Cannot be unseen. Check out the rest of the pics at Geekosystem.
Filed under Film and Television …
The Link Between Tv Viewing and Income
Some days ago I read a blog post from The Story’s Story that inferred that one of the reasons the 99 per centers are 99 per centers is because they watch too much Television. I thought that to be an interesting premise and wondered how much truth there was to it. I did what every well meaning net citizen would do: I asked the internet about it.
I first thought about the Q and A website Quora since I’ve seen many great questions and answers there. It was the first question I have asked there, and perhaps that’s the reason, but I only got one answer and it was to tell me that there wasn’t any info on the General Society Survey website that linked the two things. I did search for a bit and found that the average amount watched was 2 to 3 hours. That survey though was up to 2006. The Nielsen numbers are more current, which is an average of 4 to 5 hours.
Since on Quora the question didn’t gain any traction, I went to Ask MetaFilter. Now that’s a rich Q and A community. I received a total of 11 answers and they were all useful and insightful. A lot of them pointed me to surveys and studies. Actual PDF documents like the American Time Use Survey and the Annenberg study.
Of note was the finding that low income families are more likely to have a Tv in their children’s bedroom than higher income families and that higher income people are more likely to go out to dinner and do more outdoor activities in their leisure time.
Of course, as a MetaFilter commenter pointed out, if we’re just talking about the US and not globally, it will be a completely different picture. There are places in the world were people can’t afford a Tv and there’s simply no infrastructure to transmit broadcast signals.
The reason this whole topic has resonated with me is because I’m struggling with it. I’ve been trying to cut down not just my Television viewing but all my media consumption. The motivation was by reading The Information Diet book, which is a book I highly recommend.
Correlation is not causation, and I mentioned this first as a warning, and because perhaps subconsciously I was wishing it to be a causation. People don’t get rich because they watch less Tv. They watch less Tv because they’re rich. The poor, (poorer than the upperclass) aren’t poor because they watch a lot of Tv. They just watch a lot Tv because they’re poor.
So what did I learn? It’s easy to infer that there is a strong correlation by looking at other studies, but until a study is done that links the two data points, we can only infer. Reason and logic will bring you to that conclusion. If you spend most of your time on some passive activity that distracts you from other activities you could be doing, you’re not going to accomplish many things in life. And you’re definitely not going to make any money while sitting on the couch flipping channels. You might be entertained, culturally enlightened by watching Mad Men, and even theoretically learning something by watching PBS, but you will still be not doing something. To reference and paraphrase Clay Shirky in a different context, the problem with Television is that it doesn’t have a mouse or a keyboard.
“Premakes” Up! (1965) – YouTube
What if the Pixar film Up was made in 1965 by Disney.
Does Time Spent Watching TV Correlate with Income Potential?
Over at The Story’s Story, Jake Seliger argues that the 99%’s are the 99% because they watch too much Television and is surprised that time spent watching Tv is not considered a factor when speaking about income equality/inequality. Seliger writes:
In all of the contemporary reports and newspaper accounts and blog posts about income equality, I’ve never seen TV consumption mentioned. To me TV consumption is astonishing and might also be linked to Americans’ larger economic problems—I can’t imagine that most successful, people who earn a lot of money watch anything like four hours of TV a day, because where would they get the time? I also doubt TV probably isn’t imparting the skills and knowledge that future high earners need to be high earners. It could be that I’m succumbing to the availability bias and assuming that the high earners I know are representative, but the fact itself still amazes.
It’s a valid argument and I can see how time spent watching Tv can correlate with income. If you spend less time watching Tv, you will probably use that free time learning something new, thus having an earning potential there. However, the problem I see with the premise that people’s income is correlated with time spent watching Tv is that you can say that about any activity, or any type of media consumption. People could be richer if they bought and read less books, listened to less music, or watched less movies. They could create more stuff if they consumed less stuff.
There has to be a definite link between Tv viewing, the bad kind of Tv viewing, and your ability to accomplish a goal, be it a financial goal or just learning a new skill. Even today with the web and social media, Tv is the strongest time sucking medium there is. I want to agree completely with Seliger, but again, you can blame anything else that is distracting you from doing something productive. I advocate for the same thing Seliger is advocating though. There should be more studies on yearly incomes compared to time watching Tv.
The Uncanny Valley
The Technium: Beyond the Uncanny Valley
I thought The Uncanny Valley was something that the writers of 30 Rock came up with. But it’s actually a thing. A real thing. In that 30 Rock episode Tracy Jordan is trying to make a pornographic video game, but it’s told by Frank that it can’t be done because of the Uncanny Valley: when fake things look a bit too real and start freaking us out. Tracy manages to get beyond the Uncanny Valley in that episode, but that’s fiction. Kevin Kelly argues in his post that the movie Tin Tin may have just cracked it.
In the first few minutes of the Tin Tin, there is a momentary hesitation when you first see the face of the characters; a feeling they are just a bit shy of something. But that moment passes quickly and thereafter the humans (and animals) seem totally real. Their movements, skin texture, hair, expressions, eyes, everything says they are real — even though they are only simulations. It helps that the environments are also 100% believable, including the elements of water, weather, atmosphere, sand, and city.
I’ve only seen the trailers for Tin Tin and think it still looks a bit too creepy.
Netflix to add Original Series
Netflix original series Lillyhammer debuts february 2012 | Geekosystem
Looks promising.
Netflix’s first foray into the realm of original content will kick off this coming February with a new series called Lilyhammer, about a New York gangster trying to make a new start in Lillehammer, Norway. The new show is billed as a fish-out-of-water series, starring former Soprano’s mainstay (and E Street Band guitarist) Steven Van Zandt.
Be sure to check out the trailer.
Hacksploitation
A couple of days ago I sat down to watch Hackers on Netflix. I missed that movie when it came out in 95 and was curious on why it’s considered a cult movie. I can see the appeal and the reason why it’s considered a cult movie. It’s campy, rebellious, and Angelina Jollie wears leather. But it’s cult for all the bad reasons that a movie is considered cult. It’s not an underappreciated movie that was too ahead of its time. Let’s just say this one is cult because only a cult would be crazy enough to champion it.
When I finished watching it I was terribly disappointed. But more than disappointed, I had complex feelings about it. I felt sad and angry. I got all worked up and drove my wife crazy talking about computers in movies. The question that kept coming up is, “Has there been any movie about computers, or computer culture, that’s been fair?”. Note that I’m not asking if there’s been any that have been good or bad. But just fair. This question drove me to do some research. Meaning doing some Google searches and reading Wikipedia entries.
Hacksploitation
When Roger Ebert reviewed Hackers back in 95, he cited Andy Ihnatko’s impression of the film:
“Hackers wasn’t even in theaters before attacks on it started online. It represents a new genre, “hacksploitation,” Mac expert Andy Ihnatko grumbled on CompuServe, adding that like a lot of other computer movies it achieves the neat trick of projecting images from computer screens onto the faces of their users, so that you can see graphics and data crawling up their chins and breaking over their noses.”
This Hacksploitation term encapsulates it perfectly and it starts to answer part of my question. Think for a moment of movies that deal with computers. With the exception of You’ve Got Mail, which was a giant AOL advertisement, computer users are either hackers, or are either hackers. That’s not a typo. They’re dangerous people and can destroy civilization as we know it.
The list of movies about the computer world are either thrillers or science fiction. That’s actually a good definition of a Hacksploitation movie: Blurs the line between a thriller and sci-fi film. Another and even better definition could be: A movie that gives homage to the computer culture but sadly getting everything totally wrong about how computers work.
In the 80′s we had WarGames and Tron. If you were into computers, these movies were the best thing ever. A hacker almost starting World War III? That’s totally boss. Tron was like a PBS special on computer programming that used special effects to give give visual analogies.
But in the 90′s it’s when it really started getting weird and exploity. We had Lawnmower Man, Jonny Mnemonic, Hackers, The Net, and The Matrix. Three of those came out in 95. The Net, were Sandra Bullock plays the most unbelievable hacker in the world, looking more like she should be hosting The View, almost felt out of the Hacksploitation category until the floppy made the screen flash different images and made rapid swoosh sounds.
(The made for TV film, Pirates of Silicon Valley, could be included, but it’s more of a documentary. I wouldn’t classify it as Hacksploitation. That’s just a great and underappreciated film about the industry.)
The problem with these movies is not that they were bad or good. It’s just how wrong it got the computer stuff. The flashing code blown up in 3D so you could understand how they hacked. The totally bananas user interfaces. The stereotypes, which were really off the mark stereotypes. (Raver look?!) They had an agenda and the agenda was that computers and computer people are trouble.
It’s perfectly understandable. In those two decades, (80′s and 90′s) if you told someone that you were a computer programmer or just worked with computers, people couldn’t help to picture someone from Revenge of the Nerds. Even in the mid to late 90′s, computers and the internet was still this fringe activity. It wasn’t completely understood that computers were simply tools to make things.
So we get to the new millennium. The internet finally explodes. Blogging, social networking, and all that stuff starts happening. Computers are understood more as devices to create and consume media, than to code and hack. You would think Hollywood would know better. But they come out with Swordfish and Antitrust. Don’t get me wrong, Swordfish was badass, but it’s still a Hacksploitation film. In the oughts the films got more sophisticated: Firewall and Live Free or Die Hard are two that come to mind. It remains to be seen how would they hold up, but compared to films like The Net, they’re not as embarrassing.
There is a glint of hope though. In Fincher’s The Social Network we are finally given a straight up, raw computer nerd. Fake Mark Zuckerberg. This film had to address computers and web culture. That was a big part of the story. But it does so fairly in a non-dramatic way. Non-dramatic to a fault even. With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were getting another hacker, a goth-punk-new-raver something that happens to know a lot about computers. I haven’t seen the Fincher film, but I saw the Swedish version, and the most computer-y thing I remember the lead character doing is transferring jpgs on a Mac.
Circling back to the conflicting feelings, the “good thing” is that a movie like Hackers would never be made again. People no longer think that computers are creepy, or hard to understand. But that’s also the “bad thing”. I’m not so sure if kids would be as inspired to get into computers by watching fake Zuckerberg creating a social network, than how probably Broderick’s character in WarGames hacking into military computers inspired thousands.
The irony of it all is that the only people who could truly love these films, or equally hate them, are the same people they’re exploiting. The geeks, the nerds, and the jackals. Hacksploitation is dead. Long live hacksploitation.
Fox News and Fried Chicken
Information Diet | Fox News and Fried Chicken
Fox News is a lot like fried chicken. We all know it’s terrible for us, but we eat it because it tastes so good.
Free Sampler of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo Soundtrack
Speaking of David Fincher, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross finished up the soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo, Fincher’s new film based on the Craig Larson novels. You can pre-order the soundtrack and the free sample here.
The 8 minute trailer for the film is pretty engrossing too.
David Lynch Keeps his Head [22]
Lost Highway Article – Premiere Sept. 96
David Foster Wallace spends some time on the set of David Lynch’s Lost Highway. He never gets to interview the movie director, but he’s probably the only one who could explain the Lynchian ethos.
