Inside the Binge Factory

Langer Artikel über Netflix und wie sehr es Sehgewohnheiten verändert hat – von Anfang an.

„CEO Reed Hastings and tech entrepreneur Marc Randolph launched Netflix in 1997, rolling out its DVD-by-mail service the next year and introducing the all-you-can-watch subscription model in 1999. The service has offered streaming since 2007. But it was the company’s move into original content that has upended so many norms of the TV business: Netflix doesn’t waste millions making pilot episodes of shows that will never air; instead, almost every project it buys is purchased with the intention of going straight to series. It invented the idea of binge-releasing — dropping full seasons of shows all at once, rather than doling out episodes week-to-week, as TV had done since I Love Lucy. Instead of selling its content to international partners, Netflix has eliminated global middlemen and set up shop in over 190 countries, allowing it to debut a new season of an American animated series (BoJack Horseman) or a German thriller (Dark) around the planet, all on the same day and at the same time. It has replaced demographics with what it calls “taste clusters,” predicating programming decisions on immense amounts of data about true viewing habits, not estimated ones. It has discovered ways to bundle enough niche viewers to make good business out of fare that used to play only to tiny markets.“

(via @dvg)

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‘Designing Women’ Creator Goes Public With Les Moonves War: Not All Harassment Is Sexual

Linda Bloodworth Thomason beschreibt, wie sich CBS unter der Leitung von Les Moonves (der gerade gegangen wurde) verändert hat.

„Somewhere in the middle of all this, I was walking the halls one day in the original CBS building. In spite of no longer having gainful employment, I still felt proud that I had been allowed to make a creative contribution to the network I had grown up with — starting with Lucy and Ethel, who had electrified me and inspired me to write comedy. I never dreamed that I would become the first woman, along with my then-writing partner, Mary Kay Place, to write for M*A*S*H. I took pride in being part of a network that always seemed to be rife with crazy, interesting, brash women, from Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, to Maude, to Murphy Brown, to the Designing Women. Many of these female characters paved the way for women to be single, to pursue careers and equal pay and to lead rich, romantic lives with reproductive rights.

As I walked, I noticed that the portraits of all these iconic women were no longer adorning the walls. I don’t know why and I didn’t ask. I just know that the likes of them have rarely been seen on that network again. Thanks to Les Moonves, I can only guess they all became vaginal swabs in crime labs on CSI Amarillo.

For years, Moonves loaded up the network with highly profitable, male-dominated series, always careful to stir in and amply reward an occasional actress, like the fabulous Patti Heaton or the irresistible Kaley Cuoco. But mostly, he presided over a plethora of macho crime shows featuring a virtual genocide of dead naked hotties in morgue drawers, with sadistic female autopsy reports, ratcheted up each week (“Is that a missing breast implant, lieutenant?” “Yes sir, we also found playing cards in her uterus.”) On the day I officially parted company with CBS, the same day Mr. Moonves said he would only pay a tiny fraction of the penalties, my incredulous agent asked what he should tell me. Mr. Moonves replied, “Tell her to go fuck herself!”“

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Hintergrund-Gedanken: Bildräume in den Porträtfotografien von Barbara Niggl Radloff

Mein charmanter Kommilitone Max Westphal hat seine Masterarbeit auf dem LMU-Server veröffentlicht. Ich habe sie noch nicht durchgelesen, verlinke sie aber schon mal. Ihr sollt ja auch was von unser aller Forschung haben.

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Al Qaeda Won

Als Rausschmeißer noch was Deprimierendes. Ich stimme nicht mit allem im Artikel überein, aber die Denkrichtung finde ich spannend – auch die Hinweise darauf, dass unsere derzeitige Social-Media-Misere auf Lawrence von Arabien zurückgeführt werden kann.

„We are in the middle of the greatest expansion of mass communication in human history. Social media and the smartphone, with cameras, were not yet ubiquitous in 2001. But cable news had long before erased the distinction between news and entertainment. Reality television as a genre had just been invented. The internet had very recently become commonplace in the American home. 9/11 was the first news event that happened to everybody at once. It did not matter how distantly removed you were from Manhattan or the Pentagon; because of the instantaneous communication network, you were at 9/11 if you were at a screen. The events of 9/11 were inseparable from their recording.

The cultural front opened by 9/11 keeps widening, and the terms of the struggles along those fronts, as each new technology opens them, are almost impossible to recognize immediately. In 2015, Jeff Giesea published his famous essay on memetic warfare in the NATO journal Defence Strategic Communications. Despite its immense influence—it predicted, and possibly shaped, Russian techniques of disinformation in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, and Giesea went on to run significant elements of Trump’s election campaign—the essay’s key insight has not really been dealt with seriously. Russian meme factories achieved, with minimal expense and no direct violence, their country’s deepest foreign-policy aims: a sharp decline in U.S. influence in the world, the endangerment of the post-World War II alliances of the liberal order, and the humiliation of the notion of human rights. There has been no retaliation.

Memetic warfare is only the latest element of the diathetical struggle that has been ongoing since the arrival of the internet. The cultural front is along every point of the network—television, the press, movies, songs, sermons, advertising, and social media. Everything that gives meaning is a battleground. Diathetics is the rearrangement of the enemy’s mindset by spectacle and the means of its consumption. This is a new kind of war and a deeply confusing one. Confusion is its purpose. The problems of assessment are substantial. The line between what is military and what isn’t has blurred, and the cultural front seems ridiculous, beneath the dignity of the military and totally beyond the purview of soldiers anyway. Memetic wars, wars of popular culture, are ridiculous. That does not alter their effectiveness. A reality television star with the world’s most elaborate comb-over has helped achieve Russian foreign-policy aims.“