I'm a little ticked at the sudden "Airline Passenger Bill of Rights" idea invoked in the wake of the JetBlue stranded airlines fiasco.
Several things bug me about it: first, just like the overused "War on XXX" (War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terror) I think invoking a Bill of Rights-style (Patients' Bill of Rights, etc.) concept cheapens the actual Bill of Rights. That's a seemingly stupid point, but it takes the fundamental freedoms that, bundled together, make America a desirable place to be, and transforms it into a euphemism for citizen outrage. I'm sorry people were stranded, but if there's an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, then how about a Highway Commuter Bill of Rights, a Public Transportation Bill of Rights, and a Shopping Mall Consumer Bill of Rights, too? Lame! Seems to me that people should just be going after JetBlue and/or the FAA (or the TSA?) for boning up the process so that the passengers were stranded.
A second thing that bugs me is how quickly and vehement the response has been to these people trapped 11 hours on a plane. Again, it's lame and irritating, but I couldn't help but think of the hapless people in New Orleans, who had a helluva lot more going on than the JetBlue passengers, and where was the help for them? I think there's more than a little class and race bias in the publicity around the JetBlue thing, and the push for reform, compared to New Orleans, which is still a mess, and is likely to remain so for a long, long time, victim of not-so benign neglect (some of which created the problem to begin with). But inconvenience some airline passengers, and it's suddenly a big issue. Why? Because they had cellphones with cameras, captured those Kodak moments?
A third thing that pissed me off was how JetBlue's stock went up in the wake of the JetBlue fiasco! My rule of thumb about the stock market is this: if it's bad news for working people and consumers, then the stocks go up; good news for everyday people, and the stocks go down. That's common enough to be, in my eyes, almost a truism. Chrysler axes thousands of workers, and I bet its stock goes up. A company lets its workers unionize, its stock'll go down. So, we have JetBlue blowing it, utterly failing to do what people are paying it to do, and it gets rewarded on the stock market. It's that topsy-turvy kind of accounting that lets CEOs garner massive salaries and benefits packages even as their companies tank. Enough, already.
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Friday, February 16, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Still the loneliest profession?
Salon's Gary Kamiya is sort of complaining about the raucousness of the Web, like the tenor of the discussion being changed by the din of all the participants. It feels like he's smarting from some trollbites. But I think the democracy and anarchy of the Web are good things. The ivory towers are perhaps coming down, and many more people are involved in the conversations that are going on.
He laments how, as the cost of correspondence has moved from snail mail to click-and-send e-mail, the tone has shifted. Sure it has; that'll inevitably bring about more louts than saints, because louts are more numerous. But I think that kind of spontaneous feedback is useful, if you're prepared to deal with it.
Just like how, say, a rock band needs to get out and perform live to earn their chops, and how studio-centered bands lose something by virtue of their isolation, so I see it with writers, too. I'm a writer, myself, and I understand "the loneliest profession" more than most. But there's electricity in feedback, which is why writer's groups exist at all -- so often someone reads something I've written and they draw forth something entirely different from what I had in mind in creating it. Sometimes people read the wrong thing into something, too, but that's only from my perspective -- from their perspective, it's on the mark.
The usefulness of such feedback is that it's kind of like a straw poll -- if you immediately get a bunch of a particular type of feedback, it's possible that maybe you did get it wrong. That has to be humbling and off-putting for those in the culture-building business, who're used to being seen as authorities -- not necessarily because they're authorities, but because of their privileged perch as people permitted to offer comments on things (sorry for all the alliteration, there). There isn't a loss of power, but there is a loss of autonomy, if the writer pays attention to the comments made. There could be some dreadful accountability for one's words.
I think that's a good thing -- god knows that Rush Limbaugh O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter and Carlson (and a thousand other reactionary pundits) desperately need to be accountable for their words, although they lack the character to own up to the monster they've created.
For all the talk of the "marketplace of ideas," in practice, it was a command economy, with the public as consumers of the media product. More directly, the press isn't free if you don't own one. But the Net (and blogtech) have lowered the startup costs that kept the vast majority of people out of the media game, so suddenly the marketplace of ideas has become a bustling, chaotic, lively place, when before it was a droning sameness -- just as the Big Three automakers are tottering because they can't compete with the new economy, so are the classic Mass Media outlets suffering because their mode of expression no longer meshes with what the consumers want.
Empowered, the everyday folk with blogs are suddenly able to play the content provider game, for better and worse all at once. Even the simple letter writers (myself included) come to expect that kind of interactivity with their chosen media outlets, and god help the content provider that doesn't let more people in to play; they'll wither and die on the vine.
The Big Three television networks are bleeding audience; the newspaper chains are wilting; magazines, I don't know about them -- they may be able to niche market themselves into long-term survival (?); movies are no longer a sure thing; spectator sports are losing spectators, slowly but surely (except for those willing to pay the premium for tickets). Kids like video games more than movies -- why? Because there's participation in it.
Participation is the coin of the new media realm. I think it's a good thing.
He laments how, as the cost of correspondence has moved from snail mail to click-and-send e-mail, the tone has shifted. Sure it has; that'll inevitably bring about more louts than saints, because louts are more numerous. But I think that kind of spontaneous feedback is useful, if you're prepared to deal with it.
Just like how, say, a rock band needs to get out and perform live to earn their chops, and how studio-centered bands lose something by virtue of their isolation, so I see it with writers, too. I'm a writer, myself, and I understand "the loneliest profession" more than most. But there's electricity in feedback, which is why writer's groups exist at all -- so often someone reads something I've written and they draw forth something entirely different from what I had in mind in creating it. Sometimes people read the wrong thing into something, too, but that's only from my perspective -- from their perspective, it's on the mark.
The usefulness of such feedback is that it's kind of like a straw poll -- if you immediately get a bunch of a particular type of feedback, it's possible that maybe you did get it wrong. That has to be humbling and off-putting for those in the culture-building business, who're used to being seen as authorities -- not necessarily because they're authorities, but because of their privileged perch as people permitted to offer comments on things (sorry for all the alliteration, there). There isn't a loss of power, but there is a loss of autonomy, if the writer pays attention to the comments made. There could be some dreadful accountability for one's words.
I think that's a good thing -- god knows that Rush Limbaugh O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter and Carlson (and a thousand other reactionary pundits) desperately need to be accountable for their words, although they lack the character to own up to the monster they've created.
For all the talk of the "marketplace of ideas," in practice, it was a command economy, with the public as consumers of the media product. More directly, the press isn't free if you don't own one. But the Net (and blogtech) have lowered the startup costs that kept the vast majority of people out of the media game, so suddenly the marketplace of ideas has become a bustling, chaotic, lively place, when before it was a droning sameness -- just as the Big Three automakers are tottering because they can't compete with the new economy, so are the classic Mass Media outlets suffering because their mode of expression no longer meshes with what the consumers want.
Empowered, the everyday folk with blogs are suddenly able to play the content provider game, for better and worse all at once. Even the simple letter writers (myself included) come to expect that kind of interactivity with their chosen media outlets, and god help the content provider that doesn't let more people in to play; they'll wither and die on the vine.
The Big Three television networks are bleeding audience; the newspaper chains are wilting; magazines, I don't know about them -- they may be able to niche market themselves into long-term survival (?); movies are no longer a sure thing; spectator sports are losing spectators, slowly but surely (except for those willing to pay the premium for tickets). Kids like video games more than movies -- why? Because there's participation in it.
Participation is the coin of the new media realm. I think it's a good thing.
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