Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com

Author: Vin

When the Doom of Mass Media Became Apparent

Vin

Digital Deliverance Newsletter #4: Clear Evidence Existed 20 Years Ago Websites Won’t Compensate for Print Edition Losses When is a strategy recognized as disastrous? How long must its obvious devastation be experienced until it is called what it so clearly is? How much sheer volume of perennially negative data does it take to alert reasonably intelligent executives to the factual reality that they’ve executed a strategy which has become catastrophic? Indeed, if a strategy has already failed for over a quarter century, how much longer until the executives who maintain it escape what otherwise appears to be a zombie-like condition in which they thoughtlessly stagger towards their doom? In the cases of Mass Media executives, perhaps never. They executed a disastrous strategy for adapting to the changes wrought by the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment. They’ve hoped this strategy would at least reap revenues from online that are even greater than those which their printed products or broadcast services generated at the start of the 21st Century or at least compensated for any losses they incurred as consumers shifted media consumption habits to online rather than those traditional products and services. What they hoped clearly hasn’t occurred despite more than a quarter century elapsing. Yet rather than change, or even significantly alter this failed strategy, they mindlessly continue it despite its disastrous effect upon their industries. After all, why change course, even at the last minute, when you instead can go down with the ship? I refer to what I term the ‘shovelware strategy’. The Mass Media industries simply shoveled onto websites the contents of their printed products and broadcast services. These industries hoped that consumers would use these websites the same ways (i.e., as frequently and deeply) as consumers had used their printed products and broadcast services during the 20th Century. Compounding that hope, the industries likewise shoveled onto these websites their theories, doctrines, business models, and traditional practices of Mass Media Newspapers were the first sector of these industries to implement the shovelware strategy. They encountered personal computer-mediated technologies during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of news ticker scrolls in videotext; then as textual news stories in teletext experiments during the late 1970s through the 1980s; then in the form of third-party proprietary online services from then until 2000. When the Internet opened for public usage and the first multimedia […]

The Hallmark Flaw of the Mass Media

Vin

Ask historians to say when the Industrial Era began and they will cite dates in the 18th or 19th centuries when a factory powered by hydraulics or steam engine was first constructed in their nation. I think they’re wrong. The start of the Industrial Era shouldn’t be defined by what powered mechanisms of mass production, but by the invention of such a mechanism itself. In approximately 1454, the entrepreneurial metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press: the world’s first mass production device. Prior to Gutenberg, books were rarities, affordable only by the church or the rich. A typical scribe or monk in a scriptorium could copy by hand two to four pages daily, laboriously producing a simple book in three to six months. If the book was also ‘illuminated’ with illustrations or decorations, it could take up to three years. Gutenberg’s press used metal type characters that were set in a mirror-image analog of the page to be printed. This was then inked and pressed onto paper. A two-man team operating the press lever or crank could imprint hundreds of pages daily, enough to produce hundreds of books per month, more than a lifetime’s production by a scribe or monk. The societal effects of Gutenberg’s press are often cited as ending the Middle Ages and beginning the Modern Era. This first mass production device fundamentally improved how human beings distribute, store, and trust information. Nearly half a millennium later, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of wireless broadcasting markedly extended the immediacy and reach of information. He converted electrical teletype signals into analog electromagnetic waves of radiation that could be instantly received across huge distances. The later additions of microphones and photovoltaic sensors and cathode receiver tubes resulted in radio and television. From these analog production and distribution technologies of the Industrial Era arose the theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices that are now colloquially known as the Mass Media. Their industries globally generate US$3 trillion in gross revenues annually. The Present Since the mid-1990s, the Mass Media industries have created online versions of their Industrial Era products and services ‘converged’ into multimedia websites or ‘streaming’ services. The industries hoped that consumers and advertisers would utilize the websites the same way (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as consumers had printed products or broadcast services during the 20th Century. The industries hoped that the same Industrial Era business models would […]

Bezos & Bogeymen

Vin

Don’t Get Distracted from the Existential Problem In 1998 when I first began questioning if the Mass Media industries would have a future, the senior vice president of marketing at largest daily newspaper in Texas tried to reassure me, “People have been using newspapers for centuries, so we expect they will for centuries more.” What immediately crossed my mind was that horses had been a prime means of transportation for millennia, so people living 100 years ago probably thought this meant that horses would still be a prime means of transportation in future centuries, too. How wrong they were! Within 30 years of 1898, horses had disappeared as a prime means of transportation in most developed nations. Not just in Texas! Last week in this newsletter’s first edition, I stated that its focus is the existential threat now confronting the Mass Media industries as the Industrial Era wanes and the Informational Era dawns. What is this threat? Is it truly existential? Or am I being over-dramatic or otherwise hyperbolic? No, I can justify what I here state. Twenty years ago, the Mass Media industries was riding high. Many of those industries announced recorded earnings during the first half-decade of the new millennium. Although the ‘Great Recession’ then struck, those industries reasonably expected to restore and resume those record earnings soon afterward. However, that didn’t happen. Since 2007, almost all sectors of the Mass Media industries have seen plummeting audiences (i.e,. readership, listenership, or viewership); advertising clienteles; and gross revenues (turnover) when such numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation. Some of the declines have been spectacular, an example of which I’ll describe below and in subsequent newsletters. Starting next week, I’ll likewise write about he categorical reasons for these declines. However, in this second edition of the Digital Deliverance newsletters, let’s focus on the proximate reason why the Mass Media industries are not only in rapid decline but actually in danger of extinction, a tangible problem already creating troubling societal effects. What is this existential threat? Some myopic pundits call it the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem. During the past 30 years, literally billions of consumers worldwide have begun using personal computer-mediated technologies, rather than printed products or broadcast services, as their primary means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information. Yet during that time, the Mass Media industries unfortunately haven’t been unable to devise a business model or models […]

The ‘Threat’ of Chinese Auto Manufacturers

Vin

The last hútòng (胡同) I explored was in the year 2000, in the southern suburbs of Beijing. Many of its residents still wore drab green or grey uniform ‘Mao’ suits. A hútòng is a neighborhood of streets and narrow alleys separating blocks of one- or two-story traditional Chinese multi-family houses containing common courtyards. You’ll rarely find a hútòng in any populous city in China. During the past quarter century — yes, it’s been that long, most hútòngs have been razed and replaced by towering modern apartment blocks. Hundreds of thousands of hútòngs gone. During that time, China’s economy has advanced 600%; 850 million of China’s  1.4 billion people were lifted above the poverty line,  and by 2030 (only four years) it is predicted by Western analysts that 27% of Chinese adults with have college educations — that same percentage as Germans. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has grown 310% since 2000, the number Americans living under the poverty line has increase from 12.2% to 15.9%, and literacy has dropped to 79% to 80% — meaning that one out of every five Americans struggles to read, 21% are functionally illiterate, and half of the population reads at no better than a sixth-grade level (an 11 to 12-year old level). These declines have demonstratively shifted American politics. In the nearly four decades 1988, only two Republicans have won the White House: George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Thoughtful, probative, and politically experienced Republican nominees as Robert Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost elections. Starting in 2008 to compensate, the Republican party largely stopped campaigning about policies that compete with those of Democrat candidates and began competing about what it calls ‘cultural’ ‘ issues: the Starbucks coffee chain no longer printing ‘Merry Christmas’ on its cups, Barack Obama wearing a brown suit, there being ‘transgendered’ athletes (perhaps hundreds of them within a nation of more than 300 million people!) competing in scholastic athletic games, about immigrants allegedly eating natives’ pets, wind turbines allegedly causing cancer, scientifically-proven human-caused climate change being a ‘hoax’, alleged Jewish ‘space lasers’ causing forest fires, about the 66% of Americans who are Christians allegedly being discriminated against by the majority of Americans, and other dingbat conspiracy theories and what I call ‘conservative twinkie’ issues that rile the gullible and illiterate among Americans into voting for whomever deceitfully utters such lies. Hence, a minority of American voters (i.e., slightly under […]

Shooting Immersive Videos

Vin

Join my wife and I in a video experiment: I’ve lately begun creating ‘immersive videos.’ For example, this one from aboard a tourist cruise on the Bosporus. After being trained in still photography 50 years ago (i.e., 1973-1976 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, back then sometimes known as ‘Kodak’s Photo School’, I mostly switched to videography two years ago. Moreover, I’ve now begun experimenting with immersive videos, what some people call ‘360 video’ but (to describe it more accurately) shoot video 360-degrees in all directions. For example, if you’re viewing this 31-minute video, you’ll probably be able to experience what I mean by immersive. This technology was initially created for viewing in Virtual Reality googles. However, it can also be used with goggle the way this video demonstrates: My wife and I had some spare time during October while in Istanbul, so we boarded a tourist cruise boat on the Bosporus shortly before sunset (scroll the video ahead until its last quarter.) My first experience with this cutting-edge of video actually began nine years ago when while teaching postgraduate New Media Business I purchase a Samsung Gear 360 camera. Resembling a white tennis ball atop a tiny tripod, the Gear 360 camera could capture immersive still photos and immersive video. Unfortunately, its videos and still photos were only in HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels) and viewable only via Samsung’s special software. By contrast, this 4K-resolution (3840 x 2160) video was shot with a pole-mounted DJI Osmo 360 camera which is the size and shape of a cigarette pack. (If the quality of this video isn’t 4K when you view it, click the YouTube ‘gear’ icon and switch to a higher resolution version.) What I like about shooting immersive video is that had I missed something interesting that occurred behind, atop, or under me after I finished shooting the video, I can later edit the video as if I had intended to capture that occurrence. I also like immersive videos because these allow the viewer the ability to anything and everything that occurs around the camera. While in Istanbul, I also shot immersive videos while walking through that city’s famous bazaars. I also shot some inside mosques in Istanbul and later Cairo. I post some of those here in the coming weeks.

Click Singing in Xhosa

Vin

Yesterday, I posted the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa singing Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody in the Isizulu language, and I noted that language’s click consonants which are common to Bantu languages but virtually unknown in Indo-European or East Asia languages. Enjoy this six-minute video of South African singer Siki Jo-Ann singing in Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in that nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent. It starts with a two-minute humorous skit between a white South African and a black South African joking about those clicks. Siki Jo-Ann enters at the two and one-half minute mark, singing the clicks of Xhosa.

Zulu Queen

Vin

And why not Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody sung in Isizulu by the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa? isiZulu (note the lower-case initial i) is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in, and indigenous to, Southern Africa. It’s one of the Republic of South Africa’s official language, spoken by a quarter of that nation’s population, and was the native language of Nelson Mandela. I first heard it during 2009 while working at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. You’ll hear in it some of the click consonants common to Bantu languages, a common sound unheard of in Indo-European or the languages of East Asia. (Tomorrow, I think that I’ll post a video clip of Siki Jo-Ann who sings in the Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in the nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent.)

Stop Acting Like This is Normal

Vin

Four weeks after one-time convicted felon Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor and 92 years before the 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump‘s second inauguration as President of the United States, and four weeks after Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor, Dutch pyromaniac Marinus van der Lubbe, set afire the German Reichstag parliament building. Arriving at the scene in Berlin, Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and during the following day triggered the German ‘Enabling Act‘, emergency legislation that suspended not only the homeless German legislature but also suspended freedoms of speech, assembly, and other civil rights throughout Germany. He alone became the absolute dictator of that nation. German freedoms and civil rights wouldn’t begin to be restored until a dozen years later when conquering Allied troops seized Berlin from the Nazis. Hitler, a felon who in 1923 fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he served prison time, had better initial luck than Trump, now a convicted American felon who four years ago fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he is unpunished and on the loose, seized the Reichstag fire as excuse to gain a dictatorship. So, Trump has concocted an ’emergency,’ claiming that a Venezuelan-based drug cartel has ‘invaded’ the U.S. He fraudulently (he is, after all, a convicted fraud) claims that this permits him to trigger the little-known Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, which permits a U.S. president to deport, without trial or judicial hearing, foreigners who he believes are a threat to the nation. The Enemy Aliens Act was controversial 227 years ago, nonetheless today. Although federal courts have now blocked Trump’s implementation of the Enemy Aliens Act, he nevertheless has used it as a lynchpin to seize more dictatorial control of the nation than any president during the past 80 years or more. In this 19-minute video podcast, American political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein compares American citizen’s slow reactions to Trump increasingly dictatorial seizure of power as akin to the metaphor of frogs who don’t yet realize that they are being fatally boiled because of how gradually the heat is being applied; how so accustomed they have become to the gradually increasing danger until the realization of dangers comes too late. He issues an alarm, an alarm call to America to stop acting as if MAGA politics is normal.

Welcome to the 21st Century: the Bulletproof Volvo

Vin

Stuck in traffic? Worried about those other drivers or pedestrians? For decades, Volvos has been renowned for automotive safety in case of collisions. Yet why not purchase a Volvo armored against terrorists, MAGA cultists (i.e., we know they don’t purchase Volvos), and psychopathic citizens? Yes, to fit your modern lifestyle, you too can purchase a large family SUVs XC60 and XC90 with bulletproof protective armoring. These vehicles, now available from any Volvo dealers, are ballistically certified to NIJ IIIA standards in combination with VPAM 2009, the extensive 360° armoring can help protect all occupants in the event of a security threat. Available in both electric and hybrid gasoline/electric versions, these cars are available both to private and corporate customers.