I CAN SEE YOU FROM HERE [557]

“What is a video podcast?” is a question for which you might accuse its asker of ignorance, but I only ask it because the term has risen as something that we all apparently understand. We all know what a podcast is, so a video podcast is surely just one where you can see who is talking?

But just as podcasts, as a form, are similar to existing half-hour and hour-long speech-led programmes found on UK radio, particularly magazine programmes on BBC Radio 4, video podcasts seem to me to be too close to television, or just a video of the type you find on YouTube. At worst, it reminds me of what Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in their famous interview, that he believed cinema should avoid: “photographs of people talking”.

At the time of writing, a video podcast is currently being watched by an average of four million people in the UK because it is also being broadcast in primetime on standard over-the-air television. Admittedly, this is because it ties in to “The Celebrity Traitors”, BBC One’s wildly popular reality game show immediately preceding it, but “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” features presenter Ed Gamble interviewing his guests, massive condenser microphones on stands before them all instead of lavalier mics clipped to their clothes, our view cutting between unmoving cameras. The visuals are entirely superfluous to the programme, which the BBC also makes available as audio-only podcasts, but those pictures are there if you want them.

Having previously talked about Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, describing television as a “cool” medium, owing to the amount of attention the audience needs to give to make it “warm”, I am wary of the “warmth” of the sound of a podcast being attached to the “coolness” of an optional picture. If it is optional, it can be dispensed with entirely. If it cannot be, then you have crossed into a different media, whether that be television, competing for an attention in a room or, if you move to prioritising visuals over the picture, cinema.

My guess, and it is only my guess, is that podcasts are a more intimate media than radio: both can be listened to individually through headphones, but you will still find radio more frequently in social settings, if only as a background to them, than you will with a podcast. This bifurcation of audio broadcasting is what I think has led to the BBC announcing that its replacement for the long-running BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs show “You and Yours” will be “a refreshed consumer programme, designed to work both on air and on demand”, although the mechanics of how it will work were not elaborated.

Admittedly, other chat shows look similar to “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” – episodes of “Parkinson” from the 1970s also have microphones on stands, trailing wires out of shot – but these can be more obviously made as television shows, recorded in a TV studio in front of an audience, with operators moving the cameras. The kind of convergence being attempted by treating a video podcast as a television programme is a point when neither medium is being used as effectively as it could be, just like the act of putting a film in a TV schedule and not expecting the audience at home to turn the lights out and be quiet.

COME ON BEFORE WE CRACK [450]

“Put on the corned beef hash” is a well-known misheard lyric from Kenny Loggins’s song “Footloose”, as I discovered when I misheard it myself being played on a speaker at a food festival.

I immediately wanted to check the correct lyric, but I could not get a signal on my smartphone to check. I am very used to the impulse of checking what I don’t know with my phone, so when I couldn’t, that impulse had to be used up a different way, so I checked how many steps I walked so far – that was something the phone could count by itself.

This was the point I realised I had the perfect opening to an article about smartphones, so I opened my note-taking app to make an early start.

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s delineation of media as being “hot” or “cool” in terms of how demanding they are of their user’s attention, with television being defined as “cool” because of its lower fidelity picture and sound relative to the real world, and it having to compete for attention in the settings they are usually found.

However, is the smartphone a “medium”, or a Swiss Army knife-type delivery system for many different media? Does the device demand my attention, or the combination of all the things it can do?

Having explained the delineation of hot and cool media in his 1964 book “Understanding Media” subtitled “The Extensions of Man”, McLuhan looks at many different media to determine where they stand, and what their true message is, for example the telephone removing walls and distance from human conversation.

It is entirely possible for me to create a table from the different media McLuhan discusses, taking an average of whether the smartphone is overall “hot” or “cold”. My phone is expected to reproduce both the spoken word, through radio and recorded music, and the written word, simulating print media from newspapers and magazines to comic books and various forms. It is expected to make photographs and act as their frame. It is a telegraph, through telephony, various messaging apps and in submitting information to the internet and recalling from it. It displays various advertisements. It is my television. It is my typewriter. It can be used to light up a room. I could also throw it... but I need it so much I fear breaking it.

However, the smartphone leaves me “cold”, as it were, because it relies entirely on my attention. It may be one step on from having separate devices for each of its individual uses, but it takes you one step away from the advantages those devices had: larger screens and surfaces, better sound systems, better microphones, brighter light, and so on. I have to bring more to my smartphone to make it work the way I need it to work, which may require me to compromise to bridge the gap created by the loss of fidelity that I could have achieved with a proper camera, a book, a pen, a Blu-ray player, a torch and so on. The smartphone is a new level of compromise.

AND THEN YOU GOTTA SLOW IT DOWN [416]

Marshall McLuhan is a name that has come up here a few times already, but I somehow forgot that the founder of what we call media studies had recorded an album. Released in 1967, and an LP version of McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s book of the same name, “The Medium of the Massage” is an audio collage about the effects of media on its consumer, the title’s pun on “message” becoming intentional following a typing error in the original book. 

With McLuhan’s assured tone as a lynchpin, the effect of the album’s sound is not too dissimilar to the later experiments it influenced, like The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9”. The intention of the album is to totally immerse the listener in a constantly changing landscape that utilises sound as an entirely separate medium of the printed work – this is no audiobook.

I found myself concentrating on the voices and sounds being sped up and slowed down. The collage is constructed of hundreds of pieces of spliced audio tape, played by reel-to-reel machines on top of each other, but the varying of their pace brings more attention to the physical existence of the tape, and how what you hear is essentially a result of friction, as magnetic tape is passed over a playback head. 

The speed of the pinch roller, feeding the tape past the head, can be varied to a desired effect, quite often comic, as anyone with a cassette player at home would find by pressing the “play” and “fast forward” buttons to make your favourite band sing even higher. The age and quality of the tape player, and the tape, also affects the output: you can tune your equipment to remove as much “wow” and “flutter” as you can, but there may still be imperfections in the tape, from its recording to their initial manufacture, to factors acting on the magnetism of the tape to affect its retention of a recording.

None of this is easily replicated digitally. Filtering audio could get close, like applying a “VHS effect” to video, but outright glitches need the original equipment, and both cassette players and “entry-level” Type I ferric tape are still readily and cheaply available. Best known for the vaporwave album “Floral Shoppe” under the name Macintosh Plus, Ramona Langley released “Big Danger” in 2017, under her usual moniker of Vektroid, which sounds like a found object: a sticky, muddy-sounding cassette tape in a damaged player that cannot play at the right speed, and that is the effect being sought – plying it back on a digital file is only the current method of delivering that particular sound.

DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE [395]

1953

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium, requiring more participation and effort from the viewer to determine the meaning of its low-resolution output. Televisions were limited at the time of the publishing of McLuhan’s book “Understanding Media” in 1964: small screens, low-definition picture, mostly black and white, mono sound, and competing with any sound and movement happening outside of it. Have technological advances helped to “warm” television as a medium in the following sixty years, making it easier to simply sit back and watch?

For British viewers, this is an easy comparison to make. Only three Coronations of British monarchs have occurred in the near ninety years a regular television service has run, the first happening only six months after broadcasting began, with each occasion demonstrating the power and potential of the medium in a different way each time.

Television cameras were not allowed in Westminster Abbey for the Coronation service of King George VI and Queen Mary on Wednesday 12th May 1937 (not a bank holiday), although the BBC, who did carry a live radio commentary, later broadcast the newsreels filmed there. However, the procession following the service was televised for an hour from 2pm, from cameras placed at Apsley Gate at Hyde Park Corner, both at crowd level and above them on scaffolding, with Frederick Grisewood commentating on the pictures. This was the BBC’s first TV outside broadcast, using a unit delivered two days earlier.

You could argue this effort was pointless. With only a few hundred prohibitively expensive television sets in use, and with coverage limited to Greater London, anyone able to view were likely either in the crowd, or in the Abbey, but the precedence was set. Film cameras may have allowed people to witness events at a distance, and radio may let you hear them, but television now demonstrated the potential to eclipse them both.

British television was already broadcasting using the 405-line standard that remained in use until 1985, and the use of commentators for lower-definition, lower-contrast black and white pictures was almost a necessity – this was the same “cool” medium McLuhan described in the 1960s. When Queen Elizabeth was crowned on Tuesday 2nd June 1953 (this time a bank holiday), on one of the first occasions that British television was broadcast through the day, commentators were used at every point to interpret and contextualise the pictures, most notably Richard Dimbleby at Westminster Abbey.  

In 1953, the Queen overturned arguments from Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and his government about it being fit or proper to admit TV cameras, and asserting the right of subjects to participate in the ceremony – remember that Prince Philip remarked that he and the Queen watched the BBC’s 1954 adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, immediately snuffing out a row in Parliament over the broadcasting of violent content. This Coronation coverage, doubled the number of televisions in British homes to three million in the year preceding it in preparation - with an audience estimated at 28 million, averaging at seventeen people per television, you did well to see any picture at all.

Which brings us to Saturday 6th May 2023 (finally a weekend). In my experience of watching the Coronation of King Charles III, television remained a “cool” medium, the coverage on BBC One having to compete for my attention with ITV’s coverage from another room – the first time it has had to compete for Coronation coverage - and the sound of a tumble dryer. 

Despite that, the picture was bigger, playing on a thirty-two inch screen; the picture quality was in 1080-line high definition with vivid colour; more cameras, and mobile cameras, made for a more cinematic presentation; and the commentary was correspondingly minimal, with Huw Edwards in Westminster Abbey interjecting on fewer occasions than James Mates on ITV. The BBC alone provided four different ways to watch the same pictures, with another commentary providing further information for accessibility purposes, with signing for the deaf, and with no commentary at all.

In much the same way that films are broadcast on television, with the viewer at home changing their setting to suit, television remains a “cool” medium through its setting, no matter how much television itself tries to bridge the gap. There is no need for a separate feature film of the Coronation of King Charles III, like Pathé News did with the high-definition colour film for his mother’s ceremony in 1953, for this Coronation was shown live in cinemas, which would have been interesting to experience.

HE JUST STARES BACK UNBLINKING [352]

My TV, a Toshiba 32LL3A63DB

I have been without a television for a week at the time of writing. I had just finished summer cleaning, sat down to relax, turned on my TV, and found no picture. A troubleshooting phone call revealed it was still in-warranty, so I sent it away to be fixed.

Being the year 2022, this inconvenience has reduced me from four screens to only three, as my phone, tablet and computer attempt to fill the gap temporarily left by the TV, but their nature as multi-purpose devices make them poorer substitutes than I had reason to expect, as I sit over to examine programmes I am more used to seeing in a more relaxed, laid-back position.

In having to actively look for content to watch, I have missed the opportunity that TV provides in just switching it on and showing me something, to effectively switch myself off for a moment, as it were - getting to sleep has taken longer in this last week.

This would also be the week that Boris Johnson resigned as leader of the Conservative Party, his petulant speech underlining his tenure as Prime Minister as one of the most divisive and sordid in modern times. Instead of letting the TV take the strain in reporting what happened, able to recede into the background as I relaxed into the evening, I continued to scroll through news updates on my phone, like my work day never stopped.

In my experience, television is a passive medium, even if I play an increasing role in choosing the programmes, as both the number of channels, and the number of ways to send programmes to it, have increased. It is not the same as radio or podcasts, where you are listening intently by nature of its form – I found that I have not had the radio on at home in the evening to substitute for the TV, because that would force me to listen more intently at a time when I am trying to relax. There is an argument for my experiencing a withdrawal from the higher dopamine and serotonin levels experienced when watching TV, but I will only know that for sure when my TV is fixed and sent back to me.

I had intended to write about Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of “hot” and “cool” media, from his 1964 book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”, which I have talked about previously [link]. His definition of TV as “cool”, through the user having to do the work in connecting with the TV’s message, and filtering out any distractions from outside it. 

This hasn’t fit with my experience – I have more control over what my TV shows me than McLuhan, who witnessed the medium’s introduction in his native Canada, and would only have access to two networks, CBC and CTV, by 1964. Bigger screens and better sound also make TV and its programmes more cinematic, film being codified as a “hot” medium through its handling more of the work in relaying its message.

However, McLuhan defined a “medium” like an extension of the human body, such as  switching on a lightbulb to change the nature of your surroundings. Even if TV is just a way of packaging what I want to see, I now realise how well it did that job.

LAUGH ABOUT IT, SHOUT ABOUT IT [328]

Social media has become as much of a bête noire for myself this website as the 45^th President of the United States came to be, so I must now also write it out of my system until further notice.

Social media is just another form of traditional media, and should be understood as such. Marshall McLuhan, the philosopher whose work created the field of media studies, was forty-one years old when regular television broadcasts started in his native Canada in 1952, making him well-placed in commenting on television’s impact on communication and our world. The focus of his book “Understanding Media” was how we should study media more than the content it carries, and the impact of a new medium will be more than that of the content. For social media, which became part of everyday life during my twenties, content is fuel for the algorithm of the site, and providing content to the site is both amplification of your message and the price of admission. The “social” side is an impression created by the content.

If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across. 

It sounds not far away from preparing for a job interview, as you prepare to create the greatest possible impression of yourself, until I saw that one company, PA Mediapoint, also offers “crisis media training” in how to deal with intense media scrutiny – their website states that “the focus is on equipping comms teams and spokespeople with the essential techniques and strategies to limit reputational damage.” 

For all that you can hate about what Piers Morgan says on Twitter, his account can be viewed as the same collection of safe press release announcements and off-the-cuff pronouncements that define a brand-building social media account that keeps on the right side of the site’s terms of service, because Morgan knows how to play the social media engagement game. Whenever Twitter has been used in a controversial fashion, mostly by people since banned from using the platform, the “social” side of social media is not applicable. 

Something that is slanderous if spoken between two people is counted as libel on social media because it is media, it is recorded, it is written down. Putting yourself on public view carries an element of risk for anyone, celebrity or not, at any point, and whether it is worth putting on that off-hand comment, to be deleted later, or to target someone or something anonymously, carries its own risks.

I therefore use Twitter and Instagram primarily to link to my website, and to share things I like, because that is as much as I want to use it. I could decide to play the game, building social capital through likes and followers, but I think I prefer it more when that happens as a coincidence of one thing I posted about what I write elsewhere.

As everyone now has access to the media, we must not just get used to having a separate private and public face, but the management of that is now a life skill. That essentially makes it impossible to get it out of my system.

FILL IN THE BLANK [250]

[Please see below for the script for my latest video, as seen above.]

(black screen)

Do not adjust your device, or do not adjust it any more than you already have. Your screen has been intentionally left blank.

However, that might change, so don’t look away either. This is not a podcast, and this is not radio. This is a video.

This isn’t a confidence trick either. Videos need pictures, but my conscious decision to put nothing on screen still leaves a picture frame. I may also change my mind.

Mind you, that frame is never empty – even if your screen is turned off, it still reflects light. In 1951, the artist Robert Rauschenberg painted a series of canvasses with white house paint, but those paintings are not blank, for the brush strokes played off the ambient conditions in the room, and off anyone that looked at them.

The following year, Rauschenberg’s friend John Cage composed the musical piece “4’33”” [pronounced “four minutes, thirty-three seconds”] which of course, is not four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence: it is composed for any instrument, any band, any orchestra, but while the players do not play, the room, and the audience, plays with them.

Ideally, you want your work to be received hot, rather than cold, but I will explain that later.

I actually found this blank screen online, but in searching the term “blank screen”, I either get this:

(white screen)

Or this:

(black screen)

I recently bought a new television, and the energy-saving options actually affected how it dealt with the difference between black and white. When a video cut from black to white, or even if white text is added to a black screen, my television faded it in instead. For me to see a video properly, I have to turn off all of its fancy processing features... and set the picture mode to “sports,” for some reason. So, if I cut to a white screen:

(white screen)

And back again:

(black screen)

...and your screen faded instead, your settings are not acting in my best interest.

Video crosses over with both film and television, but these two media are not the same: as classified by Marshall McLuhan, in his book “Understanding Media,” there is “hot” media, and there is “cold” media, according to how much participation is required of the audience. For McLuhan, film is “hot”: the picture is dominant, and you are ideally in a cinema, so you are captivated by the image, because less is required of you to remain captivated. On the other hand, television is “cool”: there are more distractions, and you have to take account of this before you can start paying attention to whatever is coming from the TV. Films can be shown on television, but “hot” media cannot be rendered “cool” – making it harder to focus on a film may make it impossible to watch, missing out on detail television knows not to include.

When I next make a video, do I want to be hot, or do I want to be cool?

Thank you for watching. As ever, the nostalgia culture crisis continues at  [www.leighspence.net].