Steve Skojec

You’ll identify with this:

NOT so enjoyable was the process leading up to the movie. The pre-game, if you will, was unbearable…Now you’re getting full-featured commercials and highly produced movie shorts pitching products for minutes on end.

[snip]

Even the message to turn off your cell phones was an ad. There’s a giant 30 foot screen saying Shut Off Your Cell Phones. Everyone is looking at the screen. There is nowhere else to look. We get it. We’re supposed to turn off our phones. There’s still going to be that one moron that forgets, but we understand.

So why is the message up there not for 5 or 10 seconds, but 30 seconds or more? Why of course… it’s the glowing, pulsating AT&T logo at the bottom.

Really? That’s where their money is best spent? Do you think anyone, anywhere is signing up for a specific cell phone carrier based on seeing their logo on a Shut Off Your Phone movie promo?

How does that conversation go?

Marketing exec # 1 says: You know boss, we’ve heard from people in the field. Research shows buyers are really confused with our smart phones, they don’t know the difference between the Moto Q, the Blackjack, the Palm Centro, the 4 Blackberry models, or the Treo. We recommend allocating some marketing dollars to make up some collateral so people can easily read about the advantages of each model. What do you think?

Marketing exec # 2 says: No, I have a better idea. We don’t want to help people that are already in our store ready to buy and use our phones. Instead, lets pick a random place like a movie theatre, and put up our logo on the screen that tells everyone to TURN OFF THEIR PHONES. That would be a huge success.

Some people complain about the number of “real” movie trailers that they show, but that’s been well-documented, and most people enjoy those, so I’ll give them a pass. Ditto for paying $9 for a ginormous package of teeth-rotting gummi bears or bushel of popcorn and a 55 gallon drum of Pepsi. It’s been that way for years and the difference is, you have a choice. You can choose not eat or very easily snag a 99 cent bag of Twizzlers at the convenience store across the street.

But the number of commercials was relentless, with some even being shown twice. At times it was hard to distinguish between a commercial and a new trailer. That’s because it was a trailer. As a commercial. As opposed to the trailers that were trailers.

But to my surprise, the unwanted marketing experience transcended from the screen to the theater itself. I heard a voice in the aisle behind me, and turned to see a representative from the theater. She was making some kind of announcement, and I feared that we had lost air conditioning power.

[snip]

But no, the representative wasn’t informing us of any problems in the theater. Not content with making us sit through ads, they were now going to physically take our cash. Along with a handicapped male in an electric wheelchair, they proceeded to slowly pace the aisles – Sunday church style – asking for cash donations to the Boys and Girls Club.

[snip]

On TV, there is an understanding. You watch free TV, the content is subsidized by commercials. Conversely you can pay for HBO or Showtime and see no ads. Surf your favorite website for free? You’ll likely see some banner ads. Pay for Sirius radio? Most stations have no advertising.

Yes, there was a time when audiences were concerned that corporations were subliminally selling their products. There was a time when theatres were happy to distract you with word puzzles and trivia. That time is long gone. The theatres have crossed the line from distraction to all out infraction. They know they have you. And now you can’t miss it, and you can’t get away.

We don’t get to the movies much, but I love to go when I get the chance. Since we were too broke on our anniversary to do anything extravagant (like, say, go to a nice restaurant or get a spa treatment with a good massage) we opted for an inexpensive dinner at Carraba’s and a movie. With a dearth of choices, we went to see The Incredible Hulk, which, as comic-book fare goes, wasn’t half bad.

But having not been to a theater in several months, I was amazed at the number of commercials that had crept in, most of them as awful as the ones you get on television, running non-stop prior to the show. At least on TV, even if you don’t have the miracle of a DVR (I do, and never watch commercials) you get some of your show sprinkled amidst the commercials. But sitting in the theater for twenty minutes or so before the trailers even started, it was just a bombardment of consumerist nonsense.

And I paid $10 a ticket. For a matinee. That’s just ridiculous.

This morning, trying to get a Flash plugin for my shiny new Mozilla Firefox 3 open source browser to work, I was compelled to google search for solutions that work around my particular issue, read through an online forum until I landed on the right process, download a plugin archive in .XPI format, extract it using another open source program, 7zip, copy the contents into the appropriate plugins folder, and restart my browser.

This entire process took about 15 minutes, and I did it without giving much thought at all to the relative complexity involved. If my parents, who are quite young compared to most of my friends’ parents (Mom hasn’t hit fifty yet) were faced with a similar problem, they would probably not be aware of what step to take first. And we’ve had various personal computers in our home continuously since 1987.

My generation, and those that are coming after me, grew up in a world where technical complexity was part of every day life. We programmed VCRs for family members, set up cell phone plans before our parents did, remember MS-DOS and the novelty when Windows hit the scene, were early internet adopters, learned the ropes of online communication through low-baud dialup connections to local Bulletin Board Systems, sent e-mail before most people knew what e-mail was, might even remember Telnet and IRC and not have a problem navigating FTP, and if we’re old enough, we saw the web when it was a rowdy collection of text hyperlinks before it was prettied up with pictures and when Internet Explorer did not yet exist.

There is nothing special about any of this. It is simply a question of information and process adaptation. The 30-and-under crowd, in particular, have always lived in a digital world. We know it because it has been everywhere, as long as we remember. There are other things - older things - we don’t know, that we probably should. But the fact of the matter remains.

When I finished installing my plugin, I moused over to YouTube to make sure it was working (YouTube videos are encoded in Flash). I happened upon this video, which was really the inspiration for this post:

There’s a superficiality to the way this video was done, and it attempts to make a surprising point that isn’t really all that surprising. If it weren’t for the focus on the disconnect between the educational system and the way modern students learn as a “problem I didn’t make” (cry me a river) I think it would have been better overall. I get the frustration here, but we’re at a transitional point in the history of communication. We get to deal with the headaches but we also get to find the solutions and enjoy the opportunities.

This all ties into what I was writing about last week - the Internet (and other digital media) are changing the way we think and learn. We can make value judgements about it till we’re blue, but the reality is that the change is upon us and it isn’t going away. For those of us who have vocations that require us to be part of the world amidst all of the technology in play, we need to get used to the idea that things ain’t the same anymore and proficiency requires adoption of method.

I wish I read more books in the past. I’m reading more now, though the bulk of my reading still happens online. Truth be told, I would have been one of the kids in the video who held up signs revealing how many books they didn’t read for classes, only I was smart enough not to even bother spending the money on them. I knew I wouldn’t read them. I only wish I had now, because I would have been smarter, more knowledgeable, even if it didn’t effect my ability to breeze through my classes.

Books aside, the old structures and methods of learning probably won’t hold up much longer. The way we learn as students, the way we work as professionals, it’s all still lagging behind the information paradigm shift. I could do 95% of my work from anywhere, as long as I had an internet-connected computer and a phone. I am still, however, required to hoof it into my office, wasting (in terms of productivity-hours) about 20 hours a week commuting. In addition, because I (and many others like me) still work in an office, there are all the other old structures that can impede work efficiency - a certain amount of beurocracy, a work environment that features cubicles and fluorescent lights, lots of meetings around conference tables in windowless rooms, bad coffee, the personal dramas of co-workers within a confined space, set work hours, etc. There’s no way of knowing how much more efficient a worker could be if not bound to these structures, but some companies experimenting with a more non-linear work environment are finding that it pays real dividends.

At some point, the shift will be more total. Maybe the continued rising cost of fuel and increased environmental consciousness will convinve more employers to allow telecommuting, which would give them the additional benefit of reduced overhead for office space, utilities, etc. Maybe some intrepid educationally-minded soul from the young breed of info-warriors will help overhaul the school system. Maybe distance learning will become more commonplace, and students will participate in virtual classrooms via WebEx or something like it. (That would give homeschooling families a HUGE advantage, if they could sign up for classes they couldn’t adequately teach at home a la carte.)

I don’t know how things will take shape, I only know that they will. In an advanced technological age, nothing is as certain as the fact that things will change.