“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. 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 moment’s 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 2013-16 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 7, 2016
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.
Your Best Interest at Heart
There’s a big fight going on right now that I’m betting most of us don’t know anything about. Even though you and I are sitting right in the crosshairs of the dispute. And everyone involved claims that they are looking out for our best interests.
Late last year the Federal Communications Commission began to move towards changing the rules that govern what is called the “set top box” that we get from our cable and satellite providers. The name is left over from the days when big tube TVs offered a nice flat shelf on top where you could rest the cable box. I remember vividly the feeling that I had moved into the latest technology when I could see the box instead of the rabbit ears controlling the television I was watching.
What the Feds are proposing will make it easier for us to watch pretty much all the programming we are paying for not only on our TVs but also our smartphones and other mobile devices. Imagine taking your cable box and combining it with something like a Roku, so you could watch both pay-TV and online video. As with any change in the business environment that has launched an argument.
The folks in favor of the new regs claim that you and I will benefit from greater competition among programming providers and that will lower costs. Google is a big supporter as are some consumer groups like Public Knowledge and some big media companies like the New York Times.
The folks on the other side, like the cable companies, are claiming to have our best interests at heart as well. Their stated concern has to do with privacy issues. The claim here is that our viewing preferences would now be lumped in with all the other information about us that is flowing to Big Data. It should also be noted that current box regulations result in some twenty billion dollars of rental revenue that might be threatened. Interestingly, the folks at AT&T are already offering a privacy upgrade for their services, at a modest up charge.
The privacy issue does raise some concerns for me. What may be of even greater concern is the ongoing discussion of just how far the FCC’s legal arms reach. While they have traditionally held sway in broadcast media, this would require a much wider authority than was envisioned in their founding legislation.
With the appropriate privacy controls, this could, in fact, be an interesting change for the viewing audience. At the same time, the cable industry has a point about the federal regulatory agency’s powers.
This might be a good time for a careful examination of all sides of the issue before we rush into something.
RIP Father of E-mail
Sometimes you begin looking at one story but end up finding another. In this past week, the announcement came of the death of Ray Tomlinson, the man often credited as the father of e-mail. That seemed a pretty obvious story for this program. What I discovered was that plain, old, boring e-mail was anything but.
As with many technological breakthroughs, Tomlinson’s work was built on the foundation of those who went before him. Working with the predecessor of today’s Internet, known as Arpanet, Tomlinson wanted to find a more efficient way to send messages. While there had been ways to send messages over computer networks dating back to 1961, they could only send messages within their immediate system. Computers in those days were massive machines with a limited number of input terminals. It made sending messages both difficult and expensive. What Tomlinson did is still in use in use today. He set up the system that uses that a with a circle around it, the @ symbol, as a way of “addressing” the message. There were many other innovations that followed but it was Ray Tomlinson that created the basic system of e-mail as we know it today.
Tomlinson studied electrical engineering at both Rensaleer Polytechnic Institute and MIT and spent his career working in the computer technology field. His innovative work has been recognized many times, including by both his alma maters.
That’s the story I thought I would find. What surprised me is the vehemence of the arguments over who the real father of e-mail is. As I said, what we know today as e-mail came from the work of many people. Tomlinson’s work remains a linch pin for it all. I was also surprised to discover that e-mail, which derives from the earlier “electronic mail”, hasn’t always referred specifically to what we think of as “e-mail” today. Once upon a time, it referred to any mail type communication delivered over an electronic medium. So in the early 1970’s you can find discussions of “electronic mail” that are talking about faxes.
Ray Tomlinson’s death comes at a time when e-mail is in something of a decline. Texting is supplanting both e-mails and even phone calls. It’s an interesting side note of history that unlike Samuel Morse’s historic first telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?”, the very first e-mail is forgotten. In an interview a few years ago, Tomlinson admitted he didn’t even remember what it was. Only that it was a simple series of letters with no meaning, and that, after he told a colleague of the successful transmission, being told to not talk about it since it wasn’t the project they were supposed to be working on.
Ray Tomlinson was 74 years old.
Facebook at Work
I have mentioned before that I am a fan of Facebook. That’s not always the “cool” or “media sophisticated” position to take but I’ve had far more positives connected with it than negative (the current political season perhaps to one side). It’s allowed me to re-connect with old friends, stay connected with family and make friends with people far, far away. At the same time, I understand that it can be an enormous time suck. From an employer’s point of view, that can be a productivity sinkhole.
So I was interested when I began to see stories about the move by Facebook into what is called “enterprise application software”. If you don’t know the term, it simply means software or apps designed for organizations rather than individuals. It was an arena that Mark Zuckerberg and his minions had studiously avoided prior to last year. Now they are rolling out a product called “Facebook at Work”.
Right off the bat, my thoughts were “God, what a terrible name”. I mean, we’ve all been using Facebook at work for years. Right up until the boss catches you or the IT department blocks it. My bet is that the name will be changed in the next year. It just doesn’t sound like a serious piece of business productivity.
Beyond that Facebook is playing off of the almost universal familiarity of their interface. The goal is to function as internal communication for a company. Companies have used internal nets (called intranets) for years. Facebook at Work brings those into the social media world.
You get profiles, newsfeeds, groups and messaging. The profiles function will be great for big companies to identify just who is sending you today’s batch of nonsense. The newsfeed becomes a rolling ticker of work and information. Messaging may become a serious threat to corporate e-mails. But it’s the group function that strikes me as potentially the most troublesome.
Groups come in three flavors – open, closed and secret. The first two are just like groups in the current Facebook. The third are unsearchable and invite only. If you have ever worked in an organization with a gossip problem, the concept of secret groups will surely send a shiver down your spine. All that interoffice poison will be given their own private, protected reserve to boil, bubble and stir up trouble. I’m not sure what their business value really is. Surely the bosses can find better ways to communicate.
Facebook at Work is starting to get some traction. It picked a thirty-six thousand person company in Scandinavia just a week or so ago.
But seriously, they need to think of a better name.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2016
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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