
The Electric, Birmingham Originally uploaded by new folder
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The Electric, Birmingham Originally uploaded by new folder
idlewild had a song called 'Text Mesaging is Killing the Pub Quiz' – this is a merry dance on its corpse, and we must have one. – My Twitter quiz hell « Prospect Magazine.
There’s a lovely new site doing the rounds called Glum Councillors it’s dedicated to collecting:
“images of councillors looking glum whilst pointing at holes in the road, wearing hard hats or presenting oversized cheques.”
Sites like this and Lolitics are parodying the politicians (and wanabees) — but the poses and the tone are those of the local newspaper. It’s the language that the politicians want to use.
And it’s now not just politicians, “local paper poses” seem to be universal. One of the early big hits on the web was the Framley Examiner, which took it’s cue from very local newspapers and got them spot on — but reading it now, not much seems to have changed.
What are the new local paper clichés?
Got this today from CoTweet (which I like, it’s really the only CRM service for Twitter):
“CoTweet is not for everyone. It’s designed for teams who are managing the front-line of the real-time web for their organizations. It’s for people committed to engaging customers in authentic two-way conversations, rather than just broadcasting messages to followers.… If you’re interested in engaging with your customers in authentic, two-way dialogs, you really should give CoTweet another try.”
“Suits make a corporate comeback,” says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002.
Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.
just like “Birmingham is still vibrant”. But it’s worth keeping in mind.
The Future of Reality TV
Channel 4 have announced that they’re giving up with Big Brother after the next series — although a dedicated web show for 2011 would be my guess — they’ve tried fiddling with the format, bunging more and more people in, making more and more stuff happen. They’ve cut the “my god, who wants to watch them sleep” live stream — either on the assumption that no-one wants to watch a TV programme where not much goes on, or because of the sheer cost of keeping it legal.
But I’ve a theory that it was the “not much happens” “dip in and out” long arching narrative thing that was what got people interested in the first place — much like how Twitter works (unless you’re obsessed), or much like how the Australian soaps were a revelation in low-impact TV. I think that by making it too hard to watch they killed the format.
Reality TV, when you define it as pointing a camera at people having real emotions, is much broader than Big Brother — and most of it is edited to be as action packed as possible. It’s tiring, only the committed can keep it up. Live football is reality TV, although the Olympics – three weeks of lots of coverage, unknowns and new stories evolving is more like what we’ve come to know as staples of the genre.
I’m not of the opinion that “reality TV” is dead, but I think people want two different things; either the slow “nothing much happens” – but it happens for a long time — or the tight visceral shared experience (the way the big X-Factor finals, or even important elections do).
Reality TV commissioners — let’s face it Channel 4 in this instance, they’ve got the money — you’ll want more “event TV” that has that endurance aspect. So here’s my pitch — you want something like live uninterupted coverage of Gimpo’s 25 Hour M25 Spin or this.