Archive for 'Media Criticism'
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This week is TV Turnoff Week, the wonderful initiative started by Adbusters and the Center for Screen-Time Awareness to encourage us to turn off the idiot box. I stopped watching TV when I moved out of my parents’ house almost two years ago. I haven’t missed it. Yes, I have a screen for movies and watch occasionally, but otherwise I find things to do like exercise, read, and further my knowledge via the Internet. My only regular TV exposure right now is when I’m in the gym; there I enjoy watching the History Channel.
I encourage you this week to turn off your TV and discover activities that refresh you. Here are ten things you can do this week instead of watch TV:
- Read a Book - The one you’ve been putting off reading. Or, you can read about the media, books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman or Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg.
- Pick up a new skill or enroll in a class. Right now I’m reading Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook and studying up on my knowledge before beginning lessons.
- Two words: Spring Cleaning!
- Go for a walk/jog/bike ride outside.
- Attend a cultural event, concert, or visit an art gallery if you’re into that sort of thing (then again, if you are, how much TV do you really watch?)
- Go throw a ball or play a game with some friends - it’s about that time of year!
- Cook a meal and eat it together as a family. If you aren’t married or don’t have kids, invite some friends over and cook a meal together.
- Play a board game or party game. Recently I had fun playing classics like Connect 4 and Pit with some friends. Other current favorites are Catch Phrase and Apples to Apples.
- Write something - a short story, a long story, a how-to guide or even some thank-you notes. Start a blog and publish what you wrote.
- Review your goals and catch up on your to-do lists. Don’t kick yourself, just give yourself permission to take a fresh stab and make progress towards things you want to accomplish.
What about the Internet? Shouldn’t we turn that off too?
To that I’d ask: Are you learning and engaging your mind on the Internet, are you doing something interactive? Or are you just surfing MySpace, Facebook, or going from video to video? The Internet is fundamentally an interactive medium. TV is fundamentally one-way. Steve Jobs was quoted in Macworld as saying, “You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” This week, try dialing back your consumption online, and dialing up learning and creating.
Further Reading on TV Turnoff Week and on TV Watching
What are you doing this week instead of watching TV?
Having read many of the criticisms leveled at Sarah Lacy in the wake of her Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW (video), I offer this quick thought. In fact, it’s not even mine. Nor is it new, some dead famous guy said it.
“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Offering my own analysis of the interview itself (which I did watch, though I wasn’t there) would be beating a long-dead horse. The point here is, for the mistakes made, Lacy was the one in the arena. While there’s value in constructive suggestions and lessons learned for improvement, outright (and sometimes mean-spirited) criticism reveals character.
It’s easy to take pot-shots from the sidelines. In some circles, it’s even cool. It’s much harder to get in the arena and put your neck on the line. I’ve played both roles, as I’m sure many of you have. It’s my constant aim to criticize less and do more. Is it yours?
The last few times I’ve driven into the city, I’ve noticed more and more of these LED billboards popping up. They’re like having a bunch of TVs pointed at you as you drive, unavoidable in their bright flashes and demands that you BUY BUY BUY.
Until recently, displays like these have been relegated to downtown crossroads like Times Square, now they’re invading our backyards. I can only imagine the recent growth in LED technology and reduction in cost to producing these devices has contributed to their emergence. Couple that with media fragmentation and advertisers desperate for eyeballs, and what do we get? Advertising that’s more and more interruptive and irritating (as if the stretch of I-294 between 88 and O’Hare wasn’t bad enough already).
I won’t pretend that I don’t revile these billboards. What I don’t have (yet) is a consistent philosophy and belief system as a marketer myself, of what advertising is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad.’
In my pseudo-hippy phase, which was brief (and no I won’t show you pictures), I became a fan of Adbusters magazine. I resonate with a lot of their thoughts on how commercial culture pollutes the mental environment, but I eschew the mag’s hyper-liberal conspiracy theory politics. In fact, the latter is the reason I don’t currently read it, even though I still agree with their views on media. They talk about the “mental environment” the way environmentalists talk about preserving our physical environment. In essence, they brought a phrase to what I’d been sensing — an onslaught of commercials and content that was not relevant to me and that was designed to disrupt thought and create a sense of need that wasn’t there before. The intense, sickly feeling of being sold to at every corner.
From a business perspective, these billboards are a new market opportunity, the result of technology enabling advertisements to be more effective. Now advertisers can fraction off use of a billboard space, presumably making outdoor advertising more cost effective for advertisers, and allowing ads to be more targeted (an ad for morning commuters, for example, who tend to fall in certain demographics). Seems innocuous enough, until you consider how this affects the audience on the road and how these blaring ads stir up more angst in an already frustration-filled part of the day–the commute.
So I must ask, at what cost will we continue to push the envelope of interruptive advertising? In an age where online, marketers are moving more and more towards permission-based techniques and even social marketing that’s far more targeted, mass media is soldiering on with more resolve than ever to annoy the p*** out of people. Continuing, as they always have, to talk AT their consumer (whom they see as an object to sell to) rather than TO their customer (a person who chooses to buy).
