The Culture Beat

There’s been much buzz about the way Apple’s iPad will change personal computing, with its lightweight, mouse-free elegant design that allows greater mobility with longer battery life for web surfing, movie-watching and reading books and other print media. But there’s another big factor shaping the way we use electronic media and it’s related to devices like the iPad because all of this is involved with digital media, the technology that allows all kinds of information to be compressed into binary code and used to access multimedia on multiple platforms, as anyone who’s watched a Hollywood movie on their iPod knows.

The revolution is in the realm of home video, the segment of the media that impacted the way we use television starting in the 1980s when the VCR boom exploded across the world. Prior to the arrival of Beta and then VHS videotape player/recorders, there was no way to control one’s television or film viewing. When a network broadcast a program or movie, you either caught it the night and time it aired, or caught the episode rerun months later. The Big Three television network, NBC, CBS, ABC, controlled the television content flow on their scheduling grids so that viewers planned their lives around watching their favorite programs.
In the 1970s, the three networks accounted for over 90 % of the audience.

Two huge technological developments allowed Americans to have greater choices over what they did with their television sets. The first was the growth of cable channels and their penetration to more and more homes, giving greater choices of what to watch. The other was the rise of the VCR (the first VHS model shown here) to allow the recording of television programs for later viewing (“timeshifting”) which delivered the audience from its captivity to a program schedule; the VCR could also play prerecorded Hollywood films. The result was that the American home was now more autonomous in its viewing choices. Today, television broadcast networks are down to just over 50% of the audience, having lost out to cable and home video.

The rise of the VCR meant that we began to expect to be able to do our own programming, to view what we wanted, when we wanted. And we could fast forward past commercials, undermining the whole business model of commercial television. Later, when the Digital Video Disc brought us an even better version of Hollywood products, we began to enjoy how good movies could look on our television sets. The arrival of high-definition, widescreen monitors enhanced the aesthetic experience.

When the Digital Video Recorder, such as those made by TiVo, arrived, it used a hard drive to digitally record and store program content for pausing, or replaying anything on TV, a real improvement on the now ancient-seeming VCR. Just like the World Wide Web taught us to expect to get print content easily and for free, home video made us our own exhibitors in our home theater.

But as “digital convergence” made all kinds of content available on all kinds of devices, the term Video on Demand became one of the buzzwords in circulation: the expectation that someday soon, we would be able to order up any content we had once had to rent from our closest Blockbuster store or through the mail from Netflix. But digital convergence means that all kinds of devices can be conduits for the same streaming content. Thus it is that I have begun to experience some of the latest advances in home video.

We have a TiVo HD DVR that records many hours of programming and saves it, creating a library of movies and other programs that can be watched at anytime. We also have added a Tivo wireless adapter which receives wireless signals from our computer’s router. In essence, our router sends out signals from our cable broadband connection to our TiVo so that we can access You Tube, Amazon and other content providers over the Internet. But the biggest source of offerings is that we can watch hundreds of movies and television shows on our Netflix account this way in standard and high definition. For weeks we’ve been watching successive season of Lost in beautiful detail whenever we want to.

But wait, there’s more–Months ago, Netflix sent out an e-mail asking if we’d like to watch content from our Instant Queue on my son’s Wii game console. They sent us a disc that enabled the Wii, already able to receive wireless signals, to play back Netflix programs picked up from our router. Ever since, I’ve been able to watch movies, documentaries and television programs while using our treadmill. And last week I did the same thing on my son’s Playstation 3, which brings Netflix content in even better resolution. If I’m in the middle of a program, on any of these three devices, or one of our computers, I can stop it, and resume the program on another device in the house.

I can tell already that this will continue to change our media habits. As DVD and Blu-Ray sales stay flat, and as more titles become available instantly, we will watch more streaming content instead of having to wait for it by mail, as we have done with Lost episodes. I will still prefer to watch Blu-Ray discs of classic and major films but HD streaming at what looks like 1080i quality will certainly suffice for lots of other content, when more arrives.

This fascinating cnet article reports on Netflix’s strategy of getting more and more rights to programming from Hollywood studios. Even Netflix’s much reported agreement to delay receiving Warner Bros. DVDs for three weeks (allowing the studio to sell DVDs rather than allowing Netfix to rent them) is a long-term tactic to obtain the video streaming rights that will one day save them millions in postage fees as their growing customer based opts to stream movies rather than order them through the mail. They see that as the soon-arriving future of home video–on demand.

Any of you who have followed my following of Lost over the years at this blog have likely given up waiting for me to post something. I dawdled after it was over May 23rd, and was caught up in the controversy over finale, I kept intending to but alas, other business kept the procrastination going until now. But yesterday I found another reason to delay–for months. Our 16 year old son, Benjamin recently began watching the episodes on Netflix with us, starting at the first season and is thoroughly hooked. We had always intended to re-watch from the beginning to get a perspective on the series as a whole but now that he’s joined us, we’re urging him to avoid looking up anything about what happens from where we currently are, in the midst of the second season, to the sixth, lest he learn of any of the many developments to come. I’m even warning him from leafing through the books I’m using for my academic research on the series. Thus, my commentary here would possibly be read as he sometimes reads my blog. I therefore must stay mum about this until we finish sometime in late summer, I expect, when we order the Blu-Ray final season and special feature and see how he handles the conclusion. But if you want to try leaving a comment below, I will attempt to write you at the e-mail address you leave and respond one-on-one, something which I’d love to do, since I was quite affected by the finale and would love to share my thoughts with you.

Now for something completely different from the usual Culture Beat topics. A few weeks ago I had the chance to re-enter a world I grew up in and see faces I hadn’t seen in a generation. An uncle, my mother’s youngest sibling, died after a short illness and I drove from West Palm Beach where I now live, to Valdosta, GA, the small southern city I grew up in. Fifteen miles above the Florida line, it was as deep in the South as you can be before, going into the Florida peninsula, you continue downward until you move out of the south into something like the colony of culturally northeast where so many New Yorkers and other “northerners” now live full or part-time. The last time I had lived in Valdosta was in the latter half of the 1980s before moving to other parts of the southeast like Virginia, Tennessee and Atlanta.

When I got to the funeral home, I arrived with some trepidation; would there be faces of folks I’d known in my childhood who might remember me but I not recall them? My family was pretty well-known throughout the town so that this was a common experience–being greeted by a friend of my parents but awkwardly trying to recall who this gracious person was talking to me. Anyway, the funeral home was full of people lined up to meet my uncle’s surviving family, a testament to how loved he was. I soon met a man who I last known as a classmate in high school. He’d stayed to sell insurance, probably the family business, and though recognizable, showed the advance into middle age, his dark hair now thinner and grayer. He, of course, recognized me immediately and was as warm as ever. I saw a cluster of people across the room speaking to an older couple and someone reminded me that it was Mr. Wiggins who lived with his family a few blocks from my house. He must be in his 80s by now but his big smiling face and gracious manner was as strong as ever. What is it about insurance salesmen in small towns?

I knew there must be more people I knew and who must know me and wished we could all be wearing name tags like we were at some high school or family reunion so that we could quickly catch up–indeed, during that visit and the next day during the funeral, I felt eyes on me as they sought to recall from the recesses of memory just who I and my brothers were. These ghosts of forty or more years past haunted me the next few days as I pondered the choices of my life.

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(Embedded here is one of the many beautiful moss-shaded streets in Valdosta–follow the arrows for a little tour.)

Like a lot of Americans, I have mixed feelings about my hometown. Because it’s where you grew up, it’s the primal scene of your social orientation. I’ve used the word “gracious” more than once because that is the culture of southern middle-class people. One woman at the funeral reception saw me standing around talking to no one and struck up a conversation where she mentioned being a bridge partner with my mother–she initiated the conversation simply because she was a nice person who delighted in recalling the pleasantness of past associations. She wasn’t talky, she simply knew how to make a person relaxed and welcome, a pretty common trait that make “southern hospitality” so distinct.

I left Valdosta in my mid-twenties to follow my vision of serving God with a missions organization elsewhere in the country. I met my wife during this time; she’s from Illinois and when I introduced her to one of my southern gentlemen relations, he remarked as how the Lord could bring me together with a Yankee. I’m not saying it was provincial thinking, but it did sort of capture the nature of living in a certain small area all of your life and how remarkable it is when someone ventures out into a larger world. I left because I believed I was pursuing a vision and a purpose that couldn’t be found in the small world of my youth. My brothers did the same, leaving to live in other parts of the south and must have felt the same strange sense of wonder and stirred memories at the world left behind.

For this was the world that might have been if I had been more content and settled–these folks have the experience of being in the same community all their lives, of seeing friends and family grow, age, mature, struggle and be upheld by local bonds. I, on the other hand, have moved quite a few times as my vocational needs determined. I’ve met many good people but my ongoing relationships are not many and are spread out across the country and maintained by e-mail and occasional phone calls. Can I say who has the better deal? Should I?

I will. I wouldn’t have met my wonderful wife of over 25 years, nor had exposure to the ideas an opportunities I now enjoy in a larger world of ideas and vocation that allows me to contribute immeasurably to the minds of many young people. It’s axiomatic to say that each choice we make forecloses others, and the longer we move on, the narrower our options until one day we look back and wonder, not with regret, but curiosity, what might have been.

This winter both Marvel and DC are taking their superheroic characters through dark times. As I discussed months ago, the two premier comics companies have been stuck in ever darker big crossover stories that have shaken up their respective universes. Marvel has just finished up its “Dark Reign” saga wherein the evil Norman Osborn (aka the Green Goblin) has used his high security chief position to persecute the true heroes, particularly fugitive Tony Stark, creator of Iron Man, whom he beat into an inch of his life to obtain important information contained in Stark’s brain. Stark currently lies in a mentally “disassembled” state, having deleted his intelligence and memory to keep Osborn from obtaining the info. And Osborn’s forces have attacked Thor’s mythical home, Asgard, in the current “Siege” crossover that is supposed to wrap up years of previous ongoing crossovers. During this period Steve Rogers, Captain America, was arrested, assassinated, and recently resurrected only to step aside and let his erstwhile sidekick, Bucky, continue on as the Star Spangled Avenger, deflating his much anticipated triumphant return. Never one to resolve a crisis, Marvel fans could be understood for wanting a little more fun and escape from these exhausting megastories.

Things are hardly better at DC which is in the second half of, depending on when you started counting, eight to twelve month cosmic catastrophe, “Darkest Night.” After the previous crossover, “Final Crisis,” saw the murder of Bruce Wayne’s Batman, or maybe his banishment to some other time and place where he was last seen painting a bat shape on a cave wall. Since then, the long-anticipated “Darkest Night” centered in the Green Lantern titles but encompassing the DC universe has seen the rise of “Black Lantern” rings that seem to resurrect fallen heroes and villains as murderous cadavers in an overpowering assault against the living, a sort of DC zombies epic. All of this is quite, er, dark, in fact it is the blackest night yet seen, as even some living heroes have had their hearts ripped out before rising again as Black Lanterns. Bleak enough for you?

All of this devastation going on in the superhero world raises the question of why so much horror and doom? Most comics fans were drawn to the genre as kids enthralled by the fantastic tales of adventure and heroism by spandex-clad characters whose valiant efforts against evil helped form their earliest sense of morality. The short answer to why today’s comics are so dark is that many of these same readers grew up still reading these books and required that their heroes “grow up” as well by becoming more brutal in their wars against evil and seeing darkness in their own hearts birthing. In fact, the “grim and gritty” mode of superheroism has been with us since the mid-1980s when it was launched by the success of mostly two graphic novels, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. The more the “realism” increased, the less fun comics were, an exchange that seems to have held ever since.

While many would argue that it was necessary for comic book superheroes to face the complexities of life, a notion that made Marvel Comics the powerhouse that it became, continually darkening superheroes has had the effect of discouraging entry by the kids who were once the main readership. Thus we have swapped the caricature of the square-jawed and somewhat simplistic caped hero for the now equally cliched tormented and flawed grim avenger.

But maybe things are about to change. Both companies have announced that after their current Gotterdamerungs run their courses, late spring will bring a rebirth of heroic adventure and fun. DC has previewed the dawn of “Brightest Day,” the sequel of sorts to “Darkest Night” adding symmetry to the play on the stirring Green Lantern oath:

In brightest day, in blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light!

Some comics observers are skeptical that DC’s oft-promised lightening up will really stick this time but if for no other reason, it’s a smart marketing move to contrast with the death and misery of the last six years. And the new era is supposed to include the return of Bruce Wayne, with or without his bat cowl.

Similarly, Marvel’s coming “Heroic Age” will focus on their biggest heroes, which I’m hoping includes “reborn” Steve Roger’s Captain America, now currently sidelined after his anti-climactic return from the dead. It’s one thing to decide to tell brighter, more adventuresome stories–there’s a skill to this kind of storytelling that may have been forgotten after so many years of angst. Writers for the upcoming new stories would do well to look at a recent example of classic superhero storytelling by a master. Veteran Mark Waid’s run on The Brave and the Bold , featuring Batman and Green Lantern among many others, is now collected in two volumes, was thrilling, funny and respectful of the genre without embalming it. This is the kind of return of brave and bold storytelling that I’m looking for.