Clay Shirky on Media in 2009

Digital media futurist Clay Shirky in conversation with The Guardian on what can be expected with newspapers, books, magazines and television in 2009:

Newspapers

The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.

Jeff Jarvis said it beautifully: "If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers. What we saw happen to the Christian Science Monitor [the international paper shifted its daily news operation online] is going to happen three or four dozen times (globally) in the next year. The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press - high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication - is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.

Books and magazines

If you pick a magazine at random, it will not interest you. For people who care about quality, it's easier to find it online. If it's a highly qualified niche magazine, something aimed at surgeons or firefighters, it's going online. There's no reason those things should exist.

The great advantage magazines have is glossy pictures. It's better to read on paper than on the web but it's much better to look at pictures on paper than on the net. Brides magazine is going to be the last one standing.

The book world is more secure. I think the big revolution is going to be print on demand. Imagine only having one browsing copy of every book in a bookstore. You could say "Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers looks good", and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?

TV

The big fight will be between passion and mass appeal but I don't think it's a question of who will win. It's not a transition from A to B, it's one to many. The question is who figures out the business model that says it's better to have 6 million passionate fans than 7 million bored ones? That is going to be the transformation because what you see with these user groups, whether it's for reality TV or science fiction, is that people love the conversation around the shows. The renaissance of quality television is an indicator of what an increased number of distribution channels can do. It is no accident that this started with cable.

And the BBC iPlayer? That's a debacle. The digital rights management thing ...let's just pretend that it was a dream like on Dallas and start from scratch. The iPlayer is a back-to-the-future business model. It's a total subversion of Reithian values in favour of trying to create what had been an accidental monopoly as a kind of robust business model. The idea that the old geographical segmenting of terrestrial broadcasts is recreatable is a fantasy and a waste of time.

What does the next decade hold? Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we've seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications. But the underlying change was the basic tools of the internet. The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that's now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

American 'Kath and Kim' scores with critics

Molly Shannon and Selma Blair are two hoots worth a happy holler in NBC's "Kath & Kim," a cleverly funny sitcom debuting tonight after scoring a smash with a different cast in Australia. The show has been painlessly Americanized and might as well be an indigenous creation, armed as it is with wicked, wacky comment on the mores and morals of the mall culture.

The principal theme is Americans' pathological fear of growing old -- not the logical dread of facing retirement during an economic apocalypse, but a deep, crazy dread that goes back further, perhaps to the baby boomers and their veneration of youth as the sweetest of all virtues.

Shannon plays Kath, the divorced mother of Kim, a teenager with pathetically cut-rate values. Kim's recent marriage to the lovably clueless Craig (Mikey Day) is breaking up over such issues as her inability to cook dinner, even when it involves popping a plastic platter into the microwave. "We can't go to Applebee's every night, Kim," Craig beseeches her. "We are not millionaires!"

Although that line was quoted in the promos, it seems fresh again when it pops up in context, probably because the context is full of painfully recognizable leopard-print truths. As Kath, Shannon is obsessed with firming her glutes and thinning her thighs -- continuing to exercise even when other activities claim her time. She tries to put the kibosh on her daughter's plans to move back in with Mom, especially since Kim's room has been turned into a gym.

It's not that Kath wants to be alone. Kath is a walking "loser magnet," according to her daughter, yet has landed a bubbly Mr. Swell named Phil (John Michael Higgins) -- formerly Big Phil until he lost 200 pounds. He also gained great success as the owner of Phil's Sandwich Island (where the menu includes the Wham-Bam-Thank-You-Ham special). Phil greets Kath with a flattering "Hey there, hot stuff" and, introduced to a skeptical Kim, grandly declares: "It's a pleasure to meet the lovely daughter of the lady who rocks my world."

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Kath and Phil are a compatible couple, and a subtly poignant one, too, in their sorry striving to be cool and their steadfast state of denial. They won't acknowledge their ages, much less act them; thus do they end up, in the second episode, dancing up a storm for drag queens and couples in a gay bar called Maneaters. The three transvestites who counsel and commiserate with Kath are so touching and funny that they deserve to be series regulars.

There's something swift and straightforward about the comedy. Its only structural oddity is its occasional alternating voice-overs, during which we hear Kath and Kim's innermost thoughts -- thoughts that are hardly among the most "inner" you've ever heard. If mother and daughter aren't smart, neither are they malicious; if they're thick-headed, at least they're not cold-hearted, not even in how they misguidedly drink a toast to global warming. Yes, this heating-up might burn up polar bears, they agree, but it is good for their tans.

Shannon is one of the great female comic finds of "Saturday Night Live's" third decade (another, Tina Fey, will do more of her Palin playin' in an "SNL" election special an hour after the sitcom tonight). Shannon has gleefully hopped from movie to movie, making mountains from the molehills of tiny parts -- stealing scenes in such comedies as the stunningly funny "Talladega Nights." Blair, who has a long list of credits, might be best remembered as a virginal victim of "Cruel Intentions."

Higgins -- who played David Letterman in the HBO version of Bill Carter's book "The Late Shift" -- is perfect as Phil. As superbly superior as Shannon is (a comparison to Lucille Ball, while inevitable, would not be overreaching), the whole cast shines, and not just in refracted glory. "Kath & Kim" is a frantically tacky fracas.

Tenth-rate estate

I thought that I would point out this pile of crap from The Courier-Mail, as it attempts a hatchet job on cultural studies. An invitation to Associate Professor Jason Jacobs from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Queensland to be a keynote speaker at a conference on The Sopranos at Fordham University in New York gets written up like this:

TAXPAYERS forked out up to $2000 to help send a University of Queensland lecturer to a US conference on the mafia TV series The Sopranos.

The kind of low-rent university bashing is a staple of Brisbane's monopoly print newspaper, despite the fact that is also derives considerable revenue from the universities through various education supplements, as well as often relying on academics to comment on television show when they are running a story including, yes, The Sopranos. I certainly know that I have done 30 minute interviews with Courier-Mail journalists at short notice, and many people in media and cultural studies have done the same.

Readers of this blog would know that I am a fan of The Sopranos so my comment may be coloured by this. I am also a fan of Jason Jacobs' work, and feel that he deserves much better than this nonsense. So if anyone needs some 'Cliff's Notes' (as they say in the US) on how to respond to this stuff, try this:

• Television is the most widely used consumer entertainment technology in the world, with UNESCO estimating that 65% of the world's population or abut 4 billion people, have a TV in their homes. It is therefore important to understand how it work, not only as a technology, but as a disseminator of culture;
  
• The Sopranos has been watched by ten of millions of people around the world. In the US, its audience was about 14 million, even though it was on HBO, which is a premium cable channel;
• The Sopranos has a particularly complex and sophisticated narrative structure. On tis, don't take my word for it, but check out Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, where he cites the how as an example of popular culture that is making its audiences smarter by requiring them to deal with multi-strand narrative;
• The gangster genre was been a recurring device used as an allegory to tell wider stories about 2oth century America, from Scarface, Public Enemy and White Heat in the 30s and 40s, to the Godfather film of the 70s, to Scarface, Goodfellas and Casino in th 80s and 90s, to The Sopranos in the 2000s;
• Without knowing the details of UQ's budget, I would suspect that, like most Australian universities, it now derives about half of its total budget from non-government sources (student fees, grant income, consultancies, IP etc.), with the other half coming from HECS payments no being made by past students. So the idea that 'the taxpayer' as generic category is paying for this travel that the journalist in question - Darren Cartwright in case you are interested - doesn't know much about how universities are now funded;
• Given that you would struggle to get a return flight to the US for $2000, I would say that both UQ and Australia are getting a bargain to have Jason Jacobs' work recognised internationally at such a conference.

A quick Google check on coverage in U.S. media would suggest that they are far less sniffy about any of this than we find in the embattled provincialism of today's Courier-Mail.

The Sopranos

I haven't posted for a few days as I have been trying to work through a problem related to my impending paper at the International Communications Association conference in Montreal next week as I ready it to be sent to a refereed journal. I'll make a post on this at a later date.

In the meantime, one of my great guilty pleasures while being in the U.S. has been to catch up again on The Sopranos. Programming of the show on network TV in Australia was just awful, having to stay up after midnight for episodes run out of sequence, so having it in the U.S. (on A&E, not HBO) has been a great chance to think through one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, if not ever.

A&E run old episodes daily at 4pm (they are in Series 3 at the moment), repeats from series 6 at 10am on Sundays, and 'new' episodes from Series 6 at 10pm on Sunday (yes, I know they are not new, but I didn't see them the first time around). A disjointed way to watch the show, sure, but its not a novel, so you can dip in and out wherever you like. Also, as Steven Johnson has observed, the multi-thread narrative means that there is always something new to pick up on even in episodes you have seen before.

As The Sopranos has no doubt been endlessly analysed and blogged (see here for my favourite book on the show), I'll limit my comments to three things, other than James Gandolfini's ability to turn on a dime emotionally as Tony Soprano, as he moves in and out of otherwise disconnected situations.

1. How work always intrudes on the domestic environment, and the domestic environment always finds it way into work. Whether it is the mob hits organised in the back garden after a birthday, wedding or funeral, or Tony advising his sister about her hot water system while awaiting a blow job in a private room at the Bada Bing, the semi-public sphere of mob business and the domestic sphere of wife, children, in-laws, relatives etc. are constantly overlapping, and a big part of Tony's life is spent trying to keep some structural separation between the two. His ongoing need for therapy to deal with his panic attacks is one outlet for the consequences of this.
2. The use of violence as a weapon of first resort. The use of violence to solve problems is so much a part of the Soprano culture that everyone struggles to find a means other than violence to address a problem, even when it is known that the consequences of the violence will be greater than the problem they were seeking to address. The characters who are least well adjusted to the culture tend to bring the worst consequences to their actions - Tony' sister Janine, son A.J., the unfortunate Artie the chef, the truly appalling Ralphie, and - form time to time - Christopher Montefiore.
3. The staggering gender double-standards. While women play a core role in The Sopranos as a show, the codes that they are expected to live by, and the extent to which these codes are completely over-ridden by the men in the show, are Patriarchy 101 in action.
   

Best line of Series 6 (so far): Tony to Paulie: "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie" (about his management of the festival where his one-year-old nephew was almost injured on a faulty ride).

[Echoing George W. Bush's (in)famous observation about the Head of the Federal Emergency Management Authority during the Hurricane Katrina crisis in New Orleans.]

Runner-up: Christopher to Sir Ben Kingsley, trying to convince him to star in a movie that he is writing a script for: "To produce it, we're approaching Dick Wolf. He did Law and Order: The SUV."