“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of May 6, 2018
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.
Newly Regulated
I noticed over the last couple weeks a sudden increase in the number of e-mails I was getting concerning updates to the privacy policies of many of the social media and other online communities of which I am a part. Now those updates are pretty much annual events, but I never remembered seeing so many of them arriving one after another. For the first couple, I did what most of you probably do when you see these in your e-mail feed. I just deleted them. Didn’t even bother to look at them. BORING! But when they continued to roll in, I took a quick peek. And there seemed to be a consistent element that cropped up in many of the messages. It was the initials – GDRP.
And they represent something that might be of great interest.
GDRP stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It’s a new law passed by the European Union on how companies collect, store or process large volumes of data about people like you and me. It just went into effect at the beginning of the month. That’s why folks like Twitter and Facebook and the others were sending out new Privacy policy updates. They needed to make sure that the policy met the demands of the new European regulations. I have said before that some level of regulation is probably necessary if we are to make the internet a safer and more secure place for all of us to live and play. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is not generally a big fan of internet regulation, said during his Congressional testimony last month that he believes that GDRP is probably going to be a good thing for the internet.
The goal of GDRP is to bring some internal logic to regulations concerning data gathered online. It expands the definition of personal data, offers clearer boundaries for companies who gather it, improves the efficiency of enforcement and requires that data breaches be announced to the users within 72 hours.
Americans generally think that the Europeans go overboard with regulations. In this case, the regulations seem to be reasonable and aimed at protecting the users rather than the companies. Sadly, there doesn’t appear to be any such law even in the earliest stages on this side of the ocean.
On the other hand, a new law went into effect in the African nation of Tanzania that would require bloggers and all other content creators to get licenses and requires every citizen to have a password to lock their mobile phone or face up to a year in jail.
Let’s hope that we opt in favor of reasonable.
Grumpy Old Movies
I have suspected for some time that I am becoming a grumpy old man. It’s only logical, really. Plenty of folks who have known me over the years can tell you that I could a pretty grumpy young man. Still grumpy, now getting old, so grumpy old man-dom would seem to be inevitable.
What is sending the latest signals is my growing boredom with comic book movies. I am now and have been for decades, a huge movie fan. There are well over three hundred movie reviews on my website. And I have been a comic book fan for even longer. Long road trips were a Phillippi family tradition when I was growing up. With three boys trapped in the back seat for hours at a time, my mother’s solution was a steady stream of comic books for trips. So I grew up with the superheroes of both the DC and Marvel universes. They still hold a special place in my heart. A poster of a 1968 Iron Man cover is on the wall here at the International Broadcast Center. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more excited for a movie than when I saw the trailer for the first “Iron Man” movie. I was literally bouncing in my seat with excitement.
And that excitement is gone. While I haven’t seen the two newest movies, “Black Panther” or “Avengers – Infinity War”, they will have to be some kinda wonderful to turn the tide for me. I just watched “Wonder Woman” and “Thor – Ragnarok” in the last month. Both left me with serious cases of “Meh”.
Rather than get into a point by point critique of any of these movies, I’d rather look at larger issues that are leaving me feeling old and grouchy.
Making a stand-alone movie that is good, let alone great comes with plenty of challenges. Sustaining characters and some level of a story arc over a half dozen or more movies is almost impossible. To do it you are going to have to go deep into the personalities of the characters. Deep is not something that comic books tend to do well. The lack of any discernible character growth for many of these characters and the minimal amount of time devoted to that growth means the movies become stale quickly. Beyond that, the characters need challenging stories that will test and stretch them. Comic book movies tend to stop at the level of “Hulk Smash!”. And again, the stories get stale.
Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe I’m just a grumpy old man.
Facebook File
The trials and travails of the 900-pound gorilla of the social media world, Facebook, continue along. Mark Zuckerberg and his team continue their whirlwind of official testimony, assure the business partners that all will be well in the long run, and trying to allay the fears of the user base. Coming soon they will be offering a way to erase all our personal information. The exact parameters of that are still fairly sketchy. My thought was, shouldn’t I have some idea of what I’m erasing BEFORE it all goes away?
The good news is that you can get a report with all your personal information right now. Instructions on how to do this are easy to find, and I’ll include it with the podcast on Friday at theviewfromthephlipside.com.
In the meantime, I thought I’d take a look at my file and share what I glean from it. As a fairly regular user of Facebook, I wasn’t surprised when my file ran comfortably over two hundred megabytes. When I unzipped the file, I was greeted by 27 folders with titles ranging from “about you” to “your places”. Scanning down through them several jumped out at me. “Location History” struck me as the kind of information that I’m not sure I want Facebook tracking. Now I turn on location services in very few applications, and I never use Facebook to sign into other accounts. So I was happy and mostly unsurprised when I found that file was empty.
“Payment History” also intrigued me. Again, it’s not something I do a lot, so the file was pretty slim. The only purchase was four dollar and ninety-nine cents for something on “Angry Birds”. Beyond that was a gift of cash sent to me by a friend in Cleveland to cheer me on a very bad day. I’m not sure how he may feel knowing that his name, the amount and his message to me have been stored away in my data.
The file I found most interesting was my Messages folder. It contained nine hundred and fifty-two folders. I checked the folder for Mrs. Phlipside just to see how far back it might go. The earliest message there is dated April 30, 2009. The earliest one in my “Comments” folder is from 2007.
So the file contains a lot of information about me, both direct and indirect. My first scan of it doesn’t show much that worries me. But it’s still a lot of information that I’m not sure I want Facebook peddling. It might not be a bad idea for all Facebook users to check their information out.
(Getting your data file is simple. Click on the drop-down arrow at the top of your Facebook page, right in line with Comments and Quick Help. Under “General Account Settings” look just below the line under “Manage Account”. You should see the words “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. Click on it and wait for the notification that it’s ready to download.)
(Getting your data file is simple. Click on the drop-down arrow at the top of your Facebook page, right in line with Comments and Quick Help. Under “General Account Settings” look just below the line under “Manage Account”. You should see the words “Download a copy of your Facebook data”. Click on it and wait for the notification that it’s ready to download.)
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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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