Category: Digital Culture

Critic Cote on Digital-Age Behavior in Theaters

I had to share this article by New York theater critic David Cote because it really is an indictment of digital-age jitteriness screwing up culture and literacy instead of broadening same as was promised.  It’s not really surprising that a contemporary theater audience doesn’t know that a play is not typically an interactive experience, and yet it is still a little surprising.  Cote’s “What Not to Do at Hugh Jackman’s New Broadway Show” is a funny but stern lecture that not only lays down basic rules for audience behavior, but even implies that people need a refresher course in what exactly theater is.  All of his observations — the use of smartphone cameras, the callouts to Jackman as celebrity, applauding at the wrong moments — all reek of digital-age induced illiteracy and narcissism. From Cote’s article:

So thunderstruck are they to be in a theater with the godlike Jackman, they forget to turn off their phones. Or worse, they snap pictures. At the press night I attended, some woman lacking a filter filled in the final, quiet moments of the play with an audible, “Holy shit!” Nice way to ruin a final tableau.

Here’s the first thing to know about a play:  Although you are there to experience it, it is not actually about you.

Read David Cote’s full article at TimeOut New York here.

Vicious Cycle – Speech Now Rewards the Oligarchs

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, about the challenges and the opportunities facing the next generation — those millennials about whom everyone has a theory and whose attention everybody wants.  They are, after all, the next big generation, equalling the boomers at about eighty million with us Xers weighing in at a paltry fifty million.  But as the father of three of these so-called millennials, I’m not so much interested in them as a demographic, trying to understand their habits and tastes so I can figure out what to sell them and how to package it.  And I certainly worry about their entry into cyberspace, sharing information about themselves with Zuckerberg’s data mining organization before they reach adulthood.  But above all, I wonder whether or not millennials are up for the big social and political challenge of their age and whether or not us Xers are able to lead the charge. At the moment I’m not so hopeful in light of this report from Public Citizen entitled Mission Creep-y, explaining how Google is becoming an ultra-powerful political force and continuing to expand its “information collection empire.” Just the first few lines of the introduction reads as follows:

“Google may possess more information about more people than any entity in the history of the world. Its business model and its ability to execute it demonstrate that it will continue to collect personal information about the public at a galloping pace. Meanwhile Google is becoming the most prolific political spender among corporations in the United States, while providing less transparency about its activities than many other of its politically active peers. Despite its mantra – “Don’t be evil” – Google’s ever- growing power calls for keeping a close eye on the company, just as it is keeping a close eye on us.”

I do think the challenge of this half of this century is whether or not we’re going to allow the unfettered power of a new oligarchy to flourish.  Plutocrats have risen before in American history, but what is unique this time is that the means by which we perceive we can combat unchecked power actually waters the seeds of that power itself. To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to Occupy Wall Street.  Remember Occupy?  It was trending not that long ago.  In my opinion, this series of protests was borne of anger and frustration with exactly the right problem — wealth consolidation.  For more than a half century now, Americans have fostered both policy and business culture that has resulted in a tiny fraction of society holding the greatest percentage of wealth.  Meanwhile, opportunity continues to shrink for everyone else — the 99% championed by OWS.  Thus, the targets of Occupy were the financial industry and the government that failed first to regulate and then to punish those who practiced predatory and fraudulent schemes that led to near economic collapse five years ago.  This particular rage aimed at those particular institutions was a reasonable start, but the narrative written by OWS actually contains an ironic twist I doubt many of its founders or followers ever considered before, during, or since those days in Zuccotti Park.

If we’re going to be honest, OWS produced nothing tangible to address the fundamental problem of wealth consolidation in the U.S.  No serious grassroots political force was founded, no OWS-backed candidates were elected to office, no dialogue has even really changed much as a result of those protests.  Instead, what OWS produced was a great deal of theater. And that’s normal.  Protests always produce some measure of theater that doesn’t translate into progress, which doesn’t mean protests don’t serve a purpose.  The irony, however, with this particular spectacle in the age of social media, this free show comprised of shared photos, videos, tweets, and updates about kids tussling with city police, was that it could not exist without putting money into the pockets of the wealthiest one percent of the one percent. For every one of us who watched a video of Officer Bologna pepper spray a young woman and thought, “that’s wrong” and then went about our day, the Internet billionaires made money. The top search result of that video alone has just under a million views on YouTube, and there are I don’t know how many related videos representing how many thousands of views.  But suffice to say that long after the goals of Occupy have been swept up with the detritus from the park, Silicon Valley’s elite few continue to make money from the from the free media circus performed in the name of restoring power to the many.  This Catch-22 scenario applies to just about any cause, any protest, any movement around the world.

I wrote broadly on this theme after supposed co-founder of OWS, now Google employee (yep), Justine Tunney called for a libertarian’s coup that would install Google chairman Eric Schmidt as chief executive of America. I really don’t think it’s alarmist to say that we are spawning a new generation of Vanderbilts with a social agenda that goes beyond mere greed, and that in the end, we won’t even get a railroad out of the deal.  But what is truly different about this era’s breed of Robber Baron is that this time he owns the medium through which we naively imagine we can protect our civil liberties against his caprice and callousness.  With every tweet, status update, an even blog post just like this one, we are feeding the very monster we think we’re fighting.  This is the real conundrum of our times and for the next generation to solve:  How do we speak truth to power when that power is made stronger by every word we say?

Is Taylor Swift a Strategic Guide?

Taylor Swift’s new album 1989 is the first and only to go platinum this year.  And the year is just about over.  At the same time, Swift is making headlines because her label Big Machine (a label she and her family own) has pulled all of her albums from Spotify and other streaming services.  As David Lowery’s artists rights blog The Trichordist has been pointing out this week, streaming company representatives and Internet industry cheerleaders have revealed some rather sexist overtones in their criticisms of artists like Swift, Adele, and Beyonce for their strategic decisions to restrict streaming of their tracks. Certainly, this kind of response is SOP by the brash, young boys of Silicon Valley, who like to tell everyone, especially silly girls, that they just don’t understand new business.  The arrogance of male money losers lecturing successful female entrepreneurs is something to behold, but let’s move on…

What I find particularly interesting are the lessons to be learned from the brief report on NPR this morning in which Sam Sanders describes Taylor Swift’s ingredients for success. I say this because all of the tactics employed by Swift are consistent with a marketing strategy that blends the best of the digital age with the best of pre-internet business models.  Taylor Swift does the following:

  • Create a product people actually want.  Check.  Clearly.
  • Connect with fans via social media.  Check. Swift is a long-time user of Twitter and responds directly and personally to her fans.
  • Promote like mad.  Check.  Swift is constantly self-promoting with live appearances.
  • Tour.  Yep.  Got it.
  • Give people a real reason to buy your product.  Check. Read on…

As Swift explains, 1989 did an exclusive deal with Target that has three extra songs and a unique photo collection.   This is a real-life example of the often vague suggestion that artists need to “add value” or “give consumers something they can’t get online.”  But right there is the trick, isn’t it?  Swift did add value by creating a limited edition CD with extra stuff for her most ardent fans, but the other component to get people to buy the album was — and this is really mind-blowing — to not make it available for free right away.  Genius, right?  This is not to say that infringers have not uploaded files from the album to YouTube, which is a whole other problem.  What this story really makes me think about, what I am always thinking about, is the middle-class band or singer/songwriter, partly because that’s where I think some of the best music is produced.  People can speculate all they want about whether Big Machine is providing  a guide to success for other major artists; but my question is what do artists do who aren’t quite so huge as Taylor Swift?

For instance, I recently discovered a band I like after attending AmericanaFest 2014 in New York City.  It was clear their fans had showed up because everyone crowded around me knew the lyrics to the songs, but I did wonder if these fans were album purchasers, streaming listeners, concert attendees, or all of the above.  I happen to know through an industry source who knows this band personally that they are very typical of the middle-class band today in that their album sales are a loss leader used to promote touring and that they have to tour constantly to make any kind of living.  This colleague explained, “This is one of those bands that’s just over that line of making a living, playing just big enough venues to make it work; go one notch below them, and you’re pretty much operating at a loss.”

Now, this band is doing more or less everything Taylor Swift is doing as well as everything the know-nothing web gurus tell them to do.  They use social media, sell tee shirts, tour constantly (leaving families behind); and of course they’ll never be as popular as Swift or Beyonce and are unlikely to get invited on the Today Show to promote a new album.  And that’s nothing new. But in a pre-internet market, this middle-class band would be doing pretty well, still working hard, but not operating quite so on the edge of survival.  And while nobody may care, they ought to for selfish reasons alone.  Because the longer a band like this continues to work, perform, and experiment, the higher the probability is that both they and society will be the beneficiaries of some new song or album that becomes a favorite hit that lasts for decades.

There are hundreds or thousands of artists who match the profile of this band, and if all of them are surviving (or not really surviving) on touring and merchandise alone, their days of playing are likely to be more limited than their predecessors simply because they’re mortal.  Album sales are a form of passive income, and passive income translates into time — time to spend writing a new song or experimenting with a new sound rather than booking a tour or approving the design for another stupid tee shirt.  So the question is whether or not a band this size should take a page from Swift’s playbook, pull or limit its tracks on streaming services and effectively force, rather than beg, their fans to buy CDs or digital downloads or even vinyl?  Would there be the backlash against the artists that so many predict?  I sometimes wonder.  Certainly, the owners of Spotify and Pandora would like us to think so.  But of course, if the options are zero income or mere drippings from streaming that don’t sustain, more than a few artists may be willing to find out.