What’s Right With This Picture?
The 49 vice-presidents of the USA. When all is said and done, January 20, 2021 will be a historic milestone. And it won’t be about Joe Biden.
Video Credibility
I’m not the only person who has thought about, written about or taught college about this concept. But I have been thinking forever about the impact of screens on credibility. It’s one way to understand the Trump era. The idea is that:
If a person is on TV regularly and enough, s/he has the unique ability to be trusted by masses of people.
It almost doesn’t matter what kind of relationship the “star” establishes with the viewer as long as it’s perceived as real.
This phenomenon has been with us from the beginning of television (~1947.) The first example I can remember is Arthur Godfrey. He was on every morning on CBS, radio and television. He was hard to avoid…the most popular media personality in America. If he said something was good, America bought it, in droves. Like Lipton Tea (“Deeee-licious”) or Chesterfields (“Buy ’em by the carton”)
Oprah was the next incarnation of that power. Only her impact wasn’t usually about particular brands, but books, doctors, spiritual leaders, etc. Nobody ever has been as personally influential on TV as Oprah. In the language of the advertising industry, she had the most reach and frequency.
In the past few years, Trump, the televangelists, the Pillow Guy, the Geico gecko have all been masters of the medium…to get people to buy stuff, doing what TV does best: delivering eyeballs (audiences) to big corporate advertisers.
William S. Paley, the first electronic media billionaire, was founder and chairman of CBS from 1928 to his death in 1990. Despite his high-falutin lifestyle and philanthropic contributions, he had no illusions about the purpose of television:
“Television isn’t a news medium; it’s a SALES MEDIUM.”
FOX News, by far, the most-watched news channel, and its relationship with Trump is video credibility taken to its next logical plateau. While nearly everybody I know (and I expect it’s true for you also) thinks Trump’s four year presidency was a shameful performance, there are millions who saw him “governing” and said “He’s our President and we know him, for better and worse.”
Of course, the only way they KNOW him is from television and online. Trust him? Not necessarily. Believe what he says? Sometimes, but apparently it didn’t matter — they voted for him anyhow…more than 74 million of them in 2020. It made no difference that all of us and almost everyone we know people knew better.
Marshall McLuhan, whose genius (unfortunately) has been distilled to one phrase (“The medium IS the message,”) knew it all. But he died in 1980, before the internet which he predicted but never saw. If he had been around in 2020, he would have understood the double credibility whammy of TV and Twitter (an average 18 times a day, more than 25,000 tweets in his four years behind the curtain in White House Mar-a-Lago and Air Force One).
I’ve been thinking there’s a book somewhere in me that spells out Video Credibility on screens and Media Burn…maybe in 2021?
Billions
It’s a fun word to say. Rolls right off the tongue. Go ahead, try it. “Billions.” Even more fun to say? “Billions and Billions.” Watch this, two minutes of Trump, self-proclaimed billionaire:
Lexophilia
“Lexophile” describes those that have a love for words, such as “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish”, or “To write with a broken pencil is pointless.” An annual competition is held by the New York Times to see who can create the best original Lexophilia. Some examples:
- Police were summoned to a daycare center where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
- I’m reading a book about anti-gravity. I just can’t put it down.
- When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.
- England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
- I know a guy who’s addicted to drinking brake fluid, but he says he can stop any time.
- A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.
- The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine last week is now fully recovered.
- He had a photographic memory but it was never fully developed.
- When she saw her first strands of gray hair she thought she’d dye.
Dave Barry’s Review
Every December, the great columnist/humorist Dave Barry writes a biting review of the year, month-by-month. Here is his take on January, 2020:
Chinese news media report that a man in a city named “Wuhan” died of a mysterious virus. This is not considered a big deal in the United States, since it has nothing to do with either the impeachment [of Trump] or the [botched] Iowa caucuses.
Booze In COVID-2020
Fast Eddie
Colorful long-time Chicago pol, Edward R. Vrdolyak, known as “Fast Eddie,” has been a major power broker for decades. He was in the City Council for 16 years, President of the Council and Chair of Cook County Democratic Party. He has made millions in private practice, much of it in cases involving the city and county. Last month, at 82, he was sentenced to federal prison (for the second time in a decade) on income tax fraud charges. It is to be an 18-month sentence, if he actually serves it. Here’s what veteran Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown wrote on sentencing day:
VRDOLYAK WAS FAST WITH HIS QUIPS, FAST WITH HIS PUTDOWNS,
FAST AT FIGURING OUT THE ANGLES AND PLAYING THEM –
ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A FAST BUCK.
No doubt, corruption is a way of life everywhere. But in Chicago, it has been the mainline of politics and government since it became a city in 1837.
Big Data
Artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, 5G and other master 21st-century technologies can only exist and grow if and when Big Data takes off on major growth patterns.
Huge investments in Big Data have been made in last few years. IBM, 24 Billion; Google 13 billion allocated; Buffett personally 10 billion.
The Financial Post has called it “the fuel to run the world.” I doubt we’ll ever see another technological revolution like this in our lifetime.
Amazing stat: 90% of all data in human history has been generated in the last two years alone.
90%…Wow!
Stocks involved have skyrocketed: TALEND (129%); ALTERYX (465%) and ORACLE (1506%)
It’s similar economics to how refining oil brought the industrial revolution in 1850’s: cars, trucks, farm machinery, diesel trains, electric generators, etc.
Now data has superseded oil as world’s most valuable resource.
Ian King, multimillionaire writer and commentator says 80% of data generated is essentially worthless. “It’s crude, like crude oil,” he says. “But the 20% is worth trillions.”
As an example of how these breakthroughs impact us, medical data is used hugely inefficiently now. It will revolutionize medicine in the next few years. Same in agriculture.
Data refining is the biggest part of what will make it happen. The pattern it takes is innovation first then a huge curve for acceptance, making the opportunity for the biggest gains once they are accepted and used. After a while, it gets saturated. That’s when to sell.
What’s happened in last couple years: 70% of Amazon orders are on phones. Not possible until tech and data refining was there to do it.
Every company in the world will need data refinery, forever according to experts like King.
Demonstrators vs. Looters
With all the year-end 2020 reviews, one topic that seems to have been ignored, or at least barely mentioned, is the delineation between the almost entirely peaceful demonstrating (mostly reacting to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor) and the destructive forces for chaos and looting in our cities.
Much of the reporting has conflated the two. Perhaps that’s intentional. Maybe it’s just a complicated story that’s not easy to tell in a few sentences or seconds of sound bites. There were two nights of “looting” in Chicago and environs. I wasn’t on the streets either time.
I do believe what several people I trust have said: that there were a small group of well-prepared men who were ready to turn the confusion into destruction, guys who were definitely playing cops and robbers. Maybe that was selfish to get stuff from stores. Maybe it was meant as a way to deliberately create chaos and provocation of the police and public opinion. Or a bit of both.
Video, raw video when the camera is on and the events happen in front of it without professional news intervention frequently tells the story better than anything else. One video I saw in the springtime documented what some on both sides have claimed. It shows how a few guys (mostly white dressed in all-black) seized the opportunity to go from a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Chicago and deliberately escalate a tense situation into a totally sociopathic street nightmare.
This video was done by a “citizen journalist” on a bicycle with his cell phone. It’s over an hour of exactly what was happening in a small 2-3 block area of Chicago the night of the first looting. If you watch it, I think you’ll get a deeper understanding of what was happening on that eerie night in downtown Chicago. I wouldn’t expect you to watch the whole 60 minutes of the video, but even a few random minutes skipping around it helps understand how complicated the story of police and demonstrators can be. The video is at https://www.facebook.com/armani.rodriguez.9847/videos/561804241415561/?d=n.
So, 2021!
Hoping it will be a relief for you and that the values we’ve been forced to deal with and stuff we’ve learned these last ten months will make us stronger in the years ahead.
Here are some recent photos of the grandbabies, in close of 2020:
Happy New Year,
PY-O-MY 
all interesting stuff Tom…thanks! oh…and Happy New Year!