Pandemic finds & some serious thinking about pranks

I've been away from the blog for several months. You know how it is when a global pandemic hits. Your world gets thrown into disarray. Many activities are curtailed, many new activities emerge, like a distaste for wearing things without elastic waistbands and the idea that a shower 'every few days' is sort of kind of acceptable. And there's also the finally getting to the junk draw drawer and the opening up of long ignored boxes. My junk drawer is as junky as ever but I did manage to get to piles of university papers I've written over the years, from both undergrad and grad school days, which in my case were separated by 20 years. Among other papers, some dating back to the 1980s, I came across the dissertation I wrote in 1999/2000 in the M.A. Program in Media & Communications at University of London, Goldsmiths College, located in convivial New Cross, SE London.

Also found in the box: My students card, a 1999 Tube map,
and an attractive plastic wallet to hold the pass and the map

The paper carries the somewhat unwieldy academic title "Deride and Conquer: Situating the contemporary protocol-transgressing media personality or 'media prankster".  In plain English that roughly translates to: "What happens, and why, when the vocabulary of pranks collide with the world of media?". And remember, this question was being mulled over 20+ years ago. What was the world like then? Well, Amazon was but a money-losing online bookseller, Google was a year-old startup founded by a couple of grad students, and in the mainstream media sphere the $182 billion Time Warner/AOL merger looked like a great idea.

I think we need to remind ourselves what this thing called media looked like at the time. It was largely conventional terrain, made up of a small number of large broadcast networks, the cable universe, a bit of community and campus TV and radio, photocopied zines, and a small number of activist organizations, of which the culture jamming Adbusters was probably the most high profile. Anyone interested in 'hacking' media norms had to do so either outside the landscape of conventional media or by using comedy or an acceptable level of weirdness as a kind of 'back door' into these structures. The Internet was dial up only and therefore limited in what it could carry in terms of audio and video and mobile phones were costly devices that could do little more than place calls. A different world indeed.

But back to the topic at hand. I've had a longstanding interest in if, how, and when the rational and the ridiculous run head first into each other. Sometimes by design, sometimes by accident, and usually with great comic effect. Anyone who's alive in 2020, however, knows that we're now on the other side of that cliff, with the post-fact world being the norm, and affordable, ubiquitous technologies enabling the billions around the world with smartphones to operate as content creators, distributors, and even outright propagandists. We now know that the super spreading behaviour that gave us viral videos has also given us today's couldn't-be-more-highly-polarized political landscape.

As for the dissertation, there are 5 chapters in all, each of a few thousand words, and I believe the desired word count for the whole dissertation was 20,000. This was one of I think 6 papers we had to write for the M.A., the others being 5-6000 word papers on a combination of required and elective courses.

Chapters of the dissertation will appear here on the blog as I work through the old word doc I found. I'll add links and videos, fix any 20 year old typos I happen to find and, as much as my patience permits, deal with wonky formatting issues that originated in 1999 when this paper was embarked upon.

Here's the table of contents, and as the chapters go live I will add the links to the numbered chapters below. As you can see there's a bunch of theory that has been brought to bear on the topic, because, as I have learned, being serious about the seemingly un-serious is serious business.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Putting the prankster in context
• Chapter 2: Literature Review: Carnival pleasures: The liminal, the ludic, the synthetic, and the spectacular 
• Chapter 3: Normalization & neutralization vs. rebellion & resistance 
• Chapter 4: Methods & Analysis: Suffering the fools? The cases of media pranksters Ali G, Tom Green, Dennis Pennis, and Nardwuar the Human Serviette
• Chapter 5: Some concluding thoughts on the media prankster

And to get you into the appropriate headspace,  a few clips to get you started. First, a clip of a young Sacha Baron-Cohen, appearing on a Channel 4 (UK) show called The 11 O'Clock Show in 1998. It was seeing this show that led me down the path of doing a serious academic examination of 'counterfeit' media personalities. As you'll see below, the Ali G character was still in its formative stages, not yet the confounding blend of multi-ethnic suburban rapper that the world would come to know a few years later.

It's worth thinking about how a handful of years later, in 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert became satirical conservative pundit Stephen Colbert and ended up doing more than just crack wise and entertain us nightly for close to 10 years.

And more recently Eric Andre has taken the plunge into similar waters, setting out to make what he calls 'the world's worst talk show'. In such a scenario failure is the ultimate success, and success, defined in conventional terms, is the ultimate failure.

Now you've got the picture. And of course want to know more, so here you go: 

Chapter 1: Introduction: Putting the prankster in context

Chapter 2: Carnival Pleasures: The liminal, the ludic, the synthetic, and the spectacular

Chapter 3: Normalization & neutralization vs. rebellion & resistance

Chapter 4: Suffering the fools

Chapter 5: Some concluding thoughts on the media prankster

A YouTube Button on a Remote Control & An Oral History of Nardwuar

A little over a month ago I was in a hotel where I found this remote. Never before had I seen a remote control with these kind of 'hard coded' buttons for YouTube and Netflix.

The YouTube button in particular got me thinking. And not only because a little over a week ago an Oral History of Nardwuar podcast went live, put together by the Canadaland network. I was one of the many long time Nardwuar associates interviewed for what turned out to be a thorough look beneath the trademark tam.

If you're new to Nardwuar, the 200 words or less brief on him is that he's the exact opposite of an overnight success. Today he's a YouTube phenomenon, in the top 3 or so percent of all YouTube channels in terms of both subscribers and views. But he's not your typical YouTuber. He started decades ago, and worked his way to YouTube by way of campus radio*, then the occasional appearance on public access cable, then 2 minute pieces on MuchMusic, the MTV of Canada.

Around the time that the MuchMusic gig came to an end this new thing called YouTube appeared. And as you'll probably remember for its first few years it was full of the most random material, as well as pirated material, and far too many videos of people's kids' talent shows and of course the cats that later become the backbone of entertainment on the Internet.

And though it wasn't part of the plan -- as there really was no plan when Nardwuar starting posting videos on YouTube in late 2006 -- the inherent randomness and disorder of YouTube turned out to be the perfect home for this unconventional interviewer of everyone from pop, rock, punk, and rap stars to comedians, politicians, and even luminaries from the worlds of infomercials and conspiracy theories.

That YouTube was specifically not TV was what created a whole new space of possibility for people making online content. The idea was that anyone can make and post videos, and anyone in the world can see them, and comment on them, and share links to them. And we ought not forget that such a notion was truly radical 15 years ago, when YouTube started, and it still kind of is even now. The definitions of what an interview is, what an interviewer is, what a show is, what quality is...all those things were put into the hands of the people choosing to watch. And now, on some remote controls at least, those choices can be made right alongside the ones for network TV, cable TV, and streaming services.

If you're interested in the story of how a person whom for years received rejection letters, was told he didn't have enough commercial appeal, or was categorized as being 'off brand' for most broadcasters and network TV, ends up finding the perfect workaround to the gatekeeper-controlled world of media (and igniting a coming up on 20 year bromance with Snoop Dogg along the way), then the Oral History of Nardwuar podcast is for you.

And just one more thing...

*Oh and 33 years later he's still doing the damn campus radio show

Creative robots? Machines and the creation of music, art, and movies

A computer science professor, a new media curator and critic, and an AI entrepreneur building audience demand analysis software (no, this isn't the beginning of one of those 'walk into a bar' jokes) recently got together to think about, and talk about, artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative industries.

It all happened when the Canada Media Fund recently hosted Analog, a conference that showcased a handful of AI experts in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. The events offered an in-depth, nuanced look at the implications of AI in artistic endeavours. In Toronto, the CMF’s director of industry and market trends, Catherine Mathys, along with a computer science professor, a new media curator and critic, and an AI entrepreneur building audience demand analysis software took on the many facets of the debate around AI and the arts.

Creativity (Re)Considered

To think through the role of technology in creative practices, we first need a working definition of what creativity is. Does it refer to creating something out of nothing? Is it an ability to see invisible rules and bend — if not break — them? Is it remixing and recontextualizing ideas that are already known or in circulation? And whatever the answers to these questions may be, we need to ponder if there’s a net positive role for artificial intelligence in the creative process.

Defining creativity used to be fairly straightforward. Visual arts, music, and inventions were things made by people, using physical tools and artistic techniques. Similarly, defining ownership used to be more or less routine. With creativity melded with machines, however, it’s a different story. Once cut-and-dry issues such as copyright and authorship find themselves pondered by legal scholars and practitioners as a result.

The Computer Scientist’s Point of View

Are we using our creative brains on patterns we’ve seen before? Is our creativity anchored on things we’ve done and liked before? These are just a few of the questions University of Toronto Computer Science Professor Steve Engels asks. His work with AI finds its applications in such projects as games for the blind or to improve the cognition of seniors, and programs that generate music.

As an academic, Engels’ interest lies in the deployment of AI as a cognitive tool — something that supports human processes. One of the challenges, he says, is to figure out where the boundaries are between what’s best made by a human and what’s best made by a machine.

As a concrete example, he points to his work with the video game design community in Toronto, which has been experimenting with ‘authorless music.’ As the name suggests, that is music generated by a computer trained on algorithms. For game companies with limited music budgets, Engels says it can provide a “good enough” and affordable solution. He does, though, acknowledge what he calls “the Britney problem” — if an AI is trained on Britney Spears songs, there’s a non-zero chance that its output will sound like Britney Spears.

“It can produce Bach or it can produce Britney,” notes Engels. “It’s based on the dataset it’s trained on. It has a space it plays in, and when it goes outside of that space it tends to create things that are off the rails and don’t even sound like music.”

The Curator’s Point of View

The role of humans in creativity is critical. It is only by expressing aspects of the human condition that art ‘speaks’ to people, stressed new media curator and art critic Shauna Jean Doherty. She is therefore optimistic about a future in which AI intersects with art, but understands there are scenarios on the edge of both that represent real challenges.

She shared the example of the French art collective Obvious, creator of the first AI-based artwork that sold at auction. In the words of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, of Obvious, “we fed the system with a dataset of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th and the 20th centuries. The ‘Generator’ makes a new image based on the set, then the ‘Discriminator’ tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the ‘Generator.’ The aim is to fool the ‘Discriminator’ into thinking that the new images are real-life portraits. Then we have a result.” The resulting piece sold at auction in 2018, and did so with a $400,000-plus price tag — over 40 times the most optimistic estimates.

Doherty’s concern is that AI can “fetishize” the creative process. “By human standards it’s not great artwork, but by machine standards it might be okay. [But] It’s not enough for me as a critic and curator to say ‘it’s made with AI.’ A lot of it really looks the same.”

The AI Entrepreneur’s Point of View

In 2016, University of Waterloo grad Jack Zhang developed an AI-based system that could weigh a plotline against some 40,000 attributes to predict ― and optimize ― the resulting movies’ chances of success. As Zhang explained at that time “before a single word was written, we used a computer program to analyze a massive amount of data to see what kind of plot elements in the film were driving audiences. So we correlated that with audience taste and behaviour data and see what type of plot would draw in what type of audience, and then feed that information to screenwriters who would closely work with our computer program to create that screenplay.”

A trailer for the movie, in this case a horror movie, was created for $30. Not knowing what to expect, the trailer was posted on Facebook. The result: 2.7 million views for a movie that didn’t exist. In other words, there was demand the supply did not meet. Zhang saw a market opportunity, something he recently explained in detail in an episode of the CMF’s Now & Next podcast.

The software he has since built out goes beyond AI assisting with the creative process. It is also capable of what he calls “audience demand analysis,” which can begin with the creative process and go all the way through to marketing and distribution.

Zhang looks at the creative process in film and TV as two-pronged problem. There’s the systematic and the random — the former being what is known, and the latter being what is unpredictable and often unexplainable. As he explained at Analog, his software seeks to combine these two domains. This does not mean it’s a replacement for creativity. But it provides the ability to run probabilities in a business known for being largely unknowable.

Incidentally, Zhang’s film, based on a trailer and some AI-fuelled instinct, began as a crowdfunded Kickstarter project, and is now financed with a $3.5 million budget, with production scheduled to begin in Q2 2020.

How Viacom made the shift from MTV to digital video for a global audience

On this episode of the podcast I've been hosting we explore how a major legacy media company is navigating the shift from the 'lean back' experience of linear television to the short and on demand mode of viewing on phones, tablets, and other screens large and small.

We’ll look at this paradigm shift in the context of Viacom, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates. Viacom is best known for creating some of the coolest, edgiest, youth-oriented programming ever seen on TV. Think Beavis & Butthead and Comedy Central Roasts, for example.

But all the cool in the world wasn’t enough to defend Viacom from the array of content options people had once the internet became the dominant mode of content distribution.

How has Viacom found its way back to millions, if not billions, of viewers around the world? How is it defending its turf against the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube?

In this episode we’ll dig into these questions with Brendan Yam, Vice President and General Manager of Viacom Digital Studios International, or VDSI.  He's been with the company since 2005, and for the past year and a half has led the company’s short-form digital content output and its expansion into global markets.

Download a transcript of the episode

Jump to some highlights:

What led to Viacom experimenting with short-form digital video content (2:24)
What works and what doesn’t in this format (8:39)
Viacom’s short-form strategy and its successes around the world (10:43)
Business models in digital video (16:34)

Related Links:

• During the interview I reference an article on Viacom by Matthew Ball and Jason Hirschhorn. The full title of that article is “Why Viacom Fell (And Why It Can Come Back).” Read it here on REDEF.
• “Viacom Sets Up International Hubs to Pump Out Short-Form Content” on Digiday
• “Viacom Digital, Facebook Watch Cut Four-Continent Deal for Short-Form Shows” on Forbes

The Environmental Impact of Film & TV Production: Water Bottles, Meat, Idling Engines and More

If you’ve ever seen a TV show or film set on location, you know that production—with its rows of trucks and trailers, power generators, and catering services—is often the equivalent of a small city setting up shop.

A quick tally makes it obvious that non-trivial amounts of waste and greenhouse gases are generated on any set. As people become more environmentally conscious, anything and everything from plastic cutlery to idling vehicles become opportunities to implement sustainable production practices.

This episode of the podcast I host deals with the 'greening' of film and TV production with Zena Harris, a sustainability expert and the president of Green Spark Group.

Highlights include:

• The origins of growing worries over environmental sustainability on TV and film sets (1:54)
• Some key contributors to a production’s environmental footprint (5:33)
• Productions of all sizes and shapes can go the green route (11:50)
• Industry leaders demonstrating how production greening is done (13:13)

Download a transcript of the episode

Additional links:

• 2019 report by French think-tank The Shift Project titled “Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use Of Online Video” 
• Creative BC’s Reel Green initiative
• Sustainability Could Play Leading Role in the Film Industry”: Green Production Guide
• Why This Production Company Wants to Make the First Carbon-Neutral Hollywood Film
• From Battery-Powered Sets to Finessing Craft Service: How Hollywood Is Reducing Its Carbon Footprint
• The CMPA's Green Screens Guide
• Sustainable production tips and resources from Sustainable Media Production Canada

How Podcasts Got So Hot: An Interview with Nicholas Quah of HotPod

On this episode of Now & Next, the podcast I host, we journey into the business aspects of one of the media landscape’s most talked about areas: Podcasting.

Last season we examined the emerging podcast industry with Vancouver podcasting company Pacific Content’s Steve Pratt and Dan Misener. Since then, their company has been acquired by Rogers Media, while another company we talked about during that episode, Gimlet Media, has been acquired by Spotify for $230 million. The latter also acquired Parcast and Anchor earlier this year, spending over $400 million on podcasting acquisitions in total.

Such acquisitions speak to the industry’s real-time build-out as well as the rapid rate of growth it’s experiencing; i.e. there were about 500,000 podcast series last year, and today, there are upwards of 800,000. And more importantly, from the business point of view: The ad revenue supporting the burgeoning industry is on a major upswing. Between 2015 and 2019, revenues jumped from just over $100 million per year to over $600 million annually and are expected to top $1 billion by 2021.

Our guide for this episode is Nicholas Quah, founder of Hot Pod, the leading newsletter on the podcast industry.

In this episode, Nicholas Quah:

• Takes stock of the key moves that occurred in the industry over the past year (2:19)
• Reflects on how the influx of money in podcasting will impact the industry (6:50)
• Ponders how business models will evolve in the podcasting space (15:04)
• Shares his thoughts on what the next round of big moves in podcasting will imply (20:07)

Download a transcript of the episode

Related links: 

• Now & Next Season 1 Episode 2: Pacific Content on the Audio Renaissance
• Check out and subscribe to Nicholas Quah’s Hot Pod News
• Get a look at podcasting in Canada thanks to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2019 report
• Read Here’s Why We’re Entering the Golden Age of Podcasts, in 10 Graphs on Chartable
• Read The Podcast Industry Expected to Create $1 Billion in Annual Revenue by 2021 on The Verge
• Read Open or Closed: Who Will Control the Paid Podcast Experience, Podcasters or Tech Companies? on NiemanLab

Over 50 films in 50 years: The documentarian working at the speed of a YouTuber

This episode of the podcast I'm hosting presents an in-depth conversation with acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, one of the world’s most notable Indigenous filmmakers.

She has made over fifty films over the span of her fifty-year career. Her documentary on the 1990 Oka Crisis is among her most widely known works. Now in her late eighties, Alanis has not slowed down. Her 53rd film, Jordan River Anderson, The Messenger, premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It also won the ‘Best Canadian Documentary’ award at the 2019 Vancouver International Film Festival.

A lot has changed in the world of documentaries since Alanis Obomsawin started making films in the 1960s, and much of that change has occurred in the last few years. We are now in the midst of a documentary gold rush, with streaming services and on-demand video platforms opening up new avenues for a genre previously relegated to limited theatrical releases, home video or DVD—and maybe one or two broadcast slots. As a result, we’re seeing documentaries become bona fide hits and some bring in well into the eight figures at the box office. It’s a truly unusual phenomenon in the doc world.

So, what does an iconic documentarian make of all the changes afoot in the world not just of documentary, but of media and technology in general?

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• How Alanis Obomsawin views the role of documentary filmmakers today (4:15)
• Her relationship with new technologies (5:26)
• How tech affects the sacredness of the movie-watching experience (10:52)
• What keeps her hopeful for the future (17:11)

Download a transcript of the episode

See Alanis Obomsawin’s films on the National Film Board’s website.