Archive for December, 2008
Maybe you will watch Ryan Seacrest this New Year’s Eve. Maybe Dick Clark? But hopefully you are not watching it alone. Even if you alone at least you are sharing a media experience where if something interesting happens many people will have watched it at the same time. But this is happening less and less frequently since the dawn of television and radio.
DVR’s and things like Hulu and YouTube allow people to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch. And that’s a great thing. Yet we lose something with all this on-demand consumption of media. There was a big energy jolt during the Olympics this past summer when we all watched Michael Phelps dominate the pool (even on tape delay but we mostly all watched it together even when we knew the result!). The same thing happened when President-elect Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech in Grant Park on Election Night.
The Super Bowl is the largest shared media experience on the American landscape. People talk about the ads (sometimes even the game) for days and sometimes weeks after the event. But with television viewership continuing to fracture into smaller and smaller pieces the opportunities for shared media experiences will dwindle away. I feel a lot is lost when viewers (and even readers) of content view things over an extended period of time. Time was when we had to have a shared experience with mass media because there were 8 channels of television content (maybe 20 of radio). But it was cool that people would talk about what they had seen and it would often be provocative.
I don’t see this as any kind of solvable problem and I venture a guess that there are those that do not feel it is any kind of problem at all. We are indeed a long way from the time that people gathered outside an appliance store to watch Uncle Miltie. (Ok I am old but I NEVER did that). Certainly standing in the street to watch a television is not the answer. But in this internet age where we have social networking sites to help us share experiences with people we want to ‘follow’, care about and want to reconnect with, large scale shared experiences are going the way of analog TV.
What do you think?
Have a safe New Year’s Eve and a healthy and prosperous 2009.
Most importantly I got the gift of spending it with family – my wife’s family for that matter. I have done this for the past 31 Christmases. The family has changed a great deal but as one of my nieces in college said ‘finding your way to come home for Christmas is something that we should do no matter what’.
My place has changed going from the young kid to the middle aged uncle, son and brother in-law. It’s great to see everyone particularly the nieces and nephews who I don’t get to see often enough. All do different things – some are still students either in high school or college, some work full time. None are married – out of 9 cousins aged 15 – 27.
All are consumed with technology. Everyone has a PDA or phone and if under 30 without exception checked text messages or talked on their mobile phone at least once during the afternoon. That’s amazingly different since my first Christmas with the family back in 1978. The technology we had then consisted of a record player, a television (yes it was color) showing the Yule Log (or was that Christmas Eve?) and the long gone Blue-Gray classic college football all star game.
But now our conversations drift in and out of technology all driven by the younger set. Facebook, internet forums, YouTube, dominate. It seems someone is always sitting at the computer near the dining room table before or after dinner checking something. When I mentioned that I now tweet from time to time there were a few cousins that had no idea what Twitter was! And when I mentioned to my recent college grad (2007) niece about using LinkedIn to find a new job, she said she just had not gotten into that. She (like all my nieces and nephews for that matter) does use Facebook regularly but did not see the value in LinkedIn. What she did not see was how it could be relevant to her.
I was able to show her how I could find out about the people with whom she was going to interview after the weekend by checking their profile on LinkedIn. Of course you can Google someone as well to get information but specific to an individual LinkedIn is faster and more accurate since it is user generated.
What I also was able to articulate is how Facebook allows me to offer up my unfiltered and genuine thoughts to friends or ‘Friends’ and maybe that helps them draw a better read on me as opposed to the business oriented sides of LinkedIn and Twitter . Surprisingly my nieces and nephews actually read some of my updates (I did not know that since they never comment) and think they are funny sometimes but revealing more than that. They get to know me and I get to know them (yes I read their status updates and rarely comment) in ways that people never could before. And that might be the best gift I get of them all.
Will 2009 be the year of better communication?
As I write this sitting on a plane heading to frigid Chicago 3 days before Christmas it bothers me to no end that in flight internet access is not a regularly available feature on airplanes. Forget for a moment that the few airlines that are doing it (Lufthansa I think is one) charge passengers for the privilege of wireless web access.
Of course I can still get a diet coke if I want for free. I would rather have the internet access by far. Seeing as I cannot pick up a bottle of internet access at the newsstand (either before or after airport security) I would think that providing free access to the internet on all flights in lieu of free sodas would be a much better deal for the airlines. Remember the airlines are the folks that have brought us the $ 6 can of Budweiser. So why not a $ 3 soda? The point is that the web is ubiquitous and it is more than a mere annoyance that you get to pay hundreds of dollars to sit in a tiny seat on short (under 3 hours) haul flights with no food or in-flight entertainment options (unless you fly Jet Blue). Now I don’t want to hear Mabel talking on her cell phone to her husband about what time he should be at the airport to pick her up – EVER! NO CELL PHONES IN FLIGHT. EVER! But in the interest of better communication I think the airlines are going about it all wrong. They don’t tell you when you will land but if there were internet access we could figure out what time we would land and at which gate at the very least!
While l waited for my flight (it was delayed three hours which happens I understand) the communication was not good at all as to if or when the flight would leave. Initially it was to be 2 hours late but somewhere along the way the communication stopped and 15 minutes before the flight was to depart a sign finally went up. Why don’t the airlines have an information officer on the premises to help passengers with information? The amount of goodwill this would engender would be palpable. I can get more information in the back of a New York City taxicab now (with internet enabled televisions becoming the norm) than I can in an airport.
And once you get to your destination you know what you get to experience. The likelihood of paying for internet connections at your hotel! And the more expensive the hotel the more likely you will have to shell out $ 10.95 or more for 24 hours of internet access. When traveling on business I often stay at Marriott Courtyards for the primary reason that they offer free internet access. And it is far less expensive to stay there than at most other hotels. I just don’t get this do you? If we are living in the information age why is so much access behind the iron curtain?
3G networks are on the rise and soon (but not soon enough for me) your internet enabled phone/pda will be able to access the web from anywhere and at great speeds (even in the air!) so eventually all this stupidity on charging for internet access will go away. Unfortunately you will still have to pay for checking your bags on most airlines (this is not going away sadly) and eventually pay for your soda too. It’s coming sooner and not later. 2009 may offer a little better communication than 2008 but we still have a long way to go.
Not that easy. I have a Blackberry Pearl. It is small. I can still see the letters and type pretty well with my right hand thumb. Of course I can only have the T-Mobile network. There are many places in Connecticut where there is simply no service. It does work well in New York and most other cities to which I travel. And it is enabled such that when I travel abroad I can get service quite easily (although I do move to a local SIM card). I do use it primarily for email and phone calls but find myself using the internet function more and more. And it has no music player (ok it is 2 years old now or nearly).
So feeling that I am BB leaning guy I went to Verizon to check out the new BB Storm. How T-Mobile does not sell this phone is a mystery to me. What is it with phone manufacturers that they feel compelled to single provide service (i.e. Apple/AT & T for a long time and BB Storm Verizon)??? And Verizon can crow about its 3G service all it wants but we Nutmeg state residents won’t see 3G in Connecticut until mid-year 2009 at best I am told.
We have a family type plan and at present the rest of the family are on Verizon and they seem to love the service. Of course Verizon is more expensive. And they want to charge for the Storm but T-Mobile who does NOT have the phone I want will offer the phone for free with a contract sign up. OK – I HATE THIS GAME.
Now the Apple cultists will come out and implore me to come out of the dark side and come over to the iPhone because it is the greatest thing EVER. What is it about Apple/Mac/iPhone people that make them appear like they are all one step away from wearing long robes and singing kumbaya? Apple is cool – the Mac is a good operating system as is the iPhone a good phone. But both are far from perfect and believe it or not the Blackberry Storm has some things to offer that the iPhone cannot touch like a really good email set up. The touch screen seems adaptable and something I would get used to fairly quickly. But the BB Storm music player is far from an i-Pod application (MP3’s are so yesterday) and the internet browser is a better experience on the iPhone than the Storm.
So what to do? You can probably tell that I am leaning to going with the BB Storm and consequently Verizon service. But this is not the kind of choice I think we should be faced with. What say you?
As we are smack in the middle of the 2008 holiday selling season the bad news seems to be a constant. Corruption scandals (can you believe the still Governor of Illinois’ audacity!) layoffs, workforce reductions, terrible sales and earnings reports – it’s enough to make you want to go out and howl at the moon. Well now you have even more opportunity since on December 12th the full Moon is the biggest and brightest full Moon of the year. And it will be 14% bigger than usual.
I know I feel like howling a bit so here’s what I suggest. Go outside at 11PM (EDT so it will be dark pretty all across Europe, the continental U.S. and Alaska (sorry Hawaii) and give your best howl to release just a bit of that pent up frustration that resides in us all.
A good howl will not fix your problems but I guarantee that you will feel much better after doing it and every little bit of feeling better can only be a good thing! Make it a good one – I want to hear you. And let me know how it felt!
For information on the upcoming event:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/09dec_fullmoon.htm?list89147