fashion there is an ability to express your own identity, people can feel empowered by the clothing they wear because it defines them as a person. In many international catwalk shows, I have noticed a growing trend in the number of expressive garment collections, collections which create a sign of rebellion against social and political injustices.

Viktor and Rolf- Couture Spring 2019 ‘All these statements that are so obvious or easy- there’s a lot of banality on Instagram and social media in general- are counterbalanced with this over-the-top, shimmery, romantic feeling’. Rolf Snoreren, explained to WWD. Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren titled this collection Fashion Statements. ‘To what extend can you say something with clothing, literally’, they said backstage. ‘The outcome proved to be a clever contradiction: the feminine, princess-perfect dresses contrasted brilliantly with the hard-hitting statements’. This shows how fashion can be used as expressive pieces of artwork. They are there to contradict, and raise awareness of particular themes and ideas. I really liked this collection because of the contrast between these elegant tulle dresses with the bold, simplistic text centred in the middle of the dress.

During the lecture we also spoke about this idea of Trickle Down Fashion. This suggests that fashion trends start and originate from the upper class, then moves to the middle class and then to the lower class. This is exemplified by Chirstian Dior’s New look. High fashion started in Paris. Rationing happened during and after the war in order to preserve clothing stock.  After the war Dior launched the New Look; it’s most prominent features being rounded shoulders, a cinched waist and a full A line skirt, America and England soon emulated the style. You could also buy dress patterns allowing you to make similar outfits in this style.

Fashion ideas don’t necessarily always trickle down, they can start on the street and then bubble up. ‘First there is genuine streetstyle innovation. This may be featured in a pop music video and streetkids in other countries may pick up on the style. Then, finally- at the end rather than the beginning of the chain- a rizzy version of the original idea makes an appearance as part of a top designer’s collection. Instead of trickle down, bubble up. Instead the bottom end of the market emulating the top end, precisely the reverse’ Polhemus 2007 452-3. An example of this is the PUNK rebellion movement. Punk was an anti-establishment movement, they used safety pins to symbolise this idea of resistance. This safety pin bubbled up in the mainstream and was seen on dresses as an accessory, replacing zips and buttons. Another example is during the 1960s when there was the youth culture revolution, ‘teenager emerged’. Dressing in a different way to your parents as a result of the baby boom and more disposable income to be able to afford new clothing. Also another factor which created this youth culture revolution was the introduction of the birth control pill, this meant that there was more freedom, people expressed their freedom through the clothing they wore.

From the lecture I learnt the difference between symbolic production and material production. Symbolic production refers to catwalks, advertising, glamour, perfection, fashion, ‘untouched by the human hand’. Material production is often hidden from view- lack of transparency as to the production ‘journey’ of an item ‘backstage’. Marx, the economist and revolutionary socialist  highlighted that those who are actually making the fashion garments are usually alienated from their work. For those who are specialised in work, doing one particular function are unable to connect with their work because they don't see the value it is having and what they are contributing to the fashion industry. Another thing we discussed in the lecture which explains why the workers are often ‘alienated’ is because they can't actually afford the clothing which they are making, they receive the low wages, whilst capitalists get richer. 

Overall I really enjoyed this lecture, I found it really interesting. I liked how there were links and comparisons made between the information and real life examples. This made the information easier to understand. Assessing the different quotations will definitely improve my reading skills and it will also improve my visual analysis skills which are essential for my next unit assessment.

Viktor and Rolf- couture spring 2019. 

Punk- anti establishment: example of the safety pin. Vivienne Westwood rebellion movement SEX PISTOLS. 

[marcjampole]

Want to improve your children’s chance of academic success? Research says send them to public schools

I’m not sure whether it was the author or the headline writer, but someone in the New York Times produced a headline that certainly constitutes false news: “Dismal Results from Vouchers Surprise Researchers.” The problem with it is that those researchers who have been paying attention already know that public policy driving families to put their children into private schools will achieve dismal results. Objective researchers in the pursuit of knowledge aren’t, or shouldn’t be surprised that kids using vouchers to attend private schools experience declines in academic performance. Perhaps Kevin Carey, who wrote the article, or the unknown specialist who composed the headline, meant to say that it surprised right-wing policy wonks and political pundits, who for the better part of a quarter of a century have been pushing vouchers, charter and private schools as a means to destroy teachers’ unions and produce new income streams for businesses.

Certainly Carey, who directs the education policy program for the ostensibly non-partisan think tank New America, must have read The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools, a 2013 study by Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher A. Lubienski that demonstrates without a doubt that public schools outperform private schools when we correct raw data to account for wealth, per student spending, disabilities and other factors. I wouldn’t expect the Times headline writer to know of this important book, as a Google search at the time it came but revealed just one review in the mainstream media. The media doesn’t like to review books that disprove the current political nonsense, whatever it is.  

Using two recently generated large-scale national databases, the Lubienskis show that demographic factors such as wealth and disabilities explain any advantage seen in private school performance in the 21st century. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better at educating children but because their students come mostly from wealthy backgrounds. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis demonstrate conclusively that gains in student achievement at public schools are great and greater than those made at private ones. The Lubienskis take on the critics of real educational reform, the politicians and other factotums of the rich who don’t want to do anything that requires greater spending on students, such as teacher certification programs and curriculum and instruction advances. The Lubienskis show that these reforms do work. 

The latest research reported by Carey in his Times article concerns the results on standardized tests of students who have used voucher programs to enroll in private schools. Vouchers, which right-wingers and Republicans have been pushing for years, give money earmarked for public education to families, which they pay to private schools to educate their children. The never-proved principle underlying vouchers, first proposed by right-wing economic mountebank Milton Friedman, is that giving parents choice will improve public education by forcing it to compete with other schools. 

Over the past few years, Republican legislatures have implemented widespread voucher programs in a number of states such as Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio. As Carey reports, vouchers have largely failed to improve school performance, and in fact, have harmed the performance of many children:

·         Indiana children who transferred to private schools using vouchers “experienced significant losses in achievement” in math and saw no improvement in reading.

·         Children, primarily poor and black, who used vouchers to switch to private schools in Louisiana, achieved negative results in both reading and math; elementary school children who started at the 50th percentile in math and then transferred via voucher to a private school dropped to 26th percentile in one year.

·         A study financed by the right-wing, anti-union Walton family and conducted by a conservative think tank found that Ohio students using vouchers to attend private schools fared much worse when compared to their peers in public school, especially in math.

·         It turns out that the best charter schools, another variation on school choice liked by the right wing, are those that are nonprofit public schools open to everyone and accountable to public authorities. The more “private” a charter school, the worse its student perform.

 There could be many explanations for the lousy performance voucher students in private schools achieved compared to public schools, but I think it comes down to the simple fact that the teachers tend to be more experienced, more educated and more professional in public schools. Why is that? Because they are better paid. 

 In the real world, the best get paid the most. The best lawyers tend to make the most money. The best accountants tend to make the most money. The best writers—business and entertainment—tend to make the most money. The best musicians tend to make the most money. Forget the obscene fact that Beyoncé makes about 200 times what the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic and the masterful jazz pianist Orrin Evans do. They both do quite well when compared to the average piano teacher who gives lessons at the Jewish Community Center or YMCA. 

 Public school teachers make more money than private school teachers. Doesn’t it make sense that they would therefore do a better job and that public schools would therefore do better in quantitative comparisons?  I know that there are some very competent and dedicated private school teachers, but in general, how could the aggregate of private school teachers keep up with public school teachers, who make so much more money?

 The reason that public school teachers make more money is one of the primary reasons right-wingers want to dismantle public schools: unions. Right-wingers hate unions because they force employers to pay better wages to employees, leaving less profit for the company’s owners and operators. In unionized workplaces, employees make a far larger share of the pie than in nonunionized ones. Thus by leaving public schools and going into private ones, children leave an environment in which their teachers are highly paid but administrators make less than they would in the private sector for an environment in which teachers are paid less and administrators more, and if the school is for-profit, money is siphoned off as profit for investors. By definition, less money is spent on education in private schools.  That is, unless the tuition is so high that the voucher covers only a small part of it, in which case the voucher is merely a subsidy to the wealthy, who likely would have sent their children to the chichi expensive private school no matter what.

 The reason companies bust unions is greed. Greed also plays a major role in the insistence against all facts and reasoning that school choice will solve every educational challenge. Choice is the preferred answer because it doesn’t involve spending more money and raising taxes.  In fact, over time, vouchers can be used to cut educational budgets if the stipulated voucher amounts do not keep up with inflation. 

 Despite the fact that taxes on the wealthy are still at an historic low for a western industrial democracy, rich folk and their political and policy factotums do not want to raise the taxes needed to create an educational system that works for everyone. Here are some of the things that we could do with added tax revenues earmarked to public education:

·        Smaller classroom sizes for elementary and middle school children.

·        Computers for every student in every class.

·        A return to the days of art, music and other enrichment programs.

·        New textbooks that reflect the latest findings in science and social science.

·        More special programs for both the disabled and the gifted and talented.

·         True school choice, which involves vocational programs in the technology, hospitality and healthcare industries for high school students.

 Keeping their taxes low and busting unions are not the only reasons well-heeled ultra conservatives advocate for vouchers. Some, like our current Secretary of Education, hope to profit by investing in for-profit schools. Others, and again Secretary DeVos is among them, want to use public funds to finance the teaching of religion in private religious schools. Perhaps not ironically, moral education of the masses and suppression of unions seem always to go hand-in-hand since the industrial revolution of the 19th century. In this sense, religion is a form of social control and a social solvent that dissolves the perception of class differences.

 Thus, when you hear Trumpty-Dumpty, DeVos and other supporters of voucher programs for education spout their pious homilies, remember that they have absolutely no interest in providing our children with a high-quality education that prepares for a meaningful life and rewarding career. Nor are they dedicated to a higher principle they call freedom that trumps all other concerns in a free society. Remember, there are all kinds of freedoms, such as freedom from hunger, from ignorance, from illness, from pain. Be it education or healthcare, when they cry freedom, they only mean freedom of choice or freedom to make money unencumbered by social concerns.

 No, it’s neither an interest in America’s children nor dedication to principle that motivates the rich folk behind the school choice movement. It’s simple greed.

[armeniaitn]

Armenia Society News Digest for Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Here is the Daily Digest of society news for Armenia for Wednesday, August 19, 2020. The notable articles are the following:

What Makes You Armenian?

Nicholas Krikorian (center) with ANCA Leo Sarkisian Intern Angelika Avagian and ANCA Maral Melkonian Avetisyan Intern Tatevik Khachatryan during a visit to Capitol Hill.

BY NICHOLAS KRIKORIAN

About two months ago, I entered my first online call for the 2020 Armenian National Committee of America Leo Sarkisian. I was already having destructive thoughts that I didn’t deserve this opportunity because I wasn’t Armenian enough. I was unknowledgeable about the Armenian Cause, greater Armenian history, Armenian culture, and had essentially distanced myself from most things Armenian. Being repeatedly taught about the Genocide and religion during my childhood never seemed to help me understand what being Armenian truly meant to me — they just seemed like regular school lessons. However, through befriending Armenians throughout the diaspora, fighting for the Armenian Cause alongside them, and learning more about myself, I discovered how to interpret and appreciate the Armenian part of my identity.

Armenians tend to hold a sort of unspoken hierarchy; whether we speak the language, if we go to church, who we surround ourselves with- these all seem to be determining factors as to how “Armenian” we are. This problematic nature got in the way of me fully identifying with my Armenian heritage, as many things about me don’t align with what a perfect Armenian looked like in my mind. I’ve never liked Armenian music, nor do I have an affinity for the food. The biggest hit was when I discovered that I identify as Agnostic, while the rest of my family and Armenian community is Christian. With this rejection of the religion that Armenians so proudly boast about being the first to become, I jokingly deemed myself the “Armenian disappointment.” My biggest mistake was amounting my alignment with my heritage and ancestors based on if I believed in God or not, as it made me keep this self-discovery a secret from my family for years.

Why should it matter if you can speak Armenian or not? Or if you go to church and pray like all the other Armenians around you? If you’re an Armenian, you’re an Armenian, and no outside factors can ever change that.

So, this is the conclusion that I had come up with midway through my internship. While it did bring me a solid amount of solace, it still wasn’t enough for me to be happy. Saying I was Armenian accomplished nothing, it was just a word. What happened later was what opened my eyes to a brand new ideology.

In what seemed like an instant, Azerbaijan attacked Armenia, and that turned the calm internship into a fast-paced news cycle where tasks had to be finished quickly to keep up with the endless stream of events and information. For my whole life, I never learned more about Artsakh past its name and location. With this latest aggression, I had the opportunity to research and learn more Armenian history that strayed away from the Genocide, and I found joy in learning so much about my ancestors.

Days into the Azerbaijani bombing, some of my intern friends began saying things like “I’m so mad I haven’t been able to think about anything else” or “I cried about everything last night.” They all had a unity with all of Armenia that I had to grasp, as I didn’t find myself having any emotional reaction to everything happening.

Fortunately, more and more protests started happening around the world, demanding and to President Aliyev’s attacks and U.S. aid to Armenia and Artsakh. Seeing clips of fellow Armenians shouting and chanting and dancing all for one Cause got me riled up as well, and I began to send barrages of information to my non-Armenian friends in an attempt to educate and spread awareness. For the first time in my life, I actively sought out Armenian news and information for myself and was genuinely angry when I couldn’t attend a DC protest due to coronavirus concerns.

Since I wasn’t able to help the cause in that manner, I suggested to the ANCA intern team that we try to start a movement on social media to educate non-Armenians, similar to the way the Blacks Lives Matter movement spread. This was when we banded together to create a Carrd website to have all the necessary sources, petition links, and donation links to spread awareness and gather support from both Armenians and non-Armenians. This experience of influencing the Cause seemed to trigger some sort of change in me that I hadn’t yet recognized.

Finally, one of my intern friends sent me a live-stream of one of the larger protests on one random day, and I was enthralled. I couldn’t take my eyes off all the Armenian people, with all different lifestyles and identities, coming together to fight for our country- and this is when I cried. I realized what being Armenian meant to me – fighting for our Cause. Having a community without judgment that collaborated to achieve the aid we needed for our home country. None of that had anything to do with music or religion, if I went to bazaars or ate ethnic foods. It was what made me feel Armenian. It was what helped me go from rejecting this part of myself to exploring it and being happy to call myself an Armenian.

This is why I hope all Armenian people who feel similar to the way I felt before this internship are able to find what part of their Armenian heritage makes them comfortable in their own identities. It could come in the form of Armenian song and dance, foods, religion, friends and community, pursuing the Armenian Cause (Hai Tahd), or anything else to be individually discovered. That’s why I want to ask you: what makes you Armenian?

Nicholas Krikorian is a senior at the A. Edison High School in Alexandria, Va. and a 2020 ANCA Summer High School Intern.

Read original article here.

Turkish mountaineers turn slopes of Mount Ararat into landfill

Turkish mountaineers have turned the slopes of Mount Ararat into a landfill, Ermenihaber.am reports.

The leftovers from the food they took with them during the mountaineering were dumped in a tent camp at an altitude of 4,200 meters above sea level.

One of the Turkish mountaineers made a video and posted the footage on social media.

“If climbers are doing this, then we are in trouble. Which municipality can collect this,” he says in comments.

[embedded content]

Read original article here.

Armenia: About 300 Covid-19 patients in serious or critical condition

August 18, 2020 – 16:22 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – The coronavirus infection rate in Armenia is declining but some 300 patients remain in a serious or critical condition, Health Ministry spokeswoman Alina Nikoghosyan said Tuesday, August 18.

Nikoghosyan said people’s following of three simple anti-epidemic rules – wearing a mask, frequent disinfection of hands and social distancing – are bearing fruit.

“The number of deaths are stable, with 8-9 patients dying every day due to the fact that 300 people are in a serious or critical condition,” RFE/RL Armenian Service cited Nikoghosyan as saying on Tuesday.

15 hospitals converted into Covid-19 treatment centers have already returned to normal activity in the country.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Armenia grew by 145 to reach 41,846 on Tuesday, August 18. So far, 34,982 people have recovered, 832 have died from the coronavirus in the country, while 245 others carrying the virus have died from other causes.

Read original article here

Today on Twitter

These are some of the tweets about Armenia from some of the Twitter accounts we follow. Get in touch with us via Twitter if you want to be part of this Twitter list. We retweet occasionally.

Armenia @armenia·

20h

Things you can watch #forever...Btw the #water in #Pambak river is pure enough to drink . #NaturePhotography : Vahe Aghamyan

MFA of Armenia@MFAofArmenia·

17 Aug

Warm congratulations to the people of the Republic of #Indonesia on #IndependenceDay. Ready to reinvigorate our historic ties.

Armenia Mission to UN@ArmeniaUN·

13 Aug

Permanent Representative of Armenia sends a letter to the UN Secretary-General condemning instigation of inter-ethnic clashes and violence against the Armenian communities in various parts of the world. Addressing #hatespeech is crucial for advancing the #prevention agenda.

JAMnews@JAMnewsCaucasus·

17h

The series of firings, dismissals and imprisonments of officials continues in #Azerbaijan: https://ift.tt/3230vPP

MoD of Armenia @ArmeniaMODTeam·

10 Aug

The #Armenian contingent carrying out a #peacekeeping_mission in #Kosovo, fulfilling it's tasks, handed over the shift to the new group of Armenian #peacekeepers.The superior command assessed the Armenian peacekeepers' professional abilities and service. #ArmenianArmy #Security

4

Artsakh Parliament@Artsakh_Parl·

12 Aug

The law «On Making Amendments to the Law “On the State Budget '20 of the #Artsakh Republic"» was adopted with 26 votes in favor & 6 against. The SB revenues will make 126bln 49mln 399.2th AMD, expenditures-135bln 650mln 717.7th AMD, the deficit-9bln 601mln 318.5th.

4

AOMF@AOMFrancophonie·

7 Aug

[Arménie ] @OmbudsArmenia a reçu 794 plaintes concernant les actions relatives à l’impact économique de #Covid_19 https://ift.tt/34eRHt4

USC Armenian Studies@ArmenianStudies·

7h

Following the developments in Lebanon? Tune in tomorrow morning for this illuminating panel organized by @ArmenStudies & @NAASR1955. Zoom registration details: https://bit.ly/lebanonwebinar

ArtsakhPress Agency@ArtsakhPress·

12 Aug

Number of Divorces Reduced in #Artsakh https://ift.tt/3hbuj3c

Artsakh MFA@mfankr·

17 Aug

The President of the Republic of #Artsakh Arayik Harutyunian (@Pres_Artsakh) has signed a decree on coordinating the activities of the state administration bodies of the Republic in conducting a common foreign policy. Read the full text here: https://bit.ly/3aw5Bb7

Published February 15, 2020 at 01:41PM. Read full article at Stem Cells in the News Portal.

[holytheoristtastemaker]

In the last few weeks many cancelled events, from concerts to conferences, have been replaced by virtual ones. And in the process, many are realising that moving events online isn’t just about damage control; it actually brings benefits of its own. 

“For a start, the reach can be much greater,” notes Olga de Giovanni, global PR and communications manager at marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity. “Our initial webinars, for example, attracted five to 10 times as many participants as we’d typically get, and we reached an international audience too.”

Vinda Souza, VP of global communications at Bullhorn, is also enthused by the possibilities of virtual events. “The fact there’s virtually no barrier to attendance, other than internet access, means there’s capacity to invite way more people,” she says. “Those who couldn’t otherwise afford to travel, be away from their computer, leave overnight and be away from their family, or have mobility concerns, can now attend.”

So how do you make your event a success? In this article, we gather the best advice from both veterans and those who’ve recently joined the party.

01. Make it relevant

With so many virtual events taking place right now, you need to work hard to grab people's attention

The first point might be obvious, but it’s worth stating: any event you organise needs to take account of the strange circumstances we all find ourselves in right now. Dan Peden, strategy director of marketing agency Journey Further, offers a typical example. “We had a number of brand-facing events in Manchester, Leeds and London planned in over the next few months but have had to completely rethink them,” he says. 

“There’s no point offering advice that brands can’t action in the current climate,” he reasons. “So our first online performance marketing masterclass instead focused on how we're helping leading brands navigate the Covid19 crisis. It went down really well, and we have more planned in for the next couple of months.”

Neil Davidson, CEO at communications agency HeyHuman, tells a similar story. “People are heading towards ‘peak webinar’,” he says. “So when we organised our latest online event, which replaced a face-to-face event we’d had in the diary since the start of the year, our first question was: 'Is the content applicable right now, and is it future-gazing?' If not, don’t bother; you’re just adding to the pile. So our event focused on how neuroscience can help brands connect with customers, during and after the pandemic. It was something all brands, no matter what position they’re in, could learn from.”

That doesn’t mean, of course, that every virtual event has to be about the pandemic and its effects on society; just that it has to take it into account. For example, running an online music festival doesn't address people’s concerns about Covid-19, but it does address their need for entertainment and distraction while under lockdown.

02. Get the timing right

People are busy, so don't make your event run any longer than it needs to 

How long should your event last? Of course, that will depend on the context and the audience, but in general, an hour is a good ballpark to aim for, says Rob Dennis, PPC specialist at Liberty Marketing: “Any longer and people start to lose interest,” he says. 

If you’re hosting multiple events, you should soon get a feel for how long your audience’s attention will last. “Our first masterclass was 60 minutes long with talks from three different speakers,” says Dan Peden. “However, to keep people engaged we now think it’s best to keep events to around 30 minutes. Moving forward, we’ll be doing more focused events with just one speaker.”

Emma Robson is head of events at Ingenuity London, which recently launched Virtual Connect, an online ‘speed dating’ event for brands and agencies. She advises: “Keep individual sessions concise: anything more than an hour could be a bit of a drag. Looking at a computer screen isn’t the same as seeing someone in the flesh, so take attention spans into consideration.”

Also think carefully about when your event starts. “For instance, anything too close to lunch could summon the wrath of a small child, so give enough time either side of lunchtime to allow people to be settled into their work,” Emma recommends.

03. Differentiate your event

Roger Sanchez was among the DJs taking part in Defected Records' Virtual Festival 3.0 

While you want your event to be current, don’t just copy what others are doing. “For example, Coldplay’s Chris Martin live-streamed singing from his living room, and now everyone’s doing living room gigs,” says Alex Wilson, head of content at brand experience agency Amplify. “Instead, think about how you can differentiate from the ‘wall of same’. The way you do that is the same as before: lean into the insights of your audience, look at the best solution to the problem, and be creatively brave, to ensure you’re leading from the front.” 

James Kirkham, chief business officer at Defected Records, pushes a similar line. "It isn’t enough to merely stream and assume you’ll cut through; there are too many competing events,” he points out. “So consider what it’s unique about you, convey the essence of who you are, and find a way to get super-personal with those viewing. For example, when we put on our virtual music festival, we created a set of ‘House Rules’ for those watching and dancing along at home, intended to help convey the spirit of the brand and add a layer that made it feel like a truly Defected event.”

04. Brief your speakers carefully

Panellists at the World Media Group webinar: advertising and the COVID-10 Pandemic

If your event involves talks, then don’t think that just picking speakers and topics is all you need do. You still have to brief those speakers carefully; in fact, even more so than you would for a physical event.

That’s a lesson recently learned by Belinda Barker, director of the World Media Group, which hosts regular events for the marketing, creative and publishing industries. The Group recently held its first virtual event; a webinar with 10 industry experts discussing whether advertising is appropriate at a time of crisis. “A webinar doesn’t have the natural flow of a live event, so it’s vital to keep speakers brief and on point," she advises. "For Q&A sessions, for instance, I'd suggest scripting some of the questions in advance to make sure that speakers are aware and fully prepped for them. And remember that virtual audiences are far harsher critics, because it’s much easier to turn off an app than it is to walk out of a room full of people.”

Also, just because people are good at speaking at physical events, don’t assume those skills are instantly translatable. “Too often there’s a mistaken belief that people will learn how to do live events through osmosis,” says Richard Robinson, managing director of Econsultancy. “This dangerous falsehood is akin to asking an army of stage actors, who normally feed off the audience and energy of the room, to seamlessly step onto a film set and shoot an Oscar-winning movie." 

Anyone new to speaking at a virtual events needs to rehearse, rehearse and rehearse again, he stresses. If that includes you, you'll need to: "Master the tech, make sure you’re fluent on the platform, and the computer it will run from. Find a stable and quiet area to present, and consider the unexpected like other people living in your household, especially children and animals who take no prisoners. Lastly, be aware of the power of your gestures: rolling eyes, eyebrows and other mannerisms that may detract from your delivery.”

"Not everyone knows how to use FaceTime and how to frame themselves," adds Jon Pearson, who's recently been running a virtual comedy night called Comedy Virtually LIVE. "So I'd advise people to look directly down the lens of the camera, even if they're on video call, because you look strange on screen."

05. Choose your platform wisely

Erica Freas of Specialist Subject Records says Instagram Stories works well for hosting gigs online

When it comes to software, you’re spoiled for choice in terms of what to use to host your virtual event, as you’ll see from our sister site’s round-up of the best videoconferencing services. But how do you choose between them?

“Before you decide on an off the shelf tech platform for your virtual event, pay close attention to your users and the devices that they are most likely to be using,” advises Jason Anderson, digital director at experience agency Avantgarde. “Not all tech solutions play that well on mobiles, and some are more suitable for informal gatherings amongst friends rather than corporate events. Privacy and data security are important: the recent issues with Zoom and its invisible sharing of data with Facebook and others is a prime example. Make sure your chosen platforms meet your security, GDPR and data requirements.”

Aside from formal videoconferencing tools, social media platforms can also offer a great platform for hosting virtual events. Erica Freas of Specialist Subject Records, for example, has been coordinating virtual gigs on Tuesdays for the past month via Instagram Stories. “We've had between 150 and 5,000 viewers depending on the band, and it's been a really nice touchstone for the music community,” she says.

The company opted for Instagram Stories because it was the most simple, low barrier way to organise the event at the last minute, she explains. “YouTube Live requires verification, and none of us uses Twitch. We looked at applications that let you stream from multiple sites at once but those cost money. Instagram Live was something we already had access to, and it alerts your followers that you've started a stream, so it catches more people than those who were paying attention to the upcoming event. 

“Once we clocked that we could let the performers into our account and everyone could stream back-to-back through @specialistsubject, we knew we were done," Erica adds. "It's so fun and seamless to have musician after musician pop up in our stream. A downside is that to watch you have to have an Instagram account, but they are free. I have a handful of friends, some in their 60s and 70s, who downloaded the app just to come to the show.”

06. Consider specialist services

Hopin allows you to build in chat functionality that enables meetings and networking during the event

While there are many free services, you may find it's worth paying for a platform that will make your event look and feel more professional. Imagen's Plan B, for example, is selling itself as a ready-made solution to deliver content to registered attendees online as a consequence of event cancellations. CMO Helen Aboagye outlines some of the benefits.

“For imminent events, many video assets, scripts and presentations will already have been completed,” she says. “Imagen’s Plan B offers the ability to immediately create a branded portal to host video presentations, interviews and clips, enabling you to easily repurposing these assets for your virtual events. Access to this content can be controlled on a very granular level, so VIPs or sponsors can access premium content that is invisible to standard delegates, for example. In addition, the platform is browser-based, so any attendee with a desktop can participate, while any speaker or contributor can upload assets for approval from any computer too.”

Hopin, meanwhile, is marketing itself as an online events platform that allows attendees to learn, interact, and connect with each other. “Content is only half of a good event experience, connections are the other half,” says founder Johnny Bourfarhat. “For an online event to replicate an offline event, there needs to be a way to meet new people serendipitously. Hopin does this with an automated one-on-one matching system in the event for networking meetings, like a Facetime chat.

“Speakers may have a back and forth with your attendees in a controlled way,” he adds. “We do this through our moderated sessions. And to prevent people from feeling ‘lost in the crowd’ and losing interest, you can create different spaces where they can meet people in the way they prefer, whether that's broadcasting, one on one, or in a group.”

07. Make attendees feel involved

Letting attendees hold meetings makes a virtual event feel more like a physical one, says Dave Bradley of Real Steel

Presenting the right content is only one part of your event. If all you do is stream content in one direction, there’s no real incentive for people to keep watching, so you need to find ways to make people involved and engaged. 

Dave Bradley of Steel Media was keen to pursue this when he recently organised Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #1, a virtual event for the games industry that's going to take place again in June. "Our live conferences are well known for being places to meet and do business, so we wanted to continue that into the virtual event as best we could," he explains. "The 'meeting' system we’ve used enables you to search for individuals based on the job they do, or what they are looking for - a games developer in need of a publisher, for instance - send them a message, and automatically schedule a Zoom call. 

"There’s evidence that this feature has been heavily used," he adds. "We can see that literally hundreds of meetings per day – thousands in total across the week – were arranged. We encourage people to meet at our events through all our marketing shout-outs and this event was no different. One thing the meeting system also includes is a Digital Expo. To replace the exhibition hall, with its booths and tables, we created a space where people can post portfolio pieces, links to game trailers, samples of their work, descriptions of their services and so on. This proved to be very popular, with over 200 display pages published there."

Don’t forget about social media, either. “Social can be a major aspect of in-person events and can be just as useful for virtual events too: you just need to adjust your approach accordingly,” says Corie Leaman, director of IT Nation Events at ConnectWise. “So in our case, we still create hashtags and look for ways to communicate with our audiences, but now we’re asking different questions – about participants’ views, locations and lunches – because we know this encourages engagement. It’s also important to find a dedicated moderator and a platform able to support chat and Q&As, so that your moderator can guide the conversation and focus on relaying information between speakers and attendees."

Meanwhile, Erica Freas says that encouraging interaction between audience members at virtual gigs has happened naturally on Instagram. “Whenever someone new joins the stream at our online gigs, their Instagram handle pops up in the scrolling comments, so you do get a lot of recognition and chat, just like at a real show,” she explains. “We can't see each others' faces but we can talk to each other, welcome each other, make jokes and ask questions across the platform."

08. Remind people it's happening

Given the multiplicity of virtual events happening right now, it’s easy for people to forget they’ve signed up for one. So don’t take anything for granted, says Jason Anderson. “Don’t forget the pre- and post-event communication,” he says. “You still have to engage your audience with pre-event marketing, to ensure they sign up and actually turn up, while post-event analysis through scores such as NPS can provide great feedback and insight.”

09. Expect technical challenges

Internet connection issues can play havoc with timing, warns Jon Pearson of Comedy Virtual Live

Technical problems are the bane of every virtual event, and they’re only more likely to occur at the current time, with unprecedented demands on the broadband network. “Glitches are always likely to crop up, so be prepared,” says Emma Robson. “For instance, we found out that you can’t host two different events or meetings at the same time on our choice of platform. This meant a frantic call to our agency selection manager was needed so he could move his meeting onto another platform, and we could start our event. Wifi is also famously temperamental, so it’s helpful to have another team member on standby to jump in when your signal falters. When this happened to my colleague, I had to reclaim myself as host and take over temporarily.”

Also, don’t assume that attendees are well-versed in using videoconferencing technology: this may be the very first time they’ve used it. “So if there’s a ‘mute all’ option, make sure that’s activated as people join,” adds Emma. “This will help avoid the confusion of people talking over one another, and to help create a more seamless process.” Rob Dennis adds: “If you’re doing a screen share like I had to do, then ensure your laptop is in Do Not Disturb mode, so that you don’t receive any notifications while you’re in screen share!”

It’s important to understand the limitations of a virtual event, too. For instance, Jon Pearson of Comedy Virtually LIVE notes that “Timing is essential, and any lag on the internet will ruin punchlines.” Erica, similarly, has learned that “Singers can't duet across a shared stream: the lag is unbearable.”

It’s also worth asking yourself: do I actually need video? “For our event, we found it more natural to turn off the video once we got going," says Neil Davidson, CEO at transformative communications agency HeyHuman. “It’s not a physical audience to begin with, so we focused on great slides: they should be well-designed and pointed, rather than animated. I’ve been burnt by too many dodgy home Wi-Fi connections!”

10. Generate a sociable atmosphere

Most of these tips have been focused on public-facing events, but what about organising social events for your colleagues online? With all of us stuck home remote working, getting together for drinks and a chat can be an invaluable way of keeping up morale and motivation. 

But it can be tricky to organise a group chat that feels less like a meeting, and more like a social occasion. “So consider including activities that get everyone involved,” suggests Heather Delaney, founder of Gallium Ventures. “Games for teams can be a good way to keep a fun and consistent flow, keeping staff connected without it feeling like an awkward conference call.”

She adds: “It’s great to set a start and finish time for your internal event, in order to allow any late arrivals a window to when they might have missed the boat. Obviously virtual drinks with friends or colleagues has the likelihood of running over any calendar invite, but at least you offer those with prior commitments a way out without scrutiny.”

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” wrote George Orwell in the 1946 essay, Why I Write. By refusing to perform at the Super Bowl, Cardi B and her peers were in fact performing two acts: acknowledging that as artists they have political power, and using that political power to support Kaepernick’s cause. By replacing them, Adam Levine did the opposite (while claiming to do nothing at all): “we are going to keep on doing what we do, hopefully without becoming politicians to make people understand, ‘We got you.'” The mistake Maroon 5’s frontman made was assuming he could isolate art from politics, which is impossible, particularly in this case — the Super Bowl was already infused with political turmoil, and to negate that was to undercut its significance. Kaepernick’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, would have preferred for Levine to be open about his position. “If you’re going to cross this ideological or intellectual picket line, then own it, and Adam Levine certainly isn’t owning it,” he said. “In fact, if anything, it’s a cop out when you start talking about, ‘I’m not a politician, I’m just doing the music.’ Most of the musicians who have any kind of consciousness whatsoever understand what’s going on here.”

By using “picket line” — a term traditionally associated with labor unions — Geragos further established the Super Bowl and its halftime show as a locus of political action. Essentially he was calling Levine a latter-day scab, an opportunist subverting others’ attempts to bring about change. Though the epithet dates back to the 18th century, when “scab” referred to workers who refused to join unions, by the next century it was used to designate workers who crossed a strike’s picket line. “Just as a scab is a physical lesion,” wrote Stephanie Smith in Household Words, “the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor — both the solidarity of workers and the dignity of work.” The musicians who refused to play the Super Bowl were expressing solidarity with Kaepernick — and the people of color on whose behalf he is protesting — and preserving the dignity of work. By crossing that invisible picket line, Levine not only broke solidarity but, paradoxically, sacrificed the dignity of work in the name of his own career.

* * *

That anyone in entertainment would feign political neutrality in the current climate is jarring enough, but the move further implies a glaring ignorance of the industry’s history. Nowhere was the politics of celebrity more literal than in Hollywood during the 1940s and ’50s. At that time, the infamous Hollywood blacklist meant that any whiff of Communism threatened your job. Self-protection required coming clean and informing on others to the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC), but a group of artists dubbed “The Hollywood Ten” protested by refusing to testify. Director Elia Kazan, however, gave HUAC eight names in 1952, helping to bury the careers of actors Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets and securing his own. “I said I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he recalled in his memoir. But Kazan writes in the negative, as though he wasn’t actively promoting his personal cause. What he was really doing was expressing the power of his own politics in order to support his own work. His solidarity was with himself alone.

Nearly 50 years after he named names, in 1999, Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. Actors like Nick Nolte and Amy Madigan disagreed with his actions and thus refused to applaud his art, but others, including Warren Beatty and Meryl Streep, seemed able to divorce the two. “I never discussed it with Warren, but I believe we were both standing for the same reason — out of regard for the creativity,” George Stevens, Jr. wrote in Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But Kazan’s creativity came at the expense of others’ creativity; to celebrate him was to celebrate the truncated careers he cut short to allow his own to thrive. This cognitive dissonance appeared, for some, to be resolved by time. Kazan was 89, how long were we supposed to hold his politics against him?

It’s funny that we never ask how long we should hold up someone’s work; our cultural memory favors the art object over the lives of the artists who make it — and their politics. Hollywood’s reaction to Kazan is reminiscent of its reaction to Roman Polanski, who was accused of drugging and pled guilty to raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 before fleeing the States (and his sentence). In 2009, more than 100 actors and filmmakers signed a petition to release Polanski after he was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant. At the time, Debra Winger, of all people, said, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.” The consensus was that he had served his time. The past had therefore eaten up his offense, leaving behind only his art, as though this alone defined him. And even where it didn’t, it clearly did. “He’s now happily married; he has two children,” is how Sigourney Weaver explained last year why she had worked with him and would continue to. She believed she was listening to his victim by advancing “with understanding and compassion.”

Woody Allen, even more than Polanski, has been eclipsed by his work. Actors who align with him are aligning with the politics of privileging his creative output, as though such a thing existed on its own. “There are directors, producers and men of power who have for decades been awarded and applauded for their highly regarded work by both this industry and moviegoers alike,” Kate Winslet, who appeared in Allen’s Wonder Wheel in 2017, said in apology last year. “The message we received for years was that it was the highest compliment to be offered roles by these men.” The year prior, when asked if the allegations against Allen gave her pause, Winslet had said: “Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.” Kristen Stewart took a similar work-first approach when discussing why she appeared in Allen’s 2016 film, Café Society: “The experience of making the movie was so outside of that, it was fruitful for [me and co-star Jesse Eisenberg] to go on with it.” What this did was to elevate the work above all else, which delivered the message that the voices of regular women were secondary to the voices of creative men.

It’s impossible for one artist to work with another without their collaboration being informed by the politics of both parties. Yet Rami Malek seemed to believe he could circumvent this fact while working with director Bryan Singer — a man accused of assaulting multiple teen boys — on the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. When he was first asked about Singer at the Golden Globes, Malek responded: “There’s only one thing we needed to do, and that was to celebrate Freddie Mercury.” He claimed he didn’t know about the allegations, that he was only in it for the work. Yet implicit in the work was Singer’s labor, Singer himself. Despite his replacement by Dexter Fletcher, his presence continues to define the film. The name on Bohemian continues to be his, the accolades it receives go to him (the Baftas excepted). Every time Malek refuses to address the controversy around Singer, he chooses not to confront the realities of child abuse; and every time he appears on screen under Singer’s name, his work is a reflection of that.

Rami Malek’s stance aligns with another common myth about artists, which is that they can cast aside politics to serve the public. In the early 1980’s, the United Nations called for a boycott of South Africa over apartheid, but more than fifty musicians — including Tina Turner, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes — ignored it. “If the people didn’t want us there, they wouldn’t come to see the shows,” said Millie Jackson. What she did not acknowledge was that performing there implied she approved of how the ruling government of South Africa was treating its people — or at least, that she didn’t actively oppose it — and that she was willing to take part in its economy and contribute to the  bank balance of a problematic government. Ten years later, blue-collar-adjacent rocker Bruce Springsteen crossed the picket line set up by a number of Tacoma, Washington, city employee unions, explaining, “I know a lot of you folks came a long way to be here tonight, so I got a commitment to be on this stage.” Once again, here was a musician who, rather than refusing to contribute his labor in solidarity with the exploited labor of others, was serving the city that oppressed them. More than the words in his songs, his actions spoke to his real allegiances.

During a writers’ strike in 2007, a string of TV hosts — from Ellen DeGeneres to Jay Leno to Jon Stewart — eventually crossed the picket line, some more sheepishly than others, with variations on the “show must go on” excuse. “It’s really hard to have to deal with where they are and where I am,” DeGeneres said, “because I’m kinda caught in the middle.” This defense could be mistaken for selflessness — she is sacrificing her own petty problems for the greater good — if it weren’t for the fact that the audience also occupies the oppressed space she upheld by performing. At least Stewart, who was one of the least comfortable crossing the picket line, used his platform to further the cause of the writers by addressing their strike on air. Still, it’s hard to sympathize when you realize, around the same time, the much less powerful Steve Carell held up taping of The Office because he refused to be a scab. Each extra moment of discomfort he conveyed to the network, each bit of pay he lost, meant more leverage afforded to the striker.

* * *

Just as the artist is not static, neither are their politics, and just as vital as acknowledging one’s alliances is acknowledging one’s changes. Last year, Natalie Portman became one of the few celebrities to openly regret signing the aforementioned Polanski petition. “We lived in a different world, and that doesn’t excuse anything,” she said. “But you can have your eyes opened and completely change the way you want to live. My eyes were not open.” Polanski was not the topic du jour, but her voice was an important reminder that as a culture we had failed to hold him to account. In a similar vein, though they could not undo working with Woody Allen, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, and Griffin Newman made amends by donating their paychecks to nonprofits like RAINN. “I learned conclusively that I cannot put my career over my morals again,” Newman said. Other artists, as Portman alluded to, have opened their eyes and are willing to learn and to admit their fallibility. Though Lorde had planned to perform in Israel, she ended up changing her mind — joining fellow boycotters Elvis Costello and Lauryn Hill — after two women wrote to her about the oppression within the country, saying, “we believe that an economic, intellectual and artistic boycott is an effective way of speaking out against these crimes.” So she spoke instead of singing, aware that in this instance her voice was stronger in that act.

Still others have literally rewritten history, proving their beliefs are so fierce that they are willing to erase their own art in the name of their politics. Michelle Williams offered to work for free in 2017 to reshoot a number of scenes for All The Money In The World with Christopher Plummer after sexual assault allegations emerged about her former co-star Kevin Spacey. “A movie is less important than a human life,” she explained at the time. This is the active approach to change, which eclipses more passive sartorial gestures like the blackout at the Golden Globes. “For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour,” Time’s Up co-founder Eva Longoria said. “This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.” It was a toothless rebellion, an objection in accessory form which fit seamlessly into the system which had been exposed in all its corruption.

More effective is direct action, such as Frances McDormand using her Oscar speech to advocate for “inclusion riders” and musicians spurning the Super Bowl to support people of color or Trump’s inauguration to reject everything he represents. Singer Rebecca Ferguson, runner up on The X Factor UK in 2010, was one of the few musicians who said she would accept an invitation to the latter — if she could perform “Strange Fruit,” the 1939 protest song about racism in America. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” she would sing, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Trump chose the Great Talladega College Tornado Marching Band instead.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[scottsmyunlockedmind-blog]

Digital Downfall

I wonder if stores know that their digital downfall is coming?  It's been slowly creeping along and getting more advanced as it moves forward. I used to buy cassettes of music to listen to, then compact disks, I also used to buy VHS movies and had a huge collection, until DVD movies came out, which made my VHS collection obsolete, I had to re-buy the movies I loved most in DVD format and my collection dwindled. Portable hard drives came out next and you could digitally store your collection on them. Well, around 10 or so movies when the hard drives first came out, but now, with the storage capacities well past the 4 terabyte mark you could put most collections on one portable hard drive and have room to spare. The technology has moved even past this point, and now we can stream anything we want without the need to download anything. If we want to save our favorites we can use a cloud, an internet based storage area that takes up very little space on your hard drive. Video games can now be played like this and be streamed right from the cloud.  You can also digitally download them as well.  The best part about being able to digitally download anything is that there is no need for an extended warranty, or a storage area in your home that takes up a lot of space. In most cases the place where you bought your game, movie, or CD, will keep a record of your purchase and if your machine that plays these things dies or blows up, you can retrieve them for free after you buy a replacement machine. But what about store owners that have to pay for staff, and their building, power and other utilities?  They can't give out a deal like that because they will lose money and eventually be shut down. The internet is always growing and eventually there will be no retail stores out there, or a lot less of them. You can already order your groceries online and have them delivered to your house. You can buy clothes online and get them the same way, it might not be as quick and we might have to wait longer to get an item we really want but that is a sacrifice a lot of us are starting to make. This will change too and the demand for faster service is always growing, soon you will be able to 3D scan your body for perfectly fitting clothes, and other attire.  With everything we gain from digitally downloading our life we also lose something as well, our privacy for one, anything you want to buy online will require a ton of our personal information, our banking information as well.  It will take only one type of hack to steal anyone's personal body scan and all their personal information.  Think of what a smart criminal could do with that information. The other thing we will lose is being out in public, with digital downloading their will less reasons for you to leave your house, I can see obesity becoming a worse problem than it is already.  The act of leaving your home and dealing with society less is going to hurt us as well, in ways I cannot fully comprehend in this moment. The world is changing rapidly and physical stores are slowly disappearing because they can't compete with the online ones.  It might not be the stores that suffer, it might be the people that used to go to them as well, this could be everyone's, Digital Downfall. Scott Goerz

[rounaq-comm3p18-blog]

Fandom Subculture

As we approach the end of the semester I have realized that there is a lot more to audience studies than I expected. In the past blog, I discussed how our world is constantly changing and evolving. As audiences, our experiences have seen a massive shift in our media environment that deviate from our traditional sources of media such as print and television. This shift brings many changes to the audience experience by allowing people to obtain more information and new forms of entertainment. These new forms of media provide audiences to interact amongst each other but as well as create or follow certain subcultures that are created purely by having similar interests. The internet offers a place where individuals can actively engage in conversation and share ideas and thoughts and a prime example of that is blogs. Writing these blogs in this course taught me how quickly culture changes. For example, some of the topics I discussed in my first blog post seem outdated in today’s fast-paced society. With the emergence of new media, issues started becoming less salient due to many other issues arising. In this blog post, I want to discuss fandom culture and how the digital age is responsible for creating and breaking trends. Also, the interactivity aspect of digital culture provides society with user-generated content.

Fandom culture has existed throughout different decades and through the evolution of media, the fandom culture has progressed as well. In the early 1900’s audiences idolized people in power such as the president or the queen of England. As forms of entertainment began to rise and the view shifted to athletes, musicians, performers and artists. In today’s society, we begin to see the shift from television celebrities to online stars such as Instagram models, social influencers and more where they do not necessarily have a background in acting or sports but are there to influence consumers and are seen as “trendsetters”. But how did they get in that position to do so and where can I apply to be an Instagram star. Well, John Fiske noted that fandom is “associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class, and race” (Sullivan, 2013). Basically, these individuals have a cultural advantage by being from a certain lifestyle and culture where they are viewed as idols. When I think of a modern-day online celebrity, Kim Kardashian’s name instantly comes to mind. One day I was watching television with my cousin and Keeping up with the Kardashians was on and it got me thinking why are Kim and her family famous, do they have a successful business or are they movie stars? I was beyond disappointed when I did some research and found out that she gained her fame through another television celebrity Paris Hilton. By being a certain lifestyle and social status Kim Kardashian utilized that to earn money and influence her “fans” into the Kardashian culture.

To be fair not every celebrity in the digital age has gotten famous by being friends with a “celebrity”. There are many emerging performers that are getting international recognition by uploading their personal content such as vlogs (video logs), product reviews, comedy skits and much more. One of my personal favourite YouTuber is Casey Neistat, a filmmaker from New York City who started “vlogging” but utilizing film and camera techniques to make them look cinematic. Prior to Casey Neistat “vlogging” was quite popular in the YouTube scene due to its ability to allow everyday individuals to share their experience with a broad audience. This style emerged from the freedom of speech of blogging but by using video as the medium allowed people from all over the world to watch and it ultimately created a subculture within the YouTube subculture. Neistat’s distinct style lead me to be one of the most popular Youtuber’s and his fan base is constantly growing. By having millions of subscribers Neistat is able to create social change and influence within the community. Neistat often crowdfunds campaigns that he feels needs attention. Paul Booth mentioned that “by following a crowdfunding campaign from opening video to the funded project, one could theoretically see the birth of a new form of creative product” (Booth, 2015). Therefore, fans are able to assist in new projects by donating monetary funds and an example of this in real life was Casey Neistat’s GoFundMe page for Somalians. In March of 2017, a “Viner” named Jerome Jarre took to YouTube to help fund the Somalian food crisis. It was not until Casey posted a video discussing the issue where fans gathered instantaneously to help fund the project. This crowdfunding campaign raised over 1 million dollars in the span of 19 hours. This act highlighted the influence of participatory culture within digital media. Similarly, as Booth highlights, “that fan studies and technology studies can integrate in order to demonstrate changing paradigms of audience involvement in the media process” (Booth, 2015). Thus, it was the fandom culture that contributed to the success of the campaign and bringing exposure from international markets.

Culture is based on the lives of individuals residing in a location or sharing similarities. Cultures surpass space and time by providing individuals with concepts, ideas and ways of life. Most cultures are rooted in religious beliefs. For example, in the Jewish culture food has to be Kosher. This way of preparing food is known within the religion but also culturally. Individuals who many necessarily are of Jewish decent can participate in the Kosher tradition and learn and adapt to it. Therefore, culture is much more than religious practices but a way of life. Over the past decade, Ontario has seen a huge cultural shift through Toronto. Growing up just outside of Toronto allowed me to see the cultural changes surrounding the city. I was always a fan of hip-hop and R&B music and growing up I would listen to these artists from America who was bringing exposure to their hometowns by discussing them on the latest track. I always wondered even though Toronto does have a massive population, why are there no big artists emerging that represent the city in international markets. As I grew older, artists like Justin Bieber, Drake and the Weeknd found success in international markets. But it was Drake who actively talked about what the city has to offer and provide exposure to the Canadian culture to make it popular. In chapter 8 Sullivan discusses fan culture and I believe the artist Drake embodies the “two aspects of media fandom have emerged as central to theorists in this tradition. The first element is the social aspect, where media fans band together in either informal or more formally structured groups (such as fan clubs) to share their mutual interest with others. Second, fans act as interpreters and producers of media content, which we will call the interpretive aspect of media fandom.” (Sullivan, 2013). Due to his music fans merged together to appreciate his music which creates a social aspect and through utilizing “Toronto slang” and similar clothing, fans propagate the culture engages in the interactive aspect of media fandom.

As I was reading the article by Kihan Kim, Yunjae Cheong, and Hyuksoo Kim titled “The Influences of Sports Viewing Conditions on Enjoyment from Watching Televised Sports: An Analysis of the FIFA World Cup Audiences in Theater vs. Home” I thought my experiences of watching a sports game live vs. at home. It is pretty clear that once you are in the arena the atmosphere is totally different with fans wearing jerseys, cheering and actively engaging in participatory culture. But with the advancement of digital media, the presence of being at the game vs. watching on a television or through streaming has closed the gap between the two. Kim et al. elaborate by stating “Presence refers to the phenomenon in which an individual develops a sense of being physically present at a remote location through interaction with media”. A prime example of actively engaging remotely is through Twitter and Facebook. Using hashtags such as #wethenorth that promotes active participation from fans in a different area. In chapter 7 Sullivan discusses that “In his 1990 book The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argued that one of the hallmarks of modern societies is the breakdown in the traditional notion of ‘place’ as a specific physical location—something he called ‘time-space distanciation’” (Sullivan 2013). This absence of time and space within fandom cultures provides people with a sense of belonging even if they are not from the same area or culture. Taking Raptors as an example, a team that was always seen as the underdogs in the NBA due to their further distance from all of the American teams. With the Wethenorth campaign, it allowed raptors fans from all over the world to engage is fan culture even if they had never visited the city before.

The convergence of digital media also brings downsides to factual information. In Ben S. Wasike’s article titled “Framing News in 140 Characters: How Social Media Editors Frame the News and Interact with Audiences via Twitter” discussing the issue of framing news by social media editors. The study found that most journalists tend to focus on news that deals with war/terrorism, man-made disasters and natural disasters. Ultimately news that would “sell” across multiple platforms rather than political or social issues. When I surf the web for news my main platforms of use tend to be Facebook and Instagram because it provides me with the social aspect and interactivity amongst real worlds news and social events that my friends post. News channels have a tendency to post the same news and even in some cases the titles and the contents are the same. This convergence of news events provides a narrow insight into world issues that deviate individuals from important issues occurring internationally.

Digital media is expanding rapidly and due to the advancement, many platforms are taking advantage trying to create applications through multiple devices. Audience culture has benefited as well as had a few setback due to the digital shift. This shift has allowed subcultures to flourish and fandom culture is going to continue to grow due to the ease of connectivity throughout the subcultures. For example, Star Trek or “trekies” fans are really devoted to the show even though the show has been off the air for years now. This continuation provides the show to be timeless and passed on from generation to generation creating many subcultures.

Sources Booth, P. (2105). Crowdfunding: A spimatic application of digital fandom. New Media and Society, 17(2), 149-166.

Kim, K., Cheong, Y., & Kim, H. (2016). The influences of sports viewing conditions on enjoyment from watching televised sports: An analysis of the FIFA World Cup audiences in theater vs. home. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 60(3), 389–409.

Sullivan, J. (2013). Media Audiences: Effects, users, institutions and power. Sage Publications Inc., New York, NY.

Wasike, B. (2013). Framing news in 140 Characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal - Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5-23.

[popofventi]

Mental Yoga Sunday / 5 Favorite Long Form Reads of the Week / Issue No. 13

"The city takes a breath on Sunday. Of all that’s lost with the pursuit of what’s next, I hope we don’t lose that…"  -- Hawksley Workman

Mental Yoga Sunday is a callback to those lazy mornings and afternoons spent reading the newspaper or finishing up a dog eared novel. Days lost in long shadow in a hidden corner full of nothing but quiet and weak wifi. Immerse yourself for a spell in something longer than a text string but shorter than a binge marathon. Here are my favorite long form reads this week.

1

Leaked Recording: Inside Apple’s Global War On Leakers (The Outline)

A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products.

The briefing, titled “Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple,” was led by Director of Global Security David Rice, Director of Worldwide Investigations Lee Freedman, and Jenny Hubbert, who works on the Global Security communications and training team.

According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the press, as well as hunt down the source when leaks do occur. Some of these investigators have previously worked at U.S. intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, and in the U.S. military.

The briefing, which offers a revealing window into the company’s obsession with secrecy, was the first of many Apple is planning to host for employees. In it, Rice and Freedman speak candidly about Apple’s efforts to prevent leaks, discuss how previous leakers got caught, and take questions from the approximately 100 attendees.

The presentation starts and ends with videos, spliced with shots of Tim Cook presenting a new product at one of Apple’s keynotes, that stress the primacy of secrecy at Apple. “When I see a leak in the press, for me, it’s gut-wrenching,” an Apple employee says in the first video. “It really makes me sick to my stomach.” Another employee adds, “When you leak this information, you’re letting all of us down. It’s our company, the reputation of the company, the hard work of the different teams that work on this stuff.” - FULL ARTICLE

2

Why My Guitar Gently Weeps (The Washington Post)

The convention couldn’t sound less rock-and-roll — the National Association of Music Merchants Show. But when the doors open at the Anaheim Convention Center, people stream in to scour rows of Fenders, Les Pauls and the oddball, custom-built creations such as the 5-foot-4-inch mermaid guitar crafted of 15 kinds of wood.

Standing in the center of the biggest, six-string candy store in the United States, you can almost believe all is well within the guitar world.

Except if, like George Gruhn, you know better. The 71-year-old Nashville dealer has sold guitars to Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. Walking through NAMM with Gruhn is like shadowing Bill Belichick at the NFL Scouting Combine. There is great love for the product and great skepticism. What others might see as a boom — the seemingly endless line of manufacturers showcasing instruments — Gruhn sees as two trains on a collision course.

“There are more makers now than ever before in the history of the instrument, but the market is not growing,” Gruhn says in a voice that flutters between a groan and a grumble. “I’m not all doomsday, but this — this is not sustainable.”

The numbers back him up. In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.

What worries Gruhn is not simply that profits are down. That happens in business. He’s concerned by the “why” behind the sales decline. When he opened his store 46 years ago, everyone wanted to be a guitar god, inspired by the men who roamed the concert stage, including Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page. Now those boomers are retiring, downsizing and adjusting to fixed incomes. They’re looking to shed, not add to, their collections, and the younger generation isn’t stepping in to replace them.

Gruhn knows why.

“What we need is guitar heroes,” he says. - FULL ARTICLE

3

The Future of Language (Ozy)

In Norway, there sits a literary time capsule that is slowly filling with the unread manuscripts of the world’s best authors. Margaret Atwood was the first to submit her unpublished novel — Scribbler Moon — to this experiment, dubbed the Future Library Project, back in 2014. David Mitchell followed a year later, and the Icelandic poet Sjón after that. If all goes according to plan, a new author will submit a work every year, until the capsule is opened in 2114. Many of these authors will never live to see the reception to what could be their greatest work.

Just outside Oslo, a forest is growing with 1,000 spruce trees — near saplings that, by the time the project finishes, will have filled out enough to be cut down and turned into print editions of the time-capsuled books for future generations of readers. The question is: Will the books printed from this forest — or the words inside their pages — be recognizable? So much has changed in the last century, both thanks to the rapid rate of technological advancement and shifting demographics. OZY imagines how those things could continue to define language and literature 97 years down the road. - FULL ARTICLE

4

Supertasters Among The Dreaming Spires (1843 Magazine)

Are wine connoisseurs scientists or charlatans? Dan Rosenheck experiments with the Oxford and Cambridge wine-tasting teams

It smells like sweaty cheese in here,” thunders Domen Presern, a chemistry PhD student, announcing his presence at a second-floor Thai restaurant in Oxford. “Something with lactate crystals. Manchego?” “No,” retorts Janice Wang, on a break from her psychology dissertation. “This is definitely Morbier.” A few seconds later, she reconsiders. “I can see where you’re coming from,” she says, “but it just shows you’re not attuned to Asian flavours. Asians know it smells like fish sauce.”

The room didn’t smell like much of anything to me. Then again, I haven’t been training to become a human bloodhound. By contrast, the noses of Wang and Presern were on top form: they had just wrapped up their penultimate training session for the Varsity match, an annual blind wine-tasting contest held between teams from Oxford and Cambridge since 1953. They had spent the previous three hours simulating the actual event with two flights of unidentified wines – six whites and six reds. They filled out sheets guessing the age, grape varietal and geographic origin of each, alongside notes describing subtleties of scent and structure that made distinguishing Manchego from Morbier look as easy as apples from oranges. At “the Varsity”, as competitors dub it, experienced judges mark the submissions anony­mously. The team with the higher score gets to represent Britain at a taste-off in France, and the top taster receives a £300 ($375) magnum bottle of Cuvée Winston Churchill, a Champagne made by Pol Roger, the event’s sponsor.

This Varsity match is less well known than the Boat Race contested by the two universities’ rowing teams, but the blind wine-tasting societies have no trouble luring reinforcements at freshers’ fairs. Most recruits will lack the keen palate and dogged devotion needed to identify and memorise the flavour and aromas of dozens of varietals from hundreds of appellations. But those that do often have a bright future in the British wine trade: prominent critics like Oz Clarke and Jasper Morris cut their teeth in the contest.

Depending on your perspective, the Varsity is either an exercise in futility or a potent rejoinder to conventional wisdom. One academic study after another has found little scientific basis for wine criticism. Everyone has read florid promises of “gobs of ripe cassis”, “pillowy tannins”, and “seductive hints of garrigue”. Yet the relationships between such mumbo-jumbo and the chemical composition of a wine, between one taster’s use of it and another’s, and even between the same drinker’s notes on the same wine on different occasions tend to be faint at best. Articles arguing that, as Robbie Gonzalez of the blog i09 pithily put it, “wine tasting is bullshit” have become reliable clickbait. - FULL ARTICLE

5

The Ken Doll Reboot: Beefy, Cornrowed, and Pan-Racial (GQ)

For decades, he achieved icon status by being a basic, buff, blue-eyed bro. And for years, that was enough. No longer! Starting today, as part of a wide-ranging relaunch, Ken has cornrows. And he’s Asian. And he’s skinny. Or sometimes even fat (sorry, “broad”). Caity Weaver went deep into the valley (and design center) of the dolls to get an exclusive glimpse of Mattel’s new take on the all-American male.

Meet Ken: He is a beefy Asian man with 20/40 vision who frequently works out of doors.

And, meet Ken: He is a young record executive who expresses himself through bold sneaker attire while simultaneously being an African-American man of average build.

And, meet Ken: Against the better angels of his nature, he has bleached his hair peroxide blond, and now is determined to travel on an airplane in comfort and style.

And, meet Ken: He has a man bun, and that’s his whole thing.

In a condition of affairs at worst disastrous, at best depraved, Ken, Ken, Ken, and Ken are all dating the same woman.

Her name is Barbie. - FULL ARTICLE

[ziatechgq1-blog]

Ask Ars: What's the contrast between the old and new following frameworks on iOS? Confounded about the contrasts amongst UDID and IDFA? We have answers.

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early element of the recently propelled Ars Technica. Presently, as then, it's about your inquiries and our group's answers. We once in a while delve into our question sack, give our own take, then tap the insight of our perusers. To present your own question, see our accommodating tips page.

There has been a great deal of speak of late about Apple's new client following framework presented with iOS 6—yet positively not from Apple. The organization has remained to a great extent mum on the client side with regards to how it's helping application producers and sponsors track data about iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch clients, driving some around the Web to freeze over security. Not surprisingly, the real circumstance is more nuanced than what some would have you accept, however it merits being taught about what's happening so you can choose how to deal with your own security choices.

We've been accepting peruser addresses of late about Apple's current changes—here are a few responses to the most widely recognized inquiries.

What was the UDID and why did Apple quit utilizing it?

The UDID, or Unique Device Identifier, is a 40-character string that exceptionally distinguishes a particular iOS gadget, like a serial number. The UDID has been utilized for some things previously, including associating your gadget to an iOS Developer represent iOS beta discharges, interfacing your gadget to your Apple ID with the goal that you can reinstall App Store buys or re-download music, interfacing your gadget to iMessage so you can get messages at numerous areas, et cetera.

Those are all still real uses for the UDID—for the most part since it's Apple who is utilizing that data. In any case, until the arrival of iOS 6 in September, UDIDs were likewise utilized by sponsors and outsider designers with a specific end goal to gather client information—this was for the most part so they could offer focused on ads, yet some additionally utilized the UDID for their own particular Game-Center-like systems.

We composed an Ask Ars about the UDID back in September of 2012 with considerably more insights about its uses and why Apple chosen to expostulate it—at any rate with regards to outsiders. However, the general significance is that in spite of the fact that the UDID could have been utilized as a semi-mysterious token to track clients, numerous designers wound up associating UDIDs with clients' genuine names, addresses, telephone numbers, and other data. What's more, when that information was connected together, it could have been utilized to really recognize a specific client—truth be told, security specialists issued a paper in 2010 demonstrating that a lot of outsider applications transmitted clients' UDIDs back to their own particular servers alongside specifically distinguishing data.

That is a piece of why Apple chosen to expostulate the utilization of UDIDs with the arrival of iOS 5 in October of 2011, and began dismissing applications that made utilization of the UDID not long ago. Be that as it may, Apple's activity in demoralizing the utilization of UDIDs came past the point where it is possible to keep away from a UDID-related security bad dream.

Mysterious branch amass AntiSec discharged a rundown of one million UDIDs in September, with many appended to full names, wireless numbers, and places of residence. At the time, AntiSec asserted the rundown originated from a hacked FBI tablet, yet that claim was soon exposed by advanced distributing firm BlueToad, who confirmed that the rundown originated from its own hacked framework. BlueToad itself is not a generally perceived name, but rather it made applications for different organizations, for example, Variety Magazine, Modern Luxury, Arhaus, and others—like different distributers, it excessively gathered UDIDs and individual data from the clients of those applications.

AntiSec's arrival of the UDID list came almost a year after Apple initially told engineers it was expostulating the utilization of the UDID by outsiders, however the occurrence indicates why application producers and sponsors shouldn't have approached the UDID in any case. There was no chance to get for clients to disassociate the UDID from their gadgets or kill any sort of following, which is the reason it really is ideal that it's at no time in the future being used.

Presently I hear there's something new. Did Apple lie about escaping the following amusement?

This is the zone where there's been some deception coasting around. By the wording of this Slashdot post and its going with post on Sophos, you may have been persuaded that Apple had sworn off client following, just to guilefully sneak it back in. "Apple got gotten with its deliver the treat shake… Enough will be sufficient, correct? Indeed, perhaps not," composed Sophos this week.

That is not precisely the situation. As far back as Apple started dismissing applications that made utilization of the UDID not long ago, it had been recommended that the organization was chipping away at offering some other route for engineers to track clients. Bits of gossip about the new identifier started coursing in June—around a similar time engineers started discussing Apple's new Identifier for Advertising, or IDFA. Also, in September, when Apple issued an announcement over the AntiSec release, the organization openly recognized that another following framework was headed: "[W]ith iOS 6 we presented another arrangement of APIs intended to supplant the utilization of the UDID and will soon be prohibiting the utilization of UDID," Apple representative Natalie Kerris said at the time.

Along these lines, it was no mystery that the UDID would have been supplanted with something else, and that option was relied upon to be more protection cognizant. Since iOS 6 is out and accessible to general society, the new IDFA is in reality set up, and sponsors have as of now been utilizing it to track you on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Astonish!

How does the IDFA vary from the UDID?

Promoters to a great extent utilize the two IDs similarly, however there are a couple key contrasts between them that influence both clients and sponsors.

On the client side, the UDID was not something you could control or cutoff in any capacity—sponsors who needed to get it could undoubtedly do as such without your consent or learning, and there was nothing you could do about it. The IDFA contrasts from that since you can control it on the client end; in the event that you don't need your perusing propensities followed, you can flip it off (perceive how in the following inquiry). Moreover, as pointed out by Sophos, the IDFA "can't be followed back to people, it just connections an example of online conduct with a particular gadget."

On the publicist end, the IDFA goes about as a tenacious treat that won't be cross-defiled. This is better for them on the grounds that in the event that you offer your old iPod touch to another person and purchase another one, your UDID may change and a promoter may believe you're a completely unique client. (Also that your old UDID is currently being utilized by another person, so any promoting data that was already joined to your UDID is presently being focused toward an alternate individual.) Because the IDFA divorces itself from the UDID, it can be reset with another gadget and there won't be any intersection of the streams with regards to advertisement focusing on.

How might I control how the IDFA tracks me?

So you don't care for focused promotions—that is reasonable. In case you're running iOS 6, the IDFA is turned on as a matter of course, yet it's anything but difficult to turn it off. On your iOS gadget, go into Settings > General > About > Advertising and flip the "Confine Ad Tracking" change to "on." It will be set to "off" as a matter of course—the wording is to some degree befuddling, on the grounds that it makes you think the promotion following is off, in any case it implies that your impediment of the advertisement following is off. Precarious dubious, Apple.

[joegcpsarts-blog]

I Hope You Like Reading

Finding a Balance: Creative Control and Success in the Music Industry

I.                    Introduction

Music is an influential part of society; always has been and always will be. It is a $16 billion industry here in the United States and is projected to be a $43 billion industry worldwide (Facts, 2016). Millions of people make a living off of this wildly popular art form, and we will be looking at how they affect this global industry and likewise how this global industry affects them.

A few moments in the history of the music industry (1950’s and 1970’s) will be overviewed to build a groundwork for the conversation of creative control. Knowing where this industry has been based for the last 70 years is important in knowing how it got to where it is now and what its future looks like. This research also seeks to better understand the relationships between artists and labels as well as between artists and consumers. Music has become a well-integrated part of American culture, and for the last century or so it has grown as an artistic, multibillion dollar industry. Looking at the effects of this integration will give us necessary information about evolving artist-label relationships, differing revenue streams changing with the rising popularity of music, and the industry’s evolving relationship with its consumers. Along with this huge growth and change, artists have more options when it comes to creative control of their work. Creative control is something artists have to sort of balance with their success. Record labels exist to promote, distribute for, and profit from the artists they hire. In some cases this works out great for everyone involved, but in others it can lead to a poor artist-label relationship, a lack of creative control for the artist, or a disappointed consumer. Looking at how technological advancement has affected these relationships will give insight into why an artist may choose to embrace a record deal or work as an independent artist.

There’s a lot to talk about, but essentially:  1) Record labels controlled physical sales of music, so record labels basically control artists; 2) Popularity of internet is making physical sales obsolete; 3) Record labels no longer control artists to the extent that they did in the past; and 4) you don’t need a label to succeed anymore, and therefore creative control is much more in the hands of the artists than it was back then.

II.                  The History Lesson

 a.      Music Industry in the 50’s

The music industry has been controlled by huge multinational music groups. In 1950, one of these large music labels, Hollandsche Decca Distributie, became Philips Phonografische Industrie. Aside from this large change, there were still four other major labels; Decca Records (British), Columbia-CBS Records (American), Electric and Music Industries (British), and Music Publishers Holding Company (American, later became Warner Music Group). So all the multinational conglomerates of the music industry consisted of five corporations located in only two countries (Record Label, 2017).

Major labels have controlled the marketing and distribution aspects of music since physical music sales became popular in the 50’s. Their immense market shares give them all the resources they need to promote their artists. From controlling what’s played on the radio to packaging of CD’s and vinyl’s, major labels could keep the overhead costs of producing music lower than anybody else because of their seemingly endless resources.

Record labels were around before the 50’s (Columbia Records being the oldest, founded in 1887), but the early 1950’s is when the 45 rpm vinyl record came to be and the first major growth of the industry along with it. 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl discs sounded better than their 78 rpm shellac disc predecessors and were also much cheaper to make, so people could all of a sudden afford to own all the music they liked hearing on the radio or whatever.

The music industry is an economy of scale, and that just means put a little in get a little out, put a lot in get a lot out. In a pre-digital age, this shows why record labels were such a powerhouse; they were a golden scenario for an up-and-coming band. A record deal represents putting a lot in, and the marketing power that came with a record deal is where the band could potentially get a lot out. Simply the percent of a label’s budget that went into marketing for a band was huge, and having your name plastered pretty much everywhere can do a lot for a band’s commercial success. These were times when physical music sales were incredibly popular and having your CD on the shelf of the local music store was the best step in the right direction in terms of being successful. This growth peaked in the 1990’s but the growth existed and thrived for decades before then.

   b.      Music Industry in the 70’s

Over the last fifty years there has been a great move to consolidate the media industries. Whether it be print, music, television, or film, the majority of content is being produced and owned by a smaller and smaller number of corporations, huge multinational conglomerates now referred to as the Big Three. The premise of each of these deals was that with each acquisition, the resultant larger company could keep production and distribution costs lower, and could have even bigger access to the public and so could generate bigger sales on higher margins than either company individually. This worked for decades and is the reason that we are left with three major music labels internationally. Essentially an oligarchy of companies controlling music distribution made them an artist’s only option for success.

You have the major labels, Warner, Universal and Sony, that manage almost 90% of music industry revenue (Satariano, 2014), but then there are tons and tons of small, independent record labels (“indie” labels) that cater more to local, lesser-known artists. Few independent labels were able to establish themselves before the late 1970’s because of the immense power that the major labels had in terms of the distribution of music. But a few independent labels like Pinnacle and Spartan were able to establish an effective means of distribution eventually. As independent labels have become more popular, they have become a feasible avenue for up and coming artists to make a career.

In addition to being unable to market your album unless a label was backing you, two problems that artists have faced in the past regarding releasing their music, independent of the funding and connections of a label, are access to studio space and connections with retailers (Arditi, 2014). These were some of the barriers that prevented artists from being successful outside the funding of major labels.

c.       Music Industry in the Now

Major labels still hold the power for physical distribution, but the internet lessened the demand for physical music. Music sales have been trending away from physical sales and towards streaming. Subscription streaming services more than offset declines in unit based sales of physical and digital music download products in the first half of 2016 (RIAA, 2017), so the industry is growing again after a good decade of financial losses every single quarter. An artist can make a spotify account and have their music made accessible to their huge base of listeners for a lot less time/money/effort than a record label telling you they can do it for a huge percent of your profit. Now obviously there’s still the issue of promotion; how can an artist that doesn’t have all the resources of a record label make any sales? Well there’s the internet for that.

The internet has done a lot in terms of empowering artists to not be forced into record deals anymore. Chance the rapper, Joey Bada$$, Macklemore, Tyler the Creator; these are all examples of artists that have gotten popular just as independent artists and arguably the internet had a major role in their roads to fame. I like this quote by Chance the Rapper; “Label deals suck, that’s just the truth of it. People believe you have to be discovered by a higher power, who hires you and takes a percentage, but in reality, you have to garner a fan base on your own.” Being discovered may have been relevant back in the 70’s, but nowadays he is absolutely right; being your own marketing division through social media is so easy to do and has such huge benefits for virtually no cost.

The two problems that artists faced in the 70’s of studio space and connections with retailers have been addressed and somewhat fixed by more modern technology. Nowadays, recording technology is cheap/small enough that artists can reasonably afford to have their own home studio to record their music (this also reduces pressure to finish an album not having to pay to use the recording equipment by the hour).

d.      Music Industry in the Future; Thriving as a Global Economy

 1.      Growth of Online Music; Streaming as a Vessel for Growth

 This consolidation of media that began 50 years ago, particularly music, was relevant before the internet because of the cost of distribution; making the CD’s/vinyls, packaging them, selling them to distributors, etc. These physical sales have been taken over by digital sales for the first time just this last year, and that trend is only going to continue with the rising popularity of music streaming services worldwide, growing almost 750% in the last five years (Goldman Sachs Research, 2017).

The building of legal online downloading platforms—the most notable of which being iTunes—was the start of the music industry’s long, arduous transition to online marketing and sales, this being later adapted into the subscription services we are most familiar with today (Spotify, Pandora, stuff like that). With changes like file-sharing and digital music, ownership of music is no longer as important as access to music. Therefore paying for services like Spotify, and having access to catalogs of millions of songs represents a better deal nowadays. Instead of paying per song by way of say digital downloads, you are paying per month to have access to virtually any song you can think of, and that’s why subscription-based streaming services are becoming so popular.

2.      Piracy’s Effect on the Industry as a Whole

Up until the 1990’s, the music industry was thriving in their ability to control the physical sale of music, but the rise in popularity of the internet led to an increase in file-sharing and direct-to-consumer distribution, but mostly just digital piracy, and along with it a decline in physical music sales. Launched in 1999, Napster was a site that combined a music-search function with a file-sharing system; a perfect combination for making music a vulnerable target for piracy.

Relating back to the main idea, these losses of sales mean artists aren’t making as much money as they should. Artists making less money potentially means their creativity is being throttled through mindsets like, “I’ll only make money if I make radio single-type songs”, or, “I’ll only make money if the label keeps liking what I’m making.” Money has a lot of power in this industry, but being that it is growing into a more and more digital-centric industry, its artists, as well as the product they produce, as a whole are being heavily affected by technological advancements.

The best way to combat piracy, however, is convenience. If you make it cheap enough/easy enough to legally purchase music legally, then piracy will decrease. It’s this great morality issue where people are forced to ask themselves, “how scummy am I for stealing this when I could easily pay the $X and just buy it?”

 III.                Making it big at the cost of creative freedoms

 a.       Creative control

 Creative control for artists has been a controversy since artist-label relationships have existed. As an artist, the way you make music is, in however small a way, influenced by the label you are signed to. Avoiding this issue can be done by staying an independent artist, but this can lead to other difficulties involving marketing and distribution. Artists have to decide how they want to be a part of the industry, through the three avenues of 1) signing to a major label, 2) signing to an independent label, or 3) being an independent artist. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, and everything depends on what the artist wants to get from their career.

This major label/indie label/independent decision for an artist will also have an impact on how they will be pressured to create music. Creative control is essential to an artist ("Creative Control issues for artists", 2012), but it will often result in a balancing act. Artists have to balance creative control with financial gain. Do artists want to be free to do what they want and basically have no money (independent), or do they want to give up creative control to some extent and have a lot of money (Major label route, or “selling out”). Independent artists make up one end of the spectrum, and it means there is no influence from a corporation in what you make; you do all your own recording, marketing, distribution; the whole nine yards. Signing to a major label is the opposite end of this metaphorical spectrum, where you will get all the funding you need at the cost of creative liberties in your musical style. Independent (“indie”) labels are anywhere in between really, depending on the individual artist or label. The independent labels usually aimed their releases at a small but devoted audience, not relying on mass sales for success, giving artists much more scope for experimentation and artistic freedom (Wikipedia; “Indie Labels”). So where you end up as an artist comes down to how you want to approach the music industry; are you in it for the money or for your own art?

Artists want to control as many aspects of their music as they can, but it’s easy to get sucked into the corporate structure as an artist. In addition to maintaining creative control, you also want to be a success, to have lots of people being exposed to your music, make money from it, and for people to value your creative vision as an artist as much as you do. The corporate structure can have a negative influence on maintaining your artistic vision.

b.      Physical Distribution Becomes Obsolete; Major Labels Lose Power

Although it seems to be growing more and more obsolete, the revenue from physical music sales, CDs, vinyls, etc., still makes up a third of total music sales in the U.S. Organizational influence on recorded music: a look at the independents, by Ulf Oesterle, explores the influence record labels exert on the content of popular music. Major labels control 82% of physical sales of music in the forms of recording, manufacturing, and distribution outlets. This was back in 2005 but that figure hasn’t changed much. They still control about 80% of music sales as of this year (McDonald, 2017).

Since physical sales still make up 30% of total revenue, however, it is still worth mentioning. When a CD sits on a store shelf, it has already incurred a number of costs that are incorporated into the price of the CD. The price of manufacturing and packaging each CD ranges from one to two dollars, depending on the number of CDs being printed and the type of packaging that comes with it (Hull, Hutchison, and Strasser). On top of the cost to manufacture the CD is the actual cost to get the CD from the manufacturer to the retailer. Most distributors charge about $1.70 for each CD shipped (Hull, Hutchison, and Strasser 255). Additionally, the retail stores have their own costs and profits that they work into the price of a CD. A standard CD is sold for $12 wholesale, but the retail price is often around $17; this means that approximately five dollars of the price of a CD is a surcharge for the ability to purchase a CD at a store (Hull, Hutchison, and Strasser). The largest part of the cost of a CD is in the gross margin of the record labels, which can be from $5.51 to $6.86 depending on the rate of artist royalties (Hull, Hutchison, and Strasser). Understanding the manufacturing and distribution costs that are figured into the price of a CD is important because they contribute to the market value of the CD (Arditi, 2014).

All these costs put into a CD are represented by what is called intermediaries, all the middle men that take their own percentages. This long list of intermediaries exists with physical distribution between an artist producing an album and that album being put on the shelf at a record store. But the internet has cut out a lot of those intermediaries through digital distribution. One file of the album can be copied and shared limitless times, while physical distribution involves making copies of the album on CD’s. Making CD’s costs a lot of money relative to…the zero cost of digital distribution. An artist can upload their album straight to an online distributor without any of the hassle involved with selling music as a physical unit. David Arditi talks about this concept of disintermediation in his article, iTunes: Breaking Barriers and Building Walls. The major labels, having controlled the means of production and distribution since forever, were being interrupted by the power of the internet to share, buy, and listen to music virtually.

In recorded music the artist or band made of several musicians is often thought of as the main vehicle that brings a song from an idea through to the final album version. In some cases this is true but there are often others influencing the final version of a song. Some roles are more active in influence than others on the creative process including artist and repertoire representatives, record producers and the CEO or owner of the label. So you, as an artist, will have to change the sound of your music, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot, to fit the mold that the label has in mind. Now of course there are a lot of labels to choose from and lots of molds that might line up with your sound a little better, but the fact of the matter is that labels exist to make money, and if they don’t see you as a potential source of profit, they will try to alter your sound through a bunch of different filters, be it the A&R division, producers, etc., or they just won’t want to sign you.

Maintaining your own vision under a major label is a bit tougher than it seems however. You also have to fit into the creative vision of the label—how they present themselves to the public through their advertising as well as the artists they sign—if you want their oodles of money. The ones in charge of retaining or sculpting a labels public image/sound is the Artists and Repertoire division.

Artists and Repertoire is the division of a record label or music publishing company that is responsible for talent scouting and overseeing the artistic development of recording artists and songwriters (Cook, 2005). These guys basically have the most influence over how much your sound will change between being signed to the label and getting your album released. They essentially represent the creative interest of the label and exist to pick and choose basically what they like and don’t like from your songs. So what that means is they might tell you to make some minor edits to a song or two, or they might tell you to cut a track or two. Sometimes it might be in your best interest to take the creative direction they’re giving you, but other times it can be seen as a hindrance on your vision–your integrity as an artist. This isn’t as much of a problem when you’re a superstar, however.

c.       Income Inequality in Music; The Rich get Richer

If you’re a big artist you can have more leverage to do what you want; you’re already well-known and you can sell albums pretty much regardless of what you put out. For example, anything Drake makes, good or so-so, sells over half a million copies in its first week (XXL, 2017; Billboard, 2017). Maybe you’re so big, you have your own record label (and this is a big list)–Jay Z with Roc Nation, Ray Charles with Tangerine Records, Led Zeppelin with Swan Song Records, Kanye West with GOOD Music (Diply, 2017)—then the only person you answer to in terms of creative direction is yourself. But the point is big artists have more room to makes demands in terms of creative control, essentially more room to fail, while small artists have to sort of conform to their label just to stay signed, essentially having no room to fail.

Those superstar artists listed previously make it pretty hard for smaller artists in terms of economic opportunity. But that’s pretty obvious; it probably doesn’t surprise you that the top 1% of artists earn 77% of the $2.8 billion in global revenue from all avenues of music sales (Resnikoff, 2014). The music industry in America has always reflected greater economic trends, meaning music revenue that goes directly to the top 1% of artists has doubled since the 1970’s (Vandiver, 2013), and now for every $1000 in music sold, the average musician makes $23.40.

Artists are therefore facing challenges economically as well as financially. Between labels telling them how to make their music and more successful artists earning wildly disproportionate amounts of revenue, it is difficult to make music into a living. But although it may seem like record labels have a lot of power over the artists they sign, that power is being called into question because of the internet.

Well-known artists are found all over this major-indie-independent spectrum, so there isn’t an end all be all solution for what will make you a success in this industry. Their experiences with the industry will naturally have differed–record deals are not all the same, labels are not all the same—but finding something that works well for them is likely the key to their success.

  IV.                Conclusion

Music is becoming a dominantly digital form of media, just like newspapers, television, or film have become in the last decade or so. Big labels had power over artists back in the day because physical sales made money and big labels pretty much had a monopoly on physical sale and distribution channels. But now that the internet cuts out the need for physical distribution (CD’s and the like are basically obsolete), artists can get rich and famous without the absolute necessity of a record deal. Because major labels are losing their pseudo-monopoly on selling music to things entities like streaming services and independent labels, that means artists have more diversity in their choices on how they want to succeed as artists. Creative control is something that an artist can actually control instead of the only feasible option is signing away your control to the record company.

References

18 Musicians Who Started Their Own Record Labels. (2017). Diply. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://diply.com/musicians-who-started-their-own-labels/4?publisher=reggae

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Arditi, D. (2014) iTunes: Breaking Barriers and Building Walls, Popular Music and Society, 37:4, 408-424, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2013.810849

Cook, Richard (2005). Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia. London: Penguin Books. p. 16. ISBN 0-141-00646-3.

Cool, D. (2015). Major vs. Indie: What really happens when you sign a record deal. Bandzoogle.com. Retrieved 26 March 2017, from https://bandzoogle.com/blog/major-vs-indie-what-really-happens-when-you-sign-a-record-deal

Drake's 'Nothing Was The Same' Passes 1 Million In Sales. (2017). Billboard. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/5778279/drakes-nothing-was-the-same-passes-1-million-in-sales

Drake's 'Views' Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200 Chart, Sets Streaming Record. (2017). Billboard. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/7358025/drake-views-debuts-at-no-1-on-billboard-200-charts-sets

Facts, U. (2016). Topic: Music Industry. www.statista.com. Retrieved 22 April 2017, from https://www.statista.com/topics/1639/music/

Goldman Sachs | Our Thinking - Music in the Air: Streaming Drives Industry Comeback. (2016). Goldman Sachs. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/music-in-the-air.html

Gopal, R. D., Bhattacharjee, S., & Sanders, G. L. (2006). Do artists benefit from online music sharing? The Journal of Business, 79(3), 1503–1533. http://doi.org/10.1086/500683

Here Are the First Week Sales Numbers for Drake's 'More Life' - XXL. (2017). XXL Mag. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/03/drake-first-week-sales-numbers-more-life/

Hull, Geoffrey P., Thomas W. Hutchison, and Richard Strasser. The Music Business and Recording Industry: Delivering Music in the 21st Century. 3rd edn. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

Independent record label. (2017). En.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_record_label

Oesterle, U. (2007). Organizational influence on recorded music: a look at the independents (Dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. 3267443.

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Resnikoff, P. (2014). The top 1% of artists earn 77% of recorded music income, study finds... Digital Music News. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/03/05/toponepercent/

Satariano, Adam. "SoundCloud Said to Near Deals With Record Labels."Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, 10 July 2014. Web. Accessed 27 Apr. 2016.

Shanley, M. (2017). Spotify monthly active user base reaches 100 million. Reuters. Retrieved 25 April 2017, from http://www.reuters.com/article/us-spotify-users-idUSKCN0Z61FM

 Vandiver, D. (2013). Rock and Roll, Economics, and Rebuilding the Middle Class. whitehouse.gov. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/06/12/rock-and-roll-economics-and-rebuilding-middle-class

Why Economies Of Scale Don't Matter In The Media Anymore | TechFruit. (2012). TechFruit. Retrieved 23 April 2017, from http://techfruit.com/2012/02/21/why-economies-of-scale-dont-matter-in-the-media-anymore/

[tzp1985-blog]

Separation of Mankind- My theory has proven itself that it is true. Technology as great as it is, ( Which honestly I don’t see any value to it.) has separated mankind in an unprecedented amount of greatness. It is such vastness that our awareness to our surroundings is at the level of I don’t care, let me watch my cat videos. I will conclude with this statement. You do you, you are the only one who can control the environment to which you are surrounded. The connection between human to human is something that is so powerful that satan trembles at the thought of us communicating. When a cell phone is supposed to be for talking but nobody ever calls and years and years bypasses till something catastrophic happens to the individual filling themselves with regrets and I should of and could of and wished sears the mind of “compassionate” person. Regrets is for one day and we are back it again. I one day dream of such technological advancement that somebody can create to wipe out everything and send us to where we are forced to communicate and work cohesively together like we were meant to from the examples of our forefathers. If that is to be an EMP, to send a blast of waves to destroy every technology, then I would rather take that then being separated in a room enclosed by the walls communicating through a device that I could just easily call but yet it’s not used for that. God created us mankind to not be separated as individual but to work in harmony and unite and be the most powerful infrastructure to those who are to come into the future sharing our genetic pool of genes. We literally are here on this earth to my acknowledgement as making the next generation better and fit for their survival as they also lay the path for the next generation and so on, making the human race not ever to be extinct. We were never to be enslaved by money, greed, power, fame, and the falsifying of greatness to where we all know who can give us the unimaginable fake power to rise above this world as the individual. We were never to be ruled by the 8 richest people on the planet who own more than half of this world. Which is this very reason to the squelching of the infrastructure of our society and putting us to where one can’t even provide the basis of our needs to civilization of mankind. It’s all because of the addiction to power and the infuriating complexity that one has when it’s too “powerful” and has such vastness of money that we can’t see where it ends, ending our civilization due to a couple man who won’t share the wealth. Therefor money is purely evil and damning to the human race. We were meant to share, commute, communicate, build together, a community that was in the past to where all shared and united and had different skills and traits. A town was normal seeing children run around and play and explore. While a sweet old grandma walked around the neighborhood leaving her house unlocked to give out cookies to her neighbors. Guns were kept to use for hunting season and not for each other due to fear and lack of trust. I guess there is a reason for me to always be daydreaming and reminiscing of my 90s years. Where computer was at the beginning stage and internet wasn’t even a thought but trying to not die during the Oregon trail as the teacher was trying to show us how to use this amazing box that displayed black and green computer style font. Looking out the bedroom window and seeing the kids play during a hot summer day as laughter was echoed bouncing off the perfect manicured houses. Grass was green and a man was cooking burgers on the fancy new red grill he got from Walmart with nice cold real cane sugar coke cola in a glass small bottle in his other hand. His wife came out with her sun dress as she held a pitcher of lemon tea getting ready to have lunch outside. Movie nights was inside a tent as junk food and popcorn was mixed in a bowl watching some Scooby- Doo cartoons. Then falling asleep wondering what our purpose was on this planet and staring into the stars and quickly making a wish from seeing a shooting star. It was a life that I dreamed of never thinking that our civilization would be as separated as it is now. Technology has made me learn so much. It’s so bad and at the same time it’s good in the essence of how we use it. I use it to research and watch tons of educational videos and documentaries. I have the ability to question anything, make a theory, research it, and display it for the society to share my ideas and thoughts. I am able to research on whatever my heart desires at that very moment. We literally carry our phones with us and I get this dirty feeling that we don’t use it for the purposes of what it can benefit with this world or for this world and for each other. I love it for the purely educational part of it. Instead crawling into a library and reading the encyclopedia which I miss at times. But carrying just 1 or 2 is pretty heavy. Now Wikipedia came into my life and now I can learn on whatever topic I wish to learn. We honestly have the world of information in the palm of our hands. I want to learn how to build a space ship. Well it requires a lot of money but it’s definitely possible. I can go as far as cooking a fancy meal, to rebuilding my engine of my car, to creating music using several apps on my phone. I can travel and visit countries and see what it’s like to see the Eiffel tower from the streets using google maps. I can create a program, and learn how to paint and create a master piece. I can make my photography look like the exact replica of a famous person buy downloading a couple apps on my iPhone. I don’t need a fancy camera because my iPhone has amazing camera built right into it. I can drive for 6 hours and listen to books through audiobook. I can go anywhere using google map. I have unlimited amount of movies that I can stream and unlimited amount of music that I can listen to. So technology is beyond powerful but at the same time it is just as powerfully dangerous. It is easy to seclude ourselves and be wrapped in our bubble world and get distracted by the world which we build through our entertainment that is easily accessible. We have no assessment or acknowledgement to what surrounds us. Our construct of the world is so thick and far down into our perception that even if there was to be something catastrophic, our response would be a typical shrug and meh. It’s not affecting me so why should I even bother to care. But this would definitely get a lot of likes on YouTube and I would so totally get 2 million views so I won’t help the person getting beat but I will record it. We are extremely desensitize to the typical normal responsiveness when something is damaged at a traumatic level by a person or to a person. Back then we would immediately call the police and help the person in need. Today we are so sick in the head that we are first going to record the event and watch the person die then helping the person. On the emotional level in the categorical imperative, we are merely becoming less on the scale of being mammal for the food chain. In the sense of education and how are brains are. I don’t know about you but I think ants are far better into surviving their species then we are. I will end it with this. We will be the cause of the our extension. Your children in the future won’t be able to provide the basic needs of food, shelter, and water because it would only be targeted for the few of 1% percent who can afford any of the basic life essentials. But the thought of oh, it’s not affecting me so why should I care, will lead you, you, yourself to death. Keep ignoring as the pot is rising up in heat. Your like a frog sitting in a pot thinking oh it’s not affecting me, when you’re in a pot boiling yourself to death saying, it’s not affecting me. This would be the very reason to our extinction, is pure blissful ignorance and our bubble of our perception to the existence of what is out there and what is not. The walls with weather deterioration and mother nature at work will fall down. You will then finally see and your words will be as such. How did this come to be? It will be the same questions of how did so many millions of Jews die echoing into our future. I guess we are damned forever to repeat the past of our forefathers. Never changing but repeating until millions of lives are at stake for self-destruction and death. Does it really have to take for those to wake up to see what is going on around them, death of innocent people. Is death truly what wakes us up to see what our society is leading to? Label me as a conspiracy theorist. But I label myself as just bringing awareness to what happening around us. I am just amazed on how Ants can always surpass itself to continuously lead their race from generations to generations and I can’t even see if we will make it as a species in 20 – 50 years. The answer is always going to be admitting what’s wrong. Then we have to do something about it. Then we can rise up and create a world where humans can have the basic needs of life. Food, water, and shelter and clothes on our backs. But you do you. I will do me by in forming others. I won’t give up! Wake up!

[politicalfilth-blog]

CES 2017 The Machines Are Taking Over & Car Insurance Is A Thing Of The Past.

We Are Change

The 2017 Consumer electronics show.  

CES 2015 – the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Mercedes-Benz presents the F 015 Luxury in Motion concept vehicle. CREDIT mercedes-benz.com

Via. (Danny Quest)

It’s no secret that that machines are slowly taking over our lives.  The Internet of things is connecting everything and everyone to the world wide web, advances in memory, processing and wireless communication technology over the past decade or so has completely revolutionized the way we all go about our daily lives. Given the exponential nature of technology it is not a stretch of imagination to consider all the ways in which tech. will affect our lives in the near future. The Consumer Electronics Show; is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association. Held January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, with an annual Attendance ?of about 165,000 people, CES  was once the place to play and see the newest video games, has slowly morphed into the place to go to see the latest advances in technologies that will come into the market over the next  few years.  Honestly it would be impossible for me to describe everything at CES, everything can be found from Cars that park in your living room, to hairbrushes that keep brushing statistics like how many hairs were broken while brushing. Every major company is in attendance and so far today being the second day of the conference we have seen amazing presentations from companies like Xiaomi,  Toyota, Honda, LG, Chrysler, Nissan,Volkswagen, and break-out sensation that is poised to challenge Tesla’s dominance of the electric car market, Faraday Future. The main buzz words you will hear in all of the various auto-maker’s presentations are connected and autonomy, and after watching most of them a few things particularly about the auto-industry becomes clear, we are in the middle of an automotive renaissance, what we know of as ‘driving’ will not exist in 50 years, the future is happening now and nothing do is going to stop it.

 Humans do not generally like change and there is no doubt that the world is changing, and changing faster then we can even keep up with. I cannot possibly mention a quarter of the amazing innovations that have been presented in just first two days of CES 2017 but I highly recommend that everyone takes the time to check out the full live stream from CNET – HERE.

For many this level of innovation can be very uncomfortable, and rightly so, not only can innovation be dangerous, it also invokes one of our most primal fears, that which we do not know, people have always feared what they do not understand.  That’s why I recommend that you familiarize yourself with these technologies, products, and their dangers because their implications show more big changes are coming our way.

Privacy is a thing of the past every thing will be listening.

Seems that all future products have a microphone attached to them, our products will slowly all be connected together with networks and bio-metrics, start your oven by telling your car or phone to do it while talking to a friend or family member on a heads up display while being driven home by an autonomous vehicle. This is the future the industry is projecting, in one concept from Hyundai your autonomous car even becomes a part of your homes furniture.

A few of the things that come out of all that we have seen so far at CES 2017 is that advancement is not slowing down, in fact many analyst will say that it’s speeding up, we are becoming ever increasingly connected to each other and to our things, advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous vehicles  are approaching fast. This notion of a technological renaissance is nothing new both the internet and cell phones have altered the way that our society works. Those things are tiny steps compared to the advancements we will see in the next decade. This is both exciting and terrifying, memories of Skynet, the Dynocorp take over depicted in science fiction is quickly becoming an apparent reality, as human ingenuity is out paced by technological innovation. Concepts like cashless currencies and the notion that seemly every thing in our houses listening to us is appalling to the liberty minded, given that governments and authorities are already using connected devices to spy and convict us of crimes, sometimes with out a warrant, as was the case with Stingray technology and the recent case of  Amazon’s Echo built upon the voice search capability of Android’s ‘Ok Google’ and Apple’s Siri and turned it into a device that is capable of doing everything from answering questions to turning on your on your air conditioner. However, like all beneficial technology, when the government gets involved, this useful household item is converted into a spying machine for the surveillance state. In a seemingly unprecedented case out of Bentonville, Arkansas, the latest example of how police can use your technology against you is coming to fruition. Investigators in Bentonville have filed search warrants with Amazon, requesting the recordings made on a man’s Echo device between November 21 and November 22, 2015. The recordings belong to James A. Bates, who was charged with murder after a man was strangled to death in a hot tub.

According to CNET, while investigating, police noticed the Echo in the kitchen and pointed out that the music playing in the home could have been voice activated through the device. While the Echo records only after hearing the wake word, police are hoping that ambient noise or background chatter could have accidentally triggered the device, leading to some more clues.

“It is believed that these records are retained by Amazon.com and that they are evidence related to the case under investigation,” police wrote in the search warrant. 

http://wearechange.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Vegas-electronics-show-highlights-fears-over-gadget-hacks.mp4

Could car insurance disappear?

Besides for the obvious threats of hacking and monitoring, there is a bright side of technology, our lives will be easier, we will have more time for leisure as we can finish our work while being driven to our destination, robots will slowly inevitably take over our daily chores, opening up even more time for us to be productive or introspective. Bad driving will be eliminated by 2025 and car insurance costs will plummet, or be non-existent. Driverless cars could dominate the roads in just five years. If there are no accidents, will we even need car insurance? Currently 71% of all car insurance claims result from a vehicle reversing badly, and 23% from parking incidents. Both are expected to be eliminated on roads with driverless cars.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

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from We Are Change http://wearechange.org/ces-2017-machines-taking-car-insurance-thing-past/

[lodelss]

The New Scabs: Stars Who Cross the Picket Line

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | February 2019 | 10 minutes (2,439 words)

“Maroon 5 is just Red Hot Chili Peppers for virgins.” “This is the Fyre Festival of halftime shows.” “Anyone else think Adam Levine looks like an Ed Hardy T-shirt?” The Super Bowl halftime show was worth it for the social media stream it kicked off; otherwise, it was notable only for the fact that Maroon 5 (along with Big Boi and Travis Scott) turned up at all when so many others (Rihanna and Pink and Cardi B) turned the gig down. “I got to sacrifice a lot of money to perform,” Cardi B said. “But there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.” Though she ended up appearing in a Pepsi commercial anyway, Cardi’s heart seemed to be in the right place, which is to say the place where protesting injustice is an obligation rather than a choice (of her other appearances around the Super Bowl, she said, “if the NFL could benefit off from us, then I’m going to benefit off y’all”). The man she was referring to was, of course, quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest systemic oppression in America and has gone unsigned since opting out of his contract. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” the ex-San Francisco 49er said. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way.”

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” wrote George Orwell in the 1946 essay, Why I Write. By refusing to perform at the Super Bowl, Cardi B and her peers were in fact performing two acts: acknowledging that as artists they have political power, and using that political power to support Kaepernick’s cause. By replacing them, Adam Levine did the opposite (while claiming to do nothing at all): “we are going to keep on doing what we do, hopefully without becoming politicians to make people understand, ‘We got you.'” The mistake Maroon 5’s frontman made was assuming he could isolate art from politics, which is impossible, particularly in this case — the Super Bowl was already infused with political turmoil, and to negate that was to undercut its significance. Kaepernick’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, would have preferred for Levine to be open about his position. “If you’re going to cross this ideological or intellectual picket line, then own it, and Adam Levine certainly isn’t owning it,” he said. “In fact, if anything, it’s a cop out when you start talking about, ‘I’m not a politician, I’m just doing the music.’ Most of the musicians who have any kind of consciousness whatsoever understand what’s going on here.”

By using “picket line” — a term traditionally associated with labor unions — Geragos further established the Super Bowl and its halftime show as a locus of political action. Essentially he was calling Levine a latter-day scab, an opportunist subverting others’ attempts to bring about change. Though the epithet dates back to the 18th century, when “scab” referred to workers who refused to join unions, by the next century it was used to designate workers who crossed a strike’s picket line. “Just as a scab is a physical lesion,” wrote Stephanie Smith in Household Words, “the strikebreaking scab disfigures the social body of labor — both the solidarity of workers and the dignity of work.” The musicians who refused to play the Super Bowl were expressing solidarity with Kaepernick — and the people of color on whose behalf he is protesting — and preserving the dignity of work. By crossing that invisible picket line, Levine not only broke solidarity but, paradoxically, sacrificed the dignity of work in the name of his own career.

* * *

That anyone in entertainment would feign political neutrality in the current climate is jarring enough, but the move further implies a glaring ignorance of the industry’s history. Nowhere was the politics of celebrity more literal than in Hollywood during the 1940s and ’50s. At that time, the infamous Hollywood blacklist meant that any whiff of Communism threatened your job. Self-protection required coming clean and informing on others to the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC), but a group of artists dubbed “The Hollywood Ten” protested by refusing to testify. Director Elia Kazan, however, gave HUAC eight names in 1952, helping to bury the careers of actors Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith and playwright Clifford Odets and securing his own. “I said I’d hated the Communists for many years and didn’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them,” he recalled in his memoir. But Kazan writes in the negative, as though he wasn’t actively promoting his personal cause. What he was really doing was expressing the power of his own politics in order to support his own work. His solidarity was with himself alone.

Nearly 50 years after he named names, in 1999, Kazan was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. Actors like Nick Nolte and Amy Madigan disagreed with his actions and thus refused to applaud his art, but others, including Warren Beatty and Meryl Streep, seemed able to divorce the two. “I never discussed it with Warren, but I believe we were both standing for the same reason — out of regard for the creativity,” George Stevens, Jr. wrote in Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. But Kazan’s creativity came at the expense of others’ creativity; to celebrate him was to celebrate the truncated careers he cut short to allow his own to thrive. This cognitive dissonance appeared, for some, to be resolved by time. Kazan was 89, how long were we supposed to hold his politics against him?

It’s funny that we never ask how long we should hold up someone’s work; our cultural memory favors the art object over the lives of the artists who make it — and their politics. Hollywood’s reaction to Kazan is reminiscent of its reaction to Roman Polanski, who was accused of drugging and pled guilty to raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 before fleeing the States (and his sentence). In 2009, more than 100 actors and filmmakers signed a petition to release Polanski after he was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant. At the time, Debra Winger, of all people, said, “We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.” The consensus was that he had served his time. The past had therefore eaten up his offense, leaving behind only his art, as though this alone defined him. And even where it didn’t, it clearly did. “He’s now happily married; he has two children,” is how Sigourney Weaver explained last year why she had worked with him and would continue to. She believed she was listening to his victim by advancing “with understanding and compassion.”

Woody Allen, even more than Polanski, has been eclipsed by his work. Actors who align with him are aligning with the politics of privileging his creative output, as though such a thing existed on its own. “There are directors, producers and men of power who have for decades been awarded and applauded for their highly regarded work by both this industry and moviegoers alike,” Kate Winslet, who appeared in Allen’s Wonder Wheel in 2017, said in apology last year. “The message we received for years was that it was the highest compliment to be offered roles by these men.” The year prior, when asked if the allegations against Allen gave her pause, Winslet had said: “Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.” Kristen Stewart took a similar work-first approach when discussing why she appeared in Allen’s 2016 film, Café Society: “The experience of making the movie was so outside of that, it was fruitful for [me and co-star Jesse Eisenberg] to go on with it.” What this did was to elevate the work above all else, which delivered the message that the voices of regular women were secondary to the voices of creative men.

It’s impossible for one artist to work with another without their collaboration being informed by the politics of both parties. Yet Rami Malek seemed to believe he could circumvent this fact while working with director Bryan Singer — a man accused of assaulting multiple teen boys — on the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. When he was first asked about Singer at the Golden Globes, Malek responded: “There’s only one thing we needed to do, and that was to celebrate Freddie Mercury.” He claimed he didn’t know about the allegations, that he was only in it for the work. Yet implicit in the work was Singer’s labor, Singer himself. Despite his replacement by Dexter Fletcher, his presence continues to define the film. The name on Bohemian continues to be his, the accolades it receives go to him (the Baftas excepted). Every time Malek refuses to address the controversy around Singer, he chooses not to confront the realities of child abuse; and every time he appears on screen under Singer’s name, his work is a reflection of that.

Rami Malek’s stance aligns with another common myth about artists, which is that they can cast aside politics to serve the public. In the early 1980’s, the United Nations called for a boycott of South Africa over apartheid, but more than fifty musicians — including Tina Turner, Curtis Mayfield, and Isaac Hayes — ignored it. “If the people didn’t want us there, they wouldn’t come to see the shows,” said Millie Jackson. What she did not acknowledge was that performing there implied she approved of how the ruling government of South Africa was treating its people — or at least, that she didn’t actively oppose it — and that she was willing to take part in its economy and contribute to the  bank balance of a problematic government. Ten years later, blue-collar-adjacent rocker Bruce Springsteen crossed the picket line set up by a number of Tacoma, Washington, city employee unions, explaining, “I know a lot of you folks came a long way to be here tonight, so I got a commitment to be on this stage.” Once again, here was a musician who, rather than refusing to contribute his labor in solidarity with the exploited labor of others, was serving the city that oppressed them. More than the words in his songs, his actions spoke to his real allegiances.

During a writers’ strike in 2007, a string of TV hosts — from Ellen DeGeneres to Jay Leno to Jon Stewart — eventually crossed the picket line, some more sheepishly than others, with variations on the “show must go on” excuse. “It’s really hard to have to deal with where they are and where I am,” DeGeneres said, “because I’m kinda caught in the middle.” This defense could be mistaken for selflessness — she is sacrificing her own petty problems for the greater good — if it weren’t for the fact that the audience also occupies the oppressed space she upheld by performing. At least Stewart, who was one of the least comfortable crossing the picket line, used his platform to further the cause of the writers by addressing their strike on air. Still, it’s hard to sympathize when you realize, around the same time, the much less powerful Steve Carell held up taping of The Office because he refused to be a scab. Each extra moment of discomfort he conveyed to the network, each bit of pay he lost, meant more leverage afforded to the striker.

* * *

Just as the artist is not static, neither are their politics, and just as vital as acknowledging one’s alliances is acknowledging one’s changes. Last year, Natalie Portman became one of the few celebrities to openly regret signing the aforementioned Polanski petition. “We lived in a different world, and that doesn’t excuse anything,” she said. “But you can have your eyes opened and completely change the way you want to live. My eyes were not open.” Polanski was not the topic du jour, but her voice was an important reminder that as a culture we had failed to hold him to account. In a similar vein, though they could not undo working with Woody Allen, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, and Griffin Newman made amends by donating their paychecks to nonprofits like RAINN. “I learned conclusively that I cannot put my career over my morals again,” Newman said. Other artists, as Portman alluded to, have opened their eyes and are willing to learn and to admit their fallibility. Though Lorde had planned to perform in Israel, she ended up changing her mind — joining fellow boycotters Elvis Costello and Lauryn Hill — after two women wrote to her about the oppression within the country, saying, “we believe that an economic, intellectual and artistic boycott is an effective way of speaking out against these crimes.” So she spoke instead of singing, aware that in this instance her voice was stronger in that act.

Still others have literally rewritten history, proving their beliefs are so fierce that they are willing to erase their own art in the name of their politics. Michelle Williams offered to work for free in 2017 to reshoot a number of scenes for All The Money In The World with Christopher Plummer after sexual assault allegations emerged about her former co-star Kevin Spacey. “A movie is less important than a human life,” she explained at the time. This is the active approach to change, which eclipses more passive sartorial gestures like the blackout at the Golden Globes. “For years, we’ve sold these awards shows as women, with our gowns and colors and our beautiful faces and our glamour,” Time’s Up co-founder Eva Longoria said. “This time the industry can’t expect us to go up and twirl around.” It was a toothless rebellion, an objection in accessory form which fit seamlessly into the system which had been exposed in all its corruption.

More effective is direct action, such as Frances McDormand using her Oscar speech to advocate for “inclusion riders” and musicians spurning the Super Bowl to support people of color or Trump’s inauguration to reject everything he represents. Singer Rebecca Ferguson, runner up on The X Factor UK in 2010, was one of the few musicians who said she would accept an invitation to the latter — if she could perform “Strange Fruit,” the 1939 protest song about racism in America. “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,” she would sing, “Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Trump chose the Great Talladega College Tornado Marching Band instead.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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