Ordinarily, I have great respect for Media Matters, but there are times when their partisanship completely overrides their message, and with each such instance they are incrementally losing my admiration of their work. It’s fine if your political leanings influence your narrative so that your criticisms have a tendency to focus on one group rather than another, but only if the skewed perspective fits your narrative. I understand if you miss some things because you were busy peering closely at the opposite side of the aisle, but there is never justification for twisting your narrative to fit your partisan loyalties. That is exactly what the organization did with the Media Matters Minute yesterday.
The latest installment of the sixty second daily update mentioned that North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue had said at a meeting of the local Rotary Club that Congress should postpone elections in order to focus on the economy, rather than campaigning. I assumed that that meant she was the target of the day’s Media Matters criticism, and that when they said that a spokesperson claimed she was just using hyperbole to illustrate a point, that they would reject that assertion. Quite the contrary, they apparently took that for granted, and proceeded to indicate that “right wing blogs were not as forgiving.” Gee, no kidding? Bloggers who make careers out of opposition to Democrats and liberals didn’t shrug their shoulders, shake their heads affably, and forget all about the woman in the opposite political camp who just said that it might be a good idea to play fast and loose with the foundations of our democratic system?
Media Matters, would you have been so forgiving if Ms. Perdue had carried an (R) next to her name, rather than a (D)? It’s not as though the reason they were willing to give her that pass while the right wing blogs weren’t was because they thought the proffered defense was a good one. The way they concluded the minute makes that perfectly obvious. No one, they pointed out, took the nasty criticism of the stupid, unreflective Democrat farther than Rush Limbaugh, and to prove that they played a clip of him stating that her idiotic suggestion characterized the Democratic Party, and that, “far be it from me to [draw any connections or comparisons], but Adolph Hitler would agree with Beverly Perdue.”
See, Media Matters, you’re losing a large share of my respect now because you’re putting me in the awkward position of having to defend Rush Limbaugh. It’s not as though I think his commentary is any more measured or any less foolish that Governor Perdue’s poorly-thought-out rhetorical suggestion, but the fact is that if you want to defend one and not look like an utter hypocrite, you have to defend both. Rush Limbaugh was engaged in hyperbole. If a spokesperson for him had any good reason to defend the right wing blowhard against your criticism, he would tell you just that: that he was exaggerating in order to make a point. His hyperbole was far over the top, irresponsible, and intellectually deficient, but so is suggesting that we arbitrarily postpone the democratic process. Apparently Media Matters felt that the fact that Ms. Perdue probably didn’t mean it literally was reason enough to deflect criticism away from her. Why was it not good enough for Limbaugh?
Media Matters, please decide what you stand for, because if you mete out your criticisms this selectively, it’s not for accountability in media. If there are rules for what people are allowed to say on the air, they need to apply universally. Either nobody is allowed to say something ridiculous then bullshit their way out of admitting that they ever uttered it or nobody is. I don’t mind if your ulterior motive is to see that your side wins the game, but I care deeply about how you accomplish it. And you’re not going to get anywhere by trying to establish a harder set of rules for one side than the other. It belies your confidence in the truth and virtue of your favored politicians if you imply that they can’t win in a fair contest of ideas.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
I Guess Until Now, the Subway was like Going to Mars
This is another one of those posts wherein I alienate myself from my twenty-first century peers and take on the persona of someone who is five decades older than I am, and can’t maneuver around the rapid changes of the thrilling modern world.
I understand that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just launched cell phone service inside of New York subway stations. What burns me is the thought that there was sufficient demand to carry forward the elaborate and expensive project of building an underground telecommunications network. I imagine that the MTA must have based their installation project on a well-established understanding of what their customers needed. That then would mean that there were hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who felt cheated that they had limited cell phone reception for as much as twenty minutes.
This is just one of those things, where there is an enormous contingent of people who share a particular sentiment and find it to be among the most natural things in the world, while I absolutely cannot wrap my head around it. I’m sure the positive responses to the announcement were perfectly matter-of-fact, since people have a tendency to take things for granted the day they first gain access to them. I’m sure the positive responses will also be fantastically melodramatic, since people also have a tendency to insist without a shade of intentional irony that they cannot live without things that they lived without for their entire lives up until that point.
My own response, on the other hand, was just to be utterly dumbfounded. I simply can’t comprehend why anyone would think it’s appropriate to spend God knows how many man-hours and material resources to construct something that benefits customers only in that it prevents them from having to wait thirty seconds and then walk halfway up a flight of stairs in order to receive the associated service. Is communications technology really that powerfully addictive that even in the midst of one’s amazingly convenient and rapid commute to work, it’s an act of painful sacrifice to not talk about bullshit or surf the web?
The project cost two hundred million damn dollars. I’m not the sort of person who usually complains about how New York City is a giant cash-sink for the rest of the state, into which all of our coffers drain. But if my city is falling apart to the extent that when I have to walk somewhere new I’m not sure whether there’s going to be rubble blocking my path, while New York City is able to spend two hundred million damn dollars on the lengthy process of designing and installing something that nobody anywhere could possibly fucking need, then I really have to rethink my perspective on the wealth disparity among localities.
I have to congratulate this news story both for giving me a perspective sympathetic to people I usually chastise for whining and for giving me a much needed and rarely accessible reason to be less desirous of returning to New York. Public transportation is one of the first things that come to mind when I am called upon to compare living in a decent city to living somewhere like where I am right now. First and foremost, the MTA actually gets you where you need to go, pretty much without fail. Secondly, though, it is, or always was, an exciting, engaging, sometimes poetic way to get around. With this new development, I am absolutely sure that when I finally make my way back there, the entire process of getting around will be transformed into something far more annoying than it had ever been before.
I used to commute for an hour each morning from Eastchester in the Bronx to Grand Central in Manhattan. The train was above ground for about half of that, and there were enough people yammering on their cell phones for that portion of the journey. It’s not that there conversations bothered me terribly, although they were almost always ridiculously mundane. But they were also the sort of dialogue you could get more out of if you had it with the stranger sitting next to you. I have had an awful lot of opportunities to observe cell phone addicts in their various unnatural settings, and I’ve found that in general, while people think that their devices connect them to the world wherever they are, the real effect is just that they take wherever the person is away from him. And nobody seems to notice or care.
What was most annoying about listening to people’s conversations while on my way to Manhattan was me, namely my unwillingness to forcibly hang up someone else’s phone, point out the window and shout, “It’s a beautiful fucking day; have a look!” Come the underground portion of the ride, it’s more a matter of compelling people to look at the human beings around them, but either way, it’s the same impulse that I have to deny, and if I had had to do it for a full hour every day, I probably would have eventually jumped on the tracks.
Doesn’t anybody think anymore? I mean, praise technology whatever ways you like, but no matter how intellectual one’s use of it, it is distraction from one’s own thinking. The potential for personal development that comes of ease of access to technology is kind of lost if there is never a time when we aren’t plugged in. Naturally, people can choose to turn off their phones, but what bothers me about this story is not that there will no longer be a place in New York City where that decision is made for them (sometimes – I often did get reception inside stations), but the implication that people never want to so much as entertain the concept of letting go and getting into their own heads. Is that such a scary place for everyone now, that having to either think for ourselves or interact with strangers is something we can’t even conceive of doing for as long as it takes to get from Greenwich Village to Central Park?
I understand that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has just launched cell phone service inside of New York subway stations. What burns me is the thought that there was sufficient demand to carry forward the elaborate and expensive project of building an underground telecommunications network. I imagine that the MTA must have based their installation project on a well-established understanding of what their customers needed. That then would mean that there were hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who felt cheated that they had limited cell phone reception for as much as twenty minutes.
This is just one of those things, where there is an enormous contingent of people who share a particular sentiment and find it to be among the most natural things in the world, while I absolutely cannot wrap my head around it. I’m sure the positive responses to the announcement were perfectly matter-of-fact, since people have a tendency to take things for granted the day they first gain access to them. I’m sure the positive responses will also be fantastically melodramatic, since people also have a tendency to insist without a shade of intentional irony that they cannot live without things that they lived without for their entire lives up until that point.
My own response, on the other hand, was just to be utterly dumbfounded. I simply can’t comprehend why anyone would think it’s appropriate to spend God knows how many man-hours and material resources to construct something that benefits customers only in that it prevents them from having to wait thirty seconds and then walk halfway up a flight of stairs in order to receive the associated service. Is communications technology really that powerfully addictive that even in the midst of one’s amazingly convenient and rapid commute to work, it’s an act of painful sacrifice to not talk about bullshit or surf the web?
The project cost two hundred million damn dollars. I’m not the sort of person who usually complains about how New York City is a giant cash-sink for the rest of the state, into which all of our coffers drain. But if my city is falling apart to the extent that when I have to walk somewhere new I’m not sure whether there’s going to be rubble blocking my path, while New York City is able to spend two hundred million damn dollars on the lengthy process of designing and installing something that nobody anywhere could possibly fucking need, then I really have to rethink my perspective on the wealth disparity among localities.
I have to congratulate this news story both for giving me a perspective sympathetic to people I usually chastise for whining and for giving me a much needed and rarely accessible reason to be less desirous of returning to New York. Public transportation is one of the first things that come to mind when I am called upon to compare living in a decent city to living somewhere like where I am right now. First and foremost, the MTA actually gets you where you need to go, pretty much without fail. Secondly, though, it is, or always was, an exciting, engaging, sometimes poetic way to get around. With this new development, I am absolutely sure that when I finally make my way back there, the entire process of getting around will be transformed into something far more annoying than it had ever been before.
I used to commute for an hour each morning from Eastchester in the Bronx to Grand Central in Manhattan. The train was above ground for about half of that, and there were enough people yammering on their cell phones for that portion of the journey. It’s not that there conversations bothered me terribly, although they were almost always ridiculously mundane. But they were also the sort of dialogue you could get more out of if you had it with the stranger sitting next to you. I have had an awful lot of opportunities to observe cell phone addicts in their various unnatural settings, and I’ve found that in general, while people think that their devices connect them to the world wherever they are, the real effect is just that they take wherever the person is away from him. And nobody seems to notice or care.
What was most annoying about listening to people’s conversations while on my way to Manhattan was me, namely my unwillingness to forcibly hang up someone else’s phone, point out the window and shout, “It’s a beautiful fucking day; have a look!” Come the underground portion of the ride, it’s more a matter of compelling people to look at the human beings around them, but either way, it’s the same impulse that I have to deny, and if I had had to do it for a full hour every day, I probably would have eventually jumped on the tracks.
Doesn’t anybody think anymore? I mean, praise technology whatever ways you like, but no matter how intellectual one’s use of it, it is distraction from one’s own thinking. The potential for personal development that comes of ease of access to technology is kind of lost if there is never a time when we aren’t plugged in. Naturally, people can choose to turn off their phones, but what bothers me about this story is not that there will no longer be a place in New York City where that decision is made for them (sometimes – I often did get reception inside stations), but the implication that people never want to so much as entertain the concept of letting go and getting into their own heads. Is that such a scary place for everyone now, that having to either think for ourselves or interact with strangers is something we can’t even conceive of doing for as long as it takes to get from Greenwich Village to Central Park?
Monday, September 26, 2011
We've Got Guests! Clean Your Town!
Listening to the radio this morning, I was treated to another bout of unintentional humor from the city of Buffalo. Apparently there’s going to be something opening in Buffalo on October 16th called the National Preservation Conference. They mentioned this on the local NPR station, WBFO in the context of a story about how Catherine Schweitzer, the local co-chair of the event, is trying to impress upon everyone the need to clean up their neighborhoods. They even termed it an effort to “make Buffalo sparkle.” I’m afraid it’s going to take quite a bit more than a spit shine and some elbow grease to make a city with a thirty year history of rapid decline suddenly coruscate beneath the admiring eye of a handful of out-of-town visitors. It’s classical Buffalonian behavior to voice such optimism as to suggest that that’s exactly what we can do, though.
What I found humorous – hell, downright hilarious – about this story was the simple fact that I was essentially listening to an entire city population’s surrogate mother trying to tell them to clean their rooms because we’re going to have company. I don’t think anybody who recorded or ran this story thought much about the implication that came along with it, that we just aren’t at all used to having visitors. I found myself very much wanting to ask Ms. Schweitzer if she kept to this same practice in her own home, waiting until the day before the in-laws were set to come over for Thanksgiving dinner before imploring her household to clean up a little.
Mind you, I’m in no position to judge such behavior. I’m just the same way. There are times when I am assiduously organized and I vacuum and dust according to a regular schedule. But there are also long spates of time during which I don’t do a thing to keep a nice house, precisely because I rarely expect to have anyone over. Then of course when someone announces that they’d like to visit, I find myself scrambling around trying to conceal the evidence of my own squalor.
On the other hand, I don’t really understand the impulse to put one’s home into a state that is unfamiliar even to oneself just to impress guests with a false personal image. The reason I’m ashamed of my clutter and dirt when it builds up is because should anyone see it, they’d be getting a one-sided vision of me and my lifestyle. I’m really not like that. I truly have every expectation that I would always be better than that if I had the least bit of regular traffic over my floor to provide me with that motivation. I clean things up for myself sometimes, but if you don’t plan your visit accordingly, you only see the version of me that drops the dishes in the sink and then goes right back to work and subsequently neglects them for a week, the version of me that keeps a year’s worth of magazines in a lopsided pile next to the doorway, the version that buries things that he uses beneath things he doesn’t want.
In the case of Buffalo, though, what other version is there besides the one I know, with all its filth, decay, degradation, and neglect? How are we supposed to portray ourselves? As the long-ago city that I’m told once stood on this spot in the 1940s? Or as the theoretical place that we might be the median income was an order of magnitude higher, if our industries had never collapsed, or if anyone actually came here or had reason to?
See, I wouldn’t be criticizing Catherine Schweitzer here if it really was as simple as a friendly warning that we’re bringing out the good china tonight, so we might want to pick up a little. She said “make Buffalo sparkle,” and then she gave some examples. She was compelled to particularly emphasize Court Street, which she pointed out was a pedestrian thoroughfare, then proceeding to complain that it was lined with giant planters that are standing completely empty, and as far as anyone can tell always have been. She mentioned a Verizon phone booth that was standing crooked after being hit by a car. For those who don’t want to disappoint Ms. Schweitzer, she would like these things to get taken care of in the next two weeks. Also, reaching into the rather more mundane, she chided people to pick up all the scattered trash, although she didn’t mention whether she meant from their own yards, from the vacant, crumbling building on their left, or from the vacant, crumbling meth lab on their right.
I forget to pick up around my apartment and then find myself scrambling to do it when someone is on their way over. I get that; I can accept the same behavior on a citywide basis. But I can’t quite imagine myself waiting until my mother calls and says “I’ll be over this afternoon” before I, for instance, hang the door back on its hinges, or pick up the broken glass off the carpet, or shot-vac the flooded bathroom floor. I’m not sure that I can say the same for Ms. Schweitzer, and I’m honestly very interested to know what her guiding impulse in this case is, apart from being charged with a task tantamount to trying to get Salt Lake City, Utah geared up for the National Homosexual Monogamy Convention. Did she suddenly acquire the opinion that our urban blight and infrastructure problems are important things to deal with now that somebody’s going to be in a position to judge her personally for them? Or is it just that she actually hadn’t realized what this place actually looks like until some outside influence compelled her make an objective assessment?
Knowing what the people in this town are like, I’m genuinely worried that that’s exactly what it was.
What I found humorous – hell, downright hilarious – about this story was the simple fact that I was essentially listening to an entire city population’s surrogate mother trying to tell them to clean their rooms because we’re going to have company. I don’t think anybody who recorded or ran this story thought much about the implication that came along with it, that we just aren’t at all used to having visitors. I found myself very much wanting to ask Ms. Schweitzer if she kept to this same practice in her own home, waiting until the day before the in-laws were set to come over for Thanksgiving dinner before imploring her household to clean up a little.
Mind you, I’m in no position to judge such behavior. I’m just the same way. There are times when I am assiduously organized and I vacuum and dust according to a regular schedule. But there are also long spates of time during which I don’t do a thing to keep a nice house, precisely because I rarely expect to have anyone over. Then of course when someone announces that they’d like to visit, I find myself scrambling around trying to conceal the evidence of my own squalor.
On the other hand, I don’t really understand the impulse to put one’s home into a state that is unfamiliar even to oneself just to impress guests with a false personal image. The reason I’m ashamed of my clutter and dirt when it builds up is because should anyone see it, they’d be getting a one-sided vision of me and my lifestyle. I’m really not like that. I truly have every expectation that I would always be better than that if I had the least bit of regular traffic over my floor to provide me with that motivation. I clean things up for myself sometimes, but if you don’t plan your visit accordingly, you only see the version of me that drops the dishes in the sink and then goes right back to work and subsequently neglects them for a week, the version of me that keeps a year’s worth of magazines in a lopsided pile next to the doorway, the version that buries things that he uses beneath things he doesn’t want.
In the case of Buffalo, though, what other version is there besides the one I know, with all its filth, decay, degradation, and neglect? How are we supposed to portray ourselves? As the long-ago city that I’m told once stood on this spot in the 1940s? Or as the theoretical place that we might be the median income was an order of magnitude higher, if our industries had never collapsed, or if anyone actually came here or had reason to?
See, I wouldn’t be criticizing Catherine Schweitzer here if it really was as simple as a friendly warning that we’re bringing out the good china tonight, so we might want to pick up a little. She said “make Buffalo sparkle,” and then she gave some examples. She was compelled to particularly emphasize Court Street, which she pointed out was a pedestrian thoroughfare, then proceeding to complain that it was lined with giant planters that are standing completely empty, and as far as anyone can tell always have been. She mentioned a Verizon phone booth that was standing crooked after being hit by a car. For those who don’t want to disappoint Ms. Schweitzer, she would like these things to get taken care of in the next two weeks. Also, reaching into the rather more mundane, she chided people to pick up all the scattered trash, although she didn’t mention whether she meant from their own yards, from the vacant, crumbling building on their left, or from the vacant, crumbling meth lab on their right.
I forget to pick up around my apartment and then find myself scrambling to do it when someone is on their way over. I get that; I can accept the same behavior on a citywide basis. But I can’t quite imagine myself waiting until my mother calls and says “I’ll be over this afternoon” before I, for instance, hang the door back on its hinges, or pick up the broken glass off the carpet, or shot-vac the flooded bathroom floor. I’m not sure that I can say the same for Ms. Schweitzer, and I’m honestly very interested to know what her guiding impulse in this case is, apart from being charged with a task tantamount to trying to get Salt Lake City, Utah geared up for the National Homosexual Monogamy Convention. Did she suddenly acquire the opinion that our urban blight and infrastructure problems are important things to deal with now that somebody’s going to be in a position to judge her personally for them? Or is it just that she actually hadn’t realized what this place actually looks like until some outside influence compelled her make an objective assessment?
Knowing what the people in this town are like, I’m genuinely worried that that’s exactly what it was.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Disingenuous Comment of the Week: Mitch Daniels
On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart conducted an excellent interview with Mitch Daniels, mostly focused on wealth disparity and economic policy. After talking at length about the value of consensus-building, the Indiana Governor almost immediately launched into a stream of divisive language, referring to “the president’s obsession with wealthy people,” and his “constant bashing” of them. Daniels then stated that “You could confiscate the wealth of all those people, and it wouldn’t do any good.”
When Jon Stewart pointed out that Daniels might thus be contradicting his own advice about “the language of unity,” Daniels looked introspective for a brief moment before coming up with a very unique and creative excuse. “If I got a little defensive,” he said, “it’s because you’re asking me to defend positions I haven’t taken.”
Sure, Mitch, I understand; I do that all the time! Like if somebody were to ask me to defend the death penalty, my first impulse would be to describe those who oppose it as weak-willed anarchists who want to see murders roaming our streets with impunity. Of course, I don’t believe that, but that’s just the kind of thing you say when you’re called upon to play devil’s advocate, right? Any time that somebody misidentifies my social or political views as being more extreme than they are, I make certain that appropriate their language and launch ad hominem attacks against the opposing viewpoint. I mean, that’s the only natural way to defend oneself, right?
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a public statement that sounded quite so baldly disingenuous. The only thing more stunning than the fact that he attempted to defend his aggressive rhetoric by claiming that it was a consequence of his views actually being more moderate than they seemed was that in the context of the interview the strategy apparently worked. Rather than cutting it down, Jon Stewart adopted that point and took to defending himself against the baseless charge that he was arguing on the basis of straw men. He ended the interview by saying that he hoped the governor didn’t feel that he was asking him to defend positions that didn’t represent him.
If this sort of defense was acceptable when Daniels was caught in his own hypocrisy, can it be used by anyone, anytime their own behavior doesn’t match the expectations they set for their opponents? If I catch criticism for describing corporate CEOs as wealthy parasites profiting off the painful labors of people far below them, can I then demand more civility from them by saying that I only said what I did because somebody was asking me to defend that view? If a politician publicly uses racist language, can he keep his job by saying that he doesn’t really believe those things, but was backed into a corner by minority critics who mistakenly insisted that he did?
Whatever the spontaneous strategy a professional talker comes up with, any attempt to reverse a statement that you have just made in perfectly plain terms should be met with derisive laughter. Nobody should get away with such a thing, and it should be obvious that the gauge of a person’s real views and his actual respect for his opponents is what he says when he’s not prepared to censor his own remarks, when his pressured by being asked to defend a view that he may or may not hold. And if your job is to serve the public according to your personal views of what is right and wrong, it should be obvious that if someone challenges you to defend a view that you don’t hold, you simply don’t do that. You tell them exactly what you do believe, instead. It goes a long way towards avoiding perfectly absurd backpedaling and mind-bending rhetoric. I simply can’t imagine that someone could fail to understand that after more than six years as governor. But retaining a strong tendency for hypocrisy through that much time in office? That I understand.
When Jon Stewart pointed out that Daniels might thus be contradicting his own advice about “the language of unity,” Daniels looked introspective for a brief moment before coming up with a very unique and creative excuse. “If I got a little defensive,” he said, “it’s because you’re asking me to defend positions I haven’t taken.”
Sure, Mitch, I understand; I do that all the time! Like if somebody were to ask me to defend the death penalty, my first impulse would be to describe those who oppose it as weak-willed anarchists who want to see murders roaming our streets with impunity. Of course, I don’t believe that, but that’s just the kind of thing you say when you’re called upon to play devil’s advocate, right? Any time that somebody misidentifies my social or political views as being more extreme than they are, I make certain that appropriate their language and launch ad hominem attacks against the opposing viewpoint. I mean, that’s the only natural way to defend oneself, right?
It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a public statement that sounded quite so baldly disingenuous. The only thing more stunning than the fact that he attempted to defend his aggressive rhetoric by claiming that it was a consequence of his views actually being more moderate than they seemed was that in the context of the interview the strategy apparently worked. Rather than cutting it down, Jon Stewart adopted that point and took to defending himself against the baseless charge that he was arguing on the basis of straw men. He ended the interview by saying that he hoped the governor didn’t feel that he was asking him to defend positions that didn’t represent him.
If this sort of defense was acceptable when Daniels was caught in his own hypocrisy, can it be used by anyone, anytime their own behavior doesn’t match the expectations they set for their opponents? If I catch criticism for describing corporate CEOs as wealthy parasites profiting off the painful labors of people far below them, can I then demand more civility from them by saying that I only said what I did because somebody was asking me to defend that view? If a politician publicly uses racist language, can he keep his job by saying that he doesn’t really believe those things, but was backed into a corner by minority critics who mistakenly insisted that he did?
Whatever the spontaneous strategy a professional talker comes up with, any attempt to reverse a statement that you have just made in perfectly plain terms should be met with derisive laughter. Nobody should get away with such a thing, and it should be obvious that the gauge of a person’s real views and his actual respect for his opponents is what he says when he’s not prepared to censor his own remarks, when his pressured by being asked to defend a view that he may or may not hold. And if your job is to serve the public according to your personal views of what is right and wrong, it should be obvious that if someone challenges you to defend a view that you don’t hold, you simply don’t do that. You tell them exactly what you do believe, instead. It goes a long way towards avoiding perfectly absurd backpedaling and mind-bending rhetoric. I simply can’t imagine that someone could fail to understand that after more than six years as governor. But retaining a strong tendency for hypocrisy through that much time in office? That I understand.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Now I AM Mad at Netflix
You know, I actually defended Netflix when it originally announced its price increase. Admittedly, part of the reason was that I have an emotional attachment to physical media, and although I recognized that separating the pricing was a move toward discouraging the DVDs by mail service, I determined that it wouldn’t harm that side of the business artificially. I figured that people with the money would hang onto both services and demonstrate the continued relevance of both media that you can hold in your hand and the United States Post Office. I also supposed that certain people like me would cast a vote in favor of those things by keeping only that service. I think Netflix discovered, to their evident chagrin, that I was right.
And in a move that will become a prominent case study in future business textbooks, the solution that they decided upon in response to unexpectedly negative customer feedback was to issue an arrogant non-apology while pushing the original idea to a further and more alienating extreme. Instead of simply retaining two price structures for different services and letting customers demonstrate their demand within the existing business model, Netflix will now be separating the two services into two completely separate businesses, with separate billings, separate websites, separate ratings information, even separate brand names, and ultimately completely separate customers.
In a replay of the July chorus, the response from customers and persons with common sense about how a business should operate has been overwhelmingly derisive. The perfectly obvious complaint is that the company is making it impossibly difficult for customers to utilize the dual service that they have already had access to. The Oatmeal quickly responded with this cartoon: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/netflix. One of the thousands of commenters on the Netflix blog post compared this move to separating phone service into a company devoted to talking and one devoted to listening. References to New Coke abound. People are predicting still more declines in the stock value of the company.
In his post, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained, no doubt disingenuously, that the complete severance of the DVDs by mail portion of the business is aimed at allowing management teams for each business to focus completely on their own needs, thereby helping the DVD portion to survive for longer. Now, I have no formal education in business management, but I’m pretty sure that it’s possible for a company and a subsidiary company to be managed separately, but share billings and retain user interface that is already well in place. Even if the creation of a separate site was deemed necessary for clarity’s sake or simply for the sake of a symbolic fresh start, I find it impossible to believe that Netflix couldn't have designed two separate sites that share ratings and reviews from customers who have accounts with both.
I call absolute bullshit on Hastings’ claim that he wants the DVDs by mail service to be around for as long as possible. Completely and unnecessarily divorcing the two services forces customers to choose one or the other. They are trying to deliberately, perhaps artificially, reduce demand for the portion of their business model that involves an investment of physical resources. And if that fact isn’t evident simply from the effort to sequester the older service away from the newer, they’ve even given it an awful, awful new name. The red envelope will now bear the name “Qwikster,” a name which I can only imagine was artfully designed to imply obsolescence.
The new brand remains true to the original by having two syllables and in no other way. Those two syllables combine two assaults on the durability and desirability of the business into one absurdly shitty name. To start with the more obvious act of sabotage, I would say that Netflix’s marketing department attached the suffix “-ster” to the new brand explicitly to place it in the company of businesses that are already defunct and to make it feel at home there. “-ster” was commonly attached to web business names about a decade ago, and has never been used with anything new that had a shot at being successful since then. Napster and Friendster still exist, as far as I know, but nobody cares, nobody really uses them, and the prospects for them growing in the future are slim to nil. By making the older half of their business of a piece with these oldsters, Netflix is transparently broadcasting the fact that it perceives Qwikster to already be in the same position of neglect, or that they want it to be.
More likely the latter given the other half of the brand. “Qwik,” Mr. Hastings helpfully informs us, is supposed to refer to the quick delivery offered to customers. So in order to promote the longevity of their premier service, they’ve chosen to emphasize the one feature by which it pales in comparison to the company’s other brand, which is now being put forth as a competitor. I’ll say a lot in praise of the DVDs by mail service, but by modern standards, quick it is not. The Netflix marketing team seems to be banking on the idea that every time they read the name on that little red envelope, the word “quick” will be on their minds and they’ll think, “Gee, I wouldn’t have had to wait a day for my entertainment if I had just chosen another title that’s available to stream online and watched that instead.”
Despite the strengths that they could have emphasized, they instead chose to create a new brand identity based on the one modest weakness that will repel all the shortsighted customers who can be trained to value convenience over quality. They could have called it PickFlix, or ClearFlix, or Doesn’t-rebuffer-or-increase-strain-on-your-ISP-Flix. Or they could have just called it Netflix Mail. But they went with Qwikster. They may as well have just called it Waitster and made the logo a cartoon of a guy looking at his watch while getting older. This goes beyond bad branding. It was never intended to be good branding. Reed Hastings wasn’t caught off guard by the blowback he received today; he was counting on it. As far as I can tell, his attitude is that anyone who still wants his company to mail them any of their 100,000 DVD titles can fuck right off. Go check some other dead and decaying websites, then put on a big band LP and type a letter to the editor on your Smith-Corona, you dinosaurs. Reed Hastings is too plugged in to the rapid changes of the modern market to stop and give a shit about whether you still want what he was offering you back when his company’s stock was more valuable and you were paying less.
I suppose that given the theme of this blog, I should give Hastings my respect. He’s trying to force a breaking point. But it’s a decidedly negative breaking point for most people concerned. If we accept the shitty deal he’s giving to his loyal customers, we demonstrate that decreased quality and selection is okay as long as we get our poor, limited goods quickly. On the other hand, we could spin this breaking point in our favor. I’ll be curious to see how many more subscribers they’ve lost after another month. I’m not sure how I’m going to respond yet. Netflix has been my only reliable source of entertainment for some time. The price hike hasn’t taken effect for me yet. I was planning on just keeping the DVD side, but now I’m not sure whether to support Qwikster despite the fact that it’s designed to dissuade support and is owned by someone who’s happy to treat his customers like gullible fools, or to try to find something else.
I actually didn’t know that Blockbuster had changed to a monthly subscription model. When did that happen and why wasn’t it four years ago? There’s also apparently something called Green Cine, which doesn’t have much of a site but seems well-priced and is uniquely focused on independent and classic titles. There might also still be one privately owned DVD rental store in my area. That could be neat in light of my nostalgia for physical media. I don’t think I’ve gone inside a building to rent a film since I was a kid.
And in a move that will become a prominent case study in future business textbooks, the solution that they decided upon in response to unexpectedly negative customer feedback was to issue an arrogant non-apology while pushing the original idea to a further and more alienating extreme. Instead of simply retaining two price structures for different services and letting customers demonstrate their demand within the existing business model, Netflix will now be separating the two services into two completely separate businesses, with separate billings, separate websites, separate ratings information, even separate brand names, and ultimately completely separate customers.
In a replay of the July chorus, the response from customers and persons with common sense about how a business should operate has been overwhelmingly derisive. The perfectly obvious complaint is that the company is making it impossibly difficult for customers to utilize the dual service that they have already had access to. The Oatmeal quickly responded with this cartoon: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/netflix. One of the thousands of commenters on the Netflix blog post compared this move to separating phone service into a company devoted to talking and one devoted to listening. References to New Coke abound. People are predicting still more declines in the stock value of the company.
In his post, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explained, no doubt disingenuously, that the complete severance of the DVDs by mail portion of the business is aimed at allowing management teams for each business to focus completely on their own needs, thereby helping the DVD portion to survive for longer. Now, I have no formal education in business management, but I’m pretty sure that it’s possible for a company and a subsidiary company to be managed separately, but share billings and retain user interface that is already well in place. Even if the creation of a separate site was deemed necessary for clarity’s sake or simply for the sake of a symbolic fresh start, I find it impossible to believe that Netflix couldn't have designed two separate sites that share ratings and reviews from customers who have accounts with both.
I call absolute bullshit on Hastings’ claim that he wants the DVDs by mail service to be around for as long as possible. Completely and unnecessarily divorcing the two services forces customers to choose one or the other. They are trying to deliberately, perhaps artificially, reduce demand for the portion of their business model that involves an investment of physical resources. And if that fact isn’t evident simply from the effort to sequester the older service away from the newer, they’ve even given it an awful, awful new name. The red envelope will now bear the name “Qwikster,” a name which I can only imagine was artfully designed to imply obsolescence.
The new brand remains true to the original by having two syllables and in no other way. Those two syllables combine two assaults on the durability and desirability of the business into one absurdly shitty name. To start with the more obvious act of sabotage, I would say that Netflix’s marketing department attached the suffix “-ster” to the new brand explicitly to place it in the company of businesses that are already defunct and to make it feel at home there. “-ster” was commonly attached to web business names about a decade ago, and has never been used with anything new that had a shot at being successful since then. Napster and Friendster still exist, as far as I know, but nobody cares, nobody really uses them, and the prospects for them growing in the future are slim to nil. By making the older half of their business of a piece with these oldsters, Netflix is transparently broadcasting the fact that it perceives Qwikster to already be in the same position of neglect, or that they want it to be.
More likely the latter given the other half of the brand. “Qwik,” Mr. Hastings helpfully informs us, is supposed to refer to the quick delivery offered to customers. So in order to promote the longevity of their premier service, they’ve chosen to emphasize the one feature by which it pales in comparison to the company’s other brand, which is now being put forth as a competitor. I’ll say a lot in praise of the DVDs by mail service, but by modern standards, quick it is not. The Netflix marketing team seems to be banking on the idea that every time they read the name on that little red envelope, the word “quick” will be on their minds and they’ll think, “Gee, I wouldn’t have had to wait a day for my entertainment if I had just chosen another title that’s available to stream online and watched that instead.”
Despite the strengths that they could have emphasized, they instead chose to create a new brand identity based on the one modest weakness that will repel all the shortsighted customers who can be trained to value convenience over quality. They could have called it PickFlix, or ClearFlix, or Doesn’t-rebuffer-or-increase-strain-on-your-ISP-Flix. Or they could have just called it Netflix Mail. But they went with Qwikster. They may as well have just called it Waitster and made the logo a cartoon of a guy looking at his watch while getting older. This goes beyond bad branding. It was never intended to be good branding. Reed Hastings wasn’t caught off guard by the blowback he received today; he was counting on it. As far as I can tell, his attitude is that anyone who still wants his company to mail them any of their 100,000 DVD titles can fuck right off. Go check some other dead and decaying websites, then put on a big band LP and type a letter to the editor on your Smith-Corona, you dinosaurs. Reed Hastings is too plugged in to the rapid changes of the modern market to stop and give a shit about whether you still want what he was offering you back when his company’s stock was more valuable and you were paying less.
I suppose that given the theme of this blog, I should give Hastings my respect. He’s trying to force a breaking point. But it’s a decidedly negative breaking point for most people concerned. If we accept the shitty deal he’s giving to his loyal customers, we demonstrate that decreased quality and selection is okay as long as we get our poor, limited goods quickly. On the other hand, we could spin this breaking point in our favor. I’ll be curious to see how many more subscribers they’ve lost after another month. I’m not sure how I’m going to respond yet. Netflix has been my only reliable source of entertainment for some time. The price hike hasn’t taken effect for me yet. I was planning on just keeping the DVD side, but now I’m not sure whether to support Qwikster despite the fact that it’s designed to dissuade support and is owned by someone who’s happy to treat his customers like gullible fools, or to try to find something else.
I actually didn’t know that Blockbuster had changed to a monthly subscription model. When did that happen and why wasn’t it four years ago? There’s also apparently something called Green Cine, which doesn’t have much of a site but seems well-priced and is uniquely focused on independent and classic titles. There might also still be one privately owned DVD rental store in my area. That could be neat in light of my nostalgia for physical media. I don’t think I’ve gone inside a building to rent a film since I was a kid.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Child-Haters Versus Women-Haters
I spent entirely too much time yesterday afternoon following and participating in a debate about abortion, infanticide, and Canadian law at the Ethics Alarms blog. Though I might better have spent that time doing something more significant to my survival, it was a highly stimulating bit of discussion. I took on the task of trying to convince the blog’s author, Jack Marshall, that in the case of a 19 year-old Canadian girl who gave birth to her child in secret and then strangled it, the judge probably didn’t let her off with a three year suspended sentence because she simply considers infants to be a lower form of life.
Beyond the intellectual challenge of trying to dismantle the flawed logic and straw men involved in Marshall’s slander of Judge Joanne Veit, I found the dialogue to be worthwhile because it truly helped me to see the disparate sides of the abortion debate with greater clarity. I have often found that there is a certain middle ground in that debate, which is almost never explored. Broadly speaking, I am a pro-choice individual. But there appears to be a segment of the pro-choice crowd which believes that abortions are okay, full stop. That is not my perspective at all. Rather, I feel that abortions are sometimes the least of several evils. That is a perspective that anti-abortion individuals don’t seem to understand, and it is apparently one that is not widely represented. That makes it easy for people like Jack Marshall to characterize abortion-defenders as baby-killers who attach no value to the lives of innocents.
What I learned from today’s debate is that Marshall really, honestly believes in that characterization. He is truly of the opinion that Canadian society in general, and increasingly America as well, judges fetuses and infants as being less important than the mere convenience and whim of adult women. And it’s actually kind of comforting to know that. You see, I was afraid that the subject of abortion was peopled with activists who maintain wholly inconsistent worldviews. And while that still may be true to a certain extent, the fervor and ill-will surrounding so much of the discussion is probably derived from a tendency of virtually every party involved to mischaracterize one another’s views.
What I also learned about Marshall is that he genuinely believes he is defending the unborn against the onslaught of a society that is succumbing to the sort of utter degradation that leads it to consider newborns to be disposable, valueless, and devoid of rights. He allows for no nuance in the views of his opponents. That deepens my confidence that he is wrong, but it also aids in my understanding of why he’s wrong. It’s not, as some might suppose, that he simply thinks his moral outrage trumps a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Rather, he thinks he is defending children against women and social trends who have no moral compass whatsoever and are content to enter into abortion lightly, without reflection. I know that there are some women of whom that is true, but it is far from the norm, and what I recognize is that it is wrong to assume the authority to pronounce on what is right or wrong without having any awareness of the context surrounding specific decisions.
Ascribing highly extreme points of view to one’s political opponents makes one appear more extreme by contrast. I presume that this is happening on both sides of the debate. Pro-lifers think of pro-choice people as advocating abortion wherever there is the slightest motive for it, and that makes resistance to abortion not a personal point of view, but a moral imperative. It’s probably easy for anti-abortion activists to convince themselves that they’re fighting a group of people who, if not for the resistance, would go door to door performing abortions, even on women who aren’t sure they want them. Their own positions are probably ramped up in response. After all, if your opponent’s position has no nuance, why would yours? Meanwhile, pro-choice people think of their opponents as tyrants jockeying for control over all women’s reproductive systems. If that’s their goal, then evidently it’s not enough to defend abortion; activists believe they have to insist upon it.
I’m tired of seeing this debate framed as a contest between people who hate children and people who hate women. It’s portrayed that way because each side insists on the most evocative, rhetorical descriptions of the other. Not content to portray rivals as rivals, we feel the need to portray them as villains. We need more nuance in our understanding of the political motivations of others, but in order to achieve it, we first need more nuance in our approach to debate and political engagement. As it is, we only go on sustaining the possibly illusory perception that the two camps in any contest have wildly inconsistent views, that the definitions of “good” and “evil” are reversed on the other side.
Call me naïve, but despite all the partisanship and political rancor I’ve witnessed in my young life, I think we generally share a basic concept of right and wrong. Where we differ is in the application of it. It’s a matter of degree. By and large, conservatives don’t hate women any more than liberals hate children. We just put greater emphasis on one or the other depending upon our perception of the challenges at hand, the tendencies of the dominant society, the social position of our opponents’ views. Conservatives are categorically wrong when they paint abortion as an instance of the devaluing of nascent life, but liberals are similarly in error if they do not acknowledge the sincere good intentions of their reasonable conservative opponents.
We must take care to point out that sympathy for the emotional strain and desperation of mothers who lack support does not come at the expense of an overall respect for life. There’s room for defense of both children and child-bearers. The existing dialogue doesn’t give much hope for this, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t that what we all want? Despite how differently we rank our priorities, don’t most of us ultimately want to do right by every kind of person? We must. That's simply got to be the way it is.
Beyond the intellectual challenge of trying to dismantle the flawed logic and straw men involved in Marshall’s slander of Judge Joanne Veit, I found the dialogue to be worthwhile because it truly helped me to see the disparate sides of the abortion debate with greater clarity. I have often found that there is a certain middle ground in that debate, which is almost never explored. Broadly speaking, I am a pro-choice individual. But there appears to be a segment of the pro-choice crowd which believes that abortions are okay, full stop. That is not my perspective at all. Rather, I feel that abortions are sometimes the least of several evils. That is a perspective that anti-abortion individuals don’t seem to understand, and it is apparently one that is not widely represented. That makes it easy for people like Jack Marshall to characterize abortion-defenders as baby-killers who attach no value to the lives of innocents.
What I learned from today’s debate is that Marshall really, honestly believes in that characterization. He is truly of the opinion that Canadian society in general, and increasingly America as well, judges fetuses and infants as being less important than the mere convenience and whim of adult women. And it’s actually kind of comforting to know that. You see, I was afraid that the subject of abortion was peopled with activists who maintain wholly inconsistent worldviews. And while that still may be true to a certain extent, the fervor and ill-will surrounding so much of the discussion is probably derived from a tendency of virtually every party involved to mischaracterize one another’s views.
What I also learned about Marshall is that he genuinely believes he is defending the unborn against the onslaught of a society that is succumbing to the sort of utter degradation that leads it to consider newborns to be disposable, valueless, and devoid of rights. He allows for no nuance in the views of his opponents. That deepens my confidence that he is wrong, but it also aids in my understanding of why he’s wrong. It’s not, as some might suppose, that he simply thinks his moral outrage trumps a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Rather, he thinks he is defending children against women and social trends who have no moral compass whatsoever and are content to enter into abortion lightly, without reflection. I know that there are some women of whom that is true, but it is far from the norm, and what I recognize is that it is wrong to assume the authority to pronounce on what is right or wrong without having any awareness of the context surrounding specific decisions.
Ascribing highly extreme points of view to one’s political opponents makes one appear more extreme by contrast. I presume that this is happening on both sides of the debate. Pro-lifers think of pro-choice people as advocating abortion wherever there is the slightest motive for it, and that makes resistance to abortion not a personal point of view, but a moral imperative. It’s probably easy for anti-abortion activists to convince themselves that they’re fighting a group of people who, if not for the resistance, would go door to door performing abortions, even on women who aren’t sure they want them. Their own positions are probably ramped up in response. After all, if your opponent’s position has no nuance, why would yours? Meanwhile, pro-choice people think of their opponents as tyrants jockeying for control over all women’s reproductive systems. If that’s their goal, then evidently it’s not enough to defend abortion; activists believe they have to insist upon it.
I’m tired of seeing this debate framed as a contest between people who hate children and people who hate women. It’s portrayed that way because each side insists on the most evocative, rhetorical descriptions of the other. Not content to portray rivals as rivals, we feel the need to portray them as villains. We need more nuance in our understanding of the political motivations of others, but in order to achieve it, we first need more nuance in our approach to debate and political engagement. As it is, we only go on sustaining the possibly illusory perception that the two camps in any contest have wildly inconsistent views, that the definitions of “good” and “evil” are reversed on the other side.
Call me naïve, but despite all the partisanship and political rancor I’ve witnessed in my young life, I think we generally share a basic concept of right and wrong. Where we differ is in the application of it. It’s a matter of degree. By and large, conservatives don’t hate women any more than liberals hate children. We just put greater emphasis on one or the other depending upon our perception of the challenges at hand, the tendencies of the dominant society, the social position of our opponents’ views. Conservatives are categorically wrong when they paint abortion as an instance of the devaluing of nascent life, but liberals are similarly in error if they do not acknowledge the sincere good intentions of their reasonable conservative opponents.
We must take care to point out that sympathy for the emotional strain and desperation of mothers who lack support does not come at the expense of an overall respect for life. There’s room for defense of both children and child-bearers. The existing dialogue doesn’t give much hope for this, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t that what we all want? Despite how differently we rank our priorities, don’t most of us ultimately want to do right by every kind of person? We must. That's simply got to be the way it is.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Killing Not Just Newspapers, But News
Nielsen released its report yesterday on how Americans spend their time online, and most of the extensive media coverage seems to be focusing on how popular their research shows Facebook to be. Apparently there was some doubt about that prior to yesterday. This study tells a much larger story than that, however. Focusing on the social media aspect of it seems like a strange bit of rhetoric, and an impulse to exploit the angle that news outlets assume will generate the most attention. Social media and blogs together comprised almost a quarter of people’s time spent online, but it was not the largest category. That remains the miscellaneous category, but let’s not pull punches here, it’s porn. The smallest share of time online goes to news, at 2.6 percent.
That’s a significant piece of information at a time when the internet is said to be killing newspapers, with even television media having a difficult time keeping up with changing landscape. But if society as a whole is devoting only one fortieth of its time spent online to learning about current events, I wonder if that calls into question the assumption that traditional news media are failing because of competition from convenient, cheap, high volume online sources of news. Other analyses have indicated that overall readership of established news agencies is in decline, not just readership of their print formats. It seems that it has always been assumed that this readership was dispersing to other sources from which they gathered the same volume of information that they used to consume, but I expect that that would be difficult to prove empirically. To me, these new numbers support an alternative interpretation: that people are opting out of information-gathering altogether, and that established news media are losing ground not to competition, but to distraction.
The existing narrative reflects what I think is an unfortunate and all too common perspective that all change is positive change. Letting that perspective go unquestioned allows us to sacrifice the best of what is currently available to us, either because the best of what is emerging is thought to outweigh it or because preserving anything against the onslaught of social or technological change is deemed a lost cause. The optimistic outlook on current trends in news consumption is evidently that there is a greater volume of reporting, a greater diversity of opinion, and a greater ease of access. That’s hardly all there is to the story, though. A greater volume of reporting doesn’t mean much if the sources of that reporting are devoid of the resources that might otherwise encourage a fuller investigation and a higher quality of reporting. A greater diversity of opinion is hardly progress if it reflects a devaluing of objectivity and a tendency of people to choose the sources of their news based on a preexisting agreement with the outlet’s perspective. Greater ease of access is barely significant if fewer people are choosing to access the most significant information that is available to them.
Of course, I don’t know that any of these trends are truly dominant. I am confident, however, that there is far too much optimistic assumption about the character of American audiences, and far too much dismissiveness and acceptance of powerlessness among those who might be in a position to affect positive change in consumer behavior. Much of the media seems content to fawn over social networking sites, curve their reporting on topics of much broader significance around a sense of awe at their popularity, wrongly declare them to be the drivers of foreign revolutions, and so on. The cultural position of Facebook, Twitter and the like is crucially important, but I would love to see a lot more analysis of its causes and effects, and a basic willingness to criticize and resist.
As far as I’m concerned, the story to be taken away from the Nielsen report is not that Facebook holds irreversible cultural dominance, but that an enormous portion of the American public enjoys masturbation in its multitudinous forms, and hates information and critical thinking. And as much as that drives frivolous use of social media and a resistance to hard news, it also may inform the existing news media’s response to such trends, so that their diminished quality and misplaced emphasis drives nails into their own coffins.
That’s a significant piece of information at a time when the internet is said to be killing newspapers, with even television media having a difficult time keeping up with changing landscape. But if society as a whole is devoting only one fortieth of its time spent online to learning about current events, I wonder if that calls into question the assumption that traditional news media are failing because of competition from convenient, cheap, high volume online sources of news. Other analyses have indicated that overall readership of established news agencies is in decline, not just readership of their print formats. It seems that it has always been assumed that this readership was dispersing to other sources from which they gathered the same volume of information that they used to consume, but I expect that that would be difficult to prove empirically. To me, these new numbers support an alternative interpretation: that people are opting out of information-gathering altogether, and that established news media are losing ground not to competition, but to distraction.
The existing narrative reflects what I think is an unfortunate and all too common perspective that all change is positive change. Letting that perspective go unquestioned allows us to sacrifice the best of what is currently available to us, either because the best of what is emerging is thought to outweigh it or because preserving anything against the onslaught of social or technological change is deemed a lost cause. The optimistic outlook on current trends in news consumption is evidently that there is a greater volume of reporting, a greater diversity of opinion, and a greater ease of access. That’s hardly all there is to the story, though. A greater volume of reporting doesn’t mean much if the sources of that reporting are devoid of the resources that might otherwise encourage a fuller investigation and a higher quality of reporting. A greater diversity of opinion is hardly progress if it reflects a devaluing of objectivity and a tendency of people to choose the sources of their news based on a preexisting agreement with the outlet’s perspective. Greater ease of access is barely significant if fewer people are choosing to access the most significant information that is available to them.
Of course, I don’t know that any of these trends are truly dominant. I am confident, however, that there is far too much optimistic assumption about the character of American audiences, and far too much dismissiveness and acceptance of powerlessness among those who might be in a position to affect positive change in consumer behavior. Much of the media seems content to fawn over social networking sites, curve their reporting on topics of much broader significance around a sense of awe at their popularity, wrongly declare them to be the drivers of foreign revolutions, and so on. The cultural position of Facebook, Twitter and the like is crucially important, but I would love to see a lot more analysis of its causes and effects, and a basic willingness to criticize and resist.
As far as I’m concerned, the story to be taken away from the Nielsen report is not that Facebook holds irreversible cultural dominance, but that an enormous portion of the American public enjoys masturbation in its multitudinous forms, and hates information and critical thinking. And as much as that drives frivolous use of social media and a resistance to hard news, it also may inform the existing news media’s response to such trends, so that their diminished quality and misplaced emphasis drives nails into their own coffins.
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