A few weeks ago, Frugal Dad’s infographic on the six media conglomerates that control 90% of American media consumption cropped up across the Web (scroll down to view the graphic).
“Total 2010 revenue was $275.9 billion,” it told us. To put that in context, “that’s $36 billion more than Finland’s GDP, enough to buy every NFL team 12 times, and five times the government bailout of General Motors.”
Furthermore, “in 2010, they avoided $875 million in US taxes; enough to double FEMA’s budget or fund NPR for 40 years.”
Let’s take a second here. Thanks to Tow-Knight’s crash course in accounting, I’ve been better able to distinguish among financial terms, and Frugal Dad’s infographic equivocated profit with revenue. See, revenue is how much money a company is bringing in before recouping its costs and paying taxes. By no means is that $275.9 billion pure pocket money.
Then the infographic tells us that the big six evaded taxes. However, due to the way that companies could elect to do their accounting, that could partially be explained by cash flow and accounts receivables. Because companies can undertake such expensive projects, often subcontracting one another’s expertise and services, they shake over contracts that promise payment within a 30 to 180-day window. The expected payments, not yet received, are called accounts receivable. Meanwhile, this affects cash flow, which is the exact amount that a company has on hand to cover immediate expenses such as salaries.
I was soaking up sunlight at the Lincoln Center when, to my left, I heard, “Awwww yeah! Work it!” A young man was snapping photos with a DSLR bigger than his face. He suddenly straightened and walked away. To his right appeared a young woman in rolled up jeans and a loose t-shirt that hinted at her figure.
Nice, I thought. Young people can wear anything and look good. But those jeans would look just as nice if they were worn by a fuller woman, if those jeans hugged her curves. I paused: I’ve been both those women.
And that was the zip tie that brought everything together. At last it really sunk in that life is not a series of apexes of which we either fall short, try to maintain or failed to take the right exit. It was Mark Epstein who unravelled for me just how happiness is not the result of our most true and actualized self—indeed, we never are able to stay there—but a few of the stops, same as any other state of being.
As a society, we have saddled ourselves to certain ideals to indicate when we’ve reached the apex of success. None of us buy into the full array, but we’re haunted by some of these ideals regardless of how we feel about them. To name a few:
Beauty - youth, figure, style
Success - potential (youth), wealth, status, love + marriage + children, the feminist ideal
This week, I hung out at Code for America, where I got a glimpse into the life of a fellow. Along with the coworking space’s beer on tap, weekly community-prepped lunches and group pushup sessions, a guest speaker is also invited to the office. This Wednesday, it was David Binetti, co-founder of Votizen.
@CodeForAmerica: David Binetti talks to @codeforamerica fellows. @votizen @dbinetti
I thought I was on vacation in San Francisco, but with earworms of pivoting, disruption, the four steps to the epiphany and Steve Blank, how did I teleport three time zones ahead, back in Jeff and Jeremy’s classroom?
My friends over at Smitten Living published a post about keeping a laundry list of goals that has, in turn, inspired this post.
I started my first list at age 18. I headed straight for my computer after watching an aspiring inspirational speaker who attended my university. In his junior year, he had to be hospitalized and had since fought a years-long, arduous battle against cancer. He was only able to stand in front of the crowd that day with an exo-functioning machine, a curtain of get-well cards behind him.
Honestly, his session was painful. It was awkward, he was nervous. But the takeaways that stuck with me that night were to view hugs as an active expression of affection (what if things ended and you never took the chance to communicate your affection?) and to keep a list of goals to check against, making sure the most important things are still on your radar.
Mike passed away before I graduated college.
Marianne’s post on Smitten Living prompted me to revisit my own goals, which I haven’t updated in four years. I cringed as the editor in me thought how I could have better phrased some of the goals. But in that phrasing, I can see reflections of a past self, beliefs and versions that have given way.
CLICK TO ENLARGE - Red =Dropped (some tried) // Green = accomplished // The floating notes that you can't hover over describe how I met those goals.
George Wietor, who still includes me as he thinks through his design work and spruces up his Rapidian pieces. Or acquires another shiny tool for Issue Press operations.
And Mark Rumsey, who texts me out of the green to tell me he’s eating kale (and probably polishing some theoretical turd).
These are just a few of the folks whom I love. I’m three months out of GR now, but I still feel connected in the most important ways.
Last May, I attended a workshop at the Reynolds Journalism Institute where Joy Mayer and Reuben Stern convened bright folks from The Guardian, Chicago Trib, Free Press, Wichita Eagle, Adobe and more. The goal: To map out a starting point for orgs to measure engagement (the resulting white paper is a worthwhile read).
Breeze Richardson of WBEZ blew me away. She has such a mind for matching the sort of ooey-gooey community engagement I did at The Rapidian with ways to measure them. A year later, I’m thinking that way, too.
Which is why I have become a fan of ReadrBoard or, more accurately, the philosophy that drives its development. While reading one of Racialicious’ sharp commentaries, I noticed pinpoints trailing each paragraph. In-line commenting! And not just commenting, but reactions to specific passages and media assets.
Every ArtPrize, the walking population of Grand Rapids, Mich. metastasizes to urban proportions. For a few weeks, downtown GR is a mine field of makeshift galleries as artists compete for the popular vote that determines who will receive a cash prize.
Without fail, it sparks controversy among the GR artistic community about who benefits, the type of art ArtPrize attracts, how proud citizens want their city perceived and more. And at least one of my friends made it a deadline to move out of Grand Rapids before the third year of ArtPrize kicked off.
A close-up of "Cavalry" by Chris LaPorte, a vintage photo reproduced and enlarged as a drawing by way of pen scratches // Photo by Cliff Muller
Mark Rumsey was the first to give it a name via The Rapidian; one theme and common discussion point in GR is the West Michigan Aesthetic.
The correlation of how long it is perceived that an art object took to make is directly proportional to its value on the WMA scale. We understand time and we value time. When something looks like it took days or weeks or months to make, then we assign it value according to the labor invested.
This suspicion speaks to winners of the last two ArtPrize: Chris LaPorte’s “Cavalry” (get a sense of scale in Brian Kelly’s video) and, more embarrassingly, Mia Tavonatti’s “Crucifixion.” These works took diligence, effort and meticulous detail. But what thought did they actually provoke? What question did they pose? In other words, what are the responsibilities that come with art as an applied label?
Mia Tavonatti's "Crucifixion" is an assemblage of thousands of pieces of cut glass // Photo by David Guthrie
The most recent RadioLab short pushes this even further. It explores the beliefs of Alan Turing (father of artificial intelligence) that humans are machines, and machines are human if they claim and exhibit sentience.
At 20:16 -
James Gleick: “I think we’re just machines. I think we’re just made of matter… but for me, that doesn’t make me feel that we’re any less special. What a wonderful thing that a collection of matter created by a process of evolution that lasted billions of years, how wonderful that this process and that these little collections of matter are able to produce Cezanne’s water colors and Bach’s preludes. I can live with that.” Robert Krulwich: “If I built you a computer that could create equally beautiful watercolors and equally beautiful musical compositions, would you feel happier or diminished?” JG: “I think in a way, you’re asking, if you see how the trick is done, does it then vanish? Does it just become a trick, the trick being a great painting or a great piece of music? I feel the art I love is always art that I don’t fully understand. There’s some mystery there always. I don’t quite fathom it. So if the computer is churning out a bunch of notes and you know exactly what the rules are that the computer is following and there’s no mystery, how can that possibly be a great piece of music? And the answer is… we don’t know how the machine is gonna do it, and when the machine produces music that is as lovely as the music you and I love, I believe it will still be unfathomable.”
In a world where machines can be programmed to create works of art at the skill level of master artists, how does that change the conversation as we evaluate the merits of art?
A year ago, I began a blog entry that faded into the annals of unpublished entries. At the time, I was the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, and a young woman asked to interview me.
Ignore the top right portion, where I steamed about $11 for a cookie + smoothie + espresso. Oh, NYC.
APRIL 2011 - On a cold day, I biked up to Grandville Avenue Arts and Humanities for a site visit with the Press Club, our bureau partner focused on youth reporting. A set of magnet letters were arranged on the filing cabinet, scribbles on the white board spelled out what the kids talk about nowadays: ”Chocolate Martinez” and “Peanut Colada” (I thought hard about that last one). Four cubs made it to class, and a shy young lady asked to interview me.
A few routine questions – Tyesha and I are both twins, we both like purple – and then: If you could meet anyone in the world, who would it be?
Justin Bieber? she asked. Lady Gaga? I timed out. I may have said “Vladmir Nabokov” half-heartedly.
If I were Tyesha’s age, I would have answered Amelia Earhart. After watching a scene in Madeline where our heroine loop-de-loops around Paris (about 7:25), I was determined to become a pilot, and Amelia was the real thing. But what would I say to her? Hey how was it under those murky depths when we were all looking for you?
So I switched the setting: Who would I want to grab a beer with?
Maybe Jonathan Harris, whom I admire for his experimentation with aesthetics and interactive data to push people to engage with the world. How’s a kid going to understand that one, I thought. But who says it has to be a real person? Sherlock Holmes? I had a literary crush on him all through high school but ended our relationship when it became clear he could not give up the coke. Perhaps T-Rex (or Ryan North dressed as T-Rex)! I am irrationally into Dinosaur Comics, and his quips are so adorable. Imagine the antics!
Alas, a month later, I still haven’t settled on any one being.
See, nearly a year ago, I initiated a monthly social called Women In Tech for women working in high-level technology environments. This is commonplace in many cities, but Grand Rapids was not home to such support. In fact, for all the distance that GR has come and continues to go, it is still a place where women technologists are assailed with assumptions. Show up to a tech meetup, and people ask you if you’re there with your husband. Instead of talking Rails, you get questions about gardening. Volunteer at a code sprint, and someone may ask if you’re there to help with the food. These are all stories that women have shared.
I left GR a month ago yesterday, and one of the women sent me a link to the WIT Hackathon, generously prefacing, “Your hard work… here is your return, friend!”
This is what I love most (and the type of work I love most): Regardless of who catalyzed it, the point at which others feel such a sense of ownership and make it their own. And because they have made it their own, it grows in a virtuous cycle of sharing.
Have you heard of Ghostery? A friend pointed it out to me over a quaint Sunday brunch. It logs a metastasizing list of groups tracking you across the web, one page at a time. Takota, eyeReturn Marketing, RevenueScience, TargusInfo… Some of these groups you can’t even Google, but they are the ones that note consumer behavior and which ads to serve you across Websites.
Yesterday during our Tow-Knight sessions, Jeff Jarvis was explaining a rough but complex formula to determine cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and also explaining why it is an outdated measurement. Stephen Morse asked where ad blockers fall in the ethics scale for content consumers. Ads may bring in significantly less revenue than in an over-exaggerated print world, but I, too, agree that using ad blockers is a conscious decision to exclude participation from the economy that sustains our outlets of choice—ads subsidize free and reduced-fee news content. Of course, that isn’t enough of an argument to compel consumers; there has been such poor support for media literacy that we have never even accounted for the economics of news. And honestly, news could probably layer on a more compelling value proposition than a matter of ethics.
I began to deconstruct my own visceral reaction to advertising. I’ve internalized over the years that our generation is especially allergic to advertising. It’s a gut reaction to mute the computer during adverts, and I’d much rather see masterpieces in the masthead than a monkey chucking bananas for god knows what product. In fact, if you get to know designers who work for online ad agencies, they are just like us: No one clicks on ads. It’s that rare once-in-a-year exception, and in a bogglingly huge target population, that’s enough.
Regardless of whether ad firms harvest it, my browsing info is somewhere in the ether. If I have to watch ads, I’d rather watch those that are relevant to me. However, what dawned on me yesterday is that my intense aversion to ads, and probably many of my generation, comes from packaging more than a disgust with consumerism. Advertisers blueprint what we should look like in every possible role—as a parent, as a runner, as a woman, as an adult, as an occasional lush, as a flirt—and how we can attain status. Take a magazine to a developing country, try to explain it and then listen to the observations about American lifestyle. If you didn’t already, you’ll really think ads are insidious now. We come from diverse backgrounds of class, race, ethnicity and much more, and ads work in spite of that as the common American experience. As aware as we are of the twisted ideals we’re served, I and many of my peers will struggle with issues of beauty, body image, social cues and what it means to be good for the rest of our lives.
So when the choice comes between suffering an ad or subverting the advertiser, my generation chooses the latter. I believe that’s the choice we see in front of us, and news economics doesn’t even begin to figure into it.
I swear! Every single commercial break for The Colbert Report!
