Runaway Serfer's Open Salon Blog

You probably think this post is about Sarah Palin

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:02:33 -0500

Chances are, you don't know about the Eyeball Economy. But Sarah Palin does. She's quickly becoming very, very rich, thanks to it. And she's doing it not by producing a product (her book has been given away for the most part) or a service (she abandoned her career as a "politician" because, ironically, it wasn't as profitable as her current career) but by producing eyeballs - billions of juicy, greedy eyeballs aching to love and hate little old her. And where Eyeballs go money flows.

People buy and sell on the Eyeball Economy every day. We spend more time and money following our Eyeballs than we do making and spending old-fashioned dollars-and-cents (or yuan or euro).

The Eyeball Economy consists of what - or who - interests us. The more people become interested in something or someone, the more money that person (or thing) can generate. The Eyeball Economy can make that which interests people very rich, very quickly. For example, the masses are addicted to Sarah Palin - so much so that I recently had to unFriend someone due to her extreme reaction to my suggestion that she stop reading and writing about her if Sarah bothered her so much.

She thought Sarah couldn't make money off her unless she bought her book. But her active, vocal hatred of Sarah drives many others to buy the book - and pay to see her speak, or watch a show that Sarah was on, or spend hours and hours zealously trolling through the internet collecting snippets of the addictive, juicy vocal hatred (and love) of millions of fellow Sarah addicts. And so she joined a "I hate Sarah Palin" group where she spends her time generating crude, insulting posts.

When I suggested the possibility that Sarah, herself, had begun the "I hate Sarah Palin" group, she laughed. She called me paranoid. She doesn't know about the Eyeball Economy.

In the Eyeball Economy, hate is just as good a currency as love. Google the terms "hate+Sarah+Palin" and "love+Sarah+Palin" and see which results in more hits. [Surprise! As of 02/11/2010 it's 15 million love and 10 million hate.] That's a total of 25 million people who are motivated enough to write about her.

How many people read those writings? Well over a Billion - so far. That's a lot of eyeballs! [Go to Google Tracker and watch the Sarah Palin Currency Index.] And that's not counting all the video feeds of Sarah.

What my friend can't understand is the Eyeballs who hate Sarah are contributing to the Eyeballs Economy just as much as the eyeballs who love her. In the Eyeball Economy, attention is the currency, not love or hate. In his book Flip the Funnel, Joseph Jaffe notes:

Getting people to care these days is like climbing Mount Everest. People today are skeptical, jaded, cynical, and wary — and increasingly so, due to the hardships and hangover of the recession. And those are the good ones! The rest are apathetic, uninterested, indifferent, and detached.

Thousands of people earn their living recording Sarah's every move. Millions - hundreds of millions - more will pay billions to the recorders - and they give Sarah a percentage (called speaking fees or appearance fees). Who cares if she says goofy things or writes notes on her hand? She's entertaining!

Why, it's almost like watching a Hollywood movie.

It's hard out here for the pimped

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:12:16 -0500

Leave it to the Brits to figure out how Tiger Woods managed to "philander" without attracting media attention.

Every now and then the expectant crowds will part so that a headset-wearing hostess can march through, accompanied by wealthy men who are known in the industry as "whales". They are ushered to a cordoned-off area overlooking the main arena, where they are brought extortionately priced drinks and assigned a "mood advisor," whose duties include plumping up the cushions and offering, with the words "blondes or brunettes, sir?" to drag willing young women off the dancefloor to join the party.

Tiger Woods was a whale. In fact he was one of the biggest and most coveted (a blue whale, perhaps?) in a multimillion-dollar industry that stretches from London and Ibiza to New York, Miami, Dubai, Vegas and any number of global "party towns". And it is testament to the success with which the VIP nightclub scene quietly facilitates the indiscretions of not just Woods, but scores of other actors and sportsmen, that the scandal which prompted him to quit golf "indefinitely" to concentrate on being "a better husband, father and person" took so long to emerge.

Too bad for him the expensive "brothels" he frequented didn't pay the women to keep their mouths shut! I suspect it's because the women didn't know they were being "pimped" by the clubs they frequent and thought Tiger had selected them as a "girlfriend." I suspect that's why so many of them have been coming forward saying "No, I'm his girlfriend!"

The world will end on December 31, 2009!!!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:11:05 -0500

Just read about 2012. Have you seen the film? It's based on the belief that the Mayans predicted that the end of the world would occur on December 21, 2012.

Now, I never took this belief seriously, because the Mayans didn't actually predict that (a bunch of fearmongers did), and I didn't think anyone else seriously thought the fearmongers were correct. Was I wrong! Because this film proved - I mean PROVED! - that the fearmongers' prediction was going to come true!

"Whenever you have a myth out there, first of all it's a starting point, which makes people [think] it is real," Emmerich says. "It was interesting for me when I did some sort of research. I read, like, ten books …or at least flipped through them …and I realized that every book about 2012 says something different. You have a lot of freedom there and it's just a fact that so many people are fascinated. I think I know where this fascination comes from: it's because it is such an exact date."

How did it prove this? By making $225 Million in one weekend! I mean, if so many people will watch this movie, then they must be willing to believe on some level that the ONLY reason a calendar ends is because the world ends. And if enough people believe something, then it's true.

Fact is, they were able to convince people that the world would end on 12/21/2012 even before the film came out using what the experts call "viral marketing":

"I think people are really, really worried about the world coming to an end," said David Morrison of Nasa. "Kids are contemplating suicide. Adults tell me they can't sleep and can't stop crying."

Indeed, Nasa got so many queries, they set up a specific site to deal with them.

And then the film made it look so realistic, what with all the special effects. (They couldn't make it look real unless it was or would some day be real.)

Then I looked over at the calendar on my wall. It ends December 31. There can only be one reason why the calendar makers didn't put more months in my 2009 calendar.

Oh... my... gawd...

A misanthrope discovers Community - and men stripped naked

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:10:32 -0400

Here's a funny, funny show that's undiscovered by the masses, so don't expect it to last long. Community features brilliant comedians - including guest prof John Oliver (who drops in occasionally from The Daily Show) - great writing, and a milieu (community college) that's ideal for humor - intended and unintended. As a community college alumni I love it (though I have heard some community college instructors are offended). Here's my favorite ep so far ("Introduction to Film"). Abed's (Danny Pudi) film was brilliant (comes in at 17 min.).

It's an ultimate blow-off show! Watch it and explain to me how this is getting killed in the ratings by such crappy competition as (repetitive) Survivor and (cheesy) Flash Forward!

Speaking of cheesy, my bon-bon favorite this season is Eastwick. Their budget for Botox® and Restalyne® is bigger than the one for writing, but the men are contractually obligated to strip off their shirts at least once per month. The creepy part is they have stripped them of nearly all their body hair - and these are dark-haired men so the absense is noticeable. The naked chests and backs seem, well, TMN (Too Much Nudity). And a bit sadistic.

The Seven Lies of Journalism

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:09:16 -0400

Blogger/Journalism Professor Dr. Danna Walker (of the Mass Appeal blog) recently wrote a post called The Seven Laws of Journalism, an article full of faithful renderings of media-myth crapola. The article itself is a bit difficult to read - not due to its complexity or "objectivity" but due to the blogging prof's remarkably callous attitude toward her students. ("Grow a pair" is one of her laws. Really?) Her advice is ridiculously simplistic, not a bit objective, and remarkably fact-challenged. But I won't address her laws; instead, I'll focus on the snarky comments she made in preface of them. I call them "The Seven Lies of Journalism."

Split your audience into false categories and dismiss one category completely. The good doctor divides her students between those who will become real (paid by print papers) journalists the those she sneeringly dismisses as students who will be in "communication" (paid by radio and television) and thus won't necessarily become journalists. She is a poor educator if she thinks her students are supposed to believe that there's a difference - and if she doesn't think her "communication" students don't know of her contempt for them. What she may not realize is that her "real" journalists aspire to cross her invisible line into "communication" as a way to either (1) make some extra money or (2) make them more valuable to their employers. On-air exposure just might keep her real journalists employed. Conversely, the "communication" students need to know what she's is supposed to teach "real" journalists - journalistic ethics, bias detection (in themselves and others), investigative procedures - otherwise the television reporters remain well-paid teleprompter readers.
Convince yourself "... young people can't differentiate between newspapers and blogs." Of course "young people" know the difference: If you write for a newspaper (or radio or television) you expect to get paid for every word you write and sneer at bloggers (who don't get paid). If you're a blogger, you automatically can't write as well as newspaper writers (who get paid for writing). What she doesn't realize is that her students - the smart ones - are bloggers (or tweeters) because that's how they will get their newspaper job. Oh, and both television and newspaper journalists are one round of layoffs away from becoming full-time (unpaid) bloggers themselves. And any journalist who refuses to blog is replaced with one who will.
Her students "... tend to lump all the genres together into 'news media,' which they often deride as a personality-driven cesspool of bias (much like their parents, I presume)." Maybe they believe it because the news media is a personality-driven cesspool of bias. College students didn't learn this from their parents. They learned it by watching and reading hours and hours of snarky gossip and rumor-mongering disguised as "news." They learned it by reading about Watergate-style reporting and Walter Cronkite-style truth-telling in history books instead of seeing it or reading it. They know that the line between news and bias is as invisible as Dr. Walker's line between journalists and communicators. It only exists in her head.
She thinks "old-school folks" like her have stopped thinking of news in silos — print, broadcast, online; cable, network, public, corporate — and have become comfortable seeing journalism as an entity that crosses platforms and business models." If she and other "old-school folks" are so comfortable, why are they endlessly bitching about the success of those platform-crossers?
She thinks it's a mistake to believe that news "... is dry and objective — and generally to be avoided unless you're a hard-core politics junkie." News isn't dry, but some writers are. I've read both gripping, well-written stories and clumsy, poorly-written stories about the exact same news item. It's not the story that's boring - it's the writer. But there's no such thing as "objective" journalism and she should know this. After all, she's not exactly objective when it comes to her students. It's especially troubling, however, that a journalism professor would conflate "news" with politics.
"There's a lot of talk about objectivity, opinion vs. news, the principles of journalism, and the role of journalism as a major purveyor of democracy and justice for the little guy." It's been many, many decades since journalists have given a damn about the little guy. They are much more interested in toadying to the wealthy and powerful. Whenever they do write a story about the "little guy" perspective, they inevitably quote a taxi driver or busboy - the only "little guys" they tend to meet. Their dedication to elitism is so strong that many media outlets choose their summer interns from Ivy League colleges - and hire the unqualified children of the rich and powerful as columnists.
"Eighteen-year-olds aren't really interested in revisiting The Front Page or even All The President’s Men." Maybe because eighteen-year-olds can tell the difference between Hollywood films and real life. Or maybe they don't want to indulge in mid-life nostalgia until they are middle-aged. Instead of telling students to "grow a pair" when they come to her with their very legitimate worries about the future of journalism, maybe Dr. Walker should pick up a newspaper and learn about the layoffs in both "journalism" and "communication." Certainly she can't tell the students the truth about their job prospects: truth-telling isn't one of her seven laws.

In 1978 Caryl Churchill wrote a play where she declares that "everything is political" - meaning car crashes, weather, and tragedies of every kind are interpreted through the prism of politics. It saddens me - I'm sure it also saddens Ms. Churchill - that we are still living in such a hopelessly-politicized world. And Dr. Walker thinks that's okey-dokey.