Michael Grant

Hard to say if Joe Wilson is another Joe McCarthy. He did call the President of the United States a liar during an official joint session of Congress, which is certainly a McCarthy thing to do. Don't debate the issue; attack the individual. McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin in the early 1950s, did it by claiming the target individual, whoever it happened to be, was "a Communist."

His act came to be known as "McCarthyism," one of the grimiest terms in American political history. Wrote journalist/historian David Halberstam in "The Fifties:" "(McCarthy) knew instinctively how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end he produced little beyond fear and headlines."

Joe Wilson, until this week an unknown South Carolina congressman, may or may not have those instincts, and only time will tell if he is a mouthpiece for some political operative who does. If there are any investigative reporters left in the country, I imagine they are hard at work this week, looking for such a link.

But there is another link that is obvious, and troublesome. Since Wednesday night, when Wilson shouted, "You lie!" at President Obama during his address on health care reform, the Republican right has seized on him as a hero. I say "Republican right" to distinguish that bedrock group from Republican moderates, and what several commentators (including me) have begun carefully to call "intelligent" Republicans. Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin speak for the Republican right; John McCain, who appears to acknowledge his 2008 miscalculation, speaks for the Republican moderates; and David Brooks is the best candidate for spokesman for intelligent Republicans.

The Republican right seems to seize on bobble-head demagogues named Joe. Last year, it was Joe the Plumber. This year, it is Joe the Congressman. Hard to believe, after the Joe the Plumber goofiness, that there could be a Joe the Congressman, but there he is, making headlines for abusing the presidential office, his office, and the Congress, which makes the whole new business seem so McCarthyesque.

This time, though, not in 1952, but in 2009, it looks like a reverse McCarthyism. When he shouted out (are you there, Sarah?) on Wednesday night, Joe Wilson hoisted himself onto the shoulders of millions of citizen Joe McCarthys, growing ever more comfortable in their grassroots demagoguery, whose way around debate is to accuse the President of the United States of lying, of being un-American right down to his birth certificate, of being soft on patriotism, just as McCarthy accused all Democrats of being soft on Communism. Whether he is qualified or not, Wilson may become the new McCarthy, or McCarthy surrogate. His bearers may insist. He may have only two choices: be the bedrock right's voice of Wilsonism; or resign the position and be tagged a "traitor."

The original McCarthyism imploded in 1953 when McCarthy attacked the U.S. Army with his claims of Communist "infiltration." The hearings were nationally televised, "and, when it was over," Halberstam wrote, "McCarthy had done himself in with his ugliness." He was censured by the Senate in 1954. He was an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1957.

What are Americans to do about Wilsonism? It is completely necessary that Joe Wilson be censured by the Congress. It's too late now, but the President should have called him out on Wednesday night. Just a short, quiet, declarative sentence: "Shame on you, sir, in this house." And Americans are represented by an active media, which should be all over this.

As a post script, one of Joe McCarthy's best friends, and a campaign strategist for him, was a Wisconsin judge named Urban Van Susteren. His daughter is Greta, a personality on Fox News.

Labels: Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

Today is Sept. 1, and Americans are starting another grade in school. For me, today is the first day of the 61st grade. I will learn things this year in 61st grade that I didn’t know last year, in 60th grade. I must say, being in 61st grade feels pretty awesome. That is a lot of learning.

To figure out what grade you are starting today, go back to the year you started first grade. For me, that was 1949. Realizing I started school in the first half of the last century is pretty awesome, also. There is no way I could be that old. Then, from your first-grade year, you just count up. I know there is some arithmetic way to do that in two seconds, involving some kind of n+1 formula, but in 60 grades I have never been able to learn it. I still have to do it on a piece of paper. First I list the years: 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, and so on, up to 09. Then, next to 49, I put a 1, then next to 50 a 2, and so on. Sure enough, when I reach 09, the number is 61.

For most Americans, September is the month we begin a new grade, because we were programmed that way. The school year in America traditionally began on the Tuesday after Labor Day. Now, of course, that has all changed. In the San Diego area, some grade-school kids actually started classes on July 27! Others started in August. My own journalism classes at Grossmont College started on Aug. 24. I wasn’t happy about it. I think having to go to school in August (or July!) is un-American and should be investigated.

I think the main thing I learned in 60th grade was that it really is cool, having the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. I had been wondering about that since the 32nd grade, when I was, uh, 37 years old. That year, in 32nd grade, I had already been writing a newspaper column for awhile, and I had the six-year-old imagination all right, but on experience I was shy. I still felt like a kid, not enough accumulation of experience yet, to call it a serious accumulation. I wasn’t yet experienced enough to say in a column, “I can tell you from experience,” and expect anyone to take it seriously. Last year, in 60th grade, I turned 65, and one of the first things I noticed was, when I told someone I could tell them something from experience, 99 percent of them took me seriously.

And that’s the way it worked out. Having the imagination of a six-year-old is really only another way of saying you can think outside the box, and thinking outside the box with the experience of a 65-year-old makes a lot of the stuff out there really dazzling, the kind of stuff I couldn’t possibly have imagined at 37. It must be because there is so much more experience inside the box now, and it is experience that powers, or at least boosts, imagination. I know that at six, I could never have imagined I would have this kind of imagination to look forward to. Now, on the first day of 61st grade, who knows where imagination will take me this year?

Today, already, on the first day of 61st grade, I am learning something. I have been reading papers in my office, turned in by students who were asked to avoid all media – no books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recordings, television or the internet – for 48 hours, then write about the experience. In semesters prior, I could always count on at least a third of the 30-odd students to report being able to escape the media hurricane into calmer waters, where they could reconnect with the analog world of sidewalks, parks, porches, sunshine, clouds, street and planet sounds, and idle conversation with friends. Always, they reported how pleasant it was, even though it was only an interlude, and they could not escape the media world for long, or entirely.

In this batch of papers, I can find only two who report anything about an analog experience, while a few of the others write of their good fortune at being born into a media world, and belonging to what one called “the iPod generation.” “Just look around you,” wrote one, “it’s a beautiful sight.” Am I going to learn, in 61st grade, of evidence that all our children are slowly turning inward toward media, forever?

Labels: Media, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

On this July 5, Rush Limbaugh is cursing John McCain for even being born. Bill O'Reilly has gone into 24/7 production mode on his next book, which he knows will be his last. Sean Hannity is polishing his resume to send to The Weather Channel. Ann Coulter is packing her surgical tools. William Kristol is looking into his mirror and saying, over and over, "What have I done? What have I done?"

All of these people make their living in conservative media, and they know, better than anyone, what is happening with Sarah Palin. She is getting out of politics, where she is a relative, low-paid nobody, into media, where she is still going to be a relative nobody, but an extremely wealthy, and visible, one. She is about to become the white, right, Oprah. Bye-bye, O'Reilly.

She already IS the white, right, Oprah, trapped in the wrong business. There are 20 million Americans out there who worship Sarah, who will attach themselves to everything she does, every move she makes, every product she endorses. By comparison, Oprah averages 8.6 million viewers daily, a Nielsen rating of about 5, and those levels have made Oprah an international celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Sarah only needs to switch businesses, from politics to media, and she started that switch Friday, when she resigned the Alaska governorship, which of course is a total waste of her star power.

If "Sarah" could start tomorrow, the show would be pulling a Nielsen of 6 or 7 by September, and I'm not talking about some Fox News production. She would be crazy to go to work for Fox. She has a proven business model for creating her own production company, down to the company's name, which would be Haras, Inc., just like Oprah's Harpo, Inc., which everybody knows is "Oprah" spelled backwards.

She won't have to learn anything, change the way she looks, change the way she talks, change the way she thinks. She is a media star waiting to happen. All she needs is a studio. Look for her to relocate from Alaska soon, to a media center in a conservative part of the country with a hub airport. Atlanta would be my guess.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:35 PM | Permalink | Comments

The young Elvis Presley gave the illusion, most clearly in 1957's "Jailhouse Rock," he could move his legs in two directions at the same time, which pretty much says it about Michael Jackson's moonwalk.

Thus, Elvis was the young Michael Jackson's role model. Neither man could sit still, while singing a song, and both men knew how to move it. They knew that moving was part of singing, at least the way they sang. More importantly, they knew, or learned, that's what their fans wanted. He's got a great voice, a powerful, sexy, voice, but an Elvis fan can't watch "Jailhouse Rock" without being moved, powerfully, by how the man is moving. By then, the movements were not spontaneous, but choreographed, and much deeper, sensually, than Elvis might have managed by himself. The movement was that important.

A Michael Jackson fan can't watch "Thriller" without wanting to move like the man, whose moves, if they originated with Elvis, were different from the King's because they were not only choreographed, but tightly choreographed. The step Elvis created was compared to a dead man walking. By Michael Jackson's time, he looked like a robot responding to a remote.

Did Michael take off on Elvis? I think so. Michael was the black Elvis. I have heard several commentators compare Elvis and Michael as being "unique," and I think that is right. The only difference is, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, came first. Michael may have liked to be the King of Rock and Roll, but that was already taken. So he became the King of Pop. He couldn't be "Michael the Pelvis," so instead he grabbed his crotch. Elvis had Graceland, Michael had Neverland. He COULD wear outlandish performing outfits, and he wore them a lot better than Elvis could, strapped into his white flight suits. And, of course, Michael married Elvis Presley's daughter.

Their lives - brilliance decaying into the bizarre - and deaths were eerily the same – cardiac arrest bringing down dissipated bodies in the early afternoon, at far too young an age – but Michael's death didn't rock me, the way Elvis's did, because I was an Elvis fan, and only a Michael observer. Fans attach, physically and emotionally, to their stars. In media literacy studies, we call it the "proximity value." There is a direct connection between what the star is doing and how the fan is reacting. That's physical closeness. Emotionally, the fan wants to be like the star. I wish I looked like that. I wish I could sing like that. I wish I could move my legs like that. I wish I was rich and famous like that. I'll buy stuff that will make me feel closer to him.

Michael's fans are shocked today, and every Elvis fan knows how they feel. It was early afternoon in The San Diego Union newsroom when news of Elvis's death arrived, on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 1977. Denise Carabet, an erudite, worldly, brilliant, business world expert and financial writer, came back from lunch with her mouth open a foot. Elvis never had a bigger fan than Denise, or me. Getting out the Wednesday paper that day was an exercise in professionalism for many of us.

Elvis had long since become a blubbery caricature, but he had long since given me what I wanted. I had those 1954-57 years, and when Elvis came back from the Army in 1960 and started singing pop songs and making snoozer movies, I more or less left him behind. It wasn't fair. But fans are rarely fair with their stars. I will take his Sun Studios songs with me to my grave, and when he died at 42, I discovered, angrily, that I had wanted him to live up to that immortality. Not for his sake (though that would have been nice) but for mine.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments

Every time a pair of human eyes falls on a newspaper page, an ironic screen, as strange as it is ominous, slides automatically into place between the two. Strange, because it exists. Ominous, because of its power. Ironic, because of its source. Only a few people know it is there. The general public has no idea.

The screen conceals media codes that are embedded in the page. The same is true of whatever media your eyes are looking at: a television screen, a movie, or the pages of a magazine, or a book. The codes determine the design, content, delivery and effect of the media message, much the same as the rules of English determine the design, content, delivery and effect of an ordinary sentence.

With this code, the media can read you like a book. Media professionals use the code to create thousands of media products that are offered to the public every single day. From this blizzard, the public picks and chooses, without ever understanding why, the media products – from categories of information, entertainment, and manipulation – it wishes to consume.

Some of this content is necessary, indispensable in a democratic nation of free people. And some of it creates problems that cause the public great worry, such as "Hannah Montana." Children as young as four and five years old become swept up in media influences they don't understand, particularly influences to worship celebrities, both living and animated, to imitate their heroes and, most crucially, to buy things they are made to feel will bring them closer to their heroes.

Children and young adults, ages 4-18, become the financial backers (through their parents' wallets, routinely) of billion-dollar media industries, best exemplified by celebrity worship and professional sports, without the slightest idea of what is happening. This is not to say nobody should emulate stars or watch sports, which is fun and has emotional benefits, but fans should be at least provided with strategies used by media megabusinesses targeted at them, and some details about how it works.

Thousands of adults in America, never having received a day of media schooling, complain openly about media performance, and the deterioration of that performance in the last 20 years. Media-bashing is a primary activity in the blogosphere. True, much of it is blogoblather, but much of it is serious. The Project for Excellence in Journalism cites "growing skepticism about journalists, their companies and the news media as an institution."

The skeptics write letters to the editor like this one from my files, from a perfectly serious San Diegan named Stuart Jewell, which goes to the heart of the issue in a single sentence: “It’s strange to me, that almost all columnists and reporters assume the talent of being able to define what ‘the people’ want to know and how urgently they want to know it.”

It’s not strange at all. Columnists and reporters don’t assume anything. They go to journalism school, where they learn the definitions of what the people want to know, and how urgently they want to know it. The study of journalism, and all the other media forms, is as black-and-white as learning English. The media uses definitions, rules and values that are as clear-cut as the conjugation of verbs.

This “talent” appears strange to the general public, who Stuart Jewell represents so well, because they didn’t receive any media education in school. How can a consumer complain about the job the media is doing, with no idea of the rules the media uses to do its job?

Scariest of all, media consumers of all ages are being invited to become part of the 21st-century media, actual practitioners of the trade. If there is going to be not only a trend, but a distinct business decision to “open up” newspapers to community participation via the Internet, then I think the community participators need at least a flash course in Media Code 101. These are the principles that I want known to citizens in places where newspapers are introducing what they call “participatory journalism,” or “citizen journalism,” or what I call "macramé journalism." It scares me to read, in The New York Times, that such newspapers mean to become “a virtual town square, where citizens have a say in the news and where every reader is a reporter,” without some assurance that those readers are least are familiar with journalism principles that are older than the Constitution and are the bedrock for the First Amendment. I want to know if these macramé journalists have ever even heard of the media code.

Most of them haven't, even though the media code is no big secret. It is a relatively simple system of values, definitions and realities. You can learn it at any college or university that offers courses in journalism, marketing, public relations and advertising. I have known the code and have been using it in my work since 1969, as a reporter, columnist, essayist, author and educator. As a college educator, teaching journalism, I teach the code to more than 200 new students every school year. Practically all of them pass with ease.

It is only education, then, that keeps anyone from seeing and understanding the code. The screen, between the eyes and the subject, exists only because no one has taught the eyes how to see through it. Learning the media code is no different from learning algebra, except algebra is taught in American schools, and the media code is not. American children by the millions have graduated from its high schools with the algebra screen lifted, and the media code screen still in place. They are sent out to fly blind into lives that are informed, entertained, manipulated and shaped by daily blizzards of media code that they can’t see, and don’t understand.

It's best for all if the public knows what the media knows about this business relationship between the two. In this age, of all ages, the study of media code should not be confined to university journalism studies; it should be at least introduced in elementary school, and become a core curriculum class in every American high school.

Though that goal is not around the corner, the vital importance of making media literacy available to children in the digital world is attracting the attention of educators. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the News Literacy Project are two organizations working to bring media literacy studies into the public education curriculum. Says NAMLE: "Media literacy is a basic life skill for the 21st century. It is essential for a healthy democracy."

One of the NAMLE founders, Dr. Renee Hobbs of Temple University, in 2007 published a book, "Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English," a study of high school teachers who incorporated media analysis – journalism, television, movies, and Internet media – into the English curriculum. That is a logical step, and in the right direction, though understanding the media code might require a curriculum unto itself.

A non-profit organization called Common Sense Media, overseen and operated by a board and staff with impressive educational and professional pedigrees, is running a lively Website "dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families." Among their "Ten Common Sense Beliefs" is this one, No. 3: "We believe in teaching our kids to be savvy media interpreters – we can't cover their eyes but we can teach them to see."

All that is missing from that statement is the currency of media language, as it is spoken and employed in their work by media professionals and educators. When children – and adults – know the media code, they will have no problem reading the media the same way the media reads them: like a book. It starts with education. To change the media, change the audience.

That is the goal of this Monday Media Literacy series. When people learn to use the media code in reading the media, they take power back from the media. They pull back the curtain on the new Wizards of Oz. They become more informed consumers, whether the product is information, entertainment or manipulation. Informed consumers have the best chance to make choices they will feel good about. When the media Wizards start to realize that the consumers know the media code, know what is going on, it will move the media-public relationship toward a more honest balance of power. It can only happen with audience education, and accountability.

Labels: Media, Media Code, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments

Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab had it right in 1995, in his book, "Being Digital." He viewed the World Wide Web in a straightforward, uncluttered way, describing a new media world in which content no longer went out to the audience (the expensive, inefficient "broadcast" model), the audience came in to the content (it would only be files in a computer). He predicted the Internet would be a "spoke" system, like telephones, as opposed to a "loop," like cable companies. He said bandwidth problems would be solved by the replacement of telephone's "twisted pair" copper wiring with fiberoptics.

He even saw a new business model, in which Internet content providers, such as journalists, would be paid by the hit, or pageview. Each time a consumer visited the journalist's story online, the journalist would receive two cents. The Internet communications world that Negroponte envisioned was relatively simple, totally achievable, and utterly believable.

But the simple solution, in a revolutionary shift like the Internet, easily gets diverted, complicated, clogged up, slowed down, and damaged, sometimes irreparably, by the inevitable corporate question, "What's in it for me?" America Online (AOL) is a leading example. As an access route to the Internet, AOL in 1995 had no reason to exist; all a person needed was a computer, a modem, and an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Once connected, the user moved about the Internet with free browsers such as Netscape. It was a simple A to B connection, but AOL managed to position itself between A and B, and sell memberships. It was a business model based on the ignorance of the audience. Other business models looked like interventions but were actually fierce resistance being put up by traditional media providers who saw the Internet as a threat to their old and lucrative way of doing things.

Simplicity quickly became the finger in the Internet dike, and all those business models blew right on through. It's hard to say how badly interventions like these may have deflected, damaged, and retarded the growth of what, in the beginning, looked like a simple, but magical, system that achieved its revolutionary effect by doing nothing more than turning around the direction of information by 180 degrees. Instead of progressing directly from A to B, the Internet lurched through a long and cluttered Web 1.0, iteration into a Web 2.0, and now seems to be trying to find its way into a Web 3.0. Tuesday morning, The Wall Street Journal in a special "Journal Report" section, summed up an All Digital Conference – the seventh annual – held last week in Southern California with such names as Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Carol Bartz of Yahoo, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and cable TV mogul John Malone. Their mission: to look at the Internet in 2009, "trying to figure it out." A fine time for that.

What they are trying to figure out is: "How do we get paid?" Nicholas Negroponte had the gumption to address that question in 1995: payments will move through the Internet in tiny amounts and accumulate dramatically through a multiplier effect. His Internet reporter of the future would be paid two cents for every visitor to his story. Given a global circulation, and it is a good story such as you might see in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, the reporter might reasonably expect 200,000 visitors. The reporter earns $4,000 for the story, and we consumers have gotten our two cents' worth. At last. But first, there is all that business model wreckage to be removed.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments

I heard someone being interviewed on radio last week say, "The media loves conflict."

Of course that is not the case. It's the audience that loves conflict, and the media loves anything the audience loves, which is a fundamental principle in media literacy. The audience – people – developed reaction values like conflict, hundreds of thousands of years before the media existed. Mass media, brought into existence by the printing press, just turned those values, called a "reaction package," into a business.

Before media, people on this planet reacted to events around them – exactly the same way people still do – according to the values in this reaction package. There were – are – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity (physical and emotional), timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. Additionally, people reacted to changes in their status quo, and also to whatever threatened to change their status quo.

To experience the reaction package at the individual level, the same way people did before media, simply give up all media for one week. No books, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, or television, or Internet presentations of same. You will still react to events that happen near you, close enough to see, hear, or feel. The experience will be made most effective by placing yourself in a survival context, in a wilderness, say, where danger – the threat to the status quo – hones your keenness to respond, your reaction package.

The mass media, blasted into being as part of the Gutenberg Singularity, simply created a system for sharing the values in the reaction package. Today, that system lets people share the experiences of people reacting to actual events occurring far away, or fictional events presented as entertainment (such as "Survivor"). People love the system, because it empowers them to experience actual events vicariously, and to be excited by fictional events created to provide that excitement. The media lets people be life voyeurs. Is this the media's fault? People who lack media literacy, like the interviewee on the radio, like to think so. Thus the media comes under attack by people for giving the people what they want.

It's probably time to start putting a stop to this transference of blame. It's probably time for the radio interviewer, one of only about a million media professionals in this country, to correct interviewees when they say things like, "The media loves conflict." "No," the interviewer might say, "it's the audience that loves conflict, as long as the conflict is somebody else's." Audiences long before mass media, in ancient civilizations typified by Greece and Rome, were being magnetized by plays with conflict at their hearts. When Gutenberg needed a book title to market his new machine, he chose a book that laid out the medieval mind's direst question, the conflict between good and evil.

The Bible became a huge player in mass media, and it still is, still the best-selling book of all time, and now, maybe for the first time, presented as the definitive answer to the chicken-egg media question. When Gutenberg introduced the first printed Bible, he could not have done it because the media loves conflict; the media didn't exist. But an audience did. It wasn't long before the audience started to grow, and it dragged the media along with it. The audience is dragging it still. The audience needs to be reminded of that, every time one of its members goes on radio and says, "The media loves conflict." If he's going to shoot the messenger, he's going to have to start with the Bible.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments

Webster's defines "literacy," in its most general sense, as "having knowledge or competence," as in "computer literate," or "politically literate." Thus "media literate" means having knowledge or competence in understanding media.

Without media literacy, you can only know what others tell you about "American Idol," such as this story in Monday's New York Times.
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With media literacy, you have knowledge and competence for looking at "Idol" in a way that gives you information to make your own judgments and decisions. The difference? Without media literacy, you may think that the talk about "conspiracy theories" is all about who won. With media literacy, you will realize that, if there were a conspiracy theory, it was partly about the winner, but mostly the show. You will understand why the Fox TV and the show's producers gave deep, satisfied sighs of relief when Kris Allen won.

The main media literacy tools in play here are timeliness, novelty, prominence, the threat to the status quo, emotional proximity and sensationalism.

"Timeliness," in media, means that everything gets old. News starts to get old as soon as it is published. That is why, in mass media, there has always been a race to be first with the news. But it also applies to entertainment and advertising. It's a longer shelf life than news, but on television (since we're talking about television), sooner or later entertainment gets old. Even "Seinfeld." Even "American Idol." Audiences never tire of conflict, or of the threat to the status quo, which are the core values of "American Idol." But they weary of this particular conflict, or that kind of threat.

After four to six years, the producers start worrying about the show getting old, and the audience losing interest. That was the big story about "American Idol" before the present season began. "Changes" were made, a judge added, auditions modified. "Reinvention" is a media buzzword; Madonna is the ranking expert in "reinventing" herself. Always, timeliness is the enemy, and it is as relentless in the media field as entropy is in physics. The remedy is novelty. How do we make it new again?

This season, the changes didn't work. Ratings were down. Producers got defensive. "It's ridiculous how big this show is," one told The Times. Something needed to happen. Then something did. Nothing like a sudden star, a fresh sensation, startling prominence, to bring the audience back to a show. In Britain, it was Susan Boyle. In America, it was Adam Lambert, whose impact was compared to Elvis Presley. The audience started to fall helplessly in love with him, a phenomenon called emotional proximity.

Trouble is, Lambert became too much of a sure thing. He moved to the front early and stayed there. If there's no horse race, no conflict, no "who's gonna win" threat, people lose interest. People started looking back in the pack, looking for someone to restore the threat, even hoping for someone to make it a race. They were looking for an underdog, which is the "David and Goliath" form of emotional proximity that is even stronger than Elvis worship, because more people identify with it. The economy crisis has turned America into a nation of Davids. Two hundred million adult American backs can hold up a lot of weight, but this is ridiculous.

And now "American Idol" has provided a David. Kris Allen. How lucky can Fox TV get? The threat lives! Millions more Americans, who will take their Davids where they can find them, even ones named Mine That Bird, are aware of "American Idol" than if Adam Lambert had won. Lambert will still get rich, Kris Allen will get rich, and, most of all, the guy that Fox needed to win, did. Next season Fox can play the threat card for all it is worth, framing "American Idol" as the all-American show where anything can happen, and probably will.

Last but not least, the "Idol" David comes with minimal cost to American culture. Critics fret that entertainments like "American Idol" threaten to drag the culture into a mindless, unprincipled wasteland. But the critics overlook another media tool, a law, actually, which states that the mass media is an exercise in the power of small numbers. Nielsen Media says 28.8 million viewers out of a population of 304 million watched the "Idol" finale, meaning 275.2 million of us were doing something else. Remember that, when critics try to call mass media the end of civilization.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments

We are in the campus television studio this week, taping our newscast projects. Three talents per team, two news and one sports or weather. I sit over in the shadows and feel warm and fuzzy, watching the 20-year-old faces in the bright lights trying so hard to do good on TV.

We began the semester way last January learning the tools that journalists use to write stories. They are the same tools used to create all media products: news, entertainment and advertising, which I also call manipulation. Then we learn to write stories for print, as if we were newspaper reporters. But I tell them from the first that print is also a totally online medium now, also. I don’t know of a newspaper that doesn’t operate a Website.

What the students really need to understand, though, is that in the converging print and broadcast journalism world, they must know how to write the in-depth story, 1,000 words or so, and the quick 30-second story for broadcast. Already in television, reporters are required to write both. Right now, on television at the end of the 30-second story, the anchor will say, “For more on this story, log on to our Website, at knsd.com,” or wherever. There, you will find the 1,000-word version, written by the same reporter.

Very soon, however, the television will also be a computer, and the remote will also be a mouse, and if you want to know more about the 30-second story, you won’t have to go to no steenking Website; you’re already at it. You will only have to point your remote at the screen, click, and you will be taken to the in-depth “print” story. You can stay there, read as long as you like, then click Back to return to the newscast, which will be waiting exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a server.

Amazing, what this convergence will do to watching television. If you are a sports nut, a baseball fan, say, it will take forever to watch a baseball game. Anywhere in the game, at any time, if you want a player’s complete statistics, click on the player and they will appear. Such stats are already available online at mlb.com. Then when you have settled the bet, click Back, and it will take you to the game exactly where you left it; it’s only a file in a computer, not an analog train at a crossing anymore, passing in front of you an inning at a time.

Back to my students. Writing for print is difficult for them, because they don’t read newspapers. They aren’t familiar with the rhythm of a story written for print. At mid-semester, when we shift into broadcast, you can see lightbulbs going on over their heads; this is the writing rhythm with which they are familiar, and they are much happier when their papers come back for rewrite without so much of my red scribbling on them.

I give them the raw information for the stories. The news stories are like “Parents Against Porn,” “Yacht Drug Bust,” “Fatal Auto Wreck,” etc. In sports and weather, the home team always wins (San Diego State NEVER loses to BYU), and the weather is always interesting (in our newscasts, it’s very stormy in San Diego). Finally, toward the end of the semester, the three-person teams produce the newscast script package, and we go into the studio where production students tape the show as if it were live. Today we started looking at the tapes in class. Most students are seeing themselves on the screen, at the anchor desk, for the first time. I never get tired of it.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments

I closed last Monday's media literacy blog – "The Wizard's Toolbox" – with the argument that journalism, and all media, is practiced exactly the way people want. That is because people, not the media, created the Wizard's tools, the values and definitions that media professionals use to provide the public with news and entertainment. The mass media, created with the arrival of the Gutenberg press, simply took those values and definitions and turned them into a business.

If you want to verify this independently, close your computer right now and do not consume any media for one week. No news, no entertainment, no newspapers, no television, no movies, no magazines, no books, no radio, no recordings, no Internet, no advertising, including billboards.

When you have separated yourself from media, you will be living exactly as people did before media, before Gutenberg, going back to the beginning of humanity. Just as those pre-media people did, you will still react to the immediate world around you, using the same code with which you respond to media, a "reaction package" created from the basic Wizard's tools: conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity, plus the "definition of news:" anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

Where did this reaction package originate? How did it arrive on the planet? Let's go back to "The Dawn of Man," the title that Stanley Kubrick provided for the famous opening scene of his 1969 movie, "2001 – A Space Odyssey." That scene could just as easily be titled, "The Dawn of Media," as it unfolds before us on YouTube.

(Note: the link doesn't show the entire sequence; for the completion of the sequence, click here. The musical score accompanying this section was discarded, happily, before the movie's release.)

That planet was inhabited by primitive humans, still ape-like, in Kubrick’s vision, who lived in groups of 20 or so in forbidding terrain. Watch them, for evidence of the code emerging as they reacted to their world. Conflict surrounded them: the heat of day, the dark of night, the growl of big cats in the darkness, the search for food, the conflict for water, animals competing for the food. Disaster struck suddenly, sensationally: a cat springing from a ledge, bringing a human down, and death was the consequence. The people were never free of the threat to the status quo. They huddled in terror under rock overhangs in the darkness, listening to the cries of the cats.

They knew about prominence. Each group followed a leader who emerged naturally as the one in the group who had the respect of the others in part because of strength and size – usually but not always the largest – and because of his quality of dominance, but mostly because he seemed to know things. He seemed to want to know things, in ways the other people didn’t. He knew where food and water and dangers were and he knew the land and the sky. People in the group felt an urge to keep him in sight. He acquired prominence.

People in the groups all looked alike and behaved alike and yet they knew they belonged to their group. They recognized each other and would only mate with each other and natural bonding between parents and offspring enforced the sense of belonging. They were bound demographically, and felt a comfort in their physical and emotional proximity. In any group there were young children, young adults and adults, the total number varying from 20 to 30 depending on illness, accidents and predators. No one starved. They shared a strong human interest. Food was shared even with the weakest who could not gather it themselves. Their food was berries and grasses and bark and insects found in the ground. The best was saved for the leader because the people knew how important he was to them.

When two groups came close together there was conflict. Mostly it was food or water that brought them into the same place. Groups facing each other across a favorite watering place sought to establish priority by screaming, gesturing, foot-stamping and charging. There were rocks all around their feet but it never occurred to them to pick up a rock and throw it. Usually it was the leader’s display dominance that settled the issue and determined which group would drink first.

Then something happened. A leader scratching for food beneath a mound of animal bones picked up a bone shaft, a femur, to move it, but it tapped the ground and small fragments flew up. The leader, curiously, tapped again. Bones flew. Again, harder, and harder, and bones broke, a skull shattered, and in the leader’s brain, a connection was made. Something had changed. Now we saw a tapir fall, killed by the bone weapon, who no longer would be a competitor for the food, and that was progress.

Then, in a transfixing moment, the tapir became food. At the end of his bone club, the leader saw a red color. He became aware of a scent that moved him in a new and powerful way and brought him back to the tapir. He saw the same red color on the tapir’s battered skull, and it gave the same scent. He touched the red with his fingers. He lifted his fingers to his nose and sniffed. Deep inside him an instinct awoke and instantly was very strong. He licked at the red and inside his throat gathered a growl that grew into a roar of discovery. He knelt and lifted the tapir’s head. This took great courage. With equal care and helplessness, he sank his teeth deliberately into the flesh. Then he gently pulled, and the flesh came away. Then he chewed, and then swallowed, and a novel new circuit in humankind was closed.

It was not many generations before all the groups knew what the leader had discovered that day and after a thousand years the overall population of the people on the coastal plain had quadrupled because of the new and abundant food supply that could be killed with a bone club. And at the watering places the rock had become a weapon in the group confrontations. It was a new and violent life among the people but by then no one remembered the old ways. Irrevocable changes had occurred.

At that point, Kubrick had his ape-man throw the bone club into the air and fast-forwarded a few hundred thousand years, where the reaction package remains intact, but life is not so intense, as you will discover in your week of media deprivation. In fact life in the civilized 21st century can be totally boring, day in and day out, which is why you will yearn for more action. Your reaction package cries for it. That is why, after Gutenberg, and the introduction of the media and shared media codes, for humans, there was no turning back. They discovered they didn't need to witness a sensational conflict; it could be imported to them, from far away.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments

Media professionals – the new Wizards of Oz – use a deceptively simple set of tools in their work. There are 12 "event values:" conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity, timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism, and curiosity. There is one definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

There are other tools that come into play as needed, but these are the basic set. Let's call them the Wizard's Tools. They are the starting place for all existing media literacy education: Media Code 101. The Wizard's Tools create the code that resides in every scrap of print, video, and audio content produced by the seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. Professionals who work in those businesses learn the media code in schools of journalism, public relations, marketing, advertising, script writing, filmmaking, campaigning, and terrorism.

Yes, terrorism. Terrorists in the last 20 years have realized they aren't in the bomb business at all. They're in the television business, just like the National Football League. Terrorists are frighteningly expert in the media code. A quick quiz, with one answer: the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, and the 9/11 attacks, both occurred at the same time, 9 a.m.; and the summer, 2006, plot to blow up airliners – foiled, happily – involved airliners flying from Europe to the United States. Why? People with media literacy will know the answer immediately. The answer is at the bottom of this blog.

All media has but three functions: to inform, entertain, and manipulate. The information stream includes news of all kinds. “News” has been defined in any number of ways, but the media wizards use a good generic definition: news is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo. A plane crash, an economy crash, right-doing, wrong-doing, or a city council vote changes the status quo. Anything that may happen, but hasn't yet, is a threat to the status quo. Sports and weather are classic threat stories. In fact, sports is a multi-billion dollar business based on nothing more than the threat to the status quo.

The entertainment stream reaches the public through all seven media businesses: books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television. The most visible, literally, entertainment stream is television. Manipulation, or persuasion, shows up in media products such as books, commentaries, terrorism and advertising, intended to influence thought, inspire reaction, impact choices, and trigger spending.

Media professionals, knowing the media code, know how it works, and how they can make it work, to inform, entertain and manipulate the public. The public, at its end, is unaware of this. The media/media code/public circuit runs in one direction only, from the media toward the public, a dangerously unbalanced equation. When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, the power equation will start to change.

The American educational system never has exposed the general student population to the code, and that is strange, and dangerous, given the dominance of media in our lives. Even half a century ago when media was slow, and arrived in a newspaper, a couple of television and radio stations, a movie house, and some magazines and books, the media was still a significant part of a person's week, both as news and entertainment, and advertising.

Now, early in the 21st century, 100 years after the media code escaped into the air, the population is inundated in a media code hurricane. With their growing power, since the 1950s, to reach, inform, entertain, and manipulate people, media producers have learned to embed the code with sophisticated skill. The media codes themselves have evolved, and in many cases mutated into forms that in turn feed the sophistication. People have become aware of this new media power, and they complain about it, without having any knowledge of the power's source. This power, according to reports published in the summer of 2007, has turned American teenagers and pre-teens, down to age six, into a fifty-billion-dollar consumer group, obviously highly prized by media producers and marketers. Shouldn't their parents, and the kids, know more about media code? Like starting in third grade? Shouldn't the curtain be pulled back, on the new Wizards of Oz?

The media code is to media as DNA is to a human being. A human being, in all of his or her improbable complexity, is based on four DNA codes, A, T, C and G. Bringing a media product to life may involve divine inspiration, hundreds of sophisticated techniques, and cadres of highly skilled professionals, but the finished product is always based on the codes created by the Wizard's tools. This isn't rocket science, but media code is as genuine, and real in its discipline, as DNA is in biology, or the physics code on which Albert Einstein founded his great equation e = mc2. Media students typically go to school for four years to learn what the media codes are, how to identify them, how to quickly find them in huge piles of raw information, and how and where to embed them in media pages, scripts, layouts, campaigns, and plots.

The 12 media values, for example, are all present, each on their individual strength scales of zero to 10, in every media product you consume. You in the general public haven't seen them, until now, because you didn't know what to look for; no one ever showed you. When you see it, you will start to understand how and why the code influences and manipulates your reactions. Those strength scales, incidentally, are grossly simplified, for illustration purposes. A human being, reacting to an event on the ground, or one in the media, effortlessly produces a code combination whose composition may be described in parts per million, and is an exact, individual measure of response, unique to that individual. That combination, in its precision, is also an exact reflection of the individual’s identity; no two of us are alike.

Much of the time, your reactions are spontaneous and legitimate as you gain information being reported to you about events as they happen in the world. And much of the time, your reactions are being manipulated by code users whose job is to make you feel a certain way, particularly desirous, or make a particular choice, or decision. These code users create vastly lucrative markets composed entirely of American consumers who are too young to get a driver's license.

In the meantime, Americans are losing faith in the media. In its 2007 report on "The State of the News Media," the Project for Excellence in Journalism said that less than 20 percent of Americans "believe what they read in print." They claim bias and manipulation, even in the legitimate news flow. The study cites "continuing doubts" about whether print journalism "is being practiced in a way people want," a phrase I want you to come back and read again, when you realize how it screams with irony.

Yet evidence routinely surfaces, indicating these same people, in their doubts, really have no idea how the media does its job. In September, 2006, my home-town newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, stripped across the top of its Letters to the Editor page a series of letters complaining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.

One griped about a huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another letter thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of local teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.

Such reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions are there for all to see, right there in the page. Those values and realities are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. People know, without knowing, what the values are, because they created them. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business.

But the people don't realize that. Glance up at the Wizard's tools again. For now, just look at the event values. We know now that there are in fact 12 such values, each with a strength measured on a scale of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the newspaper, each on its strength of zero to 10.

When a media professional, in this case an editor, looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune the day after Hoffman sets a new Major League record, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.

Novelty is the event value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego! Clinton jumps to GOP!). Setting a record in major league baseball, "America's pastime," is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974, and they were talking again in 2007 about Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades, until Trevor Hoffman achieved it in 2006. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.

The proximity value means the story happened close to you, either physically or emotionally, or both. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. San Diegans are physically close to stories about the home-town team. If Hoffman pitched for far-away Cleveland, or even Los Angeles, in San Diego the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page.

Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Winning releases strong feel-good emotions; most of us like to win, and millions of Americans get a vicarious charge from watching their team win, and, in San Diego, from watching Trevor Hoffman become the best relief pitcher ever. A "sports fan" is one who gets to share the famed "joy of victory and agony of defeat" without ever doing any work.

Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. Aside from 9/11, which is in a media code league of its own, the biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series in San Diego against the Chicago Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.

Even after they know the code, and are able to see its presence in the page, more people than not may gripe about the front-page content selection. Why? Because of demographics, defined in the media code as "the science of dividing people into groups." Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see, based on personal interest. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story?

On that day, it was Trevor Hoffman. The "largest number of readers," in the editor's estimation, may have been only 20 percent of all readers, inviting 80 percent to gripe. But because of another code phenomenon, the Second Law of Media, the 20 percent was enough. In fact, a 20 percent response is enough to make an editor, or any media producer for that matter, weep with gratitude. It would be good if the paper could please everybody, get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 15 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader. It's the Abe Lincoln rule of media. You could give all the people all the news all the time, but it would be terrible for business. A reader knowing the media code would understand that, and perhaps be less inclined to doubt that journalism is practiced in a way that people want. In fact it's practiced exactly the way they want. As we shall see.

Quiz answer: The Oklahoma City and 9/11 attacks, and the foiled airliner plot, were scheduled on routine weekdays to ensure maximum events values, and timed to maximize the hours of daylight that television cameras could focus on the disastrous, novel, sensational, images.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

One of the revolutionary features of the Internet is that news is no longer local. Whether it is The Abilene Reporter-News or The New York Times, the news in that newspaper is available globally.

That means I, from where I sit in Southern California, can refer all interested parties to a powerful story I read this morning in The Times. Those parties, if they agree, can forward the story on. Frank Rich this morning wrote about the future of journalism. His topic was the first law of media, which states: the media is a business. Hence a conflict: a democracy such as ours depends directly on journalism, but somebody has to pay for that journalism. Thus the crisis of the journalism business – who will pay for it – is also the crisis of democracy.

The print circulation of The Times is minuscule, compared to the power of the Internet to distribute this news. The Internet, representing a death threat to the journalism business, is also the voice that shouts the threat to a circulation without boundaries, in which some new business model exists. Revolutionary times. Quoting Mr. Rich, ". . . the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end, we will get what we pay for."

Labels: Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments

In physics and mathematics, a “singularity” is a point or an event where the rules break down: nothing makes sense anymore. Thus, nothing about the future can be predicted. There is no way to “describe” the singularity or the world on the other side of it. It’s a world we can’t see, because we have no system for looking at it.

It’s a fascinating problem for scientists. They know such worlds exist on the other side of black holes, which (with the “Big Bang”) are the most famous singularities in physics. And they know that in the other world, laws apply. But they are laws with no apparent relationship to the laws on this side.

It is as if the singularity constitutes a total division of meaning, that the only way to understand the world beyond is to go live in it.

In this way, the phenomenon of singularities resembles history. The atomic bomb is a good example. It was reasonable for those scientists in the 1940s to wonder if they shouldn’t hold back from that brink, from stepping across the splitting atom like godless landlords and slinging an entire world tenancy into a future that nobody could see, or escape.

Step and sling they did, and it changed our social, scientific and emotional landscape completely. Someone living in this world would be hard-pressed to explain it to someone living in 1940. The act also changed history completely out of proportion with the event. The scientists only wanted a bomb; instead, they created an age.

That’s another curiosity of singularities: their effect is never singular. Singularities always create entire new worlds, from which there is no return to the old. At the time, there is no way to describe the event, or the laws on the other side. Like the Los Alamos scientists, Johann Gutenberg, in the middle of the 15th century, only knew his means of reproducing information using moveable type was unprecedented in its power. From his world, he could not see the other side and what different world this power might create.

In his world, before the year 1450, information was transmitted by a “scribal culture,” whose system extended three thousand years back toward the dawn of human communications. In that scribal culture, information was recorded and reproduced in handwriting. Each copy of a book or script took as long to create as the last. Information was reproduced at the rate of a scribe, working with feather quills, an inkpot, and paper sheets, copying one page at a time.

The scribal system was very slow, and very expensive. To imagine the relative expense, consider a modern textbook or a reference such as “The World Almanac” restricted to scribal reproduction. How many scribes could a publisher reasonably pay? One thousand? How long would it take 1,000 scribes working a 40-hour week at journeyman wages (they were, after all, professionals) to produce 1,000 copies of “The World Almanac”? What kind of market would be created by 50,000 consumers each wanting a copy? What effect on culture and intellect would be created by such a shortage of reference material?

Information in the scribal culture was scarce and exclusive and thus an instrument of power and privilege. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, the famed “feudal masses” of the Middle Ages had little or no access to information. Because they didn’t read, they couldn’t read. It was the way of that world, absolutely normal, the status quo. No one, not even the powerful and privileged, who controlled the information, had given much thought to a world of reading masses, of what might happen to ignorance and feudal docility in an age of common literacy. There was no reason for such thoughts, no way to describe so bizarre a fantasy world.

Such imaginings certainly didn’t interest Johann Gutenberg, an Austrian entrepreneur depressed by misfortune. He had had bad luck, or no luck at all, in his get-rich-quick schemes in the 1440s, including a mirror that was supposed to capture spirits, and he was deep in debt. Now, in 1450, he had a new scheme to copy books better and faster than anyone ever had. Some of the technology was old, going back to China, but his application was brand-new, and he was sure it would make money. He guarded his new business plan closely until he felt it was ready to take public.

Then all Johann Gutenberg needed was the right title. If the title was big enough, it would draw attention to the technology, which was his real product. He chose the Bible.

You have to agree, for a book with a good set of media codes, the Bible can’t be beat. There was the first line, no other like it before or since: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And it was non-fiction! There were the plots and sub-plots rife with good and evil, and the promise and delivery (via immaculate conception) of a Messiah, a son of God on Earth, who performed miracles and in the end got crucified. And then came back to life! Talk about a potential page-turner, in the hands of a mass audience. It was a great story, with a dedicated, widespread audience. It had its passionate critics, too, which was always good for business.

After all his disappointments, Johann Gutenberg had hit upon the perfect marketing tool for the world’s first commercial printing-press technology. The Bible and the printing press was a marketing marriage made in heaven. All it did was:

1. Create the book industry;
2. Create the book industry’s original and all-time No. 1 best-seller;
3. Create shared media codes, which we call "broadcast media;"
4. Create mass media.

He couldn’t know that; couldn’t see it. Gutenberg only knew that his technology would work. And so the first singularity passed unanticipated, at some precise moment in history when Gutenberg peeled back the first sheet, eyeballed it, spread down another sheet over the wet type, pressed it against the type, lifted it off, and then a third, printed and laid side-by-side on the printer’s table with the first two, all three identical, the printer in two minutes’ time precisely reproducing information that would have taken a careful scribe (in the interest of faithful reproduction) several days or weeks and great care.

Standing there, in his Mainz print shop that day, staring at the three pages that created the first singularity in media history, he could not have foreseen common literacy, the Age of Mass Media, The New York Times, or Paris Hilton.

Paris Hilton? The Bible begat Paris Hilton? Well, it took awhile, but yes. Played backward, all the laws of the media world would fetch back from the four corners, over the 550-odd years, called in from the branches of science and art and thought, converging and then hurtling as the mass collapsed upon itself toward Mainz and then vanished, a universe disappearing in a blink through a point defined in space and time by three identical pages, and the scent of drying ink, in Johann Gutenberg's shop. Imagine the thunder, in the silence of a singularity un-created.

Curiously, a researched history of the first media singularity, and of new laws starting to be created in its wake, did not appear until 1979, when University of Michigan historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein published “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.” The title is typical of the historian’s reserve. Eisenstein does not come right out and say that Gutenberg with his moveable type blew away the scribal culture without a trace and blew away the old social structures as well.

Eisenstein carefully declares that the printing press was in fact only one agent of the changes under way in early modern Europe. There also had to be present a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Newton, a Columbus, a Martin Luther. She develops a thesis, however, that the ability to reproduce accurate information in volume, with the resulting wide access, is the single theme that can unify the historic discussions of that remarkable era, and that that theme - printing - was the true revolution. Martin Luther in Germany, empowered to circulate his church reform views in volume, so alarmed Henry VIII that the English king “nationalized” all print functions on the isle, the first modern example of prior restraint.

So the singularity created by Gutenberg was volume. Reform, research and exploration were only specific and historic uses of this information volume that was naturally starting to spread out across flat ground. Printers quickly realized a general market for their new product. Imagine a bookshop scene in Paris, London, or Rome, in 1455 or 1460, as the first pages off Gutenberg’s press began to arrive.

“What good is this?” says an alderman, holding up the page. “It looks so . . . so artificial.”

“Yes,” concedes the stationer, as the booksellers were called in those days. “Such work will never equal the art of a friar with his parchment and quills. But this new ‘printing’ is fast, and cheap. For the first time, information is readily available to the masses.”

“But,” protests the alderman, “95 percent of the population can’t read.”

The stationer shrugs. “They will,” he says.

The stationer’s words heralded the dawn of broadcast. The word “broadcast,” incidentally, did not originate with media. It’s originally an agricultural verb, meaning to scatter, or sow, in all directions. If you have ever scattered grass seed or granular fertilizer across a lawn, then you have broadcast. Watering a lawn from a hose is essentially broadcasting water. On the early morning “farm reports” on midwestern radio stations, feed and fertilizer manufacturers advertise “broadcast” products.

Volume was information’s water hose. The volume singularity created by Gutenberg’s press made it possible to broadcast information in all directions, across an entire field of people. People felt this strange rain, looked up at it, licked it, liked it, started to drink it in, felt intellect sprout and start to take root. How must it have felt, to a literate 50-year-old in the year 1500, to look back and try to imagine the world before print?

Books were the first form of broadcast, as printers took classics from the scribal culture and mass-produced them.

Soon another type of communication emerged. Instead of reproducing old information, some printers saw merit in recording new information, that, because of media code, was of interest to a general audience, and distributing it on a regular basis. It wasn’t long before merchants picked up on the new system as a good way to reach people with word of their products; so good, in fact, they paid the printer to carry their ads.

In terms of media history, newspapers were clearly the most far-reaching result of the first singularity. They were the crucible for all the broadcast realm that was to follow. In that crucible, after the volume singularity, new laws started to form. Imagine the local excitement in the 1500s when people started receiving pages that weren’t all about God, but all about them. It started with books, but the greatest change to flow from Gutenberg’s creation into the everyday lives of people, measured by actual revenue over the last five centuries, was the newspaper. At the end of the 20th century, the newspaper was still the No. 1 moneymaker of all the media businesses, even television.

Like a water hose, the newspaper distributed information out to a general audience from a central point. This was revolutionary, because it not only turned the direction of information around 180 degrees, it disconnected the information from real time. Before newspapers, people had to go to a central place – churches were popular – to hear a speaker deliver the news, and they had to be there when the speaker was there. Newspapers brought the speaker(s) to the people, and let them read the news when they wanted to. An unbelievable development.

Embedded in the pages were many of the same media codes that pull us into the pages today. Remember, these first newspapers didn’t invent the media codes. The codes had always been there, and people had always responded to them. But the response had always been direct, and personal. Something happened, and people who saw it, or heard it, or experienced it, reacted to it, according to the codes – the original reaction codes – that they associated with the event.

Now the newly forming media took those codes and turned them into a business. Natural codes became media codes, that could be shared by many people, across great distances. People loved it. No newspapers? How did we survive? This is what it was like: when you finish this paragraph, close this blog and your computer. For three days from this moment, avoid all media. No reading, no books, newspapers, or magazines, no television, no radio, no CDs, no iPod, no Internet – not even email – no movies, no ads, no commercials, no billboards. For 72 hours, you are to do nothing but experience life as it happens around you.

That was the life of the average human being in the 15th century. The media codes will still be there; you will react to events as they happen around you. And because the codes are still there, you will understand perfectly how the 15th-century Europeans felt, when the first newspapers started to appear. Once humans saw they could share these codes, through a media, there was no turning back.

Labels: Media, Media Literacy

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:28 AM | Permalink | Comments

If you never heard of Susan Boyle, haven’t heard her story yet, go here and enjoy yourself.

When you come back here, you will know what I mean when I say I am feeling like a 15-year-old sophomore in a Studebaker Lark, sitting at a red light waiting for Simon Cowell to pull alongside in his Corvette.

Somebody – at least two or three people, called “bookers” – knew Susan Boyle could sing like that even as she stood on the stage waiting to start. They must have heard her sing at the local audition, before they invited her to this bigger, televised round of “Britain’s Got Talent.” Of course they kept their mouths shut. On this show, 99 percent of the time, audience and judge reaction is an even bigger appeal to the television audience than the performances themselves. The whole Boyle appearance was geared to the two or three seconds after she started to sing, and the cameras cutting to the judges’ faces.

Not that the rest of us might not feel stunned, and uncomfortable, even if we went to YouTube knowing we were about to see something special. I have been trying to figure out how I feel about myself, grinning so broadly, and patronizingly, at a frumpy spinster putting the media culture in its place. In the end, I find that the world is simply full of these pleasant surprises. A version of the Susan Boyle experience happened to me, and a group of my closest friends, a little over three years ago. On that occasion, it was a beautiful woman taking the stage. She was my wife, at our wedding reception, and, out of the blue, she announced to our guests that she was going to sing to me.

And she did. She faced me, took my hands in hers, and started to sing. “Til There Was You.” Her voice was startlingly clear and beautiful, and a complete surprise. Her beauty and voice shocked me then and instruct me now. Robin Givhan, writing in The Washington Post today, said: “Boyle would not be mesmerizing if she were not an ugly duckling.” Givhan is wrong. My wife was mesmerizing, and she is a knockout. Susan Boyle did not have to be an ugly duckling to create the sensation she did. Most people would be no less shocked – maybe even more shocked – if Paris Hilton had taken the stage and opened her mouth, and we heard Susan Boyle’s voice come out.

The last couple of days, I have watched people coming and going. I have to suppress the urge to go up to each and say, “Can you sing?” I’ll bet some of them really can. I also bet that more than half of them, and more than half of the people I see today and tomorrow and the next day, have something they can really do well, even shockingly well, that I just can’t see. Likewise, as they look at me, they would never see a 15-year-old sophomore sitting in a Studebaker Lark at a stoplight, waiting for Simon Cowell to pull alongside in his Corvette. I am not making this up. I was thinking this when I was 15 years old. Not Simon Cowell, but some cool dude in a big Chevy hardtop would pull alongside at the light, goose his gas a couple of times at my ugly hamster-powered Lark, and get ready for the light to change.

Unbeknownst to him, under my tiny hood I had a dual carb 327, stroked and bored and waiting to blow this guy’s jaw off when the light turned green. That would have been such fun. In my thoughts, I think I’ll name the Lark the Boylemobile, in her honor.

Labels: Media, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

My God, I’ve been Tigerized.

It is true that for several years, the likelihood of my watching a golf tournament on television went way up if Tiger Woods was playing. Ninety percent of the time, if Woods was playing, I could count on something unusual, or outright bizarre, happening.

But I think that was only a natural reaction, one that all, or practically all, humans are born with. It is standard human equipment to react to unusual events. “Novelty,” to a media professional, is one of the 12 basic media values, and I believe it is totally reasonable to suggest that Tiger Woods is a novel golfer. Bobby Jones in 1965 said of the young Jack Nicklaus, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar.” Dave Anderson of The New York Times used that line, after Woods won the 1997 Masters at 18-under, to set up his own line: “Woods . . . played a game with which even Nicklaus was not familiar.”

That was the kind of novelty on my mind that drew me in again yesterday for the Masters final round. Woods was seven strokes behind the leader, but pfsssh. Tiger could wipe out that lead by the fourth hole. He didn’t, ultimately, but anyone, including Woods, who has ever swung club at ball knows that in the long run, the course always wins. (There is a little-known historical fact why “golf” is “flog” spelled backward, but more about that in a minute.) Woods gave it a good run, though, all the way to the 17th hole. And that’s when I got Tigerized.

On the West Coast, the Masters was scheduled to end at 4 p.m. As Woods was walking off the 16th green, my eye caught the clock on the TV cabinet. It was a few minutes before 2. I went into one of those space-time disconnects that always happen when I think about the International Date Line. How could Tiger be walking to the 17th tee with two hours left to play? Adding to the confusion, the picture switched to something that players were doing on the front nine. How did they get back there?

Then I understood. On Sunday afternoons, I tell time by how close Tiger Woods is to the 18th hole. Sociologists spend a lot of time studying, and worrying about, the cultural influences of media. Do people become the events, the content, they consume in the media? I tend to think no, people only imitate media content without any actual change in behavior. Many times have I imitated golfers without actually ever becoming one. I was amused to note, by the way, another circle closed between me and a famous person. Two weeks ago it was Bill Cosby, who won a Mark Twain award, just as I won a Mark Twain award in 1990. During this Masters, Padraig Harrington set a Master’s record – or perhaps a professional golf record – by hitting the same tree twice on the same hole. Pretty good, but well short of my personal best of hitting MYSELF twice, on CONSECUTIVE SHOTS, including the second shot that had to hit a ball-washer post exactly right to come back and nail me in the left thigh.

That was utter simplicity, though, compared to gaining two extra hours on a Sunday afternoon because my cultural geography had shifted into Tiger Time. I didn’t say anything to Karen. No sense making her worry. She doesn’t particularly like golf, but she likes to watch Tiger for the usual novelty value. We were in the mountains over the weekend and left in plenty of time so we could, as she said, be home in time to “watch the flog.” In this case, she was imitating me. I like to call golf flog. But I wasn’t sure she knew the whole story.

“Do you think that ‘flog’ is a typo?” I said. I know that she, like me, likes to speak in typos sometimes. “Yes,” she said. “Actually,” I said, “’flog’ is ‘golf’ spelled backward,” and I told her the history of the early Scots, going out to the heath with a stitched-leather ball and walking sticks with which to hit the ball. They called it “going out for a flog.” Later, as the game caught on, the founders decided that “flog” may not be the most distinguished label for their new sport, so a committee was formed. At a national meeting of the Royal Flog Committee, a member happened to look at his nametag in the mirror in the men’s bathroom. And that’s where golf came from. You see why Karen might worry.

Labels: Heroes, Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments

Is Twitter progress?

Well, yes it is. For now. But already, people in the know – most of whom Twitter, or have Twittered – are already referring to Twitter as a “time suck.” That means that Twitter, before long, will assumed its place alongside other digital, Web-based activities that once were smart but now are known time sucks, which suck away a human being’s time without leaving the human being anything to show for it.

To better understand the gravity of such a result, let us recall what it is like to paint wood trim, or moulding. If you have never painted wood trim – around doors and windows in an ordinary bedroom for example – then you have no idea how slow and painful the passage of time can be. Painting moulding is as close to infinity as a human being can approach. That is because moulding possesses all the physical characteristics of infinity. A battleship, seemingly vast, can nevertheless be painted in less time than it takes to paint the moulding in our sample ordinary bedroom.

Now imagine you have painted the moulding with a dry brush. No paint, just bare wood behind you, stretching away to Andromeda. That is the kind of time suck that Twitter is. Ninety-five percent of the Web universe is a bare-wood time suck. Hard to believe, but I can sense the day when we will ask, “What’s on the Web?” Answer: “Nothing but old movies.”

Can you say the word, “bubble?” No, of course, the Web does not constitute a giant unified bubble. There are pockets of content that consumers can learn from and take forward with them, and there is a demographic, constituting maybe 15 percent of Web users, who LIKE time sucks. But it doesn’t take totality for a bursting bubble to shake things up. A relatively small bubble of sub-prime lending just about wrecked the mortgage industry and undermined other financial structures like gophers tunneling away all but a crust of dirt beneath the Taj Mahal.

The Web is thousands of communities attracted to content of interest only to those within those communities. The Web, most of all, is a marvel in making content available to small audiences who the traditional mass media could never serve. All those small audiences taken together, though, add up to significant percentages enjoying the novelty the Web provides them. But in the media world, novelty is totally finite. More finite in some places than others. If you are painting moulding, you may feel novelty for as long as five minutes. Novelty for “Seinfeld” lasted longer, around seven years, and it is still holding for “American Idol,” though it needed re-tooling this season.

There must be finiteness to small communities of people enjoying their hour of accessibility to unusual, even bizarre, pockets of content on the Web. One by one, as those communities burn out, there will be a declining number of communities attracted by novelty, and the number of novel subjects to attract them. For examples, watch television in the middle of the night, where resides content that once was new.

As this novelty fuel is spent, and the last time sucks have consumed themselves, one day a good part of the Web will collapse. Google will teeter then, not Twitter, as the search for novelty crashes. I would guess we could start looking for cracks around 2011.

Labels: Geezerville, Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments

When I started writing a column for The San Diego Union in 1978, my “hole” was 30 column-inches. When I wrote my last column in 1992, my hole had shrunk to 16 column-inches, and the paper’s pages themselves had shrunk as costs rose and revenues flattened. I took note of that in my goodbye column, saying newspapers were “trimming their newsprint sails, in an effort to stay afloat.”

The San Diego papers THEMSELVES had shrunk. In 1992, Helen Copley killed The Evening Tribune. They called it a “merger” of the Trib and the Union, but it was a mercy killing of an evening paper whose circulation had dipped below 100,000. Remember the first law of media: the media is a business. If the media doesn’t make money, it will go out of business.

So the newspaper media in San Diego was already in trouble in 1992, and that was BEFORE the Internet roared in from space and blew everything up.

It has been at least 10 years since, going out to get the paper one morning, I realized I was going out to pick up a dinosaur. Now the dinosaurs are actually toppling. Yesterday the Union was sold to a type of business called a “private equity firm.” I doubt if any of its principals can cite the First Amendment. The first analysis I read suggested that not the newspaper, but the land it sits on – 13 acres in Mission Valley, across the San Diego River from the Fashion Valley Mall – was the key factor in the sale. I can close my eyes and see a hotel there now. Hell, I don’t even have to close my eyes.

Surveys insist that Americans don’t care about newspapers much anymore, and would not miss them. The San Diegans I have encountered today contradict the statistics. My dentist’s first question to me was, “What will happen to the Union?” Ditto his dental hygienist, who went on for five minutes in support of newspapers as I waited there with my mouth open.

This, I believe, is because when push comes to shove, people back their newspapers, because the newspaper is the repository of a community’s civic, social and institutional memory. People can reconnect to that San Diego memory, going back 81 years, only by going into the newspaper’s files. Only in one place is it all in one place. To lose that would be unthinkable.

If people feel that way, how do you think newspaper people feel? Many of our files are now accessible online. I was one tiny player in the history of the Copley Press in San Diego, but a search for my files from 1983 to 1992 yields 1,384 documents. Multiply that by thousands, and there starts to appear above the building in Mission Valley a spectral congregation of journalists shaking hands and patting backs for a community memory well, if sometimes imperfectly, preserved. No one else could have done it.

Paper was our medium, on which we moved history from the city through the presses and into the streets. That will change, and it will not be easy. I am totally addicted to picking up a newspaper and sitting down with it. But paper is only a medium. Journalism is the message. It will flow on a new river. I just got a Kindle for my birthday, and it feels clumsy and awkward and restrictive, but it also looks like the journalism medium of the near future. It’s journalism, not newspapers, that communities must keep alive.

Labels: Media, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments

I got a Kindle for my birthday!

Karen said she wanted to give me one for Christmas, but they were out of stock. Just as well. By my birthday, Kindle 2 had been introduced, with some useful feature upgrades. Not that I could tell you what they were, or how to use them.

A "Kindle" is, of course, the book-reading hardware sold by Amazon.com. It is the debut of a new age in which paper, an excellent medium now in its second millennium of service, will be replaced by some new, flat, flexible, foldable medium on which words do not appear via impressions of ink but by the excitement of molecules. As nifty as it is to sit in the kitchen nook, command Kindle to download a book or newspaper, and receive that publication faster than you can pour a cup of coffee, I get the distinct impression that I am working with a primitive prototype.

The Kindle, to me, must be like the first telephones were to people in the 1890s living in the dawn of the telephonics age. It is a marvel unto itself, but only a starting point, the first planting of a new technology that will sprout unimaginable produce, the same way the astounding communications products of our age – including the Kindle – trace their roots back to the first primitive, prototypal, telephones.

I wonder, in the 1890s, when someone brought a telephone into our house for the first time, who I would have wanted to call first. Ceremonially, I set aside the startup instructions for the Kindle, took the Kindle off its charger, and tried to decide which writer I wanted to download first. I decided on E.B. White, the famed 20th-century essayist and author of "Charlotte's Web," and history's reigning expert on humor. "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can," White wrote, "but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Those words have guided a multitude of careers.

But Amazon has yet to provide any E.B. White titles in its inventory of Kindle availability, a features shortcoming that I am sure will be upgraded any day now. And so I moved on to Eudora Welty. Here I did slightly better, finding and downloading an anthology of Southern writers that included Miss Welty. Then I hit a snag, that developers of this new print medium technology will need to fix, or risk driving all future readers to the loony bin. In a book, you can turn to a page. In Kindle, you can't. At least not that I have yet discovered. In the anthology, if they are collected alphabetically, as I suspect they are, since the first work is that of James Agee, then I will have put a lot of miles on the Next key, and my thumb joint, before I reach Welty.

As yet, I have chosen not to do that. Instead, this primitivity invites me to look backward and forward, as I do often when I try to picture the media of the future. Since it was my 66th (!) birthday, I looked backward to 1943 and wondered what sort of state-of-the-art communications technology I might have received as a birthday gift at that time. I happen to have in my possession a couple of Life magazines from the 1940s, one from '41 and one from '42. They were huge magazines, up-to-date but also impossibly quaint, and delivered by mailmen.

There is no way to fast-forward from a 1942 Life magazine to a Kindle. The only way we could have gotten here is one day at a time. Likewise, looking forward, we must get there one day at a time. On the way, I predict (as I predicted 10 years ago) newspapers and books will be printed on a wide sheet, folded in the middle, to create in essence four pages of print. We will start on Page One, turn to Page Two, then Three and the back page, Page Four. We will press some kind of trigger in the material, and the next four pages will load.

But 66 years from now, I predict the Kindle will have evolved into a tiny chip, embedded in our audio-video neural complex, eliminating all need for external hardware such as screens and speakers. Our volume and channel controls will be managed by our thoughts. We can watch or read or listen to the content of our choice, simply by bidding it to happen.

Labels: Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

Labels: Media, Roots

Posted by Michael Grant at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments

Willie Nelson grinned amiably -- all of Willie's expressions rise from amiability -- at the suggestion that, as the 800-pound gorilla of country music, he can sing anything he wants.

"Well, I am country," he said. "Always have been, always will be. Country is what I write, what I sing, what I think I do." He grinned again. "But I do like to sing other kinds of songs."

And so in any given concert, Willie with his Family Band will offer rock and roll ("Whiskey River"), hard country ("The Party's Over"), blues ("City of New Orleans"), ballads ("To All the Girls I've Loved Before"), ethnic folk ("Seven Spanish Angels"), maybe a classical instrumental ("Bach Minuet in G") if the mood strikes him, and of course "Blue Skies," "Georgia on My Mind," and other pop standards, including -- you can count on it -- "Stardust."

" `Stardust' is probably the greatest song -- well, `Stardust' and `Moonlight in Vermont' are the two greatest songs -- that I think were ever written," Willie said.

"This is the same guy that says, `I'm country,' but I also know what is really beautiful and what's good and what's difficult. `Moonlight in Vermont' is a difficult melody, it's a difficult lyric. Your regular ordinary run-of-the-mill picker don't jump out there and start playing `Moonlight in Vermont' like he might `Fraulein,' you know."

For the moment, Willie was only talking about music, over cups of coffee in his suite at the L'Ermitage in Beverly Hills. He had come to Los Angeles in T-shirt and jeans to dangle before distributors rough cuts of another in a series of movies -- this one featuring, among others, Morgan Fairchild -- in which Willie has basically played himself.

A month ago, in a studio he owns in the rustic Texas hill country, he and his pal Merle Haggard finished a duet album -- "I like to sing duets" -- for release next month.

This week, Willie picked up the tour again, 100 dates (including "Farm-Aid II," in Austin, July 4) carrying into August, where from Maine to San Diego he sings the songs he likes and the songs he writes and the standards that he grew up loving. Next Wednesday, Willie will be 53 years old, living beyond the need for image, dabbling in music and film and vinyl, an eclectic cowboy recording his autobiography one day at a time.

Its title song is his own "On the Road Again," and you can see the lyric coming again to his mind when he says, "People say, well, how long are you gonna be out on the road, and it's really hard for me to say, because I feel like I've always been out. I travel around, and I play music. That's what I do."

This is Willie's silver anniversary on the road. It was in 1961 that he left Texas for Nashville and his first music job, playing bass for Ray Price. Pretty soon he was writing songs and selling them to Price ("Night Life"), Faron Young ("Hello Walls") and Patsy Cline ("Crazy").

Those songs were country, and then again they weren't, quite. Willie built into their country framework a little of the sophisticated '40s styling that he so admired; "Night Life" was to "Fraulein" as a buggy was to a buckboard.

"There's a lot of people in Nashville that didn't think I was country when I went there, and maybe still don't," he said.

As a singer, Willie scored in Nashville with "Touch Me," but it was not until after he moved to Austin in 1972 that the gorilla began to stir. He tapped into the "progressive country" scene already underway in Austin, and later cultivated, principally with Waylon Jennings, the "outlaw" image that, in its appeal to studio executives, propelled Willie and Waylon into the recording mainstream.

Willie survived the image, moved beyond it, on the strength of musicianship and personal chemistry. Seldom is so compelling a face matched exactly by the voice.
A person's voice, when it is recorded and played back, does not sound the same to him, and it is a curious thing when the voice is Willie Nelson's. Is he the only one who doesn't know what he sounds like?

"I know now," he said. "I didn't; I thought I sounded different for a long time, and I couldn't get used to it. I've accepted it because I don't dislike it. It sounds probably higher than I would like it to sound."

Right now, the voice is about 70 or 80 songs ahead. The album by Willie and Haggard, due out next month, features the work of a young songwriter, David Lynn Jones, who wrote the lead song on Willie's new "Promiseland" album.

There are another "40 or 50 sides in the can" after a different session including Nelson and Haggard and a long-time but underpublicized Texas musician named Freddy Powers.
"I'm definitely going to do something with them," said Willie. "They're all the same kind of stuff we were talking about, '40s stuff."

And there is also Willie the singer re-interpreting Willie the early songwriter.

"I've re-recorded a lot of those songs with my band," he said. "I'm just kind of waiting for a slot to put them out. I've had so much product out there over the last few years that I don't want to flood the market.

"The only way to know if you're getting overexposed or not is if people quit coming to see you. So far, the crowds have been pretty good."

Labels: Heroes, Media, People

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments

In California at this moment it is 9:50 a.m. but I feel like I have lived a whole day.

America 2. America II. America 2.0. America Two. America Too. America at 9:50 is not the same America I woke up in this morning. That America has lived its whole day. In that day, as Barack Obama pointed out, his father could not get served at a café in that America. A sign on the television screen: "We Have Overcome." Well, yes we have. Yes we could.

But that isn't what Obama meant in months past when he was saying so memorably, "Yes We Can." That challenge became the reality in the America that was born this morning. In an instant with a man's hand on a Bible, the massive challenge of "We Shall Overcome" is transformed to the massive challenge "Yes We Can." Talk about history being made.

Can we? Obama thinks so, with emphasis on the "we." His inaugural speech let some air out of the balloon. He's not going to be able to snap his fingers after all. America 2 begins with his dropping a lot of responsibility into our laps. America 2 is going to have to be America Too. JFK said "Ask not," etc. Obama said. "You can't just think about yourself anymore, you have to think about America Too."

He jumped all over his first chance to lead. At the second line of the Oath, he didn't hesitate to correct the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He built his campaign on the theme of inclusion, and I got the impression he didn't waste any time, in his first minutes in office, in putting inclusion into play. I have the feeling his speech didn't stand out any more than it did because it was a part of a quartet. Rick Warren may have political baggage, but he can bring white thunder at a pulpit the way Elvis brought white thunder to black music. Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem sketched the late America in a way that completed Obama's café snapshot.

Finally, The Rev. Joseph Lowery, the old leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, played stunning counterpoint to Rick Warren, providing his new America 2 compatriot a lesson in cadence, structure, and climax, while carrying the "Yes We Can" theme for Obama into a sparkling blue-sky cathedral of inclusion, all of them – black, brown, yellow, red, white – coming together in tens of thousands to shout, "Amen! Amen! Amen!" Inclusion. It occurred to me as Obama came forward and hugged Rev. Lowery that in Obama there is a generosity that lets him give the best words to other people to say. I have already seen that generosity, first-hand, in someone very close to me, and have remarked how special it is, in setting an individual apart.

Damn this blogging business. In the old days, newspapermen could watch the whole thing, then go back to the office when it was dark after everyone had gone home, and write the story for the next day. But here I sit, in the study, and I can hear the television from the living room. I refuse to miss any more of it. My God, there's a whole day left.

Labels: Media, People, Politics

Posted by Michael Grant at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

Since America's fashion pride appears to depend entirely on what Michelle Obama wears in the next few days, I thought I could do my bit by offering her some advice from maybe the best paragraphs on style ever written, by E.B. White in Chapter Five of "The Elements of Style."

White's subject was writing style, of course, but it doesn't take too much paraphrasing to see that style is style, whether in lines on a page, or lines on a woman. Getting right to it, with apologies to Mr. White and hoping he would have enjoyed some mirth from it:

"In this final chapter, we approach style in its broader meaning: style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing. Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of fabrics, causing them to explode in the mind? . . . These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good fashion . . . "

"Style is an increment in fashion. When we speak of Jackie's style, we don't mean her command of the Empire silhouette, we mean the gleam her clothes bring to the eye."

"With some women, style not only reveals the spirit of the woman, it reveals her identity, as surely as would her fingerprints."

"Young fashionistas often suppose that style is a garnish for the form, a dressing by which an ordinary dish is made attractive. Style has no such separate entity; it is non-detachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is herself she is approaching, no other; and she should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style – all mannerism, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity."

"The first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none – that is, place yourself in the background."

"Dress in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using fabrics and colors that come readily to mind . . . Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains to admire what is good."

"Work from a suitable design. Design informs even the simplest structure. You raise a little black dress from one sort of vision, an inaugural gown from another."

"Do not be afraid to seize whatever you have chosen and cut it to ribbons; it can always be restored to its original condition in the morning, if that course seems best. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your ensemble ends up in need of major surgery."

"Do not overdress. When you overdress, the party will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement, as well as everything that follows it, will be suspect in their minds because they have lost confidence in your judgment or your poise."

"Do not reveal too much. It is seldom advisable to tell all."

There is more – "Prefer the standard to the offbeat," for example – but this is a suitable place to close. I don't know how many women I have stood next to, who were revealing too much, and had to defeat the urge to ask, "Have you ever read E.B. White?"

Labels: Media, People, Politics

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments

For their semester projects, students in my media class developed proposals or pilots in one of the seven media businesses – books, movies, magazines, newspapers, radio, recording and television – and then pitched them to me in class as if I were the media mogul who would buy the project.

I can’t provide specifics. We all signed non-disclosure agreements, and I told the students, truthfully, there is no reason why an idea generated in this class can’t go on and make a bazillion dollars in the industry. If one of them DOES, trust me, you will hear about it in this blog. I can tell you that the projects reveal a lot about the future of media. When my kids were little, if I wanted a peek into what was going on in their culture, I could watch “The Simpsons” and “MTV.”

Same thing now. Students know things about media that would draw blank stares in Geezerville (over 40). These guys are already their own TV producers and directors, thanks to YouTube and MySpace, and in class they used these online resources to present their TV pilots and movie trailers that, when we were their age, would have required months of work and thousands of dollars. Watching this, I get a clearer conviction that, in media, the Web is changing everything.

One student, who has some prior acting and producing experience, has already pitched his project to genuine moguls. He won an audience with them last week in Los Angeles. I asked in him class if that pitch was different from pitching to me and the class. Yes, he said, it was. There was an oval table. He sat on one side, and three cable TV execs sat on the other. They didn’t speak, he said, or make gestures, or smile, or ask any questions at all.

So I stopped him and asked the class. “These three guys had one thing on their mind. Do you know what that is?” From four or five places in the class, there rose the word: “Money.” Either they learned something this semester, or they knew it already. I know I learned a lot. Question: how is prime time television the same as being stopped at a railroad crossing?

Labels: Media, Media Code

Posted by Michael Grant at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments

News arrives in today's Times that the computer industry is working to introduce computers that boot up faster. This work is in response to human impatience with the time it takes a computer to boot up. Those three minutes, the impatient humans say, feel like "an eternity."

Let me go on record as believing this is not a good idea. For more than 65 years I have been operating a computer that makes the PCs and Macs look like a box of cotton wads. Operating at what researchers say is only 10 percent of its capacity, this computer provides me five, and sometimes six, senses, a huge memory cache, and an ability to turn blankness into thought into action at astounding speeds.

Yet there is one thing my computer is not very good at, and that is starting up. When I wake up in the morning, it may be not three minutes, but four or five, before I am alert enough to swing my feet over the edge of the bed and search for the floor. Then I hear my computer issuing sort of DOS commands: "Stand." "Walk." "Bathroom." "Kitchen." "Coffee." "Sit." It may be a full 10 or 15 minutes before the computer is ready to check email.

I know my computer can boot up a lot faster, but it doesn't like it. When I was in Army officer training, at 5 a.m. lights went on and voices boomed commands and threats of what would happen if we weren't outside and in ranks in 60 seconds. I think the point was to teach us that we could boot up that fast if we had to. I also knew, standing in ranks, that it would be another couple of minutes before I could point a rifle and hit anything.

Living in Southern California, I have been awakened by earthquakes, and the process was the same. Quick response, slow reaction. Computers have no choice but to jump at the first surge of electricity, but they stay groggy while circuits hook up. Functions in those moments are prioritized. So it was in the first moments after the 1994 Northridge quake: "Stand!" "Run!" "Warn children!" Not until I banged on the door of my teenaged daughter and step-daughter and, when they opened the door, followed their eyes, did I become aware that I was totally naked. I take solace, knowing they were also booting up, that they probably didn't register me very well.

I have never known, certainly never lived with, a human who could boot up in seconds, and I expect the first one I see will be in either a science fiction or an aggravation movie. It seems unreasonable to me to expect it of PCs and Macs, which, compared to our onboard models, are third-rate systems second to none.
I do feel the annoyance of being personally up to speed, then starting up my PC and twiddling my thumbs while it wakes up. It's the same annoyance we feel trying to get children out of bed.

But we have to watch what we wish for. Given the choice, considering the past decade and peering into the next, I think we're better off if we engineer computers to wake up like sleepy people, instead of engineering them to be instantly up and dressed and ready to work, thus allowing the digital age to whittle our patience even closer to the bone. We still will live in the analog world, and patience is the analog world's cartilage.

Labels: Family, Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments

I always run into the theory of diminishing details when I try to remember how I cooked something.

A couple of weeks ago, Karen made “40-Clove Chicken.” It was very good, and my roots told me that “40-Clove Beef” would be even better. I went to Price Club and got a couple of big old chuck roasts, onions and garlic.

At home, I made it. It was very good. Karen remarked how good it was, the first night we had it. While I was making it, I thought I should write down the details. The technique, so to speak. But I didn’t, for the very good reason that I believed I wouldn’t forget. It was not a complicated technique, and it would be easy to visualize in the future.

Two weeks later, there is one more container of it left in the freezer. I want to make it again, but I am running into the theory of diminishing details. When you are cooking something new, particularly something simple, you think you should write it down, but you don’t because it’s so easy. Tomorrow, you could do it again exactly the same way. But then tomorrow becomes a couple days, then a week, then two weeks.

And now I can’t remember: did I use flour? I think I did, but I remember at about that same time I watched Ina Garten cook Boeuf Bourguignon, and I think she used flour. Maybe she did, and I didn’t. Maybe this time I will use flour. Maybe not. I guess “40-Clove Beef” will just come out different this time. That should be the title of my next cookbook: “Different the Next Time.” And the recipes will all have "This Time" in the title, like "40-Clove Beef This Time." A recipe is just a starting place anyway.

Labels: Food, Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments

Molly Ivins, a nationally respected, even beloved, journalist and civil rights advocate, dies. Two weeks later, Anna Nicole Smith, a busty blonde and former Playboy “Playmate of the Year” dies. Which death gets more media coverage? By far, Anna Nicole Smith’s. Does this make sense?

Well, yes, but we shouldn’t fret about it. Society is not going to be dragged down a rathole by media attention to Anna Nicole Smith. It’s just the media codes at work, and in all of human history, whenever it has come to the codes of Sex vs. Writer, Sex has triumphed every time.

It’s sort of like Madonna, who for a long time was the ranking media codes expert among women celebrities. This is how expert she was: when a person, doing something else while the TV was on, heard the name, “Madonna,” that person would reflexively glance at the TV. Why? Because Madonna had conditioned people to wonder, “What has she done now?” That media code is called Novelty, which is impossible for people, who are naturally curious, to ignore. Madonna cultivated Novelty to a science.

Anna Nicole was no media expert, and she couldn’t cultivate crabgrass. She just took off her clothes and posed for Playboy, and let her considerable body do the rest. That’s all she had to do to become famous.

Famous enough, anyway. Sex is the oldest media code in the human book, and millions and millions of people, including millions who wouldn’t want to admit it, have given more than casual attention to pictures of Anna Nicole Smith’s body. But if you polled the population, you might find 10 million people who loved Anna Nicole enough to tape all the coverage and swoon over her baby and the paternity battle, which as of 30 minutes ago was six claimants.

Taken as a percentage of the American population of 300 million, 10 million is 3.3 percent, meaning 96.7 percent of Americans aren’t glued to cable TV’s “Anna Nicole Watch.” Some of it splashes into the general media, because of the power of the Prominence media code (“big names make news”) and giving the impression that the audience for this fare is bigger than it actually is.

It’s only 10 million, but enough to make ANS famous. Ten million sets of eyeballs was enough for cable TV to sell advertisers on an ANS reality television show that was nothing more than cameras following her through her day. Yes, I know, something like that does sound like a scream that the end of civilization is nigh. Just remember what the other 96.7 percent were doing, and even the 3.3 decided in only a couple of years that they had seen enough (the death knell for any television series, whatever media codes it employs) of Anna Nicole’s reality.

All of television – and all media, actually – is an exercise in the power of small numbers. A prime time sitcom with a Nielsen rating of 17 will make big media news and millions in ad revenues, even though 83 percent of the “television universe” was doing something else. It’s silly to think that “we” are being devalued as a civilization because of anything Anna Nicole Smith did, even dying. “We” is the most misused word in the media-public debate. The New York Times did a story about renewed interest in a book about ANS titled “Great Big Beautiful Blonde,” as if readers coast to coast were lined up around the block. The new printing: 15,000 copies.

It’s sad that Anna Nicole died at the age of 39. She didn’t do anything to anybody. She just gave the 3.3 what they needed, and if the rest of us fussed about that, it was good publicity for her. Among the 96.7, I think our sighs at the news were genuine, a legitimate reaction to yet another media code. Then we went on to something else.

Labels: Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

I hate losing Molly Ivins. She was a Texas woman the likes of which you don’t run across often. She grew up in ritzy River Oaks in Houston, but she only grew up there. Her blood came from somewhere else. Her mind was sharp, her environment privileged, her perspective worldly. But wherever in the world she went, her feet stayed stuck up to the ankles in the mud of a Brazos River bank. Wherever she closed her eyes, she saw faded-denim Texas sky.

Never met Molly Ivins. But I’ve known Texas women like her. In “I’m from Texas, Too,” Ray Benson sings: “There’s no mistaking the brand.” And so I wish I had. Met her. Been friends. Talked about stuff. Driven some Texas highways, slow and with a cooler in the back. Closest I got to her was probably the late A.C. Greene, who went to Abilene High School with my mother. Later A.C. ran the Abilene Book Store on Cypress Street before he went on to greater things in Texas literature.

I know Molly and A.C. talked about Texas, and about writing. Couldn’t not have. A.C. and I conversed a time or two as well. Some years ago, when he had a heart transplant, he wrote a magazine piece about it. He said that in Texas at that time, heart transplant candidates were nervous because of a shortage of donors. It seemed that survivors wouldn’t allow the hearts of their lost loved ones to be taken, because a person’s soul resides in his heart, and they just couldn’t give up the loved one’s soul.

So, A.C. wrote, the Texas Legislature passed a law proclaiming that a person’s soul does not reside in the heart, but in the brain. I thought that was one of the funniest things I had ever read. Molly made a career of the daily hilarity in The Lege, as she called it, and I thought about how many times she sat down to write, stunned but tickled, at the end of a Lege session.

I wrote about the heart thing, too. The mission of the Texas Legislature, I wrote, is to remove any situation that would require a resident of the State of Texas to have to think. It could get a thinker from California in trouble. Stopped by a state trooper for speeding, and the trooper says, “Okay, sir, where does the soul reside?” “I don’t know,” says the speeding thinker, “all over the body, probably.” And off the thinker goes, escorted by the trooper to the Callahan County JP for undue process.

I worried, behind the safety of the California border, about the Lege being so pre-emptive. I thought the soul probably was rationed throughout the body, large percentages in the heart and brain, yes, but some also in the spleen, and pancreas, eyes, hair, toes, each toe possessing its teeny ration of soul.

Challenged by the Callahan County JP on this, I would simply call Molly Ivins to the stand. She was Texas soul from head to toe. Now she’s not there any more, and I know with certainty that something is missing in Texas. It is not Texas that is diminished; nothing could do that. It is Texans that have been diminished, sure as hell. One less among us who close our eyes and see that sky. Molly is a ground star, snuffed out.

Labels: Media

Posted by Michael Grant at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments