Evolving Web

Social Media Solves the Rupert Holmes Paradox

The other night, a budding lawyer lamented that she needed to watch what she put on her MySpace page because future employers might see it.  A few months ago, Sue Thomas told me she was sometimes taken aback by what people would type into Twitter - entries that could damage their reputation.

I've heard this a lot: there is a fear of transparency.

Historically, communication technologies (books, radio, television) have broken down barriers.  Usually these were cultural barriers. Helping people of different groups interact, become more tolerant, and calm society.

But there are little truths about ourselves that may be damaging, may seem irrelevant that social media seems to rapidly be bringing to the forefront and dispelling as either damaging or irrelevant.

Let's take the Rupert Holmes Paradox as a case in point.

The Rupert Holmes Paradox goes something like this:

Two people meet and fall in love. They get married. Over time, they start to take each other for granted, fall into specific patterns of relating, and grow bored with each other. They have institutionalized their communication patterns which has, in effect, put the spark out.

Unbeknownst to either, these two people (this is a pre-Internet story) then start checking out the personal ads sections of the local paper. They don't know what they need, but they need more. Neither are really happy about it, but they need vital communication aren't getting in their marriage.

So one takes out an ad.  He gets a great response.  In the ad, he talks about all these great romantic notions.  His respondent shares and amplifies those notions. She's so much more interesting than his wife, and she's only been in text!

And when they meet at the pub, husband and wife are face to face. They were both more interesting and relevant than they thought.

So the Rupert Holmes Paradox is: if you use one means of communicating with someone all the time, you end up not communicating at all.

Imagine if the husband and wife were on Facebook.

--

Rupert Holmes threw a Pina Colada at you!

--

Liza Holmes left a message on your wall:

I never knew you liked Pina Coladas!  What do you think of walks in the rain?

--

This is true for many things.  People have often tended to partition their lives.  Their work persona, their home persona, their "not-in-front-of-the-kids" persona, their church persona. 

Transparency through social media is wearing these boundaries away.  Is that good or bad?  No.  It's both or neither.  It's merely an outgrowth of this new communications technology.

In a very real way, social media and social networking are breaking down not external barriers for communication - but internal ones.  And that's rather exciting to watch.

Technorati Tags: Rupert Holmes, Escpape, The Pina Colada Song, facebook, myspace, social media, social networking, marriage, communication, communication technology, gutenberg, the rupert holmes paradox

Scratching the Surface

This evening was the airing of Anthony Bourdain's new Hong Kong visit on his show "No Reservations."  We'd been waiting for it.

He started out the show by declaring it to be a food paradise and said "if you're smart you'll hit the ground running."  Essentially that you could go there and eat non-stop and leave  without being anywhere near finished.

On our last trip to HK, we were there for a little over two weeks.  We ate five meals a day, with only a few exceptions.  Each meal .. very large.  We walked everywhere.  In the end, we gained no weight.

I only slowed down for one day, during which my body told me that binge eating was not appreciated.  I told my body we'd discuss it when we got back to Seattle.

I was glad to see that he hit many places I'd been that were off the beaten path.  Due to the constraints of the length of the show, he wasn't able to hit many of my favorites.  Next time, perhaps he should give us a call.

Anthony missed the outer islands - Lamma and Cheung Chau most notably.  And he missed Bo Toi O (a fishing village not on an outer island), which was pretty much the unexpected highlight of my last trip.

What the episode did capture fairly well is the speed at which Hong Kong comes at you.  It is not a destination for the languid.  At one point, Tony and his food blogger buddy are looking at some food and the woman is yelling at them in Cantonese "I don't want to be on camera, just buy your food!  If you're not going to eat it, don't look at it!"  Fie Dee!  Fie Dee!

That sounds annoying and at times it is.  But it is really Hong Kong.  Undeniable and blatant.

 Whenever I arrive in Hong Kong, I really feel like I'm there.  I really feel like I'm at one of my homes.  It is palpable.  It is tangible.

When I saw it tonight on No Reservations I felt a strange disembodied feeling.  No other show I've seen has made me feel Hong Kong like that.  It was more than a little unsettling.  I feel like I should be able to step outside my door and find myself in Tsim Sha Tsui where I can walk a block and get a late night bowl of mein.  Alas, Ocean Shores, Washington, will not satisfy me tonight.

Technorati Tags: Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, Hong Kong, Foodie, cantonese food

Some Televisions are More Equal Than Others

No matter how much I like to think I'm an evolved, caring, compassionate human being, I'm afraid I'm still amused at the outright  stupidity of people and the games they play. 

Recently, HBO's CTO "Bob Zitter" decided that he didn't like the term "Digital Rights Management".  He thought it was misleading and scary.  His alternative (no I'm not making this up) is Digital Consumer Enablement (DCE).

This is so stupid it is scary.  To quote Ed Felten:

Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.

Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV.

In 2009, so the story goes, the US airwaves are to be devoid of low-def signals and everyone in the country will need to buy a new television.  I somehow doubt that the federal government will force everyone in the country to buy a new television.

However, the ramification here is that there will be no standards for DRM (or DCE) and that various entertainment companies could require personalized descramblers to get their product.

Given that I only watch baseball and the Food Network, this isn't going to impact me much.  I haven't had HBO since the 80s and feel no personal loss. 

What worries me is that this would likely mean that for all users (myself included) Internet-based broadcast media will skyrocket in popularity.  I can get all the HBO movies downloaded from Amazon or iTunes anyway.  This means massive bandwidth usage for bloated multimedia content.

I know I'd be using it too.  It's just inevitable.

Technorati tags: mainstream media, hbo, ed felten, bob zitter, drm, dce, orwell, doublespeak, morons, self-destruction, industry myopia, food Network

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Dialogue, Duologue, Diatribe, Dissention, Deprivation, It's Only Talk

In yesterday's Yi-Tan Conference Call, I believe Howard, at the end, lamented that the often trumpeted "conversation" of the blogosphere was actually a duologue.  People were split on topics and tended to scream more than converse.  He quoted Jason Calacanis' post:  Why Intelligent People are Walking Away from the Discussion. 

Even though I (highly uncharacteristically) am generally a lurker on Jerry's Yi-Tan call, but the conversation is always very intelligent and enjoyable.  Always thought provoking. 

And I was provoked.  Some part of my brain over the last 24 hours was thinking about that and a few other things.  Those things had to do with King5 morning news.

We all know that the death of conversation in America is due to a confluence of factors that have rewarded development, thought, and social patterns that deny people the time or tools to have detailed conversations.  We have adopted an aggressive winner-take-all attitude that makes even the mundane a high-stakes fight to the death.  Even Food Network has managed to make food stressful.

We are quickly bored of victors and always ready to jeer and second guess those who do not triumph.

The News and our conversations reflect these, our new true core values.  We are a culture obsessed with failure that believes it is obsessed with success.

So, King5 news.  If I had my way, I'd set fire to current-format TV news  My wife, however, feels differently.  So, often, in the morning, I am confronted with TV news.

Over the last week we've had two local events:

Julius Williams was shot to death.  This was a "minor" event, in that if you GoogleNews Julius Williams you get more things about pro football than you do about his death.  As a society, we quickly wrote it off and moved on.  What was interesting, though, was that King5 that morning reported on the shooting telling us that Williams' MySpace page provided no clues as to why he went AWOL from Fort Lewis or why he was shot.  MySpace was a primary source of information - even when there was no information.  It was so primary, it had to be mentioned.

Jason Fortuny decided to ruin the lives of over 170 men.  He did this last week, King5 reported on it today.  But ... a few things.  The first - they reported it like it happened just now.  "Over 170 men in the Seattle area woke up to find themselves victims of a prank today...."  So the "timeliness" of the network news was a bit overstated.  True, they woke up to that today, but they also woke up to that the preceding four days. But the really interesting part came at the end of the 15 second segment where anchor Joyce Taylor glibly said, "Gosh, I wonder why someone would do something like that, I guess we'll never know."  Then they went off to traffic.  Which they spent over 2 minutes on and which you can get any time here.

So when we add these together, what do we get? 

We have proponents of the blogosphere watching blogs take on the predictable and boring divisions of our society.  We have a society that understands it isn't satisfied with its own level of communication, but doesn't know what to do about it.  And we have those that bring us our news expecting their work done for them and, in one case, they expect a personal MySpace confession and in another they don't notice four days of constant blog posting and discussion.

Another thing that someone said in yesterday's Yi-Tan call (I'm sorry I didn't note who) was that we didn't get the division between mainstream media and the blogosphere as we thought we would.  What has developed instead of a million Ralph Naders poking holes in mainstream news stories, is an evolving partnership.  But it's still humans underneath the movement.

Anyone who has any expertise and then reads a news story on the matter of their expertise seems to see errors in the news story.  Most stories I've seen on urban planning, the growth of technology (MySpace especially), or transportation have sometimes minor, sometimes major, errors.  Blogs will catch those errors and discuss them.  We do.

Here are my fears about all these things:

1. Our attention span is too short (especially in blogs) to have a long conversation.
2. Our society is too auto and television oriented to meet in anything other than a contrived way to have a face to face meeting
3. Our existing political divisions have caused us to distrust everything
4. The rate at which we receive information makes it easy to forget or dismiss things even more than a few hours old
5. America is really expensive now.  We all have to work, we don't have time to relax, we are temperamental.
6. Mainstream media is a publicly-traded commodity which must shock in order to sell.  Detail is not shocking.  Media will never tell us what we need to know to understand, only to tune-in.
7. As Calacanis says, As the conversation becomes shrill, it becomes boring.  It's all fight or flight.  Smart people recognize that partisan bickering is a time-sink.  They leave when the Al Frankens show up.  Even if the Al Frankens are funny.
8. We currently have no mechanisms to reward a long, thoughtful conversation.

Perhaps we web 2.0ers should band together and figure out how to actually reward community, rather than finding gizmos to flip.

Update: My champange breakfast buddy Martin Geddes, also notices a similar phenomenon - creating telephony solutions with no attention to users.  The news is intent on instant consumption - information without regard to usefulness.  The telephony providers are intent on instant consumption as well.  Usefulness and users, if they become necessary, will be a later product to sell.

Technorati Tags: king5, NBC, MySpace, Jason Fortuny, Calacanis, Ralph Nader, web 2.0, Al Franken, Yi-Tan, community_indicators

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Searching for the Fit

I read this article on C|Net about CNN starting an on-line video repository a'la You Tube several times.  One for each reaction.

I'll work my way through them in order of social acceptability.

1. Evolution

I noted the other day that NBC was using YouTube footage in their broadcasts.  According to the C|Net article CNN does the same thing.  The blogosphere has been very hard on mainstream media - seeing them as dinosaurs that "don't get it".  I have said as much myself.

But supposing you are mainstream media - especially newspapers - and you've been doing business the same way (more or less) for a hundred years.  Rapid change might catch you off guard.

So good on CNN for trying to start their own video repository like You Tube.  This shows that they understand the democratization of news gathering .   

2. Fear

CNN looks at the war coverage on You Tube, complete with historic footage people can search and retreive later, and says "Oh crap."  Suddenly, CNN may not be where the world turns for news or video of real-time events.  Even though CNN is mostly pundit shows now, they still want to be the world's news leader.  You Tube, and things like RocketBoom, are terrifying. 

Not only do these on-line services provide information, but they provide it often without a direct subscription model.  So CNN wants to neutralize a threat by providing an on-line video repository that comes with the implied game of getting your footage on CNN.

3. Greed

As we saw recently, those that own the copyright on history, control the dissemination of history.  Robert Tur wanted to control his slice of history and shut people out from their memories.  CNN saw this and saw the stuff on You Tube and said, "That's a lot of history we can control."  So now they are creating CNN Exchange to gather up that content and hoard it.

My Question

Why not just analyze and report?  Rather than having pundits providing non-nuanced retorts for everything inflamatory that happens - why not actually analyze what is happening and provide in-depth coverage on-line and via television.

Imagine if CNN, rather than trying to encapsulate everything that happens on earth into a 30 second spot, had people from a wide range of think tanks, investigative journalism, and other areas actually provide papers detailing the real underlying issues.

CNN, It doesn't matter in the end if you own a million 30 second shots of people dying in Lebanon.  What matters is that you help the people of the world understand why it is happening, why it is hard to stop and, just maybe, how to have compassion for the people involved and how to avoid such things in the future.

But before that, a very loud commercial from Chevy's SUV division....

Technorati Tags: CNN, time-warner, copyright, robert tur, history, media, mainstream media, chevy

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YouTube stock footage

This morning, on the KING5 morning news in Seattle, newscasters were discussing the World Cup headbutt incident.  At the end they said "The Internet is buzzing with tribute sites" for the French butter.  However, instead of showing a tribute site, they showed the full video of the actual event via YouTube.  With full credits.

The Blindspot of Incorporated Information Dissemination

The Washington Post today had a telling article by Patricia Sullivan entitled As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed.  This article describes the dynamics of the impacts of digital media on traditional print and televised journalism from the perspective of mainstream journalism.  An industry perspective.

This article does an excellent job of describing how mainstream media views the encroachment of other forms of information dissemination.  Blogs, talk radio, etc.  And it posits that mainstream media will have to "adapt or die."  Which may or may not be true. 

Patricia and other journalists look at the impact of CNN on the televised news industry and the impact of blogs on all news and see the immediacy - the speed at which information can be distributed.  They are threatened by the speed.  But the speed is only relevant if the product is worth getting quickly.  My post yesterday shows that there are problems with mainstream media - but it's still more fact-checked than blogs or talk radio are.  Or at least that's the perception.

Patricia mourns the passing of a variety of news vehicles, among them the News Magazine.  Not hardly.  What's happened is not that need for Sixty Minutes is dead, but that the need for Sixty Minutes has expanded.  Wake up CBS, a Sixty Minutes stand alone web site, investigating things, putting up streaming video, inviting blogging comment / support, providing a vehicle for community interaction is a freaking gold mine! 

Right now, www.sixtyminutes.com is owned by a cybersquatter who must be slightly smarter than CBS.  This is the easy to type and remember Sixty Minutes URL http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml It is a "show" subordinate to the CBS News web site. 

They have podcasts and RSS feeds but they don't engage.  They are still trying to feed us.

Patricia says:

Technology has driven behavioral changes, as reporters, producers, photographers and editors learn that interactivity in the form of e-mail, blogs, polls, hyperlinks, Videologs, podcasts and news delivered via cell phones can open their work up to a newer and bigger audience, for better or worse. It's far easier for a reader to find a reporter now than it was in the past; it's also easier for a story published overseas or in a local or regional outlet to have a bigger impact. No longer are readers or viewers bound by network broadcast schedules, the delivery of a newspaper or magazine or the top-of-the-hour radio headlines.

Here we see an understanding about reach and resources.  People can reach out and gather resources from everywhere.  Information is immediate and accessible.  For certain articles the Washington Post still makes people create a "free" account and log-in.  Many newspapers don't seem to understand that their product isn't of individual value.  It is, however, of massive value as part of the information stream.

In order to gain readership in this world, you need to be relevant and part of the conversation.  People no longer want to just be drizzled information to.  They participate.  A vast vast majority will only read and move on.  But that's all they did with the paper before.  Many "subscribers" to newspapers merely let their papers collect in the yard before they send them off to the landfill.

Mainstream media needs to understand that it is possible to remain part of a community, but still objective.  They also need to understand that objectivity is never absolute and that they will get called out for lapses or exposed to alternative points of view.  The difference is that now a letter of praise or rebuttal is much easier to write.  That may be seen as letting every crackpot have a voice - but it can also been seen as giving people the ability to really discuss things.

Mainstream media's attempts to hold on to purely push technology are understandable, as this is easier to commoditize.  But I'll bet if CBS News hired Robert Scoble to run the Sixty Minutes web site - it would be quoted every day, twenty million times a day, around the world.  It would become the single most influential investigative journalism vehicle since ... Sixty Minutes.  And you can surely monitize that.

Technorati Tags: sixty minutes, 60 minutes, washington post, blogs, robert scoble, media, conversation

Life of a Model

Jane Jacobs passed away this week.  I couldn't figure out how to blog about it, but I wanted to.

I was having a quiet coffee with my friend Sandra yesterday.  She was telling me about how some rocky events of her personal life had played out over the unfortunately several months since we last talked.  She told me that she was generally happy with the way things had worked out, but that during the time they were actually worse than she let herself believe.  She had some perspective now that let her evaluate what had happened.

Simultaneously, she was in a professional transition that had led her to many positions, both paid and unpaid, with many organizations.  While she was doing it, it felt like chaos.  Now that she was on the other side of the chaos, she could see the gifts of that journey and all the good things it brought her.

One of the books in my recent-read list is Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.  I mentioned to her that his experience was similar.  That his childhood and coming-of-age felt to him directionless and chaotic.  However, when he reached a certain point in his life he was able to look back and see some coherence.  That there was meaning in the chaos and that his journey - while neither scripted nor directed - had distinct destinations.

Perspective, it seems, requires a vantage point which can only be appreciated by actually arriving at it.

Here's the tricky part:  just about every trail we hike down has its own spots with a scenic view.   I think that's the blessing and the curse.  We have to enjoy the views we get and not overly mourn the ones we never get to see.  That can be frustrating - especially when a vantage point on one path let's you see what things might have been like on another path.

As we move through life, we become acquainted with many people - personally or throught their writing.  We engage in conversations.  And, like I mentioned the other day, we learn.

People therefore become dear to us because they help us be better people.  They help us actualize.

Alas, as we move through life we also have to deal with the loss of such people - literally or figuratively.  After a while one becomes almost numb or discounts the feelings.

Three influences of my journey

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs is a woman I never had the opportunity to meet.  As an urban planner her books were obviously required reading for me.  But her central message is one that has always resonated with me.  Jane Jacobs wanted us to be a part of our own lives.  She feared and resented the alienation that cultures and impose on people when people aren't being attentive.

She encouraged people to go outside, walk around, see what they liked about their community and then make sure they see to it that those things endure.

In Cities and The Wealth of Nations, she describes how local pockets of economic activity build a neighborhood and how neighborhoods build cities.  In Seattle, I am lucky to live in a region that understands this dynamic.  Our city is a network of walkable neighborhood centers.  (Now if only we could have some transit to get between them).  When you participate in your local community, you share yourself with that community.  You become more aware of things happening in the community and more vested in making it a better place to live. (Jane Jacobs Video and here too <- the second one is way 60s, you've got to see the second one).

Francis Edward Elliot

In a similar vein, another influence of mine was a man named Ed Elliot.  He was an architect who worked in transit design.  Ed was a big advocate of making transit stations be pleasant.  In keeping with this, his design of the Seattle Bus Tunnel (with artist Jack Mackie) created a space that captured people's imaginations while they were waiting to catch a bus.  This may seem frivolous, but it's actually very important.  Anyone who has felt the mundane, helpless air of the BART subway stations knows that nearly anything is better than feeling like you are standing in a tube.

I never actually had the chance to meet Ed either.  We worked that the same company, but I came along a few weeks after he passed away from AIDS complications.  I ended up talking to many people who had worked with Ed across the US and visiting stations he had designed in several cities.  It was also because of Ed that I ended up coordinating activities for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt for quite some time.

Like Jane, Ed wanted people to enjoy their communities and wanted their communities to reflect their worth. 

Jim Henson

People often tease me because Jim Benson sounds like Jim Henson.  I'm lucky that I'm one letter off from someone I have always so deeply admired.  (Thank God my name isn't George Tush!)

If it's hard to condence feelings about Jane Jacobs into a blog post - it's nearly impossible here.  However, the essence of Jim Henson's message to me is - pay attention to your life and understand how you are a part of something wonderful. Most people reading this blog post can probably sing the "People in your neighborhood" song.  It's fun and simple and somehow it resonates.  And listen to the thing ... listen to the postman guy ... there's so much there.

Jim Henson seemed to inately understand that integration wasn't just about busing, but about how we all integrated with our surroundings.  That's not possible by congressional mandate, but it is possible if we just observe, learn from each other, and talk.

Incorporation

These people and countless others have had a deep impact on me.  In my current company, which designs software, these voices nudge me along.  Software isn't just about how it looks on the screen or how an action is represented by some nifty animation or how Ajaxrubycomet will save us all.  It's about how we can build the virtual world in the service of strengthening the physical one.  How virtual environments can help us catalog our experiences, observations and desires in ways that will help us all learn and grow.

But above all, it shouldn't replace the physical world any more than day care should replace parents or freeways should replace neighborhoods.  The virtual world, day care and freeways are all quite important - but used improperly they can diffuse society and make us all grow more distant.  Jane, Ed and Jim show us that being observant and engaged is vital.  Here's a good Jim Henson clip for being observant.  Or this one.

Now, if you would have told me that while watching aliens from Koosbean make telephone noises at a phone that someday I'd be able to integrate it with socioeconomics and transit station design .... I'd probably be hard pressed to figure out why.  But all this has been incorporated into my world view.   All this has led me to this vantage point.

I'm going to tell you again to watch this Jane Jacobs clip from the 60s. It's pretty close to video blogging.

Photos via Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: jane jacobs, urban planning, jim henson, architecture, community, cooperation

Webbywood Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wawa Webbywoooooood

Let's put it on the web!

Fox is piling on the put-yer-shows-on-the-web front just like ABC.  This will allow people do download shows at will.

This ultimate on-demand programming is very convenient.  But Fox and ABC should ask themselves how this integrates into their overall production scheme.

The reason that ABC is starting with Lost is that it's already profitable.  The push media has made it so.  That's the tall side of the power curve.

The net isn't about the tall side of the power curve, it's about the long tail.  At that impacts the shape of the curve.  How, remains to be seen.

Lost gets big money and can put on a big production.  But what if I'm more happy looking back on old re-runs of Flipper?

On the other hand, shows like Twin Peaks or Smallville had cult followings that would likely continue watching the show forever.  Could the net and the long tail provide a revenue stream to make production runs like Dr. Who or the Simpson for all shows? 

Such long tail productions would only be possible in an on-demand environment.  Like my post yesterday, on-demand environments require something to drive traffic to the site.  Groups need to discuss the content.  The content needs to develop context.   Having said that, context is best created outside the organization that produces the content.

I could see interest generated by having writers and actors affiliated with the show blog, having on-line events, but having shows start to reach outside their own environment.  Most cult favorite shows have a draw beyond just the actual show.  As an example, X-Files incorporated a wide range of occult references which could be explored in-depth on line by fans. 

Simply telling me I can pay $2.99 and watch a TV show I missed last night isn't going to get me excited.  It may be convenient and I may do it.  I may even do it often.  But it's not going to drive me to watch new content.  It's not going to create a buzz.  It is using the internet as a utility and not as a community.  That's boring.




Technorati Tags: Fox, web, blogging, community_indicators, context

Up Next: Context!

The world of media is finding its way in the era of context.  It is hard to find context when, not so long ago, you were context.

As John Hagel notes today, ABC is going to toss a few programs up on the web.  They've chosen these programs because they already are popular and have been made so in the existing media machine.

But is that how things get popular on the net?  John says (my emphasis):

That is one of the consequences of the growing relative scarcity of attention – anyone who can help audiences connect with the most relevant and engaging content will be richly rewarded.

The key word here is connect.  In the past, connecting was something done to you.  The operator would connect your call.  The television station would show you Three's Company on Wednesday nights.  Connecting was a temporal, directed, and limited process.

But now connecting is about context.  If I'm in the mood for really good suspense, I should be able to go read up on some sites that deal with suspense - or poll my network.  Does anyone have a good recommendation for a suspenseful drama?

Context doesn't have to supplant advertising revenue or direct fees or anything like that.  Cost of entry to the entertainment would be part of the decision structure.  People have a history of paying for good things.  There are a lot of creative ways to drive money through this model.

John goes on to talk about branding and opening up the ABC site to other content.  I'm not sure this is as important as having a directed strategy to inject content into the web and make sure that people talk about it.  ABC, NBC, Microsoft, Yahoo or other big companies will have less and less a role in the defining of context because they are nobody's friends.  (sorry guys).

My friends have names.  They are the ones that make up my trusted network.  Research requires several sources, but your personal network has always been your highest value information source.

Every film is a powerhouse thrill ride - but we only see certain films.  Largely because of our networks.  If ABC understands this, then, grasshopper, they will have learned.

Technorati Tags: ABC, media, context, television