Category: Media

The infamous exchange between Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise about the efficacy of psychiatry, re-staged by a pair of aliens speaking through text-to-speech synthesizers. Back in June when the interview originally aired, it was widely regarded as an example of a typical Scientologist going off his nut. Which is why this “alien” rendering is so interesting: Take out the star power, take out the vocal intonation and the finger wagging, and you’re left with pure dialog. Without having your anti-celeb, anti-nutjob radar bleeping away in the foreground, you get to focus on the words. And somehow, I expect that most people listening to this exchange, stripped down to its actual words, will find a lot to agree with in what Cruise was trying to express.

We may not share his adamant stance, as pretty much everyone is close to someone whose lives really have been helped by psychiatry, but at the same time, it’s good to see someone famous look out on an over-medicated world and say “This is getting ridiculous.” Scientologist or not, he’s not all wrong.

Oh, and it’s funny too.

Went last night with Amy (an actual date!) to see NPR’s Ira Glass in conversation with comic artist Chris Ware (“Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth”), hosted by Orville Schell. Started with a 20 minute story drawn by Ware and narrated by Glass, followed by fascinating, funny general banter about life, hermitage, television, architecture, etc. Ware is inward to the point of awkwardness, completely out of place on stage (“Given the choice, I’d never leave my house.”)

Interesting thread on the current “media landscape” — Glass says we’re living in a new golden age of television, because producers have become so desperate to find the next big thing that they’re willing to try anything at all. As TV consumers, we benefit from the sheer range of content types this produces. And it’s true — as much as we lament the death of the sitcom, the variety we have to choose from now is deafening compared to what we had in, say, the 80s. And for shows that are scripted (as opposed to reality-based), the level of complexity just keeps rising (compare The Sopranos to Dragnet, c.f. Everything Bad is Good For You).

Glass also talked about how the fakeness of TV news drives him crazy. Stuffed shirts and talking heads all the way ’round. “Why can’t we just have real people talking about the news? The Daily Show has shown us how badly we crave someone real addressing the news. We need a show like that that isn’t comedy.”

Wikipedia may be phenomenally popular, a testament to the Power of Many, the ultimate manifestation of the online hive mind, yadda yadda. But just how credible is it? The Guardian UK asked a handful of experts to review and rate the Wikipedia entries on their specialty topics. The results are not exactly glowing, with most entries scoring a 6 or 7 out of 10 for accuracy and completeness. It seems that topics of broad popular interest (Bob Dylan) make out with higher marks, while more obscure topics (Samuel Pepys) score lower. Which seems to validate the idea that the ability of a Wiki to extract collective intelligence from the masses is best leveraged when the number of writer/editors is high.

The trouble with this rating system is that each judge judges just one entry and has different personal criteria for credibility. I’d like to see a test like this extended to a thousand or so entries/judges to get a better sample size, then see a correspondence map between traffic to an entry and its judged rating.

Thanks Paul

Never ceases to amaze me what a really talented Flash programmer can do with a bit of screen scraping, a whollop of ActionScript, and a great idea. KrazyDad packs a couple thousand classic science fiction book covers from the Visco archives into a single screen, randomly navigable. Be sure to read how it was made.

A bunch of suits sit around a boardroom table, asking what they can do to attract young people to their site. Grapevine says blogs are hot! No idea what one is, but they’ll build one anyway. A swirling splash page, insipid, faked daily entries, each one locked in a tiny Flash text box dwarfed by extraneous gew gaws. Oh, and be sure we make the site go ‘Ding!’ each time user navigates between entries.

Juicy Fruit has ensured that the weblog as a form has officially jumped the shark.

If I gave a tinker’s cuss about advertising, I’d give an award to Hitachi for best ad in a magazine. Doing the usual dump of blow-in cards from the current issue of Wired, encountered a thick page, which turned out to be a standard beer coaster attached to heavy stock. On the reverse of the page, a gen-yoo-ine U.S. patent application form, ready to fill out, tear out, and send. On the back of the beer coaster, these instructions:

1) Ask your waiter/aspiring actor for a pen.
2) Sketch plans for cool new device utilizing a Hitachi hard drive.
3) Fill out patent form on back of page.
4) Raise a glass in a toast to your brilliance.

OK, it’s corny, but it’s also the closest I’ve seen a print ad come to the kind of engagement/interactivity common online.

Very nice piece at A List Apart on techniques for writing a weblog people will actually read. Focuses on things you should do, rather than things you shouldn’t (why are viable suggestions so much more rare than lists of things to avoid?)

Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. At the same time, you don’t want to over–explain yourself. Understatement can be thunderous, or humorous, or heartbreaking. Or all three.