Archive for April, 2010

Glee Tells Us What It Feels Like For a Girl

{ April 24, 2010 @ 10:59 am } · { Uncategorized }
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For some time now I have maintained an intense love-hate relationship with the critically acclaimed Fox dramedy Glee. Admittedly, the set up of the show itself is quite innovative for a television series, given it succeeds at maintaining a musical genre format in its weekly hour-long episodes. Although employing the tactics of a musical can often be successful in a single episode within an entire straight-acting series, few television shows have managed to stay on air when they attempt the musical genre consistently. Glee can maintain the sensibilities of a musical because it centers itself on a high school show choir as they sing popular songs with complex choreography.

Unlike a real musical, however, Glee autotunes all of their singers, which knocks out both the musical imperfections and personality of each performer. Sadly, our society seems to have grown completely comfortable with this overproduced sound. One of the most lucrative aspects of this franchise has become the sales of the Glee CDs, which use a number of the songs recorded specially for show in the brassy autotune style.

Throughout the course of the show, the plot has varied from the very trivial (girl likes boy, but boy likes other girl dilemmas) to the more substantive (the struggles of a young gay man coming out to his father; a girl getting kicked out of her home for getting pregnant, etc.). The show tackles these issues very directly and makes special use of dialogue to explore these issues, leaving the musical numbers as further extensions of the already expressed emotions.

This past week’s episode again chose to focus on a more serious societal problem. At the onset of the episode, the show choir star Rachel asks her female colleagues within the glee club what she should do now that her new boyfriend is pressuring her into having sex. Laden with irony, one of the cheerleaders, Santana, responds that she always agrees, stating “What’s the worse that can happen… Oh, sorry Quin.” (Quin used to be the head cheerleader  until she got knocked up and kicked off the squad). The conversation continued to move away from the specifics of males dominating discussions and decisions about sex to evolve to the greater power that the guys tend to hold over the girls. At the close of the scene, Quin stresses the importance of this issue as she leaves the classroom declaring, “The fact is, women still earn 70 cents to every dollar that a man does for doing that same job. That attitude starts in high school.”

The rest of the episode uses Madonna as a model for the girls to find strength, independence, confidence, and a sense of equality beside their male peers. Yes it is corny, but through exploring Madonna songs, the girls realize how powerful they can be and how they should not stand for the guy’s arrogance. By the end of the episode, the guys realize that they cannot treat the girls as if they are something below them.

Unfortunately, this understanding and recognition does not always surface in high school, let alone later in life. Leave it to TV to provide such wish-fulfillment. But I guess that’s what keeps us watching.

More Than Just a Play Thing: The iPad

{ April 9, 2010 @ 1:16 am } · { Uncategorized }
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Even in this downtrodden economy, Americans love to consume. And with incredible new trinkets on the market, why not? If you’ve got it, flaunt it. All you need to do is fork over that $500 you have lying around to get the latest innovation from Steve Jobs: the iPad. People may make fun of you for holding an enlarged iPod touch. People may question the necessity of possessing a 9″ Multi-Touch Screen. But, ignore these nay-sayers. After getting the chance to play with Apple’s latest product, all I could muster to say mirrored the exclamation of  David Carr of the New York Times: an extended shriek of “Yeeeeeee!” Yes, the iPad is a shiny new toy, but it is also a beacon for the future of how society can function. Get excited.

Even in this first edition, the iPad provides a wonder of services in its highly portable tablet form. Although the iPad possesses many of the same applications as the iPod Touch, the iPad improves the functions of many of those applications, especially the Mail, Notes, Calendar, and Safari capabilities. As Jobs merrily claims, the iPad lets you hold the Internet in your hands. You surf the web by gliding your fingers back and forth across the screen. The iPad makes the fictional style of  newspapers from Harry Potter come to life. Users can read what looks like a hard-paper copy of The Wall Street Journal, but if the page has a video, users can watch the video amidst the screen of text. Yes, this technology piggy-backs off what many users can accomplish with a computer, but the iPad makes it mobile.

Technological advancements that amplify mobility still take a bit of time to gain adherence within society, despite the reality of the world becoming more mobile everyday. The idea of a mobile phone frightened members of society at its initial introduction.”Why would I want to bring a phone around with me when I leave the house? I leave so no one can reach me.” Today, the idea of not being able to get a hold of someone ushers in panic. Only the accident of forgetting a charger or keeping a phone hidden on silent would explain any break in constant communication. Skeptics denied the practicality of smart-phones, trusting the new emphasis on lap-top computers could surely sustain any businessperson’s needs. Oh, how wrong again.

The two features of the iPad that will revolutionize the lifestyle of  society come from the applications for  iWork and iBooks. Apple redesigned its version of the Microsoft Office Suite, iWork, for the iPad. Creating professional looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be done at the swipe of a finger. Apple has long provided a user-friendly operating system, but the technological advancements of controlling and creating such polished products seems like a fantasy item of ease from some Sci-Fi flick. The handling of business and production of products will ironically return to being incredibly hands on through the use of this technological tool.

Now for the future of books. The iBooks app essentially takes the concept of Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Nobles’s Nook and amplifies the capabilities many times over. Similar to iTunes, users can preview books, and read reviews. Once you download a book, you can easily flip through it and rotate the screen depending on your preferred viewing style. The one function it seems to miss – and will surely attain in the next version, given the iPad’s current ability to pop up a key board in any direction – is the ability to take notes to accompany one’s reading. Once this emerges, it will cause a major leap in the how people interact with texts.

Already, a major push to digitize books has begun. The ability to carry around a 9 inch long, 1/2 inch deep, 1.5 lb screen to encompass an entire interactive library is a logical progression forward. As the environmentalist movement continues to reign over society, the prospect of avoiding the stripping of countless trees becomes very appealing.

The iPad may be a bit pricy for now, but that will quickly change. When the iPhone first entered the market in 2007, a simple 8GB model cost $599. Today, the 8GB model costs $99. Although the iPad may never go below the hundred dollar mark, it will become affordable to broader branches of society, making the implications of the technology that much more resonant.

Upon first appearance, the iPad seems like yet another easily portable product. But given its breadth of applications, the iPad converges important functions together into a simple tablet form. Steve Jobs, you did it again. You changed how society can interact with its surroundings and the very mentality for accomplishing tasks. I await the next i_____.

Google Good; Bing Bad

{ April 3, 2010 @ 5:14 pm } · { Uncategorized }
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Really, Microsoft? Continuing to allow China’s censorship of Bing is your chosen path to ultimate victory over Google?

Microsoft’s tardy version of a universal search engine – Bing – has been playing catch-up ever since Google emerged in 1997. Bing did not reach computer screens until 2009, only twelve calendar years but, in terms of cyberspace, an eternity later. Given its prodigiously late start, computer-programming legend Microsoft says it is committed to Bing’s displacement of Google as the world’s top search engine. But, from Bing’s latest maneuvers in China, it is doubtful that any of the smart money is ready to bet long-term on Mr. Gates.

For any company, China is a key market.  Because “search” is a relatively young phenomenon, it is logical that Bing would attempt to make inroads against Google in a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, 300 million of whom constitute a new “middle class” that eagerly consumes trendy products and desires everything “high tech.”

The problem, however, is that China is an authoritarian nation, where the leaders in Beijing control practically everything and usually with a firm hand. The same one-party state that seriously damaged its image with a bloody crackdown against protesting students in 1989, at Tiananmen Square, continues to stifle protest by heavily censoring its citizens’ access to information.  With an explosion of information now available to all Internet users, China’s leadership is not only uninterested in any  “right to free speech” but is sufficiently paranoid that it seeks to control – absolutely – every bit of information that is available to its citizens, in hopes that it can forestall another “Tiananmen Square.”

Still, even in this tightly controlled environment, the promise of 300 billion+ Chinese customers is extremely attractive to aggressive international corporations.  Thus, even “righteous” companies like Google have attempted to navigate around Chinese governmental restrictions and even to look beyond certain human rights violations. So, for four years, Google adhered to China’s strict censorship restrictions, as its search engine churned out impressive numbers in the Middle Kingdom. Although Google’s decision to accept a certain level of censorship in China generated repeated and widespread criticism, the company insisted “that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.”

Then matters escalated.

Hackers within China breached Google’s security, stealing aspects of the company’s intellectual property. Chinese restrictions on retrievable sources of information from Google’s search engines subsequently increased, further limiting the degree of “free speech” in China. This past January, it was learned that Chinese hackers attacked the Google email accounts of Chinese human rights activists. This was the final straw for Google.  It publicly announced that these recent incidents could force its exit from the world’s most populous nation. China’s response was far short of guarantees that it would budge from its intensified heavy-handed censorship and likely hacking.

And so, two weeks ago, Google pulled the plug. Google no longer adheres to the censorship guidelines outlined by the Chinese government. Users of Google in China automatically get redirected to Google’s facilities in Hong Kong, where there is no such censorship. Already, China has responded by blocking access to part of Google’s site throughout the country.  For Google, its more principled recent decision to reject Beijing’s heavy hand will likely come at the cost of sizeable loss in profits, at least for the near term.

Meanwhile, how goes Bing?  Apparently it aims to fill the vacuum that Google’s departure from the mainland is leaving. Politics and morality aside, that will be a tall order, as Bing’s brand recognition in China is even more limited than its miniscule footprint in the US.  Moreover, most Chinese Internet surfers are already sufficiently comfortable with the widely known search engine of a Chinese company, Baidu, whose market share is likely to accelerate in coming months.

Ultimately, however, the greater threat to Bing is that its acquiescence to Chinese government censorship threatens to seriously tarnish its image back in the United States and engender intense criticism around the world.  Ironically, it also appears to be exactly the opposite Grand Strategy that any upstart, any “alternate option” company would ever plan, to catch the gargantuan Google.

For a latecomer who offers – at best – a nearly identical product that has been highly successful around the world for more than a decade, Microsoft should re-think its strategy regarding Chinese censorship of the Internet. Should uber-programmer Bill Gates ever hope to make any inroads into the separate field of “search,” it is time to join Google in standing up to the Chinese censors.  For Bing, it is time to re-boot its Chinese strategy.  A search for any alternate course should yield the answer, “no results.”