Sometimes the media gods do us a big favor by giving us a clear example of how corporate media is occupied by Wall Street. In this case we are presented with two different covers of the same issue of Time Magazine that ran domestically and abroad. Reading between the lines it shows how scared the media elites are of pushing the idea of revolution at home. And just as the disconnection between the US State Department’s support for the Arab Spring overseas versus the various crackdowns against the Occupy movement throughout the US is not casual, no doubt the editors at Time are nervous about the idea of revolution in Egypt further inspiring the locals. This makes the alternate title, “Why anxiety is good for you,” that much more interesting. Surely their editorial choice reflects a great deal of anxiety.

H/T to CommonDreams.org for the heads-up.

Loyal readers of this blog know that I’m not a big fan of Adbusters (because I think antimarketing is ultimately just a kind of graffiti that reinforces marketing). But I don’t wish upon them further grief for a big faux pas they made with their One Flag competition. The idea was to open up a flag design contest to represent the global community. The problem, though, was that the panel of experts appointed to select the flag were all white men. How ironic. Well, let’s hope this is a teachable moment for the Adbuster’s crew (sounds like it is).

William Drenttel, one of the judges who opted out, writes in Design Observer:

I’m writing this here not to further abuse Adbusters, but to forcefully argue that this should not happen again. It is time for organizations to encourage diversity as a part of developing new ideas, excellence and a richness in the future of design — an increased focus on multiculturalism, gender equality and globalism is more than appropriate in these times. Designers should take a personal pledge that they will not participate in events or initiatives that do not include participation by others, whether of sex, color or language. It’s a simple step, but it’s time.

You can check out the competition here. There are actually some pretty cool concepts. I voted for The Rainbow of Existence. (Today, March 17, is the last day to vote)

Had gotten my act together, I would have made one that was white with the handwritten words, “This is not a flag.”

I like to say when things get weird, the weird go pro. I’m not talking Obama here. What I’m referring to is the under-the-radar fact that Time’s Man of the Year cover image is made by a punk-skater-guerrilla artist by the name of Shepard Fairey, the man who plastered America with Andre the Giant for the past 20 years or so. To learn more about how the poster and cover were conceived, I highly recommend viewing Time Magazine’s little video about the cover art (they don’t have an embed option, so I posted a CBS news piece above), featuring Fairey talking about guerrilla media and memes. Kinda weird to see such ideas boasted about at Time…Time “Henry Luce” Magazine, that is. I hope someone out there gets the historical significance of this.

Michael Shaw, however, who blogs at BagNewsNotes, had a less-than appreciative take on the cover:

Besides TIME’s own Obama-envy and the blatant play to a younger demographic, the illustration, as much as anything, seems to telegraph Fairey’s own desire to cash in on the original artwork — another reason for the poster-within-the-poster on Obama’s collar just under his chin, not to mention the enormous dollar sign.

Based on Fairy’s description of his own process in the Time Magazine video linked above, I think Shaw is misreading the image. But me being an Gen Xer, I feel a need to defend a fellow tribester. Also, I’m a sucker for poster art, and this is as iconic as they get.

If you study the history of media, you see very quickly that they always go to war against each other. Accompanying each new media technology’s adaption curve is a decline for another. So as magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and now the Internet vie for attention, each borrows and steals from each other until, as is the case with convergence media, they start to blend together. Obviously each has its strength and weakness, and in the current battlefield, the Internet seems to be outpacing newspapers very rapidly. If you are a media manager or company owner, your motto should be adapt or die.

So what will the future of magazines be? The New York Observer ponders the question and you may be surprised by the results. I’m still pretty old school, so I happen to like holding a thing– a magazine, paper or book– and not to worry about whether or not I lose or damage it. I like rolling up a magazine and sticking it in my pocket or making coffee stained rings on the paper. At the same time, I hate paying thousands of dollars to ship my library across the ocean. If only books could pay rent!

Kindle? Well, the DRM is an issue, and honestly, I cannot think of a different way of browsing a book than running my thumb down its trimmed edge to catch a page by surprise. I also have a mania of buying my own books (as opposed to borrowing or checking them out) because I am lost if I cannot underline or scribble notes in the margin. I know Kindle allows you to highlight text and to write notes, but it looks too slow for me. However, if there is a way to copy and past the highlighted text from a Kindle book into a word processor, then that would make its features more interesting (maybe it can do that– I don’t know for sure). Then there’s the cost. Geez, I really don’t want to spend a large stash of money for something that will be outdated in a year. I’m already smarting from how rapidly my iPod has become obsolete.

Anyhow, read on. If you are a media watcher, I think you’ll like the piece.

Where Will Magazines Be Ten Years From Now? | The New York Observer:

In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.

“You’ll subscribe to five magazines and six newspapers,” Mr. Carter said. “That is what I see as the future. … That I know is coming.”

“Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!” said Peter Meirs, the vice president of production technology at Time Inc.

“In a decade time frame?” asked Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. “No. Technology adoption happens slowly. This is the editor of Wired telling you no. Obviously, newspapers are going to be changing dramatically over the next few years, but magazines are not newspapers. And I think magazines 10 years from now are going to look something like they do now.”

As evidence that cognitive dissonance permeate our culture, look no further than this specimin of the pop culture complex.
It’s not clear why Belgian’s Che Magazine took on as it’s namesake the Argentine revolutionary, but perhaps the transformation of the South American rebel into a pop icon made him game to become a cigar smoking, beard sporting poster man for the postironic set. Che Magazine, in its ever ending quest to rid the world of feminism and all its gains, has no problem invoking the cad personality, but updates it with high tech glee. It’s a man’s world after all, when more than a one syllable name is too complicated.

A bush mosaic made of faces with photos of deceased soldiers from the Iraq debacle. If you add the images of dead of Iraqis I think they would blot out his face. You can download this image from The Nation magazine.

The Independent was a great mag for film and media makers. It will be relaunching this Fall after a year hiatus. Media Rights interviews the publisher about changes and the state of the industry.

My only beef is that I think we need to move away from this mentality of “independence” to move towards “interdependence.” Independence is not necessarily a virtue anymore, especially considering the ramifications of individualism that runs crazy in the world these days. Moreover I think “indy media” gets too much of a free ride in terms of seeing itself as noble cause. What I mean by this is that just because something is independent it doesn’t mean that it is right, fair or free of wrong-headed assumptions. Still, I welcome the return of the magazine, which I have always enjoyed.

MediaRights: News: The Independent Relaunches This Fall:

MediaRights.org: Your website defines the “Independent” as: not dependent: as a (1): not subject to control by others (2) : not affiliated with a larger controlling unit b (1) : not requiring or relying on something else : not contingent (2) : not looking to others for one’s opinions or for guidance in conduct (3) : showing a desire for freedom

How do you see this definition as both a virtue and an obstacle in the sustainability of a 501(c)(3) publication?

Michele Meek: It’s always a balance in the real world to maintaining independence. Everyone answers to someone. For us, we answer to our subscribers, advertisers and donors. The challenge for us is to keep a balance, and make sure that our decisions are always in line with our core mission. This is such a subjective area–what one person sees as seizing an opportunity someone else sees as selling out. Even the words ‘independent film’ have come to mean something so different to everyone. To me, independent is not a film made by Miramax because they are owned by Disney. Independent is a film made by a small company or individual and is able to find its audience against the odds. If it goes to Sundance and then gets picked up for distribution by Miramax, it’s now a film with indie roots that has corporate marketing behind them. Is that still an independent film? I say yes, but someone else might disagree.

Once again I have to say that I am sadly disappointed with Adbusters. The above ad, which recycles a Situationist slogan, is a poor substitute for organizing. I think Adbusters is becoming its own worse enemy be reducing the causes they believe in into images and slogans. It’s a bit like Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” a song that I love dearly, but it’s a vague slogan that reduces the cause to a crafty sound bite with little meaning. Adbusters wants you to pay to have this ad on TV as part of their so-called “meme war,” but please don’t waste your money. Running ads on television is not social change. If you want to get down and dirty, this strategy just further props up the thing they are against by throwing money at it. My belief is that running an ad like this is like throwing a glass of water into Niagara Falls. This is a kind of pseudo activism that I have seen repeated over and over again as people see themselves as heros who merely have to show people the truth to set them free. As noble as it is, I think the online comic Shooting War also repeats the same trope.

This “great adventure” substitutes ideas with images. It glorifies people fighting the police. What good does that do except generate fear, anger and hatred between people? The Situationists were engaged in in real interventions, things that involved people contacting each other in dialog in the streets. Their bodies moved through space. This ad is just empty mental space. Moreover, it is a kind of passive, armchair activism that I liken to “riot porn.” The ad “others” the rioters by reducing their cause into hollow symbolism. As memes go, where’s the beef?

I don’t want to discount Adbusters entirely, because they have inspired many people and have created many insightful projects that brought important issues to the forefront. But when I was at a conference in Seattle and complained to the magazine’s founder and publisher Kalle Lasn that the publication was no longer useful as teaching tool because of its increasingly incomprehensible avant-garde design, he said it was worth the risk of alienating people such as myself to deconstruct the idea of a magazine. OK, great within the schema of museums and art history, but totally impractical.

You can read my other critiques here and here.

Technorati Tags: adbusters

This article was sitting in my backlog, so I thought I’d shoot it out there. I had read some interesting critiques of the Vanity Fair Africa issue that confirmed my suspicion that the goodwill gesture of celebrities to highlight problems in Africa was furthering the racist construct that Africans cannot speak for themselves (Boing Boing had some great links). Additionally, there is a problem of thinking about “Africa” as one monolithic concept when in truth it is a highly diverse continent that is rich with so many different cultures and perspectives.

What Bono doesn’t say about Africa – Los Angeles Times (this may require registration to view):

JUST WHEN IT SEEMED that Western images of Africa could not get any weirder, the July 2007 special Africa issue of Vanity Fair was published, complete with a feature article on “Madonna’s Malawi.” At the same time, the memoirs of an African child soldier are on sale at your local Starbucks, and celebrity activist Bob Geldof is touring Africa yet again, followed by TV cameras, to document that “War, Famine, Plague & Death are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and these days they’re riding hard through the back roads of Africa.”

It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that’s being offered up to TV watchers and coffee drinkers. But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help.

This important action from FreePress. If you live in the US, please read and follow-up.

Take Action: Save Small and Independent Publishers:

Postal regulators have accepted a proposal from media giant Time Warner that would stifle small and independent publishers in America. The plan unfairly burdens smaller publishers with higher postage rates while locking in special privileges for bigger media companies.

In establishing the U.S. postal system, the nation’s founders wanted to ensure that a diversity of viewpoints were available to “the whole mass of the people.” Time Warner’s rate increase reverses this egalitarian ideal and threatens the marketplace of ideas on which our democracy depends.

It’s time stand up for independent media. Demand that Congress step in to stop the unfair rate hikes. The deadline for comments to the Postal Service is fast approaching.