“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 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of December 17, 2017
This Week’s Podcast
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.
Patreon Fail
In the course of doing business mistakes are made. In fact, for a business trying to be a market leader, you almost have to make some mistakes.
The list of major blunders by corporate America is pretty impressive. The Ford Edsel, New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, the Apple Newton, Microsoft Bob.
What the folks at Patreon did in the last couple weeks was something of a tour de force when it came to messing the whole thing up.
Patreon is an online membership platform designed to help artists and creators get the financial support they need to continue doing what they do. With Patreon, supporters, known as patrons, can fund the creator on a recurring basis or item by item. The patron can set the amount they are willing to give and the frequency. It’s not a perfect system, but it has been pretty successful since its launch back in 2013.
So it was rather amazing to see just how badly the company could mess it all up two weeks ago. They announced that they were changing the ways fees were charged on the donations. The old system charged variable fees to the creators. In the proposed system, those fees would be set and paid for by the donors. Creators who rely on smaller donations immediately noted that the burden would fall especially hard on their patrons. Patrons were less than impressed as well. Now a ten dollar a month donation cost the patron more than ten dollars, with that extra money going into Patreon’s pocket. To make matter’s worse, Patreon’s initial response to the concerns amounted to a pat on the head and assurances that the company knew what was best for everyone. Effectively, they told the creators that Patreon knew a better way to run the creator’s businesses.
What happened was predictable. Smaller patrons (and they make up a large part of the donor community) simply dropped out. The new fee structure of 2.9 per cent plus a flat thirty-five cent charge, made the cost of the small donation jump. The creators put up a howl.
I’ll give the company this much. They recognized their mistake and changed direction in a matter of days. Patreon offered one of the better apologies I’ve read as well. In the words of founder and CEO Jack Conte, “We’re going to press pause”. The promise is that the next system will take all the needs of the creators and patrons into consideration.
Making mistakes is part of pushing the boundaries in the pursuit of being the best. Learning to recognize those mistakes and move away from them as quickly as possible is what separates the best from rest.
(The original radio broadcast and podcast misstated how much the fees would increase the total donation. We apologize for the error)
Milkshake Duck
With this next story, I have to admit to feeling I’ve let the side down a little bit. I discover that there has been a “thing” on the internet for about a year now, one that took off over the summer, and I didn’t hear about it till just this past weekend. Reuters has listed it as one of the top words for 2017. The folks at the Oxford dictionary listed it as runner-up for word of the year. Somehow, I missed it completely.
Are you familiar with “Milkshake Duck”?
This began as a tweet back in 2016, but took off this past summer. It appeared on the feed of an Australian comic artist who goes by the handle “@pixelatedboat”. The original, posted June 12 of 2016, read “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later * We regret to inform you the duck is racist”.
It took off as the concept when it became attached with online furors like that of software designer Tim Soret and Gamergate. In simplest terms, the meme speaks to the transitory nature of online fame and favor. We’ve seen it over and over. The flavor of the moment will have some kind of flaw or shortcoming revealed. The online community then turns on that person or thing with just as much negative energy as there had been positive. It’s a true piece of Millennial humor in that it’s surface of whimsy covers a deeply cynical foundation.
Underneath it all are two questions that we need to answer. Why do we fall all over ourselves for every new sensation? It doesn’t seem to be enough to enjoy something or like someone. They have to go “viral”. Beyond even that is the question of just how high should the standards be for folks who are thrust into the spotlight? It seems that the expectation is that they have to be as clean as the driven snow. Anything short of that means they are rejected, and in the tradition of the internet, rejected as completely as possible. There is no subtlety or nuance. It’s black and white. God-like or the pit of misery.
Both the questions and the meme point us towards the shallowness of so much of what happens online. That fame is fleeting isn’t a new concept. In the modern world, it seems that we build things up simply for the sport of knocking them over again. The shallowness we find may be within ourselves rather than outside.
Perhaps Milkshake Duck will suffer it’s own version of sic transit gloria mundi. Which would be the perfectly ironic ending it deserves.
Most Wonderful Time of the Year
The song assures us that this is “the most wonderful time of the year”. I know that’s not always true for everyone, but when it comes to the media, there’s no other time quite like it. Halloween is a great time for themed movies, but it Christmas that is the King of All Media.
This is a huge time for new movies and a wondrous time to re-visit old ones. There is an entire genre of music dedicated to the season. There are television special events. Even the commercials join into the fun. The media dedicates itself to this time of the year like no other.
In my household, there are a variety of media harbingers of the season. Kid Phlipside looks forward to the Hershey’s Kisses Christmas bells commercial, while Dad waits to see the Corona Christmas palm tree one. Growing up it was the Norelco electric shaver Noelco spot that was a Christmas touchstone.
I’m sure you won’t be surprised to discover that there is a long list of Christmas movies and television shows that are watched every year at my home. They range from “White Christmas” to the “WKRP Christmas Special” to Berke Breathed’s little known “Bloom County” Christmas special called “A Wish For Wings That Work”.
On Christmas morning, we put a Yule Log fireplace on the TV via DVD or cable, put our favorite Christmas music on the stereo and enjoy our Christmas morning.
Whatever your traditions may be, I hope you’ve found the time to enjoy them all during this time of year. I have friends whose tradition is to avoid all of the traditional holiday stuff, and I support them one hundred percent.
Media can be a wonderful addition to our lives. The instant it stops being that we all need to turn it off. As the decades of my life have passed, it has become harder and harder to do that it seems. Our modern media has so infiltrated our lives that it seems alien to silence them. Yet it may be that very silence that will increase our appreciation of both our lives and our media.
Whatever is the best media mix for you this holiday season, I hope you enjoy it to the fullest. If that’s every version of “A Christmas Carol” ever produced, go for it. If it is religious observances and holy music, immerse yourself in it. If it the absence of reindeer, and jingly bells, I hope you enjoy that as well.
May we find the perfect way for the most wonderful time of the year to bless us, everyone one.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
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
Stories Are My Life 
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