“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-14 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Program scripts from week of March 23, 2014
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Staying with Commercials
I’ve talked here before about the fact that most people don’t like commercials. The major exception to that are the Super Bowl ads but beyond that commercials of any kind are something that we try to avoid. With the advent VCRs and then DVRs we no longer had to sit through them on TV. We could just zip through them and we did with increasing frequency. Manufacturers started building that function in, my current DVR has a button that is labeled Commercial Skip. Dish Network offers the Hopper to make it even easier.
None of this makes the TV channels and networks very happy. Their entire business model is built on advertising sales. Companies pay a lot of money for the chance to show their commercial message to the audience. That’s wasted money if that audience is actively able to skip past those messages. Advertising theory says that a consumer needs multiple exposures to the commercial message for it to sink in. That doesn’t work if they just skip on by.
So a variety of networks are trying ways to get us to stick around. One of the first I saw was on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” where they drop in on the talent during the commercial break and give you a taste of what they talk about during the breaks. Sometimes it’s boring but sometimes it’s hysterical. You stick around, just in case.
Sporting events have gone to split screens in some cases. I am a big fan of Formula One racing. They will sometime keep the race in one part of the screen while the rest is given over to the advertising. It’s another approach to getting people to stay where the advertiser can make their pitch.
Recently Fox’s talent franchise “American Idol” combined the two approaches. During commercial break they split the screen (into as many as six boxes at one point!) with the advertising in various boxes but the action live on stage being shown at the same time. It’s an interesting approach to trying to keep the audience that ties into the latest trends in media watching. More and more people are dealing with multiple windows or even screens anyway so that this feels like a natural experience anyway. It’ll be interesting to see if the trend continues to grow.
On the other hand you have the tradition in another of my favorite sports, soccer. Where there are no commercial breaks during the action at all. I’ve always kind of liked that approach.
Relying On Technology
But technology is now not only part of our media life, it’s part of our fashion life, it’s part of our social distinction. Think I’m overstating it? Go into a room of people, ask them who is iPhone and who is Droid and then step back out of the way. We have come to make our technology not only an integral part of our lives but of our identity as well.
The problem in all of this is brought into focus by the recent, probably tragic, story of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. I am seeing increasing numbers of posts from people who are frustrated by the fact that we can’t find the plane. We have come to believe that anything is possible with technology. Hasn’t technology made the world a smaller place? Can’t satellites see everything. Yet that plane has disappeared.
I worry about this reliance on technology. I worry about the generation that is being raised to be dependent on technology. The one comfortable with a GPS but is a little lost with a paper map.
Technology is fun and it enables us to do many more things than we could have done a decade ago. But have we let technology do too much for us?
Sometimes the power is going to go off, sometimes you’ll be in an area where there is no service, sometimes you just might find yourself in a room with a bunch of people that you can’t just mute.
We still don’t know what happened on that flight. We may never know. But it can give us the chance to consider the role that we have allowed technology to have in our lives. If your various devices all went black tomorrow, what would you do?
And what does that say about who is really in control of your life?
This is a little earlier than usual for my advance look at summer movies but this never ending winter weather is making me look for any way to think warm thoughts.
Of course we still have two months before the summer months of June through August arrive. Between now and then there are some big movies headed our way like the next Captain America (which opens next week), and the next in the reboot version of the Amazing Spiderman. Plus we get Angelina Jolie as the Disney villain Maleficent in the movie of the same name.
But let’s talk summer!
There’s the usual boatload of sequels – 22 Jump Street, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Transformers 4, Think Like A Man Too, the reboot version of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and The Purge-Anarchy.
Summer time is a great time for the action fan and the science fiction fan and this year it runs true to form. Look for the second (and wholly unrelated) Hercules movie of the year, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, some new Marvel superheroes in Guardians of the Galaxy, Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow, Jupiter Ascending from the folks that brought you the Matrix movies, plus two that might slip under your radar because they don’t sound like they belong in this category but they do – “The Congress” and “The Giver”.
For the kiddies check out “Hero of Color City” which is about the adventures of a band of crayons and for the Young Adult crowd there is “The Fault in Our Stars” and “Earth to Echo” which is about teenagers getting strange messages on their cell phones. I’ll let you fill in your own punchline on that one.
Two musicals – Clint Eastwood directing “Jersey Boys” and a new version of “Annie” with Quvenzhané Wallis (from Beasts of the Southern Wild) in the title role and Jamie Foxx in the Daddy Warbucks role.
Looking for laughs there will be “Let’s Be Cops” (which is about exactly what it sounds like), a roadtrip comedy called “Tammy”, “Obvious Child”, “Can A Song Save Your Life” (which is a terrible title) and Daniel Radcliffe in “What If”.
Round it out with some bio pics (one of Yve St. Laurent and the other on the Godfather of Soul, James Brown) plus a whole lot of movies you’ll probably never see or hear of and it should be some fun time at theaters.
Now if we can just get the weather to cooperate.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Stories Are My Life 
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