This morning I was on WNPR’s “Where We Live,” hosted by John Dankosky, to talk about issues of social behavior and how new media affect it. You can listen from their site or download the MP3. The first 20 minutes are devoted to Dick Meyer discussing his new Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium
This is awesome: redeeming not only (as Boing Gadgets notes) Feist from repetitive iPod commercials, but Sesame Street from small red monsters that start with the letter E.
I’m sometimes put in the position of being asked by those in traditional media institutions what they can do to defend against the incursions of the internet. It’s rarely put exactly like that, but something similar. I try not to get too excited, because where they (rightly) see a potential threat, I see a lot of opportunities. And, to avoid sounding like a complete nut job, it’s always nice when you can point at institutions doing it right. The New York Times and the BBC, for example, have continually attempted to innovate their way into networked media. Some of these attempts have failed, naturally, but they have managed to demonstrate that they are not just relevant, but essential to the media ecosystem.
I think it would be fair to say that I was a skeptic of the Bryant Park Project when it started up. Inherent to any project that tries to make the image of an organization more hip, it smacked of trying too hard. After all, NPR has a market psychographic, and they should stick to it. Despite this skepticism, I found myself listening to the show on my commutes up to Connecticut, and found it engaging, amusing, and enlightening. As a radio show, it succeeded brilliantly, I think, at reaching a demographic that was on the edge of NPR already—a group of educated GenXers who won’t be dead (mostly) in the next decade. That they jumped into social media with both feet, allowing it to pervade their program without the programming being necessarily about social media, made it a great example to bring up when people asked the “what to do?” question: go see what BPP is doing.
Unfortunately, it looks like BPP won’t be doing much of anything as of next month, which is really a shame. As the 200+ comments on this posting suggest, BPP had assembled a loyal and interested following. They also suggest that the following was deeper than it might have been wide, but there is no way to know this. Given another year, I suspect that BPP would have brought more non-NPR listeners into the fold; it’s too bad we won’t get to see that happen.
On a personal note, I feel guilty now for not listening. Now that it’s summer, I’m not making the commute up to school, and I generally don’t listen to talk radio while I’m working (too distracting). But I’ll make an exception for the rest of the month, listening to the last of their shows.
Brilliant talk by Clay Shirky:
Don’t have time to tag your own walls? Outsource it!
Send a Message is an interesting site that allows you to dictate a message to be spray-painted on the Palestinian wall. Full employment for Palestinian graffiti artists. Besides, remember back when the Berlin Wall came down and Bloomingdale’s was selling chunks? Maybe in a few hundred years, when they knock down this one, it some part of your message can sit in someone’s living room.
Regardless of which side of the wall you sit on, it is hard not to appreciate this as an interesting way to call global attention to an issue on a person-to-person basis.
(Via Josh Spear.)
Pew has another report out suggesting that Daily Show viewers are the most knowledgeable about current affairs. Viewers of the show tend (54%) to be in the “high knowledge” group, whereas only 35% of the general public are. I’m a little surprised at how low the numbers are across the board. I took the quiz and found the questions to be pretty basic, despite not being much of a news junkie. Most of my news these days is from (a) NPR during my commute, (b) the Daily Show, when I can catch it, or© random news items on Digg.
In one of my classes a few weeks back we talked about the role of Daily Show, and whether it is humorous to those who are not aware of the day’s news. I contend that it is—that most viewers are not just going there to be amused, but to be informed. Others in the class argued that the humor was predicated on already having a good idea of the days stories. I thought about doing a self-experiment and avoiding the news altogether, except for the Daily Show, but that is far easier said than done. I managed to mostly remain unaware while in Barcelona a few weeks ago, but in my daily routine, I run into too many latent sources of news.
Nonetheless, I think it would be an interesting study. What are the uses and gratifications of the Daily Show to those who watch with high news context, as opposed to those who watch with low news context?
The media has discovered Second Life in a big way. So, I’m chatting with people about it. Here is an article in the New Haven Register (but I do have land!), and below is a piece for the local NBC affiliate. Camera adds 100 pounds, as they say. Oh, wait, they don’t say that?