You can call the following “Mad Men and me.” If I knew then what I know now about advertising, I might never have become a journalist. When I watch that show, all I can think is what a great life! What great looking women, even the mousy ones! What fun drinking on the job in the office and smoking in the office and, more importantly, drinking after hours. We did some of that in TV journalism where I spent my career, but never with the panache as depicted on that popular show. Drinking as a TV journalist usually had a more desperate quality to it. I have to admit that I worked briefly at an advertising agency when I was doing graduate work at NYU. My job was menial. My hands were dirty. But I did wear a suit even though I was in the mailroom. It was not much of a job. Not really. I delivered the mail to people outside the mailroom and I spent a lot of time at the post office sending out the taped commercials produced in the small agency where I worked. Remember, this was in the days before landline, satellites and digital that now allows agencies to send commercials through the air for little cost. The agency I worked at produced 15 minute long commercials that it mailed to stations around the country looking to fill airtime because they lacked what TV executives call “product.” I didn’t stay around long enough to find out how successful (or not) those commercials were, but I know that my arms grew weary from lugging boxes of filmed, yes, filmed, commercials to the post office, standing on line to send them around the country, and then paying cash to the United States government for the privilege of allowing it to carry these cultural artifacts to stations everywhere. After three months, I grew tired of the job and quit. I took another part-time job selling advertising space for a maritime publication. That didn’t work out so well either and is a story for another day.
Is the so-called Obama fatigue something created by columnists who have their own campaign fatigue, and thus too much time on their hands? Or, is the idea of fatigue during this lengthy political season something concocted by a pollster who has run out of ideas and questions to ask people who are all too willing to offer their two cents about almost anything?
Talk about fatigue! I believe there is no fatigue that matched the current reporting from China, and worse the coverage of the Olympics. China will be there forever. Luckily the Olympics only come once in four years and even that seems too soon between medals. I don’t know any of the self-proclaimed pundits, most of whom are hard-working journalists, currently pontificating on the presidential campaign. I assume without knowing for certain, that his or her take on Barack Obama and John McCain is a reflection of his or her bias, confusion, and self-absorption about their own lives, thus life in general. How else can it be that one writer sees arrogance in a candidate and another writer reads the same appearance as modesty? I want to believe it is more than red and blue states. Though I am not naïve, I would like to believe that objectivity still exists. Doesn’t it? Why do political columnists seemingly have the right to decide the meaning and direction of a campaign without using a single source to support their meandering musings? Must be high summer, attendant heavy humidity, and crowded campaign buses. It is obvious that cable channels have names rather than numbers because it is the only way to tell one from another. Numbers would be more fun and we would have an idea how many channels the cable providers are really selling us. Especially when they raise the price each year and blame the rise in costs on expensive new programming. Do cable operators ever look at the fare they put on their channels? From my nephew Darryl about my “Notebooks” now appearing here and on the DVN Blog. He said, “It's pretty amazing to have that glimpse. I remember having many of the same thoughts in college. I suppose the year doesn't matter, we tend to all be at similar places in development while in college.” Those words say that what I experienced and wrote about does resonate with people no matter how old. Here is another random thought. Would gyms exist if there were no mirrors? And is this a metaphor about life? What if each health club had one mirror and people had to get in line to use it and all could watch a person preening to see if they had had success after a workout? Would this, too, be a metaphor for life?
©Ron Steinman
Think: had we not been born with opposing thumbs, how would we ever send text messages?
Where would so many of us be if our ear buds turned to dust? According to a recent survey by JupiterResearch/Ipsos Insight Wireless, practically no one uses a handheld device to surf the Web. The numbers are startling. Only 4% use it daily for the Internet and another 4% use it weekly. Four more percent only use it monthly. That same number, four percent, use it twice a quarter and five percent use it once of twice a year. It gets worse. Fifty-eight percent never use a handheld device, meaning a cell phone or PDA, to go online and 22% have a cell phone without the ability to go online. Advertisers must be crying in their collective beer as they search for answers as to how they might make these devices better outlets for selling products that probably most people don’t want, anyway. Most people on social network sites contend that the online behavior they engage in is not public, nor should it be. Oh? If not public, what is it? As soon as someone posts something, anything, on the Internet it is automatically public. It is impossible to be otherwise. Therefore, anyone who complains about being under the microscope because he or she posts parts of his or her life on a public site has little to support a contention of privacy. Privacy is important to me. Clearly, it is another reason for my not joining or participating openly in any of these sites where my life and thoughts are there for everyone to see. As a writer, I control what I want published. I tell you only what I want you to know about me without you knowing how many friends I have or even those who want to befriend me. However, I haven’t read anything about the invasion of privacy on these sites in months. Either Facebook solved it, the people originally offended no longer care, or, as is often the case in this jittery world where we live, some new concern came along to displace it. For the record, Facebook has over 80 million subscribers. In June it had 123.9 million unique visitors and 45.4 billion page views. The chance for shenanigans is so high it is impossible to calculate. Here is something else to ponder. By all estimates there are now more than a billion personal computers in the world. More than three billion people have cell phones. Three billion people! Think of all the advertising space waiting to annoy all those people. Or, maybe not. Add to all these numbers a serious estimate that I believe is too low, that in the next six years we are likely to see another two billion people with mobile computers, meaning the next generation of cell phones and the like. These numbers contrast with recent figures from Nielsen Mobile that contend about 40 million mobile phone “subscribers” use their phones to go online. These people want to know the weather, they look for a restaurant, search for sports scores. It is unclear how long they stay online and if the content they seek is anything more than a jittery click in time. But maybe that is all an advertiser seeks – that one small click that says look Ma you do recognize my ad. Twitter demands that anyone sending a message use only 147 characters, or is it 140? No matter, but you got it right – yes, characters, and not words, to get across his or her message about “what you are doing.” The twittering class wants everyone to be “hyper connected” in an effort to downsize “the information overload” we all face. Talk about small minds. “The Critique of Pure Reason” by Emanuel Kant is 800 pages long. How many twees, and how many years, would we need, if we were so inclined, to send Kant’s monumental. but mostly inaccessible, work to everyone we knew and those we do not know but want to tease with something that is nearly incomprehensible? Some fun, huh? Or, as they used to say, it would be a super way to blow one’s mind in addition to anything else of our being, we could find to dismantle. Oh, the wisdom gained from using twitter. Let me count the ways and be thankful that for me explaining something in detail is not frightening. It is clear that we have become a jittery, of-the-moment-only people. Importantly, thinking tiny removes the pressure of having that occasional big thought. We have now advanced to the world of small minds. How twee. Oh, remember, with the Hula Hoop, at least you got some exercise. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand a word of what Jim Cramer says on his nightly TV show? Worse, how he says it and presents it. We have all these “Dummy” books. We could probably make a fortune on a book called, “Jim Cramer for Dummies.” I am sure Jim will approve. It is obviously making something out of nothing and there is no better way of creating a profit than that. Here are a few of my recently favorite words culled from campaign rhetoric. They all have the same “father” or “mother” if that is how you are so inclined to think. Dissemble. Evade. Hedge. Quibble. Dither (how I love this word.) Put off. False appearance. Essentially, meaning the appearance of something that is not. Perhaps dither defines anyone who is a politician.
None