Frank Beacham's Journal

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Some observers, such as the late Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans has decreased as modern technology — especially the internet and television — has increased in volume.

Internet users, especially young ones, can move from web page to web page at astounding speed. Most now spend only seconds on the average website. So today, a major issue for modern media is how to capture and maintain a user’s attention.

Studies have shown that the neural pathways of seasoned internet users are altered as they experience heightened activity in their pre-frontal cortexes (the area of the brain that is mostly responsible for processing complex thoughts, personality expressions, decision making and social behavior).

However, this fundamental “re-wiring” of the human brain as a result of heightened internet use means that “we read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online,” said Nicholas Carr in his seminal Wired article from 2010.

Carr reported that it is not only the span and scope of information that is detrimental to our ability to focus, but the speed and simultaneity at which we are exposed to it.

Hyperlinks, advertisements, share buttons and cues to related content are just some of the distracting influences that drive users away from the seemingly simple act of reading and exploring, not to mention the constant pressure of open chat windows, email updates and social media connectivity.

The bottom line, Carr found, is that attention is a limited resource that must be used wisely on the internet to avoid superfluous visual pathways and exits.

Sadly, this trend subverts the very core idea that Tim Berners-Lee conceived in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

The genius of the WWW's hyperlinks was the ability for ordinary computer users to easily discover new places and ideas with a simple click of a computer mouse. The very randomness of discovery through hit and miss surfing is one of the endearing strengths of the web.

Like the best of travel — the kind where there's no preset agenda — open-minded people make personal discoveries through accident and sagacity. It's a modern version of serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

The issue of serendipity on the internet unexpectedly evolved into a major topic of discussion a few years ago at symposium at the Media Laboratory on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Sellars, a noted director of theater, opera and film, offered memorable insight on the subject.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars, "we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage, the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Thinking, creative people, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

We are only a few years into the science and art of web site design. Are most new web sites simply not complex, divided and multilayered enough to sustain a demanding audience?

Or, perhaps, is it that modern audiences are not as adventurous as they'd like to believe they are — quietly preferring the comfort of simplified, shorthand information delivery over a more demanding, thoughtful exchange of ideas?

These fundamental Internet questions are still on the table and have yet to be answered.

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that allowed instantaneous nationwide communication

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — workers of the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that for the first time allowed instantaneous communication between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln, predicting that the new communication link would help ensure the loyalty of the western states to the Union during the Civil War.

The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks.

The Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the critical link that would span the territory between the western edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.

The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada.

Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and these too had to be shipped from the western mountains. In the summer of 1861, a party of Sioux warriors cut part of the line that had been completed and took a long section of wire for making bracelets.

Later, however, some of the Sioux wearing the telegraph-wire bracelets became sick, and a Sioux medicine man convinced them that the great spirit of the "talking wire" had avenged its desecration.

Thereafter, the Sioux left the line alone, and the Western Union was able to connect the East and West Coasts of the nation much earlier than anyone had expected and a full eight years before the transcontinental railroad would be completed.

The Telegraph Office in the photo below shows where the east and west coasts lines were joined in 1861.

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported.

Not all of these people — rather amusingly called "internet opinion analysts" — are actively censoring web content. Instead they are trawling social media for troubling entries that are indexed and collated and then passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers.

All of these people are apparently on the government's payroll.

In July, 1981, I went to China when it first opened to Americans. In those days, there was no internet, but still plenty of censorship. In fact, a guide told me a Chinese citizen could be put in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine. (I gave him one as a parting gift, being very careful in the handoff!)

China may be more modern today, but the reigns of censorship remain tight. The internet there is monitored closely — just as in United States and most other countries. Wherever you are in the world today, be aware.

Here I pose with two Chinese censors in 1981.

Mexico and the United States began the first telephone between the two countries on this day in 1927 — 93 years ago.

President Calvin Coolidge and his Mexican counterpart, Plutarco Elías Calles, exchanged pleasantries via telephone to celebrate the start of new telephone service between the two countries. Previously, a dispute over land rights in Mexico had soured relations.

Both leaders needed interpreters, but they each saw promise in the communications advancement. Calles hoped it would aid “an era of good will and mutual understanding, which cannot fail to put an end to all those needless misunderstandings.”

The American president praised the engineers who completed the critical piece of infrastructure that made the call possible — a telephone line system more than 780 miles long linking Mexico City with Laredo, Texas.

The music at the festivities celebrating the telephone connection was also notable. Mexico’s national anthem was played for Coolidge in Washington. In Mexico City, “The Star Spangled Banner” was performed at the National Palace for the first time since 1846.

The same year commercial transatlantic telephone service also began. And, the first AT&T videophone call was also made that year between Washington, D.C and New York City by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.

Thanks New York Times!

Peter Sellars: A Memorable Encounter

It’s Peter Sellars 63nd birthday today. He is noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. But I remember him for another reason.

I met Sellars at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge in the 1990s and heard him give some insightful comments on the issue of serendipity on the internet. Not only have his early perceptions proven true, but they were memorable and have stuck with me over time.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," Sellars said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars in the 1990s: "We are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Artists, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.

"You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued. "Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How — with set up (new media) structures — do we show our real feelings?"

The World Wide Web, as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, offered the promise of a new media structure for a greater diversity of voices and ideas. But it has since been hijacked by not only by traditional media, but by commerce and narrow demagogic political voices. Even the most creative new works remain invisible — hidden under a cluttered sea of political and commercial noise?

Peter Sellars saw this early on and sadly it has not changed all these years earlier.

For his innovative collected work in the field of opera and music productions, Sellars was awarded the prestigious Swedish Polar Music Prize of 2014 alongside Chuck Berry.

It's the Story, Stupid

Our society’s storytellers — including musicians, actors, writers, artists, photographers and the backstage people that support their work — are going to have to rethink their places in the future.

How? I have some preliminary thoughts on the question. It’s not meant to be complete by any means, but only a baseline to begin thinking about the future.

What do all artists have in common? We are storytellers — in one form or another. Through our work as “communicators,” we seek to create stories that reflect on the human condition.

Some artists provoke, others make us reflect, some soothe us with beauty while others make us laugh. It’s a real hodgepodge, but in the end it is all storytelling.

Telling stories is an essential human need. It has been with us since the beginning of time — whether painting on the walls of caves, writing on stone tablets or telling stories around a campfire.

What is constantly changing is the technology used for presenting that art. In the pandemic of 1916, people had few ways to communicate. Today, we have the internet. It is not only keeping many of us sane, but offers one of the few ways today for artists to tell their stories to the world. This is a major plus.

But let’s face the hard truth. It is going to be a long time before audiences gather again, even after venues reopen. There will be fear of infection until a vaccine is readily available. Regardless of what the government tells you, it is going to be a very difficult period ahead.

Depending on how artists use the internet will determine the ultimate success...or failure.

For writers, videographers and still photographers, little has changed in the way we distribute our work. Most of us were already using the internet. In the coming days, each of us will use our creative sensibilities to tell stories that will seek to connect with people in crisis.

For musicians, the internet landscape is most interesting. Some big name performers are blowing it — with poor production values and really bad audio and video quality in presenting their work. Viewers will put up with poor technical quality for a very short time...after that all video is judged on its quality.

Many younger, amateur musicians are using the internet far more effectively than successful musicians used to working before live audiences. A shakeup may come from this in music. Video may be the great equalizer before this pandemic is over.

Judy Collins once told me that audiences want her to tell a personal story in performances after she sings a couple of songs. This is because people want to know behind the scenes anecdotes about the music they love. For some successful musicians, perhaps there is more power in stories than songs right now.

For actors, performing on stage isn’t going to happen soon. Who’s going to pay big money to be crammed close to others in a theatre? It will be a hard sell — at least for a while.

Again, it is interesting to see actors informally on video. Many big “stars” are awkward and incredibly uninteresting when out of character. Others are charming and delightful people that we see in a totally new way.

There is an opportunity to reinvent the concept of acting as storytelling. New opportunities are open to aspiring actors during this crisis. One person performances on video may be the future for some actors. Others may find their way to communicate effectively as real people. Creative thinking is needed here.

As to behind-the-scenes workers who know audio, lighting and stagecraft, there is a growing opportunity to help creative artists set up small scale home video studios.

Streaming media is the future (at least for now) and the rules of good production have not changed.

If I were a lighting designer, I would be using small, inexpensive LED lights to create home studio packages. A lot of entertainers definitely need help with audio and out of work sound operators could help. And surely there are better set backgrounds for video from homes than bookcases and cluttered home offices.

As a community of storytelling artists, the goal always has been to tell good stories from a unique point of view. Those stories may be local, national or global. But they are the “stuff” of all human communication. The need for good stories never goes away.

Humans always adapt to new situations...as the old ways disappear. The art will never change, but the way we deliver it to people is in play. This what we should be thinking about.

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.

Telling the Truth Is No Longer the Top Priority in Journalism

I graduated debt-free from journalism school in 1968 at a time when there were plenty of jobs and some great opportunities in the news business. I was lucky enough to work at some prestigious news organizations, including United Press International, Post-Newsweek, Gannett and the Miami Herald.

In every one of those news jobs, accuracy in reporting was priority number one. At UPI, it was very simple. Make a major error in a story that’s released nationally and you were fired. There were no ifs, ands or buts. Rules like that kept you on your toes.

Yes, you also had to be quick. But not so fast that you made mistakes. You were judged on a combination of both speed and accuracy. But accuracy was always the most important part of the job.

It’s clear that’s no longer true. Just in the past week, the New York Post got the Boston Marathon bombing story so wrong on so many counts it was hard to believe. They reported that 12 people had died, when only three had. They reported that a Saudi man was a suspect being held “in custody” when that wasn’t true.

And, perhaps worst of all, they put pictures of two young men on the front page that turned out not to be the bombers. The newspaper admitted not knowing whether the men were even suspects. One of those young people was 17 years old and told other reporters that he was afraid to leave his home after the Post printed his picture.

Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the paper, should have been outraged—but he was not. He argued that the picture was “instantly” withdrawn when the mistake was known. He did not explain how one instantly withdraws a printed front page from the streets.

Television news networks are equally notorious for errors. When astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, died, NBC incorrectly called him Neil Young, the musician. That’s what happens when networks rely on 20-something staffers who don’t know their history.

We are all aware that few journalism jobs are left and most pay very little. In fact, I was paid far more in the early 1970s than most journalists make today. Make no mistake, it’s that downsizing of jobs and salaries and journalistic standards that leads to the mistakes and errors we see so often today.

At least most news organizations try to be accurate. Others have a different agenda, which complicates the picture further. Networks like Murdoch’s Fox News present a clearly right-wing agenda—not one based on genuine attempts at truth and accuracy. Too many people believe this is actual news.

Yet, the politicization of journalism seems to be getting worse. Charles and David Koch, the notorious supporters of far right-wing causes, are said to be exploring the purchase of the Tribune Company, which owns 23 television stations and eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.

These men, who finance favored political candidates, are not journalists or even interested in objective reporting. The New York Times reported a source saying the Koch brothers often say “they see the conservative voice as not being well represented” in the news media. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what these financiers are up to.

“It’s a frightening scenario when a free press is actually a bought and paid-for press and it can happen on both sides,” Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group, told the New York Times.

Journalism is not just in a poor financial state these days. It is in a moral crisis as well. The old standards of truth and accuracy in news reporting have been thrown out the window. The Internet, which has empowered everyone as a citizen “journalist,” has not helped. The day is quickly coming when truly independent journalists will have to work on their own.

Just as members of Congress are under the control of money, now the same has happened to journalism. It’s a sad day indeed for accurate, truthful reporting.

"Wild History" Kickstarter Project is Launched

My first Kickstarter project—“Wild History”—is now in progress.

For friends and readers of this blog, this interactive multimedia journalism project is the culmination of a complex 20-plus year personal effort. It has been totally self-funded and came after a long career as a professional journalist. The work was triggered by my deep frustration in the decline of most mass market journalistic storytelling.

It is no secret that during recent years the integrity of most news and information programming has fallen dramatically. No longer can we trust mass media—whether television, print or web sites—to bring us truthful, fair or unbiased reporting. Those with money and special interests now control most media outlets.

So I created the “Wild History” project. The term “wild history” comes from Chinese scholars who divided historical works into two distinct genres. Official histories were called “zhengshi.”

Unofficial histories, or literally “wild histories” were called “yeshi.” They were based on eyewitness accounts, personal remembrances and popular lore. These “wild histories” were more truthful and fluid—catching “life on the wing.”

As a storyteller, I categorize myself as a “wild historian.” Through the years, as I researched and developed my true stories, I have collected film and video, photographs and audio elements during the research.

I had looked to a future when I could combine these audio-visual elements into my written text—creating interactive multimedia. Well, finally, that future has arrived. Now, multimedia books—soon to become a new genre entirely—can be done produced for Apple’s iPad.

This Kickstarter project—“Wild History”—is to raise money to bring the first three of those stories into the interactive age. Most of the story elements have been secured and completed. What remains is putting it all together.

If my work interests you, please visit my Kickstarter page. If the project intrigues you, a contribution of any size would be appreciated.

Thanks for your consideration as I begin this exciting experiment.

Frank Beacham

Kickstarter "Wild History" Project

Beware! Much of Local TV News is Fake!

You probably didn’t know it, but much of the local television news you see is produced by corporations and not journalists. Stories are made to look like news, but they are actually disguised commercials trying to sell you something.

The practice is also perfectly legal, if the station buries the info about the fake reporting at the end of the newscast during the fast-moving credits. Otherwise, it could face a $10,000 fine.

This issue has been going on a long time. But don’t expect to hear about it on your local news.

A few years ago, several public interest groups complained to the Federal Communications Commission that television news operations were including commercial content in newscasts disguised as news. Now, the FCC is reacting, proposing a new regulation that would require all broadcast stations to disclose on the Internet all corporate interests behind their news content.

The FCC has determined that TV newscasts are increasingly seeded with corporate advertising masquerading as news, though the news program is portrayed as the work of independent journalists. Increasingly, paying companies are shaping news coverage at broadcast stations.

The FCC would change the rule from disclosure in the closing credits to making television stations maintain a public file managed online by the FCC. This way it will be easier to track fake news.

A recent Washington Post article documented a live interview segment in which a seemingly neutral reviewer recommended a series of products that the “reviewer” had been paid by sponsors to mention.

The newspaper also said television stations across the country have brokered “exclusive” relationships with local hospitals in which the hospitals pay the station to be featured in health stories. Other stations, the Post reported, have aired “news” programs that feature interviews with sponsors who’ve paid for the privilege.

The FCC said many television stations use “video news releases,” which is lookalike news footage produced by a sponsor or corporate interest that appears to be shot and edited by the station.

We have always said it is best not to watch or pay attention to local news at all. There has never been real “news” there to start with. But, if you watch, beware that you may be watching corporate commercials. Nothing in our culture is as it appears to be. So turn off the damn box.