“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.
Programs from week of October 24, 2016
This Week’s Podcast:
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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.
Algorithms
I am always quick to point out that math was never my strong suit. Even simple math. This is why Mrs. Phlipside balances our bank accounts every month. So I’m going to step off the deep end here for just a moment before I swerve back on to solid-er ground.
The Internet is dominated by things called algorithms. An algorithm is defined as “ a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer”. Algorithms are used in business to determine who they should interview for job openings and on the web to determine what stories to show.
That’s where the problems begin to arise. The little bits of high school calculus are great at sifting through all the data and spitting out more of the same. In other words, they will tend to recommend exactly the kinds of things you have shown a preference for in the past. Wonder why the same kinds of stories always seem to pop up on your Facebook feed or in your Google searches? This is why.
And that’s becoming a problem as the primary source for news among folks thirty-five and under is, Facebook and Google. The Washington Post was interested in what was happening with the news stories showing up on Facebook’s feed after Zuckerberg and company dropped their human editors for algorithms. What they discovered was fairly appalling.
The number of fake news stories has increased, as has the number of what the paper deemed “grossly inaccurate” stories. The truth of the matter is that computers and the bits of code that run them are, essentially, morons. They have no way to distinguish the parody news from the real, which is how a story from a site that includes the words “faking news” in its name had a story presented in the newsfeed as if it were, you know, news.
The idea is that the algorithms work without bias to make the world more personalized for us all. Except when they don’t. In England a couple years ago, a female physician was denied entry to the women’s locker room at her gym because her ID said she was a doctor and the mathematical moron had been set to believe that all doctors were men. Instances of programming “bias” are not uncommon, sadly. But then, there was plenty of bias with the human curators as well. The math was supposed to cure that problem.
Facebook is in the process of trying to instill the process with ways of weeding out parodies, fakes, and clickbait.
Until then, we’re just going to have to pay attention and try to be smarter than the math.
The Battle of the Bots
.The great science fiction author, Arthur C. Clarke stated that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” For most of us, the Internet may as well be magic.
There was a time last week when the Internet may have lost a little of its magic. If you follow the news, you heard that most of the East Coast had the same problem, following a DDOS attack on a DNS server. For most of us, those words are just techno-babble. Here’s the reality, you may have had more to do with that lost magic than you imagine.
First, let’s take a look at what we are talking about. A DNS is a domain name system, and it’s a vital part of the Internet. A DDOS is a distributed denial of service, which means a whole lot of computers were banded together to overload part of the Internet.
Here’s a very simple image of that. Image the DNS is a large mall with lots of stores. A DDOS is Black Friday and the weekend before Christmas all at the same time, done on purpose. Done specifically to keep you from being able to do business.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The number of service requests, those are our mall customers, being sent into the system are generated by thousands of computers that are infected with a virus through e-mail, websites and social media. If you don’t take the proper precautions when surfing the web and have good quality anti-virus software installed, your computer could be one of them. You would never even know necessarily. If your computer is compromised it’s called a “zombie computer”.
But that’s not the only problem. A Chinese company that makes DVRs and digital cameras has acknowledged the software in their products got hacked. I’ve talked about the Internet of Things before and echoed the concerns of experts about the lax security measures on all these devices that connect to and talk with the Internet. Well, here’s a bunch of them that were used to generate parts of the attack last week.
All those zombie computers and hacked Internet of Things devices get banded together into what’s called a “botnet”. The final frightening note in all of this is that according to TrendMicro Research if you wanted a week long DDOS for some nefarious purpose, it’s available on the black market for about one hundred fifty bucks.
There’s nothing wrong in dealing with the Internet as magic. You just need to remember that there are plenty of people out there willing to practice their black magic on you if you’re not prepared.
Rocky Horror Flop
The numbers are in. And everything I feared turned out to be true.
Last Thursday, the Fox television network tried to continue the string of big audience event musical broadcasts. Earlier this year, “Grease – Live” had been a huge, and a little surprising hit. Other musicals had shown some real strength beginning with NBC’s “Sound of Music” a couple years ago.
So how did the “sweet transvestite from Transylvania” do? Let me put it this way. Of all the music broadcasts in this string, “Rocky Horror” numbers put it dead last on the list. The next show ahead of it, “Peter Pan” had roughly twice the number of viewers.
The appalling thing is that Fox could, with justification, call the dreadful 1.7 rating in the 18-45 demographic a good night, since it was an eighty-nine percent INCREASE over its regular programming in that time slot!
When I talked about this back in January, I had several reservations. I was concerned about the supporting cast behind star Laverne Cox. While there has been some dissent over changing the gender identity of Frank N. Furter, the reviews are at least OK for her. The rest of the cast seems to have impressed no one. Plus, unlike the more successful musicals, they chose not do the show live. Add to that the choice of a Disney veteran as the director and you ended up with the one thing that “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” can not ever be, dull. Critics all over the media world are trying to dissect just what it was that brought the show crashing to the ground.
I will stick to my original analysis. “Rocky Horror” was an awful choice for this kind of performance. First, it’s a cult show. By its very nature, it is NOT mainstream. Broadcast TV networks are, by their very nature, as mainstream as you can get. Brad and Janet and Riffraff and friends simply were not ever going to make it onto the small screen. The best that might be managed were pale phantoms of the counter-culture icons beloved by their fans. Fox set themselves up with a show that the straights weren’t going to get, and the fans weren’t going to like.
If a small time media analyst like me can figure that out, why couldn’t the folks in the expensive suits?
In the end, I just have to wonder why they didn’t listen to some of the lyrics of the most iconic song from the show.
“With a bit of a mind flip, you’re into a time slip and nothing can ever be the same.”
Which is pretty much exactly what I had feared.
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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