Effigy

Who is burning, who is burning…Effigy!

“Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone because times they are a changing.” There are no truer words in the English language. The landscape of communication changes with each generation, indeed, these days, within each decade, or sooner. The old adage that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish paper has been put on steroids. Today’s iPad is tomorrow’s recycled plastic, and everything in it. One thing never changes, the future belongs to the swift.

FM radio was the rage of the age. MADE pop stars overnight. MTV blew FM out of the water. Then YouTube sent MTV packing. Is there a video anywhere on MTV anymore? Is there EVEN an MTV anymore? Now the advent of the live feed is taking the market by storm. While the dead or dying main stream media grinds out its fake news, Alex Jones, Dennis Michael Lynch, and many others generate the real news from their iPhones. The approaches are all different, but the results are the same. People will tune into THEM before they’ll watch the cackle babble heads in the ultra slick plastic boxes of MSNBC, or Fox News. Jones, with his “Walter Cronkite” studio approach, or Lynch, who’s feeds are reminiscent of YouTube legend Renetto, walking along a garden path with his camera in his hand.

The live feeds as yet, haven’t been corrupted by advertising, or profit sharing. There are rising stars, and a few flops. The style is being developed. What works, and what fails is just beginning to be understood. As the art form takes position the owners of the networks are scrambling to understand what they simply cannot. They are like dinosaurs standing by a BetaMax while the world has already moved on to DVDs and beyond.

Some standard rules remain. On one end you have short, direct shows that drill down like Emily Longworth, who comes at us with a short message salted with a little sailor talk, all the way to Scott Binsack who rambles for hours like a deranged Oral Roberts, promising salvation if you’ll only by a T-Shirt. Only problem is that this is the fifteen minute generation that absorbs terabytes of information over a burger, and has a BS barometer set to zero! Elimly ten, Binsack zero! Ring the bell, school’s in!

This is the reality of mass media. This is the business we’ve chosen. No one asked anyone to pull off the freeway in Nashville and join the music business, and no one asked anyone to jump into the firestorm of mass media. Simple fact is the kids will flock to Longworth, they’ll make short work of old school hacks like Binsack, as he burns in effigy, and he’ll get all upset just like Bill Haley did when he discovered that a guy from Memphis was the real king or rock and roll. Evolution always moves on. Unless I miss my guess, somewhere in New Mexico there are a couple of kids, living on beer and hot dogs, sitting in a garage, quietly carving the epitaph of Facebook’s tombstone while the baby in the playpen beside them is waiting to carve THEIRS!

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