lovehatethings

There was a whole crapload of freaky, scary stuff that happened all over the world this past year. It's a shame that most of us got, at best, glimpses into what are probably some of the most pressing and meaningful issues of the day while most news outlets decide to spend the majority of their time on mindless minutiae, or buying into slants of stories that are promoted to shunt us away from truth. 2009 suffered the media equivalent of someone pointing up to a phantom airplane, and while everyone else looked, they'd run away.

I know. A pretty crazy title, but I managed to get every major topic in. Enough cryptic titling. Let's get on with the podcast.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big content guy. 

Whether its called a time suck, a time killer, or a time waster, people are accused of occupying their time with pursuits that are determined by other "industrious" folk as wasteful.

Having the first few minutes at home, in front of my desktop, since attending the Copyright Town Hall Inc. Lobbying Mixer this past Thursday at the palatial Royal York Hotel in Toronto's Financial District, I have decided to construct a blog post/submission to the copyright website all in one. And far be it from me to do anything normally, I thought I would use my words to poke some holes in the common myths that revolve around relaxed copyright legislation.

There is nothing so special in society as the charismatic orator. For entertainment and education value, the orator can stand on the stage, on the soapbox, behind the mic, in front of the camera, and reach out to one mind or a million. The content appeal and most often the appeal of the orator is completely subjective, yet the quality of certain individuals isn't lost on masses.

The practice has melded from the ancient to the cutting edge. From Greeks standing in front assembled crowds to podcasts that receive tens of thousands of downloads a day, the orator has moved from the floors of democracy to the warm glow of an LCD screen. And in so much I enjoy podcasts of people interacting, discussing and dialoguing, I hold a fond affinity for the monologue, the rant, and the introspective narrative. From Garrison Keillor to Henry Rollins, from Stuart Mclean to Jello Biafra, from MLK to Bill Hicks, from John Kennedy to Lenny Bruce, the orator has developed and ex panded to suit the needs of audiences and the conventions of the times. (And I'll take the heat here for not including any female examples - my only excuse is for populist impact and general ignorance of comparable pop culture examples, which is a more of a social tragedy than an excuse.)

That the orators of today can hide in a basement behind a microphone may bastardize the centuries-old traditions of standing in front of a crowd and bellowing to assembled throngs, but the intents have not changed: inspire, motivate, educate, even manipulate. Orators try to inspire confidence with confidence, encourage fun by having fun, and move to action by using words as tools - and sometimes weapons.

While some would complain that oratory is a lost art, I often think that, instead, the audiences have lost oratory. For hundreds of millions of people oratory has been reduced to places of public worship - the preacher at the pulpit. The orator used to represent the closest thing to mass media that existed during a place and time. Our attentions have been drawn to flash and pomp and circumstance, yet there's nothing quite the same as a live venue with a passionate speaker, a message, and a desire to communicate. If the ability to experience a charismatic orator live has waned from our consciousness, perhaps some of us have turned to modern substitutes.

I'll be the first to admit that the crowd atmosphere, facial contortions, body language and electricity is difficult, near impossible, to reproduce over a microphone, but remains, noenetheless, enjoyable. Our minds have a boundless ability to fill the voids left without the live experience. The podcaster also has a great strength that is borne on a huge disadvantage. Let's face it; there's little social inhibition in not downloading or stopping and walking away from listening to a podcast. The buy-in on behalf of podcast listeners ensures their engagement and should encourage the content creators. While millions of people sit solemn in houses of worship, there is a stigma involved in getting up and walking out on a sermon.

The faceless orator of portable media devices is not so much the Big Brother or Supreme Sister of the future, but instead a voice of choice, an expert in semantic antics, expressing luminosity in verbosity... and the Earbud Orator shall reign forever... or at least until something cooler comes along... like holodecks.

In exploring the archetypes of any media (and especially entertainment media) I like to think that there are fairly common standards in which my emotions are tugged at for enjoyment's sake. Though the paradigm can be exercised in many ways, depending on the medium, I like to simplify the pattern by commonly calling it "Tension and Release".

In music, tension and release can occur in many ways. Sometimes it's a musician simply playing with volume. Think of the grunge standard of the quiet verse followed by the loud chorus ala Smells Like Teen Spirit or Creep. While these examples are very basic approaches to tension and release (T&R) volume, made effective by immediate contrast, slow builds culminating in auditory climaxes have been around from early drumming to classical to jazz to rock. But music also allows for T&R through harmony and dissonance, varying speeds, rhythmic complexity and simplicity, and varying tonal densities. How many people have had cerebral orgasms upon hearing the cutting single guitar bend that breaks through repetitive vamp of a chord progression?

The basic concepts of T&R extend to novels, films, poetry, visual arts, and basically any other sensory media. It's why the action film often inserts comic relief. 120 minutes of non-stop action eventually becomes wallpaper without contrast in the same way that thrash metal bands have to consider some sense of dynamics if they don't wish to become redundant.

So, I ask myself the question. If most (maybe all) of enjoyable entertainment consumption contains T&R, where does paradigm fit, if at all, with Social Media or Networking. While set pieces like songs, films, and novels have, at their core, a sense of time constraint that contributes to the anticipatory set that one comes to the medium with, what which set do we approach Social Media?

The problems that arise in applying such parameters (and I'll fully admit the marriage of this paradigm may seem forced with SM) lie in the multi-pronged creative approach to the content output. It's kind of like a freeform jazz odyssey with musicians from virtuoso's to drunken karaoke performers. But I think the tools have offered some parallels that help to form the T&R of Social Media.

Twitter is the noisy, fast, guitar solo full of notes that run the gamut of multi-octave scales. Facebook is the dissonant amalgam of everything we want and don't want at the same time. Seesmic is the sample ripped from another artist and dropped in to the pastiche of sound. Youtube is the brief respite leaving the cacophony of sound behind for a time... well, to be replaced by other sound anyway. And blogs are the deep sweeping textures and swaths of sound that allow us to escape for periods of time and consume by... reading. How can all of these content creators possibly orchestrate anything so intentional as an artisitic process like T&R? They don't - you do.

In the ultimate vindication of "reader response" theories, we inherently mix or consumption to achieve appropriate T&R. I could just use Twitter all day or watch Youtube clips or sift through pictures of people's kids in Facebook. I can, however, mix and match, often by instinct to achieve the ebb and flow that best suit my sensibility. Because like anything, there is an "artistic" component if you fly high enough or zoom in enough.

And if you haven't bought any of this, consider the experience of reading it nothing more than the the long sustained notes of a Klaus Schulze composition or the outer movements of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. You may now return to the metal solo.

One of the features Amazon has built into its recommendation engine is the "Frequently Bought Together" section that, I'm guessing, is supposed to inspire you to think "WOW! If other people are buying that, I should probably by it too!"

In the case of a recent purchase of, however, (and what I'm sure isn't a rare occurrence) there were two pieces of media that I could never imagine going together... ever. You see, the concept of "Frequently Bought Together" would indicate to me, more than once. Now I could buy into the fact that perhaps no one who had purchased that Ben Folds' University A Cappella! CD would necessarily buy the same second item before leaving Amazon. I more than expected the second item in the side-by-side purchase push to be another CD by Ben Folds or similar genre pounding piano rocker. I was shocked to find out that, as evidenced by the "Frequently" recommendation, the most popular accompanying item was the DVD Repulsion by Roman Polanski.

Ben Folds CD is described as "a great mix of pop-sounding arrangements (with beat-boxing and voices substituting as drums) and more traditional a capella singing (with lovely harmonies, etc.)"

Polanski's Repulsion, on the other hand, "shows us, in simple but effective terms, the horrors that lurk inside a troubled psyche. While obviously working on a shoestring budget, Polanski recreates with disturbing impact the strange and unsettling horror of a mind that has begun to turn upon itself. Carol Ledoux is not on a strong emotional footing as the story begins: she's at once compelled by and terrified of her sexual needs, and she displays an unhappy emotional distance from others that suggests a mild form of autism. When Carol is left alone after her sister leaves on vacation, her fragile connection with the rest of the world gives way, and. as she isolates herself in her apartment, Carol's mind fragments into a hallucinatory state, which Polanski manifests on-screen with an apt surrealism. Within the increasingly grim and shadowy confines of the flat, revolting images of rotting food and buzzing flies mingle with things that shouldn't or couldn't actually be there, and Polanski's impressionistic use of odd angles, visual distortion, and blunt, shocking violence make Carol's world seem as frighteningly alien to us as it must be to her."

Now those Ben Folds haters out there might think themselves clever by saying... "I get it. Ben Folds REPULSES me!" But to use film commercial techniques, I believe I can make the case for the tie...

The new Ben Folds CD is "simple but effective". Its "strong emotional footing" will convince detractors as "the rest of the world gives way". A "frighteningly" "apt" selection that will have an "impressionistic" "impact" all over the "world".