SLOW Movement

NY Times: In Singapore, Political Campaigning Goes Viral

 

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May 5, 2011

In Singapore, Political Campaigning Goes Viral

By SETH MYDANS

SINGAPORE — This tightly controlled city-state has taken a step into the unknown in advance of its parliamentary elections on Saturday, loosening its grip on political discourse in the unruly world of the Internet, where Facebook, Twitter and other social media have amplified a clamor of voices and points of view.

In a nation where government opponents are often sued over defamation and where carefully vetted public speech has been permitted only in a little park called Speakers’ Corner (which has been shut down during the campaign), experts say the new opening, if only in the virtual world, appears to be a redefinition of what are known here as “out-of-bounds markers.”

Following recent changes to the Constitution and election laws, Internet election advertising is now permitted throughout cyberspace — on podcasts, videocasts, blogs, instant messaging, photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, social networking sites and electronic media applications like those found on mobile phones.

For the first time, election campaign recordings can be posted as long as they are not “dramatized” or published “out of context.” Video taken at an election rally can be uploaded onto the Web without being submitted to the Board of Film Censors.

“Social media have lowered the barriers of entry into political discourse everywhere,” said Mark Cenite, an assistant professor of communication and information at Nanyang Technological University. “But that’s particularly significant in Singapore because here the barriers to entry into political discourse and the accompanying risks have been so high.”

Despite the changes to Internet regulations, demonstrations and public speech still require permits in Singapore. Political speech is restricted to candidates. Opposition politicians and news media face the possibility of defamation suits. The mainstream news media are tightly controlled and have not acted as a check on the government, experts say.

During the last parliamentary campaign, in 2006, a small number of current events blogs were the main forum for online citizen participation. Political speech was technically illegal and demanded a greater level of risk and commitment.

“Now that the barriers to entry to political dialogue have fallen, the effect has been electric,” Mr. Cenite said. “Government critics are able to easily identify and support one another without making a headlong commitment to politics and take the accompanying risks.”

All of this has contributed to an intense campaign in which opposition parties — which now hold just 2 of 84 elected seats — are drawing bigger crowds to rallies, fielding more candidates and, in contrast to the past, contesting all but one constituency. In the last election, opposition parties contested just half the constituencies.

Analysts say it is impossible to know whether this enthusiasm will translate into votes against the People’s Action Party, or P.A.P., which has governed Singapore since 1959.

But the campaign itself has been transformed as social media give smaller, poorer parties a wider audience, bringing greater inclusiveness and competitiveness to political debate.

Rather than trying to suppress online political organizing, as China and Vietnam have done, Singapore is taking a gamble on making it part of the legal campaign system.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” said Kin Mun Lee, known on his blog as Mr. Brown, who said he skirted the law in the last campaign by avoiding explicitly political comments. “Before, it was a very limited kind of provision for online speech. Definitely they had to change the rules because of the proliferation and availability of options.”

Opposition Web sites and Twitter accounts are being used to urge people to attend election rallies. They also send out streams of comments from rallies, hugely increasing their audience. The site Gothere Maps plots out the locations of rallies on a map.

The site Party Time aggregates conversations about the elections and graphically represents who is getting the most buzz online.

Facebook is estimated to have up to three million members in Singapore, whose population is more than five million. All seven competing parties have their own sites, as do many of the candidates.

By one estimate, there are 900,000 local users of Twitter.

Online coverage has pushed the main pro-government newspaper, The Straits Times, to publish fuller and not always critical news and photographs of opposition campaigns, said Alex Au, a prominent blogger.

“In the present era, with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, the old editorial policy is no longer viable,” he said on his blog. “If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.”

The Straits Times has dedicated a portal on its Web site to extensive electronic election coverage, and it is now aggregating online comments from the social media on a page it calls Buzz, which gives a flavor of some of the newly energized online commentary:

“The opposition can make ferocious speeches, but can they deliver?”

“Is it true that civil servants will be ostracized if they vote for the opposition?”

“If the opposition is sincere in serving the people, it would have been on the ground in the last 4 years, not starting their engines only when the whistle is blown.”

“Why must we be so dogmatic about democracy and stability being mutually exclusive?”

Economist: Peggy Sue got old

Media's ageing audiences

Peggy Sue got old

Viewers, listeners and readers are ageing fast. Oddly, media companies don’t regard that as a catastrophe

Apr 7th 2011 | from the print edition

A FEW years ago Universal Music Group spied a gap in the market. How about a CD for people who grew up in the 1950s and wanted to revisit the pop music of their youth? The label pulled together songs by British and American artists, some well-known (Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison), others largely forgotten. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” was released in time for Christmas 2007.

That gap turned out to contain a seam of gold. “Dreamboats and Petticoats” has sold enough copies to be certified as double platinum. It has inspired a West End musical and three follow-up albums, with another due in November. In total the series has sold 2.3m copies, mostly in Britain—a country where fewer than 120m albums were shifted last year. And virtually everybody who bought the album forked over money for a compact disc. “They don’t download, and they don’t want to download,” says Brian Berg of Universal.

“They” are consumers in late middle-age or beyond, who increasingly drive the music market. In Britain people aged 60 or over spent more on pop-music albums in 2009 than did teenagers or people in their 20s, according to the BPI, a trade group. Sony Music’s biggest-selling album worldwide last year was “The Gift”, by Susan Boyle, a 50-year-old Scot whose appeal derives in part from her lack of youth. And what has happened to music has also happened to other forms of entertainment.

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

Grey anatomy

In America the audiences of all four big English-language broadcast networks are looking middle-aged. Since 2003 the median age of a prime-time CBS viewer has increased by three years, according to Nielsen, a research firm. Viewers of ABC and NBC are five years older; Fox’s, seven and a half. In that time the median age in America has probably risen by a year and a bit. Some shows are greying faster than the networks that carry them, in part because they have fan bases that are ageing naturally. The audience that tunes in for the desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane is approaching 50 (see chart 1).

Indeed, every network except Fox had a median age of 50 or over last year. That is significant because advertisers tend to be most interested in how a show rates among people aged between 18 and 49. As Alan Wurtzel, head of research at NBC, puts it, a growing proportion of viewers are becoming almost invisible to marketers—“forgotten but not gone”.

If broadcast television is growing old gracefully (helped by Botox injections), newspapers are racing towards senescence. Between 2002 and 2010 the proportion of American papers’ regular readers who were aged 55 or more rose from 37% to 46% (see chart 2). Fully 43% of readers of Britain’s Daily Telegraph and Daily Express are at least 65 years old, according to the National Readership Survey. Such papers are littered with advertisements for comfortable shoes, cruises and stairlifts.

The reason why newspaper readers are ageing so quickly is simple: the young are abandoning print faster than everyone else. They may pick up free papers to read on public transport, but when reception is good they tend to plump for mobile phones and the internet. The Pew Research Centre, an American think-tank, finds that 65% of 18- to 29-year-olds describe the internet as their primary or secondary source of news. Only 14% of people aged 65 or over say the same.

In music, too, the young have drifted to illegal file-sharing and, more recently, to free streaming services such as Spotify. By and large, the middle-aged and old have not. David Munns, who manages Bon Jovi, a rock band that was formed in the early 1980s and is still going strong, notes that older fans have more money and more scruples. They also regard illegal downloading as “too much work”, he says. Bon Jovi’s “Greatest Hits” was the 15th-biggest-selling album in the world last year.

As the young cut back on conventional media, their elders consume more of it. In Spain 54.2% of people aged 55 to 64 routinely listened to the radio last year—up from 46.6% in 2000. As a result, the Spanish radio audience has greyed even as overall listening has risen. Japanese baby-boomers carry on buying music at an age by which earlier generations had largely stopped. Singers who appeal to the middle-aged and old, such as Hideaki Tokunaga and Junko Akimoto, rule the charts.

The same is true of television. British 55- to 64-year-olds spent an average of five hours and ten minutes a day watching television last year—50 minutes more than in 2001. The middle-aged and old now have free digital channels dedicated to their tastes, such as ITV3, home of wrinkly detective dramas, and the highbrow BBC Four. They have seized on easy-to-use gadgets like digital video recorders, which increase their enjoyment of television.

The young are not watching less TV. But some of their viewing is now done through computer screens. And much of it is of unconventional channels. Instead of the evening news, American 20-somethings watch “The Colbert Report”, a spoof news show. MTV has moved beyond music videos into reality shows, and is enjoying its best ratings in years. Media outfits that appeal to immigrants and their children often have youthful audiences. Univision, a Spanish-language broadcast network, boasts a median age of 37.

Now they’re 64

Greying audiences are causing discomfort among media executives. But not as much discomfort as you might expect, given the industry’s long preoccupation with youth. The ageing of the large baby-boom generation means there are a lot of potential customers in their 50s and 60s. Furthermore, the executives argue, people of this age are worth much more than in the past.

The practice of measuring television audiences by the number of 18- to 49-year-olds they contain is simply an historical anachronism, argues Mr Wurtzel of NBC. David Poltrack, his counterpart at CBS, agrees. It used to be assumed, he says, that older people had already worked out which brands they liked and could not be persuaded to try new things. But the middle-aged have taken to toys such as e-readers and iPads. Mr Poltrack has devised an alternative way of classifying viewers that emphasises tastes and attitudes to media (for example as “sports enthusiasts” or “surfers and streamers”) rather than age.

It is not surprising that ageing television networks should argue that the old are becoming more valuable. But the West’s economic slump has given force to their claims by sapping the earning power of the young. In March the unemployment rate among Americans aged 20 to 24 was 15%. For 16- to 17-year-olds it was 29%.

Lack of work has combined with tighter lending standards to squeeze young people’s buying power. Between 2007 and 2009 average spending on new cars and trucks by Americans under 25 fell by half, according to the Consumer Expenditure Survey. It fell by 31% among people aged between 25 and 34. By contrast, expenditure by those over 65 was flat, and the over-75s actually spent more, on average. The young also spent less on audio-visual equipment and services—that is, television sets and cable TV—while the old shelled out more. This helps to explain why advertising money has flooded back to the ageing broadcast networks since the recession. Advertisers are not so in thrall to the cult of youth that they are prepared to overlook such a shift.

Desperate, but not for younger viewers

Another reason why media companies are not too worried about the ageing of their audiences has to do with a change in business models. A firm that depends on advertising needs to attract valuable consumers. A firm that relies on subscriptions, by contrast, cares only whether its consumers pay their monthly bills. And perhaps the strongest trend in media in the past few years—stronger even than ageing—is the growing reliance on subscription as a means of paying for content.

BSkyB, Discovery Communications, ESPN, Netflix: many of the media industry’s best-performing companies and hottest stocks of recent years rely on subscriptions. The recession may have slashed advertising and discretionary spending. But most people carried on paying the bills for entertainment. As a result, subscription-based businesses were able to sustain spending on content. So clear are the advantages of these businesses that even firms that have habitually relied on advertising are moving to copy them.

As newspaper advertising has declined, publishers have raised the prices of subscriptions and single copies. Last year 41.3% of the New York Times’s newspaper revenues came from subscriptions—up from 28.8% in 2007. Similarly, broadcast networks are battling for “retransmission fees” (essentially a cut of subscriptions) from cable and satellite distributors. As the broadcasters become less dependent on advertising, sheer numbers will come to matter more than demography.

The clearest sign of this shift is the appearance of online paywalls. Last month paywalls went up around the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. The websites of Britain’s Times and News of the World began to restrict access to subscribers last year. Hulu, an American website that carries broadcast TV programmes, and Spotify, a European music-streaming service, are both pushing subscriptions.

One good reason for media firms to erect paywalls is that new media are beginning to age, too. The proportion of people aged 65-plus who get most of their news from the internet may be only 14%—but in 2006 it was a mere 2%. Online video streaming began as a young person’s hobby but has increasingly become mainstream. “Often it’s the young who adopt a technology, but others follow them,” explains Patricia McDonough, a television analyst at Nielsen.

With a few exceptions, media firms have found it hard to make money online. Consumers seem to tolerate fewer ads, and rates are low. When digital media were the province of youth, this did not matter much: media firms could argue that they were at least promoting their brands to young people, while deterring them from piracy. But let the middle-aged and the old, too, discover they can have entertainment for nothing? That would not do.

from the print edition | Briefings2

NY Times: Japanese Universities Draw ForeignStudents with Manga

December 26, 2010

Japanese Universities Draw Foreign Students With Manga

By MIKI TANIKAWA

TOKYO — When Zack Wood produces his illustrated stories online, his Japanese classmates say they look like American comics while his American friends say they look decidedly like manga, the popular form of comics that originated in Japan.

That is precisely the blend Mr. Wood, who grew up in the United States and is now studying at Kyoto Seika University’s manga program, is angling for.

Mr. Wood, a 25-year-old graduate of Stanford University in California, and students like him have gravitated toward the modern Japanese arts, feeling they may help them advance their careers in animation, design, computer graphics and the business of promoting them.

And as Japanese universities work harder to attract students to fill their classrooms while the country’s birth rate declines, more are offering degrees in manga and animation.

“I like it here because you get totally immersed in the skill training” of manga and animation, Mr. Wood said. “It has turned out to be a lot of fun.”

Once they are armed with unique technical and industry knowledge, many international students are eager to gain work experience here upon graduation before heading back home.

Li Lin Lin, 28, a student from northeastern China who attends Digital Hollywood University, a school in Tokyo that specializes in animation and video games, said that upon finishing her degree, it would probably be “easy” to find a job in the animation field in China. The real trophy, she said, was getting job experience in the country of manga. Ms. Li is especially interested in working for a Japanese animation studio.

“I think you can do almost anything back home once you get a degree and animation working experiences in Japan,” said Ms. Li, emerging from her class on digital animation coloring one Saturday afternoon.

Hidenori Ohyama, senior director of corporate strategy at Toei Animation, said it was possible that international students could end up at Japanese companies like his. “If they apply, take our tests and pass, they will become employees just like anyone else,” he said.

His company, a leading animation company that has produced “Dragonball” and “Slam Dunk” films, has Romanian and Korean producers, among other foreign citizens, Mr. Ohyama said.

None of the animation-themed Japanese university programs seem to be on the international radar yet, said Kison Chang, a training manager at Imagi Studios, an international animation production studio based in Hong Kong.

But he said students studying in Japan who ended up with solid work experiences at Japanese studios could be prime candidates for international recruitment.

“They would certainly be a great benefit to our professional line,” he said. “They might bring in some kind of spirit which we may not know, or something we didn’t realize that would be a benefit to us,” he said.

Such individuals are not yet on his teams, nor at any of his rivals, he said.

Another possible reason that the programs have not received international attention is that the language of instruction is Japanese.

Tomoyuki Sugiyama, president of Digital Hollywood University, conceded that language might be a serious barrier, especially for Western students.

“If we had an English-based program at the graduate level, for example, we would be inundated with Western students almost instantly,” he said.

Nevertheless, at Kyoto Seika University, which established the country’s first manga program, the number of foreign students in it has risen to 57 currently out of a total of 800 students in the program from just 19 in 2000.

Since it was founded in 2005, Digital Hollywood University has seen its international students grow to 84 this year, roughly 20 percent of its student body, from just one when the school began.

“I want to see it grow to 50 percent of the entire students in the very near future,” Mr. Sugiyama said.

In the past 10 years, more than a dozen university departments and programs have been created to offer a degree or a cluster of courses meant as a concentration in manga, animation and video games, and a similar number of vocational schools offer training in the art.

At Digital Hollywood, with campus buildings spread across the Akihabara area in Tokyo, the nation’s capital for otaku, or nerds, students from Korea, China, Malaysia, Taiwan and other Asian countries, who constitute the bulk of the international student body, mingle with Japanese students.

The curriculum at the schools usually includes courses on drawing, coloring, and motion picture production, as well as film directing, writing plays and the study of copyright laws.

In recent years, universities in China and Korea have also begun offering manga and animation programs, drawing many students locally. But Keiko Takemiya, dean of the manga program at Kyoto Seika University and a famed manga artist, said there were differences.

“What they teach in Korea is mostly cartoons like you see in the U.S.,” she said. “They don’t quite teach the ‘story manga.”’

Story manga is known for its feature lengths and distinct story lines, as compared with the one-liner cartoons with gags and jokes.

Ms. Takemiya said that manga’s secret was in its limitless boundaries in form and content, and that the sheer number and the kind of manga available in Japan far exceed those in other countries.

And that includes adult-themed manga/animation that may or may not include sexually explicit content that many other countries are staying away from.

“What they teach in China is animation meant for children,” said Mr. Sugiyama of Digital Hollywood. “But what we teach is geared towards both children and adults.”

A professor at Kyoto Seika University, Jacqueline Berndt, one of the few non-Japanese faculty members in the field, said language and culture were an obstacle to wider acceptance of the programs.

In addition, she said, the manga and animation programs might not have yet been fully organized into a coherent body of knowledge and theories that scholars from other countries can understand and appreciate.

One reason the art has never been compiled into a structured body of knowledge: In a country where public education has been strictly administered, manga and animation have thrived in a creative way precisely because they operated outside the purview of the system, free from any supervision from the authorities.

“Manga flourished as a counterculture to the establishment academia,” Ms. Takemiya said. “There was actually a resistance to the idea of organizing the art into an academic program” in the industry.

Most Japanese scholars and teachers acknowledge that the body of knowledge they teach is still in the process of being organized into a system.

“We put together and offer classes that we believe will be of use to people who are going into the trade, but if we wait till manga and animation studies are fully structured and organized academically, that’s too late,” Mr. Sugiyama said. “In a world where creative content is digitalizing and globalizing, we need to train young people in these arts now.”

FT: Listening to customers can be bad business

Listening to customers can be bad business

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: October 17 2010 15:51 | Last updated: October 17 2010 15:51

Last week, for the first time ever, the mob on Twitter and Facebook forced the management of a big company into defeat. This victory of democracy over autocracy was scored over something people feel strongly about: whether three letters belong inside or outside a box.

For the past 20 years, the letters G-A-P have resided in a dark blue square, but two weeks ago the management of the clothing company announced that the letters had escaped and that a smaller blue square would henceforth sit above the P. All hell then broke loose. Thousands of people protested online and, a week later, Gap backed down. The big box was going to stay.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: We need CEOs who speak out - Oct-10

Lucy Kellaway: Posing and flattery beat an MBA - Oct-03

Lucy Kellaway: Jobs was clear, tetchy and right - Sep-26

Lucy Kellaway: Words to describe the glory of Apple - Sep-19

Lucy Kellaway: CEOs cry all the way to the bank - Sep-12

Lucy Kellaway: Personal life invasion - Aug-29

The new Gap logo was not obviously an improvement on the old one. And the sight of management listening to customers and accepting humiliation in order to satisfy them seemed like a good thing.

Yet what happened was not really good at all. It isn’t progress when a company panics and surrenders when faced by an armchair army of protesters. It is feeble.

Compare Gap’s experience to that of PwC, which changed its logo two weeks earlier. The new PwC look is an even uglier version of the new Gap effort, with the letters in italicised lower case, and not one, but a whole jumble, of little boxes scattered over the C. This logo was launched old-style, with corporate fanfare and a statement of customary idiocy from senior management, followed by customary sniping from journalists and from a couple of tweeters (people don’t care as much about accountants as about jeans) and that was that.

“We think our new brand expression visually distinguishes PwC in the same way that the quality and expertise of our people differentiates the experience of working with PwC,” said the firm’s chairman. Which is, of course, absolute, total tosh. Three little letters and some squares cannot say anything about quality or expertise at all.

But then logos are a fluffy subject; I have never heard anyone say anything that wasn’t daft about the thinking behind any change. This is because there never is any thinking, save the idea that it’s time to do something different.

PwC’s management evidently judged that time had come, and knows that any fuss will quickly die down. One day people may even become fond of the nasty new look – to the extent to which it is possible to be fond of the logo of an accountancy firm, that is.

Now back to Gap.

Once Marka Hansen, the company’s president for North America, got wind of the scale of the protest, she wrote a piece on The Huffington Post defending the “contemporary and current” new logo. Her post is a marvel for students of corporate language, with its “living and breathing”, its “alignings”, and its “journeys”. But mainly it is remarkable for its disingenuousness. Ms Hansen was surely feeling shock and awe at how badly her new logo had gone down, but claimed to be delighted that everyone felt so “passionate” about it.

The chummy message that she simultaneously posted on the company’s Facebook page was even more frightening for its attempt to get down with the kidz and talk the right chirpy language through gritted teeth: “Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.”

But even this didn’t work. The mob continued to show its passion by saying it hated the new design and, last Monday, she gave up.

This time the tone was more like when Princess Diana had died. Ms Hansen spoke of the “outpouring of passion from customers” on the company’s old logo and solemnly announced that the letters would stay in the box after all.

She should not have capitulated. By letting tweeters see the whites of her eyes, she has done other companies a disservice. Now that the mob has got its way on this, it is going to be harder for other companies to insist on their management’s right to manage.

Listening to customers is one thing, when they are voting with their wallets. But company logos should not be designed democratically on Twitter. If managers allow themselves to be frightened of the tweeting mob, they will become emasculated, change will be even harder than it ever was, and the status quo will always prevail.

[email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Many sides of porn

Life!

Home > Life! > Life Arts > Story

Oct 21, 2010

Many sides of porn

There is food porn, nature porn, torture porn, poverty porn and even divorce porn

By yong shu hoong, culture vulture

 

Porn is a strange four-letter word.

Beyond a salacious connotation that's more commonly known, the word boasts many creative tie-ups - from food porn and nature porn, to any instance where we witness an unhealthy indulgence in a particular subject.

So, what's food porn? An example would be how Singaporeans have this curious habit of snapping photographs of their food before digging in.

Some of my friends diligently post on their Facebook pages appetite-arousing photos of dishes they've cooked at home or sampled in acclaimed restaurants.

I also recall how a former colleague once bought me lunch at a posh eatery and, as each course arrived, promptly whipped out his SLR camera to take close-up shots of the artfully arranged cuisine from every possible angle.

The same voyeuristic fervour can be extended to the best that nature has to offer, in the form of 'nature porn' - which, as a friend kindly reminded, is a much better phrase to use than the more easily misinterpreted 'animal porn'.

Some may associate it with lingering images of wildlife on the National Geographic Channel or nature-fixated documentary films such as Earth (2007) and Oceans (2009). And no, you don't necessarily need to watch animals or insects copulate for nature to become porn.

Then there is 'torture porn', a phrase coined by smart-alecky critics to describe a trend in which violent slasher flicks, such as James Wan's Saw (2004) and Eli Roth's Hostel (2005), pile on gratuitous images of people having their assorted body parts severed.

Both Saw and Hostel were popular enough to spawn sequels.

When Slumdog Millionaire (2008) became a hit and subsequently won the Oscar for Best Picture, critics were quick to invoke the term, 'poverty porn'.

But Vikas Swarup, author of the novel which director Danny Boyle based his film on, was quoted in an interview saying that the film, like his book, 'neither trivialises nor degrades poverty'.

'I just don't buy this concept of poverty porn,' he added, with regards to his tale of a former street kid from a Mumbai slum taking part in a TV gameshow. 'Who likes to see poverty and who gets pleasure out of seeing poverty?'

Just when I thought critics couldn't get more creative than 'poverty porn', I was tickled to find Julia Roberts' recent film, Eat Pray Love, labelled as 'divorce porn' in a New York Times article.

Based on the 2006 memoir of American author Elizabeth Gilbert - described in the same article as the 'Hugh Hefner of divorce porn' - the film has Roberts playing a divorced woman who goes on a year-long journey of self-discovery across Italy, India and Indonesia.

With a New York Post review describing the book as 'narcissistic New Age reading' and 'the worst in Western fetishisation of Eastern thought and culture', it's perhaps no surprise that the film didn't succeed in elevating the story above its perceived indulgence.

At this point, I decided to take a break from writing this column and examine the 128-page report that the government-appointed Censorship Review Committee released last month.

The word 'pornography' appears many times throughout the report.

I'm just glad that the committee has chosen to restrict the definition to that of the sexual kind - otherwise, no online filtering service in the world would be able to block out all the different types of porn that we've discussed or missed out on.

To complicate matters, just as art can easily degenerate into pornographic excesses, porn has also made its crossover into art.

If one wants to be prudish about it, wouldn't Giambologna's sculpture of The Rape Of The Sabine Women - along with many old masters and statues in world-class museums - be considered explicit and provocative?

French film-maker Catherine Breillat's Romance is an arthouse film which contains explicit sexual acts and even features porn actor Rocco Siffredi in its cast.

Shown in mainstream cinemas in Europe, the 1999 film is credited for sparking a trend of arthouse films featuring unsimulated sex.

For example, The Brown Bunny (2003) is notorious for its scenes of real sex between writer-director-actor Vincent Gallo and actress Chloe Sevigny.

Another film, 9 Songs, was described by The Guardian newspaper as the most sexually explicit mainstream film at the time of its release, due to graphic unsimulated sexual scenes between the leads, Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the 2004 British film resulted in much debate over whether the sex scenes add anything to its artistic merit or are, in fact, pornography.

But just when I was about to decry all forms of voyeuristic debauchery and proclaim how dwelling excessively on a theme will yield cliched results, I found myself enraptured by Italian writer-director Luca Guadagnino's haunting and visually arresting masterpiece, I Am Love.

Filled with all kinds of 'porn' - nature porn (close-ups of insects and flowers), food porn (Italian dishes on proud display) and fashion porn (actress Tilda Swinton and her co-stars wear Jil Sander and Fendi in the film), with a little sex thrown in for good measure - it turned out to be one of the best films I've seen this year.

Famed critic Roger Ebert calls it 'an amazing film' that's 'deep, rich, human'.

I call it an amazing example of how art continues to astound us - and how sometimes less can be more while at other times, less is simply not enough.

[email protected]

Yong Shu Hoong is a poet, freelance writer and Singapore Literature Prize winner.

Fast Company: How TED Connects the Idea Hungry Elite

September 1, 2010

How TED Connects the Idea-Hungry Elite

By Anya Kamenetz

Inside the World's MOST EXCLUSIVE (and Most Accessible) CLUB with SPECIAL GUESTS including

Elizabeth Gilbert • Richard Branson • Jamie Oliver • Malcolm Gladwell • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala • Barry Schwartz • Ken Robinson • Sarah Silverman • Bill Clinton • David Byrne • Bill Gates • Craig VenterJill • Bolte Taylor • Dave Eggers • Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy • Sunitha Krishnan • Tony Robbins • Julia Sweeney • Isabel Allende • E.O. Wilson • and the chief himself, Chris Anderson!

The other day, I got an email from a new friend. The subject line read "Are you a TED talk person?"
It linked to an 18-minute video of MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely talking about the bugs in our moral codes. Other friends have sent me videos of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert on the spiritual dimension of creativity; rocker David Byrne on how venue architecture affects musical expression; and UC Berkeley professor Robert Full's insights into how geckos' feet stick to a wall.

Each of these emails is like a membership card into the club of "TED talk people." I love being a member of this club. The videos give my discovery-seeking brain a little hit of dopamine in the middle of the workday. But just as important, each one I see or recommend makes me part of a group of millions of folks around the world who have checked out these videos. What links us is our desire to learn; TEDsters feel part of a curious, engaged, enlightened, and tech-savvy tribe.

These two things -- great ideas and the human connections they create -- make TED a unique phenomenon. Other conferences, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos and D: AllThingsDigital in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, have similar elite A-list rosters. But TED, which takes place annually in Long Beach, California, is the only one that fully exploits the power of what you might call, with apologies to Cisco, the human network. In the nine years since publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson bought TED, it has grown way beyond a mere conference. By combining the principles of "radical openness" and of "leveraging the power of ideas to change the world," TED is in the process of creating something brand new. I would go so far as to argue that it's creating a new Harvard -- the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.

Of course TED doesn't look like a regular Ivy League college. It doesn't have any buildings; it doesn't grant degrees. It doesn't have singing groups or secret societies, and as far as I know it hasn't inspired any strange drinking games.

Still, if you were starting a top university today, what would it look like? You would start by gathering the very best minds from around the world, from every discipline. Since we're living in an age of abundant, not scarce, information, you'd curate the lectures carefully, with a focus on the new and original, rather than offer a course on every possible topic. You'd create a sustainable economic model by focusing on technological rather than physical infrastructure, and by getting people of means to pay for a specialized experience. You'd also construct a robust network so people could access resources whenever and from wherever they like, and you'd give them the tools to collaborate beyond the lecture hall. Why not fulfill the university's millennium-old mission by sharing ideas as freely and as widely as possible?

If you did all that, well, you'd have TED.

Its "faculty": A roster of speakers that runs from Bill Clinton to J.J. Abrams, from Desmond Tutu to Isabel Allende -- anyone who's driving change across the globe. Their topics range from biophysics to graphic design, covering all that Roman playwright Terentius might have had in mind when he said, "Nothing human is alien to me." The economic model? With attendance fees, advertising, and corporate sponsorships, TED ran an operating surplus of more than $2 million last year, which was reinvested into expanding its reach.

That's because unlike fearful old-school colleges, TED is finding that the more open it is, the more it becomes the global education brand of the 21st century. The runaway success of the TED talk videos, Chris Anderson tells me, persuaded him "to completely rethink what TED was, from a conference to a platform for ideas worth spreading." When you frame your mission in those terms, transformation follows. TED's Open Translation Project has in the past year made its videos truly accessible to a global audience; 3,100 community volunteers have translated the videos into more than 77 languages, adding a potential audience of 2.2 billion people. Anderson has gone even more radical, doing something that few universities would ever consider: He has started licensing the TED name and video content to anyone who wants them -- for free. The result: In just the first year, with comparatively little input from the mothership, TEDsters from around the world have put on 615 independent conferences, called TEDx, in locations from Kiberi, Nigeria, to Amsterdam. "We're exploring TED as a global classroom," Anderson tells me. "It's very much part of what we're dreaming of."

[video_twistage 1]

The story of TED goes back to 1984, when Richard Saul Wurman -- everyone calls him Ricky -- started the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference. As the former chair of the American Institute of Architects, Wurman had helmed the Aspen international design conference. But with TED, he says, "I just wanted to throw the world's best dinner party."

Wurman wrote the elegant, distinctive design rules that have been key to TED's success: A single track of programming ("They think people want choice, but the people talking at the break don't have a common memory and all feel that they went to the wrong session"); no Q&A ("Out of the first 20 questions you get, 19 are either speeches or bad questions"); and, most famously, an 18-minute-talk length. Wurman is Jewish, and 18 is a significant number in Judaism, representing the word chai, or life. But don't bring that up with him. "It's become mystical -- it's not fucking mystical," he says. "Fifteen minutes would be trivial, too short. If you said 20, people would talk for 25; 19 seems perverse, 17 is a prime number, so I made it 18."

Wurman, who's a cross between Ricky Jay and P.T. Barnum, turned TED into a three-ring circus of ideas. (One year, in fact, a Barnum descendant handed out red noses to attendees.) "I had the stage decorated with Norman Lear's copy of the Declaration of Independence valued at $25 million here; a couple million dollars' worth of Chihuly glass there; a cast of the head of Sue, the big dinosaur from the Field Museum, in Chicago," he remembers. "I had animal acts with live snakes and cheetahs. I kissed a brown bear that was as tall as I was. I had magicians and I had jugglers and I also had Nobel Prize winners and Bill Gates and Billy Graham and the Google guys when they were just two kids from Stanford -- everybody you could think of."

With that kind of mix, speakers (who have never been paid, but don't have to fork over the $6,000 admission fee) would hang around for the entire week, mingling with celebrities, writers, moguls, and their moms in a marathon bull session. These days, TED's atmosphere is more Sundance than circus, but the bull session still thrives. And that's something, sadly, that you won't find on a conventional college campus. "I teach really smart kids," says Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz, whose TED talk on the paradox of choice was based on his best-selling book, "but mostly I'm teaching them. Maybe once or twice a year, some particularly sophisticated, talented, imaginative kid will come up with something I haven't already thought of." The same holds true, he says, of his fellow faculty. "The problem is I've been in this place for a long time and after awhile you develop this lazy attitude that you no longer have anything to learn from your colleagues. You withdraw into your own cocoon. Well, people who come to TED are open to being changed by their interactions and conversations. They're in an environment where they're going to learn something new every five minutes. You could create something like that on a college campus, but generally that doesn't happen."

It's "networking extraordinaire -- just a total bonanza," says Cyndi Stivers, editor of Entertainment Weekly's EW.com [1]. And out of that networking comes action. Wired magazine was born there. An Inconvenient Truth got a big push at the conference. Researchers and not-for-profits find sponsors; writers and scholars find agents and publishers; Web geeks find a path out of obscurity. Esra'a Al Shafei is a 23-year-old from Bahrain who runs an online hub for journalism and free expression called MideastYouth.com [2]. In 2009, she was made a TED Fellow at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. "TED gives you a sense of credibility," she says. "I've been running Mideast Youth for four years, but before the fellowship, nobody talked about it." TED connections have led her to sources of technical and moral support that helped her launch CrowdVoice, which tracks voices of protest around the world.

In 2007, biologist E.O. Wilson won TED's annual prize, a $100,000 grant intended to make a world-changing wish expressed from the TED stage come true. Wilson and his team are creating an open biodiversity database called the Encyclopedia of Life. But if you ask them, their TED connections have been even more important than TED's money. Microsoft and Adobe loaned programming expertise, and the high-profile ad agency Razorfish made an award-winning four-minute video of the project. "We're constantly getting messages from people who have heard about us from TED," says Bob Corrigan, the project's acting deputy director, "and their energy has made real contributions."

This is exactly what Anderson hoped for when he bought TED in 2001. "I showed up there in 1998 for the first time," he tells me, "and basically fell completely in love with the conference, the people attending, their willingness to think big, crazy thoughts. From my point of view, it felt like something you could devote your life to."

Like TED, Anderson himself is a blend of technology, shiny entrepreneurialism, and do-good zeal. As the son of a missionary doctor, he grew up in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, and as an adult he sold two tech-related publishing companies. After purchasing TED, he changed its status from for-profit to not-for-profit, and went about trying, in Wurman's words, "to save the world." According to Bruno Giussani, a former journalist who now directs TEDGlobal, "Chris believes in the fact that when you put smart people together into a room, they tend to engage, and he wants to use that to make a contribution toward a better world."

The most important thing Chris did," says EW.com's Stivers, "was take this inward-looking, exclusive dinner party, and have it face outward." The TED videos best manifest this about-face, yet they're an idea that almost didn't happen. June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, says, "Friends of mine thought this was professional suicide. It was not at all obvious that there was an audience for taped lectures online."

Think of online video and what's the first thing that comes to mind? Piano-playing cats? Lady Gaga? Maybe Paris Hilton? The instant popularity of TED talks might say something more promising about both our collective consciousness and our collective attention span. Cohen tells me, "When we launched, the example I used to help size the opportunity was a Malcolm Gladwell podcast that had been downloaded 40,000 times. Actually, the talks were watched 10.5 million times in the first year." People emailed Cohen from all over the world, saying that they had shared a video with their entire address book, or that they'd watched a video with tears running down their face. That passion reset TED's mission. "Within three months, we relaunched ted.com [3] and realigned the entire organization around this mission of spreading ideas," says Cohen.

It was a risk. Would lecturers who typically pull down five-figure fees agree to sign release forms and give their speeches away online? Would attendees grumble about sharing the secret sauce? "Releasing all the content to the world for free had the potential to capsize our business model," Cohen says. Not so. TED first put the talks online in 2006. "That year," she says, "we increased the fee for the conference by 50%, and sold out in one week with a 1,000-person waiting list."

If you visit ted.com today, you'll find more than 700 talks. The most popular clock 5 million or 6 million views apiece, and are backed by advertising from sponsors such as IBM. "It is absolutely amazing," says Nicholas Negroponte, who spoke at the first dozen TEDs. "I met a man in South Africa recently who told me that his wife is angry because he is spending all his time with a 'mistress' " -- that is, the TED talks.

TED talks appeal to some needs a little further up Maslow's hierarchy than Paris Hilton's video, but they're not steamed broccoli. "Most staged presentations," as Cohen says, "are filmed like a high-school musical." TED uses multiple cameras, ready to catch a close-up when Bill Gates decides to unleash mosquitoes on the crowd to demonstrate a point about malaria. It edits out throat clearing, aiming to grab the viewers' attention in the first 30 seconds. Its techies are expert in what Cohen calls the "black art" of encoding video in various formats -- an embeddable player, streaming video, YouTube, podcast.

One thing that it does have in common with the Hilton video is that when a TED talk goes viral, it changes the star's life. Just ask Jill Bolte Taylor, whose video about her spiritual awakening following a stroke went online in 2008. "My name was placed on Time's Most Influential list for 2008," she says. "Oprah saw the video and interviewed me immediately for her Webcast Soul Series. More than a dozen book publishers saw the video and wanted to republish my self-published book, My Stroke of Insight. It was a remarkable six weeks."

Kevin Kelly, journalist, visionary, Wired brain truster, and TED veteran, puts it best: "This is a new genre of communication. Now, just like people running to The New Yorker with short stories, there's this global competition to do the perfect 18-minute TED talk."

Sure, these talks have their limits as an educational medium. An 18-minute presentation, no matter how expert, can't accommodate anything overly theoretical or technical -- the format is more congenial to Freakonomics than economics. Sometimes the earnestness threatens to overflow, while trendy technophiles and bullish business folk are often too slick. And there's a more fundamental problem with the model: In the age of free, members of TED's virtual faculty don't get rewarded directly for their contributions. They must have a foundation, a consulting business, a book, or a job at a traditional university -- something else to do that ugly work of monetizing their ideas, even as the videos bring TED money from sponsorships.

Nevertheless, the videos are finding their way into classrooms across the world. After posting on Twitter, I heard from educators using them to teach 10th graders at a private school in Arlington, Virginia; MBA students at Indiana University; and even a freshman seminar built entirely around TED talks at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia. And thanks to volunteers like Anour Dafa-Alla, an Arabic-speaking Sudanese PhD student who lives in Seoul, the Open Translation movement has subtitled 10,000 videos in just one year, bringing them into global classrooms too. This year, 61% of ted.com traffic is from outside the U.S., up from 49% in 2009.

Let's stop to review. With the best minds, an experiential aspect that doesn't burden the venture with ridiculous overhead, a business model that works, a brand name that creates great opportunities for alumni, and a fantastic way of disseminating this learning to the world, TED seems pretty far along in creating a 21st-century education model that's open, yet high in prestige. So what's next? And what's still missing?

"When we put the talks online for free," says licensing director Lara Stein, "the brand was increasing in visibility. The concept was, how can we leverage the power of that and allow people to create something with it?" Stein, previously at Microsoft, championed the idea of allowing the community to create spin-off conferences called TEDx. She established a short-and-sweet set of guidelines designed to affirm the balance TED has always sought between intellectual freedom and quality control. TEDx licenses are free. Events can't be longer than a day. At least 25% of the content must be existing TED talk videos. Local speakers must be recorded, with the videos released to ted.com and also to a YouTube channel. If more than 100 people are to attend, one of the organizers must have attended TED proper and "experienced the TED DNA," as Stein says. Live by those guidelines and you too can set up a TEDx event.

Anderson told me that the response has been overwhelming. "We thought we might get a few dozen and that they'd be small. Instead, we're getting 20 every week, and the ambition is breathtaking. Jeff Bezos was knocked out by [one]. He was saying it's an astonishing phenomenon. It's not exactly a franchise -- there's really no direct obvious precedent." The TEDx events have been on all kinds of themes in all kinds of places, from Sydney and Tel Aviv to the Great Wall, a village in Rajasthan, an American school for the deaf, and a shantytown in Nigeria. Last spring, people stranded in London because of the ash cloud created by Eyjafjallajökull organized a TEDx Volcano in 24 hours, and TEDx Oil Spill took place in Washington, D.C., in response to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

I gave a talk at TEDx Atlanta this May, on the future of higher education. The other talks were meaty, and as promised, the networking was even better. I hit it off with fellow speaker Gever Tully, who runs an unusual camp called the Tinkering School. I went to visit him later on the cloudy northern California coast. We played with cardboard and copper wire, as his students do, and he showed me a catamaran designed and hacked together out of PVC pipe by grade-schoolers, as we talked over future plans to collaborate. The experience drew me further into the learner-centered education movement. The Atlanta event was one of three organized by Tod Martin, president of Unboundary, a strategic and brand consultancy in Atlanta that has FedEx and Coca-Cola as clients. "It's more of a self-governing system than a TED-governed system," he says. "But people police the brand reverently once they're entrusted with it."

Giving the store away so successfully has softened even some of TED's harshest critics. In 2008, veteran tech columnist Sarah Lacy wrote a much-noted BusinessWeek piece called "Why I'm Fed Up With TED." Now, Lacy says, "From what I've seen on the ground, TEDx is doing a better job of walking the TED talk of including people from more underprivileged backgrounds in this conversation. I hope that continues. That is way more meaningful than a bunch of famous people sitting in Long Beach together and comes closer to actually changing the world." Even Wurman, who dismisses TEDx as "amateur night at the circus," says that the one he attended was of high quality.

That said, TEDx remains nerve-wracking for the TED team. "One of the mantras of management for the past 20 years has been that you must be obsessive about protecting your brand," says the European director, Giussani. And frankly, there are any number of ways that risk could backfire. What would happen if a TEDx event hosted a junk scientist or a hate-spewing cleric, or had a misfire like the Sarah Silverman debacle this February? (She gave a crude talk at the Long Beach TED conference, Anderson promptly tweeted his disapproval, and TED had its first celebrity fiasco.) And what would happen if TEDx events, by their sheer numbers, start to decline in prestige and excellence? It's hard to see how organizing, participating in, or attending one can give someone the same caliber of contacts or reputational boost as doing the same for TED proper. How can you keep up quality control if you let everyone play?

I don't know the answer. What I do know is that you have to admire an organization that has consistently doubled down on its philosophy of trusting the power of connected individuals and great ideas. "It is truly a new model," Stein says, "this willingness by a community to volunteer and change the world through education, and leveraging the platform to do that. There's nothing I can point to quite like it."

That's why I'm not surprised by TED's next move, which is to help its global community connect online. Global Conversation, which launches this fall and is sponsored by GE, is a set of tools that will allow people to hold conversations and plan meetings through ted.com. "Those tools will have a great impact, by empowering conversations and connection," says Cohen. "That's part of what fascinates me about working at TED: We're catalysts. What happens when you create a platform that can be used by people in a way you never predicted?" The answer, so far, is bold and promising. Here's hoping that promise is fulfilled.

Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/148/how-ted-became-the-new-harvard.html

FT: Tea with the FT - Michael Caine

Tea with the FT: Michael Caine

By Peter Aspden

Published: October 1 2010 21:54 | Last updated: October 1 2010 21:54

Disappointingly, Sir Michael Caine does not, when we are introduced, look me firmly in the eye and declare: “My name’s Michael Caine.” Nor, during the course of our tea together, does he at any stage say, “Not a lot of people know that”, or – and this admittedly asked too much – “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”. Is there a greater deliverer of catchphrases in the history of cinema than Michael Caine?

He is, at 77, still an impressive figure, standing tall and possessing of a rich baritone with which he fires jokes with deft and natural comic timing. The accent is much-imitated and inimitable. “They’ve got scones and clotted cream here,” he offers, and somehow makes it sound funny. I am not sure about the word “clotted”, I say. It doesn’t have good connotations. “That’s just what I thought,” he replies. “If it had just said ‘cream’ I’d have had it.”

A shared concern for cholesterol levels established, we settle on smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches and cups of tea, English breakfast for him and Earl Grey for me. We are in a suite at the slightly soulless Wyndham hotel in Chelsea Harbour and there is a barrage of helicopter noise outside, as if there is a nationwide search for a runaway spy going on. It is because we are next to the Thames, says Caine knowledgeably (he has a flat just round the corner), the kind of thing Harry Palmer might say to put me off the scent.

Now that dates both of us. Harry Palmer – star of The Ipcress File, Caine’s breakthrough role – hit the screens 45 years ago. The longevity of Caine’s career is not the least remarkable thing about him. In his new autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, there are poignant personal recollections of two movie stars who were brought down by the pressures of stardom: one is Heath Ledger, the other Rita Hayworth. That is some chronological range. But Caine is still going strong.

Next year he once more reprises his role as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie. He won critical acclaim for last year’s Harry Brown, a hard-nosed vigilante movie shot in his native Elephant and Castle – a tough inner-London district (hence the title of his book). These are high-profile roles, in challenging and/or lucrative films. That is a rare feat for any actor, let alone one in the latter part of his eighth decade. How do you keep getting such great parts, I ask him? “I dunno,” he deadpans. “I sit back and wait for my agent to ring.”

But it wasn’t always like that. The autobiography starts at an awkward moment for Caine. It is the early 1990s, and he is shooting a belated sequel to the Harry Palmer films, Midnight in St Petersburg, in the Russian city. He goes to the toilet. It is, he recalls, “the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. No one had cleaned it out. And I suddenly thought: ‘What am I doing here?’” He makes the existential crisis sound as desolate as Beckett. It sounds like a forlorn experience, I say. “It was just after the communists had gone. When we had lunch on location they gave us Geiger counters, to test the food for radiation. And of course the first thing we did was test the batteries!” He laughs loudly. “You don’t want a duff battery!”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Can Hollywood stars bring Michelin stars? - Oct-01

Lunch with the FT: Fernando Henrique Cardoso - Sep-24

Jim O’Neill: An economist’s view - Sep-24

Lunch with the FT: Jerry Hall - Sep-17

Lunch with the FT: Tony Blair - Sep-10

Lunch with the FT: Gary Shteyngart - Sep-03

“It was a low moment,” he confesses, turning serious again. “But I was quite philosophical about it.” He saw the incident as a turning point. He was preparing to wind his career down, getting increasingly involved with his restaurant businesses and enjoying the easy life in his new apartment in Miami’s South Beach. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Jack Nicholson called. “He was the catalyst,” says Caine. “I had got to that stage in life when you wouldn’t even send me a good script. I had done a couple of duff ones. And then Jack was doing a movie with Bob Rafelson in Miami, and asked me to come. He said, ‘Get off your ass and just do it.’ And that changed everything. Jack is the nicest and kindest person, it was such a joy working with him.”

The resulting film – the noir thriller Blood and Wine – didn’t change the landscape of motion pictures, but Caine’s appetite was refreshed, his career revivified. Along came Little Voice, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, Baftas, Golden Globes and an Oscar. He says one of the aims in writing the book is to inspire readers of a certain age. “As they get older, people think, ‘It’s over.’ But it isn’t. It doesn’t have to be.”

The food arrives. The sandwiches are triple-deckers. “Blimey! They give you a lot don’t they? We will weigh 400lb by the end of this!” He offers to serve the tea but is flummoxed by a designer teapot. “I can never pour these bleedin’ things. Either nothing comes out or it all goes all over the table.” Between us, we crack it. Caine dutifully removes one of the slices of his sandwich and tucks in with relish.

Caine has a habit of saying nice things about everyone. He makes Hollywood parties sound like village green fetes. He doesn’t even have a bad word for Frank Sinatra, for goodness sake. I am suspicious of this. When he first travelled there in the 1960s, was Hollywood not full of predators trying to shaft this presumptuous Limey?

“No, truly not. And you know why? Because I wasn’t their idea of a Limey. I wasn’t posh. I didn’t have this superior English attitude. And I was all for them.” His love affair with things American started during the war. “There were American soldiers parked in the local recreation ground and we used to make their beds in exchange for chewing gum and Coca-Cola. I didn’t actually go there until Alfie.” His maiden voyage happily coincided with an Oscar nomination. “But then I saw Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons and thought, there’s no point in turning up.” (Scofield duly won the award).

Was he an innocent when he went to Hollywood? “I was an innocent by Hollywood standards. What surprised me was the hospitality, how kind people were. Even the lawyers and agents were the nicest people.” I raise an eyebrow. “Remember, I wasn’t really competing with anyone. You weren’t going to lose a part to me if you were Jack Nicholson.” And then, in 2000, there was the knighthood, which helped. “They like a bit of King Arthur.”

Never mind that, this was a town that famously spat people out for its own entertainment, I say. “It can do. But I wasn’t successful until I was 30. And I was a very tough 30, not some giddy little girl.”

The toughening of Michael Caine is the most sobering part of the book. Born Maurice Micklewhite to a working-class family in south-east London “with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets”, he was evacuated during the war to a couple who would lock him in the cupboard for the weekend while they went socialising. That’s the kind of thing you read about in the Sunday papers, I say.

He shrugs it off. “A lot of children had a very bad time.” But to be locked in a cupboard for a whole weekend? “They weren’t wicked people. They took in the children for the money, and then didn’t want to look after them. They wanted to go away for the weekend and didn’t want to cart these dirty tykes from London around with them. Of course, when my mother came, she nearly went to prison for assaulting the woman. She beat her up.”

He is unsentimental about the war. “I benefited from it. For a start I ate nothing but organic food for six years. We had no sugar, no biscuits, no fizzy drinks.” He went on to serve in Korea. “It was a nightmare at the time. But I saw the world, and mixed with people from all classes and societies.”

He speaks movingly of his parents, particularly his father, whom he describes as a “hero”, a market porter at Billingsgate, who read voraciously and had an aptitude for technology, building his own radio from scratch. “He was a symptom of this country losing out on talent because of class,” he says. “They never knew they had it, they never knew they lost it. But today computers will compensate for any bad education there is.” He pauses for a second, and free-associates. “I’m a Google freak.”

What do you Google, I ask?

“Everything. It’s a wonderful thing. I had a gardener who didn’t know much about gardening.” (Read this out loud in a Caine voice and it is somehow hilarious.) “Every time I bought a plant I Googled it to find out how to look after it, and gave it to him and said, ‘There you go’.”

It can be a terrible distraction, I add. He evidently agrees. “I was looking for a penthouse once. And so I put in ‘Penthouse’. Oh my God.” I quickly wonder to myself how many people who hit the Penthouse website are actually after a penthouse. “And it’s a funny thing – you can’t switch it off. I had to take it out of the wall. I had to take the battery out.” There is something endearing about this techno-porno nightmare. Perhaps Jack Nicholson should have been around, I almost say.

He says in the book that 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, the third Harry Palmer film, featured an early version of the internet. “I read that in the paper,” he says. He remembers an adviser on the set trying to explain it to him. “I said, ‘What a load of bollocks. Just tell me which knob to turn.’ I thought it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard.”

Like many people, I say, I became fully converted to Caine’s acting talents by his performance in Educating Rita, for which he gained weight, looked permanently drunk, and gave a startling portrayal of vulnerability. “I had never been offered parts like that. But it is the proudest piece of acting I have ever done. An English professor in a college – it was the furthest thing from me that you could get. It was the first time I completely disappeared.” Was it hard to let his ego go like that? “I realised that I didn’t have that kind of ego, worrying about looking great. I didn’t care about that.” He reminds me that he was in repertory theatre for nine years before his big movie break. “A different role every week. I love being an actor. And I love not being me.”

Caine spends his time today between his Chelsea flat and his 200-year-old converted barn in Box Hill, Surrey, spending part of the winter in Miami. His days in Hollywood are over (he lived there for eight years, as a vociferous critic of Britain’s tax regime). There is a touching account of a mournful farewell to his press agent on Rodeo Drive. “I went straight to Ermenegildo Zegna [he mangles the name magnificently] and bought a shirt.” Did the retail therapy have the required effect? “I was all right. I got on a plane and went home.”

Home is where his heart is. He is “besotted” with his three grandchildren, a strength of reaction that surprised him, and reveres family life. Both in the book and our conversation, he repeatedly pays tribute to his wife of 37 years Shakira, “the nicest person in the world”, with whom he has a daughter (he also has a daughter with his first wife, the actress Patricia Haines). It is because of his family, he says, that his book is studiedly discreet about all those Hollywood parties. “When you fall in love, that becomes part of your past. Like mumps and measles. I didn’t want to go into all that. Not like Kirk Douglas – he named them all, Marlene Dietrich, bleedin’ Marilyn Monroe, everybody!”

As for the films, he says, touching every piece of wood in the vicinity, they keep rolling in. As well as the next Batman, he is preparing for a part in a version of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, about which he is unexpectedly rapturous. “I have grandchildren now. And I get to fly off on a giant bumblebee. I want them to see that.”

..................................................

The Wyndham Grand

Chelsea Harbour, London

Traditional Afternoon Tea (all inc.) x 2 £30

Scottish Smoked Salmon w/ Herbed Cream Cheese x 2

Royal English Breakfast Tea

Earl Grey Tea

Total £30

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Dilbert: Social Media

ST: Modern Manners

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Hot > Story

Sep 12, 2010

Modern manners

The world of new media blurs the line between what is rude and what is acceptable

Nicholas Yong and Huang Huifen

Civil servant Mohamed Rafi, 28, attended a wedding last month with a twist - the bridegroom was updating Facebook throughout the whole-day affair.

'I check my Facebook quite often, so I saw his status updates. It was a blow-by-blow account of the wedding, things like when he was making his costume change and how he was feeling throughout,' says Mr Rafi.

Further from home, Manchester United and England footballer Wayne Rooney, 24, told his wife Coleen that details of his affair with a call girl would be surfacing in the press - via a text message.

Welcome to the strange new world of social networking, smart phones, instant messaging and the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the social and the professional.

Others are simply calling it the new world of bad manners.

With the rise of the tech-savvy generation, old-fashioned notions of privacy and even shame appear to have been outstripped by the demands of online and real-time communication.

Ironically, as much as Generation Y is technologically savvy, it is not necessarily astute when it comes to business etiquette, says Mr Mark Sparrow, managing director of recruiters Kelly Services Singapore.

Shortened and abbreviated communication forms have become prevalent even in office e-mails, he adds. 'They view using 'SMS speak' as commonplace and as such, there have been instances where in e-mail correspondences, they write as they would a text message'. Some examples include 'ppl' for people, and 'cfm' for confirm. This lack of etiquette extends into the social realm as well, with everything from holiday snaps to lovers' quarrels available to all online.

PR executive Li Jiayi, 29, says: 'I know a friend who will log on to Facebook the minute he wakes up and posts, 'Good morning, Facebookers!' and a minute or so after that, 'I'm having my breakfast now'. I mean, who cares?'

Assistant Professor Michael Netzley of Singapore Management University says much of this behaviour is due to 'increased transparency and narcissism'.

'Everything we do could be on display and the web experience thus increasingly becomes more about 'me',' he says.

And while social networking websites are designed to share photos and updates, the barrier to exit is 'extremely low'.

'If I don't like the online experience I am having, I click the mouse button and immediately go to something else in the endless stream of content,' he adds. Ms Li had a similar solution for her over-informative friend - she deleted him from her friends list.

Assistant Professor Mark Cenite of Nanyang Technological University says: 'Research shows that when we are communicating with others online, where the cues we have in face-to-face interactions are absent, we tend to express ourselves in more highly charged, less restrained ways. We are often more emotional and less polite.'

Prof Netzley adds: 'This constant input from social media changes expectations.

People expect us to interact with them online in the same we interact offline. And just like in the real world, people sometimes take offence when we do not meet their expectations.'

So what are the rules governing the use of social media? For example, what is acceptable to post online and what is not? How much time should you be spending on your mobile phone or Twitter?

Prof Netzley says: 'These channels are new and people are still learning to use them in a balanced and reasonable way. It is a social learning process and takes time. We are unlikely to find hard and fast rules here.'

Writer Anton Javier, 26, admits that using his Blackberry has cost him valuable face-to-face interaction.

He says: 'Sometimes, when I am having a meal with my family, a message comes in Blackberry Messenger and I concentrate on my phone. Then my brother will go, 'hey, can you do that later, just enjoy your food first, talk to us'.'

But Prof Cenite is hopeful. 'Every new technology creates panic about a breakdown in traditional values, but we tend to adapt and develop new norms,' he says.

[email protected]

[email protected]

Do you think that people do not mind their manners as much nowadays because of social media? Write to [email protected]

===

'...when we are communicating with others online, we tend to express ourselves in more highly charged, less restrained ways. We are often more emotional and less polite.'

MR MARK CENITE, assistant professor, Nanyang Technological University

Good etiquette in social situations

Can I send an SMS just before meeting someone to say I am late?

Producer Erwin Nah, 25, waited two hours for a friend who was held up at a meeting and who kept sending him texts updating him on the progress, or lack of it.

He says: 'I don't like it when we set a time and my friend decides to change it at the last minute. I am usually very punctual, so I have to hang around and wait. People don't realise it is an issue.'

Ms Yvonne Anjelina, etiquette coach at The Etiquette School Singapore, says: 'Sending an SMS to a friend you are supposed to meet to tell him of a delay or change of venue at the last minute does not count. When you are late, you are late. As long as one inconveniences another, etiquette has been thrown out the window.'

Should Facebook or Twitter be a place to:
a) Start an argument

Student Chloe Kay, 16, drew flak for her tweet criticising a celebrity's looks. An acquaintance responded curtly: 'What did she do to offend you?'

Subsequently, the acquaintance and her friends posted nasty comments about Chloe on their Twitter feeds, calling her names. 'I was hurt by their comments asking me to take a good look at the mirror before commenting on others,' she says.

Ms Agnes Koh, director of Etiquette & Image International, says: 'Everyone has a right to say what's on his mind and post anything he wants on his Facebook wall. If there is any content you do not agree with, say it in a respectful manner. Don't fight it outright.'

b) Declare your love

Project analyst Krystal Lee, 23, has no qualms about posting messages such as 'I love you' or 'I miss you' on her boyfriend's Facebook wall.

Her Facebook friends even 'like' her posts or comment on how sweet and loving they are.

She says: 'There is nothing to hide. If people don't like it, they can just not view our profile pages or hide our feeds.'

The Etiquette School's Ms Anjelina says: 'Mushy expressions of love and feelings should be kept private and not be posted on your partner's wall. The mushy declarations may cause a certain level of discomfort to those reading the post as well as your partner if he is the conservative type.

'However, simple messages of affection are acceptable and should not cause too much discomfort to anyone.'

Can I update my Facebook or Twitter or reply to an SMS or e-mail, when I am out with friends?

Software designer Muhd Khairul Hafidz, 25, used to be a Facebook addict and would log on whenever he had the chance. His girlfriend complained that he was more interested in it than her.

He deleted his account shortly after. Ms Guinevere Ho, principal consultant at Image Mastery International, says: 'When you are out with one or two friends, pay attention to them rather than update your Facebook or Twitter feed. While it is less of a guilty charge in a group of 10 people, we still advise that you pay attention.

'The reason for social media is to connect with friends, so why not make use of the chance in reality to spend time with them? It is akin to talking on your mobile phone and ignoring your friends.'

Can I break up with my partner over MSN, SMS, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter?

Writer Will Chin, 24, was ditched on MSN messenger a few years ago. He says: 'The cracks were building up and I saw it coming, but I was very shocked as it seemed out of character for her to do that. It was very cold and impersonal.'

He feels it is because people hide behind the new media as a form of defence against a violent reaction. When he bumps into his ex-girlfriend now, she still does not talk about it.

'But breaking up is such a heavy thing, you don't just text someone casually,' he says.

Ms Cecellia Telkes, associate consultant of Imageworks Asia, says: 'It is rude and shows a lack of consideration, manners and cowardice. You are better off without a person who breaks up with you over social media.'

Make a point to meet and have the guts to talk it through with the person. In the case of a long-distance relationship, use the telephone or Skype.

But Ms Koh of Etiquette & Image International says: 'If the relationship is tricky and you have evidence that your partner is two-timing you, waste no time. An SMS is enough.'

Huang Huifen

Good Etiquette at the workplace

Is it appropriate to use emoticons and abbreviations in official e-mail?

Ms Yvonne Anjelina, etiquette coach at The Etiquette School Singapore, says emoticons and abbreviations should be avoided in formal situations, as they tend to have an informal and friendly feel to them.

Senior corporate communications executive Victor Yen, 30, uses emoticons in internal e-mail to set up meetings within a close circle of colleagues.

His boss also uses emoticons in e-mail on areas of improvement, which he appreciates.

'The written word can come across as harsh. Emoticons add an extra bit of cordiality to the conversation,' he says.

'I feel my boss is friendlier and encourages a response in a more positive way. It doesn't seem like we are being looked down upon.'

Is it acceptable for the boss to send you a text message late at night?

'Unless it is in your job description, leave it until the morning,' says Ms Cecellia Telkes, associate consultant of Imageworks Asia. She says the only exception is when you have been notified regarding an urgent matter beforehand and told to expect it.

A give-and-take attitude should be adopted by both parties, she adds. For example, employees should not be sending e-mail or an SMS to the boss after midnight either.

What should you do when your boss wants to befriend you on Facebook?

'My first reaction was 'is it really him?'' says civil servant K. Teong, 33, who received a friend request from his boss more than a year ago.

Realising that his boss was on a 'friend-adding spree' among his co-workers, he saw no harm in accepting the request.

Ms Anjelina says a friend request from the boss indicates a relatively amicable relationship and nonacceptance may cause unnecessary tension at work.

But she warns: 'You may be treading into dangerous waters as you would then not be able to voice your opinions and criticisms of your workplace, colleagues and especially your boss on your wall posts.'

While Mr Teong saw his boss as approachable, he was more careful with his wall postings. His wariness grew after his boss posted a strong reaction to an article that his colleague shared.

Eventually, he removed all his co-workers from his friends list. The relationship with his boss did not change as he was unaware that he had been deleted.

'We 'see' enough of each other at work every day so let's keep that little private space we have,' he adds.

Should employees be using their mobile phones during a meeting?

The answer is a firm 'no', says director of Etiquette & Image International Agnes Koh. Using mobile phones and laptops is a message that you give priority to these devices, she adds.

'You are not showing respect. If you are expecting an urgent call, you should let the person know and take the call out of sight. Keep the conversation short and resume the meeting immediately.'

Nicholas Yong

FT: BBC does business a dramatic disservice

BBC does business a dramatic disservice

By Luke Johnson

Published: July 27 2010 20:30 | Last updated: July 27 2010 20:30

The BBC has always regarded business with suspicion. As an institution funded by a regressive poll tax, it struggles mightily with the whole concept of the profit motive, or indeed the very concept of organisations having to actually generate revenues to pay the bills – rather than just acting as a spending empire that extorts money from taxpayers. For the BBC, the assumption is that business is ruthless, domineering and egotistical. And so the grotesque programme Dragons’ Den fits their in-house prejudices perfectly.

Dragons’ Den is a cartoon masquerading as factual television. It has more in common with broadcast wrestling than the real world of investing. The very idea that genuine venture capital takes place in such a ludicrous way is a farce. It is obvious that many misguided projects are encouraged to present because they provide a few cheap laughs. Does it serve the cause of enterprise to have multimillionaires humiliate inventors, and cackle like schoolboys while treading on people’s dreams? But the BBC – despite being a public service broadcaster – doesn’t care. It all feeds the ratings monster, even if it does a disservice to innovation and the private sector.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More columns from Luke Johnson - Jul-06

My tips for saving money in tough times - Jul-20

A job may be the best launch for a start-up - Jul-13

Business books for the holidays - Jul-06

Healthy body, healthy business - Jun-29

Start-ups focus on the true prize - Jun-22

Having chaired a rival broadcaster for six years, I understand well that television is a mass medium that is obliged to use broad brushstrokes. But in the case of Dragons’ Den, entrepreneurship has been dumbed down to the status of staged entertainment. This is a tragedy. Britain needs entrepreneurs who are positive role models, who inspire others, and who help create jobs and accelerate our recovery from the recession. The BBC gives us the bullying of The Apprentice (another idea formatted from elsewhere) and the superficiality of Dragons’ Den.

Perhaps in 2005, when Dragons’ Den was first shown in Britain, there was a degree of novelty and even a modest element of authenticity about it, even if it was a derivative format copied from Japan. But now in its eighth series, the concept has been milked dry and has descended to the level of caricature. The “Dragons” participate for the publicity, the producers want tears and jokes. The amount the investors risk is small change to them, but in return the show buys them plenty of exposure. As Simon Woodroffe, one of the original Dragons, said: “The thing to remember is that when you walk up the stairs [to pitch an idea] it’s not five people thinking ‘How am I going to be able to make an investment here?’ They’re actually thinking ‘Am I going to be the star of this next little piece?’”

Real angel investing is not a game. It is a vital source of funding for early stage companies that may represent the next wave of industry. It succeeds when it involves rigorous due diligence, conscientious research and professionalism. It involves long-term backing and collaboration, not macho bidding contests based on a two-minute pitch. It is a shame such a serious matter is debased by this sort of fake drama, much of it cooked up for the cameras for prime-time consumption.

It takes little imagination to produce shows like The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den, which pander to popular misconceptions about business and entrepreneurs. I suppose the patronising behaviour and casual cruelty are meant to toughen up candidates for the rigours of the market and the workplace. In reality they display a distorted picture closer to slapstick comedy than a genuine 21st century corporation.

As long as the audience and participants realise the programme is an exploitative sham, then I suppose it is merely a missed opportunity. But I do wonder why they bother. The entire purpose of the BBC is to deliver public goods in the form of high quality transmissions that are edifying and uplifting. After all, the BBC does not come cheap. Prosecutions of licence fee evaders undertaken by the British courts on the BBC’s behalf represent at least 10 per cent of all prosecutions of any kind. Meanwhile, law abiding citizens contribute £3.6bn ($5.6bn, €4.3bn) a year – all to deliver misleading confections like Dragons’ Den. When will the BBC adopt a more constructive and grown-up approach to business and free enterprise?

[email protected]
The writer runs Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and is chairman of the Royal Society of Arts

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Paper, scissors, tones

Paper, scissors, tones

By Harry Eyres

Published: July 3 2010 00:18 | Last updated: July 3 2010 00:18

My father and I have what you might call an oblique relationship. Feelings tend not to be conveyed directly, but mediated through other things. We talk about wine or golf or music, and through those prisms the refracted light falls on other areas of life. When I turn up at my parents’ house in my elderly second-hand car, my father solemnly inspects the tyres and tut-tuts over wear to the inside rim. I used to find this annoying but now see it as an expression of concern.

Roughly once a week these days I receive an envelope addressed in my father’s hand stuffed with newspaper cuttings. Some relate to his particular areas of concern, for instance the lamentable state of the privatised British railway system. There are stories of people who have had to pay £200 for a ticket from Manchester to Birmingham, victims of a budget-airline-style pricing policy which fails to make any distinction between optional jaunts to Lanzarote and essential national rail travel. Then there is that other scandal of the ring-fencing of the Trident nuclear submarine programme in defiance of logic and ethics, opposed by many top military figures but shunted out of open political debate first by New Labour and then by the new coalition.

Not all the cuttings are about such serious matters. My father also sends scathing and funny cartoons by Peter Brookes and extracts from the newsletter of the Rex cinema in Berkhamsted. I have taken to returning the gesture and sending the occasional satirical jibe from Private Eye or a Matt cartoon: I loved the one recently of a woman at Ascot wearing a hat marked “BP” which spouted oil over astonished race-goers.

There is something touching about receiving cuttings that someone has taken the trouble physically to snip out with scissors, put in an envelope, stamp and post. The effect of e-mailing articles found on a website is entirely different: most of us are swamped with e-mails anyway and are itching to delete anything non-essential which dares to clutter our inbox. But I doubt anyone is annoyed by a cutting. The fragile, hand-trimmed paper calls for your attention in quite a different manner from the disembodied bytes.

The cuttings my father sends me are both a physical gesture on his part and a reflection of the physical reality of newspapers in paper form. Newspapers are a wonderful jumble, as mixed and impure as life itself; as Dr Samuel Johnson said in another context: “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”. Like a Shakespearean drama, a good newspaper presents different perspectives and tones, from tragic to comic, from sober reporting to passionate invective and comic ribaldry; a free play of views.

This has a profound connection with democracy. The link between newspapers and democracy has perhaps become something of a cliché, but it didn’t appear to me that way when I lived in Spain in the early 1980s. The founding of El País as the first truly serious newspaper, free from the dead hand of autocracy, to emerge in Spain for generations was a key event in the miraculously peaceful Spanish transition to democracy – quite as important, in my view, as other structural reforms to the constitution, education and the judicial system.

El País in those early days didn’t just report on a country but helped to remake it. It was a beacon for mature democratic debate and for cultural renewal; one of the best ways of repairing the deep damage done to Spain’s soul by 40 years of repression. For me living in Spain in the early 1980s, it was a way of learning the language, the history and culture. I saw in it the late flowering of the enlightened liberalism cut down by the civil war; I remember in particular the wise essays by the non-conformist Catholic philosopher José Luís Aranguren.

El País became a rallying point not just for Spanish but for Hispanic culture. In its pages I encountered essential Latin American voices such as those of the Uruguayans Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano. I have always liked the way international news comes before national news in El País.

Nowadays El País is not quite the paper it was; too closely linked to the Spanish socialist workers’ party (PSOE) on the one hand, lacking in its former philosophical reach on the other. But now also Spain has a more plural and less high-minded newspaper culture.

I linger over this particular case because of the current panic over the future of newspapers in their traditional form. It is discouraging to hear editors sounding the death-knell over their own product. They should have more faith in it, and enunciate its political and cultural value more clearly. The problem with an internet paper or journal is that you go directly to a favourite writer or section while ignoring the rest. How many people ever read the obituaries or readers’ letters or look at cartoons online? But all those are part of the folded microcosm which makes newspapers, despite their legion abuses, the most civilised way of mediating democracy that we have yet invented.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

WSJ: Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

THE SATURDAY ESSAY

JUNE 5, 2010

Does the Internet Make You Smarter?

Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture, says Clay Shirky.

By CLAY SHIRKY

Charis Tsevis

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media.

Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

1.8 billion

Estimated number of Internet users world-wide

But of course, that's what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid. This fear dates back to at least the invention of movable type.

As Gutenberg's press spread through Europe, the Bible was translated into local languages, enabling direct encounters with the text; this was accompanied by a flood of contemporary literature, most of it mediocre. Vulgar versions of the Bible and distracting secular writings fueled religious unrest and civic confusion, leading to claims that the printing press, if not controlled, would lead to chaos and the dismemberment of European intellectual life.

Journal Community

These claims were, of course, correct. Print fueled the Protestant Reformation, which did indeed destroy the Church's pan-European hold on intellectual life. What the 16th-century foes of print didn't imagine—couldn't imagine—was what followed: We built new norms around newly abundant and contemporary literature. Novels, newspapers, scientific journals, the separation of fiction and non-fiction, all of these innovations were created during the collapse of the scribal system, and all had the effect of increasing, rather than decreasing, the intellectual range and output of society.

To take a famous example, the essential insight of the scientific revolution was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.

We are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.

Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources.

34.5 hours

Time an average American spends watching television per week

Source: Nielsen

Similarly, open source software, created without managerial control of the workers or ownership of the product, has been critical to the spread of the Web. Searches for everything from supernovae to prime numbers now happen as giant, distributed efforts. Ushahidi, the Kenyan crisis mapping tool invented in 2008, now aggregates citizen reports about crises the world over. PatientsLikeMe, a website designed to accelerate medical research by getting patients to publicly share their health information, has assembled a larger group of sufferers of Lou Gehrig's disease than any pharmaceutical agency in history, by appealing to the shared sense of seeking medical progress.

Of course, not everything people care about is a high-minded project. Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly. Today we have The World's Funniest Home Videos running 24/7 on YouTube, while the potentially world-changing uses of cognitive surplus are still early and special cases.

That always happens too. In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals, and complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, "The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing." Edgar Allan Poe, writing during another surge in publishing, concluded, "The enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age; since it presents one of the most serious obstacles to the acquisition of correct information."

The response to distraction, then as now, was social structure. Reading is an unnatural act; we are no more evolved to read books than we are to use computers. Literate societies become literate by investing extraordinary resources, every year, training children to read. Now it's our turn to figure out what response we need to shape our use of digital tools.

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

Mick Coulas

The cognitive effects are measurable: We're turning into shallow thinkers, says Nicholas Carr.

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we'll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet's abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture. There are likewise three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

First, the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

The present is, as noted, characterized by lots of throwaway cultural artifacts, but the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away. This issue isn't whether there's lots of dumb stuff online—there is, just as there is lots of dumb stuff in bookstores. The issue is whether there are any ideas so good today that they will survive into the future. Several early uses of our cognitive surplus, like open source software, look like they will pass that test.

The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but the only thing really worth arguing about is the future. It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity. We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies.

It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.

—Clay Shirky's latest book is "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age."Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Seth Godin: Micro magazines and a future of media

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/micro-magazines-and-a-future-of-media.html

Micro magazines and a future of media

Does anyone read Time or Newsweek (being sold to anyone who will take them) any more? And when they disappear, who will really miss them?

The problem is that they are both slow and general. The world, on the other hand, is fast and specific.

Is there a business here?

While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that's awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me. They have elements that make them very attractive to advertisers and readers.

I'll define one as:

• Being digital (probably a PDF), that's free to 'print', fast to make and easy to share. (Newsweek spends seventeen million dollars a year on paper.)
• Having subscribers, either by email or RSS
• Focused on issues that appeal to some, but not all
• Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
• Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
• Containing ads that are relevant to that audience
• Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail

There's room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines. Why not have one about Aruba, for example? If all the people who vacation in Aruba could read about the island in detail every month, read about restaurants, resorts and politics, for free, in an easy to share format... Multiply this by every destination, every interest group, every type of profession (how about a micro-magazine for ethnobiologists?)

Surely you can think of a group of people that share a demo- or psychographic, that are appealing to an advertiser base and want to learn and share what they learn... for free.

Take a look at Clay and Ishita's new magazine, Fearless.  It's jammed with good stuff, it's engaging and it begs to be shared. While the audience for Fearless isn't as vertical as some, it clearly should resonate with some advertisers, the sort that might pay for an ad in the soon to be irrelevant newsweeklies. And the big difference is that instead of paying for an office building and paper and overhead, the money for an ad in a micro-magazine can go directly to the people who write and promote it and the ad itself will be seen by exactly the right audience... (Aside: Newsweek has 427 employees and a guaranteed circulation of 1.5 million. Fearless will probably end up reaching 100,000 people with 2 employees.)

Don't expect overnight successes in this form of media, but certainly expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.

Does anyone read Time or Newsweek (being sold to anyone who will take them) any more? And when they disappear, who will really miss them?

The problem is that they are both slow and general. The world, on the other hand, is fast and specific.

Is there a business here?

While there are still people hoping to make a living writing a blog (not as a tool for something else, but as an end into itself), that's awfully difficult to do. Micro-magazines, on the other hand, feel very different to me. They have elements that make them very attractive to advertisers and readers.

I'll define one as:

• Being digital (probably a PDF), that's free to 'print', fast to make and easy to share. (Newsweek spends seventeen million dollars a year on paper.)
• Having subscribers, either by email or RSS
• Focused on issues that appeal to some, but not all
• Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
• Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
• Containing ads that are relevant to that audience
• Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail

There's room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines. Why not have one about Aruba, for example? If all the people who vacation in Aruba could read about the island in detail every month, read about restaurants, resorts and politics, for free, in an easy to share format... Multiply this by every destination, every interest group, every type of profession (how about a micro-magazine for ethnobiologists?)

Surely you can think of a group of people that share a demo- or psychographic, that are appealing to an advertiser base and want to learn and share what they learn... for free.

Take a look at Clay and Ishita's new magazine, Fearless.  It's jammed with good stuff, it's engaging and it begs to be shared. While the audience for Fearless isn't as vertical as some, it clearly should resonate with some advertisers, the sort that might pay for an ad in the soon to be irrelevant newsweeklies. And the big difference is that instead of paying for an office building and paper and overhead, the money for an ad in a micro-magazine can go directly to the people who write and promote it and the ad itself will be seen by exactly the right audience... (Aside: Newsweek has 427 employees and a guaranteed circulation of 1.5 million. Fearless will probably end up reaching 100,000 people with 2 employees.)

Don't expect overnight successes in this form of media, but certainly expect that once someone figures out how to be the voice of a tribe, the revenue will take care of itself.

FT: Generation game plays out on Facebook

Generation game plays out on Facebook

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 21 2010 22:16 | Last updated: March 21 2010 22:16

Last Wednesday at breakfast, my generation discovered that our time is up. I got wind of the news on Tuesday by reading it online but, like most people my age, I never entirely believe something until I see it printed on a large sheet of paper, anachronistically delivered to my door by the paper boy. So for me, the penny did not drop until Wednesday morning that the world now belongs to the generation below mine.

At the bottom of the front page of the Financial Times it said that Facebook has become bigger than Google. In the US, more people now visit the social networking site to write on each other’s walls and swap pictures of drunken japes at parties than turn to Google to get travel directions, check the spelling of “definitely” or search for internet porn.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lucy Kellaway - Mar-28

First law of enduring success: a big lucky break - Mar-28

You can’t always get what you want - Mar-12

Why feedback forms leave me fed up - Mar-07

A corporate calendar that is so last year - Feb-28

Why insensitive bosses make more sense - Feb-12

Social networking, it seems to me, is the biggest separator of the young from the not-so-young. In most other respects there is not much to choose between people of 50 and of 15, apart from a bit of experience and a great many wrinkles. Everyone wears jeans. More or less everyone (quite) likes Florence and the Machine. But 15-year-olds live on Facebook, while 50-year-olds don’t understand it at all.

This isn’t a small thing: it’s a ginormous non-meeting of minds between two generations over what is not just a different way of communicating, but a different way of living.

Google is natural for old people because we were taught how to look things up at primary school. It is like a library only a lot better: you don’t have to get on a bus, and the thing you want is never out on loan to someone else. E-mail is natural for us, too. We might still grapple with the right stylistic flourishes for this flat medium, but we understand the principle perfectly. One person communicates with another, only it happens faster than a postman takes to drop a letter through a door.

My generation can even do Twitter, at a pinch. Twitter is just a sort of showing off, and we are just as good at that as anyone born a decade or two after us.

But Facebook remains deeply alien. For us, the point about communicating is that it is a consensual activity between two people. I like to talk to one friend at a time, which allows you to vary the tone and content to suit the person to whom you are talking. When we deal with more than one or two friends at a time, we get in a flap. Think of the kerfuffle that goes into deciding who to invite with whom to a dinner party.

By contrast, the idea that communication becomes a random broadcast to 500 “friends” about what you were up to last night is perfectly incomprehensible. As is the thought that you park yourself for hours on end in front of a screen gawping at the random communications of your unmanageably large group of friends and commenting on them.

This gap between the Facebook/non-Facebook generation is wider than the gap between my generation and our parents. My dad liked Verdi, I liked the Rolling Stones. He thought mine was noise, I thought his was weird. But it was the same 12-inch circle of vinyl going round on the turntable, and listening to it involved sitting on the same sofa. My mother would not throw any food away, and while I did not admire the half a roast potato sitting in the fridge, I understood that she had lived through rationing and was therefore constitutionally incapable of chucking it out.

I have asked my children to explain Facebook to me, but I’m none the wiser. They can’t explain it because they don’t understand what I’m asking. The scale of my puzzlement makes no sense to them.

Whether or not we see the point of it, my generation is going to have to sign up in time. A friend of my daughter’s recently complained that because her grandfather wasn’t on Facebook, she couldn’t wish him a happy birthday. The thought of picking up the phone, let alone buying a card, had not occurred to her. Last week’s news makes it clear. If in the future we want to get birthday cards (or communicate with anyone under 40) we are going to have to join Facebook whether we understand it or not.

There is only one risk to the site, as far as I can see. Last week I read that 36m US mothers had signed up to keep an eye on their children. Having your mother as your Facebook “friend” would surely put as much of a damper on the whole jag as being chaperoned at the disco by your father.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Collective buying takes off

Collective buying takes off

By David Gelles

Published: February 15 2010 22:40 | Last updated: February 15 2010 22:40

Late last year Marina Nelson, a marketing consultant in San Francisco, returned from a visit to Yosemite National Park with a very dirty car. “It was filthy,” she remembers. “There was mud caked in the licence plate and the carriage.”

So Ms Nelson appreciated the serendipity when just days later, she received an e-mail offering a 57 per cent discount on a luxury car wash: a wash, wax and interior clean that would normally cost $70 was just $30.

The offer was from Groupon, an e-commerce startup that pairs local businesses with bargain-hungry consumers. But there was a catch: the offer was only good if at least 20 people signed up. For the car wash to offer such a steep discount, it had to be assured it would receive an influx of new customers.

Groupon offers one such deal a day in more than 40 cities across the US. Users sign up to receive a daily e-mail from Groupon, and the company recruits local businesses willing to trade deep discounts for an influx of new customers.

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In the case of the car wash, Groupon delivered. By the end of the day 612 people had purchased the offer. The car wash, Keatley Detail, received a sudden influx of business over the next few days, and Ms Nelson took her Lexus SUV in for a clean-up soon after. “It was something that I needed anyway,” says Ms Nelson. “So when a discount came up, of course I’m going to take it.”

Groupon is part of a new wave of companies reviving so-called “group buying”, using the collective purchasing power of a block of consumers to negotiate better rates from goods and service providers. Where one crop of dotcom startups failed 10 years ago, Groupon and others look to succeed by harnessing the power of the internet and focusing their efforts on local goods and services that otherwise are rarely marked down.

“[Group buying] has shown itself to be very compelling from a marketing standpoint,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst with Forrester Research. “It resonates with people and gets them to make a purchase quickly. And it’s a great way for businesses to drive new customer acquisition.”

Groupon’s early success has inspired imitators. LivingSocial Deals and BuyWithMe are offering similar programmes in cities around the US. At least five similar companies have started up in Europe, including DailyDeal.de in Berlin, and Wowcher in London.

Group buying is not a new concept. Ten years ago companies such as Mercata and MobShop tried to leverage collective buying power to achieve discounts on everyday commercial goods like electronics and sports equipment.

But e-commerce was still a novelty, fewer people were online and, critically, the discounts they could achieve through collective buying were not much better than shoppers could find at Walmart or Costco. After taking millions of dollars in venture capital, Mercata and MobShop went out of business as the dotcom bubble burst.

Andrew Mason, Groupon chief executive, thinks his company is poised to break the mould. “For customers, we’re a great way to get a deal on something they already love or want to try,” he says. “For businesses, we’re hands down the best way to get customers through the door, which for small businesses is the difference between success and failure.”

Finding businesses willing to play along is key to Groupon’s success. It maintains a sales force that looks for small businesses willing to participate, then negotiates a deal to offer to consumers.

But keeping up the quality of the deals will be key to Groupon’s long-term success. Many businesses take a financial hit when they offer a deal through Groupon, and may be disinclined to repeat the offers too often. “The biggest challenge is sustaining the model,” says Forrester’s Ms Mulpuru. “Every day needs to be a homerun for them to be a huge success.”

One day Groupon sold 1,600 skydiving coupons for Chicago Land Skydiving, delivering a 25 per cent rise in annual sales for the skydiving outfit in just 24 hours. In another promotion, Groupon offered discounted memberships to the Art Institute of Chicago. Five thousand people signed up, a significant boost for a museum that previously had 85,000 members.

And because the deal is only activated if enough people sign up, users are encouraged to spread the word to their friends. Groupon makes this easy by linking to Twitter and Facebook, and relies heavily on this word-of-mouth advertising.

By keeping between 30 to 50 per cent of each sale, Groupon has been profitable almost from the start. The company has dealt with 1.8m transactions since the company was founded just over a year ago, saving consumers more than $85m (€62m, £54m). Mr Mason said his company was on track to do $100m in sales this year.

Collective deals

Groupon

$45 for a 75-minute deep-pore-cleansing facial at Lia Schorr in New York

Value: $95

Discount: 53 per cent

You save: $50

Minimum purchases needed: 150

Total purchases: 2,582

Estimated Groupon revenue: $45,000

1BOG

5.5 kilowatt residential solar installation in San Francisco

Gross cost after 15 per cent discount: $38,000

Rebates and tax credits: $21,000

Net cost to homeowner: $17,000
Estimated 1BOG revenue: $1,375

Where Groupon has succeeded in obtaining deep discounts for restaurants, entertainment and simple services, a San Francisco-based startup is applying the same model to a much pricier item: residential solar installations.

One Block Off the Grid, or 1BOG, rounds up groups of homeowners in a city and matches them with a solar installer offering a discounted rate. By serving as a matchmaker, 1BOG aims to demystify the complex solar installation process for buyers, and brings a hefty chunk of new business to the installers.

Dave Llorens, chief executive, says his group has become an effective intermediary between consumers and the installers, who have not standardised their rates and sales pitch.

“In [the solar] industry, you have to do it in a group fashion because that’s how you reach the tipping point where people realise solar is not only for rich environmentalists,” he says.

“We should be at a massive adoption rate for solar in the US ... but the sales process for residential solar installation is not designed to scale.”

Like Groupon, 1BOG is enjoying early success. The company operates in 10 cities and has signed up more than 600 homeowners for solar installations through 16 different campaigns. Installations are discounted about 15 per cent for each home. The company takes a flat referral fee from the installer, and 25 cents per watt installed, or about $1,000 per home.

Both Groupon and 1BOG are backed by New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital group that specialises in consumer internet and clean technology investments. NEA gave Groupon $4.8m in early 2008 and followed up last December with a $30m second round co-led by Accel Partners, one of the early investors in Facebook. Last week they gave 1BOG a $5m investment.

Ravi Viswanathan, a general partner at NEA, says his firm was bullish on group buying. “There’s a viral nature to it that can really drive adoption,” he says. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy ... and the possibilities are endless.”

1BOG is already running pilot programmes to test the model for home retro-fitting, and conversions that turn Toyota Prius petrol-electric hybrids into plug-in electric vehicles.

“The model clearly extrapolates pretty well to any big-ticket home improvement,” says Mr Llorens. “We’re just scratching the service of what new social technologies can do with this.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010

FT: Footprints and fingerprints

Footprints and fingerprints

By Mike Southon

Published: February 5 2010 16:14 | Last updated: February 5 2010 16:14

Environmentalists frequently remind us about our carbon footprint. Just as important, however, is our digital footprint, which represents a business opportunity, once it is fully understood.

Tony Fish, a serially successful entrepreneur, understands this. He advises media agencies on their digital strategy and has written a book on the subject, My Digital Footprint.

He is fully aware that everything we do on the internet is observed and recorded, both by the powers that be and those seeking financial gain from understanding our behaviour. Our footprint includes the websites we look at, our online purchases, the content we create and the online conversations we have via e-mail or on social networking sites.

This is the natural outcome of using most of these services for free and, while we may have concerns about privacy and civil liberties, it must be acknowledged that we largely give these up as soon as we log in.

Those of us with long digital memories remember that the internet was originally funded by a US Department of Defense project. This enabled Unix machines to operate in an intelligent network that could deliver messages if a site was to come under nuclear attack. A by-product of this was “big brother” being able to intercept all the e-mails if he wished.

Such privacy concerns are of little concern to younger people, who have grown up with a ubiquitous and nearly free internet. They will happily or unwittingly generate a significant amount of personal data as a by-product of their daily interactions. This process has been accelerated and enhanced by smart phones that add location-based, real-time data to extend significantly the user’s digital footprint.

However, Fish argues that raw data about web users is of little value unless it is put into context. It is not so much what you might be doing, or saying, but who you are doing it with – the interactions and conversations you are having online.

For example, the fact that you have just bought a new car is of minimal interest on its own. While you might be interested in cars, you have just bought one and are, therefore, not likely to be in the market for one soon.

But if you are going online and telling everyone how wonderful the car is, and how great the service you received was, this is of value – especially to the car dealer and other relevant suppliers, who can identify your long-term value from measuring your digital footprint.

In the future, those of us with the largest digital footprints will be the most valued consumers. Fish predicts that soon we will all have two online identities: a personal one tailored for consumer benefits and a business one for a different level of transaction.

He concludes that the ability to understand the value of online conversations is an opportunity, as nobody owns the space. Entrepreneurs should, therefore, gather and analyse data, and concentrate on developing online relationships that can help them tailor products and services to customers’ needs.

But online conversations are also a threat to businesses. Their expensively developed brands can potentially be destroyed overnight by the online chatter of customers with large digital footprints. This is why wise brand owners monitor Twitter and other platforms – and take appropriate action.

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More columns at www.ft.com/mikesouthon

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Economist: The book of Jobs

Tablet computing

The book of Jobs

Jan 28th 2010
From The Economist print edition

It has revolutionised one industry after another. Now Apple hopes to transform three at once

Illustration by Jon Berkeley

APPLE is regularly voted the most innovative company in the world, but its inventiveness takes a particular form. Rather than developing entirely new product categories, it excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly. Under its mercurial and visionary boss, Steve Jobs, it has already done this three times. In 1984 Apple launched the Macintosh. It was not the first graphical, mouse-driven computer, but it employed these concepts in a useful product. Then, in 2001, came the iPod. It was not the first digital-music player, but it was simple and elegant, and carried digital music into the mainstream. In 2007 Apple went on to launch the iPhone. It was not the first smart-phone, but Apple succeeded where other handset-makers had failed, making mobile internet access and software downloads a mass-market phenomenon.

As rivals rushed to copy Apple’s approach, the computer, music and telecoms industries were transformed. Now Mr Jobs hopes to pull off the same trick for a fourth time. On January 27th he unveiled his company’s latest product, the iPad—a thin, tablet-shaped device with a ten-inch touch-screen which will go on sale in late March for $499-829 (see article). Years in the making, it has been the subject of hysterical online speculation in recent months, verging at times on religious hysteria: sceptics in the blogosphere jokingly call it the Jesus Tablet.

The enthusiasm of the Apple faithful may be overdone, but Mr Jobs’s record suggests that when he blesses a market, it takes off. And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three—computing, telecoms and media.

Companies in the first two businesses view the iPad’s arrival with trepidation, for Apple’s history makes it a fearsome competitor. The media industry, by contrast, welcomes it wholeheartedly. Piracy, free content and the dispersal of advertising around the web have made the internet a difficult environment for media companies. They are not much keener on the Kindle, an e-reader made by Amazon, which has driven down book prices and cannot carry advertising. They hope this new device will give them a new lease of life, by encouraging people to read digital versions of books, newspapers and magazines while on the move. True, there are worries that Apple could end up wielding a lot of power in these new markets, as it already does in digital music. But a new market opened up and dominated by Apple is better than a shrinking market, or no market at all.

Keep taking the tablets

Tablet computers aimed at business people have not worked. Microsoft has been pushing them for years, with little success. Apple itself launched a pen-based tablet computer, the Newton, in 1993, but it was a flop. The Kindle has done reasonably well, and has spawned a host of similar devices with equally silly names, including the Nook, the Skiff and the Que. Meanwhile, Apple’s pocket-sized touch-screen devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch, have taken off as music and video players and hand-held games consoles.

The iPad is, in essence, a giant iPhone on steroids. Its large screen will make it an attractive e-reader and video player, but it will also inherit a vast array of games and other software from the iPhone. Apple hopes that many people will also use it instead of a laptop. If the company is right, it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music and video players and games consoles. Different industries are already converging on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer-makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style “app store” for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.

If the past is any guide, Apple’s entry into the field will not just unleash fierce competition among device-makers, but also prompt consumers and publishers who had previously been wary of e-books to take the plunge, accelerating the adoption of this nascent technology. Sales of e-readers are expected to reach 12m this year, up from 5m in 2009 and 1m in 2008, according to iSuppli, a market-research firm.

Hold the front pixels

Will the spread of tablets save struggling media companies? Sadly not. Some outfits—metropolitan newspapers, for instance—are probably doomed by their reliance on classified advertising, which is migrating to dedicated websites. Others are too far gone already. Tablets are expensive, and it will be some years before they are widespread enough to fulfil their promise. In theory a newspaper could ask its readers to sign up for a two-year electronic subscription, say, and subsidise the cost of a tablet. But such a subsidy would be hugely pricey, and expensive printing presses will have to be kept running for readers who want to stick with paper.

Still, even though tablets will not save weak media companies, they are likely to give strong ones a boost. Charging for content, which has proved difficult on the web, may get easier. Already, people are prepared to pay to receive newspapers and magazines (including The Economist) on the Kindle. The iPad, with its colour screen and integration with Apple’s online stores, could make downloading books, newspapers and magazines as easy and popular as downloading music. Most important, it will allow for advertising, on which American magazines, in particular, depend. Tablets could eventually lead to a wholesale switch to digital delivery, which would allow newspapers and book publishers to cut costs by closing down printing presses.

If Mr Jobs manages to pull off another amazing trick with another brilliant device, then the benefits of the digital revolution to media companies with genuinely popular products may soon start to outweigh the costs. But some media companies are dying, and a new gadget will not resurrect them. Even the Jesus Tablet cannot perform miracles.

Copyright © 2010 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Human beings or human resources?

Human beings or human resources?

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11

Recently, my partner Ching Ling got an iPhone. It is an amazing piece of engineering, so sleek and clever and attractive to handle that you could hardly fail to fall for it. A poet friend who, a while ago, penned a magnificent invective against mobile phones, comparing them to sex aids, would have to revise his lines. This thing is more like a cat: you stroke it and it purrs. Not always a well-behaved cat; plugged in for recharging, it woke us up in the middle of the night bleeping loudly. I have no idea what it wanted.

Essentially, though, it is a toy. Once you acquire an iPhone, you can’t stop playing with it. But the phone is also playing with you. It is making money out of you, cajoling you into signing up for all sorts of unnecessary applications. Watching me playing with it, Ching Ling observed that I had reverted to the age of five; shortly after she revised that to three.

The iPhone represents the power and attraction of the new – of technological innovation, promising social benefits but driven by commercial interests that do not uphold the principle St Paul enunciated in his first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child ... I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things”. I really don’t know whether an iPhone will help me to live better; I rather suspect not. I have no idea whether mobile phones in general have added to the sum of human well-being. We seemed to get on quite well without them; I have a feeling they have made it harder for people to be on their own.

For a long time now the power of the new has trumped the power of the old. But almost a year ago, when President Barack Obama gave his inaugural address, I noted a sea-change. In the most stirring piece of political oratory delivered for decades, Obama made a distinction between new challenges and instruments and old values, including “tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism”. Later in the speech he harked back to one of the battles that gave birth to the US. It seemed the old was making a comeback, and in the UK that coincided with a sense of hollowness and decrepitude in the political project that has dominated the late 1990s and the 2000s, New Labour.

One old thing Obama did not so much talk about as represent was the power of the word. The word is probably the ultimate old thing that went out of fashion: words became “mere rhetoric”, windy nothingnesses set against the hard truths told by numbers. But Obama did not offer rhetoric so much as oratory, and many commented on the debt his speeches owed to classical models. Something rather strange and fascinating was going on: a youthful president, of African-American ancestry, was speaking not in bullet points but in the style of Cicero.

My gripe with Obama’s old things is that they are not old enough. He may speak in the style of Cicero but his values are drawn from the Enlightenment. Of course that makes sense, because America is a product of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment values Obama praises, such as tolerance and curiosity, are both admirable and essential – especially so in the context of insurgent bigotry. But they are not sufficient.

Sixty-five years ago, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had a nightmare. The Enlightenment, instead of liberating mankind, had bound it in chains. “The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with calamity ... What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to enslave both it and human beings.”

You don’t have to go quite as far as the two dour Frankfurt philosophers to see that the Enlightenment project of raising human reason to god-like power has had disturbing results. These can be seen both in the state of nature, reduced and damaged possibly beyond repair, and of human beings, retooled as “human resources” – that is, means to be exploited rather than ends in themselves.

I think we need to go back beyond the time of the Enlightenment and the birth of the US to rediscover the values that give god-like dignity (what Plato called the “divine something”) to human beings and restore the non-instrumental beauty of the natural world. One place to start would be the beautifully redesigned Medieval and Renaissance galleries at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. And within those galleries you might pause in front of the Symmachi panel, an exquisite late Roman ivory carving showing a young woman performing a pagan rite at an outdoor altar. Under the shade of a spreading oak an offering is being made, and thanks are being given. We don’t know exactly of what, for what, but we can imagine it has something to do with sky and earth, and the sustaining of life.

[email protected]
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: Book extract - Viral Loop

Book extract: Viral Loop

By Adam L Penenberg

Published: November 6 2009 14:24 | Last updated: November 6 2009 14:24

Businesses are keen to harness the digital world to extend their brands and increase sales

It was the autumn of 2005 when Fritz Grobe, a professional juggler, and Stephen Voltz, a trial lawyer, first heard from a friend the amusing revelation that if you dropped Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke, it would explode. Performers at heart – the two were members of a regional theatre company in Buckfield, Maine – Grobe and Voltz went out to the backyard to try it. After the pyrotechnics, their first thought was: how far could they take it?

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They weren’t the first. For decades, high school students had mixed vinegar and baking soda to make volcanoes erupt at science fairs and, since the early 1990s, the people at Mentos had been aware of the geyser phenomenon, which would come and go in popularity. Then, in September 2005, science educator Steve Spangler demonstrated the Mentos-Diet Coke effect on a news programme in Denver, Colorado, with the anchor Kim Christiansen getting soaked in the process. The online video became a minor hit.

In Buckfield, Grobe and Voltz spent a morning playing around with the idea. After corralling as many bottles of Diet Coke and Mentos as they could, they constructed a 10-bottle fountain with the aid of some cement blocks and put on a show at the nearby Oddfellows Theatre for other members of their troupe. The response urged them to greater heights and they spent about five months experimenting – cutting slits in bottles, drilling holes, adding screens.

YouTube’s top viral videos

Charlie bit my finger

The Sneezing Baby Panda

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Extreme Sheep LED Art

After settling on the idea of recreating the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, the two drafted blueprints and carefully choreographed their effects to match those of their glitzy muse. On April 29 2006, they laid out 200 bottles of Diet Coke in an intricate design and prepped more than 500 Mentos mints (total cost: $300), then spent eight hours doing walk-throughs. “It felt like blowing up a building,” Grobe says. “We had one chance. We had never done more than 20 bottles at a time before that.”

While a friend with a digital video camera recorded the action, the two, dressed in white lab coats, crossed their fingers and let it fly. Amazingly, it all went off without a hitch. It was an unseasonably warm day, so the effects were even more spectacular, especially at the end when the grand crown shot out in different directions and spun. They got soaked, puddles of Diet Coke gathering in their goggles.

On the first Saturday in June they posted the experiment to their website. Voltz told one person about it: his brother. Within hours, thousands of visitors were viewing “Experiment #137”. By the end of the first day, they counted 14,000 downloads. Two days later, The Late Show with David Letterman called. Grobe told producers they had only done the fountain once and would need a chance to rehearse. Over the next few weeks, Grobe and Voltz grew confident they could perform the Mentos geyser live. Meanwhile, the video became a runaway hit. Over nine days, more than 2m people logged on to their site.

The concept of collective curation has been around for thousands of years; it just didn’t have as sophisticated a propulsion system as it does today. At first it was verbal, with gossip and information spreading from person to person. Chain letters mailed through the nation’s postal system urged recipients to make copies and send to 10 other people, or suffer the consequences. Then there was the telephone, the first efficient person-to-person mode of communication, which, before the rise of the internet, offered an unprecedented level of virality.

Once Mosaic and Netscape seeded the viral plain, though, jokes, memes and information that touched someone’s heart or funny bone – or both – could be dispatched to dozens, if not hundreds of people in an instant. It was only a matter of time before businesses began to recognise the benefits of viral campaigns to extend their brands and, in the process, increase sales. They just had to figure out how.

The answer came from Burger King in the form of a guy dressed up as a chicken willing to do whatever you wanted. The brainchild of ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky in 2004, the “subservient chicken” was one of the first mega-successful corporate viral campaigns. There were some wacky television spots, but it was the ensuing interactive web campaign that turned it from idle curiosity into a phenomenon.

Crispin launched a website with the chicken in a living room, encouraging visitors to type commands and watch him perform them, as long as they corresponded to one of more than 300 pre-recorded moves – from a cartwheel to a Michael Jackson moonwalk. But the chicken would draw the line at anything obscene (such as a sex act), approaching the camera to wag his finger in disapproval.

Within a week, the chicken hosted more than 20m visits, with the average user spending an astonishing 5 minutes and 44 seconds on the site. More to the point, sales of Burger King chicken sandwiches increased 9 per cent a week in the month following the site’s launch.

. . . .

Pete Healy, vice-president of marketing at Mentos, heard about the geyser phenomenon on radio. He told a reporter that Mentos was “tickled” by the video. He called Grobe and asked if there was anything the company could do to help.

“Send Mentos,” Grobe replied.

Healy did more than that. What followed was a marketing coup that has become a textbook example of how a company can harness the power of viral video, where the 30-second TV ad, which is waning in influence, is replaced by the audience. Because collective curation means the audience alone decides what’s good and what should be watched while the traditional gatekeepers – TV networks, movie studios, news media – are pushed to the sidelines.

Although Healy knew there would be risks to involving Mentos in this type of new-media campaign, in the end Mentos was candy, not a cure for cancer. How much effort would people put into ridiculing it? “As long as we maintained a light touch and were authentic, we figured we would probably be OK,” he says.

When Grobe and Voltz appeared on Letterman’s show, Healy dispatched the Mentos-mobile, a Pontiac Solstice wrapped in Mentos graphics, which was parked outside the theatre, while street marketers toting six-foot rolls of Mentos gave out sweets to passers-by.

Unlike Healy, the people at the Coca-Cola Company didn’t know what to think. A Coke spokeswoman said: “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it.” She added that the “craziness with Mentos” didn’t “fit” Diet Coke’s “brand personality”.

Michael Donnelly, the company’s interactive director, admitted that Coke wasn’t prepared for this. But in July 2006 the soft- drink maker relaunched Coke.com with a new focus: consumer-generated media that celebrates creativity and self-expression. Within days of starting his job at Coke, Donnelly contacted Voltz and Grobe. This led to a meeting between Coke, Mentos, Grobe, Voltz and Google, which also wanted in on the action.

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz told one person about ‘Experiment #137’; after nine days, 2m had downloaded it

The companies agreed to work together to support the performers in a second Mentos-Coke sprinkler video, which Grobe and Voltz dubbed “The Domino Effect”. At the end, there was an advertisement that linked to Coke.com or cocacola.com, announcing a contest. For three months, people could submit videos of ordinary objects doing extraordinary things, with Grobe and Voltz judging. Coke supported the campaign by buying up hundreds of search keywords on Google, MSN and Yahoo, anything relating to Coke, Mentos and explosions, and counted 1.5bn ad impressions.

This democratisation of content is made possible by cheap video cameras, camcorders and mobile phones that capture user-generated infotainment, aided by powerful software like Final Cut Pro and iMovie to shape it, and distributed via a massive digital infrastructure with ample bandwidth. The technological zeitgeist is, however, equal parts human, as online communities blog about what interests them or disseminate links to everyone in their e-mail address books. Meanwhile, user communities have sprouted up on people portals such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and Digg. There, people share everything from blog posts to news articles, pictures, audio podcasts and videos in a quest for their own 15 megabytes of fame.

“It’s all about the combination of next-generation content creation and distribution coupled to instant access to your social network community,” says Adam Lavelle, vice-president of strategy for iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. “Because distribution is so huge and fluid and easy, your community connects to other communities, which fosters this distribution. If I know you, then I know everyone you know.”

As for companies caught up in a viral loop, they have little choice but to let go of their brand. As AG Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, once told the US Association of National Advertisers, “The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”

A company willing to let go of its brand can find untapped riches, as Mentos did. The Bellagio Fountain video was downloaded 20m times and more than 10,000 copycat videos were posted online, which created a multiplier effect: Mentos tallied a staggering 215m mentions of its product in TV, print or radio stories over nine months, and estimates the free publicity was worth $10m to the company, half its annual marketing budget. Sales climbed 20 per cent during the first viral wave and, even after the commotion died down, they remained 15 per cent higher than they had been. Mentos made a mint.

Before the video, Diet Coke’s sales had been flat, while the company as a whole was losing market share. But Donnelly reports that after it went viral there was a “significant spike” in sales of two-litre bottles of Diet Coke, the ones used on camera. He wouldn’t give exact numbers but confirmed it was between 5 and 10 per cent.

On YouTube some videos have been downloaded tens of millions of times. There is a cat playing the piano , a music video set on treadmills at a gym, a cackling baby. At first there may not seem any rhyme or reason behind their appeal. Yet there are shared characteristics to some viral videos, and companies seeking to advertise their products are keen to decipher these.

A series created for the Sony Bravia HDTV featured explosions of paint covering whole buildings, thousands of bouncing balls and giant clay rabbits, all in vivid colour; a Dove Evolution ad showed a normal-looking woman instantly transformed into a supermodel before our very eyes. The tagline read: “No wonder our image of beauty is distorted.”

These are the antithesis of the hard sell. In exchange for entertaining us, the companies are afforded the privilege of mentioning their product. The narrative of each video is woven tightly into the brand’s message. Sony’s ad played up the Bravia’s colour and image clarity. Dove’s idea expanded the idea of beauty to encompass more than twiggy supermodels. On YouTube alone, several parodies were viewed a total of 5m times. (“Slob Evolution”, in which a male model eats, drinks and smokes himself into someone who resembles Christopher Hitchens, is a personal favourite.)

Plenty of others have played the system, with decidedly mixed results. Samsung released a series of videos on YouTube featuring a Saint Bernard named Sam on an aeroplane. The few who actually watched characterised these ads as “lame”, “a stinker” and “zzzzzz”. And though Dove scored big with Evolution, another promo for Dove Cream Oil Body Wash received more than 10,000 comments on YouTube, almost universally negative.

What’s the secret of a campaign like this? “You have to have a light touch and be careful not to act like a guy in his mid-40s trying to be a hipster,” says Pete Healy, the fifty-something Mentos marketer. “It doesn’t smell right.”

This is an edited extract from ‘Viral Loop’ by Adam L Penenberg, (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99). © 2009 Adam Penenberg.

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Adam L Penenberg on what’s next for the virtual economy

One need not be fluent in the lingua franca of social media to realise that Facebook is viral through and through. From the start it grew because each new user begat others, for what’s the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are? Today there are more than 300m Facebookers and it is en route to half a billion.

Facebook not only constantly expands, stacked atop it is a teeming ecosystem of thousands of social networking applications: games, horoscopes and quizzes, apps for business and charity, all of them also viral in nature. With 25m users, one notable Facebook app is the gruesome game Mafia Wars. Users start their own mafia family with their friends, operate crime syndicates and shoot to be the next Godfather.

While the script isn’t all that interesting, the gamemaker Zynga’s revenue scheme is, because it turns bits and bytes into cold hard cash by trading in virtual goods, which yield about half the company’s revenue (advertising is responsible for the other half). Zynga combines free-market capitalism with high-tech killing hardware. Need an assault rifle for your arsenal? Pay Zynga real money and it’s yours. How about a “meat grinder” machine gun, an Easter egg bomb or napalm? Yours, for your next ambush, at a price.

Even more popular is Farmville, enabling its 60m users to buy digital representations of seeds, chickens, eggs, tools and plots of land. (While neither game runs exclusively on Facebook – they are also available on MySpace, Yahoo and over the iPhone – Facebookers form the biggest base of users.)

Don’t laugh. The market for virtual goods is estimated to be about $1bn in the US. It is spawning entire virtual economies, even being funnelled into charitable causes. Zynga released a special “sweet seed” it sold for the equivalent of $5 each, promising to donate half the proceeds to two non-profits in Haiti. Farmville players generated $640,000, with $320,000 going to charity.

These games, like the social networks they sit on, are viral, with each user attracting others to play. They will not only continue to spread, they will become more realistic and it’s not far-fetched to think that one day an alternate economy could arise.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

WSJ: Web Ads Hidden Under Cloak of Invisibility

ADVERTISING

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Web Ads Hidden Under Cloak of Invisibility

By EMILY STEEL

Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial have bought some strange ads on the Internet lately. What's so strange about them is that they're invisible.

The companies might not have known about their invisible display ads—the kind that are supposed to appear alongside content on Web pages—if not for Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies Internet advertising.

Mr. Edelman says his research shows that all three marketers, and many others, have fallen victim to Web sites that use such ads as a way to sell more ad space than they have.

The Web sites can get away with it, he says, because online advertisers don't always audit their campaigns for proof their ads are appearing. It isn't clear how common these ads are or how much they cost marketers.

Mr. Edelman and other Internet-security experts say the ads are created with the use of computer code that makes it look to marketers as though their ads are showing up on legitimate Web sites. But consumers who visit those sites can't see the ads because they have been placed on invisible Web pages.

In one example, visitors to a site called MyToursInfo.com saw an ordinary-looking Web page with one ad for Verizon Communications and another for a weight-loss product. But, Mr. Edelman, who studied the site in January, said software code running behind the scenes opened more than 40 Web pages, each including three ads from marketers such as Domino's Pizza and Capital One, which were invisible to visitors.

Digits

• It's 10 P.M.: Do You Know Where Your Online Ads Are?

Mr. Edelman's analysis of the code was confirmed by computer-security experts at Symantec and McAfee as well as online-ad advisory firms DoubleVerify and Anchor Intelligence.

MyToursInfo.com has since shut down, and efforts to identify its operators were unsuccessful.

Domino's Pizza says it is aware of sites like MyToursInfo.com and is taking steps to protect against them by buying display ads it pays for only when a consumer clicks on them. Capital One said it wasn't familiar with the situation but said it keeps "a close eye" on its online ads.

Verifying that ads appear is an issue that has long plagued traditional media, particularly commercials on local TV stations. But a single online ad campaign can appear on thousands of Web sites, making verification even harder.

Advertisers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get. Over the past, year, an increasing number of scams have sought to take advantage of that pricing system as advertisers have started buying more of their online ads via middlemen called ad networks, instead of directly from the Web sites themselves. These networks sell ad space at cheap rates across thousands of sites, and they don't always weed out illegitimate players.

Several such networks, including Burst Media and Tribal Fusion, sold ads that appeared on the MyToursInfo.com site, Mr. Edelman says, according to his analysis of computer code.

Tribal says MyToursInfo.com isn't included in its network now but can't say whether it was in the past. Burst says MyToursInfo.com was included in its network earlier this year but isn't now part of its network.

The ad networks say they use a combination of high-tech scans and manual processes to ferret out unscrupulous sites.

"Unfortunately, these bad actors are kind of like ants at a picnic. You constantly have to be vigilant," says Chuck Moran, Burst Media's chief marketing officer.

"It is one of the big challenges of running a network," says Toby Gabriner, president of Tribal Fusion. He said his company now is working with Mr. Edelman to help detect possible fraud across its network. Mr. Edelman does similar consulting work for clients including Time Warner's AOL and Microsoft.

Ads are typically rendered invisible by manipulating computer codes called iframes that determine how a Web page appears on a visitor's computer screen. Iframes allow one Web page to be built inside another, the procedure used to make display ads. But, programmers can also make iframes invisible, so that computer users don't see anything contained in them. In the case of the invisible ads, they typically use multiple invisible iframes. In the case of the invisible ads, they typically use multiple invisible iframes.

Mr. Edelman, who trolls the Web for examples of invisible ads, says ads for Kraft Foods and Greyhound Lines recently ended up buried on invisible pages on a site called MyProfilePimp.com, which offers games, photos and other ways for consumers to personalizetheir profile pages on social-networking sites like Facebook. Mr. Edelman says a visit to the site in June opened a series of invisible pages on the visitor's computer with as many as 46 ads. He says none of those ads could be seen.

MyProfilePimp.com declined to comment.

Kraft says it monitors its online ad purchases but wasn't aware of the MyProfilePimp.com ads. "We are looking into it as we would with any other possible violation of our agreements," it said.

Greyhound was similarly unaware of the case and said that the site shouldn't have been included in any of its ad-network buys. A spokeswoman says the bus line is working to "safeguard against fraudulent activity moving forward."

Write to Emily Steel at [email protected]

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