As IF Times

Source: Vizio Smart TVs Track Watching Habits To Work With Advertisers « CBS Sacramento

I get that this is a great idea for advertisers, but I’m unclear on why it’s a good idea for anyone else.

It all started with caller ID.  When this little feature was offered on phones, it was a godsend because you could ignore telemarketers, your in-laws, your boss and of course pesky boy or girlfriends.  Stalking people became more problematic if the name of the guy breathing heavily on the other end of the line had his name clearly displayed on your phone screen.

Of course the reverse of this is an advertiser’s dream.  Using modern computer technology, they can now tell who has been looking at their ads, or browsing on their sites.  To make it even easier for them, people actually volunteer not just their names and addresses, but their likes, dislikes, travel activities, lists of friends and their likes and activities by having them posted online via Facebook, Instagram and Linked-in to mention a few of the most popular social media sites.

The proliferation of apps that people download to their smartphones are widely accepted as convenience tools to help make peoples’ lives easier and more convenient.  It’s hard to imagine how we lived before we knew the identity of the plane flying overhead just by pointing our phone at it.  Or the position of the dog star in the sky.  Or the most recent astrological update.

There are apps now that will send notifications of sale items to your phone as you walk through retail stores.  A coupon will flash and point you to the product.  From here, it’s only a step away from the app ringing up the purchase if you swiped left or right.  This notion is supported by Apple’s Tim Cook declaring that cash will be unknown within a generation since all transactions will be done virtually.  As readers may know, I am not of that opinion, How Do You Tip The Girls .

So now it’s reported that ‘smart tv’s’ will be monitoring peoples’ viewing habits.   If you happen to binge watch The Golden Girls on a rainy weekend, ads will pop up showing walk-in tubs and medic alert amulets.  If you happen to watch a lot of Cesar Millan dog shows, you may get deluged with dog food ads.  Same thing if you happened to watch The View.

In essence, information on where and how you spend your money, who your friends are, how you pass  your entertainment time and where you go as mapped by your car’s GPS is on a database somewhere for someone to use for whatever reason they may wish. What could possibly go wrong?

Source: Media graveyard: Daily newspapers down nearly 80%, hard news ‘in danger’ | Washington Examiner

We’ve touched on this before, “Headlines R News” and it’s timely that this topic has come up again.  Certainly it’s no surprise to those who scour news feeds on a regular basis.  Many (but not all) know that when they see a headline from certain particular news outlets,  there will most certainly be spin to the actual story.  To name the most obvious ones, The New York Times, The L.A. Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and yes, even NPR.  We also know that the old line TV networks such as ABC, CBS and certainly NBC are also tainted when it comes to giving an objective story.  CNN is long past its halcyon days as an objective news source and has moved to insert more entertainment based programming in their schedule.

As the article states, the emergence of opinion based sites have mushroomed in the wake of the decline of hard news outlets and that success has caused much cross outlet sharing of stories so that it becomes increasingly difficult to discern fact from opinion laced skew.  It’s an easy bet that many younger people today think that The Huffington Post is a news site.  There was a disturbing revelation a while ago that many considered Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show as a news source.

It’s been my opinion that the ubiquity of smartphones has been the dynamic which has shifted the way news is consumed.  That and of course, social media.  Because screens are small and attention spans short, people do not delve into the fabric of a story, defaulting instead to scanning the headline and perhaps a few follow on sentences.  The more sensationalist the headline (or controversial) the more likely that the story gets read further. So why buy an entire newspaper when you get the gist of a story within a few headlines?  Matt Drudge is the most successful entrepreneur to exploit this technique.

Another big reason for the demise of hard news companies is…just what is hard news anymore? We’ve earlier opined that many old line companies put out biased reportage, so how does anyone determine what’s news and what’s spin?  It’s seldom that you get served the main course of a news item without a healthy side order of political bias.  Classic journalism wisdom posits that dog bites man stories don’t sell whereas man bites dog stories do.  Now, we are given myriad psycho babble reasons for why the man bit the dog, the racial undertones, the consequence to society at large and of course the possible political consequences.

My most discussed example, because it’s the most egregious, is the coverage of the ever evolving topic of Global warming.  All kinds of activities are purportedly contributors to global warming and all kinds of crazed schemes are put forth in the premise of stopping its effects.  I’m surprised no one has suggested putting up curtains or venetian blinds to block some of the sun’s rays.  Only recently are we beginning to hear some voices that offer lucid skepticism of the cartloads of claims associated with the charade.  For the most part though, news outlets treat global warming the same way as Al Gore characterizes gravity, it just is.

So the small screen and social media have both contributed to the demise of hard reportage. It’s quite possible that in time, some novel news organization can recapture the public’s confidence in reportage.  Meanwhile, we expect that much of what passes for news will continue to be biased, vapid and ignored.  As long as people judge the veracity of an event by the number of likes on Facebook, or by the number of twitter followers, it only gets worse.