Storytelling is powerful, and in the deepest sense, magical. Skillful storytellers burrow deep into our minds, hearts, and souls. More than we know, we’re affected by characters, storylines, context, authority, myths and legends (ancient and modern), storytellers, and messages.
Of the 24 hours available each day, adults spend a third of that time sleeping (the national average is 8.5 hours). Total waking hours: 15.5. We spend 2.6 of them watching TV, and another hour browsing the web, reading emails, browsing magazines, listening to the radio, and catching the occasional billboard, sign, or poster. It would be fair to say that we spend nearly 4 hours each day-- 1 in 4 of our waking hours, every day of our lives-- in the midst of programs, stories, advertisements, and marketing messages whose content is dominated by Fortune 500 companies.
Our best storytellers are employed by corporations. They are paid to be concerned about shareholder value, not the public good.
Joe Camel didn’t become well known by six year olds because he was cute. He became well known because Clear Channel, Viacom, and Lamar—the nation’s largest billboard companies—plastered his enormous puss on billboards in places where children were likely to see them.
Children don’t pass a McDonald’s and decide they’re hungry for a Happy Meal. McDonalds’ commercials bribe children to take their parents to the restaurants with the promise of a toy (often promoting a new kids’ movie).
Lucky Charms teaches children the morning cereal habit by combining fantasy (a leprechaun and a rainbow) with a “magically delicious” cereal that contains colorful marshmallow candy. Through the magic of storytelling, commercials teach “It’s okay to have candy for breakfast.”
On A&E’s Biography, even the most complicated lives are reduced to an hour-long magazine-style documentary. On the Scripps networks (Food Network, HGTV, etc.) and on the Discovery networks (Discovery, TLC, etc.), people who do the hard work are cheerful and get along (or charmingly disagreeable); results are always handsome and stories always resolve with clear endings. Homes are remade in an hour; gargantuan machine shop projects are planned, built, tested and launched without serious mishap. We watch these tidy stories because they are nicely packaged and entertaining. We try our best to filter their odd sense of reality, propriety, and proportion. When we watch these stories for a quarter of our waking lives, their skewed reality inevitably affects our perceptions and real life expectations.
For many of us, a nuanced understanding of the American legal system runs as deep as all that we’ve learned from CSI, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and 11PM newscasts. We know what the bad guys look like, how they behave, and the neighborhoods where criminals lurk because we’ve watched stories about prostitution, drug wars, gangs, random shootings, and arsonists. Our attention is diverted from other crimes or investigations whose stories are complicated, insignificant, or politically sensitive. A good shooting always aces a tangled matrix of corporate or government misbehavior or an exploration of sometimes-contradictory ethical or social concerns. Night after night, week after week, in Philadelphia and in Buffalo, there are stories of bad Black men and their out-of-control gunplay; in Los Angeles and Dallas-Fort Worth, there are stories of bad Latino men and their out-of-control gunplay. We know the bad guys. We know who they are, how they think, and why they ought to be punished.
Stories leave a deep and long-lasting impression, a cumulative impression that operates at a conscious and sub-conscious level. (This is why advertisers buy flights of many commercials over weeks or months--to lay in lots of impressions.) Effects manifest themselves over time. Gradually, moment by moment and year by year, acceptable levels of sexuality, violence, frank adult storylines, graphic images, shorthand messages, and simple-minded stories become the norm. In time, storytelling changes the way we think about our lives. “We become blunted by all of the hype, jolts, shock, information overload, we never even notice the supermodel, even if she is scantily clad.”
It’s rare that a story is as simple as one person shooting another. There are always reasons why: reasons the shooter had the gun in the first place, reasons why the shooter became a shooter, why he or she selected a particular target or no particular target at all. Television has no time for context; in order to keep the viewer’s attention--our attention--they must keep moving, to the next shooter, the next fire, the next human tragedy.
January 28, 2007
Selling Ourselves Out
Did you ever wonder why magazines that you buy on the newsstand for $4.99 per issue cost just $1 per issue when you subscribe ? That’s an 80 percent discount! With hundreds of pages printed in full-color, plus the cost of the staff needed to put the magazine together, how could a publisher possibly afford to sell a full-color magazine with hundreds of printed pages filled with dozens of written and edited stories for just a buck?
Most American magazines cannot support themselves on payments from readers—it’s nearly impossible to find enough readers willing to pay enough money to support the combined writing, editorial, design, marketing, printing, and distribution budgets. Instead, advertisers fund magazines by buying readers in lots of a thousand (CPM refers to Cost Per Thousand readers).
In the May 30, 2005 issue of Newsweek, the publisher’s efforts were funded by Canon, Apple, Philips, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Toyota, ExxonMobil, Nabisco / KF Holdings / Kraft / Altria (owner of Philip Morris), Van Kampen Investments, Discovery Channel, T-Mobile, Chase, HP, Colonial Williamsburg, Tempur-Pedic, RBS, Toshiba, Blackberry / Research in Motion, Quaker / Pepsico, LG, Xerox, Siemens, GlaxoSmithKline, GM, US Smokeless Tobacco Co., MSNBC, SONY, Unilever, A&E, or United. With this impressive list of advertisers, one cannot help but wonder how a news magazine can be entirely objective.
Long-time Ms. Magazine publisher Gloria Steinem explained, “historically, P&G would pull its ads from any Ms. issue that contained material about “gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or the disparagement of religion.”
Here’s another example of a sell-out… When cable television was still a new idea, local politicians bought into the promises of entrepreneurs and sold exclusive service rights to wire and provide cable television service to their communities. (Often, local politicians were bought by the cable companies so that these deals could be made.) Promises of new schools, libraries, parks, and local television channels were rarely fulfilled; the cable companies pleaded poverty and kept their valuable franchises. Eventually, about half of these were sold to either Time Warner or to Comcast. Every month, these two companies collect over $40 per month from tens of millions of cable households. Total amount collected: $1.5 billion, every month.
Our legislators have given our valuable over-the-air rights to large corporations at no charge. (That’s right: ABC, FOX and the others get to use the public airwaves without paying a penny for the privilege.)
In the 1970s, no corporation was allowed to operate television stations that reached more than 18 percent of the country’s television households. Today, each corporation is allowed to operate television stations that serve 39 percent of the US, including one large and one small station in each city, and up to three stations in larger cities. Assisted by endless spin, industry lobbying has succeeded, and the limit will probably raised to 50 percent within the next decade or so. The Heritage Foundation explained, “the ability to own multiple media outlets can provide substantial benefits to consumers…” then points out that NBC can compete more effectively with FOX or CNN through corporate synergies. ” When the spin is unspun, there is no apparent benefit to consumers, but the benefit to corporations is clear.
Not that it matters: NBC does not own the 200-plus affiliates in its network, but NBC controls every affiliated station’s most-viewed hours in the morning, afternoon, early evening, prime time, and late night on all of those stations.
Most American magazines cannot support themselves on payments from readers—it’s nearly impossible to find enough readers willing to pay enough money to support the combined writing, editorial, design, marketing, printing, and distribution budgets. Instead, advertisers fund magazines by buying readers in lots of a thousand (CPM refers to Cost Per Thousand readers).
In the May 30, 2005 issue of Newsweek, the publisher’s efforts were funded by Canon, Apple, Philips, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, Toyota, ExxonMobil, Nabisco / KF Holdings / Kraft / Altria (owner of Philip Morris), Van Kampen Investments, Discovery Channel, T-Mobile, Chase, HP, Colonial Williamsburg, Tempur-Pedic, RBS, Toshiba, Blackberry / Research in Motion, Quaker / Pepsico, LG, Xerox, Siemens, GlaxoSmithKline, GM, US Smokeless Tobacco Co., MSNBC, SONY, Unilever, A&E, or United. With this impressive list of advertisers, one cannot help but wonder how a news magazine can be entirely objective.
Long-time Ms. Magazine publisher Gloria Steinem explained, “historically, P&G would pull its ads from any Ms. issue that contained material about “gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or the disparagement of religion.”
Here’s another example of a sell-out… When cable television was still a new idea, local politicians bought into the promises of entrepreneurs and sold exclusive service rights to wire and provide cable television service to their communities. (Often, local politicians were bought by the cable companies so that these deals could be made.) Promises of new schools, libraries, parks, and local television channels were rarely fulfilled; the cable companies pleaded poverty and kept their valuable franchises. Eventually, about half of these were sold to either Time Warner or to Comcast. Every month, these two companies collect over $40 per month from tens of millions of cable households. Total amount collected: $1.5 billion, every month.
Our legislators have given our valuable over-the-air rights to large corporations at no charge. (That’s right: ABC, FOX and the others get to use the public airwaves without paying a penny for the privilege.)
In the 1970s, no corporation was allowed to operate television stations that reached more than 18 percent of the country’s television households. Today, each corporation is allowed to operate television stations that serve 39 percent of the US, including one large and one small station in each city, and up to three stations in larger cities. Assisted by endless spin, industry lobbying has succeeded, and the limit will probably raised to 50 percent within the next decade or so. The Heritage Foundation explained, “the ability to own multiple media outlets can provide substantial benefits to consumers…” then points out that NBC can compete more effectively with FOX or CNN through corporate synergies. ” When the spin is unspun, there is no apparent benefit to consumers, but the benefit to corporations is clear.
Not that it matters: NBC does not own the 200-plus affiliates in its network, but NBC controls every affiliated station’s most-viewed hours in the morning, afternoon, early evening, prime time, and late night on all of those stations.
Free Media
In Britain, during a House of Lords argument about appropriate funding for the new television medium, the BBC’s legendary leader John Reith compared the idea of broadcasting funded by commercials to the bubonic plague.
Since its inception, Britain’s BBC has been funded by an annual tax on every radio and television receiver in the UK. (In 2004, every British citizen paid $200 per color TV set.) The per-set tax system allowed the BBC tremendous resources, but it also kept for-profit broadcasters off the British airwaves .
In the US, early radio was a lot like the early internet. Hobbyists, and budding entrepreneurs were fascinated with a technology that was previously available mostly for government use. In just a few years, commercial radio equipment makers GE, Westinghouse and AT&T already developed radio stations and network connections between the stations. One of the first networks was NBC, which was, from the start, supported by commercial advertising. Americans thought they got a better deal than the British: their radio programs were “free.”
Today, the price of that freedom is exposure to nearly 100 commercials every day, or over 30,000 commercials, year in and year out. (Given the choice, would you prefer to watch 35,000 commercials or pay a few hundred dollars per year to avoid them entirely? )
Americans love a bargain. In exchange for that bargain, we have made it possible for marketing and media juggernauts to grow, and to dominate our culture.
Large corporations now control our stories. They define our heroes. They publish our textbooks. They provide our news. They set the topics for national debate. They provide role models and cultural cues that show us how to live our lives.
Since its inception, Britain’s BBC has been funded by an annual tax on every radio and television receiver in the UK. (In 2004, every British citizen paid $200 per color TV set.) The per-set tax system allowed the BBC tremendous resources, but it also kept for-profit broadcasters off the British airwaves .
In the US, early radio was a lot like the early internet. Hobbyists, and budding entrepreneurs were fascinated with a technology that was previously available mostly for government use. In just a few years, commercial radio equipment makers GE, Westinghouse and AT&T already developed radio stations and network connections between the stations. One of the first networks was NBC, which was, from the start, supported by commercial advertising. Americans thought they got a better deal than the British: their radio programs were “free.”
Today, the price of that freedom is exposure to nearly 100 commercials every day, or over 30,000 commercials, year in and year out. (Given the choice, would you prefer to watch 35,000 commercials or pay a few hundred dollars per year to avoid them entirely? )
Americans love a bargain. In exchange for that bargain, we have made it possible for marketing and media juggernauts to grow, and to dominate our culture.
Large corporations now control our stories. They define our heroes. They publish our textbooks. They provide our news. They set the topics for national debate. They provide role models and cultural cues that show us how to live our lives.
Defining Creative People
(One way or another, everything on this blog ties back to creative people and their contribution to society. This is a topic that I care about, and even wrote a book about. The material below was first published in The Creative Professional. You'll find a link to that book in the "Books" section of this blog. Okay, I'm new at this... here's my first posting on my first blog...)
Who are creative professionals? Artists, writers, musicians, producers, directors, performers, designers, and others with similar job descriptions are among the most obvious answers. In fact, the list is longer, as creative professions embrace not only those who develop ideas and products, but also those who market, analyze, and improve upon them.
Dictionary definitions provide little more than synonyms, suggesting that creative people “produce something through imaginative skill.” Psychologist Teresa Amabile judges a work to be creative if it is both novel and an appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to a task that requires a degree of discovery or learning.” That definition roughly parallels Laurie Anderson’s brilliant summation, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
A closer look at the habits, styles and attributes typically associated with creative professionals at work may mirror your own way of working.
1. Intense Focus
The best creative work demands an extreme amount of attention paid without regard to time, relationships or other real-life priorities. Quoting Edison: “Godlike genius! Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius!”
2. Self-Motivation
Creative professionals make a project their own. Money is rarely the primary driver. More often, the primary drivers are personal adventure or challenge, the opportunity to collaborate, the opportunity for reinvention or rejuvenation, and/or satisfaction.
3. A Sense of Humor
Most creative work is fun, or ought to be. Humor may be lighthearted, but it is often dark, cynical or razor-sharp. If a creative workplace lacks laughter, something is fundamentally wrong.
4. Taking Breaks
In one office, this materialized as a daily nap break for the writing staff. Breaks relieve the pressure and allow ideas to simmer on a back burner.
5. A Need for Feedback
Creative work benefits from early input from others, and from peer review. Feedback late in the process is not as productive or useful.
6. Passionate Self-Confidence
Most creative professionals are driven by a clear understanding of their own capabilities and value. Nevertheless, we all dip into the stereotype from time to time, becoming fearful, insecure, and overwhelmed. Once the curtain goes up, stage fright vanishes—or we don’t remain creative professionals for long.
7. A Highly Personal Sense of Time
Creative people may perceive time differently. When a project is in active production, hours pass quickly; days and nights may blend, and sleep may be scarce. Work may be done at odd hours; tasks planned for hours may require days. Ideas may require decades to move from concept to completion.
8. Individuality
Among the endless manifestations: odd choice of clothes, hair styles, hair colors, word choices, perceptions of the world, places to go on vacation, ways of decorating a work space. We may be colorful just for fun, or monochromatic for the same reason. Or, we may have reasons that you really don’t want to know….
9. A View of Society Based on Merit and Quality of Contribution, not Power or Authority
From a creative perspective, the ones who do good work are the ones who deserve praise and recognition. Those who ascend without superior talent or better-than-average output are regarded with suspicion. Creative people think about power as the ability to garner resources to do good work; they tend not to relate to power over people for its own sake. Similarly, those in authority over creative professionals should approach governance with enlightened outlook, or serve a rabbinical role as guide or teacher. Authority figures who serve in power positions without these attributes are often vilified or ignored by creative people. Richard Florida wrote, “Casual dress gradually crept in partly for the simple reason that it’s more comfortable, but also because creative work came to be more highly valued in our economy. No longer did status accrue from being an officer, or at lower ranks, a good soldier. It is accrued from being a member of the creative elite—and creative people don’t wear uniforms….They dress as they please.”
10. “Networks of Enterprise”
Biologist Karl Pfenninger noted that creative people tend to build and nurture their own communities. Members may provide resources, business contacts or advice, feedback, suggestions for improving work, recommended reading, or perhaps most commonly, cool ideas that might be pursued by the community itself, by members, or by individuals.
Physicist Freeman Dyson confirms, “Science is a very gregarious business. It is essentially the difference between having this door open and having it shut. When I am doing science, I have the door open… You want to be, all the time, talking with people. It is essentially a communal exercise….”
Intelligence expert Howard Gardner studied several of the world’s best-known creative professionals, and recalled, “Picasso particularly appreciated the companionship of poets and writers, whose interests and skills complemented his own. They helped him articulate what he was trying to accomplish, gave him suggestions about where to direct his considerable energies, informed him of the world of ideas, and promoted his work to the rest of the world….”
Who are creative professionals? Artists, writers, musicians, producers, directors, performers, designers, and others with similar job descriptions are among the most obvious answers. In fact, the list is longer, as creative professions embrace not only those who develop ideas and products, but also those who market, analyze, and improve upon them.
Dictionary definitions provide little more than synonyms, suggesting that creative people “produce something through imaginative skill.” Psychologist Teresa Amabile judges a work to be creative if it is both novel and an appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to a task that requires a degree of discovery or learning.” That definition roughly parallels Laurie Anderson’s brilliant summation, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
A closer look at the habits, styles and attributes typically associated with creative professionals at work may mirror your own way of working.
1. Intense Focus
The best creative work demands an extreme amount of attention paid without regard to time, relationships or other real-life priorities. Quoting Edison: “Godlike genius! Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius!”
2. Self-Motivation
Creative professionals make a project their own. Money is rarely the primary driver. More often, the primary drivers are personal adventure or challenge, the opportunity to collaborate, the opportunity for reinvention or rejuvenation, and/or satisfaction.
3. A Sense of Humor
Most creative work is fun, or ought to be. Humor may be lighthearted, but it is often dark, cynical or razor-sharp. If a creative workplace lacks laughter, something is fundamentally wrong.
4. Taking Breaks
In one office, this materialized as a daily nap break for the writing staff. Breaks relieve the pressure and allow ideas to simmer on a back burner.
5. A Need for Feedback
Creative work benefits from early input from others, and from peer review. Feedback late in the process is not as productive or useful.
6. Passionate Self-Confidence
Most creative professionals are driven by a clear understanding of their own capabilities and value. Nevertheless, we all dip into the stereotype from time to time, becoming fearful, insecure, and overwhelmed. Once the curtain goes up, stage fright vanishes—or we don’t remain creative professionals for long.
7. A Highly Personal Sense of Time
Creative people may perceive time differently. When a project is in active production, hours pass quickly; days and nights may blend, and sleep may be scarce. Work may be done at odd hours; tasks planned for hours may require days. Ideas may require decades to move from concept to completion.
8. Individuality
Among the endless manifestations: odd choice of clothes, hair styles, hair colors, word choices, perceptions of the world, places to go on vacation, ways of decorating a work space. We may be colorful just for fun, or monochromatic for the same reason. Or, we may have reasons that you really don’t want to know….
9. A View of Society Based on Merit and Quality of Contribution, not Power or Authority
From a creative perspective, the ones who do good work are the ones who deserve praise and recognition. Those who ascend without superior talent or better-than-average output are regarded with suspicion. Creative people think about power as the ability to garner resources to do good work; they tend not to relate to power over people for its own sake. Similarly, those in authority over creative professionals should approach governance with enlightened outlook, or serve a rabbinical role as guide or teacher. Authority figures who serve in power positions without these attributes are often vilified or ignored by creative people. Richard Florida wrote, “Casual dress gradually crept in partly for the simple reason that it’s more comfortable, but also because creative work came to be more highly valued in our economy. No longer did status accrue from being an officer, or at lower ranks, a good soldier. It is accrued from being a member of the creative elite—and creative people don’t wear uniforms….They dress as they please.”
10. “Networks of Enterprise”
Biologist Karl Pfenninger noted that creative people tend to build and nurture their own communities. Members may provide resources, business contacts or advice, feedback, suggestions for improving work, recommended reading, or perhaps most commonly, cool ideas that might be pursued by the community itself, by members, or by individuals.
Physicist Freeman Dyson confirms, “Science is a very gregarious business. It is essentially the difference between having this door open and having it shut. When I am doing science, I have the door open… You want to be, all the time, talking with people. It is essentially a communal exercise….”
Intelligence expert Howard Gardner studied several of the world’s best-known creative professionals, and recalled, “Picasso particularly appreciated the companionship of poets and writers, whose interests and skills complemented his own. They helped him articulate what he was trying to accomplish, gave him suggestions about where to direct his considerable energies, informed him of the world of ideas, and promoted his work to the rest of the world….”
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