K-Drama School: A Pop Culture Inquiry into Why We Love Korean Television

K-Drama School: A Pop Culture Inquiry into Why We Love Korean Television by Grace Jung

When reading this book, I waffled from loving it to not liking it. Overall, I went for the positive. K-Drama is covered extensively, but is almost incidental to the book. korean Drama serves as a framing mechanism for the author to discuss her life and challenges, as well as the experiences of Koreans and Asians. Koreans has had a challenging history with large falls and rapid rises. Japan occupied Korea, kicked out the monarchs and attempted to wipe out Korean identity. Korea achieved freedom at the end of World War II, only to be divided into two. Many travesties occurred in the Korean War. The war was inconclusive (and technical is still ongoing.) South Korea has a large US military base (despite being an ally.) Televisions were introduced to Korea at this time. The dictatorship ruling the country created a television network to help spread propaganda. Television manufacturers created their own network to sell televisions. Korean Drama came out of this setting. The country suffered from many wounds and still had challenges ahead. Korean dramas were created rapidly and at low cost. There were limits on what could be shown (with the producers often hitten the edge of these limits.) Various tropes, such as amnesia were employed. Dramas also focussed on important parts of the Korean psyche. Society is heavily driven to succeed.  We can see both general as well as individual challenges in the dramas.

The author looks at various dramas and discusses how they relate to her experience (which includes various forms of abuse) as well as Korean life (including adoptions.) She has the power to look beyond the immediate problems. Abusers are people who often suffered from abuse earlier in their life. Ending the cycle is important. She suffered significant abuse from her parents. (In one case she received a huge beating from her mom after her mom misunderstood an elementary school teacher.) She suffered greatly and wanted to separate herself from her family. However, she was able to make peace with them. She is critical of woke people who bring people down for behavior they do not respect. This does not help. Instead we are better understanding and helping others to learn. She received many degrees but was turned off from the academic culture. She finally found an area that she enjoyed. 

Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Conquered the World

I'm no longer feeling the warm fuzzies for Google. This book is primarily about YouTube. However, the use of algorithms instead of humans is scary. Algorithms seem good when looking retrospectively. However, for anything future looking, they are subject to manipulation. You get algorithms to respond to algorithms. Do we get to the state where computers are creating videos that are watched by computers and monetized by ads generated by other computers? 

This book is a fairly objective look at Youtube's rise and the many challenges it has faced. Creators often struggle when a simple algorithm change greatly curtails their viewership. Quality is not so important as engagement. Algorithms that pick the next video can easily lead people into echo chambers where their beliefs are amplified. Curtailing one person's hate speech curtails another person's legitimate conversation. To some there is not enough monitoring. To others there is too much. Even Kids Youtube can let not-good-for-kids content slip through. Even worse the "next video" feature can lead people down an endless trail of morass. YouTube as a platform has too much power to influence our thoughts. Yet, there is not anyone that really understands how this power is used. Even monetization is based on algorithms to show the maximum amount of advertisements that don't hurt viewership. It feels like we should keep away, rather than let it be consumed with regularity. 

Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back

My how things have changed in a decade. There have been huge changes in the media landscape since Free Ride was written a little over a decade ago. People are now comfortable streaming movies on phones. A computer might as well be a big screen. Paying for multiple streaming services is also the norm. Buying individual movies or songs has become rare. It seems that media producers have gained some ground. However, all is not well in the universe.

The author argues that tech companies have appropriated the "content" that from media companies without proper compensation. This has lead to a tough times for various media companies. The internet has not been the panacea that they hoped for. However, when you dig deeper into the argument, it turns out that people had not previously been paying for the media they desired. There were various forms of cross-subsidies involved. The internet helped unbundle these leaving media producers looking for a source of revenue.

Newspapers are a good example. Papers are sold for cheap (or even given away.) The cost of a newspaper may not even pay for the paper it is printed on. The newspaper provided reporting and content that interested the readers. It also was a medium for selling eyeballs to advertisers. Enter the internet. Now instead of paying the newspaper for a classified ad, you sell your couch on Craigslist. When looking to make a big purchase, you will search company websites instead of going to the newspaper. Display and keyword advertising can also be keyed to your web usage instead of what section of the newspaper you are reading. The revenue source of the newspaper evaporated. People can use Google to go directly to the newspaper article that interests them. It isn't that people are getting for free what they used to pay for. It is that they have never paid for it. The person selling the couch was paying for the reporting. Now they sell the couch for free on Craigslist.

Copyrights in general had been carried away. There is little justification in extending the copyright after the fact. (How does this encourage more creativity in the past?) Other media operations were filled with cross-subsidies. Cable companies forced you to pay for hundreds of channels you don't watch to get the few that you do. You had to pay for a full album of music even if you only wanted a single song. This unbundling requires adaptation. A lot of that adaptation has taken place since the book was written.

Alas, for the consumer things are getting worse. Today there are multiple streaming services. Each has a bundle of changing content. To get the "top hits", you must subscribe to multiple services. This would include a lot you are not interested in. The change away from physical media also eliminates the second hand market. There is no physical copy that you have to sell or give away. This gives producers greater control. It also leaves the black market as the primary way to "pass along" media you enjoy. 

What content should be free? What should be paid for? Did the pre-internet age of fat-cat gatekeepers make sense? Did the Napster free-for all make sense? There were issues with both. I don't think we have stumbled on the best method for encouraging new content and ensuring it is available. Hopefully things will shake out for the better in the next few years.

War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire

The War at the Wall Street Journal details the takeover of Dow Jones by Rupert Murdoch. The staff of the Journal had a feeling of "exceptionalism" and admired their detailed analysis. They were afraid of the populist Murdoch. The Bancroft family that owned a controlling interest in Dow Jones felt they were protecting an important national treasure. They were deeply concerned about the "editorial independence" of the newspaper, yet they did not ask the staff for the details of why. (Yet another case of elites trying to represent others that they do not understand.)
The Bancroft family were not one unified force, and had some that wanted to sell, while others felt it was important to not let the company fall into the hands of the Fox News owner. They were business neophytes and had inadvertently told the world that the company was for sale. In the end, Murdoch's deal was something they could not turn down. The newspaper industry was suffering, and there were not any other significant suitors. In retrospect they lucked out. The "great recession" occurred shortly after the deal closed. News Corp's value plummeted, and they had to write down a significant amount of the purchase price of Dow Jones.
Would things be better if the company was not sold? Or would the newspaper have just gone bankrupt? And isn't it ironic that a company that advocates strongly for the free market finds itself more concerned with the "editorial independence" than providing what the market needs?

Filter Bubble

Companies like Google, Facebook, Axiom and Blue Kai know a lot about you. They can use this to taylor websites and advertising to individual users. This can have serious impact on our society.

Huge amounts of information are produced every day. Determining what is relevant is a huge challenge. That is where algorithms come in. Google taylors search results to the individual users. Facebook's news feed is based on what it thinks users are interested in seeing. Advertisers and retailers also customize their online promotions based on what they think users will be interested in seeing. This can cause people to reside in a "bubble" where they only see things that they like. They may not see opposing viewpoints or anything that allows them to think. This is even more worrisome since most of this data filtering is done transparently without users knowing they are living in a bubble. (Perhaps this is a form of "mind control" where the big companies can gradually nudge people in a direction they would like.)

Personalization is treated as a "black box" by most companies. The companies themselves may not even know exactly what results are being returned. They can tweak algorithms based on feedback. However, they probably could not tell exactly what type of results would be returned. The algorithms can use various different data points to personalize. Thus, even if a user is not logged on, their location, computer or web browser could identify them and provide personalized results.

This book rambles on to sound the alarm against "filter bubbles" that allow individuals to live in their isolated worlds filtered to provide what they want. This will keep out information from opposing viewpoints. It will also tend to stock them up with the most "sensational" junk-food content rather than the "good for you content." This could result in a dumbing down of society as people don't work their brains to get around new thoughts. Also, it can make it more difficult for new thoughts and media to get out there. (Since discovery is often based on "likes", only things most like what already exist will tend to get more exposure. Thus, even though it is theoretically easier for new things to be discovered, it is actually much more difficult to find innovation.

The filter bubble is often transparent to users, and can gradually steer content to more extreme viewpoints. This can lead to highly cantankerous partisan discussions. (Since each side is not exposed to the opposing view, they not even understand how others can feel that way.) Even worse, people wont realize they are living in the filter bubble and assume that everybody else is receiving the same information. Discovering "new" ideas can actually be more difficult than it was in the days when everybody was force-fed the same broadcasts.

I was expecting this book to be a discussion of the difficulty we have today of "filtering" through all the information out there. Instead, it focussed on the danger of a personalized web. The two are tightly related. However, this book seemed to spend a lot of time rambling from bullet point to bullet point. It contained plenty of good ideas, but the connections where not very strong.

The amount of information out there is enormous. Discovering useful information is becoming more and more difficult. The quantity of "junk" out there seems to be growing at a faster rate than the amount of useful data. Fifteen years ago, it was easy to put a website out there and get visitors interested in the content. You might get a few random spammers or bots, but most traffic was legitimate. Similarly, if you wanted to search for something, you could use one of the numerous search engines and find relevant sites. The search results may contain a bunch of sites that you were not interested in, but this was more a result of bad algorithms than bad sites.

Today, however, there is so much junk out there. You may have to wade through numerous spam and junk sites to get to the site you want. People are much less likely to find a site that somebody just put up. I see more traffic on this blog than on my proto-blog from 1996. However, the quality of traffic seems to be much worse (at least judging from the ratio of real comments to spam comments.) It is harder to discover quality new content. And it is harder for quality new content to be discovered.

I find myself spending more time on "established" sites. They may occasionally guide me to independent sites. However, they are more likely to simply direct to other well-known commercial sites. With so much information out there, curation has to be done somewhere. I don't have the time to do it (or even to create an algorithm to do it.) I'm dependent on somebody to do it for me. Since this is a huge undertaking, these "somebodies" will likely be large corporations that need to earn money. Since I am cheep, putting up with advertising is my most likely "payment". This puts me in a position vulnerable to being influenced by whatever the corporation or the advertisers desire. (Ironically, at the same time the internet is giving away unlimited content for the price of advertising, broadcast media has become more reliant on "subscriber fees" as part of its business model.) Thus, we become subject to whatever whims the big algorithms have. Is this really much different from being beholden to the broadcaster's desires? At least with the broadcasters, we were likely to find something new we liked. With personalization we can find ourselves further ghettoized. (I'm often finding that problem with online radio. I can create a station that plays songs I like within a very narrowly defined range. However, I get sick of the same type of music and want more variety. However, it is difficult to get variety without a bunch of junk. I'd almost prefer to have a DJ picking the music for me.) I still haven't found a recommendation engine that does a really good job. With the glut of information out there, one of the big challenge is filtering the unique from the derivative. Perhaps now is the time to reinvent the web.

The football player's virtual girlfriend

Manti Te'o had girlfriend that died of cancer. Only she never existed. Now the college football world is suddenly awash with plenty of stories covering this bizarre revelation. Well, what else are they going to write about today? You have Oregon's coach bolting for the NFL and San Diego State putting the nail in the Big East's coffin. But none of those have the drama of a media-induced "fake scandal".

Way back early in September, Manti Te'o lost his grandmother. He also found out that a female friend had also died around the same time. He went on to play the game of his life that day, and put himself on the shortlist for the Heisman trophy.

As the initial story was breaking my impression was that she was just a friend. She was somebody he would talk to and felt close to. It didn't appear that he was a "girlfriend". After all, they were on opposite sides of the country. Later, she turned in to a "girlfriend" and he was portrayed as being noble for staying with her even as she was hospitalized.

Why did she suddenly become a "girlfriend"? If we take the "innocent Manti" route, he initially told people that a friend died. The media start to report and ask questions. They here about female friend and string it together as "girlfriend". The poor guy says sure, she was my girlfriend. No point in denying a relationship for somebody that is now dead. He had lots of deep conversations with her. Even if they weren't a "couple", saying that he was a girlfriend helps show respect to her and her family. The media go and ask a few other people what they feel and they get some people to say what they want to hear. Now we get a great story about a guy's girlfriend dying. He gets caught up in it. After all, his grandmother did really die. The grief is there. And as far as he knows, a girl he was close to also died.

However, this close girl was only a virtual friend, somebody met online and over the phone. You can have a close online relationship. However, online relationships are still stigmatized. Terminology would be used that could be interpreted either way. You still "meet" somebody online. You still talk to them. He may have really thought he was meeting her in person. He thought he saw her up in a crowd at a game. They planned on meeting in Hawaii or someplace, but a flight was delayed or something just didn't work out. It could still be a "meeting" even though only one side saw it, right?

Even in later discussions, Te'o's speech was fairly guarded. There was not a lot of talk about seeing her in person. He was a special woman that inspired him, but there is not much talk of holding her hand or a personal relationship.

How were we to know she was a fake? Well, first off, there was zilcho reporting of her from the Stanford side. I remember looking around the Stanford newspaper shortly after the story broke. A student or recent grad getting in a car crash and dying of cancer would probably make the student paper. However, there was nothing. In fact, a google search came up with pretty much nothing more than the Te'o stuff. In retrospect that was a red flag. However, then, it could just be somebody that wants privacy.

As for Te'o learning that she was a fake and sitting on it? Well, just look at the press coverage now. Wouldn't you be embarrassed to find that out? You don't want that type of distraction when you are receiving rewards or preparing for the championship game. I imagine he initially must have been in denial. It took some time before he want to the school. However, he waited, and hoped that it would go away. He wanted to get a good spin on it first before going public. Alas, somebody beat him to it. It may have been somebody connected with the hoax. (After all, they tried to fess up to him, maybe they just had to get it out elsewhere.) More likely, it was somebody tangentially connected. Somebody may have heard something. Or somebody may have seen some snooping around. They thought there was something there, and wanted to find out more.

Te'o eventually played a sub-par game in the national championship and Notre Dame lost. Could this distraction have led to the problem? Perhaps it was a plot by Alabama fans all along. They inspire him to do well enough to get Notre Dame to the championship, then let him know at the end so that 'bama can easily roll to victory.

Baring Alabama conspiracy theories, we still have the the "why?" question. Perhaps this did start out as an innocent online relationship. The girl used a fake name in order to protect herself. She wanted to ingratiate herself with a famous football player. She saw things going too far, so she had herself injured in a car crash. However, she missed her time with him, so she had herself recover, but gave herself leukaemia so that she could kill herself off later if she got tired of the relationship. She saw that Te'os grandmother died and that it would be a dramatic time to kill herself off ending the relationship. She loved the publicity, but saw that people were snooping, so she deleted her accounts. She saw that Te'o was doing well, so kept quiet. Then, when he was getting the rewards, she just couldn't hold on any longer and wanted back in his life. But she was dead, so she had to come things. And that is where things started to unravel.

And until they come clean, there will be many other possible explanations.

Was there any crime committed? Possibly. Fake identity. Defrauding. I'm sure politicians will love to pass the Manti Te'o act to protect people from "catfishing". However, an assumed name and fake events are quite common on the Internet. A faked death? A little more rare. But if you want to end a relationship, that is the way to go. Did they do that to get gain? Well, there doesn't seem to be much gain on Manti's side. Perhaps the girl got some flowers or money. Or perhaps she was after some wealth when he became a star. (Maybe she did it thinking that he would go pro after his junior year, but thought she couldn't pull it off all the way through the senior season.)

As for Te'o himself, there is not a whole lot that could have been gained if he had fabricated it all himself. It would have made his story a little less dramatic. However, the performance after a grandmother's death was still had a lot to it. It would stand to cause a degree of embarrassment if it came out. It is hard to see much rationale for him to make it up. However, once the press started latching on to it, things could be different.

The moral: Don't believe what you see written in the media - especially if it is written about you

Google: The End of the World as we Know It

Another book on the rise of the Google juggernaut. I wonder how these will look a few decades from now? Will Google crash and burn? Or will it continue to maintain its strong influence? I can see some parallels to Xerox or even Bell Labs from a few decades back. Both companies had cash-cows that were gushing in money, and used that to invest in great engineering research. Some of the many modern technologies like the mouse and graphical user interface came from these sources. However, the companies failed to take advantage of these, and eventually, the companies faltered when their mainline business gradually eroded.

This book doesn't consider the eventual fall of Google. Instead, it is concerned with the fall of media companies at the hands of the internet. Google is often seen as a "frenemy". It is trying to play nice, however, the forces are taking away the markets where old media had thrived. Google eliminated many of the inefficiencies that allowed old media to charge top dollar. While some respond by attacking Google, the smart companies are the ones that adapt. However, it is difficult. Most advertising is going online. However, online advertising only brings in 10% of what newspaper advertising does. How can newspapers survive? How can movies, music and books survive in the internet age?

The book posits many of the questions, but does not provide many answers. It does, however, provide plenty of biographical sketches and snippets in to the lives of (mostly former) googlers. It also has the somewhat self-introspective view of media writing about troubles facing media. Journalism is seen as a vital resource. The collaboration in true journalism is lost in blogging. How can this be maintained, even if the whole business of newspapers cannot? Perhaps an ASCAP for news articles? Or maybe micropayments? These are mentioned by the book, but no solution is given.

The book flows fairly well, and gets us to Google in late 2009. It doesn't go very far in depth with the company, but provides enough details of major issues to keep things interesting.