Archive for the ‘pop culture’Category

Pokemon Go: Fact, fiction, myths, and observations

An example of container for geocaching game, C...

An example of a container for geocaching game, Czech Republic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Instead of reading news articles about Pokemon Go, I decided to download it myself.

Here’s what I have to say about it.
 

1. First of all, it’s only a game if you decide to play it. I think that a large percentage of people don’t do much with the game aspect. It is more like augmented reality geocaching (treasure hunting via GPS).

 
2. The game aspect is virtually an afterthought. It is so simple that a 4-year-old (maybe younger) can handle the mechanics and the concept. You flick your finger across the screen. Sometimes there’s a small strategy to it, but mostly it’s just a spin of a coin to see what treasures pop-up.
 
3. This is where people usually ask me, why? If there’s no complexity and little strategy, why is it so popular. The reason is simple, it gives people a reason to get outside and discover stuff. True, you can go outside and discover stuff anytime you want. The difference here is that there is a thrill in the hunt. It’s exactly the same as a taking a Saturday to go shopping for a nice pair of shoes or a nice dress or a bull elk.
 
4. As a long-time citizen of the Internet and cyberculture, I have learned that there will always be trolls. People who are determined to ruin anything fun or uplifting or beneficial. Here we have a game that essentially is an anti-game. It forces people to go outside, it doesn’t really have an addictive element other than you can “catch them all”, and it is most fun when you get a group of people working together socially (again, out of the house).
Anyone who has tried to lose weight, get out of debt, or start a new business knows that as soon as you share your plans, there are trolls who try to discourage you.
 
Murder of Adam Walsh

Murder of Adam Walsh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

5. Substantiated myths can reach mythical proportions. Yes, someone found a body while playing Pokemon Go. Also, some people were using the locations to stock victims to mug. Also, there was a kid once named Adam Walsh who was kidnapped from a Sears once and the entire country stopped letting their kids peruse the in the toy aisle by themselves for almost 20 years. There was also once a kid who got hit by a car while riding his bike. And this one time a kid went to school and got bullied by a teacher ever day.

My point is, don’t be a troll. If you hate the game because you don’t like that other people are having a good time, you can read books and work in the garden, and do crafts in your house and the Pokemon Go people will not hurt you. I promise. You can take joy and rant on Facebook when you read that one of them got hit by a car. Or you can scoff when you hear that someone vandalized a monument while playing the game.
 
6. There is safety in numbers. There are photos all over the web of crowds of people in Central Park, wandering through public spaces, and driving around town to get to the next cache. Is it really more or less likely that people will be committing serious crimes under these conditions?
 
7. Virtually nothing about the game is random. The locations are curated and there are ways to report problems to the game developers immediately. You won’t find caches on the runway at the airport or inside the home of a pedophile. Ordinary people can’t make their own hotspots. The game developers only selected areas that were legally accessible to the public. So, don’t believe andy rumors you may hear about someone placing a cache of Pokemon fodder in the basement of their home to catch 6-year-olds. That can’t happen.
Technically, a bad guy could stock a given cache at weird times for unsuspecting victims, but that takes us back to the previous point. The same bad guy could stock a certain secluded sidewalk for kids as they walk home from school or joggers at 5am. There is nothing inherently dangerous about Pokemon Go that makes it easier for bad guys to do whatever their evil minds can dream up.
 
8. This is a fad. By this time next year, only a small percentage of people will still be playing the game. However, the game has subtly taught people and app developers that there is a new frontier in augmented reality. Expect shopping apps, travel apps, and more games to begin using these features.
Imagine driving up to a landmark and pointing your phone at it to read more information about that spot. Imaging panning your camera from an area where you can look down at your town and see the city transformed back to certain decades so that you can learn about the progress and history of the city.
Education, commerce, travel, and recreation are about to change for the better. It will mean that we are more plugged-in than ever. But, do we really want to go back to the time where we had to figure everything out from scratch?
 
9. Security glitches will happen. Something will happen with security and something will be exploited. It’s essentially a guarantee. However, ALL of your information is on the Internet. Every time you use your credit card, that information flies through the Internet. Anytime you use your Google Maps or other mobile mapping services, your location is recorded. Every time you go to the hospital, everything you are there for is recorded in a digital database, usually stored in the cloud or on servers that use the Internet to transfer and backup.
If this scares you then you should also know that every single city in the united states is planning on releasing a book that will be placed on every citizen’s front door. Inside that book will be every citizen’s phone number, address, and even their first and last name. Businesses aren’t even safe from this.
A company called Xerox has invented a device that allows you to make hard copy prints of both sides of any credit card. All bad guys have to do is find a way to get you to hand them your credit card for less than 2 minutes. They are going to allow these machines in the billing offices at restaurants and retail stores!
 
My point is, people need to stop worrying so much. If you want to be afraid of something, be afraid of bears, they can kill you. Or be afraid of saturated fats, sugar, and a sedentary lifestyle. Don’t be afraid of millennials walking around a public park or community sidewalk flicking their cellphone screens.

BONUS: If you want to know how they made the maps, how they chose the cache locations, etc. Mashable has a pretty good article explaining all that.

12

07 2016

How to save the movie theater business while lowering popcorn prices

English: The impressive Egyptian-themed entran...

English: The impressive Egyptian-themed entrance to the Cinemark Egyptian 24 movie theaters located at Arundel Mills Mall. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cost of going to a first run movie is roughly the same as tickets to the nosebleed section of a professional sporting event – especially if you get popcorn and soda. The high cost of movie tickets is a better small talk conversation topic than the weather. Some people like rain, some like the heat, but everyone feels that movie tickets are too expensive.

For well under $1500, you can get a great home theater system, including the 65″ television. The subwoofer will shake the house, the floors aren’t sticky, and you can can pause it when the baby cries or you need to pee.

Those of us who pay extra to see a movie in the theaters do it because we love the experience. The smell of the popcorn, that moment when the lights dim, the bad red robot moving through the grass – often the movie itself diminishes the experience. Nobody wants to see the end of theaters. In fact, we want the ceremony of the theater experience to be greater than what it is.

Over the past 20 years, theaters have increased efforts to make the experience that is worth the premium price. Megaplexes have added stadium seats, cup holders, cuddle seats, and even tables with group seating in some hipster venues. The results have kept the industry alive, but they have also muted the nostalgic red curtain experience.

When discussing films, friends often provide opinions of a given movie by declaring it to be worth seeing in theaters, a rental, or wait for it to come on Netflix (or worse television). This is a confession that the theater experience still offers something significantly more special than all of the the amenities of home viewing.

The problem with the current movie theater business model is that it is too rigid. The most avid Adam Sandler fan will pay $20 (including the snack – maybe) to see Grown Ups 6 on opening day. After that week goes by, Sandler begins competing with Avengers 9. Avengers will likely be well attended, even on week nights, for two or three weeks while Grown Ups will barely fill 50 seats all day on the weekends. Read the rest of this entry →

08

08 2015

Introvert is the new black

social networking

social networking (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

by Adam Cochran

Over the past year I have noticed that introverts are all the rage. Introverts are the new extroverts. Everyone wants to be one. All of the geek blogs are posting about how to be a successful introvert, how to be an introvert and still have friends, or top ten lists of the most powerful introverts.

I joined Facebook on August 13, 2008 almost a year after I joined Twitter. It was an experiment. I am not an introvert, I prefer to talk to people in person. I like to mingle. That said, I love social media because it keeps me educated on what all the hip cats are calling the bees knees.

Social networks, prior to Facebook, never really appealed to me because I was married, had four kids and my business was doing well. Before Facebook (arguably before Twitter), social networks were designed to be more like dimly-lit singles bars where everyone had a great body but a bag over their head.

Facebook was the first major full-featured social network to remove anonymity, which made it the first social network that was actually useful for being a legitimate social tool.

Being happily married, I had no use for the anonymous singles bar atmosphere of MySpace-era social networks. But, I had lost touch with almost all of my best friends from high school and middle school. The need to meet other Neil Diamond fans didn’t really appeal to me, but I was very interested in what my former co-workers were up to.

Like everyone else, my first few weeks on Facebook were spent finding people I had lost touch with, friending them and then looking through their pictures. And, I like everyone else, I felt like I was doing something sneaky but insightful. Everyone from my past turned out to be disappointingly normal. Sure, there were a handful that hit it pretty big and a few that I expected to hit it big that fell short of what I had envisioned for their future when I was in 11th grade. Most, though, were married or divorced with boring jobs and average incomes and real estate.

Over the years my Twitter feed has become a way for me to get a pulse of what’s going on in the world and my Facebook feed has taken the place of Twitter for my daily news consumption. Roughly 30 percent of my Facebook feed are humans, the rest are companies, news outlets, publications and trend aggregators – some might call them blogs.

Two years ago I reduced my number of Facebook friends from almost 2000 to less than 500. I only have two rules for Facebook friends: 1. I have to have had a conversation with the person in real life, 2. They have to occasionally post something worth reading. I will count interesting comments in my qualifications for No. 2.

Occasionally, I contemplate whether I should unfriend the guy who was the lunchroom “You gonna eat that” kid who I haven’t talked to in real life since third grade or the assortment of people from all ages and backgrounds that only post about whether they ran or did not run on a given day.

There are some things that will get you unfriended immediately. If you post more than three recipes in a week, you’re gone. Pinterest works because it allows me to search for what I want to see. Few things in social media are more annoying than when someone uses Facebook to share something they found on Pinterest – especially if it’s an untested recipe. Everyone who cares deeply about recipes or cute outfits has a Pinterest account.

Over the past two years, I have noticed that the Facebook algorithm has caught-on to how I use Facebook. It is common for people to complain that Facebook doesn’t let them see every post from every person every time they post, but I consider this a good thing. While I do have a lot of human friends on Facebook, I find the real value of Facebook, for me personally, is in the ability to follow news outlets and brands. This probably makes Facebook very happy because that is what they want me to do.

While I love to hear about my siblings adventures through day-to-day life, I find that posts from Fast Company, Wired, and the local news stations of play a more significant role in my day-to-day life as a professional.

There is a big disadvantage to seeing so many professional pages on a Facebook feed. When something is in the process of going viral, that content item is all I see. Over and over and over and over. Some accounts do a standard share of the content, others totally re-write the headline or the body copy and make it their own (as much their own as stolen content can be).

Sites such as BuzzFeed and UpWorthy are like the supermarket tabloids of the Internet, but they do serve a purpose. They tell us everyone will be talking about for the next week, before everyone is talking about it. In the tabloid world, that’s a rather insignificant truth. However, In the world of mass communication via the Internet’s popular culture, it’s a very big deal.

Popular culture in the world of geeks is a different realm that popular culture in the world of couch potatoes.

While the fashion and entertainment industries rely heavily on television to inform the world what everyone is wearing to the latest gala or awards ceremony, the Joan Riverses of geek popular culture are writing 1200-word scathing satirical pieces on what Facebook will do with Oculus Rift, Apples acquisition of Beats, and don’t even get me started on Net Neutrality.

Traditional and geek popular culture fanatics have more in common than what may appear on the surface. They both have their superstars, they both have their lingo, they both require a little command of historical reference related to their given industry.

If there is a difference it’s that geek popular culture requires a constant awareness of trends without a single focal point. Traditional popular culture may have an intense awareness of itself, but it typically fails to recognize that anything outside of its own world exists. On the other hand, geek popular culture requires a Ken-Jennings-meets-Dennis-Miller-like ability to twist cultural, scientific, entertainment and academic references so that the digitally-educated introvert can use Google and Wikipedia to research as they read, watch, or listen.

Please allow me to introduce a couple of examples that compare and contrast geek popular culture with traditional popular culture…

In this video we see what appears to be a traditional popular culture reference. But look a little closer. The chances are you either know who Tupac is, or you know who Freddie Mercury is – unless you are a geek. Dive in deeper as you watch the video. If you pause the video several times so that you could google a split-second reference by the host in order to understand the concept, you have just succumbed to geek popular culture.

That’s one of the most significant differences between geek popular culture and traditional popular culture. Traditional popular culture attempts to cut down it’s message to find the largest possible denominator. Andy Worhol pioneered traditional popular culture by using Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe. The most common modern comparison to Andy Worhol would be Banksy. While many of his works are simple and easy to interpret, just as many require an awareness of multiple reference points that breach the boundaries of any single industry, culture or market.

For comparison, here is a video to contrast with the PBS Idea Channel shown above…

Wow! I need to end this article now. All the blood just drained out of my brain and I need to go spend some time with John and Hank Green to get it back.

16

05 2014