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4 Jun 2011

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
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When those of a certain generation first hear of the "Filter Bubble," they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-'90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like a private driveway upon which only targeted and personalized information travels at the expense of the broader range of knowledge. This shift to personalization raises as many questions about one's online privacy as it does about censorship, whether it's intentional or the result of an algorithm trying to give you what it thinks you might like - or buy. As Pariser explains in his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, a personalized world is one that only serves to confirm our existing beliefs as determined by the digital breadcrumbs we've left along the way. When we only receive information aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, "It's difficult to maintain perspective," suggests Pariser. Or, as he whimsically put it during a recent chat at Seattle's Town Hall Center for Civic Life, "When you step to the side for a new perspective, it's as if the world moves to meet your gaze." In an Amazon Q & A, in which Pariser credited the bookseller for its relative transparency as regards its product suggestions with the apropos example, "We're showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984," the Internet activist explained, "Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop." "The technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in," Pariser said to The Atlantic. "It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience." Of course, the Filter Bubble is more the unintended consequence of a business strategy than an insidious plot on the part of a gaggle of geeks in Silicon Valley to control your Internet experience and by extension your thinking. The fact is, in some cases, we're censoring it ourselves. As Pariser recently explained on KQED's Forum, "Because Facebook mainly uses how many people 'like' something as a means of figuring out what they should show other people, what that means is that you see well-liked news on Facebook." Google, however, has 57 different ingredients in its secret sauce. Even when logged out of your account, Google gleans signals from your online behavior and applies them to a profile that it uses to tailor results more to your liking. Consequently, like a fingerprint, no two search results are the same for different users. Try it - it's spooky. It should be noted that the sources for this piece came entirely from links presented through the various mechanisms Pariser describes, so it's likely only part of the story - the part the robots intended to be seen by someone in the media to be shared with those it knows are reading that media. When I asked him personally what content producers could do to override the algorithm, Pariser essentially said we're SOL: "Content creators are at its mercy." Time to crank the Filter.
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4 Nov 2010

Buzzy Logic: Jail House Rock + Facebook + Amazon = Book Deal
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When it comes to publishing a memoir, the odds of obtaining an agent, bringing a book to market and selling it within one’s lifetime whilst the publishing industry endures seismic change, are astronomical. Local music scene fixture Buzzy Martin, however, aimed for the stars (and scored) by doing precisely none of the above. Don't Shoot! I'm the Guitar Man

, recounts an odyssey that began with Martin teaching music to at-risk kids to a stint playing tunes for hardboiled cons at San Quentin. Throughout, he brought back life lessons he shared with his young pupils – think Scared Straight with power chords. This very paper applauded the book as “a compelling portrait of the transformative power of music and of the impact that it can make on men from drastically different walks of life” and recommended highly. Berkeley, an imprint of publishing juggernaut Penguin, released Martin’s book in a trade paperback edition last month. A film adaptation is underway. Martin’s accomplishment is interesting on several levels, not least of which because the wild-haired and mustachioed guitarist never intended on being a writer. He wanted to be a rock star. “That never happened and I have to cop to that and that’s okay but what did happen is that I’m changing the world in my own way.” More specifically, Martin is changing the worlds of those he mentors through music and now words. Martin’s commitment to healing broken souls through music is total and he’s more inclined to discuss the issues faced by incarcerated kids than the vicissitudes of the publishing industry. However, his experience in this realm is an object lesson in persistence, friendship and belief in oneself – attributes he tries to awaken in his students. This is how he did it: After afternoons playing ZZ Top covers sand stewing in the existential experience of jailed felons, Martin would recount his experiences into a tape recorder to decompress during his commute home. Being computer-averse at the time, Martin later transcribed the six resulting 90-minute tapes by hand and later coaxed his wife into keying his words into a word processor. Thereafter, Martin began working the material into a cogent narrative – writing and rewriting until he “had what I didn’t realize was called a manuscript.” With little notion how to proceed, Martin sought publishing advice from staffers at Copperfield’s Books who suggested he self-publish. With his wife’s continued assistance, he did. He then proceeded on an ill-fated campaign to place the book in the hands of juvenile hall inmates, which he perceived as his target audience. “The only juvenile hall director I talked to said ‘Don'’ ever call me again, these kids are my fucking retirement, I’m not going to read your goddamn book’ and that was it,” said Martin. Mike Grabowski, a professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Santa Rosa Junior College, had a markedly different response and made Martin’s self-published book required reading. “That was the first ‘yes,’” said Martin. It only takes one. If the so-called “vanity press” finds some authors gazing fondly at themselves in the mirror, Buzzy Martin is the opposite – he went through the looking glass. When Martin finally got hip to Facebook he used it to connect to everyone from guitar players (Toto’s Steve Lukather among them) to criminal justice professionals and asked each if they would accept a copy of the self-published tome and review it on Amazon. The approbations rolled in. Meanwhile, a friend’s wife at Penguin Books gifted a copy to a colleague who emailed Martin some kind words about the work. Contemporaneously, Martin pursued a contact in San Francisco’s juvenile court system who learned had quit and moved into a position at Prodigy Motion Pictures. She recognized the potential of Martin’s story, which also sparked with company founder Ray Robinson, which Martin shared with Penguin. He was offered a contract in a matter of days. The film contract followed shortly thereafter. Don't Shoot! I'm the Guitar Man

is available in 40 countries. It’s first printing sold out in six days. The movie is coming soon to theater near you. Originally published in the North Bay Bohemian.
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30 Aug 2010

Unfriend Me
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How to be a Social Medea and give "friends" the axe
Credit must go to Facebook for turning "friend" into a verb, as in "Friend me on Facebook," or perhaps "Go friend yourself," should one choose to decline the invitation. When it became appended with the antonymic prefix "un-," the new verb took its place in the New Oxford American Dictionary last November as the lexicographer's choice of "word of the year." "It has both currency and potential longevity," senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg of Oxford's U.S. dictionary program told CNN at the time. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year." Of course, new entries into the lexicon can't be truly integrated into the language until some daft, first-year journalism student attempts to use it in a dreaded "dictionary lead" á la "The New Oxford American Dictionary defines 'unfriend' as 'To remove someone as a friend on a social networking site.'" Likewise, "retweet" is also a pitch-perfect neologism: if to "tweet" is to post something on Twitter, then to retweet, one can easily intuit, is to repost (not to be confused with "riposte," a fencing term used to describe an arch reply dipped in wit—which often accompany retweets) that tweet. Of course, "retweet" sounds like what Elmer Fudd would say at Waterloo, but in cyberspace no one can hear you scream, so what does it matter? Long a verb in its own right, Google is said to be cooking up its own Facebook-killer, "Google Me," which apparently makes one's self-absorption sharable online with the masses you might eventually unfriend. To "Ungoogle Me" would likely be the result of an online restraining order. The fine folks at the Oxford American Dictionary will likely leave that one, well, undefined. From the get-go, public relations professionals have hitched their wagons to Facebook lest they be made irrelevant by the bumper crop of social-media marketing professionals (and otherwise) once everyone realized the platform combined the worst aspects of open-mic night and a social disease. Everyone has a shot at infecting their friends with the message; now advertisers, corporate and individual brands and causes are considered so-last-century if they're not represented on what was quaintly called "the" Facebook until its fateful name change in 2005. Among those trying to refract a little of the site's limelight is Know Me Social Media Marketing, which is simultaneously based in San Diego, Calif., and Nashville, Tenn. The company, whose "head geek" Don Lowe could pass as a stand-in for Dan Aykroyd circa My Stepmother Is an Alien, is promoting its Facebook-inspired-brainchild "Worldwide 1st Annual Delete a Friend Week on Facebook." Represented by a fan page on the site entitled "Delete a Friend Week," the campaign, as of this writing, boasts 2,266 fans. "This fall, fall out of touch with seven of your most annoying friends. Starting Sept. 1st, join us in deleting seven Facebook friends who drive you nuts," reads the fan page. "Maybe it's that they never comment or maybe it's because they write posts that are 19 paragraphs. Let us know what made you decide to delete them as well." The fact that joining a Facebook page while unfriending friends is akin to taking seven steps forward and one step back in terms of managing one's online relationships hasn't seemed to bother the "movement's" adherents. The call to post one's reasons for dropping people is the campaign's secret weapon: it provides a forum to justify what others might construe as an antisocial act. One can cut a cretin with a clear conscious by posting that one has tired of "those people who post about their 'awesome' mac & cheese" as one woman wrote. Participants aren't so much cutting friends, however, as redirecting their energies to another corner of Facebook's walled garden while bolstering a marketing company's portfolio. That the gauge of Know Me Social Media Marketing's success lies within a body count of ended online relationships is not as peculiar as the fact that it has been so embraced prior to its official launch next week. It's a queasy catharsis, for sure, but "digital dharma" has yet to enter the dictionary. Alas, "frenemy" already has. Unfriend me here.
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17 Jul 2010

How to Make a Feature Film for $250
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Of the "rags to riches" narratives comprised in the American Dream, one variation seems to be recurring with the regularity of sprocket holes on celluloid. It's the tale of the independent filmmaker, rebuffed by Hollywood, who manages to make a movie on little to no budget, often maxing out credit cards and the goodwill of friends and family along the way. CUT TO: An alignment in the stars that results in a heap of money made by the filmmaker and, ironically, the Hollywood machine that originally passed. A decade ago, The Blair Witch Project set the gold standard with a $60,000 budget that bloomed into a $240 million profit worldwide. Technically, at $25,000, Deep Throat is still considered the most profitable independent film ever, having grossed around $600 million. In dating terms, that same cost-benefit ratio would be the equivalent of throwing a penny at someone's window and getting blowjobs for the rest of one's life. "You might say that Deep Throat was the film that started the independent film movement," director Fenton Bailey once remarked. He was right; independent filmmakers have remained on their knees to creditors and distributors to make and release their product since the days of the Lumière Brothers—that is, until the digital age ushered in production and distribution means that emancipated filmmakers from industry gatekeepers. A recent example is filmmaker Shane Carruth's 2004 sci-fi thriller, Primer. Famously made for a mere $7,000, the film became a darling of the festival circuit and landed international distribution. In terms of lowering the budget-bar, however, Santa Rosa's Lee Cummings has Carruth beat by $6,750. His upcoming feature film, Date for Hire, will be released on DVD by Maverick Entertainment Group this fall, streamed by Netflix and available at such retailers as Blockbuster, Best Buy and Wal-Mart. The film cost $250 to make. The unrated flick centers on "Marcus," a romantic schlemiel who bets he can score a date with the next woman who walks into the bar frequented by him and his male cohorts. Of course, the femme fatale who sashays in (the gorgeous Jennelle Harris) brings with her a host of complications and plot twists. "Now a simple bet has turned into an all-night adventure, where money, stalkers and craziness collide," reads the official synopsis. "We shot it in 17 days straight," says the 39-year-old Cummings, who began production a year ago. "It's like when the lightning strikes you; it's like a one-in-a-million shot. I mean, everything can happen badly on a movie." Especially when that movie's total budget is the price of an iPhone. Though Cummings already owned a camera and could rent the lens packages he desired, he couldn't afford the monitor necessary to view the resulting image right-side-up while shooting. Consequently, he shot the entire film upside-down. And the rest of the budget? Cummings reckons much of it went to the "lighting guy" and Calumet Photographic, an equipment rental house in San Francisco. Fortunately, Cummings had after-hours access to his primary location, Santa Rosa's Round Robin (aka "the dirty bird"), on the house, as it were. This meant that he and his cast and crew worked from 2am to 10am for more than two weeks. He credits the long-standing friendships between him and his principal cast—Romas Reece, M. Jennings and Scott Fitzgerald—for enduring their turns as swing-shift Stanislavskis. Remarkably, Cummings scored his distribution deal without any festival screenings to stoke the market. All the festivals to which the film was submitted rejected it, likely because the rollicking dude-driven comedy didn't match the higher-minded profile of typical festival fare. Moreover, after Cummings had sent Date for Hire to Maverick Entertainment Group, he wasn't confident that it had registered on the distributor's radar. Fortunately, he found their company page on Facebook and was able to fortify a connection through the social network. Will the film be profitable? The relatively low capital investment suggests that Cummings could redeem the beer cans from a screening party and be out of the red. Will it pay back on the estimable sweat equity invested by all involved? Perhaps, but then friendship is its own reward.
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7 Mar 2010

And the Tweet goes to…
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Oscars & Twitter: A Cast of Thousands but only 140 Characters

Come February of every year, scads of entertainment journalists engage in a ritual peculiar to their beat. They apply for press credentials to cover the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Academy Awards. An awards ceremony for motion pictures presented on television epitomizes traditional media. If the gold statuette was wrapped in newspaper like a fish, perhaps the event could be even more quaintly 20th century. Despite its antiquarian trappings, this year Oscar is poised at the nexus of traditional and social media. In addition to the usual questions used to vet journos' credibility in the online credential application, a new query appears: "Tell us about how we can find you online—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other social media platforms." Social media like Twitter have been a boon for journalists, and not merely for those upgrading their bylines to brand names. (The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism cited the "personal branding" of journalists online as a major trend in its State of the News Media Report for 2009.) Social media tools have also enabled journalists laboring under repressive regimes to bypass censors and transmit reportage to the world, if only at 140 characters at a time.

For some media critics, freedom of the press coupled with free blogging services have resulted in either a free-for-all or a free fall. Consider the so-called citizen journalists, whose training consists of little more than glossing the "Terms of Service" agreement on a video-sharing site and who routinely break stories via social media. In an era when an anonymously posted YouTube video depicting the death of 26-year-old Iranian activist can put those who produced it in the company of New York Times and New Yorker reporters when winning journalism's prestigious George Polk Award, the redefining of what a journalist is must be under way. In its own way, the Academy Communications Department, which dispenses Oscar credentials, has contributed to this process. In short, professional journalists are now expected to have a social media presence—just like the amateurs. ABC, which broadcast the Oscars this Sunday, has yet to reveal an official policy regarding tweeting at the Oscars, whether that be by journalists, attendees or even nominees (Up in the Air director Jason Reitman seems to be the only nominee with an active Twitter account). Rival network NBC, however, has had to contend with the social media factor head-on as some of its current XXI Olympic Winter Games broadcasts are released on taped delay; it is hopeless to prevent medal results from being tweeted to the world. There is, as yet, no such thing as a tweet-delay, though the Iranians are surely working on one. The International Olympic Committee speaks to this, in part, with its "IOC Blogging Guidelines for Persons Accredited at the XXI Olympic Winter Games, Vancouver 2010," a four-page document intended to police the social media habits of accredited attendees. "It is required that, when Accredited Persons at the Games post any Olympic Content, it be confined solely to their own personal Olympic-related experience," it states, suggesting that no news is good news, but writing of one's aspiration to appear on a box of Wheaties is acceptable. Moreover, "the IOC considers blogging, in accordance with these guidelines, as a legitimate form of personal expression and not as a form of journalism." Micro-blogging, fittingly, was addressed via tweet on the Olympics' official Twitter account where athletes were encouraged to share the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat: "Athletes go ahead and tweet, as long as it's about your personal experience at the games." As a live event, the Oscars have little fear of its winners being revealed prior to some celebrity saying, "The envelope, please." At worst, entertainment journalists will offer a deluge of online snark, which they will later recapitulate online, in print and wherever else news goes to die. If Oscar winners tweeted their acceptance speech à la "You like me, you really like me. #Oscar," that might warrant a re-tweet or two. But, alas, no.
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