Serendipity Book

Does rolling TV news have a future?

As I sit and watch BBC News 24 it is clear that most of the output is not new news. They are so desperate for content that these two stories make up a large proportion of the 'news' this morning:

1) A package on the north-south divide in obesity ... using vox pops from Easington in County Durham, they are reporting the 'news' that people in the north of Britain are more likely to be obese than those in the South. This is only a rehash of a story from May 2004 which tells us nothing new. Experian are merely trying to get their name out there by rehashing an old study ahead of their demerger from GUS.

2) Using vox pops from outside a Norwich cafe we learn that the council have started offering a very limited WiFi service for free with funding coming from the East of England Development Agency. Maybe they should have focused on the fact that taxpayers money is paying for a service that could easily be provided by the private sector as it is in Milton Keynes (incidentally using newer, better technology than Norwich is now lumbered with).

The Power Of Nightmares

The Power of Nightmares, a fantastic BAFTA award winning documentary completely passed me bywhen it first aired on BBC2 in Autumn 2004. This is just part one, parts two and three can be found on Google Video. The whole documentary can be found at Archive.org

The producer of the series, Adam Curtis, argues that rather than being a clash of ideologies, the War On Terror represents the ascendancy of two very similar ideologies, both of which have their roots in the America of the 1950s: neoconservatism and islamicism.

In looking back he discovered that the progenitors of each of these movements - the American political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the Egyptian revolutionary Sayyid Qutb - had been responding to similar observations. They had both been at American universities just after the Second World War - Strauss as a professor, Qutb as a student - and what they had seen there had convinced them that within American prosperity lay the seeds of its moral destruction.

'Everyone was thinking Truman's America is great and these two completely obscure figures were looking at it, in 1949, and thinking no, there is something wrong with this; they were both pessimists. We now live in a world that is shaped partly by the results of their thinking.'

At the heart of his argument is the proposal that Blair and Bush have, deliberately or not, exaggerated the current danger to give themselves a new connection to their voters. 'The war between good and evil gives them a purpose. Blair has a temperamental sense of imagining the worst. What the films begin to show, though, is that they are protecting us against a myth.'

The Power of Nightmares seeks to overturn much of what is widely believed about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The latter, it argues, is not an organised international network. It does not have members or a leader. It does not have "sleeper cells". It does not have an overall strategy. In fact, it barely exists at all, except as an idea about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Dilbert on Effectiveness

My favourite Dilbert (click the pic for a full size version)

Ad serving tech used to restrict content access

The New York Times has used their ad serving technology to restrict UK residents from access to a story it published yesterday in an attempt to "respect" UK law.

UK residents who who tried to access the story, Details Emerge in British Terror Case are diverted to an information page which reads:

“On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain,” is the message they would have seen. “This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.”

From a NY Times story today explaining their actions:

"Richard J. Meislin, the paper’s associate managing editor for Internet publishing, said the technological hurdle was surmounted by using some of The Times’s Web advertising technology. The paper could already discern the Internet address of users connecting to the site to deliver targeted marketing, and could therefore deliver targeted editorial content as well. That took several hours of programming."

Wired on the Pitchfork Network Effect

Wired has an article on the increasing influence of the Chicago-based indie music review site Pitchfork Media who first turned me on to Yo La Tengo, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene. The reviewers at Pitchfork have directed much of my iTunes experimentation ever since I took the plunge and decided to buy into Apple's DRM a few years ago.

"Though the music industry has seen drastic changes in recent years, what has remained constant is the fact that most listeners still find their music with the assistance of a filter: a reliable source that sifts through millions of tracks to help them choose what they do (and don't) want to hear.

The filters we traditionally depended on – music magazines, radio stations, music video channels, even the recommendations of a trusted record store clerk – have diminished in influence enough to give a player like Pitchfork room to operate.

Pitchfork is a small site: The traffic it draws is too tiny to be measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. But like the indie bands that are its lifeblood, Pitchfork has found its own way to thrive in an industry that is slowly being niched to death: It influences those who influence others."

"The priorities of the mainstream media are to give the audience what they believe they want," says Matthew Perpetua, who writes about indie rock at Fluxblog.org. "Pitchfork goes for things that are not obvious, or aren't on the radar at all. They write about things simply because they're interested in them."

Philips shows off LED fabric

It seems Philips is ready to launch their Lumalive fabric. You can get more of an idea how the technology looks in action from this video demonstration.

"Philips Research intends to impress the visitors at this year’s IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) with a world-first demonstration of promotional jackets and furniture featuring its innovative Lumalive technology. Lumalive textiles make it possible to create fabrics that carry dynamic advertisements, graphics and constantly changing color surfaces."

"Lumalive fabrics feature flexible arrays of colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs) fully integrated into the fabric - without compromising the softness or flexibility of the cloth. These light emitting textiles make it possible to create materials that can carry dynamic messages, graphics or multicolored surfaces. Fabrics like drapes, cushions or sofa coverings become active when they illuminate in order to enhance the observer’s mood and positively influence his/her behavior."

Of course this could go the same way as the global hypercolour t-shirts of the 80s which offered wearers the dubious benefit of being able to communicate to others that you had sweaty armpits.

Technology to fuel your paranoia

Dutch company SpyPhones.com sells 'phones that allow you to spy on your friends, family and colleagues.

Apparently they are perfect for:

"Keeping track of your partner, seeing if you can trust your business partner, listening in to sales talks of your employees, protecting your children and revealing secrets."

And of course, fuelling paranoia.

"These Spyphones look and operate like a normal phone ... but when you call the phone from one special number programmed in the phone the spy phone will be turned into a sophisticated bugging device, allowing you to hear what is going on in the vicinity of the phone."

"The spy phone works like a normal mobile phone and so shows nothing suspicious or unusual to the user. But when called using the special access number the phone answers but does not ring, light up, bleep or anything else. Even the display freezes."

"When a key is touched the Spyphone automatically breaks the connection to prevent suspicion. The phone appears normal and in standby mode. However you can be listening in to everything that is happening and being said in that room or around the target person."

"You can access the phone from anywhere in the world with no range limitations, just dial in and listen. The phone comes in it's original box and with charger, manuals etc. and so could be given as a gift without arousing suspicion."

via GearLog

Backlash against Greenpeace anti-4x4 nannying

The wonderful online political newspaper Spiked linked to this pathetic ad by Greenpeace campaigning against the use of 4x4s in cities.

From Shirley Dent at Spiked:

"Have you ever seen such a petty-minded, dimwitted, teenage-angsty little film? This is bitching dressed up as a serious debate. It is also dripping, you will note, with a kind of loathing for the ‘wrong’ sort of aspirational lifestyle. A Greenpeace press release to accompany the ad says: ‘The advert satirises the aspirational images and glossy marketing used by motor manufacturers to encourage car drivers to purchase an urban 4x4. In the film, a city employee encounters disdain from his fellow employees, but only at the end of the film does the viewer learn why – he owns a city gas guzzler."

"It seems that Greenpeace is somewhat red-faced about the bad reaction to its ad – which might explain why you probably haven’t yet seen it on TV or in a cinema. For all the money spent on making the ad, there is now little mention of it on the main Greenpeace website, and on other green-leaning websites, and the video-sharing site YouTube.com, there is much vocal criticism of Greenpeace. On YouTube, one user says: ‘They hate a man for the car he drives? That shows how loving they are as fellow humans.’ Greenpeace, it seems, has been hoist with its own green petard. I should think so, too."

Notwithstanding the fact that 4x4s are a pretty lame target for Greenpeace's efforts, this is a terrible ad both in strategy and execution. Next time they might want to do more than "take advice from advertising industry insiders" as it says on their press release and actually actually bring an agency in on a pro bono basis to work for them. AdJab puts it well:

"The ad shows a man going about his daily routine at work while his co-workers ignore him, talk behind his back, flip him off, spit in his coffee, and affix a sign to his back that reads, "I am a prick." The man, however, appears to be a perfectly nice and amiable gentleman. In other words, the only people who come off as a-holes are the ones who are all ganging up on this one man. There is nothing in the ad that explains why one shouldn't drive an SUV, and the only impression one is left with is that everyone this man works with is an arrogant jerk. The idea might have worked if the man had some shred of malevolence to him, but he doesn't, and by the end you just feel bad for him, and couldn't care less what he's driving."

More comments on the ad here at Autoblog and here at Treehugger.

BMW Kinetic Sculptures Ad

Powerful ad from BMW celebrating the role of the engineer as innovator.

The ad, created by Ireland/Davenport, features the moving sculptures of the artist Theo Jansen who is scripted as saying "the walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds", before the ad closes with the strapline: "And few have the imagination to see beyond them. BMW. Defining Innovation."

More on the ad here

Vanilla & Magnolia

I love the American use of the word vanilla to denote conventional, plain or boring. I suppose in the UK the equivalent is magnolia or beige, the archetypal representation of bland decoration; the coice of a person who is conservative with a small c and who shows a very limited imagination.

So, I inevitably turn to Jeremy Clarkson for my example of contemporary usage:.

"Vauxhalls have always been my bête noire, because they’ve always been so depressingly dull. Magnolia paint with a tax disc. As appealing and as tasty as warm skimmed milk. As dynamic as someone who’s dead."