iPlot

10 Good Reasons Why TV is Good For You

Our friends from the Norman Lear Center, one of the world’s leading think tanks and research institutions devoted exclusively to entertainment, is celebrating their 10th anniversary in style – with a list of ten good reasons why TV, the last remaining mass medium, is good for you: “We've heard the arguments: How TV is bad for us, how it's linked to violence, the obesity epidemic, the dumbing down of culture. At the Norman Lear Center we've made it our business to study entertainment -- televised and otherwise -- and believe that whatever its downsides, TV also has much to contribute to a healthy, connected and well-informed society.“

"10. TV Can Change Policy After an episode of ER was shown to Congressmembers, the Patient Navigator Act was passed. And an episode of Law & Order: SVU that shed light on pesticide testing prompted an official response from the EPA.

9. TV Can Keep You Company As humans, we crave connectedness. Studies have shown that those who suffer from loneliness find comfort in parasocial relationships with favored TV programs and TV characters.

8. TV Can Tap Into Our Better Selves Fonzie got a library card and requests for library cards increased over 500% nationwide. When Hollywood, Health & Society worked with the CBS show Numb3rs on an organ donation storyline, a study found that viewers of the episode were more likely to become registered organ donors.

7. TV Can Make Us Smarter Over the years, popular television has grown in complexity from simple narratives (Bonanza, anyone?) to multi-threaded storylines featuring 15 or more characters (Lost). In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that these complexities in plot, storyline and character have actually made us smarter.

6. TV Can Break Down Barriers Following the 1965 Watts Riots, then CBS broadcast journalist Joe Saltzman produced Black on Black, a primetime documentary about what it meant to be black in Los Angeles.

5. TV Can Motivate Us TV viewers are learning important civic lessons from government-themed dramas like 24 and Law & Order, according to a Lear Center study.

4. TV Can Bring People Together In today's fragmented media markets, shared televised experiences are few and far between. Televised events like the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the World Cup give us a rare opportunity to share a moment in time with the world.

3. TV Can Strengthen Democracy Seventy-two percent learn about elections and candidates from TV news. The Lear Center created The Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism in order to encourage broadcasters to do the job right.

2. TV Can Empower Entertainment-Education posits that what we watch can amuse as well as educate. When South Africa's soap opera Soul City featured a key character as a victim of domestic abuse, it spawned the grassroots "Pots & Pans Campaign." Soul City's creator received the 2009 Everett M. Rogers Award in 2009.

1. TV Can Save Lives For better or worse, viewers absorb what they see on TV, including health information. Studies indicate enormous potential for TV to serve as health educator. The Sentinel For Health Awards recognize achievements of TV storylines that inform, educate and motivate viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives."

Mad Men Finale: So You Like Being in Advertising After All?

What a season finale it was. ‘Shut the Door. Have a Seat’ was a “tight balance of emotionally pungent drama and company coup d’etat,” the LA Times wrote. And indeed, Mad Men came through in the end. And all the mad men and women came through: Sterling, Cooper, Pryce, Pete, Peggy, Joan,  and, more than anyone else of course, Don Draper.

He took Conrad Hiltons’s advice to heart and instead of “crying and relying on other people’s moves” he became the master of his fortune and finally did something meaningful. You could see the glow in his eyes, the pride, and the deep satisfaction of someone who has found (or accepted) his calling. “So you like being in advertising after all?” Sterling asked (a rhetorical question). Facing a divorce from his wife and separation from his kids, Draper, for the first time, gained the stature of a man who has a moral compass. With faith both in himself and in others, the boss turned into a leader.

The final scene with the new agency crew gathered in the makeshift hotel room office poignantly displayed that Draper’s evolution mirrored the dramatic changes a whole society was undergoing at the time: Gender equality, democratization of ideas, flat(ter) hierarchies, and employee empowerment, and an angst, underlying all this progress, triggered by JFK’s assassination. “People used to buy things. Then something terrible happened. And people changed. They want different things now. No one really knows how everything’s changed. But you do,” Draper says in his pitch to Peggy, as he’s trying to convince her to join the new venture rising out of the ashes of the firm formerly known as Sterling Cooper. Although set against the backdrop of the early sixties, the Mad Men finale could be read as commentary on the current cultural climate. Times are as transformative as they were back then. The sentiment is equally nervous, and after 9/11 and the Great Recession people are looking for new meaning in a post-materialistic and, sorry Don, post-advertising world.

And yet, Mad Men’s finale represented both swan song and rebirth of an industry. It may be very American to consider every crisis an opportunity, and in this sense, the end of Mad Men season III was a genuinely American happy ending, or better, an ending with the happiest possible departure – the beginning of a whole new story.Peggy, the empathizer and Pete, the innovator, both had tears in their eyes when they were asked to join the new firm, because, at last, they were given the recognition they deserved, and the opportunity to “build something.” Happiness lies in its pursuit, as we all know, and the Mad Men finale reminded us of a great national pastime: If we throw all our talent and passion together, we can build something great. It can be an advertising firm, a movement, or an entire nation.

Inauguration Immersion

It is only consequent that coverage of the eagerly awaited inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States on Tuesday is as crowdsourced, people-powered, and mashed-up as the campaign which got us this (once) improbable President in the first place. And it comes as no surprise that it is CNN, arguably the most innovative player among the big news networks, which is extending the experimental and experiential flair that has been a hallmark of Obamaesque politics 2.0 to the big day itself.

CNN has already demonstrated its ambition to embrace social media with its bold use of Twitter and iReport, the co-opted citizen journalism video site (well, let’s disregard the silly holographs for a moment). As part of its inauguration coverage, CNN will now partner with Microsoft Live Labs to launch a special micro-site called “The Moment” that offers visitors a photosynthed view of the historic event, combining snapshots of citizens with professional footage into an immersive 3D experience: “We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN's professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN.” Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Microsoft Photosynth and “The Moment” sites, all of the photos will also be shared via CNN’s iReport.

Photosynth allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. The girth of photos from the inauguration will be particularly well-suited, given that there will be millions of images from thousands of different vantage points.

CNN “The Moment”

Also see this TED Talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft Live Labs) about Photosynth:

Live from the White House: Governance 2.0

On the occasion of Barack Obama’s nationwide TV prime time infomercials last night, Fast Company’s Ellen McGirt reviewed the campaign’s media strategy and in particular its innovative use of amateur (or “professional” amateur a.k.a. promateur) video. While the Obama camp has heaped millions of dollars on traditional TV broadcasters, setting a new record for ad spending ($250 million), McGirt believes that the true winners in this campaign are amateurs and democracy

To get an insider’s perspective, McGirt interviewed Obama’s director of field video, Arun Chaudhary, in a frog design mind event in July in New York. Some of the insights Arun shared were pretty amazing. You thought we’d live in an age of snack-size media? Think again!

One thing is clear: the Obama campaign - just awarded "marketer of the year" by AdAge -- has raised the bar for political communications and has created new ways of citizen engagement. During the last presidential election I was working towards a masters' degree in communications at the Annenberg School, and I remember that I wrote a lofty paper about “super-democracy,” in which I drafted a radically idealistic vision of a media-driven democracy in real-time. It’s amazing to see that four years later this has become a reality beyond my boldest imagination. Leveraging the power of new web technologies, the Obama campaign has transformed political media from something to watch to something to do.

This means of course that we citizens expect this form of participatory democracy, transparency, and authenticity to extend to the White House. Interactive visualizations of federal budgets and tax dollar spending, open platforms for public deliberation and collaborative decision-making, instant polling via mobile apps, RSS feeds with policy updates, and fireside video chats with the President are just some of the possible formats that come to mind for the New Governance Media Platform – McGirt is right: Obama and team are on the hook.