I’m fairly good at associating the U.S. presidents of my lifetime with the decades in which they were in office. But, I find myself unhinged in time when it comes to the late night talkshow hosts. I am constantly surprised upon hearing, say, how long Leno has been on.
You too? Let’s find out. Here’s a quiz. (All answers authenticated by the experts at Wikipedia.)
Year Steve Allen started The Tonight Show. 1954
Year Jack Paar took over. 1957
Start and end years of Johnny Carson’s hosting of The Tonight Show. 1962-1992
When did Carson move the show from NY to Hollywood?. 1972
What year did the Tomorrow Show (which came on after the Tonight Show) start? 1973.
During what years did the Dick Cavett Show run on ABC as a late night show?Decemver 29 1969-Jan 1 1975, so we’ll accept 1970-1974 as accurate.
What year did Late Night with Letterman start?1982
Whom did Letterman replace? That is, who had been the host of the Tomorrow Show? Tom Snyder.
Who was host of The Tonight Show during most of the years that The Arsenio Hall Show was on? Carson. The Arenio show ran 1989-1994. Woo-woo!
Who was President during the year that Jay Leno first took over The Tonight Show? Clinton’s first year was 1993
When did Conan O’Brien take over Letterman’s Late Night? 1993
What year did Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show begin? 2003
Extra Credit
What road served as a bizarre euphemism for “penis,” expressing a ritualized fear of castration, on Carson’s Tonight Show ? Slauson. Carson would give directions that included the line “Go to the Slauson Cutoff ,” followed by the audience co-recitation of “Cut off your slauson.” Hilarious.
What object did Ed Ames accidentally turn into a surrogate penis, resulting in the longest laugh in Tonight Show history? In 1965, he threw a hatchet that hit a target in the shape of man, landing in the man’s crotch. Hilarious.
Do we sense a disturbingly Freudian pattern here? Do trains enter tunnels?
Who played the non-endearing but frequent guest on the Tonight Show who went by the name “Aunt Blabby”? Carson. She was old, hard of hearing, possibly senile, nasty, and not funny.
What game show host had a late night talk show on a major network for a season? Pat “Wheel of Fortune” Sajak, on CBS, 1989-1990
What did Merv Griffin create that is probably known by the most people?The Jeopardy “waiting for an answer” theme music
Name the funniest sidekick on any late night talk show? Andy Richter
Have you ever seen a complete episode of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show? No.
[Note that I've removed all the distributed "in my opinion"s from the following, and instead have concentrated them in this introductory paragraph. The following expresses nothing but my opinion:]
Tonight is the season finale of Mad Men, a show that I think has gone from good to great because it has outlived its premise.
Shows that start out with a strong premise often need a couple of seasons to find their way past it. The Sopranos, for example, initially revolved around the cute premise that a mob boss would have mother issues that drove him into analysis. The Sopranos was good from the beginning, but not because of the premise: the acting was amazing, the cast was large, the relationships were complex. It took a season or two for the Sopranos to develop the tragic sense that made its basic comedy so deep. Dexter likewise has gotten better (unevenly) as the starkness of the premise (decent guy except he has to kill people) has been surrounded by less extreme human drama. The same for the Mary Tyler Moore Show (a working girl who is ok with being single) and M*A*S*H (doctors kept sane by humor in an absurd foreign war).
Now, it may well be that what’s really happening is that it takes a couple of seasons for the relationships to develop that deepen a show. If the best of television has gotten more complex over time (as Steven Johnson argues in Everything Bad is Good for You), then the same is true within a series as well as across all series. TV series let us tell (in Steve’s words) 100-hour stories, and the first set of hours are necessarily not as developed as the later sets. During those early sets, the show relies more on its premise.
For me, Mad Men started out as a totally enjoyable series that focused on reminding us through mores and decor what life in the 1950s was really like. That first season was all about the wall art and the martini lunches. You could almost hear the writers’ meetings in which they’d say things like, “Oooh, you know what would be really cool? Let’s have an embarrassingly pretentious ‘bohemian’ ad guy who dates a black woman to make a statement,” or “Let’s make sure that all the offices have bars in them.” Now in its fourth season, there are plenty of period references, but the show is less about them. It’s about an amazing ensemble grappling with timeless issues within the constraints of their era. It’s blown way past its original inspiration. And that is awesome
[SPOILER ALERT for those who have not seen Season One:] My once concern is the series’ continued fascination with Don’s double identity. In the original idea for the show, that might have been the kicker that sold it to the TV executives: “So you have a show set in the 1950s as they really were. But what’s it about? What happens?” The fact that Don stole his identity long ago and is at risk of being discovered might have sounded like a good answer. But by now for me it’s a melodramatic contrivance that’s out of place in the series’ genuine drama.
The identity theft has shown up in this season. I’m afraid that the finale will come back to that as the cliffhanger. If so, it’s too bad. We don’t need it. There are enough cliffs already; this season has been about the humiliation and cleansing of Don Draper, a long night that is not yet over. Don Draper is fascinating enough without the silly dual identity backstory.
BTW, have I mentioned how much I love the acting? Even January Jones (Betty) is having a good year, perhaps because she’s out of the dramatic center and thus doesn’t have to try to round her character out to a full three dimensions. Every one of the rest of the women are phenomenal, expressing so much nuance and life within and through the limited social roles they are allowed to play — which is itself a heartbreakingly true reflection on the times. And I have to say that Don and Betty’s daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) is amazing. I don’t know how tonight’s episode will wrap up the season, but I do know that we will be watching this phenomenally gifted 12 year old for the rest of our lives.
Christian Sandvig is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “The Television Cannot Be Revolutionized.” [NOTE: I am live-blogging, making mistakes, getting things wrong, leaving things out, not spellpchecking. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK and do not assume this is an accurate reflection of Christian's talk.]
He begins by crediting Gil Scott Heron for the title. He says he’s looking for a research agenda for studying TV, especially three bottlenecks: distribution, search, and genre.
He talks about a 1995 effort to create a cable channel (The Puppy Channel, then Channemals) that was all cute animals all the time. The creator’s market research showed it would capture a respectable 0.1% of the US TV market. So, he went to Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and Ted Turner, but they thought it was “too weird” an idea for cable. He found it’d cost $17M to distribute it himself.
So, says Christian, the creator launched ThePuppyChannel.com. no one is watching it, but people are watching cute animals on YouTube, etc. The bottleneck has been broken, but it still looks like 1995. E.g., YouTube has a Rentals beta and puts ads everywhere. “YouTube is behaving like a television network and not like a tube for you.” The person behind the recent redesign (Margaret Stewart) of YouTube said “We want you to go into passive mode, sit back, and watch.” We used to think that the Net and Net TV were about interactivity.
TV is important, Christian says. A Ball State U study in 2009 looked at what Americans spend their time doing with media. 100% of people use the phone every day. People use video about 6 hours a day in the US. (This includes video on any device.) About 2/3 of views were on YouTube last year. Analysts say YouTube loses money, but Hulu is profitable. One possible conclusion: Dump amateur content.
In an essay, Christian and a colleague compared Life Magazine and You Tube. Life launched as pioneering photo-journalism. Is YouTube becoming like Life magazine?
Christian shows the power law distribution. What would be the ideal distribution, he asks. We don’t want a single producer of media. We don’t want only a long tail because then none of us share any single media content; that would be complete fragmentation. We don’t want only the head, because that’s media concentration, although it would at least give us enough shared experience to have a culture. In fact, says Christian, we shouldn’t be thinking simply about the shape of the curve. If we were talking about monetary income curves, we’d want to do a mobility analysis: How hard is it to move up the curve? It’s not so much the shape as whether you can move up it, he says.
“We seem to be in the process of building two Internets, Christian says, “which is worrying.” Getting your baby video up on YouTube is easy, and you don’t even need YouTube to do it. But, if you want to show the Olympics, NBC has to do a deal with a Net intermediary; if you tried to do it from the server under your desk, it wouldn’t work. History break: Adorno was exercised by the making industrial of culture via things like expensive, complex broadcast studios; the same is happening with the Net because we need expensive, complex hosting/edge-caching services.
A difference between broadcast and Net media: The head of the curve was purposefully built for TV, but emerged for the Net. TV started out with only local audiences because there were no national networks. After a lot of investment and lobbying, after 1962 we have a national TV system, built to satisfy advertisers.
The Net is supposed to be a cheaper form of distribution than TV. Is this true? If you use Amazon Web Services to distribute a video to a million people, is it cheaper than TV? It’s a hard comparison because TV bundles in the costs of building a market. So compare putting on a late-night one-minute infomercial. The costs are surprisingly similar.
Christian asks why more people aren’t doing research on this and on mobility. In part, he thinks, this is because of the way university departments are structured; they don’t always have people combine expertise in media and Net infrastructure.
Second bottleneck: Search. Videos become popular through being featured on distribution home pages, and on recommender systems. Chris Anderson says recommender systems help you find unpopular results. But there’s no reason for a system to design their algorithms that way, instead of promoting more popular systems. These systems look at things like featured videos (which can be paid placements). Steven Wittens in 2009 found that the algorithm tends to match view counts: If you look at a video, it will recommend other videos with the same or greater number of views.
Finally, the third bottleneck: Genre. How do unpopular things become popular? So much on YouTube apes the conventions of broadcast genres. Parodies of television sitcoms. Parodies of newscasts. Does mobility depend on adopting broadcast genres? Is YouTube just the A&R of the tv industry, externalizing the development of new talent?
Christian says he’s surprised that television seems to be going backwards. Distribution: He’s looking for ways to study this. And, he says, policy issues depend on this as well. E.g., Princeton has a distributed, p2p edge-caching system, sans Akamai. Search: See Frank Pasquale, Christian says. Search: Maybe vlogging, video game commentary, or animal videos are the new genre.
Q: Google says it puts user experience first. Are they betraying that at YouTube?Are they serving users by driving them to popular videos?
A: It’s hard, because people’s wants can be trained. Their search algorithms may reinforce popularity.
Q: You set up a dichotomy. TV is still transforming. There are more channels than content. TV is heading to the Net. Why not see this as a convergence?
A: I admit that in the framing I’ve emphasized a question of Internet exceptionalism. But, this, the Berkman Center, is Ground Zero for Internet exceptionalism.
Q: Maybe the conclusion is that people want mass hits and a long tail.
A: We don’t have good tools for arguing about what we want the shape of the curve to be, but we could about mobility.
Q: What about marketing? That makes a big diff about where you are in the curve. Networks are the biggest advertisers of themselves.
A: Yes, marketing is crucial. We’ve also unintentionally made capital requirements for distribution. I’d like a way to host a video that isn’t hugely expensive.,br>
Q: Why not be in the tail?
A: Chris Anderson says it’s finding your niche, but you could also call it total irrelevance. You want everyone to be able to construct culture.
Q: Isn’t BitTorrent the tool you’re looking for?
A: Any p2p performance tracks to page rank. The ones that will perform best are the ones that are popular.
Q: We want more bandwidth for the popular, and less for not popular.
A: We want a route to move from unpopular to popular. If I put it on my host, I’ll get hit if popular zooms.
Q: Could we be going back to the CompuServ model where we paid but the content was good?
A: Normatively, if we paid for it, there’d be a lot of advantages. Right now we have a sender-mostly-pays system, which is why we have edge-caching.
Q: How much does the culture of the users matter, vs. the culture of the distributors? What happens when users start to game the system?
A: One of the best way to find out about the algorithms is look to people who use these services a lot. E.g., the search engine optimizers. And the new users of new media tend to bring forward assumptions and behaviors from the old culture. Cf. Claude Fischer. Amanda Lotts in The Television Will Be Revolutionized focuses on the old industry. It’d be interesting to see how the old TV folks think about the new one.
Q: Content will flow uphill to money. TV has moved toward the Net. We watch when we want. We’ll see a merge of the two technologies. Understanding why some videos go viral would be valuable, because that will attract money.
A: It’s such a challenging research challenge. There are so many factors involved. But, I do want to say that my talk does recognize the influence of money.
Q: [yochai] You are proposing three distinct kinds of research projects: 1. Look at video creators and musicians. Mimi Ito on anime movie videos: they’re not primarily on YouTube. Look at how hard it is for a producer community to reach the relevant audience. And how important is that, normatively. 2. How much does a user see, read, or hear that is not news and that does not come through capital-intensive media? What is the flow of streams that people watch? We don’t know the answer to that. 3. What is the ability to set the agenda for what is broadly viewed as culture? MediaCloud looks at agenda-setting over time. Start with case studies. E.g., find 50 of the 895,000 viewers of the autistic kids YouTube.
A: This talk is a reaction against looking at how artists reach their desired communities. Lots of research is being done on this. How virtuous communities arise is not the most pressing question. More important: Are there new cultural gatekeepers arising?
A: Imagine that the answer of #2 is the 40% spend 50% of their time on content that doesn’t reach more than 100 people…
Q: Anita Elbersee [sp] says that the Web is magnifying the impact of blockbuster media. This gives the mainstream little incentive to be revolutionized. What’s the impetus to change?
A: Chris Anderson’s book doesn’t hold together because what drives things down the tail you could argue the other way, e.g., the recommender algorithms I talked about. So, what’s the incentive? There’s no “charlie bit my finger” lobby. There are beginning discussions about open video standards. I’d like to see more of a counterpoint to the mainstream approaches. The institutional impetus isn’t there. In most user-produced content, you don’t see revolution, nor would you expect to. Maybe I was being naive.
Q: If you kill the edge-caching business, why wouldn’t everyone get what they want?
A: The fact that you have to rely on third party hosting has effects broadly.
I’m looking forward to Christian Sandvig’s Tuesday talk at the Berkman Center:
THE TELEVISION CANNOT BE REVOLUTIONIZED
Tuesday, April 6, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
ABSTRACT
Video on the Internet briefly promised us a cultural future of decentralized production and daring changes in form–even beyond dancing kittens and laughing babies. Yet recent developments on sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Fancast as well as research about how audiences watch online video both suggest a retrenchment of structures from the old “mass media” system rather than anything daring. In this talk I’ll argue that choices about the distribution infrastructure for video will determine whether all our future screens will be the same.
ABOUT CHRISTIAN
Christian Sandvig is a Fellow of the Berkman Center and Associate Professor in Communication, Media, and at Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds the Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University. In 2006 he received the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in the area of Human-Centered Computing.
All part of what one might see as the Berkman Center’s recent (past couple of years) theme that the Internet isn’t working out the way some of us hoped. (Note that the Berkman Center doesn’t really have a theme. I’m just pointing to a trend that may be more of a result of selective perception on my part, reflecting changes in my own thinking.)
Note the info about RSVPing if you want to attend, and the fact that it will be webcast live…
HuffingtonPost has a scene from Big Bang Theory with the laughtrack removed:
The stated point is that a show with the laughtrack removed is funnier, but in a different and unintended way. But, the experiment is more provocative than that. (Big Bang is filmed in front of a live audience.)
BTW, Big Bang is on our TiVo list. I sort of like it because it’s good within its genre, as opposed to, say, Two and a Half Men, which is bad within its genre, but also as opposed to, say, Frasier, which was superb within its genre, and as also opposed to, say, Seinfeld which was hilarious as a self-conscious awkward inhabitant of its genre. (Please note that these are what I find funny, not what I think you ought to find funny. Except for Two and a Half Men. Gotta draw a line somewhere :)
David Lloyd, who not only wrote some of the greatest single episodes in TV sitcom history [Chuckles the Clown youtube], but consistently wrote hilariously, has died at 75. I especially loved a lot of his work on Frasier. With the death of Larry Gelbart (best known for M*A*S*H, but also a writer for the original Sid Caesar show, and of the movie Tootsie), a generation is passing.
It’ll be time soon for someone to do a retrospective on The Funniest Generation that assesses the effect of its sitcoms on our culture. And you can remind us all you want of how awful most sitcoms were and are, but there has almost always been at least one really funny sitcom running throughout American TV’s history. Usually on a Thursday night on NBC, by the way.
There are two new-ish Radio Berkman interviews up: Me talking with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger about his book that argues that we are in danger of forgetting how to forget, and Russell Neuman on learning from the past of the media.
Herkko Hietanen, a Berkman Fellow, is giving a talk about TV. “Television is really broken.” It’s not providing what consumers want: programs when we want them, where we want them. It lacks interaction with other viewers and with broadcasters. It has ads. It’s geographically limited. If you had to pitch TV to a venture capitalist, it would have a hard time getting funding.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.
Herkko gives a brief history of the highlights. VCRs were an early attempt to fix tv. This frightened the broadcasters, who took it to court, where — in Sony vs. Betamax — they lost. The court said the manufacturers were not responsible for infringing uses because the devices had non-infringing uses, and personal use was declared a fair use. Satellites extend over-the-air (OTA) broadcast. Community antennas were first set up by stores selling TV sets. Now cable is dominant. But contracts limit core innovation. “If you’re afraid you’ll piss off your content provider, you’re not going to do something that’s good for the consumer.”
There has been some innovation in the core. On-demand video. Time-Warner “LookBack” lets you view any show on the day it’s broadcast at any time during that day. Cable also provides a whole lot of channels. But, “Intelligence in the middle stops innovation at the edge.” The industry has litigated against just about everything innovative. E.g., Cablevision want to launch a service that would centralize storage rather than putting it in the set-top boxes. Just about everyone sued Cablevision for copyright infringement. The court saw that every user would have their own copy of a saved show. The court decided it doesn’t matter where the copies are stored. Herkko says it’s too bad it didn’t go to the Supreme Court so we’d have a definitive decision.
The problem with mythtv, Herkko says, is that it’s not user-friendly. [I spent 1.5 yrs trying to get MythTV to work, and failed :( Wendy Seltzer, seated across the table, has been using MythTV for years.] Tivo is easy but not all that easily hackable. You can’t share TiVo’ed shows, you can modify the code in the box. ReplayTV got sued for having a skip commercials feature, and went bankrupt.
Herkko points to living room clutter as another problem with TV today.
Herkko looks forward to PVRs getting connected to the Internet, because connected users create social networks, and they start to innovate. “We want stupid networked records and intelligent open client-players.” We want connected and tagged shows. We’ll have interactive TV for real, including gambling. Social groups could recommend what to watch.
This all creates privacy problems. E.g., an MIT study discovered they could identify gays by analyzing their social networks, with a high degree of accuracy.
At some point, users will probably start sharing their resources, cluster their recorders. Why should everyone record the same show over and over? Why get it from a central recorder when your neighbors have a copy? Of course, this is what got Replay TV into trouble, Herkko notes. He thinks that the social interaction around shows will happen before and after the show, because people won’t sit with a keyboard in their laps. [Since I'm on the backchannel as I listen to him, I guess I disagree.]
What about ads? Adding social networks would mean that people could watch ads they actually want to watch.
Overall: TV can be fixed. Social networks. Socially-oriented recorders.
Q: This is a compelling vision of the opposite of the Net. The Net is smart at the edges and dumb in the middle. TV has been the opposite. You seem to hope that the future will invert so consumers can get what they want. But consumers have never gotten what they wanted. What will change it?
A: We need brave entrepreneurs to test it in the courts. Having network recorders isn’t that different from having a VCR.
Q: When you were talking about the keyboard in your lap, I think that’s wrong generationally.
A: Voice works while watching tv. But typing and sharing the screen doesn’t.
Q: You’re talking about what the cable companies will do. But then there’s the stuff in the IP world: mythTV, Boxee, etc. That’s where the exciting stuff is.
A: Innovation at the core is very slow, while innovation at the edge is happens very fast.
Q: If the Internet arises to bypass the core, will the quality decline? Will it be more like YouTube style?
A: That’s a real concern. If everyone skips the ads, then there won’t be profit in producing high quality shows. Although there are also premium channels. And in Finland we pay an annual fee and get 4 channels.
Q: There are a lot of forces driving the centralization of TV. With that comes control against innovation at the edges. Is TV going to change or be changed by people sharing content from the edges?
A: If we force a change on TV, the broadcast flag will be re-introduced. Big audiences still demand the lay-back experience.
Q: The sitting back phenomenon has persisted for 50 yrs. Why will it continue?
Q: What is your main research question?
A: When recorders get connected, what sort of innovation are we going to get?
Q: Don’t we need non-Net neutrality to ensure that the video experience over the Net is good enough to inspire innovation in that space?
A: It can be done in other ways. You don’t need immediate delivery of all packets if you’re downloading for viewing late. E.g., in Finland I have a box that records 2 weeks of all 10 channels.
Q: The picture you’re painting is not very TV-like. It’s not broadcast, not one-directional, the business model doesn’t work, we’ll be using our computers…So, it seems like you’re dissolving what TV is. Rather talking about the “social enrichment of TV” [the title of Herkko's talk], we should be talking about the visual enrichment of the Internet. E.g., how do you see Hulu, which has some community features.
A: I defined TV at the outset: It’s geographically bounded, it’s broadcast, it’s scheduled, etc. And Hulu takes some of the edge approach, but it’s very much a core app. We’re going to see a big shift of control from the rights owners to consumers.
Our thoughtful and inventive children gave us tickets to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for Chanukah. Yesterday was the day.
We had an easy ride from Boston to NYC on the MegaBus, which was clean and on time. But, although they promised free wifi, it was actually wifi-free once we left Boston. (Word order makes such a difference!) Nevertheless, for $15 each way per person, it’s hard to muster a good head of complaint.
We stayed at the Blakely Hotel, which was excellent, especially since they let us put four in a room. The rate included a continental breakfast. Put a few of those together on a plate and you’ve got yourself a breakfast.
We spent the morning and early afternoon walking around lower Manhattan, then subwayed up to the Museum of Natural History — oh those bones still amaze, plus, unlike today’s fancy-dancy science centers, you can actually learn stuff there — and then walked through Central Park to the Daily Show studios on 11th Ave., between 51st and 52nd.
When you get the tickets (an email), you’re told that the line starts to form at 3:30. So, some of us got there at 2:30. Sure enough, there were ten people ahead of us already. At 5:15, they actually let you into the building. So, it’s a looong time on line, or, as some of you say, in line. While you are waiting, you are read a long proclamation of restrictions: No large bags, no weapons, no drugs, no food, no gum. All phones off. Be prepared to go through the metal detector. Show your drivers license. (No one under 18 is allowed in.) No twittering or blogging, especially since your electronic devices have to be switched off. No flash photos. Don’t ask Jon to hug you, kiss you, sign autographs, or “anything else creepy.” There are bathrooms downstairs, but once they let you in, they will not let you out.
Once we seated, there was another hour of waiting, much of it with punkish rock music blaring, not quite loudly enough to drown out the 18 year olds behind us who thought they were very witty indeed. After a while, the warm-up comedian came out. No set jokes, just audience interaction. The audience seemed to love him. He was a little too much of a humiliate-the-audience sort of guy for my taste, but I’m old and easily made to squirm.
Then Jon Stewart came out and took questions. Because the show was running late — during rehearsals they discovered some of the material, “how you say, sucked,” JS explained, and it had to be rewritten — he only took four or five questions, which he used for riffing. When someone responded that it was his first time in the city, JS explained why NYC “is a city that works” compared to DC, which irrationally has four “Eighth Streets,” and therefore is a “shithole.” (As you might imagine, it was way funnier in JS’s hands). Some kid started to ask whether he should go to the funeral of his best-friend’s fiance’s dad, and JS cut him off and said, “Yes! You go to the funeral” even though you don’t know the dead guy, because your best friend asked you to. And you try not to make the funeral all about you. It was moral-stance-as-humor, which we love JS for (and, I suppose, some hate him for).
Anyway, JS’s warm-up was great. He’s smart, funny, and a mensch, which is why we came down from Boston to see him.
The show was pretty good, but you can judge for yourself here. I loved the opening segment, about Obama at Notre Dame. The Wyatt Cenac at-desk interview was pretty funny, but I am not his biggest fan; our kids loved it.
While waiting, we had speculated about who the guest would be. Might it be Will Ferrell, who was in town for SNL and has a movie opening? Might it be Joss Whedon, simply because we love him? How about Dick Cheney, and if so, would it be appropriate for me to yell “War criminal!” from the audience? As it turned out, the guest was Indianapolis 500 driver Sarah Fisher.
By the way, throughout the taping, it was odd to hear JS swear. I think it actually works better with the bleeps; the swear are jarring. At least until we get used to them.
At the end, Stephen Colbert came on the monitor and they chit-chatted. It went on for an unusually long time, and it was only after JS said something like, “Ok, let’s do this,” that we realized that they were really just chit-chatting; the official, on-air promo started after that. It was actually pretty charming. When Colbert said what he’d done that weekend, it took JS’s prompting to get him to say that not only had he received an honorary degree, the university named a building after his father, who had been a provost (or something) there; Colbert’s reticence to brag was, of course, at odds with his persona.
Then it was over. We walked to 9th Ave, twittered for vegetarian restaurant suggestions, and ended up having a terrific meal at Zen Palate. Then, onto the MegaBush for a 2AM arrival.
Was it worth doing? Absolutely. We all love the show. If anything, we admire JS more than ever. It’s a long wait, and you are merely a prop for the show, but there Jon Stewart was, right in front of us! Being all Jon Stewart-y!
Our one regret: At the very beginning, JS made some comment about something weird happening in the audience. We always wonder what he’s going on when he makes these audiences references. But we couldn’t see what weird thing had happened! Nooooo! [Tags: jon_stewartthe_daily_showtv ]
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Over-emphasizing small points. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are hereby warned.
John Horrigan of Pew Internet and American Life, gives a “non-Koolaid” presentation. He says that about 12% of Internet users have a blog. The percentage of people doing some form of content sharing is not increasing much at all. The demographics says that 18-24 do the most sharing, and then it goes down in pretty much a straight line. The change over time is not distributed evenly across age groups. Younger adults are turning away from the 6 core UGC behaviors, the 24-35s are increasing. The rest: not much change.
But people are increasingly going to social networkingIf UGC is migrating to rules-based environments, is it a good bargain? On the one hand, good governance can build sustainable mechanisms. OTOH, bad governance is a risk, so you want an open Internet.
Q: A decrease in activity among younger folk? Because they were so heavily involved initially?
John: They’re going to social networking sites instead of maintaining their own sites. But UGC is still an important activity to them.
Q: The changing behaviors as people age and how that will effect UGC?
John: Impossible to answer because we don’t know how the tech will change.
Mainak Mazumdar of The Nieslen Company begins by looking at blogging topics. It’s quite diverse he says. Next: size. Wikipedia has many more topics than Britannica. Also, social networking is very big: Member communities are #4 on most visited lists, after search, portals, and software manufacturers. #5 is email. Social media is big everywhere. (Biggest: 80% of Brazil. 67% in US.) The US is showing comparatively slower growth in “active reach of member communities.” Time spent in CGM has been increasing. So is the time spent on social networking. 35-49 years are the fastest growing audience for social networking sites. Teen consumption of SNS is going down, because they’re going more and more mobile. Mobile will be huge. TV will be big. People are watching more TV. Big media companies are doing well. “Becoming a mother is a dramatic inflectin point and drives women to the Web in search of advice and a desire to connect with others in her shoes” (from the slide).
Is the Net a game-changer for research companies? He compares it to scanner data in the 90s and online surveys in 1990s. In 2000s, perhaps [perhaps??] social networking will once again change the game. Reasons to think the Net is a game-changer overall [i.e., exceptionalism] : Pervasive, sticky, generational.
Q: Is TV watching growing on all screens or just on the living room screen?
Mainak: Time spent watching TV content on a TV.
Q: Maybe SNS have surpassed email because email was used to listserves to serve the social function.
Mainak: We’re talking about how long you spend in Outlook + Web mail. We install monitors that report on how long you spend in each application.
Russ Neuman: Be careful of projecting out from the current tech. It can be disrupted easily.
Q: Older people are entering SNSs. I call them “parents.” To what extent will that change what started out as a youth movement? Is the move to mobile a move out of the SNS as they become mom and dad’s spots? [Oprah is on twitter.]
A: Yes. Some younger teens are going straight to mobile and circumventing the Internet.
Eszter Hargittaitalks about the role of skill in Internet use. Yes, young people use digital media and spend a lot of time online, but it’s true that they engage in lots of online activities or that they’re particularly savvy about the Net and Web tools. So, the idea of “digital natives” is often misguided.
She’s particularly interested in the skills people have and need. Her methodology: Paper and pencil surveys to avoid biasing towards those comfortable with using Web tools. 1,060 first year students at U of Illinois. Most of the data comes from 2007, although she has some pre-pub data from 2009. The question is: What explains variation in skill? Gender, education and income predict skill. “The Web offers lots of opportunities but those who can take advantage of them are those who are already privileged.”
This has an effect on how we intervene to equalize matters. You can’t change socio-economic status. And it turns out that motivation doesn’t seem to make much of an effect. You can only be motivated to do something that you already know is a possibility. She shows new data, not ready for blogging, that show that very small percentages of users have actually created content, voted on reviews, edited Wikipedia pages, etc. The number of teenagers who have heard of Twitter is quite low. [Sorry for the lack of numbers. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be reporting even these trends.]
Mainstream media remain strong. Eszter points to the media story about Facebook users having lower grades. Eszter looked at the study and finds it to be of poor quality. Yet it got huge mainstream play. Eszter tweeted about it. She blogged about it. The tweet led to a co-authored paper. Even so, the mainstream probably won’t care, and most of the tweets are still simply retweeting the bad data. The Net is a huge opportunity, but it’s not evenly distributed.
Q: A study found that people online are lonely. It was picked up by the media. The researcher revised to say that it’s the other way around. It wasn’t picked up. The media pick up on the dystopic.
Q: Your data reflects my experience with my students. They don’t blog, they don’t tweet. There’s a class component to this.
Eszter: We measure socio-economic status. Why does it correlate? We’re exploring this. We now ask about parental support of technology use, rules at home about tech use, etc. So far we’re finding (tentatively!) that lower-educated parents tend to have more rules for their kids.
Q: What happens when there’s universal wireline connection?
Eszter: As the tech changes, the skill sets change. The privileged stay ahead, according to my 8 years of studies.
Q: What skills should we be teaching?
A: Complicated. Crucial issue: The evaluation of the credibility of sources. There’s an extreme amount of trust in search engines. That’s one place we need to do more work. And librarians are highly relevant here.
Q: How do people use the Net to learn informally, e.g., WebMD?
Eszter: There are lots of ways and types to do this. But, first you need to know what’s on the Web. You need good search skills, good credibility-evaluation skills.
Cliff Lampe talks about how Mich State U students use Facebook. He presents a study just completed yesterday, so the data isn’t yet perfect. 97% of his sample are FB users (although Cliff expresses some discomfort with this number). Mean average of 441 friends; median = 381. Ninety percent of these they consider to be “actual” friends. 73% only accept friend requests from people they know in real life. Most spend just a little time (under 30mins) at FB per day. About half lets their friends (but not everyone in their network) to see everything in their profile. Almost everyone puts a photo of themselves up. Vast majority have a photo album. About a third think their parents are looking at their page. Overall they think they’re posting for their college and high school friends.
He talks about Everything2.com, a user-generated encyclopedia/compendium that is 11 years old. Why have people exited? Research shows they left because other sites came along that do the same thing better. Also, changes in life circumstances. Also, conflict with administration of the site. There’s a corporitization of some of the UGC sites. He also has looked into why new users don’t stick: They don’t glom onto the norms of the site.
Q: Are reasons for exiting a negative network effect? More than 150 and the network deteriorates?
Cliff: We see that in Usenet. But not so much at Facebook where you’re just dealing with your friends.
Q: Any sites that have tried to drive away new users?
Cliff: Metafilter has a bit of that. Slashdot has a “earn your bullshit” tagline.
Q: Are your students alone or with others when they are online? Are they aware of the technology?
Cliff: The rise of the netbook has had an effect. Most of my students experience social media as a group activity. But a lot of them are not that savvy. They generally don’t know how Wikipedia operates. [Tags: snssocial_networkingfacebookexceptionalismtvwikipediaenvironment ]
