Dec 2007

Beacon shines far beyond Facebook

Saturday, December 08, 2007

The flap over Facebook’s Beacon isn’t over yet. New research from CA’s Threat Research Group reported this week indicates that the service extends further than they initially let on.

“Facebook’s controversial Beacon ad system tracks activities from all users in its third-party partner sites, including from people who have never signed up with Facebook or who have deactivated their accounts,” said Stefan Berteau, senior research engineer at CA’s Threat Research Group.

Ultimately this type of tracking information is designed to more effectively commodify the audience for marketers—which is how Facebook and its investors hope to further monetize the success of the burgeoning social network. What concerns me, almost more than the privacy issues, is that the awareness of Beacon may be quite low among the mass of Facebook users or non Facebook users who visit and do business with affiliated sites. So consider this my (tiny) contribution to making sure people know about it.
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Target’s Rounders outed

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Related to my prior post, we’re now to the point that audiences can work a little harder to extract some perks from advertisers for helping market products to other audience members. Check out this little Facebook scandal from Target corp. The very existence of a marketing effort like Rounders is very telling as to just how far Smythe’s “audience commodity” has come in the Web 2.0 age.

What amazes me is that people in the target age demographic (no pun intended) buy into the corporate-hipster speak when it’s so pathetically contrived–like the 40-year-old youth worker that tries to be “relevant” by using the vernacular of the cool kids. Of course, the millennials may be gaming “the system” to get the rewards. But at less than $100 in value on average, is becoming a marketing stooge in the eyes of your friends worth it? If so, I'd like to set up a meeting with you to discuss a business opportunity with Amway.
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Social media pokes at Smythe’s blindspot

Saturday, December 08, 2007

I can’t resist saying I told you so (it may be a little too early for that), but the news about Facebook last week and this week should give social media users pause.

Facebook has been pressured to (kind of) reverse an earlier decision to use purchasing or commercial activity data to poke (send messages) to member’s friends about the things they have purchased, etc. (via a technology they call Beacon). They’ve added an opt in feature. The only trouble is that you are asked to opt in every time you make a purchase. The AdWeek article explains the issue in more detail.

The corresponds very well with communication theorist Dallas Smythe’s theories of the “work” of the audience commodity. While he had TV, Radio and Newspapers in mind when he wrote about this in the 70s and 80s, his ideas continue to manifest themselves in commercial use of Web 2.0 social media. Some more from Smythe:

A threadbare myth which is still a part of the propaganda of capitalism is that of consumer sovereignty—that the consumer is in charge and in fact chooses freely between the many thousands of different commodities daily pressed on him/her. The people are told they can always “switch off” if they do not like a program, newspaper, or magazine. And the use of “ratings” do decide which commercially sponsored programs will be continued and which dropped is sometimes called cultural democracy. After all, should not the majority rule? These propaganda themes ring hollow when one realizes that [product marketers] are not throwing their money away when they pay for advertising. And when one pursues the question, what kind of “work” is it which audiences do for advertisers? What sort of work is it which is not paid money wages, must continue from childhood to death, and must wait for the next hour or day before it is presented to the workers? The only comparable form of labor is slavery. It is tempting to think of referring to audience power as mind slavery. Slavery however, means ownership of the person. And the term must be rejected as applying to audience members in the core area because they are legally “free” to try to control their own lives.

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A post for my sports-loving readers

Saturday, December 08, 2007

A couple weeks ago someone forwarded me the Mii Lebowski on YouTube, which is totally not appropriate as a post on my blog. However, the clip put me on to the viral video trend of combining real-world video and/or audio with video game animation. One result is a video recut that is sure to warm the hearts of any classic NES playing sports fan (although Red Sox fans may not want to relive this one).
The 1986 World Series, Game 6, as reenacted in RBI Baseball. 

(Spoiler alert: the Mets win.)

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Kindle wants to burn a hole in your pocket

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Services we don’t need, so people can charge us fees we can’t afford: That’s how I sum up the Amazon Kindle. Here’s what I mean.

You may have seen this week’s Newsweek cover story on Amazon’s new Kindle book reader and platform. Okay, it won’t fit in your pocket, but excuse the metaphor in my headline. Besides being a downright fugly-looking machine, it seems Jeff Bezos can join the ranks of other CEOs that think consumers are just waiting to fork over more of their money given the right P.T. Barnum-esque pitch. He’s wrong.

Walt Mossberg gives it a fair review over at the WSJ. Here’s what uncle Walt didn’t cover in much detail. That cell network the Kindle is tethered to costs money. And since it isn’t a cell phone, you don’t pay for it in a talk time plan. Here’s what they expect people to pay for (besides the obvious price for book downloads): While you can subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and blogs, getting them on the Kindle will cost anywhere from 99 cents to $14 per month. And no, you can’t just use a web browser on the Kindle to get to them. Plus, if you want to move a personal document to the Kindle, Amazon will charge you a fee to do it. Why? No sync.

Instead of coupling the device to the PC and allowing people to freely sync data and move their owned media freely across platforms, Bezos decides to fly in the face of more than 100 million iPod sales and make the Kindle a standalone wireless access reader that charges the user for everything you could possibly think of.

Try again, Bezos. And this time, put the consumer higher on your list of priorities. Shareholders may have been excited last week (no doubt with those dollar signs dancing in their heads), but don’t expect them be giddy when they realize nobody’s going to buy this thing.

Why would anyone need to buy a book on the fly so often that an expensive cellular delivery approach is the only option? Books take time to read. I have no issues with browsing my book purchase on Amazon via my Mac, iPod Touch or BBerry; downloading it (which provides a backup, by the way) and then syncing a reader device (like Sony’s). But that’s not how the Kindle works. To Kindle, PCs and the real internet don’t really exist apart from Amazon’s messed up version.

I really like this concept and the digital paper technology going on here, but apart from that, the only thing about the Kindle that works well is the online store for purchasing books, according to Mossberg. And that’s just not enough when the object you are holding in your hand is clunky, ugly and exists mostly to find ways to empty your wallet.
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Commodify me, oh Lord, part 2

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Sanctuary

Fasten your seatbelts, this is going to be a long one folks.  See part one for the set up. Also check out this lecture as a good primer. It's long and requires Real Media--no YouTube version is out yet.

According to the Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2006-2010 issued by global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, worldwide advertising spending was $385 billion in 2006. The accounting firm’s report projected worldwide advertisement spending to exceed half-a-trillion dollars by 2010.

What does that equate to per person, per advertising message today? Depending on whose research you believe, it’s something like 300 to 3,000 advertising messages per day. At either end of the extreme, that’s a lot.

It boggles the mind to think that for every person on the planet, a total of $64 per year is spent just to advertise to them. But if you get more creative (and realistic) about the ad spend, its likely that at least 1/3 of that spend is targeted at the U.S. Doing the simple math (which is all I am competent to do), that works out to $426 of ad spend per citizen based on 300 million people. If that does increase as PWC predicts, this rises to $550.

In terms of my own experience, I often compare the commercial onslaught of today’s culture with my formative years in the 70s. From this vantage point, the ramp up and expansion of commercial messages is staggering—infiltrating nearly every public space and media form in our culture. People’s homes, schools, recreation, political and social frames have become venues for commercial messages.

The impetus for my project is too look at how these messages of commercialization are entering the sacred frame of our church communities, and evaluate specific commercial media that are targeting the church audience: movies, music, books and consumer products

Far from advocating dropping out of the capitalist system we are a part of, I’m looking toward an emerging opportunity for communities of faith: Embracing the alien culture of the Kingdom of God as communities that offer people sanctuary from commercial media, rather than deepening the syncretism with commercial enterprise, and cooption of entertainment media to achieve cultural relevance in our mission.

Why do I think this is a worthy objective? I’ll let media theorist Dallas Smythe chime in: 
The enormous mass of advertisements and other mass media content which bombards the individual in the advanced capitalist state from all the mass media has the systemic effect of a barrage of noise which effectively exhausts the time and energies of the population. This is a powerful deterrent to consideration of the possibilities of alternative systems of social relationships.


Given the weariness of “being sold to” and “selling” that some in American consumer culture may be experiencing, my theory is that there is a growing opportunity for The Church to play a brave new role in America (or return to an old role, perhaps). As a countercultural movement, we can offer real sanctuary from commercialization and commodification in our communities of faith. Restated in the terms of Smythe, The Church can provide a sanctuary for people to rest from the constant, incessant “work” of the commercial audience. 

Our attraction and relevance to new generations of people may now hinge on this. Sadly, most of the American Church has become so enamored with the power of consumer marketing, that commercial media forms have become unchallenged and essential ingredients in “success.” The trouble is that, by most measures (Barna, Pew, etc.), these approaches haven’t made a dent in terms of adding souls to The Kingdom.

Let me take a moment to delineate where I think the Church lost site of its role regarding commercial media and communication:

There are two basic critical perspectives on media: Content and context. Most often the church has offered its moral critique on media content, while at the same time trying to harness the communicative power of the context.

I’m not concerned with content criticism with this project. It’s not a question of avoiding certain media content to keep pure or separate from a moral standpoint. While I don’t discount the need to consider content on moral grounds, there is a deeper moral question at stake with context.

I’ve had a couple of significant epiphanies in my research over the past few weeks. One of these has to do with the intersection of consumerism with theology and ecclesiology. As some recent books are now exploring (Paul Metzger), both The Church and the Gospel message are being commodified quite readily in American culture through the marketing and branding of churches, evangelism via marketing tactics, and the transformation of our messages into entertainment and self-help forms, etc. What hasn’t been discussed as much is what the effects are—why this is a truly problem. Most people don’t think there is a problem, although some in emergent circles do recognize the issue. This is where communication research and theory can add to the conversation.

In short, both The Church and The Word (both living entities, I would argue) risk being objectified when subject to or coupled with commercial communication approaches. This objectification, or “fetishization” as it is referred to by media theorists such as Sut Jhally, is what creates identity and meaning for consumers. The commodification of sacred messages, which are placed at the mercy of a consumer marketplace when contextualized as commercial media, become elements in a transaction, which are consumed (not in the sense of spiritual nourishment, but as objects to satiate people’s needs and desires—needs and desires that have been engineered by commercial media forms from birth. In that sense, the objects are emptied of their intrinsic meanings and given new meanings by the commercialization and consumption process. 

Seen through a spiritual lens, the objectified Word no longer gives and sustains life eternal and sacred, but only perpetuates life temporal and secular.

Oh yes. There will be a part 3.

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Thank you Sara Groves

Saturday, December 01, 2007

For another gift of beautiful songs. (This is worth seeing full size). Support artists like Sara.



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Absolutely loving this record

Saturday, December 01, 2007

I missed this record when it debuted in April, but still had to get a post written on it. I became a fan of Maria McKee in the late 80s when she fronted Lone Justice. After that, I lost sight of her artistic visions in the 90s. This new project, called Late December, while markedly different than everything else that comes before it, fully showcases her greatest assets: her powerful voice, and her inventive approach to melody. 

While it’s not the return to the belfry-rattling power cow-punk of Lone Justice I would have loved to hear, it’s a refreshing turn from an artist that continues to evolve.

I can't find a video off the new project, but here's a classic live cut: Wheels, circa 1986.


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I’m going to eat this book up

Saturday, December 01, 2007

While I do plan to get McLaren’s new book, Everything Must Change, I’m really more excited about this one: Consuming Jesus, by Paul Metzger. 

I read some reviews online (Jesus Creed), and really think this will be helpful to my project. While it focuses on how consumer churchianity diasbles multi-ethnic congregations (an incredibly important observation), It looks like it will translate well to other issues, as well.

Thanks to Derek for referring. Consider it on my Christmas list, bro. That, and the iPod touch 16 Gb. See my wife to contribute : )

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