This is an interesting article on Techdirt that deals with a disorder where people believe their lives are a movie, like Jim Carey in the Truman Show.
Having had a brother with paranoid schizophrenia, I’m actually well aware that this is a real condition that drastically affects peoples lives, as well as the people around them. People with this disorder really have no say in how they perceive the world, they just do, and it’s a struggle for many of them to deal with many of the things we take for granted. Often, these delusions cause anxiety and depression, which can lead to social disfunction. Honestly, it isn’t a disorder that magically goes away by itself, but people who have this disorder benefit greatly from having good emotional support around them. And while I’m not a big proponent of medication in general, some medications seem to work for people.
Anyway, I won’t repeat the article, just passing it on.
So now we’ve built a culture that has survived the tech boom and moved into what could only be described as a Utopian Social Trend. People want people, not just machines, not just things, not just cool facades. The general sense I get looking at television, pop-culture, the news, and just the people around me is that people want community.
If you look at current trends in the online world, we see Second Life and MySpace as two of the largest examples of growth in online communities. Here people can gather online and interact. If they so choose they can even meet.
Sit down restaurants and cafes have begun popping up on every street corner from Minneapolis to Timbucktoo. In the last five years I’ve seen several community revitalization projects go up in the Twin Cities area. In each case, dining establishments have been the focal point of the development. Like the kitchen at your friends house party, these establishments are natural points of congregation for people to meet, talk, and socialize. They are also a strong indicator of both economic and social factors currently at play in the United States. People have more money to spend on eating out and are making a bigger point of doing so than ever before.
Further, the media has picked up on this trend as well. Television depicts peoples want for a larger world community in shows such as “Extreme Makeover: Home Addition”, and “the Biggest Loser”. Even Oprahs, “The Big Give” was a failed attempt in the same vein. These shows are an example of peoples need for community, a way to self identify by comparing oneself to others, and a hope to make the world a better place to live.
Even corporations have jumped on the bandwagon. NBC the other day did a whole weeks campaign on keeping things green. Shows such as The Office and 30 Rock depicted the studios efforts to influence peoples ways of thinking on the environment, as well as their own commitment to stewardship. Plus we get to see David Schwimmer dressed up as Greenzo in a power mad rampage to save the environment and a cameo by Al Gore…both are hilarious.
Companies such as Best Buy and Target often have volunteer days for their employees to spend the day cleaning up the community. They sponsor charity classic golf tournaments. They also sponsor community projects such as United Way and Urban Ventures. While it could be argued that these are just tax write offs or less than subtle attempt to win over community approval for their failings, without employees backing these programs and customers demanding these programs, none of it would ever have happened in the first place.
It’s this awareness of the larger world that really drives the economy today. Because people are influenced by the media, are better educated, and have greater social incentives to argue for social change, companies have to be more aware of their customers and employees wants and needs than ever before. Without a greater effort to meet these demands, companies risk failure at the hands of the community as a whole and are deemed socially ineffective.
I’ve been checking out Firebrand on the tube as of late and it’s a really neat show. It features some of the best commercials I’ve seen from around the world. The main focus of any good commercial if to draw attention to your product and sell the brand, and this program does it nicely…makes me wish I’d gotten my all commercial cable station off the ground back in the days of the food network…I could have made a fortune.
Also, as I was checking out the site, I remembered this commercial from the launch of the PS2. Check it out:
It seems like in the last few years the quality of SNL has started to get a little better. Sketches are running shorter, ideas are more original, and the talent is getting more charismatic as opposed to being merely characters. The show format is still too long, the musical guests are still generally pretty lame, but at least now there’s a spark again, and that’s pretty cool to see.
Check out this sketch for the Barry Gibbs Talk Show. I love the songs at the beginning and the end, and Justin Timberlake is pretty funny. Enjoy!
This clip is from a show that Joe Rogan does on cable…at least I’d assume it’s on cable because I’ve never seen it. I’m not sure what else to say about this other than it’s funny. Check it out.
So here are the new details on the return of Futurama.
Matt Groening: Talk about a day job and night job, my night job after The Simpsons is Futurama, which is coming back on Comedy Central in 2008, 16 new episodes, and we’re going to be running the old episodes, as well.
Rather than one movie it apears that we are now getting a full season on Comedy Central.
Matt Groening: Well, I was frustrated when it got cancelled, but Fox, 20th Television is the one who came back and said, “Would you like to do a DVD movie?” and we said, “Let’s do two” and they said, “Well, why not three?” and we said, “Well, why not four?” and they said, “Okay, four” and then that’s it.
Crave Online: Are they really full movies or just three episodes together?
Matt Groening: We’re writing them as movies and then we’re going to chop them up, reconfigure them, write new material and try to make them work as separate episodes.
Crave Online: Can DVD versions be more extreme than the ones for air?
Matt Groening: Those are the marching orders we gave ourselves, yes, to really try to push it and do things we might not be able to do on TV. And then Comedy Central picked up the show and we went, “Okay, probably there’s nothing we can think of that Comedy Central won’t run” because I’m astonished at what I see on Comedy Central every day.
I can’t wait. Though I am a little surprised that the Cartoon Network didn’t land this deal.
Though this isn’t as cool as the first trailer for Seinfelds Bee Movie, it’s still pretty fun.
I never really appreciated Seinfield’s sense of humor until I started seeing him do projects other than Seinfeld. When you’re doing a television show, it isn’t always easy to tell when the actors are being shielded from failure by the other people in the production. When something clicks, and strikes a coord in people, it often succeeds despite itself…God knows why…but it really isn’t until you see the breadth of someones work that you can really stand back and say, “Man, that was really really cool!”
