Category: Social Media

Beware the Good Olde Days

olde daysI love to bitch about the Oscars to the point where my friends (IRL) avoid me at this time of year.  If I believed in that crap, I’d say I had OCD or something, but, in actual fact, I’m just a cantankerous old fart who’s become a bore about the Academy Awards.  (FYI, a bore is someone who won’t change his mind and refuses to change the subject.)  My problem is, I remember a time when filmmaking was an honourable profession.  However, in my defence, I’m not the first person to get trapped in the Good Olde Days without an escape hatch.

Quite honestly, if you’re over 18, chances are good that the objects in your life’s rear-view mirror are distorted.  The ice cream was creamier when you were a kid, wasn’t it?  The music was sexier, the rain sadder, the sleep softer and the love — well — who doesn’t remember their first love without tears in their eyes?  This is natural.  It’s how our soul reminds us just how cool it is to be alive.

Personally, I think the Good Olde Days were brilliant, and I play “remember when” better than most people.  I wouldn’t trade any of the tales I can tell from back in the day for even a remote understanding of the techno-tawdry world we live in.  But that isn’t the problem.  As I say, a certain amount of nostalgia is good for the soul.  The problem comes when “remember when” starts to replace Friday morning, 2016.

It happens when we get lazy and don’t actually taste the ice cream anymore or sway to the music or listen to the rain.  It happens when we fool ourselves into believing that our eyes should squint with experience when we look at autumn leaves or that first crust of frost winter gives us.  It happens when we begin to think we’ve “been there/done that” too many times.  It happens when we quit doing the things we love.

Oh yeah, that reminds me: the Oscars suck!

Social Media: The Teenage Years

stephen fryIn the face of a midwinter morning, it would be so-o-o-o easy to be bitchy.  It’s cloudy without the threat of mystic rain, chilly without being snuggly cold; the light’s all wrong and Stephen Fry has quit Twitter — again.  Fry is the most recent casualty in the War On Humour.  He made a joke at the Baftas and the Eagerly Offended from Social Media were on him like ugly on an ape.  (No offence, apes!)  Anyway, Fry has gone home to lick his wounds, or whatever else takes his fancy, saying, “too many people have peed in the pool” an apt description of Social Media: The Teenage Years.

Everybody knows the Internet has been around since Al Gore invented it back before Bill Clinton taught the world the value of sexual semantics. (See what bitchy looks like?)  However, most people don’t realize that Social Media is barely a dozen years old.  It isn’t even close to the Age of Consent.  In fact, if Social Media were a person, the things we do with it would get us all arrested.  I’ll just let that one sink in for a minute.

My point is Social Media is still an adolescent.  We all have high hopes that it will become that great intellectual and philosophical adult forum which will connect us to the ideas of the world, but … at this point, it’s still just one giant middle school.  It’s a place where we hang with the people who most reinforce our image of the world.  A place where the unfamiliar is viewed with caution, even suspicion — and sometimes anger.  It’s a place where the questions are painted with broad strokes so the answers can be straightforward.  But, beyond all that, like middle school, Social Media is a place where we’re all desperately, desperately trying to fit in and be cool.  In fact, when Glamour editor Jo Elvin took Fry to task, her exact words were “Uncool of Stephen Fry to say bafta winning costume designer dressed like a ‘bag lady’ I was thinking it was cool she wore what she wanted.”  And that’s what it all comes down to: who’s cool and who isn’t.

Cool is a teenage life choice and “I’m more sensitive than you” is a teenage social tactic.  Clearly, Social Media has a lot of growing up to do.  But Stephen Fry said it better, calling Social Media: “A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended — worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know.”

Sounds like he doesn’t like the Cool Kids, either.  Get ’em Stephen!

God, it would be so-o-o-o easy to be offended on behalf of Stephen Fry today.  It’s a good thing I’m an adult and don’t go in for that sort of thing.

Super Bowl, The Jacksons and Man Boobs

superbowlSunday is Super Bowl Sunday — the game that’s more than a game.  I love the Super Bowl.  I assemble all the “that-stuff-will-kill-you” faux food I can find, chill the sugary beverages, realign my ass groove on the sofa and settle in to watch what usually turns out to be just an average game — because every year the Super Bowl is never as good as the month of playoffs that precede it.  Oh, well!  The Super Bowl is still the biggest sporting event in the world.  Sure, piles more people watch World Cup and the Tour de France or even some cricket championship in India, but that doesn’t matter.  The Super Bowl is Numero Uno, the Big Kahuna*.  The one everybody talks about.  But it wasn’t always that way.  It took a lot of refining to turn an ordinary winner-take-all championship game (which wasn’t even taped the first time) into a worldwide phenomenon where over half the people watching don’t even understand the rules.

The history of the Super Bowl can be divided into four distinct eras.

Squeaky Clean Disney — In the beginning, the Super Bowl wasn’t actually all that super.  It was a championship game but no big deal beyond its domestic fan base – boys to men.  There was lots of advertising, but mainly for the regular man stuff like cars and razorblades and aftershave.  The halftime show was based on the college bowl game model — Disney kids and marching bands.  Every once in a while, a recognizable name got thrown in there, but most fans took the halftime opportunity to go to the bathroom or the fridge for more beer.  That was it, and it stayed that way until 1993 when Michael Jackson showed up.

Michael Jackson and Friends — The news that Michael Jackson would perform at Super Bowl XXVII shot the expected TV ratings through the stratosphere.  Suddenly, everybody wanted their advertising front and centre, and they weren’t about to waste that placement on some lame old commercial.  Unique Super Bowl ads had been around for a while, but Michael turned them into an art form.  And he didn’t disappoint: Super Bowl XXVII was one of the most watched events in television history.

For the next ten years, the Super Bowl halftime show read like a Who’s Who from Billboard — Tony Bennett, Britney Spears, Stevie Wonder, Phil Collins etc. etc.  Even U2 did a solo concert!  The domestic TV audience began reaching for 100 million, and worldwide it went off the charts.  Ads became bolder, flashier and funnier as modern Mad Men went after this audience.  In 2003, The Dixie Chicks sang the National Anthem, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked the snot out of the Raiders 48-21, and Shania Twain and Sting entertained everybody in sight.  Market share and ad revenues were the largest in history.  All was well with the world — or so it seemed.

Janet Jackson and “Man Boobs” — In 2004, Super Bowl XXXVIII threatened to be a complete snooze.  New England was clearly a better team than Carolina.  And the halftime show featured Janet Jackson, the aging sister of a spooky superstar, and Justin Timberlake, the lead singer of the non-threatening boy band ‘N Sync.  However, as Gomer Pyle used to say; “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”  Not only did the game turn into one of the best in history, but Janet and Justin put on a bit of a show themselves.  Does the term “wardrobe malfunction” mean anything to you?  Janet and Justin’s halftime presentation of Janet’s 38-year-old breast shocked a lot of people and scared the crap out of the NFL, CBS and the American federal government.  Family entertainment had been assaulted; those two crazy kids had put billions of ad dollars in jeopardy.  OOPS!  The boys down at Super Bowl Central needed to fix things without going back to boring old “squeaky clean Disney,” but which contemporary entertainer could they trust?  Hip Hop?  Rappers?  Not a chance!  They came up with a brilliant solution – man boobs!  They got male entertainers so old they wouldn’t dare take their clothes off!

For the next six years, Super Bowl fans were subjected to some of the greatest names in Geriatric Rock.  The list is impressive: from Paul McCartney (who was born two years before D Day) to The Who (where half the original band was already dead.)  Even Prince, the youngest of the crowd, was pushing fifty so hard he could see the pension plan from there.  Combine that with Springsteen, The Stones and Tom Petty, and it looked like the nursing homes of Cleveland were having a 2-for-1 sale. But here’s the deal.  It worked!  The audience grew.  It’s amazing how nostalgia and half-naked Go Daddy ads can prop up a mediocre sporting event.  Then Madonna came along.

Safe Sex —  Madonna may have been everybody’s bad girl at some point, but in 2012, chances were good she’d at least keep her clothes on.  After all, she was old enough to be Tom Brady’s m-m-m — older sister.  Unfortunately, nobody vouched for M.I.A., Madonna’s on-stage buddy, who gave over a billion people the finger during, “Give Me All Your Luvin’.”  This time, the NFL went through the roof and sued M.I.A. for something in the neighbourhood of 16 million dollars.  Ouch!

These days, the Super Bowl halftime show might show a lot of skin and have a few suggestive gestures, but with the NFL lawyers standing guard, it pretty much sticks to the safe sex of Bruno Mars and Katy Perry dancing with awkward sharks.  Even Beyonce kept it clean enough to get invited back.  And this is the way it’s going to be for the foreseeable future.

*Just to show you what a big deal the Super Bowl is, notice I didn’t mention “football” once!