COMMENT IS FREE… THERE’S A REASON FOR THAT.

FACT OF THE WEEK: You secretly fancy Kate McCann


HAIKU REVIEW

This week, Charlie Wilson’s War…

Tom Hanks drinks whiskey,

Seymore Hoffman hates Russians,

Some woman’s there too


MAIN EVENT:

The internet is cool. We know this because the media tells us so every day. Those guys love the internet. If the internet were a rock star, the media would be a queue of groupies jostling to give it a long lingering blow job while it talks to its tour manager about t-shirt sales. Get more than one media type together and the conversation - after the customary discussion of where they can get some cocaine - will turn to the wonders of the internet and how it’s going to change everything, literally everything, every-fucking-thing!

In any such discussion one buzzword that’s sure to be bandied about is ‘Web 2.0’. Good rule of thumb: the first person to use the phrase is generally the biggest nob-head in the room. It refers largely to the explosion of user participation sites like YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia which wouldn’t exist without people writing or uploading ‘content’ to them.

The media, like a child who’s just learnt their first joke and expects it to be as funny every time they tell it, has decided to tack on a user generated content element to half its output. UGC ‘innovations’ include things like ‘BBC Writer’s Room’, ‘Comedy Lab’ and Guardian Unlimited’s ‘Comment is Free’ section – by far the internet’s biggest nutter magnet. For all its lofty aspirations it’s basically just a way of getting keyword searchable text, videos and sometimes entire programmes without spending any money! Saying that comment is free is basically the same as saying that coming over to the Guardian offices and making us all a cup of tea is free. Of course it’s free I’m driving traffic to your site!!!

By far the worst offenders in this respect are the news media. Local news in particular, you’ve all heard the appeals, ‘Filmed anything on a grainy camera phone today? Got any nice pictures of snow? well send them in and we’ll put them on telly.’ No! Find your own news, you’re the journalist, you’ve got pens and pads and cars go drive to the news you lazy local bastards!

National news is just as bad though. There’s currently a troubling obsession with reading out the demented texts of viewers. This strikes me as a bit odd. When you’ve carefully prepared and meticulously researched a report and then illustrated that report by discussing it with experts live on TV, is it really necessary to get John from Hemmel-Hempstead to weigh in?

Ironically ‘News Round’ was doing this ten years ago, way before it was cool. I remember the comments from children scrolling across the screen. They were always weirdly right wing and reactionary and always ended with the phrase, ‘It should be banned!’ For example ‘kissing in public is disgusting! It should be banned!’ – Kelly, aged 8, Durham. This isn’t the first time Newsround has predicted the zeitgeist either, think of the changes in TV news over the last few years, presenters without ties, standing up whilst reading the news, Krishnan - all News Round innovations.

But that’s off the point. What was the point? Oh yeah, Web 2.0. Another feature of Web 2.0 is synchronised media pant wetting over new online features like Internet TV. Internet TV is admittedly quite a cool idea in theory, though almost invariably shit in practice. The reason is that whilst you can get a guy to build you a channel for about 80k, TV programs are y’know actually quite expensive and hard to make.

So the channel controllers think, right I’ll get a load of UGC from the public, we’ll call it ‘Guerilla Telly’ or some shit, they’ll love it. Instantly 5 million students say ‘brilliant we’ll do it.’ However, anyone with the wherewithal to actually have a good idea realises that giving up their intellectual property for absolutely no reward is a stupid thing to do and puts their show on YouTube instead, where it stands a fighting chance of generating some buzz because thousands of people are actually watching it. Meanwhile, the channel controllers are counting the cost of the Guerilla TV publicity campaign and hiring two researchers to sift through the videos the students have sent in, all of which involve at least 12 breaches of copyright and are therefore useless.

With their entire operating budget wasted on absolutely nothing, they are forced to go cap in hand to big name brands and ask for their ‘branded content’ or in English, the adverts they have vaguely disguised as programmes. Half the time they won’t even give these up because by now the idea for what the channel was initially supposed to be has been changed, revamped and mangled so many times that it no longer makes even basic sense when they pitch it. The brands therefore think, fuck that we’ll be tainted by association.

The end result looks something like this… www.canned.tv

Hooray for the internet!



It’s not all bad though some channels have actually managed to make a go of it…

VBS.TV – Like MTV in the early nineties only a bit better.

MANIATV.COM – Decent American indie station. Has ridiculously good guests.

There are others that are worth checking out too, if you really want to know email me or something.