It occurred to me a few days ago that social networks could be having a big effect on the way people grow up and move through life. When I was in my early high school years, one of my best friends moved to the Washington, DC area. I went to visit him once, we wrote a few letters, and then lost touch. That's kind of the way these things happened.
When I graduated from high school, I went off to college, met new people, and made some new friends.
After college, I started working, moved to a new town, and - again - met new people, and made new friends.
During these transitions, I also lost touch with some of my family, my earlier friends and co-workers.
It was an evolutionary process - your circle of people changed with your life experiences. Your interests, work and hobbies evolve and with them, the people who share those things would change. Sure, you have your immediate family, and probably one or two really close friends your whole life, but most of the rest would come and go.
Now, everybody you've known since 3rd grade, your cousins who live in Nevada, your mail carrier from two moves ago, and your last two boyfriends all interact with you on a weekly - if not daily - basis.
Is this good? Does staying connected with your past hold you back? Or does having that huge network of "friends" help you advance?
I've always felt one of the important things about graduating from high school and either getting a job or going to college is you get to start over. There's a whole new group of people who don't know you were the class brain or flirt or jock - so you get a chance to do a little makeover of yourself if you want to. Now, your whole past comes schlepping along with you, and when you 'friend' somebody, they can see all your old friends making the same old jokes about the pass you dropped in the playoffs, or how many girlfriends you had in Junior High, or how you bombed the World History test three times. I suppose you could delete your old page and start over, but how would that make your old friends feel, and would the new ones think it kind of odd you only have 7 friends - all of which you added this week?
On the other hand, you have a great resource of people to draw on to help get you through a tough class, deal with a slave-driver boss, and then there's that slob of a house-mate. But does leaning on these old connections hold you back from learning to deal with them yourself?
Do social networks (and unlimited calling time and texting on cell phones) keep you in the past, or help you to get where you want to be?
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
My Conundrum
I've often heard it said about someone "They're a walking contradiction." I must say, I certainly fit that description. I like cars - a lot. Driving them, looking at them, watching races. And yet I also consider myself to be environmentally-minded. So how do I reconcile my dinosaur-burning, hydrocarbon spewing, mildly scofflaw-ish activity with my love for clean air and water and realization that there is only so much oil to go around and gathering, refining, and distributing it is a messy business at best and environmentally catastrophic at worst.
Well, here's my rationalization - as lame as it may be. In my 37 years of vehicle ownership, I have only owned one vehicle - a Ford Econoline van - that got worse than 20mpg. And that vehicle was driven only about two or three times a month as my DJ gear hauler. Even that had the smallest engine available and a manual transmission. Actually, I'm not even sure it got less than 20mpg because I never checked. I'm just assuming it did. Of my many other vehicles, I had one that got 40+mpg with 1970s technology. There were a few that averaged about 30mpg, and couple that got barely over 20. Most - including my current fleet of 3 - got right around 25mpg. Also, I try to avoid running into town for one or two things - if I have to drive somewhere to get something, I'll make a concerted effort to get several needed items to cut down on trips.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if all those SUV drivers had reasonable automotive transportation instead of motoring around in a 13mpg behemoth - alone - making a special trip to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, maybe we wouldn't have to be searching for dissolved dinosaurs under a mile of ocean. Yet.
Well, here's my rationalization - as lame as it may be. In my 37 years of vehicle ownership, I have only owned one vehicle - a Ford Econoline van - that got worse than 20mpg. And that vehicle was driven only about two or three times a month as my DJ gear hauler. Even that had the smallest engine available and a manual transmission. Actually, I'm not even sure it got less than 20mpg because I never checked. I'm just assuming it did. Of my many other vehicles, I had one that got 40+mpg with 1970s technology. There were a few that averaged about 30mpg, and couple that got barely over 20. Most - including my current fleet of 3 - got right around 25mpg. Also, I try to avoid running into town for one or two things - if I have to drive somewhere to get something, I'll make a concerted effort to get several needed items to cut down on trips.
So I guess what I'm saying is, if all those SUV drivers had reasonable automotive transportation instead of motoring around in a 13mpg behemoth - alone - making a special trip to the grocery store for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, maybe we wouldn't have to be searching for dissolved dinosaurs under a mile of ocean. Yet.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Why Music Radio Sucks
How did music radio get so bad? God-awful songs, interchangeable artists, and completely unimaginative programming. What happened?
Those of us who have been in the business long enough remember when radio was fun, there were new, progressive artists appearing seemingly daily, and many of the established ones changed their sound from album to album. Now The Fray sounds like Snow Patrol sounds like Five For Fighting sounds like (fill in the blank).
The problem? The listener/music buyer no longer has any say in what goes on the radio. Once upon a time, they had full control over what was a hit, and what wasn’t.
Back in the mid-50s, Billboard Magazine began charting the popularity of pop songs based on record sales. Music fans voted with their dollars. And radio stations looked at that chart and played the songs that people liked enough to part with their hard-earned money to buy.
Somewhere in the mid-1970s record companies and radio programmers woke up to the fact that they had little or no control over what they were selling and playing. And not many businesses like to have someone else control their livelihood. Also, the sales-based model made for some pretty dramatic changes in the chart. Once everybody who liked a certain song had purchased it, it dropped off the chart like a stone. So a radio station’s playlist would change considerably from week-to-week. Not a corporate-type programmer’s ideal situation. But what to do?
What if radio stations and record companies decided themselves what they want to play no matter what people are buying? “We’ll say what is a hit and what isn’t.” And so, the airplay-based chart (and Radio and Records) was created. The name of the magazine should have been the first clue – “Radio and Records”. And since smaller stations tend to look to the bigger ones for guidance, they wait and see what Z100 in NYC and KISS102 in LA add and drop before they make their moves. As these bigger stations are programmed by suits, they tend to be very conservative, slowing the music turnover. Moving into the late 80s, more and more stations are owned by two or three big companies, and each company has one programmer who decides what music get played nationwide. It’s a lot easier for a record company to leverage one programmer for 50 stations, than try to get 50 independent stations to play their artists.
Fast forward to today, and you have the entire music radio programming – all formats - controlled by about, oh, 15 people. Is there any doubt it’s going to be bland, boring and unimaginative?
Of course, the doomsayers are telling us “the portable music player and the Internet are the problem. Radio has to be very narrow to reach our target audience!” Okay, tell me this – if playing the same 30 songs over and over for months on end is what people want, why do we have 40 and 50gig mp3 players with thousands of songs on them? Or websites like Pandora and Jango that play songs people – you know, listeners – select themselves?
So if music radio is dying, there is no foul play involved - it's a suicide.
Those of us who have been in the business long enough remember when radio was fun, there were new, progressive artists appearing seemingly daily, and many of the established ones changed their sound from album to album. Now The Fray sounds like Snow Patrol sounds like Five For Fighting sounds like (fill in the blank).
The problem? The listener/music buyer no longer has any say in what goes on the radio. Once upon a time, they had full control over what was a hit, and what wasn’t.
Back in the mid-50s, Billboard Magazine began charting the popularity of pop songs based on record sales. Music fans voted with their dollars. And radio stations looked at that chart and played the songs that people liked enough to part with their hard-earned money to buy.
Somewhere in the mid-1970s record companies and radio programmers woke up to the fact that they had little or no control over what they were selling and playing. And not many businesses like to have someone else control their livelihood. Also, the sales-based model made for some pretty dramatic changes in the chart. Once everybody who liked a certain song had purchased it, it dropped off the chart like a stone. So a radio station’s playlist would change considerably from week-to-week. Not a corporate-type programmer’s ideal situation. But what to do?
What if radio stations and record companies decided themselves what they want to play no matter what people are buying? “We’ll say what is a hit and what isn’t.” And so, the airplay-based chart (and Radio and Records) was created. The name of the magazine should have been the first clue – “Radio and Records”. And since smaller stations tend to look to the bigger ones for guidance, they wait and see what Z100 in NYC and KISS102 in LA add and drop before they make their moves. As these bigger stations are programmed by suits, they tend to be very conservative, slowing the music turnover. Moving into the late 80s, more and more stations are owned by two or three big companies, and each company has one programmer who decides what music get played nationwide. It’s a lot easier for a record company to leverage one programmer for 50 stations, than try to get 50 independent stations to play their artists.
Fast forward to today, and you have the entire music radio programming – all formats - controlled by about, oh, 15 people. Is there any doubt it’s going to be bland, boring and unimaginative?
Of course, the doomsayers are telling us “the portable music player and the Internet are the problem. Radio has to be very narrow to reach our target audience!” Okay, tell me this – if playing the same 30 songs over and over for months on end is what people want, why do we have 40 and 50gig mp3 players with thousands of songs on them? Or websites like Pandora and Jango that play songs people – you know, listeners – select themselves?
So if music radio is dying, there is no foul play involved - it's a suicide.
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