MediaSavvy

I’m convinced that reading Ayn Rand at too young an age causes brain damage. For a large part of my life I believed I could have been a libertarian, but my love of liberty made it impossible.

I don’t understand how you can simultaneously believe that the coercive power of democratic government is a potential force for evil that must be reigned in (which I do) and believe that the coercive power of big corporations is a force for good that must be unleashed.

I don’t understand how you simultaneously believe in that the chaos of the Internet is what makes it great (which I do) and believe that deregulating the access monopolies will improve the Internet.

I don’t understand how you can believe the Bill of Rights is the most important part of the Constitution (which I do) and turn our communications, personal information, schools, privacy, and bodies over to entities that are not bound by the first, fourth, or fifth amendments.

I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t believe that an essential function of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

After a week of listening to the NPR/Slate co-production “Day to Day“, I have to say that I don’t get it.

When I first heard the show, I thought, “What is this and why are they doing it?” When I heard the multiple credits to Slate salted throughout the show, things became more clear. NPR already does two or three hours of this kind of stuff, and “Day to Day” just seems forced.

When compared to the freshness of “This American Life”, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, or even “Talk of the Nation”, “Day to Day” reminds me of those clip shows the network magazines make for the airlines.

I suppose it’s a milestone of sorts, as the first online publication repurposed for radio. But if you believe you were put on this earth for a purpose, it’s probably wasn’t for repurposing.

It also makes me realize how far online publishing has to go. It’s still mostly repurposed print material. Individuals are already producing sites that are as exciting as “This American Life”, but with the possible exception of Salon, no one’s doing it on large scale.

Maybe it’s simply beyond the abilities of corporate media to produce anything that lively, intelligent or engaging. But I’d certainly like to see to big media companies use a little more imagination in their online products.

Date.com used to rely on direct email marketing for the bulk of their new users.

Now, it turns out that spam filters are wrecking their marketing efforts:

“A year ago, I would have said e-mail was critical to our business,” said Brad Shapiro, vice president of sales and marketing at the Toronto-based company. “We were sending over 100 million prospecting e-mails a week. But a lot of those e-mails weren’t getting through or the response rates were too low. Now we’re sending out 60% less.”

Let’s face it, nobody is sending out 100,000,000 legitimately-sourced emails a week. These guys are stinking up the Net with spam.

When will the direct marketing industry finally get the message that defending spammers is not in their best interest, and cut sleazeballs like Date.com loose? Using Congress to put the entire nation on opt-out status with every company in the world isn’t going to do them any good if their messages can’t make it through the filters.

It’s hard to believe the following isn’t parody.

The Scion story is interesting. Toyota’s customer base is aging rapidly and their cars don’t appeal to the twenty-somethings depicted in the VW and Mitsubishi ads.

Apparently, these new cars are inexpensive and designed to be cheaply customized. This is a great concept, but the way that they explain it on their site is remarkable for its obscurity.

The overall theme of the site is clumsy double-think: don’t confuse your identity with brands (“In this brand-heavy world…We want to be recognized as unique beings who revel in the freedom of expression. “) and instead express yourself by customizing your Scion ( “the re-appropriation of mass culture…the challenge and the successes of keeping it real”):

In this brand-heavy world,we are constantly inundated with messages about what to wear, where to go and how to be. However,we know that independent thought doesn’t come from picking and choosing an identity from a series of prefab selections. Although we may like some of the individual elements of what’s available, on the whole we would rather be able to mix and match, choose those pieces that support our distinct qualities as independent creatures. We want to be recognized as unique beings who revel in the freedom of expression. SCION (the car company and the magazine) recognizes the value of the individual and the remix, the re-appropriation of mass culture, and it will focus on the struggle, the challenge and the successes of keeping it real.

The idea of the remix has become more common and now can be applied to entire identities, from music to fashion, from technology to art. The lines have been blurred. The opportunity for independence is vital. We are now active participants in the process, tricking out the smallest details, tweaking the characteristics to fit our lifestyles. By changing color palettes, textures and soundscapes, we can be recognized by our peers for who and what we are.

The tragic truth is that modern popular culture is indeed about keeping it real by wearing, drinking and driving what the cool kids are wearing, drinking, and driving.

It seems like every weblog goes through a stage where the blogger’s personal focus changes and the site goes dead for a while…or forever.

I’ve just realized I’ve been absent from MediaSavvy for a couple of weeks. I have been working on a new site that will be in beta in couple of weeks and I lost track of how long it has been since I last posted.

My new site is a community site for the place I live — a distinct community in the San Francisco Bay Area that is poorly served by the local media. I’ve chosen Scoop as the platform because I wanted a site that was focused on discussion and personal experience. A community site for my community.

This should be good for MediaSavvy. The sites I find most useful are those that are about the writer’s real world experience and not simply blogging about what the other bloggers are blogging about.

I’m going to continue to focus on what the current Internet media research is telling us and spouting off about the news, but I’m going to spend more time my personal experience running a community site. It should be good for me and for MediaSavvy.

Responding to uber-libertarian William Safire’s condemnation of media concentration, Arnold Kling says that big media are failing because they have too much competition. I wouldn’t disagree with that. He goes on to say that they should be allowed to fail if they can’t make it in the marketplace. He’s right. And then he says that therefore we shouldn’t stand in the way of media mergers. And he’s dead wrong about that.

Given my view of the causes of the decline of newspapers, broadcast TV, and radio, trying to save those media by preventing mergers is pointless. Big media is failing, not succeeding. As an economist, I say let it fail.

People’s use of media is changing. Newspapers are in a steady decline before they drop off the cliff of an inflection point. The networks are living on borrowed time. The recording industry is circling the wagons. And radio is in chaos.

Yet, none of these media are going away. They’re going to be savagely restructured, find new audiences, dramatically alter their value chains, and generally change into something we can’t even anticipate.

No one is trying to prevent the “failure” of existing media businesses. On the contrary, the fight against media concentration is a fight to preserve a competitive market from becoming an oligopoly of protected franchises.

I’d rather have thousands of individual media outlets desperately seeking new markets and ideas, rather than six big companies struggling to find synergy where none exists by stripping the media of assets and talent, using “convergence” as an excuse for eliminating local production, using the media they own to subsidize their other failing businesses, and generally managing our media as a dying cash cow.

I received a call from my wife’s credit card company (MBNA) yesterday while she was out. The caller wouldn’t say why he was calling because of “confidentiality”.

In the past, the only time a credit card company cites “confidentiality” is if there a problem with the account or the card may be stolen, so I gave her the message. Once she called them back, she discovered that they wanted to sell her a loan.

Not only is MBNA decreasing the likelihood that their customers will respond to legitimate calls about security and account problems, they’re projecting that same problem onto the rest of the industry.

This is an extraordinarily deceptive and self-destructive practice.