Pimp My Program, the Third Screen Drama Unfolds…

The future is looming like crocodiles near the water's edge where the gazelles drink. They sense each other’s presence, but what can they do?

I sat and watched two full episodes of Kim Possible and another half an hour of Disney Channel Live…on my cellphone. I should add that the screen size mattered not, it was still an entertaining hour and a half. "What had happened was", I was trying to avoid real work, so I opted to "test" the newest feature on many cells, the third screen: cellphone/PDA television. There were no lack of choices, I actually had too many programs to choose from. I could have chosen several sports or news channels; however, Disney was the first to pop up at the top of the scrollpage. I thought, hey why not? Plus, it made me feel good to know that I was going to seem pretty cool to my daughter who just recently asked me, in a sort of condescending way, if I knew what a Sidekick was. She went on to say that when she got her own “SK”, the first thing her auntie was going to show her was the ins and out of text messaging…did I mention she is nine?

People, what we have is yet another new media evolution poised to be a revolution, as the playing field for the entertainment industry becomes increasingly more level as mediamakers take prosumer equipment and software and go from concept to broadcast ready edits. At the same time the distribution machine that was once a Oz-like mystery has continued to deconstruct itself to the point that many cells/PDAs come standard Wi-Fi ready allowing free Wi-Fi hot spots, that often include whole cities, to literally skip past broadcast and cable options and deliver to the user whatever they find out there in cyberspace. Content can quite effortlessly be delivered via outlets like, podcasting for the second screen and the now increasingly popular third screen. A Reuters report reads that "the Internet, portable music players and other types of new media have widened the entertainment choices for Americans, creating competition for the $70 billion in advertising money the TV industry attracts a year." The same report finds that 1 in 3 Americans watch TV somewhere other than on their home televisions.

The future of television now only requires this business model to connect content to revenue. I envision that those that master this aspect by generating revenue via niche advertising, while keeping consumer costs at zero and their own overhead costs low can make a fair return on investment and that ladies and gents is what will get the attention of new media investors who dare fund these projects and the advertising world who is salivating to pimp these projects to their clients and the cyber masses.

Do you currently watch video on your cell, IPod or other PDA? Do you see watching it in the future? Post your comments.

Rubin Whitmore II, hip hop media guy

cll me ltr

One night I awoke to the sudden blare of the kanye west tune that served as the text alert on my cellphone:
jst hrd "soul food". i mss u. we shld hook up!
I checked the caller id on the message. It was from a female friend (I'll withhold her name) that I hadn't heard from in at least a year and had long since convinced myself to stop wondering why.
She was referring to a song from a music video that I had directed over a decade ago.
The problem was it was 2:00 am on a Tuesday morning and given the deadline that I had in exactly six hours and the fact that I had only just fallen asleep about 45 minutes prior,
I was not too keen on responding.
But I rolled over in bed and thought "what the hell" and proceeded to text back:
whts up? cool, cll me ltr!
As I thought about this exchange later that day it occurred to me once again that I had not actually seen or talked to this "good" friend face to face in what really was over a year.
But through something as impersonal as this thing called texting we had instantly and in a very impromptu way reconnected.
There was no need to call some evening at 8:00 pm when either of us were attempting to settle down in the after a long work day and have that "catch up" conversation or even spend time composing a gmail with all the mundane details of what was happening in our lives these days, with 3 lines and way less than 100 characters we had made contact.
And although months ago I had begun to be a bit concerned about the fact that I had not heard from my estranged friend who in the past had been subject to prescribed rounds of antidepressants and ayanla vanzant book binges, I was oddly enough content with and assured of her well being through that simple communication.
I began to consider the implications that this "simple" mode of contact had on human communication and on relationships as a whole. Because although I had no problem with using text messages, instant messages or the occasional emoticon within an email line to get a point across or make an emotional punctuation, I was struck with how the ease of this dumbed down form of communications has made it possible for us to relate to one another with out the obligation of a true physical or emotional exchange.
Case in point I can recall my guy friend who through the ease of text messaging, some very succinct phrasing and a pix message or two was able to sustain for at least a year relationships with three different females. While he clearly carried on a physical and emotional exchange with one of the women via a family and home life,
he spent whole work days conducting, at times, explicit text conversations with the other two simultaneously.
Now without burdening you with the titillating details of his actual messages suffice it to say any woman could get a significant buzz off the lines he was texting.
But that's just it, a buzz, only a twinkling of what could be considered an emotional interaction.
And although I do not presume within the context of this blog to define the nature of either of these "text relationships" I do marvel at how easy it is to maintain a contented relationship with another person that is almost soley based on text communication.
When did we come to see pinging a person as an acceptable way of maintaining communication with them? What does this simple, impromptu form of conversation say about how we really relate to one another? And the real question that I think has even more unsettling implications to me as a culture and communications professional is how the hell did terms such as "bff" and "lol" work it's way into everyday American jargon? Are we turning into a society that is taking it's cultural cues from AIM and the auto text of our cell phones?
By the way, my female friend never "clld me ltr" but I got an email from her a week later where she carried on about the new guy in her life who she thought she was pretty close to marrying. Interestingly enough he lived 4 hours away in the next state.
Guess how they mostly kept contact?

Hip Hop vs America

So, for the first time in years I wished that I’d had cable or satellite, specifically BET…Black Entertainment Television. They were finally showing something that I was excited to see, Hip Hop vs America . I was geeked to watch it, so I did what anyone would expect, I downloaded it off the net (gotta love new media…but that's a entirely different blog post). I excitedly watched as they introduced some of my favorite scholarly hip hop voices like Michael Dyson, Nelson George and Chuck D. A relative unknown, Jeff Johnson, acted as the moderator and I can tell you I soon realized…this was going to be some BULLSHIT. With its constant finger pointing blame game the "squares" looked like a gang trying to pick on the "popular" kids for being, well…popular. They insisted on accusing the artist, those represented, Nelly, T.I., Mike Jones saying that they needed to defend their artistic expression and success. The artist shouldn’t have to defend their art, they’re artist. They should be free to explore whatever art they feel worthwhile. I acknowledge there is some value in hearing first hand why an artist chooses to do what they do, but only if what they do actually matters artistically or was met with some well-formed artistic criticism. However, this was not an issue of art, what this discussion all came down to was money, who controls it and who exploits for it. To me the focus, along with the supposed problem, seemed contrived and misdirected especially when considering the source.

The real problem is media as a machine, not media as an art. The entertainment industry, driven by its insatiable capitalist gluttony, currently has significantly more influence and control over Hip Hop as a product than the Hip Hop artist or the art form itself. How was this about Hip Hop vs America when the title itself was misleading. First of all, the series has very little to do with Hip Hop, and with all of the focus being put on the artist and their music videos, it didn't seem to have much to do with America either. Let's start with the fact that it is on BET…Black Entertainment Television, which is owned by Viacom, a media conglomerate, which is not Black owned. But even when it was Black owned, BET was the first in line to re-enforce negative stereotypes with music video after music video showing nothing but the best in sex, money, violence and comedy. Even when MTV and VH1 wouldn't play it you could rest assured that BET would step up to the plate. How ironic is it that BET felt the need to run this series, as if they are somehow the vanguard of subtenant programming. The exaggerated need to make it a three part series along with the urgency to call it a “special” simply felt more like an effort on the part of BET to exploit an opportunity to increase their viewership. It felt as if they created this forum not because they actually cared about the negative affects of Hip Hop, but because they were fully aware that 4 out of 5 people who consumed Hip Hop were white and therefore ripe for the picking by touting an “Us against Them” concept, or in this case, Hip Hop vs America. This wasn't even about Hip Hop as a culture but rap music as an industry. The only mention I caught of Hip Hop was acknowledging that the purest form of Hip Hop is no longer found in the U.S. but is nurtured in far away lands like France where they embrace, B-Boying, Djing, Emceeing and Graphing. So this farce was really about Rap music and the lucrative yet unscrupulous industry that it has spawned.

If there is a problem with Hip Hop it revolves around its willingness as an art form to allow itself to be fragmented and pimped by the media machine for the purpose of pure capitalism. Many of these scholars spend their time barking about what an artist should do. Let's set aside that these artists who are in many regards enjoying a life of work doing what get's them paid and what they like, not necessarily in that order, but hey, who do you know with a job or a career for that matter, who is not fully aware of what they must do to make a living? And how many more do you know who don't completely like what they do but still do it? I find it interesting that so many people who fit in these categories will place an artist so high on a pedestal that they expect them to be the embodied voice of morality and purpose. Now let's be clear, I do feel that artists are blessed. Being a mediamaker aka film artist I regularly tell people that I am blessed, because I have never had a job…since a job is that thing that most people dread going to in the morning. But me, when I wake up, even groggy and tired at 5 in the morn, I feel appreciative, because I am waking up to do film. That's my blessing. I feel that people need not invest so much energy into the artist. Consider redirecting the energy towards the actual capitalist media machine, which maximizes the desires of the consumer. Now hold on a minute, I acknowledge that the media is also significantly responsible for molding and influencing the consumers desires, but that has less to do with the artist and a great deal to do with the consumer and the media as a capitalist machine to be, well…a capitalist machine. These people are in business to make money and dammit that's what they are doing. If you want to change the programming options…stop watching the BULLSHIT and in the words of another BET moment…
"Read a book muthafucka! Read a book muthafucka!"

Rubin Whitmore II is a mediamaker and media scholar with deep roots in music videos and Hip Hop. He is working on several documentaries exploring Media and its Impacts on Society.