“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 9, 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.
IoT Update
I continue to be fascinated by the growing world of the Internet of Things. I also remain somewhat unconvinced this is something the world desperately needs. It has some novelty value to it but I am not sure there’s a whole lot more there. Some wearables, like activity trackers, make sense, smartwatches still have a ways to go for me.
With that in mind, there are some interesting things happening out there, both good and bad. On the smartwatch side, the news is uncertain when it comes to the flagship of the genre, the Apple Watch. A forecast by an investment firm seems to indicate they think there is still so flexibility in what is still a very young market. Their prediction is a 25% drop in sales for the Apple watch compared to last year. When you realize that the product was only on the market for eight months last year and this is twelve month projection for 2016 showing that kind of decline, it just reinforces my questions about the whole concept.
In other strange and wonderful things that happen when you connect objects to the Internet, I just saw that Coca-Cola and Spotify are teaming up to bring a little music to your summer enjoyment. Special Coke products will connect with song lyrics or themes like “First Kiss” and allow you to connect with curated songlists on Spotify. It’s an interesting riff on the classic campaign where Coke tried to teach the world to sing.
But of all the web connected concepts out there, I’m not sure I’ve come across anything weirder than this last one. A researcher at SUNY Buffalo has developed a wearable device to help you track your eating without you having to do all the usual weighing and recording. Wenyao Xu realized that very often you can tell what someone is eating simply by listening to the sounds they make when they chew. That’s right, he has created a device that actually wants to hear you chewing. It’s called “AutoDietary” and you wear it around your neck. If it works accurately it will solve one of the biggest issues for people trying to track their caloric intake. That’s the fact that most of us do a really poor job of estimating and remembering what we actually eat. AutoDietary would handle the job pretty much without you having to pay any attention at all. It listens to the biting, chewing and swallowing noises, compares them to a library of sounds and uses an algorithm to deal with each user’s individual noise spectrum
I can’t tell you if it will turn out to be useful, but this just might be the most disgusting story I’ve ever done on this show. I humbly apologize.
Take It Slow
The Internet is the world of the instant reaction. While that may make things “fresh” and “relevant” or whatever but it also comes back to bite people in the butt on a regular basis. The case of the coach at Texas A&M a week or so ago is a prime example. So I try to take a second before I jump on topics for this program. It has rewarded me a couple times. I was really excited about the story that the Beatles sons were going join together to create a second generation band. Yeah, it was a hoax. Glad I passed.
So I was all set to make a bit of a fool out of myself this week over the big story that popped up last week on Facebook about Apple stealing people’s music. Before we get any further into this story let me note – it’s not true. I’ll remind you again at the end.
The story began with a blog post from a gentleman named James Pinkston, who discovered that Apple had apparently deleted his music library when he had signed up for their music streaming service. The problem was made worse when a customer service rep at Apple apparently told him this was, in fact, normal. This is annoying at the minimum but for Pinkston, it was far more than that. He is both a composer and music collector. So when he checked his music library he found lots of his original work gone, plus rare tracks that he had found over the years. What it appeared had happened was that the iTunes app found a track it didn’t recognize it would download it to their library in the cloud and delete the original. There was a process to download the tracks back on to the computer but Apple’s idea of a match wasn’t always what he wanted. Instead of rare bootleg tracks, he would get a more common version. It was something of a nightmare.
Until I did a little research. It does not appear that deleting music off your hard drive is a standard part of the service. The problem is that software itself is not particularly intuitive. In computer terms intuitive means the average user can figure out the basic functions without any special instructions. In other words using it should be fairly obvious. From my personal experience, the iTunes software left intuitive behind about four years ago. Which is when I stopped using it. What happens is that you can send your music to the recycle bin inadvertently. Yes, that technically makes it your fault but it’s really the fault of overly complicated and cutesy software.
So let’s not panic just yet. As always with the Internet, it’s best to take a deep breathe before we lose our marbles.
Preaching Reality
This is a rather bizarre intersection between my two careers. For anyone out there who doesn’t know, when I left broadcasting in 2000 I began what is now a fifteen year career as a paid staff person in a mainline church. Other than commenting on the spiritual challenges of the media, there’s usually not a lot of crossover from what I do now and what I did then.
That may be about to change, however. The next big thing in reality TV could be preachers. There are a whole slew of programs either on the air now or preparing to launch that focus on the lives of ministers in churches. Oxygen Network seems to be the center of that universe at the moment. Oxygen is a wholly owned subsidiary of NBC/Universal with a target demographic of women. Meanwhile, Lifetime has also got two preacher type shows lined up as well. And they seem to be convinced that preacher reality TV might have some legs.
Oxygen is running a series of shows with a familiar style. They are borrowing the “Real Housewives of…” motif with “Preachers of Detroit”, “Preachers of L.A.”, and “Preachers of Atlanta”. They also have one that focuses on an attractive ministry couple called “Rich in Faith”. The Lifetime shows are “Preach” which follows the five women show style and “Preacher’s Daughter” which is about the daughter of a minister who is choosing a very different path from her parent. That’s in addition to the talk show being hosted by the well known preacher and author T.D. Jakes that is just going into syndication and a Fox Network show, called “The Preachers”, that will get a test run this summer.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot worse groups of people we could be turning into reality TV stars. At the same time, I am concerned about the reality of reality TV and the work that these ministers are called to do. Reality TV requires drama, it requires conflict. It’s a TV genre that isn’t shy about editing reality to meet the programming needs of the show as well. To be honest the life of the average church minister is pretty dull. There are committee meetings (LOTS of meetings) and worship and moments of counseling members of the congregation that aren’t appropriate to be aired on network TV. Reality TV needs flash, and while there are plenty of ministers who can bring the flash with the best of reality stars, there comes a point when you have to wonder where the work of God ends and the work of the media hype machine begins.
Otto von Bismark famously said that there were two things you don’t want to see made – sausage and legislation. Count me as adding the lives of preachers on the list of things I don’t need to see.
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
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