I’ve often thought that in politics, the signature of honesty is not lack of dishonesty – an impossibility in party politics – but a certain discomfort with the the lies you have to tell. I’m giving Joe the benefit of the doubt on this one. And good on you Penny for your dignity in the midst of indignity.
This wasn’t supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here) but Jessica Irvine’s recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents’ worth – well someone else’s two cents’ worth but at least inserted by me.
First; highlights from Jessica’s column:
US labour market economist Sherwin Rosen in his 1981 paper ”The Economics of Superstars” identified two preconditions that lead to superstardom. First, every customer in the market must want to buy the good supplied by the best producer. The second condition for the birth of a superstar is that the good provided must be able to be distributed cheaply to all customers in the market. You don’t see superstar plumbers, because their services are only available to one geographic area.
Rosen’s theory of superstardom as an efficient outcome of the market was challenged by another US economist, Moshe Adler, who pointed out that whether people preferred one singer over the other was not necessarily determined by how talented they were. There is, after all, no standard unit to measure increments of talent. The key thing about groups like One Direction, according to Adler, is not that they are the most talented – for such a thing can never be measured – but that they are simply the most popular.
According to Adler, consumer desires are not innate preferences – as standard economics assumes – but are influenced strongly by society. We desire the same art, culture and music that is desired by other people.
To which I would only add the graph below which features in Paul Ormerod’s forthcoming book. In a controlled experiment with people listening to music if they were not ‘networked’ which is to say they didn’t know what other people thought was good, there was a fairly big inherent difference between songs. If they were networked, they ‘herded’ strongly.
Typical outcome of the music download experiments; number of each of the 48 songs downloaded over the course of an experiment, participants only know the names of the song and band and can listen to songs before deciding whether or not to download. The average number of downloads is set equal to 100 for comparative purposes
Same experiment as before except the participants know the number of previous downloads of each of the songs before they decide themselves
Of course the upshot of this is that we’re all madly herding from one place to another, but the extent to which there’s signal in the noise of our herding is greatly attenuated. Further; large amounts of rent are being expended trying to get people’s attention with marketing to get into people’s headspace and win the battle for the next hit.
HT Possum.
“Make the media more accountable for their sins, and worry less about new technologies and freedom of speech”.
That’s a one-line summary of Ray Finkelstein’s Independent Media Inquiry. It argues for a new system of media regulation to apply to journalists, commentators and most of the Australians who contribute to online news and opinion. It wants a government-created News Media Council to set standards for all media – broadcast, print, online. When necessary, that Council should “require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply”. And when the media outlet won’t comply? Normal contempt of court rules would apply. So eventually, an editor would spend some time in a jail cell.
The report is already copping it from the management of Australia’s major print media groups, who see themselves as its targets. I’m writing more out of interest. I’m involved in the media, as chief operating officer of the online publishing firm WorkDay Media. But WorkDay Media has always been happy to make corrections and grant prominent rights of reply; it has even tried to join the Australian Press Council. As a business manager, there’s nothing in the report that worries me.
There’s a lot to admire, too. I have done enough report-authoring to be impressed by the speed with which Finkelstein and his team (mostly lawyers) marshalled their arguments into something at once informed and understandable. It’s a good introduction to Australian media regulation issues, it appropriately handballs the issue of print media industry assistance to a Productivity Commission inquiry, and it seeks to align the jarringly different treatments of broadcast, print and online media.
But for all that, the Finkelstein report remains a flawed 468-page attempt to justify new government regulation of media. Four flaws, in particular, make it unconvincing.
The first question about this inquiry has always been: why now? Why should Australia introduce new media accountability regulations just when the Internet has delivered a huge new source of media competition?
Of course, one answer might be “because Bob Brown wants to restrict News Limited and the federal government at least wants to frighten it”. But you can’t make that the philosophical basis for a government inquiry. And besides, the fact that an inquiry has a political motive does not prevent it coming up with useful conclusions; all inquiries are founded with politics in mind.
So: why now? Finkelstein’s answer is first that there is an “increasing and legitimate demand for press accountability”, and second that the federal government must accommodate that demand. He has plenty of evidence for the first point, much of it drawn from public opinion research. Trust in the media is relatively low and may be declining, many voters think the media use their power irresponsibly, most people think various media outlets report inaccurately, journalists often recycle press releases, and sometimes media seem to be pursuing the agendas of vested interests (ranging from poker machines owners to the Victoria Police) or overstating things such as the likely effect of the carbon price on household budgets. The call for accountability is the report’s keystone, the piece of rock which keeps everything else from falling down.
But calling for accountability only suggests we need some rules. It does not tell you what those rules should be.
Setting down those rules is hard. Nevertheless, if you’re serious about accountability, that’s what you have to do.
The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy.
One morning last week I listened to ABC’s Melbourne local radio presenter, Jon Faine, beat up the banking industry’s official spokesman, Steven Münchenberg, on radio (audio here). Münchenberg could well be Australia’s King Of Making Difficult Arguments Sound Reasonable, but Faine is fast turning into Australia’s One And Only Left-Wing Shock-Jock, and the whole thing quickly became pretty awful to listen to. Its worst awfulness was that Faine kept insisting that the banks were now rendering government and Reserve Bank policy impotent. By deciding to react to rising overseas funding costs by raising their rates, he claimed, the banks were saying: “we will decide what’s best for the Australian economy; we won’t let the Reserve Bank decide what’s best for the Australian economy”. “It nobbles the government’s main strategy for trying to in some ways address inflation and therefore control what goes on in parts of Australia”s economic activity,” Faine declared, in a tone that suggested he knew exactly what he was talking about.
If Faine were right, this would be a huge problem for macroeconomic management in Australia. Thankfully, it’s populist blather. As a couple of Faine’s phrases disclose, he has little idea about how or why the Reserve Bank conducts monetary policy. If Faine really believes it … Continue reading
Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn’t Susan Sontag written something on this?)
[On checking, it turns out that Sigmund "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" Freud is the great theorist of the uncanny and Susan Sontag hasn't come up with anything that turns up with any prominence in Google. Nothing like a bit of raw ignorance to begin a post with.]
In any event I love the uncanny – and thinking about what’s comic about impersonators – both those that strive for verisimilitude like Max Giles and those that don’t – like John Clarke. All this humour works at the level of the uncanny it seems to me – surprising us by showing us what is familiar and how it is familiar – because we can see something just like it which is clearly not it. It surprises and delights us with what we take for granted and what we cognise as we see it.
And speaking of the uncanny, check out the screen test for the three great actorlets in Harry Potter. It’s a great risk casting someone when they did who will pupate while you make the films. I think that in the movies they were pretty much all at their best in the first movie. Hermoine was simply wonderful, Ron was great and Harry – though blander than the others – was excellent. They all remained good of course, but Hermoine was never as good as the first film – which is more an observation of how totally wonderful she was in the first film. Ron stayed as good as he was and Harry pupated rather badly – and ended up a bit wooden and somehow ended up with a bit of a macho stance – with his arms hanging wide around his hips a little like a gunslinger.
Anyway in the screen test, Hermione isn’t nearly as good as in the first movie (though she’s good) – so they worked on her and did great things for it. Ron is the great same old same old – good in his test and in all the movies.
But Harry is the big surprise. Daniel Radcliffe is quite lovely in the screentest and has a kind of pellucid quality – I don’t know if I’ve got the right word, but there’s some youthful freshness that shines through in an extraordinary way.
In a previous post I made this comment:
One of the things that intrigues me about the world is that acting is never ‘realistic’. For instance whenever you listen to a documentary and some scene is ‘reconstructed by actors’, you can always tell that they’re actors. They say their lines like they’re in a play or a movie, yet they’re acting real life. Strange isn’t it? They’re professionals at feigning life, and yet, when their only job is to feign life, not to ‘put on a play’ which is understandably a kind of hyper-real-life, they can’t do it. I’d like to understand why this is so. I’m sure it’s not a reflection on actors that their acting is not fully ‘realistic’, just as a TV presenters speech to camera is not like they speak normally, and just as when we give a speech to a group it’s not the same voice we use to speak to each other. Still I think it is a very telling reflection on actors that they show little sign of doing something completely realistic on the rare occasions when it’s called for.
But in a way that’s very rare for an actor, indeed, I guess this is because it is before Radcliffe became an actor you can’t quite tell that he’s acting. He’s got an awkward kind of smile on his face which makes you think he’s not really doing the screen test, but it turns out he is – and doing a quite extraordinary job of it.