“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 May 2, 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.
Media Humanity
It is very easy to think of the media as a “thing”, inanimate technology. When it does what we want, it’s “Big Hero Six” and when it does something that we don’t want, it’s SkyNet. The media is a service which we consume, not something that we need to be concerned about in any human manner.
Yet the reality is that all media is fundamentally human. It is human beings that use the technology to bring their creations; music, movies, stories; into our lives. The problem becomes when we begin to lose the idea of the humanity that underpins all of the media. When we begin to treat those people who create the content as things as well.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, although my feeling is that it’s increasing. There’s a classic story from forty years ago or so about a famous soap opera actress who played the villain on her show. The one who broke up marriages and stabbed people in the back. One day she was walking down the street when a woman ran across the street, confronted her and slapped her. All because of what the character was doing on the show.
Recently it has actress and comedian Amy Schumer who has run into the same thing. While in Greenville, South Carolina, Schumer went out for some exercise. While she was jogging a man ran up to her and, according to Schumer’s version of the story, demanded a photo with her. She told him no, he persisted telling her in effect that the public owned her. The man in question claims that he did it in a non-threatening way, despite the fact that Schumer clearly felt threatened. Inevitably, he is getting some unwanted attention himself as fans of the comedian are harassing him online in utterly inappropriate fashion.
Being a celebrity is a careful balancing act. There is a certain amount of privacy that is surrendered in return for putting your creation out in the media. Performers who forget the debt they owe to fans for their success get burned. At the same time, these performers are still human beings. They have a right to go about their regular day to day lives without the constant insertion of their fans into those lives. If the man in question had simply taken a photo of Schumer jogging down the street he would have completely within his legal rights. By demanding a personal interaction, one that Amy Schumer did not want, he stepped over the boundary. She was no longer a person but a thing.
In the end, all human beings, including those in the media, deserve to be treated with respect.
Butting Butt Heads
One of my least favorite television games was on a week or so ago. It’s a form of reality TV. In this case, it’s a form of really annoying reality that I wish TV would stop doing.
We are a long time Dish Network family. A couple weeks ago the announcements started. The ones threatening the sudden disappearance of channels because of the failure to negotiate a new deal between the content providers and the satellite system. In this case, it was the Viacom channels that were going to go away because Viacom, according to Dish, wasn’t playing fair. Viacom was running ads that claimed it was all the fault of Dish Vader. As it turns out, we don’t watch a single Viacom network in our house, so it was doubly annoying since I didn’t care if they didn’t come to a meeting of the minds.
This basically happens on an annual basis. Some cable or satellite provider begins threatening to dump some channel, could be the local channel or a bunch of affiliated networks, and the networks or channels talk about being bullied. It’s boring and it’s stupid. Without content, the providers are pretty much non-existent and with the almost total demise of an over the air viewing audience, the content providers need the service providers. My advice, as always, is grow up and make a business decision.
In 2014, a smaller service provider actually bit the bullet and simply dropped Viacom. That’s not a model they want to see repeated. But here’s the other side of that coin. Cord-cutting continues to be a growing thing. The end of satellite and cable is not immediately forthcoming but there is a new piece of news that should be of growing concern for the service providers.
According to a new survey, there are now more houses with internet connected TVs or streaming devices than there are households with cable or satellite boxes. In 2010, twenty percent of households had such a device. In 2013, it jumped to forty-four percent. The current number is sixty-five percent. Some service providers are taking notice. Comcast has announced that Xfinity subscribers can watch through a smart TV or Roku rather than a traditional set-top box.
The other side, of course, is that folks like Viacom can just create a Viacom channel and stream their programs directly to the customer. The business model isn’t really that easy but it will be a chip in the ongoing war of words.
I can tell who will get my support. The side that manages to get me my programming without dragging me into boring, stupid, pointless PR battles. Deal with your own problems on your own time guys.
Much Ado
I am going to call this my Shakespeare commentary. Not because I’m going to talk about the Bard this week but because I’m stealing one of his titles. Call this commentary “Much Ado About Nothing”. I admit it up front. That doesn’t mean I can make much ado.
There are few things in the computer world that annoy me more than big corporations telling me what I can and can not do. I’m not talking about using products without the proper license or payment. I’m talking about things like Facebook insisting that on changing my News Feed from my preferred “Most Recent” to “Top Stories”. Sigh. I just checked the setting to make sure I had the terms right, and they had changed it again. Mark Zuckerberg better hope we never meet.
It’s not a big thing, but I use these websites and applications for my purposes. As long as they generally match up with my needs I will keep using them. The Information Superhighway is littered with the broken and burning carcasses of services that couldn’t keep up with the desires of the users.
So I was a little annoyed when I heard that Microsoft was making it’s digital assistant function in Windows 10, called Cortana, Bing and Edge exclusive. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine. Edge is the replacement in Windows 10 for the old and generally disliked Internet Explorer. You can add its name to the burning carcass list.
The folks in Redmond Washington have been trying to make Bing a competitive entry in the search engine wars. Google continues to control somewhere between 66 to 80 percent of the search engine traffic in the world. I’m sure it’s simpler to have Cortana simply use the Bing search engine. I mean, it’s not like OK Google gives you options to use DuckDuckGo or Blekko. It the requirement that any link you click on from your search will only open in Edge. That’s what makes me go all Prospero summoning the tempest.
Once I find what I want, I want to go about my business the way I want it. Bing has actually shown some growth over the last couple years by doing things, gasp, BETTER than Google. That’s how you get people to use your product, by being better. Given the large body of animus and disdain that has built up over the years about Microsoft’s browser, they need to make sure they are doing the best job there as well.
Win me over by being better than what I have. Because I guarantee that if you try and force me the contrarian side of my personality will come out. There is some early indication I’m not alone, with reports coming in that folks are simply opting to turn Cortana off.
And for Microsoft, that would be Love’s Labours Lost.
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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